Libertarian Solidarity with the MST

brazil/guyana/suriname/fguiana | repression / prisoners | press release Sunday July 27, 2008 21:54 by Federação Anarquista Gaúcha - Fórum do Anarquismo Organizado secretariafag at vermelhoenegro dot org

The report divulged in the last days, approved by the advice of the State Public Ministry made a sentence of the ruling class: the MST must be dissolved. The Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST - Movement of the Landless Agricultural Workers) was made target of a policy of criminalisation of poverty and of the social movements that is being led in the state of the Rio Grande do Sul. It is a policy of the police State, where executive government, devices of justice, media groups, transnational and latifundium corporations, concur with the police force fulfilling and make the law of the commander of the military brigade. [ Português]

The association of transnational capital with the latifundium made the aggressive formula of the agro-business that concentrates, in the national scenario, the lands that are expropriated from the agrarian reform. The bio-combustibles, genetically modified soy and cellulose are the shop window of the monoculture that pulls the workers out of the fields and sends them to urban misery. Agro-business is able to be deeply articulated with politics, is a financier of electoral campaigns without partisan discrimination, is mounted in the expedients of the Lula government together with the oligarchies and the financial system, and is the privileged place to which the credits of the Bank of Development (BNDES) go. The neoliberal doctrine of the central administration of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT - Workers' Party) is surely a factor of the “economic growth”. In the state of RS, for the cellulose corporations, this power made donations to the adversary candidates Yeda Crusius of the PSDB and Olívio Dutra of the PT. With the resolved election campaign, it knocked down controls for the culture of exotic plants and finished eliminating, in the course of this year, with the environmental zoning to have pumps and to drink the guarana water.

As an organised expression of the peasants expelled from the land, the MST sought to change the profile of class struggle in the fields. The latifundium strengthened itself with transnational capital, planted eucalyptus, pinus and other species for cellulose production. It took the discourse of development where it only had idle property, masqueraded social function for extensive production that causes environmental damage and does not give anything to the people to eat or to be empowered with the great modes of communication. The resistance to these new formations of the dominant power was stronger, as it could not leave it to be. The tactics of working class struggle had made more of an offensive, leading to scenes where the enemies of agrarian reform play with more force and new techniques.

Elements of politics and ideology for the left also weigh in the arena where the MST acts: the project of reformist intention that polarized the social forces of change for the PT, when taken for the government of the republic revealed itself a tremendous failure. Integrated as the leading elite in the neoliberal guidelines of the power structure, it dragged the syndical movement organized in the CUT and all its social camp to bureaucratization and class collaboration. The MST saw itself isolated as method of direct action of the masses, as a combative proposal for social struggle, and lost to the dominant system its referring of the political project.

The state of Rio Grande Do Sul passed through a special conjuncture. It has a government corrupt until the highest level, directed by a weak party that accomodates the political groups of the oligarchy dividing state agencies as it orders the modus operanti of bourgeois politics in a liberal democratic regime. An economic policy line in the World Bank to make fiscal adjustment with privatizations, dismantling of the public services and to pay the expansion of the transnationals. An ultraconservative discourse circulating in the society by the force of the media groups and the emergence of the police forces in the social-political scene as normative institution. As regional institution of the power it has the character of a police State.

It is a state that diminishes the spaces of public freedom, inside of its crisis of representation and makes more ostensive violence as recourse of politics on the behavior of the poverty excluded from the government agenda. As discourse it has social reproduction for the always eminent figure of delinquency, the disturbance and the violation of property.

The MST, as the social movement most expressive of the struggles of the working class in this state, is the target of a plot of the institutional and economic powers to break the popular resistance to the oppressive model that is imposed by the Gaúcha elites and the transnationals. Police infiltrations, violence on encampments and mobilisations for agrarian reform, judicial actions that criminalise the movement, according to the report published in the press, are the concretions of a confessed proposal to taint it in illegality in order dissolve it. To destroy this that has been a brave organisation in the defense of the interests of the working class, that has made the path of social justice, skinned with their own hands the dignity of the poor expelled from the field.

Our modest militant force is solidary. The MST and the struggle without truces for agrarian reform is a cause of all that fight for a new world without asking for it. To reorganise classist unionism from the base, to give expression to the struggle of the poor people of the city and to empower the voice of the communities without asking for license are the tasks of the hour, of these difficult times, where the best solidarity is made fighting.