not the motorcycle diaries

I’m more inclined away from using the MST as a traditional, empirical case study than I ever was. In part this is because of the ironic difficulties I had in accessing actual participants in the movement whilst I was in Brazil. Mostly though, these difficulties yielded information of their own which leads me further and further away from the traditional line of inquiry.

It’s clear from the time I spent with MST leaders, affiliates and settlers that the internal politics of the movement, its diversity across an enormous and varied geography, and its positioning in Brazilian rural culture are all characteristics that not only contradict the picture of the movement created in global justice movement discourse (see for example the account in We Are Everywhere), but suggest that it is impossible to talk about it in the same general terms than one might talk about, say, Reclaim the Streets.

It’s a question that’s not lost on contemporary activists. How are the struggles of the most vulnerable (like landless farming families) taken up by those with comparative privelege (land, money, safety etc)? Even talking about them in the same breath is to potentially co-opt, homogenise, fetishize and/or neutralise the particularity of different struggles. And it leads to distortion and misconception. The MST, for example, is not a de-centralised, non-hierarchical, affinity-based, egalitarian movement as global justice movement discourse suggests. The MST is a political organisation functioning similarly to a state-based NGO. The settlers I met were staunchly loyal to the organisation who had orchestrated for them a stable livelihood, but this was not a critical loyalty. This is a primarily material revolution, carried out through doctrinaire and hierarchical means.

And most importantly, the MST don’t pretend to be otherwise, and for this they are subject to a continuous level of skepticism by Brazilian social commentators, though this rarely appears in English. I suspect it is western activist writers and scholars who primarily propagate the idea of the MST as one big happy affinity group. At worst, they’re just using it to reinforce their own narrative of the global justice movement. The need to be unified, to have an authentic voice from The South and so on over-rides critical reflection. One of the most striking absences is a feminist critique. The respected activist stalwart who spoke passionately about structural impoverishment in the rural north is the same man who tries to get me to come back to his hotel room. His friend asks me sniggeringly if my boyfriend beats me on the drive to an assentamento; where women take care of the children, tend to guests, make jam and water the seedlings while their husbands sit around and talk business and politics, or use big machines and trucks.

And so I still plan to harp on about the question of reflection, probably still using concepts like reflexivity and friendship. How do the more priveleged activists in alliance movements think about their power? How much of what they say is about the legitimate need to show authenticity, partnership and a united front; and how much of this replicates domination? More fundamentally, how do we think and feel about difference and power, and alliances across difference and power? In Brazil, I was not so much alarmed by the myth of the MST as by the myth-making in global justice movement discourse, and now I am not so concerned about exposing the myth as I am about reflecting on this myth-making. And I think that a counter-cultural critique and counter-cultural set of values requires an equally counter-cultural form of reflection.