The Class Struggles in Brazil: The Perspective of the MST

The MST (Brazil's Landless Rural Workers' Movement) and Via Campesina have developed a common understanding, a common reading, of the historical evolution of capitalism in Brazil. We had four centuries of what might be called the 'agro-export model', which was inaugurated by colonial capitalism. Industrial capitalism was not really implanted until 1930, and as Florestan Fernandes said, it was a model of dependent industrialization, because it was so highly dependent on foreign capital. It was not the result of local accumulation. It lasted until the early 1980s, and was quite successful insofar as in those fifty years the Brazilian economy grew at an annual average rate of 7.5 per cent. But by the early '80s it fell into a crisis--part of the general crisis of that model. There is now a new economic model in Brazil in which the most dynamic sector of the economy, aimed at the export business-- represented by the largest 200 firms, each of them embodying the alliance between international capital, the banks and the large Brazilian economic groups. This has been the economic journey of Brazil in the long historical period, with the transition to neoliberalism leaving us today with an economy in crisis for two decades but containing a dynamic pole that is growing very fast, and reinforcing the dichotomy that exists between the interests of big capital and the economy as a whole, an economy that should be solving the general problems of the population. Our strategy is resistance, leading towards the accumulation of social forces on our side of the class struggle. At least for the time being, our strategy is defensive not offensive. Why? Because our theory of cycles in the class struggle shows that an offensive strategy is not possible during the downturn of the class struggle. We could only defeat agribusiness if and when the working class as a whole enters into a new upturn, in an offensive phase against capital. Then, and only then, we are going to launch an offensive against agribusiness, imperialism, neoliberalism