Growth and autonomy
Urban exiles flocking to Brazil’s hinterland seek freedom. Review: Return from the World, Gregory Duff Morton, by Gavin O'Toole
Return from the World: Economic Growth and Reverse Migration in Brazil, Gregory Duff Morton, 2024, University of Chicago Press
Reverse migration has become a prominent focus in Latin America as the region slowly begins to shrug off the legacies of developmentalism.
This is the second book on this theme to be published recently, the first being The 0.5 Generation: Children Moving from the United States to Mexico by Víctor Zúñiga and Silvia E Giorguli.
Unlike that title, however, the focus of which is the international migration children from the US to Mexico and their (re)integration, Return from the World looks at internal migration in Brazil with an interesting perspective: motivations for leaving the city for the countryside.
What is it that enhances the appeal of a life farming, a lifestyle change pursued by hundreds of thousands of Brazilians seeking to escape the oppressive grind of the country’s burgeoning megacities? Many of these people are returning to the countryside after they or their forebears were robbed of the means of subsistence and forced into the urban economy.
The landless movement in Brazil has become a key metaphor for social inequality in this vast and otherwise abundant land, making this study in social anthropology timely and valuable.
Focusing on the sertão, or drylands, of south-west Bahia, Morton zooms in on the question of growth, and how village farmers can carve out spaces of autonomy in a capitalist world designed to take it away from them as wage slaves.
He writes: “The village farmers cultivated freedom as the opposite of dispossession. In the capitalist world, dispossession is one of the oldest stories … What small farmers demonstrate, at Maracujá and Rio Branco, is that dispossession can be reversed.”
The author argues that by controlling a plot of land, these migrants determine the level at which they can participate in “growth”, a concept he explores in terms of a debate between two mainstream arguments: that growth draws people out of poverty, improves life expectancy, and forges ties across borders; or that growth is a deception that causes ecological devastation and propels us to live meaningless lives acquiring goods.
His lens is the motivation of villagers who have chosen to distance themselves from the growth imperative, that complex narrative which has become all but the sole language of development in much of the Global South.
Morton argues that economic growth involves submission to command whereby migrants to the urban economy participate in a boom by submitting to an employer. Some of the author’s subjects, however, leave this behind because they have a profound human need for autonomy—eventually consolidated in a very special kind of asset that he names a “premio”, a permanence that the worker can find by escaping a familiar workplace. This latter quality speaks to the insecurity of wage labour in a market driven by the pursuit of surplus value.
The real history of these places, and indeed of the landless workers’ movement in Brazil in general, is less about political ideology than it is about emancipation, suggest Morton. And to engage with it in this way is to think differently about what “progress” really means in Brazil.
As he writes: “These migration stories were far from the dismal yarn in which impoverished workers, deprived of all aspiration, find themselves tragically pushed into the countryside and out of modernity. Just the opposite. These were stories about dreams.”