War of position
Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education, Rebecca Tarlau, reviewed by Gavin O'Toole, 27 February 2023
Occupying Schools, Occupying Land: How the Landless Workers Movement Transformed Brazilian Education, Rebecca Tarlau, Oxford UP, 2021
The great merit of Rebecca Tarlau’s prize-winning study of the educational programmes of Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) is that it applies a Gramscian analysis to this fascinating topic.
Gramsci has been the front and centre of theoretical focus in the study of this unique social organisation but also within it, and rightly so.
As Tarlau points out, Gramsci’s concept of intellectual and moral leadership is critical for the understanding of any political bloc, and why political organisations such as the MST must win over diverse groups to support their goals.
She focuses on the emphasis placed by the MST on education, something about which little has been written but is, as Tarlau shows, a critically important aspect of its development and outlook.
Created in 1984, the MST is arguably one of the most successful social movements in Latin American history, with an informal membership of millions and covering most of Brazil’s states.
Its Marxist precepts have set the land reform agenda in the country and beyond for nearly 40 years, a period in which it has come to shape policy and social transformation in the countryside not solely in terms of opposition to the Brazilian state but as a key collaborator with its institutions.
This unique relationship with the state—both antagonistic yet collaborative—is what the author calls “contentious co-governance” and ultimately contradictory, because the MST’s underlying objective is to overthrow capitalism.
The value of this relationship, however, is that it offers a singularly useful way with which to apply Gramscian ideas to the study of Latin America.
Tarlau does so by employing the notions of the German activist Rudi Dutschke surrounding the “long march through the institutions”, by which social movement leaders enter the state to both carry out the daily job of public service provision while prosecuting a long-term strategy of economic and social transformation. Dutschke’s inspiration was Gramsci’s “war of position” by which a political project finds allies in civil society.
The MST has three broad aims, land reform, agrarian reform and transformation through socialist change, but at the heart of all of these is education, which has been a central focus of this movement’s evolution since the early 1980s.
As the MST has grown, its educational programme advancing alternative pedagogical practices has extended throughout its settlements and camps and into the Brazilian state itself through adult literacy courses, vocational schools, degree programmes in agrarian reform and partnerships with educational institutions. Its programmes have become institutionalised through national public policies to such an extent that by 2010 the MST’s educational proposal—Educação do Campo—had become the Brazilian state’s official approach to rural schooling. The movement’s most important triumph was the establishment of the national agrarian reform education programme PRONERA.
This remarkable achievement reflects the “long march through the institutions” and by extension the Gramscian war of position that the MST has come to embody. As Tarlau explains, the public education system is a particularly powerful institution for social movements to garner influence through, thereby prosecuting a long-term shift in consciousness.
The author provides an account of how the MST developed its educational proposition in support of its broader political and economic struggle, and how its leaders worked with state agencies and governments to institutionalise this at both state and federal levels.
The implications of this ethnographic study for other Latin American social movements are profound—highlighting the possibilities offered by building mass grassroots movements with institutional strategies that are both intelligent and disruptive.