Taking the Land into their Hands: The Landless Workers' Movement and the Brazilian State
| Date | 01 December 2000 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6478.00166 |
| Author | George Meszaros |
| Published date | 01 December 2000 |
JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY
VOLUME 27, NUMBER 4, DECEMBER 2000
ISSN: 0263-323X, pp. 517–41
Taking the Land into their Hands: The Landless Workers’
Movement and the Brazilian State
George Meszaros*
Institution and constitution building are very much in evidence and
continue to lie at the heart of contemporary international governance
programmes. The paper explores the underlying limitations of legality
and associated institutional frameworks in the light of one of the most
significant and, apparently, successful transitions to democracy of
recent times, that of Brazil. Against the background of struggles over
land, the paper discusses the actions of two leading state institutions
specifically charged with implementing the 1988 Constitution, and a
social movement, the Landless Workers Movement, which uses mass
direct action techniques to demand implementation. Although the study
highlights the profound limitations of formal legal processes and
institutions, and stresses their socially and politically embedded nature,
it also affirms the historical and contemporary significance of the realm
of legality in the construction and reproduction of social struggles.
INTRODUCTION
What was often at issue was not property, supported by law, against no-
property; it was alternative definitions of property-rights: for the landowner,
enclosure for the cottager, common rights; for the forest officialdom,
‘preserved grounds’ for the deer; for the forresters, the right to take turfs.
For as long as it remained possible, the ruled if they could find a purse and a
lawyer would actually fight for their rights by means of law; occasionally the
copyholders, resting upon the precedents of sixteenth century law, could
actually win a case. When it ceased to be possible to continue the fight at law,
men still felt a sense of legal wrong: the propertied had obtained their power
by illegitimate means.
1
517
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2000, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
1 E.P. Thompson, Whigs and Hunters: The origin of the Black Act (1978) at 261.
*School of Law, University of Warwick, Coventry CV4 7AL, England
I am grateful to both the Nuffield Foundation for initial funding and to the Economic and Social
Research Council for their support (project 7085LAA Law, legitimacy and social change:
Brazil’s Public Ministry and Landless Movement). I would also like to thank professors
Upendra Baxi, Lee Bridges, and Mike McConville for their supportive and critical comments.
This article concerns itself with socio-legal aspects of Brazilian land struggles
in the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries – a far cry, apparently, from the
conflicts of eighteenth-century England of which Thompson speaks in Whigs
and Hunters above. In fact, however, the parallels between the two are quite
striking. Like its English counterpart, Brazilian society underwent a process
not dissimilar to forced enclosure. Similarly it saw the successful enactment
of legislation whose primary objective was the buttressing of landed class
power. And yet in the English context against the background of the Black
Act – ‘a bad law, drawn by bad legislators, and enlarged by the interpretations
of bad judges’ – Thompson nevertheless concluded that law was ‘more than a
mystifying and pompous way in which class power is registered and
executed’ and that ‘if the actuality of law’s operation in class-divided
societies has, again and again, fallen short of its own rhetoric of equity, yet
the notion of the rule of law is itself an unqualified good.’
2
Law could, he
argued, ‘inhibit power and afford some protection to the powerless’.
3
Indeed,
‘far from the ruled shrugging off this rhetoric as a hypocrisy, some part of it at
least was taken over as part of the rhetoric of the plebeian crowd’.
4
Our concern is with a group demanding land reform, the Landless
Workers’ Movement (MST), which, not for the first time in Brazilian
history, has taken up the rhetoric and instruments of legality. Opponents,
once again not for the first time in Brazilian history, have sought to
characterize this kind of movement as a threat to law and order. Although
there is little doubt that the MST’s raison d’e
ˆtre is to undermine the existing
order, one of the most concentrated patterns of land distribution in the world,
the relationship with law is more complex. To paraphrase Thompson, the
issue here turns out not to be property, supported by law, against no-property
but alternative definitions of property rights: in this instance the MST’s
advocacy of socially oriented and controlled forms of rural property. More
significantly, in what represents at least a partial vindication of Thompson’s
thesis, it turns out that far from eschewing law and everything it stands for,
this social movement actually employs legal tools and concepts in the
articulation of these alternative definitions. Law is an important part of the
process of ideological self-legitimation. The MSTs repeated reference to the
validity of the 1988 constitution’s clauses on the ‘social function of property’
is just one example of this. Given, however, the movement’s use of direct
action tactics the relationship with law is also an ambiguous one.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to look in detail at Thompson’s more
problematic assertion that ‘the rule of law [is] . .. an unqualified human good’
(an expression he later modifies to ‘the notion of the rule of law is itself an
unqualified good’).
5
To say, as he does elsewhere, that ‘law matters’ seems
more tenable. What is relevant for present purposes, however, is that he draws
518
2 id., at p. 267.
3 id., at p. 266.
4 id., at pp. 263–4.
5 id., at pp. 266 and 267 respectively.
ßBlackwell Publishers Ltd 2000
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