Resistance is Possible

MST, Street Art, Belo Horizonte

I was sitting in a bar with an old friend, when he abruptly pivoted on his stool and said, “you know something, I was thinking the other day that at the heart of the history of human society lies the history of class struggle.” - ‘For land, art and bread,’ reads the caption on the T-Shirt in a play on the Bolshevik slogan of 1917.  The giant mural celebrates the MST, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, the landless workers movement, who for years  now have struck terror in the hearts and bank accounts of Brasil’s landowners and political class. As in Scotland and probably every other country in the world, the concentrated private ownership of land remains one of the most poignant examples of social injustice and inequality. A grassroots organisation of the rural poor with an estimated one and half million members, the MST is rarely out of the news. Its commitment to participative democracy, direct action, and Agrarian Reform, have placed it at the forefront of the political struggle for the social transformation of Brasil. Not surprisingly the right-wing press and their agrobusiness allies portray the MST as a devilish Marxist organisation. But for oppressed people who daily suffer the consequences of the capitalist appropriation of nature, footage of the MST marching with crimson banners, cutting down fences and occupying abandoned land, is a reminder that another world is possible.