Sue Branford reviews Alex Ungrateeb Flynn’s book Pathways to Utopia – Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers’ Movement of Brazil.

In this delightful book Flynn chronicles over a fifteen-year period the lives of people struggling to win a plot of land in the state of Santa Catarina in the south of Brazil. He leaps straight in with the story of Clarice, a young woman born in an encampment set up as the first stage in a land occupation organized by the Movimento dos Sem Terra (MST), Brazil’s Landless Movement.

Clarice was born on an earth floor, without electricity or running water, in a shack covered in lona preta – the black plastic that the MST characteristically uses as a roof covering in its land occupations. For eight years her family moved from encampment to encampment, frequently threatened by the police and hired gunmen, before finally winning a plot of land where they started, which was where Clarice was born.

Tais, another acampada interviewed by Flynn, talks about her life as a child. ‘We went hungry, it was cold, we lived in fear. We had full-on confrontations with the police, and those confrontations really left a mark on me.  … I can’t get away from them. It’s like they’re always with me.’ She went on: ‘I drank milk for the first time when I was seven. like I didn’t know what it was.’ She smiled. ‘I value what we have now because we used to starve.’

To survive, many acampados had to look for badly paid work outside the encampment. One told Flynn: ‘I went one time picking onions. This is how the boais frias, the day labourers, are exploited. The work is really hard, like backbreaking, because you have to do it on your knees … This is debt bondage, peonagem. The work makes you feel like an animal.’

For the MST the encampment is not just a period of suffering but also plays an important role in creating political awareness. ‘The acampamento is where you truly learn to be a sem terra. It is a great education’, one former acampado told Flynn. Flynn says:  the encampment is ‘the primary locus of a social transformation, a process designed to empower members and make possible their rebirth as new social citizens.’

This transformation is more important than ever now that, as a result of the rural exodus, almost all acampados come from towns and cities. Luizinho explains: ‘There are no more rural people. All of them have gone to the city. And it’s these people we have to bring back.’

An important part of the process of transformation is acquiring the MST’s utopian vision, while also realising that compromises have to be made, something he calls ‘counter-utopian practices’. Clarice says: ‘Agrarian reform and the MST, all together, is a dream, it’s something that drives us forward. There’s a certain contradiction. It’s a utopian movement. It’s impossible but it’s a way forward. It’s a dream, but it’s also the dispositivo, the mechanism.’

Clarice goes on: ‘The MST is not totally utopian. I mean you get land. You achieve agrarian reform in small spaces.’ But, as Busatto, one of the leaders, tells Flynn, even after acquiring their plots, the sem terra maintain their dream of creating ‘a new society, an alternative society to capitalism’.

The MST has achieved a lot, settling 450,000 families on land, somewhere they can call home. After getting their plot, the families’ first priority is to produce wholesome, natural foods derived from native seeds.  They adopt an agroecological approach, eliminating the middleman and providing high-quality organic produce, while maintaining the long-term fertility of the soil.

The veteran MST leader, João Pedro Stédile, warned from the beginning that in doing this, the movement would acquire new enemies — Parmalat, Nestlé, agribusiness and finally neoliberalism – and that the struggle of occupying the land would be easy compared to the new lines of battle. Indeed, the MST has needed to ally itself with other progressive forces – the unions, leftist parties, all progressive forces – to make their strategy work.

When Jan Rocha and I wrote our LAB book, Cutting the Wire – the Story of the Landless Movement in Brazil, published in 2002, we concentrated on the first phase of the MST story – the actual winning of the land and accessing the right to education and health. Flynn has carried the story on, saying that ‘being a member of the MST is to undergo a lived experience of struggle’ and to start ‘a continuous process of transformation’.

Even so, some of the old struggles are still going on. When we wrote our book, we noted the ingrained machismo and sexism within the movement, realising that these deep-rooted cultural attitudes would be hard to change. Indeed, this is proving to be the case, though it is encouraging to see that the problem is being tackled, though in a frustratingly slow and fragmentary fashion.

Flynn points out that an overwhelming majority of state leadership in Santa Catarina are men and that women leaders had commented to him that the only opportunities they had were roles in the health and education sectors. This makes change difficult.

Flynn tells the story of André and Vera, who have won a plot of land on an MST settlement. André has been violent towards Vera, with Vera herself explaining it by saying that André was permanently damaged as a child because his father repeatedly beat him. Violence is difficult to escape from, Vera says, even when you join the MST and become a new man.

Although the MST has a strict moral code, André, who is a regional leader and spends much of his time on movement business, started an affair with a woman in an acampamento. The state leadership learnt of it and threw the woman out of the camp, but the affair reportedly continued.

Vera said that the tension that had arisen between her and André made her feel unsafe, and she and the children moved out. Vera wanted her own plot of land, but the state leadership, mainly composed of men, refused to do this, saying that she should move back home, as André wants.

But she won’t do this, and the leadership has decided that André has a greater claim to the house, the property, all the cash tied up in agricultural stock, all that Vera has struggled for her whole life. Vera has moved out of the settlement and is unhappily working as a maid in a motel – the kind of life she was hoping to escape from through the occupation.

Flynn writes: ‘Vera is one of the bravest people I have ever known, with a tireless, phenomenal commitment to the movement. I watch as she reaches for a pair of scissors on the table and begins to snip bits of skin on her hands. She draws blood before I can pull the scissors away. “If he takes my children, I’ll have nothing left to live for”, she says.’

The leadership says they can’t help her unless she helps them – by which they mean that she goes back to live with André. ‘Tell her she has to fight if she wants our help’, they tell Flynn. He concludes: ‘In articulating her rights and contesting normalized values, Vera seemed alone. Having devoted her adult life to the movement, she had been cast adrift.’

Machismo is still alive and well in other ways too, though again women are fighting it. In this process, the book stresses that importance of cultural events, particularly the mística, a cultural presentation that happens at every meeting. Tais said: ‘It’s a strong point of the movement, you know … There are people who sing, play guitar, play other instruments really well. Some people love to dance, you know.’ But even here there are problems. Tais said: ‘We had a youth meeting and each assentamento had to prepare a cultural presentation, an expression of mística. And me and a friend prepared a dança do ventre, a belly dance.’

But the leadership, she said, saw it as something ‘vulgar’ and banned it.  They protested and in the end the leaders agreed to it being performed, not in the evening, but at midday, ‘when presumably the audience would be less susceptible to, as the leaders saw it, the form’s sensual movements’, comments Flynn wryly.

Tais was going to perform the dance with a friend, but her friend pulled out. Tais told Flynn: ‘So I danced alone. Like, just on my own.’ She raised her voice. ‘Vou quebrar isso. I’m going to break this. And I danced in front of various leaders of the movement.’

Tais continued: ‘It’s this very conservative part of the movement. They invest a lot in consciousness, political training and such, but leave these cultural matters to one side. They could be so important in keeping young people involved and also in winning over more young people from outside.’ She sighed with frustration.

Flynn said: ‘Tais’s bloody-mindedness became mística in and of itself, underpinning and inspiring the movements and gestures of her performance … Tais was, I suggest, seeking to create a  rupture with the moral conservatism to which she was subject, an essentializing power that sought to control her identity, her body and, importantly, what being sem terra meant for her.’

Flynn sees what is a happening as a conflict between utopian ideals and counter-utopian practices. This tension is the motor driving transformation.

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn, Pathways to Utopia – Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, Indiana University Press, 2025. Available to order in UK here.

Main image: MST commemorates 38 years in Santa Catarina, Photo: Juliana Adriano