Jasmine Haniff reviews Alex Ungprateeb Flynn’s book about Brazil’s landless worker’s movement, which offers a compelling framework for understanding how a social movement can develop an alternative collective future, through decades of grassroots struggle.
Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil is a beautifully written and meticulously-researched anatomy of a movement. Alex Ungprateeb Flynn spent fifteen years embedded with activists who form the heart of the MST, a movement that has shaped Brazil’s social and political landscape over several decades.
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), has been organising for land reform and against social inequalities in rural areas for the past 40 years. It has staged more than 2,500 land occupations and resettled over 350,000 families. MST is one of the largest social movements in Latin America, if not the world, and certainly one of the longest-running.
Rather than analysing the movement’s watershed moments, such as mass protests or high-profile land occupations, Flynn hones in on the everyday lives of families at the heart of the MST. The activists he introduces have made lifelong commitments to the cause; their activism manifests not only in large actions, but also in the everyday acts that sustain their struggle over time, demonstrating a kind of activism that is both quotidian and radical. As Flynn notes: ‘Victories are fleeting, but based within an understanding of time as duration, it is the struggle that is transformational.’
Eschewing traditional linear narrative forms, Pathways to Utopia is split into four ‘Scenes’. The first goes back to the beginning of the movement, tracing MST’s multigenerational struggle, and how it emerged into the hundreds of thousands-strong movement it is today. Scene II outlines how the lived experiences of current MST members contradict the tenets initially put in place; Scene III examines how creative expression is used to imagine alternative futures, and the final scene looks at how the movement is constantly being transformed from within.
These ‘scenes’ are interspersed with pausas – evocative and anecdotal vignettes that take us out of the flow for a moment and ground the book in human stories. The fact that the book begins with a dramatis personae is testament to the importance of lived experience stories in this study, reflecting just how deeply Flynn engaged with the participants over the fifteen years of his research. Throughout the study, anecdotes of community meetings, dinners and performances are woven together, offering a patchwork portrait of the movement filled with voices from all sides of the struggle.
As the title would suggest, the concept of ‘utopia’ and the MST’s relationship to it is at the core of the book. Flynn argues that, for the MST, utopia is not an abstract, unreachable ideal; rather, it is a vision deeply rooted in the everyday struggles of its activists. For them, utopia is both a method and a means to advance the movement. As Clarice – one of the MST members Flynn meets in the north settlement near Bom Jardim – remarks: ‘Agrarian reform and the MST, all together, is a dream, it’s something that drives us forward. There is 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.’
Indeed, while the utopian dream of land reform is the driving force behind the activists in the MST, Flynn suggests that their action is also grounded in what he terms ‘counter-utopian practice’. This doesn’t sit in opposition to utopia but alongside it. Rather than presenting utopia as a finished ideal, Pathways to Utopia frames it as something that must be continually questioned, revised and transformed.
Flynn describes how the MST rejects the capitalist, neoliberal forces that perpetuate inequality and land dispossession in rural Brazil. As one of the book’s interviewees – Luizinho – remarks: ‘Up to ten, fifteen years ago, our enemy was latifúndio… But from 1990 with the model of agroexportation and agribusiness, our enemy has become the big corporations connected to the production of food, seeds, pesticides: Monsanto, Syngenta, Cargill. ’While the movement’s enemies might have changed, the economic and social systems that support landowners and corporations remain the same.
The characters we meet in Pathways to Utopia live in ways that ‘subvert established norms and reorder social relations.’ Through land occupations that often span decades, cooperative farming and solidarity-based community organizing, the MST members create a ‘counter-utopian practice’ that resists the existing structures of power in Brazil.
Pathways to Utopia by no means paints the picture of MST society as perfect. Flynn does not shy away from the tensions that emerge with different opinions as the movement members attempt to build their utopian society. Gender divides, economic questions and differences of opinion over the division of labour and production often prove difficult to overcome.
For one woman, Vera, the rules put in place by the MST make it difficult for her to emancipate herself from an abusive husband. In another instance, a woman who has lost a child is forced to work in a creche as ‘only certain gender-normative pathways to self-realization were open to [women].’
In spite of this, Flynn illustrates how members of the MST, particularly women, counter these structural issues through embodied acts of rebellion and resistance. Building on themes explored in his previous work Taking Form, Making Worlds: Cartonera Publishers in Latin America (which LAB reviewed in 2023), Flynn observes that creative expression becomes a tool for political transformation. As Tais, one of Flynn’s participants suggests: ‘These performances of mística have become a method to communicate political things, like a tool.’ In this sense, performance, art and creative expression becomes a form of durational activism.
Through its thorough theoretical insights and deep engagement with MST members, Pathways to Utopia offers a compelling framework for understanding how a social movement can develop an alternative collective future, through decades of grassroots struggle. The time, passion and meticulous research that went into creating Pathways to Utopia is brought to life through Flynn’s beautiful writing. Ultimately, the book is an essential chronicle of resistance and a blueprint for how collective action can create a more just future.
