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2 books match the query 'Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (Brazil)'

cover of Brazil's Long Revolution: Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers Movement

Brazil's Long Revolution

Radical Achievements of the Landless Workers Movement

Anthony Pahnke

University of Arizona Press, 2018

Economic crises in the Global North and South are forcing activists to think about alternatives. Neoliberal economic policies and austerity measures have been debated and implemented around the globe. Author Anthony Pahnke argues that activists should look to the Global South and Brazil for inspiration.

Brazil’s Long Revolution shows how the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement, or MST) positioned itself to take advantage of challenging economic times to improve its members’ lives. Pahnke analyzes the origins and development of the movement, one of the largest and most innovative social movements currently active. Over the last three decades, the MST has mobilized more than a million Brazilians through grassroots initiatives, addressing political and economic inequalities.

The MST and its allies—together known as the Landless Movement—confront inequality by constructing democratic ways of governing economic, political, and social life in collectivized production cooperatives, movement-run schools, and decentralized agrarian reform encampments and settlements. Their strategies for organizing political, economic, and social life challenge the current neoliberal orthodoxy that privileges individualized, market-oriented practices.

Based on research conducted over five years, Pahnke’s book places the Landless Movement squarely within the tradition of Latin American revolutionary struggles, while at the same time showing the potential for similar forms of radical resistance to develop in the United States and elsewhere in the Global North.
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cover of Return from the World: Economic Growth and Reverse Migration in Brazil

Return from the World

Economic Growth and Reverse Migration in Brazil

Gregory Duff Morton

University of Chicago Press, 2024

An anthropologist’s investigation of why some Brazilians choose to leave behind a booming economy and return to their villages.

In Return from the World, anthropologist Gregory Duff Morton traces the migrations of Brazilian workers who leave a thriving labor market and return to their home villages to become peasant farmers. Morton seeks to understand what it means to turn one’s back deliberately on the promise of economic growth.

Giving up their positions in factories, at construction sites, and as domestic workers, these migrants travel thousands of miles back to villages without running water or dependable power. There, many take up subsistence farming. Some become activists with the MST, Brazil’s militant movement of landless peasants. Bringing their stories vividly to life, Morton dives into the dreams and disputes at play in finding freedom in the shared rejection of growth.
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