Potencialidades transformadoras dos movimentos camponeses no Brasil contemporâneo: as comunidades de resistência e superação no MST

Abstract

The author starts from a historical retrospectiva of the Brazilian social formation and it considers that there was not in this country a continuous process towards the constitution of lhe Brazilian peasantry. This does not exclude the existence of intensa struggles, nor the formation of many peasant organizations. We have had a peasantry in mutation. In the 70's and 80's, the capitalist production relations expanded, and with them, the rural proletariat and semi-proletariat. These changes placed social struggles on another level. The contradiction between this semi-proletariat and the dominant class in lhe countryside, which was subject by the hegemony of the larga land holdingrural enterprises and agribusiness, acquired centrality. In these new conditions lhe MST emerged, and in lhe 90's, it developed a settlement organization policy, which was blocked, in various ways, by lhe adversa power relations of the time. At the and of the decade, the movement expanded its organizational principles and started experimenting with new settlement formais and new actions aiming to altar the productive and technological matrix, inthat way creating conditions for the introduction of the Resistance and Surpassing Communities. Those have given rise to the possibility of a new popular reference for the Brazilian countryside