THE TRICONTINENTAL
The photographs featured in this dossier–edited by Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research’s art department–are portraits of living culture expressed through the art, education, agricultural cultivation, popular communication, and mass mobilisations of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST). Each photograph contains a portrait of those who struggled before us, who continue to feed our struggles today: Rosa Luxemburg on a banner, Carlos Marighella on a samba drum, Carolina Maria de Jesus on a flag, Zumbi dos Palmares on a wall, Frida Kahlo on a canvass, Bruno Pereira and Dom Phillips on a stage, Che Guevara on a shed in the countryside, and, of course, Antonio Gramsci himself overlooking a mística in progress. The images, just as the text of the dossier, share the concrete experiences of a movement fed by Gramsci’s ideas as it sows the seeds for the creation of a new human being and the transformation of society.
Introduction
Despite the persistent hegemony of capitalism and its ruling neoliberal ideology, various forms of resistance, social struggle, and proposals for an emancipated future continue to emerge. This is taking place in the face of economic, political, social, and environmental crises as well as a continuing lack of vision of how to overcome the health crisis. Our intellectuals must put their hearts and souls precisely into this orientation toward the future, one based on the possibility of change and hope for human emancipation, as we argued in Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research dossier no. 13, The New Intellectual. We must create innovative proposals on how to use our social wealth to resolve the immediate problems faced by humanity, such as hunger, poverty, disease, and climate catastrophes, and study and familiarise ourselves with the resistance and struggles that emerge in all corners of the world; such proposals, in a draft form, are available in dossier no. 48, A Plan to Save the Planet (developed with the Network of Research Institutes). We must also challenge ourselves to be creative in developing possibilities for cooperation, solidarity, and social and cultural enrichment among peoples.
The Italian communist Antonio Gramsci (1891–1937) was already aware of the role of new intellectuals who, in actively participating in political organisations, dedicated themselves to developing popular consciousness and creating space for popular struggles to thrive. It is in this context that we want to revisit the work of Gramsci and the relevance of his legacy for our struggles today, reinforcing the Battle of Ideas, and–as Fidel Castro and José Martí said–recognising that the struggles within the various cultural and intellectual institutions are as important as the struggles in the streets, which go hand in hand and feed off of one another. That is why it is important to bring to the fore contemporary social experiences that are inspired by this legacy and that dialogue with Gramsci’s ideas: so that we might build the seeds of hope for this new world in real life. We use hope not only in the sense of orientation toward the future, but also in the sense that Paulo Freire taught us, of ‘giving hope’ (esperançar). This means to lift oneself up, to pursue and take forward, to join with others to build new social forms. Faced with the current social reality, it is in the enactment of this phrase that humanity’s alternative path lies.
Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST)–the largest militant, popular movement in Latin America–works to create this hope every day. The MST emerged at the start of the 1980s, rapidly transforming the peasant struggle into a tool to challenge authoritarianism in the midst of the military dictatorship which ruled Brazil at the time. Its actions, which go well beyond the struggle for land, include the pursuit of agrarian reform in order to democratise access to land and produce healthy foods as well as the fight for social justice. Today, approximately 500,000 households in the countryside are members of the MST. Some live on encampments (acampamentos)–land occupations in the throes of demanding access to fallow land–while other are live on settlements (assentamentos)–meaning that they have already won land ownership through struggle. These families continue to organise themselves in a participatory, democratic, and inclusive structure on local, regional, state, and national levels.
With this in mind, and in order to better understand the importance of Gramsci and his legacy for the construction of this popular movement, our dossier no. 54, Gramsci Amidst Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), features an interview with Neuri Rossetto, a member of the national coordination of MST. Rossetto made a point of highlighting, firstly, that he does not consider himself to be an expert in Gramsci’s thought; he is merely a militante– a cadre of the MST–and an admirer of Gramsci who aims to bring to popular movements some of the tremendous and invaluable contributions that this Italian thinker made to working-class revolutionary movements.
Reflecting on Gramsci’s legacy and its contemporary contributions, Rossetto believes that there are three main challenges ahead of us: to precisely identify the adversaries who impede efforts to address the dilemmas of humanity (such as agrarian reform), to establish an ongoing dialogue with the working class to build a political project for each country, and to strengthen the political and organisational capacity of the main forces who advance our struggles.
As the motto of L’Ordine Nuovo, a magazine led by Gramsci, Angelo Tasca, Palmiro Togliatti, and Umberto Terracini, put it in 1919: ‘Educate yourselves because we will need all your intelligence. Rouse yourselves because we will need all your enthusiasm. Organise yourselves because we will need all your strength’.
Renata Porto Bugni, the deputy director of Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research, interviewed Rossetto in 2021. An earlier version of this dossier was published in Notebooks: The Journal for Studies on Power, a journal supported by Gramsci Lab. For this dossier, we are grateful to the partnership of GramsciLab and the Centro per la Riforma dello Stato (CRS), both of which are members of the Network of Research Institutes.
How important was Gramsci’s legacy in shaping the MST’s struggle? Do you believe that Gramscian thought is still useful today for building social and political organisations to transform society?
For us in the MST, a mass social movement formed by rural workers who advance the struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil, Antonio Gramsci’s contribution is invaluable and extremely necessary for understanding the current moment and the complexity of bourgeois society. From a socialist perspective, overcoming the bourgeoisie requires an ever clearer and more contemporary understanding of bourgeois society’s functioning and reproduction. In addition, paths to political action for subaltern classes must be uncovered based on an understanding of bourgeois society’s own contradictions.
The MST has always been clear in its understanding that the success of the struggle for agrarian reform in Brazil will not only come from the strength and political actions of rural workers and peasants. Democratising ownership and access to arable land requires mobilising wider sections of society in defence of this idea and placing agrarian reform–and the question of the Brazilian agricultural development model as a whole–at the heart of a political-economic project that meets the needs and interests of the majority of the Brazilian people, not those of the capitalist class. In this sense, Gramsci’s contributions alert us to the daily struggle for hegemony and the pressing need for a societal project to be built around the centrality of workers’ struggles. This is the path we are trying to create.
With these objectives in mind, we have a triple challenge:
- to identify and define the main enemies of agrarian reform, just as Gramsci did with the forces of fascism;
- to establish a permanent dialogue with the working-class forces of civil society in order to build a consensus around a political project for the country; and
- to raise the level of organisation and politicisation of our social base.
Consequently, we can cite three examples of how Gramsci’s vast and invaluable political-theoretical contributions are both relevant and critical for popular movements to shape themselves into protagonists in the class struggle today:
- to understand how the state works, in the wider sense, as well as its attempts to gain control of the conflicts provoked by a society divided into classes;
- to look to civil society, which offers potential for subaltern classes to open new and varied lines of struggle against the domination of a minority over the majority; and
- to continuously challenge ourselves to be a political force, holding the Gramscian concept of hegemony as a reference point.
According to Gramsci, civil society is composed of what he calls private hegemonic apparatuses, which are institutions for legitimising power such as schools, the Church, trade unions, and the media, among others. How is the performance of civil society, faced with the government of Jair Bolsonaro in the midst of the pandemic, being evaluated? How is the movement interacting or dialoguing with these institutions on the frontline and strengthening civil society?
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