Práticas organizativas do MST e relações de poder em acampamentos/assentamentos do estado de São Paulo
Abstract
This thesis aimed at analyzing the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST) organizational practices and its power relationships within the State of São Paulo campsites and settlements. MST acquired a never before seen dimension among the history of other characters in the struggle for land, constantly broadening its claims alternatives, interventions and alliance network. In recent times, amidst the campaigns supported by the movement there are those against genetically modified foods and against AFTA. The movement s organization has been re-issued in MST s formation material for several years. What however replaces the same question? What are the movement s strategies and its forms of organization and staff selection? In what measure its members consciousness is built ? How members are indicated to determinate tasks or positions ? Those were some of the questions we put to ourselves. Data were collected through the reading of manuals, newspapers, magazines and other material produced by the movement; as well as through interviews with camped and settled families, with militants and with leaderships; nevertheless, through participant observation of several events, seminars and courses also organized by the movement. In a certain way, we could observe that MST politics longevity is mainly due to this organizational structure and to the professionalizing of its direction board, what guarantee its political authority, personified in its main leaderships. We shall add to that the fact that the movement finds itself nationally and internationally articulated in a network of support and political and, occasionally, economic background. Militants and directors are submitted to a series of principles and politic lines that provide unit to the movement, re-enforced in its formation material and courses. By means of the same mechanisms, tasks delegation and evaluation criteria are stipulated. Militant conduct is observed by other members and this is an indispensable factor for further indications to upper levels of complexity and responsibility tasks. We could observe that camped members attain themselves mobilized to activities because they believe it is a path to obtain land, once their place in the camping is due to the movement, and militants and directors mostly detain the territory, the forms and strategies of organization domain. In settlements there is a smaller political participation. It is common to find settlers concerned only to their families and their allotments care, and not actively participating in the movement s activities. Families show themselves reluctant to militant intervention, choosing rather to constitute affinity groups in order to solve their community problems. In other hand, those social relations can not be understood as separated or distant from social dynamics itself, what ends up producing arrangements and re-arrangements of organizational structures, new inventions within organization forms and new subjects. From established relationships emerge new though marginal or submersed relationships that allow us to allude to new experiences of social transformation.