Will Brehm  1:32
Rebecca Tarlau, welcome to FreshEd.

Rebecca Tarlau  1:34
Thank you. It’s great to be here.

Will Brehm  1:36
Well, first off, congratulations on your book for the award that you just received. And I’d like to sort of begin by thinking more broadly about one of the main points or topics in your book, which is about the Brazilian landless workers movement. For someone who doesn’t know too much about it, how would you explain what this movement is?

Rebecca Tarlau  1:57
Great! Good question. And it’s my favorite topic. So, the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement is one of the largest social movements in the world, and certainly the largest social movement in Latin America. It is an agrarian reform movement, which means that it’s a movement of previously landless people who are fighting for land access in order to build sustainable small family farming communities in these areas. And that the Landless Workers Movement, or in Portuguese Movimentos Sem Terra or MST for short. It’s a social movement that arose in the late 1970s, early 1980s. And interestingly, it didn’t arise as one united coherent movement, but rather, there were like groups of landless farmers who were in deep situations of poverty, and inspired by the Catholic Church, and specifically a progressive part of the Catholic Church that was liberation theology, a lot of these landless farmers actually decided to take the issue of poverty into their own hand. And they began to occupy large, unproductive land estates in Southern Brazil. And they would then squat on the land for several months and try to pressure the government to get that land redistributed. And even in a period of dictatorship -Brazil had a dictatorship from 1964 to 1984- this tactic of occupying land and squatting in that land and refusing to leave actually worked. And the government began to buy up this land and redistribute it to these landless farmers. And so, there were actually a lot of landless farmers who got land access between 1979 and 1984. And it was in 1984 that the leaders of these dispersed land occupations throughout Southern Brazil decided to come together and they decided to found one movement, the Landless Workers Movement, the MST, with the phrase that land belongs to those who work it, which is a critique of this huge concentration of land in Brazil, where historically, very few people have owned the majority of the land, and the majority of the population has been landless. And so that was the founding of the movement in 1984.

Will Brehm  4:07
And so, the goal, you know, on the one hand is land reform. But are there other goals that this movement MST is aiming to achieve?

Rebecca Tarlau  4:16
Yeah. So, the MST articulates its goals in terms of fighting for land reform, agrarian reform, and societal transformation. And so, land reform or access to land, is one aspect of agrarian reform. But in order to live a dignified life on the land, the movement realizes that land isn’t enough. You also need roads, and houses, and technical assistance for agricultural production. And you also need schools, and childcare, and health care systems. And so, the fight for agrarian reform is really the fight to have all the resources you need to live a sustainable, vibrant life in the countryside as a farmer. And then the movement’s third goal is their fight for social transformation. And so, this movement is a self-declared socialist movement and they embrace historical attempts to construct more collective, just societies, and they openly critique capitalism. And so, the movement is fighting for agricultural production that is more collective, they’re fighting for what’s called food sovereignty, where local communities can produce their own food that’s healthy and appropriate for their culture. And they don’t have to actually depend on the market. And so, the movement absolutely fights for these larger goals of what they call socialism, and what we could think of as more social justice-oriented communities that are more collective. And then interestingly, over the past 30 years, the movement has actually evolved to embrace other goals such as racial justice, indigenous rights, gender equity, and most recently, over the past five years, the movement has also been struggling and fighting for LGBTQ landless rights, or in other words, the rights of LGBTQ rural people to a dignified life as well. So, I always say the movement is in movement because it’s sort of transformed over the past 30 years to embrace other struggles as well.

Will Brehm  6:21
Do we know anything about the size of the MST? How many people are we talking about? And I know that might be different at different points but maybe can you give us a sense of the size of this movement?

Rebecca Tarlau  6:33
Yeah. So, the movement has got an approximately 350,000 families that have gotten access to land through this process of land occupation. And the unit they use is families because families are actually the ones that occupy land and they can get rights to use that land. So, that’s about a million and a half people in total that have gotten access to land through this process of land occupation. After families are able to get -so usually what happens is the families occupy land, they have to camp out on that land for three or four or five years, and then in the best of situations, the government will buy up that land and redistribute it. And then those communities go from being what’s called a landless encampment to actually being an official government recognized agrarian reform settlement. And then once there is a settlement or a rural community, the relationship between families, and that new community, and the MST is sort of widely different across the country. And then so there’s many settlements where the majority of families still support the MST and participate in the movement. There’s other communities where families will sort of do their own thing and start farming and no longer be participants. And so, at any one time, there might be, let’s say, 20-30,000 people across the country that are active participants in the movement, and what the movement would refer to as militants or militantes, which in Portuguese, means sort of like activists, but it’s more of like a dedicated relationship to your social movements. So, sort of, full time activists within the movement. And then there’s lots of other people who’ve gotten access through these land occupations who the movement still considers as part of their movement, but who aren’t active every day in the different activist spaces that the movement has developed.

Will Brehm  8:28
You talked about some of their tactics in terms of occupying land and that has been quite successful. Are there other tactics, and other ways in which they’ve tried to go about achieving these different goals that they’ve articulated?

Rebecca Tarlau  8:42
Yeah. So, I mean, my research specifically is about the movements’ educational initiatives. And so initially, the movement occupied land, and then would try to construct new communities and new societies on this land. And the movement was actually pretty critical of the school system. Like I said, it was this self-identified socialist movement, they were very critical of the capitalist state, they assumed school systems would simply reproduce a capitalist ideology. But what happened is that once these farmers got land access and built these new communities, local governments had no choice but to build schools in the communities to attend the hundreds of kids that were in these communities. And so initially, in the 1980s, the government would send teachers to these schools in these MST communities, who would know nothing about the movement, who would tell the kids of these MST activists that their parents were illegal outlaws, that the movement was worthless, and that the only thing they could do to succeed in life was to study hard and move to the city and get a good job. So, very early on, the MST realized that in order to promote the type of sustainable, vibrant, rural communities they wanted to promote in the countryside, they not only had to occupy land itself but they had to occupy the public school system as well. And so, beginning in the early 1980s, the movement began to think about what type of school do they want for the rural countryside. Like what type of school would embody their fight for more collectivist social justice-oriented initiatives in the countryside. And so that was a big part of their struggle from the very beginning.

Will Brehm  10:22
And were they successful? That seems like obviously, the government might not want MST to take over the public school system.

Rebecca Tarlau  10:32
And thus, you have articulated the question in my book, right? Like why would a government that is inherently a government that supports markets, supports capitalism, supports these more dominant ways of organizing society -why the heck would they allow this radical social movement to participate in the local public school system and promote alternative pedagogies? So, that’s the question in my book, and that was the question I was really curious about because when I arrived in the field for the first time, I saw with my own eyes that indeed, the government was allowing activists to do what I call co-govern the public school system. They were allowing activists to become teachers, to become principals. They were allowing the movement to develop curriculum that talked about the history of agrarian reform and social struggle. They were allowing the movement to reorganize the schools, to encourage youth to stay in the countryside, to engage in activism, to be part of the self-governance of their own school systems. And they would even have -like, I would go to public schools, where there’d be pictures on the walls of like a Brazilian flag and also, the MST has its own flag that symbolizes its movement. And they’d be sort of tied together in the front of the school representing this partnership between this radical social movement and the government. And so, my question of the book became, how does a social movement convince local state officials, and also federal officials, to participate in the co-governance of the public school system?

Will Brehm  12:17
And so how did they do it? I mean on the one hand, if you’re running this MST, it has its own flag, it has its own institutions, and organizational structures, and it has huge amounts of people in rural communities backing it -it’s a pretty elaborate social movement. Why would MST even want to work through government institutions? Like it seems a bit contradictory?

Rebecca Tarlau  12:43
Yeah. And it’s the opposite of other social movements. For example, the Zapatistas embrace a different strategy towards social change. The Zapatistas, which is an indigenous movement in Chiapas, Mexico. And that movement, they create schools outside of the state system. They create, sort of, their own counter institutions that don’t have to engage the state. But the MST is different. The MST believes that it is the obligation of the government to provide education to all of its citizens. However, it is the right of citizens to determine what that education should look like, and how that should be appropriate to the local context. And so, the MST’s entire vision and theory of social change is about the transformation of state institutions and how citizens can be part of the co-governance of those institutions. And it’s contentious. So, one of the main concepts I present in my book, is the idea of this contentious co-governance, where you have a socialist movement co-governing schools with a capitalist state, and they’re working together yet they’re always also in conflict. And the movement will protest against the same government that they’re co-governing with. And so, it’s a very contentious process of co-governance.

Will Brehm  14:07
And so, what does that look like? Is it typically that the MST will hold protests, or what happens in the day-to-day realm of co-governing where it becomes contentious?

Rebecca Tarlau  14:18
So, there’s lots of examples that I saw with my own eyes doing this ethnography. I lived with the movement for 20 months, like in the homes of educational activists. So, I saw these conflicts happen all the time. One example that I like to give is in the southern part of Brazil, Rio Grande do Sul, the movement actually got permission from the state government to build legal public schools within their illegal occupied encampments. So, you would have an actual legal public school within this encampment and the movement also got permission for the school to sort of move with the movement of the movement is what I say. So, for example, these occupied encampments were often getting evicted. But if the land occupation and that community of 500 families who were occupying that area, if they got evicted and had to move to a new location, the school was legally allowed to move to that new location and those teachers continued to be public school teachers that would be paid by the state government. But at one point, the resources stopped coming in and the movement wanted more resources, both for some of their agricultural cooperative initiatives and for the schools. And so, the movement decided they were going to organize a huge statewide march against the governor. And so, they began to march to the capital of Rio Grande do Sul, Porto Alegre, and they marched from all different corners of the state. And the schools actually were allowed to march with them. So, the movement would march to the center of Porto Alegre and these schools would set up makeshift schools in the middle of the march, where you’d have chairs in the middle of the street, and you’d have like a little mini school session, you would have kids calculating, for example, the distance they were marching each day, in order to do math class. You would have like the biology teacher asking about what the plants look like. And what’s interesting is that they ended up in Porto Alegre in front of the governor and they were protesting him. Yet the governor was still paying these public school teachers in these schools that were part of the protest. And so, these schools, what were referred to as itinerant schools, they were both a public institution and now part of the mobilization of that social movement against the same state that was institutionalizing them.

Will Brehm  16:57
Oh, my gosh. Oh, my gosh, I mean, it’s so interesting on different levels because it really even challenges what the idea of a school is. You don’t need these physical walls and spaces anymore to be a school. It can literally move in different spaces over time and still be constituted as a school. And it’s somehow being paid for by the state, but also involved in the very protesting of that state. I mean, it’s a really amazing example.

Rebecca Tarlau  17:25
Yeah, it’s really interesting. And it’s related to one of the main arguments I try to make in my book, which is about what happens when social movements engage state institutions. And so, there’s a long standing argument in the academic literature, but also sort of common sense hunches among activists, that once a social movement engages the state, they’re going to actually demobilize and decline in their activism. And this argument in the academic literature goes back to Robert Michel’s iron rule of oligarchy, where he says, organizations always become more oligarchic over time, and also Piven and Cloward’s writings about the civil rights movement, where they argue that the only effective form of protest is disruption. That there’s no other effective form of social movement action. And so, I contest that in my book. I say, no. Social movements engaging the state won’t necessarily be co-opted. In fact, what I argue in my book is that social movements’ strategic engagement with state institutions can increase their internal capacity and long term ability to promote social change. And so again, this is a huge argument where I say, because the MST has occupied the public school system, and has been able to influence hundreds of thousands of students across the country, and also plug their own activists into the school system as teachers and promote higher educational programs for their activists, they’ve been able to recruit new activists. And a lot of those activists are women and young people which is because the school system is a gendered institution with mostly women working within them. That means that there’s a lot of women that actually become activists through their participation in these school systems. So, because of that, they’re able to recruit new activists. They’re also able to give activists both technical and political training. So, activists are becoming lawyers, they’re becoming teachers, they’re becoming historians, agronomists, and they’re doing this through this alternative educational project that’s both offering technical training and it’s also offering political training in the sense that these schools and even these higher education programs are structured through this alternative form of organization that emphasizes self-governance and emphasizes the importance of politics and political mobilization.

Will Brehm  20:00
Right, so not simply that embracing state institutions would somehow reduce the value and importance of the MST but it actually has improved and helped them meet their goals even more, is what you’re sort of arguing. Which is an amazing insight that you can get from the MST itself. One of the things that maybe you can still help me understand is, why would the state want the MST involved in their schools, right? I mean, I can understand the MST side, but what’s the state’s logic for embracing the MST?

Rebecca Tarlau  20:43
Great question. And I have a two by two table in my book that tries to draw on the different contexts where this is possible. But just to give you an answer, I think before we can talk about that, we just have to reflect a little on, what’s your theory of the state? And in comparative and international education, there is a tradition of thinking about theories of the state that I think has been lost a little because people just sort of assume that the state is the government and it’s all the same thing. And so, for me, the state is not one entity, and no one has power over the state. So, even the president doesn’t control the state because the state is actually a really multifaceted organization that exists at different levels and within different institutions. And then there’s all these different pieces of the state and people, and because of that sort of decentralized nature of the state, especially in contexts, like Brazil, and even the United States where there’s like a federal system, in those contexts, there’s lots of opportunities to work with different state actors within that sort of multifaceted ecosystem of state institutions. And so, what I find in my research, is that the MST is able to garner control and convince state actors to co-govern the public school system in very different contexts. Like some of the contexts you might expect, which are more left-leaning contexts where you get an elected official in power, whose goals and whose ideology aligns with the movement. And so that’s a situation where, for example, in the state here in Rio Grande do Sul, where these itinerant schools were constructed, that was a situation where a very left-leaning governor came to power. I have these quotes from the State Secretary of Education, who says, “yeah, we came to power, and the MST became part of our government. Like we invited them to participate.” Now, the problem with that form of transforming school systems is that when you’re aligned with a particular political party, if that party gets kicked out of office, which eventually happened in the state, and a very right-wing government took power, then you have what becomes this full out attack on this social movement and their schools. And so here in Rio Grande do Sul, which is one of the case studies I have in my book, the MST is first able to create these amazing initiatives by aligning with left-leaning governments. And then when a right leaning government comes to power, those initiatives are attacked, and in most cases destroyed.

Will Brehm  23:27
Do they ever come back? If the next election happens, and a left-leaning government comes back into power?

Rebecca Tarlau  23:32
Yeah. So, if the social movement has enough sort of capacity -so in the case of Grande do Sul, that period of right-wing attack, actually hurt the movement’s capacity in that state. So, even when another left-leaning governor came to power, the movement itself didn’t have enough land they were occupying, or enough kids in those occupied encampments to even justify this itinerant school experiment that had existed, right. And so that’s sort of a case of ideological alignment, but actually, the cases that I talk about the most in my book, and that I find the most interesting are in cases where there is potentially a really, really right-wing government. However, the capacity of the state itself is very low. And so, in some of the northeastern municipalities that I study, like there’s one town where I did research for eight months, where the same family has been in power for 125 years. I mean, the same family from like, 1890 something like they’ve been in power. Yet, this municipality has such little ability or capability to support the school system that when the MST started engaging with the school systems, at first they were sort of wary about it but what happened is that the MST began to convince teachers on the ground that what they were doing was helpful. And so just for example, you would have like dozens of teachers in these schools, and the MST activists would simply show up to these schools and say, “Hey, I am Jose Aleni. Can I help you set up your chairs? Oh, do you want me to organize a parent meeting tonight? Oh, by the way, we’re running a teacher training next week on how you teach in rural school systems and how to improve rural school systems. Do you want to go to that teacher training? Oh, by the way, we have a higher education college program, we know that you only have a high school degree. We’ve developed this program with the federal government, do you want to study in our program?”

And so, these teachers, and I interviewed dozens and dozens of these teachers, but they were so scared of the MST, they’re like, “Oh, my God, I’m going to teach in a school where they just invaded land and what are they going to do? I’m so scared.” But then they arrived and they realized that the movement was actually a bunch of activists that were like humans, and that were helpful. And so, for these teachers who had been in these rural schools, they had never seen the municipal government in decades, ever helped them with anything. The municipality was so poor, they never ran a single teacher training or professional development program. And suddenly, you have this social movement that is offering to  help organize, to help offer teacher trainings, to help offer higher educational access. And so little by little in these towns, the MST convinced dozens and dozens up into hundreds of teachers to support them, to support their educational project. And so how that translated into like municipal mayor support is, I would talk to these mayors who by the time I got there in 2011, like these mayors were partnering with the MST to run teacher trainings in this town. And I would go to these teacher trainings and they’d be about like the history of capitalist exploitation. They’d be like explicitly Marxist. And these mayors were very conservative. And so, I would ask them, I’d be like, “Leandro, why are you like paying for these Marxist teacher trainings?”

Will Brehm  27:21
And what did he say?

Rebecca Tarlau  27:22
The answer would be like, “You know, Rebecca, I don’t agree with the Marxist line of seeing the world, but these MST leaders have a relationship with my teachers, I have to govern for everyone, I don’t want to cause conflict.” Or another mayor said, “Look, Rebecca, it’s like really practical. Like when I arrived, and I became mayor, the MST was already working in the schools and was helping the schools function.”

Will Brehm  27:53
Right. And the state couldn’t sort of fill the same need. So, you just rely on what is there. I can see how that practical decision would trump any ideological disputes.

Rebecca Tarlau  28:04
Yeah, right. So, in my book, I talked about these three factors that really influence the ability to co-govern schools. And I talk about ideology is important. But for me, ideology is only important when you have a very strong state capacity, where a right-wing government can implement right-wing goals. But if you have a low capacity state, like the ideology almost doesn’t matter because if the MST can support the governance of the school system and increase the capacity of the state to actually offer educational access to students and teachers, that actually trumps it. And then the third thing that I talk about, though, is just the importance of the social movement infrastructure itself. And so, I went to one town, which was a similar sort of low capacity town, where the local mayor really wanted the MST to be involved, even though he was very conservative. He’s like, “Yeah, I’d love the MST to help, except we gave the MST control over one of the schools and the community itself so that people who had occupied land 10 years previously actually mobilized against that teacher and said, they didn’t want the movement in their school.” And so that’s a case where you have a town where, like, the MST itself has actually lost the support of its base. And so, what I refer to as “social movement infrastructure” is very low. And if that happens, it’s like a social movement loses its power and its relevance in local communities, then co-governance can’t happen. So, it’s sort of like those three factors: social movement infrastructure, state capacity, and government ideology.

Will Brehm  29:50
It’s really fascinating to think how it looks differently spread over the entire country rather than just seeing it as what’s happening in the nation-state. In 2019, Brazil did -I guess it was 2018 when the election happened but- Bolsonaro came to power in 2019. A very right-wing government, at least at the national level. Has that changed, sort of, relationships between the Brazilian state in its multifaceted way with the MST?

Rebecca Tarlau  30:24
Yes. So, I have an epilogue of my book. It’s called What’s Left of the Brazilian Left. I had to write this epilogue five different times because between when I first submitted my book to Oxford University Press in 2017, and then when it got published, things just kept changing so quickly. And actually, in the last version of my epilogue I submitted in August 2018, I only had two sentences about Bolsonaro because he was still this fringe candidate that no one really took seriously. And so, in October 2018, when he won the election, I had to beg my press to let me rewrite the epilogue one last time to try to understand this particular moment and the right-wing resurgence that was happening in Brazil.

Will Brehm  31:19
And so, what happens with the MST since the book has been published, what has happened?

Rebecca Tarlau  31:24
So, again, I talk about this in my epilogue, but my argument in the epilogue is that even though Bolsonaro is in power, he doesn’t have all the power of the Brazilian State, right. And so, what I argue is that this 35 year-long march through the institutions has meant that the MST is embedded in hundreds of different state institutions and within dozens of different sub-national governments across the country. And so, although Bolsonaro does have power over the federal government, that does not mean he has power over all the institutions and sub-national governments that make up this complicated thing we refer to as the Brazilian State. So, Bolsonaro has done things to attack the movement. He’s shut down -like the movement had a lot of federal programs that were some of the most exciting educational initiatives, were some federal programs they developed like in the late 1990s, and 2000s. All of them have been shut down. Bolsonaro has increased the number of evictions, trying to evict people that are occupying land. He also just has a really hateful rhetoric. He calls the MST a terrorist movement. He said literally,  “The welcome mat for land invasion is going to be a bullet.” And although he hasn’t used federal and state police to repress the movement yet, that hateful rhetoric has increased the violence against the movement, has increased the assassinations. So, all of that is true. But what I do in my epilogue is I try to offer some reasons for cautious optimism, even in this new conservative context. And I talk about four reasons for cautious optimism.

The first reason for cautious optimism is that, if Bolsonaro doesn’t solidify a military fascist state, and his only strategy is to cut resources at the federal level, the MST will potentially be able to ride that out for a few years. And that looks like what’s happening right now. Although I say that cautiously because I know that things can take quick turns. So, that’s one thing. Another thing is it’s interesting that now we have this common enemy who has mobilized -like the Brazilian left had been divided for the past 30 years since the Workers Party came to power. There was lots of divisions, a lot of internal fighting. And now actually, these different left groups are more united than ever before. And the MST itself had to play this sort of delicate political dance with the left-leaning Workers Party government when they were in power. And now they don’t. They can just protest and go back to old repertoires of action, of like, protests and mobilizations. So, that’s like a second reason for optimism. A third reason for optimism is just the children, or the youth, who have grown up through these MST educational offerings that have become active in the movement through this alternative form of schooling where they participated in the self-governance of their school and were encouraged to then translate that into the self-governance of their social movement and their communities. And so, there’s thousands and thousands of youth still in MST communities whose political consciousness has transformed and who are not going to be leaving the movement anytime soon. And then just my fourth reason for cautious optimism is that I think, unlike the early 1980s, the movement is now facing this conservative context with this new arsenal of resources that they’ve gained through this long march through the institutions. So, for example, in the agricultural sphere, the movement has dozens and dozens of successful agricultural cooperatives throughout the countryside. And although federal support was really critical to get those started, now they’re just part and parcel of local economies, they’re really viable and again, unless Bolsonaro takes a really fascist turn, he can’t destroy those successful economic initiatives.
And in the educational realm, the movement has already, through federal programs, given higher educational access to hundreds of thousands of people from the rural countryside throughout the country. Bolsonaro can’t take away those degrees that people have achieved. The movement developed partnerships with over 80 universities and they went from being a movement of farmers with, like, fifth grade education to a movement of farmers with college degrees, master’s degrees, PhDs and beyond. And again, it’s through this particular program, where the movement was able to create what you could call like affirmative action programs for agrarian reform areas, where only people from these occupied land encampments, or from these agrarian reform settlements could enter these higher education programs. And through these programs, again, thousands and thousands of people got their higher ed degrees. But more important than getting their degrees is they got their degrees through this alternative educational model that allowed them to “prefigure” -and I use this language in my book- it allowed them to actually prefigure the type of social and economic world they wanted to live in through this four year course. And so, I always say that these activists are very aware of the type of world they want to create because they lived it in practice through these programs. And now a lot of these activists are working at the sub-national level in schools. And so, this is sort of like the final point. The 2000 schools the MST has in their communities are actually run by municipal and state governments. Like it’s a very decentralized system. And so, although Bolsonaro won the election in 2018, in the north and northeast, like the Workers Party just swept the election, and in a lot of those locations, governors and mayors that are left leaning are more willing than ever before to work with the MST as a form of resistance against Bolsonaro, right. And so, I think the MST obviously is going to have -a lot of their federal programs and federal initiatives were cut, but now they’re looking for other sub-national arrangements where they can keep pushing forward their educational and agricultural goals and so the MST is not going anywhere. Bolsonaro does not have the power to stamp out the MST and the power the MST has garnered over 35 years through this long march through the institutions.

Will Brehm  38:33
Rebecca Tarlau. Thank you so much for joining FreshEd. And, again, congratulations on the award.

Rebecca Tarlau  38:38
Thank you. Thank you so much. It’s been great chatting.