O Programa de Reforma Agrária Popular como instrumento de formação de cultura popular emancipatória no MST.

Abstract

This master's dissertation examines the Popular Agrarian Reform Program of the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) as an instrument for shaping a new emancipatory popular culture. It approaches the concept of culture in a broad sense, as a way of life and sociability, grounded in Gramscian theory and in dialogue with Marx and the Marxist tradition, to analyze the centrality of productive organization and labor in constructing the hegemony of a fundamental social class. This research acknowledges the strategic importance of culture in political hegemonic struggles and the intentional dynamics inherent in such disputes within the superstructure, where culture either intensifies or mitigates contradictions arising from the material base of social relations. By analyzing the Popular Agrarian Reform Program, developed by the MST throughout its trajectory, this study seeks to understand a concrete experience of formulating a popular and emancipatory political project constructed by subaltern classes in Brazil. This project carries strong markers of a popular initiative with both national and international dimensions. Following Gramsci’s perspective, we interpret this project as having the potential to shape and guide the collective will of the masses, fostering critical consciousness in their formation as a hegemonic class. The general objective of this research is to analyze the configuration of the Popular Agrarian Reform Program within the class struggle, highlighting the historical protagonism of the Brazilian peasantry, particularly the MST, while considering the determinants of the Agrarian Question as an arena of hegemonic disputes in Brazil. The anti-systemic nature of the MST’s struggle, encapsulated in its program, can be understood as an expression of peasant resistance against the structural and systemic violence of capitalism, dominated by the logic of agribusiness, whose exploitative and neocolonial nature upholds a solid cultural project of the ruling class. Thus, Popular Agrarian Reform is not only a counter-project to capitalist development in rural areas, but also an instrument for building a socialist alternative, strengthening the popular project of subaltern working classes — for themselves and for Brazil — emerging from the concrete dynamics of the struggle for land and agrarian reform.