Re: [Marxism] Venezuela

["Carlos Eduardo Rebello" <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Nestor wrote:

"The fact
that Brazil is an urbanized society does by no means mean that the
agrarian question is settled there. In fact, the Sem Terra have been
struggling for a return of the mass of urban unemployed to the
countryside. Don't know if this is possible on a massive scale. Nor do
I know for sure that this "counters" any "Marxist" Shibboleth. If
there are no "land hungry" peasants in Brazil as a political force
like that in, say, 1910 Russia, it is simply because they have been
returned to the state of nature in urban slums.

Exactly: the massive transfer of most of Brazil's peasant (share croppers 
and other smallholders) population to the urban periphery in the wake of the 
consolidation of landed property as a purely capitalist venture (the fusing 
of land rent & profit through direct capitalist management)  is one of the 
greatest human tragedies of the second half of the lest century, in that it 
generated a huge mass of dysfunctional manpower concentrated in the cities 
and led the Brazilian bourgeois to deal with the urban working class in the 
same way their forefathers dealt with the rural poor: through naked police & 
private thug violence. Therefore the gist of the MST's activities: to raise 
the issue of  landed property (both rural and urban,as there is an urban arm 
of the MST, the Homeless [Sem teto] Movement) as one of socio-political 
empowerment.

Carlos Rebello 


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