Atilio Boron (AB): The Socialist Register has long had a great appreciation of the Landless People’s Movement in Brazil and of your role as a leader of the MST. We feel it is very important for readers of the Register in particular to learn more about the MST strategies and tactics to resist neoliberalism’s encroachments, so we want to focus this interview on how the MST has re¬acted to the neoliberal policies carried out in Brazil by the Cardoso and Lula governments. But perhaps we should start by asking you for a panoramic overview of the evolution of class struggles in contemporary Brazil, in order to put this in an adequate historical perspective.
João Pedro Stédile (JP): The MST and Via Campesina have developed a common understanding, a common reading, of the historical evolution of capitalism in Brazil.1 We had four centuries of what might be called the ‘agro-export model’, which was inaugurated by colonial capitalism. Industrial capitalism was not really implanted until 1930, and as Florestan Fernandes said, it was a model of dependent industrialization, because it was so highly dependent on foreign capital. It was not the result of local accumulation. It lasted until the early 1980s, and was quite successful insofar as in those fifty years the Brazilian economy grew at an annual average rate of 7.5 per cent. But by the early ’80s it fell into a crisis – part of the general crisis of that model.

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