MST releases photo and public note to society:

The Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra) comes to public to manifest his grief again for the loss of companheiro Elton Brum loss, to manifest  solidarity to the family and for:

1. To denounce one more harsh and violent action of the Military Police of Rio Grande do Sul, what resulted in Elton Brum murder, 44 years, two children’s father, natural of Canguçu, during the forced eviction of Southall Farm occupation in São Gabriel. The information on the eviction shows that Brum was murdered when the situation was already controlled and there was no resistance. There are indications that he has been murdered by the backs.

2. To denounce that besides the landless worker death, the action still resulted in dozens of injured, including women and children, with wounds of splinters, swords and bitten of dogs.

3. We denounced Governor Yeda Crusius, hierarchal commander of the Military Police, responsible for a politics of criminalization of the social movements and of violence against the urban and rural workers. The use of firearms to deal with social movements reveals that the violence is part of the politics of this State. The criminalization is not an exception, but it is the rule and an unpopular government’s need, to service of obscure interests and to remain in the power by force.

4. We denounced Colonel Lauro Binsfield, Commander of the Military Police, whose report includes other disarray actions, cruelty and violence against the workers, as in the March 8, 2008, when he repeated the same methods against the women of Via Campesina.

5. We denounced the Judiciary Power that impeded the expropriation and the emission of ownership of Fazenda Antoniasi, where Elton Brum would be seated. His life would have been saved if the Judiciary Power was to service of Federal Constitution and not of interests of local oligarchies.

6. We denounced State Public Prosecution service in São Gabriel (MPE – Ministério Público Estadual) that was omitted when the seated families demanded the liberation of resources already available for the construction of the school for 350 families, of which kids now will lose the school year, and for health, what already costed three children’s life. The same MPE was omitted in the moment of the action, in front of the violence they witnessed in the field. And now they come to public to eulogize Military Police action as professional.

7. To recall the Brazilian society that rural social movements have been denouncing for more than one year that there is a criminalization politics from Yeda Crusius Government to the Commission of Human Rights of the Senate, to the Special Department for Human Rights, to Agrarian Audit and to OAS – Organization of American States. The omission of the authorities and the disrespect of the Governor to any institution and to democracy resulted today in a fatal victim.

8. To reaffirm that we will follow demanding the settlement of all families camped in Rio Grande do Sul and the infrastructure conditions to implement the settlements foreseen to São Gabriel.

We demanded Justice and Punishment to the Criminals!

For our dead, not even a minute of silence. A whole life of struggle!

Land reform, for social justice and popular sovereignty!

Rural Landless Workers Movement (MST – Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra)

(English version by me)

By Francis Cody

“But for the women who had come to the office that day from Katrampatti, my sense is that they would only have been satisfied that they had performed the act of petitioning at grievance day if they had been able to see the collector and plead with him orally using generic conventions compelling superiors to act on behalf of the weak, not unlike those found in the praise language that had been erased from their petition. Their ambivalence is a product of having been denied the chance to make an affective claim through eye contact, ensuring that the collector would feel with their suffering. Karuppiah and I had tried to make it up to the petitioners by taking them all out to lunch after submitting the petition, but the bus ride home was certainly marked by disappointment and uncertainty about what had just taken place at the collector’s office. They all knew that it would be very difficult to collectively take yet another day off of work and come back to town.

Any governmental claims to rationalized and disenchanted Weberian bureaucracy remain particularly vexed in this context, because the collector does in fact sit in the erstwhile king’s seat, in his palace. In fact, he collects petitions in the old darbar hall where the king of Pudukkottai would have met with the court and those who had come to plead before royalty. Such a dense semiotic environment does not lend itself easily to a bureaucratic ideology of directness, or “reduced,” “logical” communication in the eyes of petitioners or even petition writers. The collector does appear to act like a king. It took so much pedagogical work just to get the group from Katrampatti to come to the collector’s office and it seemed somehow incomplete, in part because after such effort they simply turned in the sheet of paper at a small office without being able to see and talk to the collector at grievance day. The petitioners’ idea of seeing the collector directly (neratiyaka), a face-to-face encounter with a powerful patron, conflicts with the ideals of directness as the simple transmission of a communication in written form in which a petitioner has no face. Beyond this sense disappointment at not connecting visually or orally with their addressee, these petitioners have repeatedly been deceived or disappointed by the state, as by other higher powers. They know they are dealing with a realm of power that is in some sense beyond their control. This was, after all, an act of faith (oru nampikkaitan) as much as it was an exercise in citizenship.”

Read it at Cutural Anthropology

By Ellen Meiksins Wood

“In fact, we could just as easily say that the history of rights has
been a contraction, not an expansion, of political rights — not an
expansion from one set of rights to another but a contraction of
political rights to exclude the social and the economic. Political
rights have certainly expanded in the sense that they’ve become more
universal. More and more people have achieved the right to vote. But at
the same time, political rights have contracted in the sense that they
now exclude so many aspects of life.

There was a time when fewer people had political rights, but the
rights they did have were economic and social powers at the same time.
Today that isn’t true. People with political rights may not have any
social or economic power; and that’s one reason we’ve had to invent new
kinds of economic and social rights.

Let me explain what I mean. I’ll give you the punch line first: we
live today in a capitalist world, and capitalism has completely
transformed the meaning of political rights and their relation to
economic and social rights. The distinctive relation between political
and economic power in capitalism is fundamentally different from
anything that existed in the world before the system came into being.
Capitalism has created a separate economic sphere with its own rules
and its own forms of power; and political rights have been emptied of
economic and social content.

At the same time, the system has produced a whole new set of social
problems. In fact, I think you could say that the very idea of a
distinct sphere of social problems belongs specifically to capitalism.
The idea of “the social question,” as it came to be called in the 19th
century, is very specifically related to the development of capitalism,
with its propertyless laboring class. And it’s specifically in the
conditions of capitalism that we’ve had to start thinking about social
rights, social justice, social citizenship, the social economy, and,
yes, social work.

In other words, just when political rights have been emptied of
social content, there’s a whole new range of social problems, and one
of the great debates of our time is how, or even whether, the political
power of the state should intervene to solve them.”

Read full article at Against the Current