Agrarian business corporations, the main winners of globalization and the designers of the system that fulfils their demands are continuing their concentrating and expanding strategies. Endued or supported by the states and international organizations they attempts to force their socially excluding and ecologically destructive models of development on the southern countries, which also undermines the safety of food supply there.
All posts by sz szilu84
Learning to Participate: The MST Experience in Brazil
Maybe the Landless Workers' Movement (MST) of Brazil has one of the hugest social base and most radical leftist program in Latin America. It constitutes an unavoidable reference for all contemporary leftist peasant movements both in Latin America and in the other continents as well. Its legendary combative land occupations and its highly organized and conscious autonomist system of popular education in the spirit of Paulo Freire designate the MST to be the most massive and theoretically most advanced bloc of the Via Campesina. The author, a Brazilian sociologist, presents us a relatively detailed account of the main practices of the movement, of its theoretical starting points and also its practical results.
Twenty-First-Century Land Grabs Accumulation by Agricultural Dispossession
The main incentive for the multiform land grabs is the utilitarian, profit-oriented use of land. Among the leitmotivs of the present wave of land grabs, especially on the global South, one could find the increasing ecological problems, and the speculation for the likely future boom of food prices. The centralization of land control and the food production that is dominated by profit based industrialized factory farms is hamstringing agrarian small producers and is aggravating the population of slums; from the other hand it is incompatible with the needs of an ecologically sustainable agriculture and the food sovereignty of the peoples.
People without land, land without people. Material and spiritual expropriation of land in Hungary
The questions of the ownership and use of land have generated a huge flood of scandals during the last year in Hungary. Naturally, the land question is not something new: agriculture is still the main element of the Hungarian economy, as it was also before WWII, in the age of state socialism and following 1989 as well; hence the acquisition of land, the relations of ownership and of power could be seen completely in the struggles for the land. As far as possible, the authors intended to review both the historical and the more present questions and hope that a wider dialogue about the land could arise on this base.
Reflections on the New International
Also Peter Gowan wrote that the incorporation of East Europe into the capitalist world system is highly similar to imperialism. The starting point of the study of István Mészáros is that structural crisis of the system of capitalist production specifically falls into military interventions, in which globalized capital (which disposes the strongest positions in the so called postmodern countries) turns against modern and pre-modern regions "in order to perpetuate their so-called »liberal imperialisms and the total domination of the militarily less powerful countries by unleashing »death and destructions." According to the study, despite former experiences there are positive preconditions nowadays to organize a more combative International.
