Anarchy Works.pdf - Infoshop.org

decisions
Anarchy Works
After the day's work, delegates from all the work teams met
on the job and made necessary technical arrangements for
the next day's work. .. The assembly made final decisions
on all important questions and issued instructions to both
the team delegates and the administrative commission:'"
Many areas also had District Committees that pooled the
resources of all the collectives in a district-basically acting as a
clearinghouse to circulate surplus from the collectives that had it
to other collectives that needed it. Hundreds of collectives joined
federations organized through the CNT or UGT (the socialist labor
union). The federations proVided economic coordination, pooling
resources to allow peasants to build their own fruit and vegetable
canneries, gathering information about which items were in
abundance and which were in short supply, and organizing uniform
exchange systems. This collective form of decision-making proved
effective for the approximately seven to eight million peasants
involved in this movement. Half the land in anti-fascist Spain-threequarters
of the land in Aragon-was collectivized and self-organized.
In August 1937,just over a year after anarchist and socialist
peasants started forming collectives, the Republican government,
under control of the Stalinists, had consolidated enough to move
against the lawless zones of Aragon. The Karl Marx Brigade, units of
the International Brigades, and other units disarmed and dissolved
the collectives in Aragon, crushing any resistance and spiriting
off numerous anarchists and libertarian socialists to the prisons
and torture chambers the Stalinists had set up to use against their
revolutionary allies.
Brazil today bears a Similarity with Spain in 1936, in that a
tiny percentage of the population owns nearly half of all the land
22 Sam Dolgoff, The Anarchist Collectives, New York: Free Life Editions,
1974, p. 113.
while millions of people are without land or sustenance. A mor
social movement has sprung up in response. The Movimento dos
Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), or Landless Workers' Movement,
is made up of one and a half million impoverished laborers who
occupy unused land to set up farming collectives. Since its founding
in 1984, the MST has won land titles for three hundred fifty thousand
families living in two thousand different settlements. The basic
unit of organization consists of a group of families living together
in a settlement on occupied land. These groups retain autonomy
and self-organize matters of day-to-day living. To participate in
regional meetings they appoint two or three representatives, which
in principle include a man and a woman though in practice this
is not always the case. The MST has a federative structure; there
are also state and national coordinating bodies. While most of
the decision-making takes place at the grassroots level with land
occupations, farming, and the establishment of settlements, the MST
also organizes at higher levels to coordinate massive protests and
highway blockades to pressure the government to give land titles
to the settlements. The MST has shown a great deal of innovation
and strength, organizing schools and protecting itself against
frequent police repression. It has developed practices of sustainable
agriculture, including setting up seed banks for native seeds, and
it has invaded and destroyed environmentally harmful eucalyptus
forestry plantations and test grounds for genetically modified crops.
Within the logic of democracy, one and a half million people is
considered simply too large a group for everyone to be allowed to
participate directly in decision-making; the majority should entrust
that power to politicians. But the MST holds an ideal in which all
possible decision-making remains on the local level. In practice,
however, they often do not meet this ideal. As a massive organization
that does not seek to abolish capitalism or overthrow the state
but rather to pressure it, the MST has been brought into the game
of politicS, in which all principles are for sale. Furthermore, a
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