Indiana University Press Pathways to Utopia: Time and Transformation in the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil

Through collective occupation and unrelenting work for social justice, more than 450,000 Brazilian families in the Landless Workers Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra, or MST) have gained the security of a place to call home. MST members have endured years of painfully slow progress since settling on lands deemed unproductive by the federal government, where they lobby for legal autonomy, usage rights to the lands they occupy, and educational access for their children. Pathways to Utopia focuses on the MST's extraordinarily long-term struggle for land, dignity, and acknowledgement of what it means to be sem terra (landless), revealing that, contrary to the political understandings that have underpinned previous calls for change, it is the individual that empowers the collective. Where earlier theorists have positioned activist and utopian politics as processes defined by rupture, points of crisis, and a linear progression through time, Alex Ungprateeb Flynn argues that the MST's 40-plus years of endurance directly arise from its members' less spectacular but ultimately more resilient duration activism and counter-utopian practices. Evocatively written and balancing careful ethnography with key theoretical interventions, Pathways to Utopia demonstrates how members of social movements can transform the world around them, and in doing so, demand transformation of the movements to which they belong.