I presume so. The only justification for any repressive institution is economic or cultural backwardness. In time, we should move to the gradual elimination of all repressive institutions without limit, as far as I can see. Just looking at the epoch that we are in now, it seems to me that our present level of technology permits enormous possibilities for eliminating repressive institutions. Automation makes it unnecessary for people to carry out the kind of imbecile labour that may have been necessary in the past. It is often said that advanced technology makes it imperative to vest control of institutions in the hands of a small managerial group. That is perfect nonsense. What automation can do first of all is to relieve people of an enormous amount of stupid labour, thus freeing them for other things. Computers also make possible a very rapid information flow. Everybody could be put in possession of vastly more information and more relevant information than they have now. Democratic decisions could be made immediately by everybody concerned. Computers also make simulation possible; you can run simulation experiments, so that you can test decisions without bearing the cost of failure. Of course, that is not how this technology is actually used. It is used for destructive purposes. The percentage of government expenditure on advanced technology has been reduced since the Vietnam war escalated, for the simple reason that you have to supply all the soldiers with uniforms and bullets and shoes and so on. But the end of the war would not divert any money to meeting collective needs or extending democratic practice. It would go back into aerospace and telecommunications, for the Defense Department or the Space Agency. Within a capitalist framework it could hardly be otherwise.

What we see there is a dramatic asymmetry in the power of the state. The nation-state remains the absolutely fundamental regulator of labour. The idea that it is dwindling or disappearing as a centre of authority in the age of globalization is a silly notion. In fact, it distracts attention from the fact that the nation-state is now more dedicated than ever to creating a good business climate for investment, which means precisely controlling and repressing labour movements in all kinds of purposively new ways—cutting back the social wage, fine-tuning migrant flows, and so on. The state is tremendously active in the domain of capital–labour relations. But when we turn to relations between capitals, the picture is quite different. There the state has truly lost power to regulate the mechanisms of allocation or competition, as global financial flows have outrun the reach of any strictly national regulation. One of the main arguments in The Condition of Postmodernity is that the truly novel feature of the capitalism that emerged out of the watershed of the seventies is not so much an overall flexibility of labour markets as an unprecedented autonomy of money capital from the circuits of material production—a hypertrophy of finance, which is the other underlying basis of postmodern experience and representation. The ubiquity and volatility of money as the impalpable ground of contemporary existence is a key theme of the book.

[...] Throughout my years in Baltimore, I always tried to maintain some relationship to local politics: we bought up an old library, and turned it into a community action centre, took part in campaigns for rent control, and generally tried to spark radical initiatives; it always seemed to me very important to connect my theoretical work with practical activity, in the locality. So when I got to Oxford, the local campaign to defend the Rover plant in Cowley offered a natural extension of this kind of engagement. For personal reasons, I couldn’t become quite as active as in Baltimore, but it provided the same kind of connection to a tangible social conflict. It also led to some very interesting political discussions—recorded in the book, The Factory and the City, which Teresa Hayter and I produced around it—a fascinating experience. Soon afterwards I read Raymond Williams’s novel, Second Generation, which is exactly about this, and was astonished by how well he captured so much of the reality at Cowley. So one of the first essays in Justice, Nature and the Geography of Difference became a reflection on his fiction.

My answer is—oh, but you do: you do subordinate competition in all kinds of areas. Actually, the whole history of capitalism is unthinkable without the setting up of a regulatory framework to control, direct and limit competition. Without state power to enforce property and contract law, not to speak of transport and communications, modern markets could not begin to function. Next time you’re flying into London or New York, imagine all those pilots suddenly operating on the competitive principle: they all try to hit the ground first, and get the best gate. Would any capitalist relish that idea? Absolutely not. When you look closely at the way a modern economy works, the areas in which competition genuinely rules turn out be quite circumscribed. If you think of all the talk of flexible accumulation, a lot of it revolves around diversification of lines and niche markets. What would the history of capitalism be without diversification? But actually the dynamic behind diversification is a flight from competition—the quest for specialized markets is, much of the time, a way of evading its pressures. In fact, it would be very interesting to write a history of capitalism exploring its utilization of each of the six elements of the basic repertoire I outline, tracing the changing ways it has brought them together, and put them to work, in different epochs. Knee-jerk hostility to Wilson isn’t confined to the Left, but it is not productive. Advances in biology are teaching us a great deal about our make-up, including the physical wiring of our minds, and will tell us much more in the future. I don’t see how one can be a materialist and not take all this very seriously. So in the case of sociobiology, I go back to my belief in the value of rubbing different conceptual blocks together—putting E. O. Wilson in dialogue with Marx. There are obviously major differences, but also some surprising commonalities—so let’s collide the two thinkers against each other. I’m not going to claim I’ve done it right, but this is a discussion we need. The section of Spaces of Hope which starts to talk about this is called ‘Conversations on the Plurality of Alternatives’, and that’s the spirit in which we should approach this. I have questions, not solutions.

The MST was the result of the conjunction of three basic factors. First, the economic crisis of the late seventies put an end to the industrialization cycle in Brazil, begun by Kubitschek in 1956. Young people had been leaving the farms for the city, and getting jobs quite easily. Now they had to stay in the countryside and find a living there. The second factor was the work the friars were doing. In the sixties, the Catholic Church had largely supported the military dictatorship, but with the growing ferment of liberation theology there was a change of orientation, the emergence of the CPT and a layer of progressive bishops. Before, the line had been: ‘No need to worry, you’ll have your land in heaven.’ Now it was: ‘Since you’ve already got land in heaven, let’s struggle for it here as well.’ The friars played a good role in stirring up the farmers and getting them organized. And the third factor was the growing climate of struggle against the military dictatorship in the late seventies, which automatically transformed even local labour conflicts into political battles against the government.

It was against this background that land occupations began to spread throughout the South, the North and the Northeast. None of them were spontaneous—all were clearly planned and organized by local activists—but there were no connexions between them. From 1978 onwards, the first great strikes began to take place in the cities: they served as a good example of how to lose your fear. In the five years from 1978 to 1983—what you could call the genesis of the movement—there was an outbreak of large-scale land occupations, and people really did begin to lose their fear of struggling against the dictatorship. The role of the CPT was of crucial importance here—the Church was the only body that had what you might call a capillary organization, across the whole country. They soon realized that these occupations were happening in different areas, and started setting up meetings between the local leaders. I’d already been involved in helping organize various actions in Rio Grande do Sul, the first one in September 1979. The CPT contacted me and other comrades and we began to hold national meetings, along the lines Julião and I had discussed. The farmers talked things over, in their own way: ‘How do you do it in the Northeast?’, ‘How do you do it in the North?’. Slowly, we realized we were facing the same problems, and attempting similar solutions. Throughout 1983 and 1984 we held big debates about how to build an organization that would spread the struggle for land—and, above all, one that could transform these localized conflicts into a major battle for agrarian reform. We knew it changed nothing just to bring a few families together, move onto unused land and think that was the end. We were well aware from the agrarian struggles of the past that if farmers don’t organize themselves, don’t fight for more than just a piece of land, they’ll never reach a wider class consciousness and be able to grapple with the underlying problems—because land in itself does not free the farmer from exploitation.

For two or three months, our activists visit the villages and communities in an area where there are lots of landless farmers, and start work on raising awareness—proselytizing, if you like. They explain to people that they have a right to land, that the constitution has a clause on agrarian reform but that the government doesn’t apply it. Next, we ask the farmers if there is a big, underused landholding in the region, because the law is clear: where there is a large unproductive property, the government is obliged to expropriate it. They get involved in the discussion, and start to become more conscious. Then comes the decision: ‘You have a right to land. There are unused properties in the region. There is only one way to force the government to expropriate them. You think they’ll do it if we write them a letter? Asking the mayor is a waste of time, especially if he’s a landowner. You could talk to the priest, but if he’s not interested, what’s the point? We have to organize and take over that land ourselves.’

When that decision is reached, we can bring to bear all the historical experience we’ve accumulated—which, from a political point of view, is simply what the Sem Terra Movement does: our role is to pass on what we’ve learnt, as a class. As far as land occupations are concerned, we know our business—not everything, but a lot. Everyone has to go, all the families together. It has to be done during the night to avoid the police. Those who want to join in have to organize themselves into committees of fifteen or twenty people. Then, each committee—there may be twenty or so of them—has to hire a truck, and set up a kitty to buy canvas and stock up on provisions. It takes three or four months to get ready. One day there’s a meeting of representatives from each of the fifteen-person committees to decide when the occupation will take place. The decision has to be kept secret. On the night, the hired trucks arrive, well before daybreak, and go round the communities, pick up all they can carry and then set off for the property. The families have one night to take possession of the area and build their shelters, so that early the next morning, when the proprietor realizes what’s happened, the encampment is already set up. The committee chooses a family to reconnoitre the place, to find where there are sources of water, where there are trees for shade. There are a lot of factors involved in setting up an open-air encampment. It’s better if you’re near a road, because then you don’t have to carry so much on your back. This sort of logistical experience has a big influence on how an occupation works out. But success really depends on the number of families involved—the more there are, the less favourable the balance of forces for the proprietor and the police; the fewer the families, the easier it is to evict them, and the more limited the political repercussions will be.

In terms of the land occupations themselves, we have a principle: all the costs have to be borne by those who participate. Otherwise things get confused: ‘I don’t know who’ buys the tents, ‘I don’t know who’ pays for the transport; the farmers end up depending on ‘I don’t know who’. At the first sign of trouble they’d say, ‘No, I didn’t come here on my own, so-and-so brought me’ and they’d leave, because they wouldn’t see the struggle as a personal sacrifice. We could carry out much larger actions if we asked for money from outside—but it would have a disastrous ideological effect. Instead, every family taking part in an occupation spends months working, to get materials for shelter, to get food—they know that they’ll be surrounded by police, that they’ll have no food, that they’ll have to hold out for weeks until there are political repercussions, and solidarity begins to bring in resources. On a lot of occupations we’ve had to reduce the number of families taking part because some were so poor, we would have had to pay for their transport and shelter. We’ve been faced with this dilemma many times.

By the simple fact of existing for eighteen years, a farmers’ movement that contests the ruling class in this country can consider itself something of a triumph—it’s longer than any previous one has lasted. We’ve won some economic victories: the lives of the 350,000 families that have occupied land are improving—they may still be poor, but things are getting better. But maybe the greatest success is the dignity the Sem Terra farmers have won for themselves. They can walk with their heads held high, with a sense of self-respect. They know what they’re fighting for. They don’t let questions go unanswered. That’s the greatest victory. No one can take that class-consciousness away.

Our relations with the Zapatistas are simply those of solidarity. Their struggle is a just one, but its social base and its method are different to ours. Theirs is, at root, a struggle of indigenous peoples for autonomy—and if there’s a criticism to be made of their experience, it would be that the slowness of their advance is due to their inability to broaden it into a class struggle, a national one. They have accepted the terms of fighting for a specific ethnicity, within a particular territory—whereas ours is a farmers’ movement that has been transformed and politicized as a result of the advance of capitalism, of neo-liberalism. If the fight we’re carrying on today had been waged in the 1930s—if Brazilian farmers had been able to organize then as well as they can now—it would have just been a movement for agrarian reform, seeking only to meet the needs of its own sector.

In Via Campesina, we’re building a platform independent of the particular tendencies of the farmers’ movements within each country. One plank on which we agree, at the international level, is that there must be the sort of agrarian reform that would democratize the land—both as a basis for political democracy, and for building an agriculture of another kind. This has major implications. From the time of Zapata in Mexico, or of Julião in Brazil, the inspiration for agrarian reform was the idea that the land belonged to those who worked it. Today we need to go beyond this. It’s not enough to argue that if you work the land, you have proprietary rights over it. The Vietnamese and Indian farmers have contributed a lot to our debates on this. They have a different view of agriculture, and of nature—one that we’ve tried to synthesize in Via Campesina. We want an agrarian practice that transforms farmers into guardians of the land, and a different way of farming, that ensures an ecological equilibrium and also guarantees that land is not seen as private property.

The second plank is the concept of food sovereignty. This brings us into head-on collision with international capital, which wants free markets. We maintain that every people, no matter how small, has the right to produce their own food. Agricultural trade should be subordinated to this greater right. Only the surplus should be traded, and that only bilaterally. We are against the wTO, and against the monopolization of world agricultural trade by the multinational corporations. As José Martí would say: a people that cannot produce their own food are slaves; they don’t have the slightest freedom. If a society doesn’t produce what it eats, it will always be dependent on someone else.

The second plank is the concept of food sovereignty. This brings us into head-on collision with international capital, which wants free markets. We maintain that every people, no matter how small, has the right to produce their own food. Agricultural trade should be subordinated to this greater right. Only the surplus should be traded, and that only bilaterally. We are against the WTO, and against the monopolization of world agricultural trade by the multinational corporations. As José Martí would say: a people that cannot produce their own food are slaves; they don’t have the slightest freedom. If a society doesn’t produce what it eats, it will always be dependent on someone else.