Article

Thesis Eleven
2018, Vol. 147(1) 62–75
Gramsci in Brazil: From ª The Author(s) 2018
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DOI: 10.1177/0725513618787939
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Philip Roberts
University of York, UK

Abstract
This article examines the specific case of Brazil as an area in which Gramscian analysis has
been put to practical use. It examines the application of Gramsci’s work to Brazilian
reality in three different ways. First, the introduction of concepts derived from the Prison
Notebooks in order to understand the development of capitalism in Brazil. This aspect
deals in particular with the concept of ‘passive revolution’, and the relationship between
‘Eastern’ and ‘Western’ social formations in Gramsci’s analysis. Second, the role of
Gramscian thought for political parties, particularly the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB)
and later the Workers Party (PT), in particular the novel formulations of Gramsci’s
concept of hegemony that appear during the PT presidencies. Third, the varied appro-
priation of Gramscian analysis by the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil (MST),
situated in an appreciation of Gramsci’s concept of the ‘Modern Prince’. The purpose of
the article is to reflect on the possibilities and limitations of translating Gramsci’s thought
to new contexts, and how new developments may or may not maintain the leitmotif of his
thought.

Keywords
Brazil, Gramsci, hegemony, Landless Workers Movement, Latin America, subaltern

Introduction
Brazil has a curious relationship with Antonio Gramsci. Despite Gramsci only having
mentioned the nation once in his famous Prison Notebooks (Gramsci, 1971: 22), over
time the nation has taken his work from an object of superficial interest to a central plank
of class strategy. Such is the influence of the Italian, not only over Brazil but indeed
Latin America, that he overshadows even similar local thinkers, such as José Carlos

Corresponding author:
Philip Roberts, Department of Politics, University of York, Heslington, York YO10 5DD, UK.
Email: philip.roberts@york.ac.uk
Roberts 63

(2011). The uptake of Gramsci’s work is varied across the Latin American continent, and
the applicability of his thought has depended on the particular experiences of each
country, especially in their differing engagements with the ‘Pink Tide’ of responses to
neoliberalism (Chodor, 2015). José Arı́co (2005 [1988]) has produced the definitive
study of Gramsci’s influence on Latin America; however, this article offers a more
focused treatment of Brazil.
This article examines the specific case of Brazil as an area in which Gramscian
analysis has been put to practical use. It therefore skips over purely exegetical works on
Gramsci that were produced in Brazil (e.g. Bianchi, 2008). Examination follows three
different dimensions. First, the introduction of concepts derived from the Prison
Notebooks to understand the development of capitalism in Brazil. Second, the role of
Gramscian thought for political parties, particularly the Brazilian Communist Party
(PCB) and later the Workers Party (PT). Third, the appropriation of Gramscian anal-
ysis by social movements. This section focuses on the Landless Workers Movement of
Brazil (MST), and examines how different aspects of Gramsci’s thought are dispersed
across the movement. This transition will show how Gramsci’s thought has been
developed into a program for transformation, though not for the type of actor that
Gramsci expected.
It is not within the scope of this piece to evaluate every application of Gramscian
analysis to Brazil. His popularity across the Brazilian left precludes such a com-
prehensive treatment (for a longer treatment see Secco, 2002). Instead, I will
evaluate how Gramsci has been read, appropriated, and re-purposed in Brazil with a
focus on political movements, namely the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), the
Workers Party (PT), and the Landless Workers Movement (MST). In this contri-
bution, I cut a fine line of argument. I do not wish to defend orthodox readings of
Gramsci, though I do intend to point out where his thought was deformed to serve
non-Gramscian ends. Equally, I do not simply want to chart his uptake solely
amongst intellectuals (for a treatment focused on intellectuals see Chilcote, 2014).
Rather, I want to explore how the leitmotif of Gramsci’s thought applies to Brazil.
This entails examining how Gramsci’s process of reasoning has been applied in
Brazil, rather than just the specific concepts outlined in his writings. I will therefore
examine how Gramsci has been applied in support of political agendas, translated to
cope with new historical contexts (Del Roio, 2012), and embodied in the practice of
new social actors, but without betraying the spirit of the original works even where
the letter may be ignored.
The structure of the article centres on three ‘moments’ in the use of Gramsci in Latin
America. These are the analysis of passive revolution as a path to state formation under
capitalism; the struggle for hegemony through contest over government; and the con-
struction of a ‘Modern Prince’ in Brazil. Unlike other intellectual reviews of Gramsci’s
reception in Latin America, this article does not therefore deal with commentaries on
Gramsci’s influence on Brazil in the order they were written (cf. Burgos, 2002, 2015).
My intention here is to stress the plurality of appropriations of Gramscian analysis, rather
than trying to assert that in each period of Brazilian history Gramsci was only used in a
singular fashion.
64 Thesis Eleven 147(1)

The ‘Brazilian revolution’ and the passive revolution

Although Gramsci never shaped his theory with Brazil specifically in mind, there are
good reasons to think that his work would be useful in Latin America. Gramsci’s analysis
focused overwhelmingly on the ‘peripheral’ transition to capitalism within Europe,
directing his attention towards Italy rather than towards the ‘core’ states of France and
England. Moreover, Gramsci’s framing of the process of capitalist development in Italy
phrases it as a response to pressures emerging from development elsewhere, particularly
in terms of how Italy’s ‘passive revolution’ occurred in a context shaped by earlier
transitions to capitalism elsewhere (Gramsci, 1971: 82–5) Accordingly, economies in the
global periphery, such as Latin America, should have sympathy with this kind of
analysis. Indeed, Brazil has been described as the ‘place par excelence’ of passive
revolution (Vianna, 1997: 43, my translation).
In order to understand Gramsci’s reception in Brazil, it is necessary to give a brief
overview of the state of class struggle in the country when his works were first intro-
duced in the early 1960s. Brazilian Marxism before 1964 was effectively defined by a
single major debate. Discussion on the left concerned whether or not Brazil should be
considered a capitalist nation, and accordingly what tactics should be adopted in the
struggle for socialism. The conflict was played out between Nelson Werneck Sodré
(1979), attached to the PCB, who claimed that Brazil was still not at a capitalist stage of
development, and Caio Prado Junior (1971 [1967]), who maintained that as a colony of
European merchant capital, all of Latin America had been capitalist since the outset in
1500. Sodré’s position won out, and the PCB articulated an essentially Stalinist strategy
of stagism, believing in the need for a bourgeois-capitalist revolution before any later
transition to socialism could occur. As Fernando de Azevêdo later observed, this strategy
robbed the Peasant Leagues of an opportunity to push for a more direct struggle against
the passive revolutionary state under Getulio Vargas, as the rural-urban alliance with the
PCB collapsed in the early 1960s (Azevêdo, 1982: 87–9). In so doing, Brazil lost another
group that could have been its Jacobins, in Gramsci’s phrasing, that would have
endeavoured to expand the struggle for revolution across the whole of society.
Following this defeat, members of the PCB began to engage with new currents of
Marxist thought beyond the previous rigid model, principally Lukacs, Sartre, and
Gramsci. Of these, the principal translators of Gramsci were Carlos Nelson Coutinho,
and Marco Aurelio Nogueira. As other commentators have noted, the original engage-
ment of these thinkers, themselves members of the PCB, was to introduce Gramsci as a
philosopher and theorist of culture, rather than as an analyst of the state (Dias, 1996).
However, particularly the later work of Carlos Nelson Coutinho shows a deeper
engagement with the concept of passive revolution.
Coutinho’s use of passive revolution is interesting because, despite the analytical
failures of the PCB line outlined above, Gramsci is pressed into the service of a similar
politics after 1964. Specifically, Coutinho uses an analysis of the process of state
transformation under capitalism to suggest that the era of direct confrontation with the
state, in the fashion pursued by Carlos Marighella and other guerrilla fighters, was now
over for Brazil (Coutinho, 1993: 104–5). In describing the passive revolution in Brazil,
Countinho outlines a process of gradual change from above, based on an alliance
Roberts 65

between domestic latifundio large landowners and international capital, and notes the
central theme of ‘restoration-renovation’ in the logic of passive revolution (pp. 106–9).
This, for Gramsci, is the dual moment of restoration of the power of the dominant classes
in the face of subaltern dissent, combined with a renewal of capitalist accumulation
through renovation of the state and economy. In this way, pressures from ‘below’ are
absorbed by the dominant classes, and channelled into a renewal of the form of dom-
ination. Coutinho applies this to the failed Jacobin rebellion of the ‘Lieutenants’
movement of the 1920s and 1930s, which was co-opted from ‘above’ in the dictatorial
coup of Getulio Vargas (Coutinho, 1993: 109–10). However, Coutinho noticeably skips
over the form of the subaltern pressure ‘from below’ before the 1964 coup that con-
stituted Brazil’s second passive revolution, obscuring the role of the PCB in failing to
unify the subaltern groups in a successful struggle for socialism.
Coutinho also extends this analysis of the condition of passive revolution in Brazil,
looking to Gramsci for an understanding of how the Brazilian left should pursue social
transformation. Coutinho here turned to a famous passage from Gramsci, examining the
difference between the successful revolution in Russia and failed revolutions elsewhere:

In the East the State was everything, civil society was primordial and gelatinous; in the
West, there was a proper relation between State and civil society, and when the State
trembled a sturdy structure of civil society was at once revealed. The State was only an outer
ditch, behind which there stood a powerful system of fortresses and earthworks. (Gramsci,
1971: 238)

This appropriation of Gramsci in Brazil is notable in that it follows Gramscian

analysis in a literal and philological manner. In Coutinho’s reading, the concepts of East
and West are hypostatised as forms of society, organised along a continuum which sees
Eastern societies as backward and Western as modern. Coutinho then poses the question
of whether Brazil under military dictatorship is a ‘Western’ society or an ‘Eastern’
society. In asserting that Brazil has become ‘westernised’ during the long history of
passive revolution, Coutinho concludes that the revolutionary path to socialism has been
closed off, once again employing Gramscian categories, this time of the ‘war of move-
ment’ that connotes a direct confrontation between subaltern and dominant classes, and a
‘war of position’ which involves a gradual accumulation of power in civil society
(Gramsci, 1971: 237–9). Speaking of the period of military dictatorship that began in
1964, Coutinho claimed: ‘it is no longer possible to imagine forms of transition [to
socialism] centred on the “war of movement”, on a frontal attack on the coercive
apparatus of the State, in revolutionary ruptures concentrated in a brief space of time’
(Coutinho, 1993: 126, my translation).
And so, the PCB line of before the military coup was pursued by other means, as the
‘gradualist’ and reformist strategy of the Brazilian communist party was recast as a
Gramscian ‘war of position’. Here, again, Coutinho hypostatises Gramsci’s concepts,
picking them out as static elements of a binary, rather than as moments in a dynamic
relationship that is open and plural. The war of movement is the working-class strategy
applicable to Eastern states, and the war of position that for Western, modern states, and
thereby recruiting Gramsci’s phrasing in support of grassroots struggles for democracy,
66 Thesis Eleven 147(1)

whilst distorting the underlying concepts (Freeland, 2014: 285–6). The culmination of
this line of argument in the politics of the Brazilian left came from Coutinho’s famous
essay of 1979, ‘A Democracia como valor universal’ (Democracy as a Universal Value),
which advocated that this war of position should take the form of a struggle for a pluralist
left-democratic movement.
At the end of the 1970s, under conditions of gradual economic collapse during the
dictatorship, Coutinho shaped a position on the struggle for democracy as the hegemony
of the working class which he attributed to Lenin, Gramsci, and Eurocommunism
(Coutinho, 1979: 36). Coutinho claimed, in a somewhat functionalist argument, that
socialist democracy was not simply a continuation of liberal democracy, but that the
embryonic forms of socialist representation existed in capitalist societies (p. 37). In the
abstract theoretical portion of the piece, Coutinho invoked Gramsci on the ‘regulated
society’ to state that, under socialism, political institutions of the state will be absorbed
into workers’ organisations of civil society (p. 40). However, the attainment of socialism,
for Coutinho, was predicated not just on overcoming economic but also political alie-
nation (p. 38). In the historical and concrete portion of the essay, Coutinho used the
ostensibly Leninist-Gramscian framework he earlier set out to argue for a unified
struggle for liberal democratic rights in Brazil, as a process incorporating workers,
peasants, the middle classes, and even the national petite bourgeoisie (p. 43). This
struggle for democratic rights would likely not result in socialist democracy, but rather
liberal democracy, described as a ‘regime of formal liberties’ (p. 42, my translation).
Coutinho argued in favour of this initiative, on the basis that it would constitute a break
with the dynamic of passive revolution that had typified Brazilian history up to that point
(pp. 41–2). In this line, Coutinho described the struggle for liberal democracy through
this class coalition as a Gramscian ‘war of position’, which he defined as taking place
through a gradual conquest of positions in civil society and culminating in a democratic
conquest of political power (p. 44).
Through this argument, Coutinho laid the foundation for the political practice of the
Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, PT), formed in 1980 with Coutinho an early
member. In this optic, Coutinho effectively closes off the possibility of a revolutionary
transformation of society. The ‘war of manoeuvre’ as a direct confrontation with state
power is elided. Coutinho effectively inverted the base-superstucture relationship of
orthodox Marxism (Coutinho, 1993: 107), suggesting that the conquest of liberal
democracy is a necessary pre-requisite to the reshaping of the economic base through
governmental tools (Coutinho, 1979: 43). Where he mentions the productive aspects of
civil society, it is only regarding their forms of representation, such as workers’ councils
and trade unions (Coutinho, 1979: 37).
Thus, this period in the appropriation of Gramsci’s thought in Brazil entailed that the
relationship between economic and political power was radically simplified. Coutinho’s
analysis effectively omitted the transformation of production as a means of building
workers’ power, or indeed as an element of hegemony in general. This is in contradiction
to Gramsci’s analysis of hegemony, in that for Gramsci, ‘though hegemony is ethical-
political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function
exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity’ (Gramsci,
1971: 161). Gramsci’s work was appropriated in a manner not consistent with its internal
Roberts 67

logic, which saw hegemony and transformation of the economy as elements of a rela-
tionship. Coutinho’s rendering, that informed the practice of the PT, separated the
political and economic moments, suggesting that reform of the relations of production
could come only after the attainment of democratic consent under a liberal regime.
Coutinho divorced the project of hegemony from the transformation of Brazilian society,
by focusing on how Brazilian political institutions could be socialised through a struggle
for a united front of left-democratic parties, and overlooking the need to socialise the
means of production and in so doing transform the capitalist state. The next section
therefore examines the consequences of this political direction for the Workers Party as
the dominant left-wing party in Brazil after 1985, specifically in terms of how Gramscian
analysis has been applied to understand the experience of the PT presidencies.

Translating Gramsci in Brazil: Struggles over hegemony

1985–2016
As reviewed above, the more rigid appropriation of Gramsci’s thought outlined by
Carlos Nelson Coutinho was far too limited to deal with Brazilian reality. Brazilian
society did not simply ‘westernise’, shifting from a nation defined by backwardness to a
‘modern’ society comparable in type to those in Western Europe. Instead, Brazil’s return
to democracy threw up new problems that were foreign to the ‘classical’ analysis offered
by Gramsci of European social formations. This became increasingly clear after the
victory of the Workers Party in the 2002 presidential elections, which many believed
could herald the beginning of a workers’ hegemony in Brazil. In this period, the use of
Gramsci in Brazil shifts significantly as the central ‘moment’ of analysis changes from
the struggle against passive revolution and towards the dispute over hegemony. At this
stage of Brazilian thinkers’ engagement with Gramscian analysis, a far greater emphasis
is placed on ‘translating’ Gramsci’s thought, rather than ‘applying’ specific elements.
Indeed, this is the moment where the leitmotif of Gramscian analysis becomes most
important (Gramsci, 1996: 137). This approach adheres to Gramsci’s own method of
reading and interpreting texts, what he termed a

reading in favour of a particular purpose . . . which concentrates on the relationship between

author, text and context, and which adheres to exegetical rigour and accuracy, whilst
acknowledging that certain elements are immanent in the text and need to be related to the
changing ‘concrete terrain of history’. (Gramsci, 1971: 450)

In this sense, Brazil’s Gramscians came to follow the method of his analysis more
closely than the letter, and translate Gramscian analysis into the new ‘concrete terrain’ of
neoliberal Brazil (cf. Morton, 2007: ch. 2; Thomas, 2009). The following section reviews
the translation of Gramsci’s writings to deal with this new historical terrain, with a focus
on the political activity of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, PT). Specif-
ically, it explores responses to the question of how neoliberalism in Brazil came to be
administered by a nominally worker-oriented political party.
The post-dictatorship uses of Gramsci in Brazil include the peculiar instance of
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, long aware of the work of Antonio Gramsci (Cardoso and
68 Thesis Eleven 147(1)

Faletto, 1979: 216). As president of Brazil in 1997, Cardoso invoked Gramsci as the
theorist of civil society against the state, in support of a neoliberal program to privatise
public enterprises and change the form of regulation in Brazil (cited in Coutinho, 2012:
174). However, this reading is clearly at odds with the overall approach set out in
Gramsci’s writings, which sought to challenge capitalist accumulation rather than renew
it through re-regulation. Instead, the more genuine bearers of Gramscian thought in
Brazil after 1985 could be found within the Workers Party. In an essay from 2002, Raúl
Burgos gives a great overview of the PT engagement with Gramscian themes, drawing
on preparatory documents for the national conference of the party, as well as official
documents produced to codify its positions. Early documents describe the PT as the
‘bearer of the working classes’ will to hegemony’, and suggest that the political praxis of
the Workers Party is based on constructing a workers’ hegemony (cited in Burgos, 2002:
21; see also Secco, 2002).
The rise and failure of a post-Leninist PT became the central focus of Brazil’s
Gramscians after 2002. Most innovative amongst these were Francisco ‘Chico’ de
Oliveira and Armando Boito Jr. Writing after Lula da Silva’s second successful presi-
dential election in 2006, de Oliveira drew on Gramsci to articulate a novel theory of
hegemony (De Oliveira, 2006). Primarily, de Oliveira was concerned with how the PT
had ceased to be a ‘mass’ party advocating social change, as indicated in the quotes from
Burgos above, despite its successive electoral victories (de Oliveira, 2006: 7). De Oli-
veira is clear that the PT in its mass movement phase was close to what Gramsci defined
as a hegemonic project, providing class leadership and moral direction (p. 17). However,
following Lula’s ascent to the presidency, the PT lapsed into a kind of populism based on
the extension of social programs in a context of de-industrialisation and financialisation,
and where key roles within the state were taken up by capitalist managers rather than
socialists with a remit for transformation (pp. 19, 15–16). This does not, however, result
in the collapse of the PT and its removal from power, but rather: ‘Class bases in
decomposition, neo-populism emerging through that very dissolution, a bourgeoisie that
cannot be unified through the dominance of finance capital, a “new class” defined by its
investment function – all this seems to point to a new paradigm’ (p. 21).
This new paradigm, outlined by de Oliveira, is that of ‘hegemony in reverse’ (see also
de Oliveira et al., 2010), a situation under which the working classes have formally taken
power through electoral politics, but under which ‘the dominated dominate, since they
provide the “moral direction” and even provide the personnel to staff state organiza-
tions’, and in this sense the capitalist class exercises leadership over society despite its
apparent defeat by the organised working class (De Oliveira, 2006: 22).
Armando Boito Jr. displays a similarly creative engagement with Gramsci. His
intellectual trajectory illustrates how applying Gramsci in Brazil became inadequate
under neoliberalism, particularly after the ascension of the PT to the presidency. Writing
of the Cardoso government of the 1990s, Boito used Gramsci at a more orthodox register,
arguing that neoliberalism had formed a new historical bloc that was the basis of a new
class hegemony (Boito, 1998: 71). However, in the period of the Lula presidencies
(2003–10), Boito claimed that the traditional Gramscian analysis of hegemony no longer
applied in Brazil (Boito Jr, 2007: 130 fn5). Instead of the positive hegemony outlined by
Gramsci, where one class assumes ‘leadership’ over the others in an essentially active
Roberts 69

relationship, Boito suggested that Brazil’s neoliberal phase was defined by a ‘regressive’
hegemony (Boito, 2003: 5). This conception of hegemony is positioned in contrast to the
traditional Gramscian notion of hegemony. As noted in the previous section, Gramsci
identified hegemony as having a material basis, but Boito affirms that capitalist hege-
mony under neoliberalism offers no real material concessions to workers (p. 5). Instead,
it effectively demobilises and disarticulates a working class that continues to be dis-
advantaged through rising unemployment and falling economic growth (p. 5). In this
way, the impoverished class fractions came to support neoliberalism despite being
disadvantaged by it, as their blind reaction against social inequality was channelled into a
program of state reform which did not benefit them (pp. 14–15). In this sense, the support
of the poorest for neoliberalism was for ideological reasons, rather than an ‘organic’
cohesion between class fractions (p. 14). The ideological critique of state clientelism,
rooted in Brazil’s history of social exclusion for the majority, was employed to convince
workers to support the erosion of their own standards of living (p. 19). The defining
characteristic of this form of hegemony is that it is based upon divisions between the
different fractions of the working class, as opposed to a unifying project based on the
leadership of a single class fraction (p. 22). As a consequence, neoliberalism in Brazil
was based more on dismantling the privileges of the few than a universal demand for
improved social wellbeing.
Boito’s characterisation of neoliberalism in Brazil was a knowing departure from
Gramsci, in an attempt to translate the category of hegemony to a new empirical context.
Like de Oliveira, Boito emphasised that the experience of neoliberalism in Brazil was
something separate from the historical situations described in the Prison Notebooks,
whilst maintaining that Gramsci’s overall approach retained significant explanatory
power. Therefore, though the use of Gramsci in discussing hegemony has centred far
more on the openness, flexibility, and dynamism of his thought, this has also taken place
during a de-linking of Gramscian analysis from the practice of the Workers Party,
mirrored in the separation of the PT apparatus from its social base (Anderson, 2011,
2016). Writing on the economic and political crisis in Brazil after 2014, Ruy Braga and
Sean Purdy (2018), employ another adaptation of Gramsci’s concept of hegemony. As
the limited gains observed under the Workers Party presidencies are unwound by
recession, austerity, and a ‘parliamentary coup’ (p. 9) in the wake of the Lava Jato
corruption scandal, Braga and Purdy suggest that these events are driven by the collapse
of a ‘precarious’ hegemony. This is precarious in a dual sense, in that it requires the
passive consent of the precariat of informal workers combined with the active consent of
leaders, and that such hegemony was undermined by the transformation of Brazil’s class
structure that it drove (pp. 3–4, 11). As Giovanni Semeraro (2017) has observed, the
collapse of the progressive potential of the Workers Party reflects a failure to engage in
the ‘intellectual and moral reform’ promulgated in Gramsci’s work, where the masses
were to be made active participants in the construction of a transformative workers’
hegemony (p. 93). The combination of these observations suggests that the aforemen-
tioned separation of Gramscian analysis from the practical activity of the Workers Party
contributed to an unsustainable political and economic strategy.
The emphasis in this moment of Gramsci’s reception in Brazil was defined by the
theme, present in much of his work, of explaining the failure of working-class agency.
70 Thesis Eleven 147(1)

Both de Oliveira and Boito, and indeed Carlos Nelson Countinho (2012), drew on
Gramsci to explain how radical transformation had been frustrated, and not how it could
be built. Thus, whilst they adhered to much of the method of Gramsci’s thought, Bra-
zilian academics often elided his focus upon the possibility for the subaltern to construct
an alternative social order. However, developments beyond the Workers Party showed
that Gramscian analysis could have a positive dimension in Brazil. This paradigm of
engagement with Gramscian analysis is defined by Gramsci’s concept of the ‘Modern
Prince’ (Gramsci, 1971: 129) as the organiser of subaltern struggles for hegemony.
Marcos del Roio (2011), another Brazilian interpreter of Gramsci. has made the salient
observation that in translating Gramsci’s analysis to Brazil, we should not expect the
‘Modern Prince’ to take the form of a political party, any more than Gramsci expected
the Prince to be a single individual in the Italy of his time. Instead, he suggests that the
Landless Workers Movement of Brazil may be a more viable option. However, Del Roio
never explores this topic in depth (see also Burgos, 2015: 180). Therefore, the final
section of this article is devoted to exploring how the MST may constitute a ‘Modern
Prince’ for Brazil.

Heirs of Gramsci: Social movements in Brazil

The Landless Workers Movement of Brazil is Latin America’s largest social movement,
organising over a million rural workers and involved in continual political struggle.
Though early Anglophone treatments of the movement focused primarily on its strategy
of using occupations to win land (Wright and Wolford, 2003; Ondetti, 2010), more
recent work on the movement has emphasised that it is a Marxist organisation with a
complex political strategy and a vision of social transformation (Vergara-Camus, 2014).
As I will argue below, the framework underlying this strategy and vision is based on an
integration of the different aspects of Gramsci’s thought.
In a sense, the uptake of Gramscian analysis by the Landless Workers Movement
mirrors the development of Gramsci’s thought. As Peter Thomas (2013: 31) notes,
Gramsci’s thought developed from an analysis of passive revolution and hegemony to a
theorisation of the ‘Modern Prince’, as the agent of a new kind of subaltern politics and
the foundation of a new social order. Likewise, Gramscian analysis in Brazil has shifted
from grasping the process of passive revolution, to examination of hegemony, and finally
to the formation of a subaltern actor that could become a ‘Modern Prince’ in the
Gramscian sense. In his commentary on Machiavelli, Gramsci (1971: 129) writes:

The modern prince, the myth-prince, cannot be a real person, a concrete individual. It can
only be an organism, a complex element of society in which a collective will which has
already been recognised and to some extent asserted itself in action, begins to take concrete
form.

As Peter Thomas (2013: 32) explains, the Modern Prince is more than a political party
or organisation (cf. Gramsci, 1971: 129), but is instead a ‘dynamic collective process,
which aims at nothing less than a totalising expansion across the entire social formation,
as a new organisation of social and political relations’. Thus, the MST fulfils at least the
Roberts 71

concept of the Modern Prince in the sense that it is not restricted to a single field of
agency in social transformation. Unlike the Workers Party, the Landless Workers Move-
ment not only struggles within governmental structures, but also on the fields of edu-
cation and production that form part of the ‘extended state’ of hegemony in Brazil.
Crucially, as I argue in this last section, the MST is not merely a subject of Gramscian
analysis; the movement itself incorporates a Gramscian perspective, and moreover fol-
lows the leitmotif of Gramsci’s thought.
This fact is at its most explicit in the political arm of the Landless Workers Move-
ment. During field research undertaken in Brazil in 2012, I attended political meetings of
the MST in the south of Bahia. At one such encounter, a member of the national lead-
ership outlined the analysis of the state and government used by the MST, saying:

The state is no longer simply the legislature, judiciary, executive. The state now, it is
amplified [integral]. Do not believe that the state is only a police and military . . . there are
two states, but they are the same. One, is the political state . . . The councillor, the mayor,
governor, judge, parliamentarian. This is the political state . . . There is another state, which
is the civil state [civil society] . . . It is part of the amplitude of the state, which is the school,
the university . . . the church . . . private means of communication . . . the public prosecutor’s
office . . . The two together constitute hegemony over society . . . this hegemony is created
by two apparatuses . . . private apparatuses of hegemony – the NGOs . . . [and] the church.
(MST national-level leader, Santa Cruz de Cabrália, Bahia, 11/6/2012)

The analysis of the orientation of the MST towards the Workers Party government
within the capitalist state in Brazil was therefore clarified using Gramsci’s analysis of the
integral state, comprised of government and civil society, and the role of civil society in
developing capitalist hegemony. The leadership went on to claim:

. . . to mount a strategy against the amplified state to create a revolution has two paths
now . . . the war of movement, we need to have a direct confrontation with the centre of
capital, the centre of the state . . . the war of position requires the occupation of strategic
positions within the hegemonic apparatus. And if it is not possible to occupy this strategic
step, we have to construct our own. (MST national-level leader, Santa Cruz de Cabrália,
Bahia, 11/6/2012, emphasis added)

This statement reveals the difference between the position of the MST and the appro-
priations of Gramsci made by Coutinho and others. Instead of hypostatising and counter-
poising the concepts of ‘war of position’ and ‘war of movement’, the leadership of the
Landless Workers Movement view one as a necessary pre-requisite to the other. The
possibility of revolutionary politics has not been closed off by modernisation in Brazil,
according to the MST. Instead, by applying these categories as two moments of class
struggle, the Landless Workers Movement articulate a strategy which is more than
simply Eurocommunism or golpismo.
The engagement with Gramsci’s leitmotif does not end at the level of the political
leadership. It is spread across all levels of the movement. This mirrors Peter Thomas’
summary of the role of the construction of hegemony through class agency, in that:
72 Thesis Eleven 147(1)

. . . as a project, hegemony involves the articulation of different modes of social, cultural and
economic leadership into the form of an overall political project. It involves active and
continuous agitation and organization on the widest range of fronts, from the explicitly
political, to the social, to cultural and religious practices, conceived in a broad sense as
common ways of thinking and seeing in a given sociocultural formation. (Thomas, 2013: 27)

The diffusion of Gramsci’s influence on the Landless Workers Movement is partic-

ularly evident in the critical pedagogy approach taken within the schools constructed on
agrarian reform settlements. This project, won by the MST through demands for state-
funded education in the countryside, is called educação do campo, meaning ‘education
from the countryside’. The focus of this education is on forming not only another
generation of agricultural workers, but specifically politically conscious subjects who
are aware of the exploitative nature of capitalist social relations. As such, it recalls
Gramsci’s assertion that the Modern Prince ‘must be and cannot but be the proclaimer
and organiser of an intellectual and moral reform’ (1971: 132–3). Through educação do
campo, the MST follows a pedagogical ethic that valorises rural subaltern subjects,
positioning them as a new type of individual within a new form of social movement,
each of which plays a part in forming a new socialist society. Though this project clearly
has roots in the educational philosophy of Paulo Freire (1996 [1970], 2011 [1974]), it is
based on a sympathy between Gramsci and Freire that is well documented (Mayo, 1999).
The educação do campo project also incorporates a considerable amount of intel-
lectual output, both from the movement itself and academics integral to its political
theorising. These outputs include Roseli Salete Caldart’s (2004) foundational work
Pedagogia do Movimento Sem Terra (The Pedagogy of the Landless Workers Move-
ment), and more recently the collaboratively produced Dicionário da Educação do
Campo (Dictionary of Education from the Countryside) (Caldart et al., 2012). This last
work, in particular, highlights the centrality of Gramsci’s work on education, culture, and
intellectual and moral reform to the practice of critical pedagogy in MST schools. MST
militants and educators contribute chapters on critical education, hegemony, and col-
lective intellectuals which all draw on insights from Antonio Gramsci. Equally, the MST
has produced its own educational guides, used within schools on agrarian reform set-
tlements. This material is also suffused with a Gramscian conceptual vocabulary, indi-
cating that the different areas of the movement appreciate the different aspects of
Gramsci’s thought. These range from the role of intellectuals, to political strategy, but
crucially to the role of ideas which binds together productive and political projects. In
describing the broader role of education for the political praxis of the MST, one teaching
guide describes how education ‘is always connected with a determined political project
and with a conception of the world’ (MST, 1995: 5, my translation, emphasis added).
This connects educação do campo to Gramsci’s notion of a conception of the world, as a
philosophy that provides a practical guide to political engagement, and necessarily forms
the basis of social transformation (Gramsci, 1971: 267). In amongst the material
described above, and developed elsewhere (Bogo, 1999, 2010), is the need of the
Landless Workers Movement to produce ‘organic’ intellectuals in Gramsci’s terms, as
intellectual workers who also play a function in co-ordinating the social and political
activity of their class (Gramsci, 1971: 5). In this way, the MST project to educate its own
Roberts 73

cadre of agronomists in agroecological methods is also an extension of a Gramscian

program that combines productive and political activity.
In connecting economic production, critical education, and political strategising
through using a theoretical framework based on Gramscian analysis, the MST fulfils the
tripartite functions of a ‘Modern Prince’. These are ‘mass elements’, a principle cohesive
element (i.e. a leadership) and an ‘intermediate’ element which binds the two together
and maintains contact between them, on a moral and intellectual level (Thomas, 2013:
31). The MST possesses each of these elements, in a cohesive leadership engaged in
political life (Vergara-Camus, 2009), a mass membership connected to the goals of the
movement, and a strata of organic intellectuals who bind the two together. Crucially, this
is based on a knowing engagement with Gramsci’s work, at all levels of the movement. It
is in this sense that that MST ‘embodies’ Gramscian analysis in Brazil, by weaving
together different aspects of Gramsci’s thought across the movement as a whole.
Through this embodiment of his work, Gramsci has been more fully translated to Brazil
than ever before.

Conclusions: A Gramscian research program for Brazil

A review of the above material opens more questions than it answers. We can clearly
identify a shift from ‘applying’ Gramsci, in service of a project that was not itself
Gramscian, to ‘translating’ Gramsci to deal with contexts that he himself never
encountered, and finally of ‘embodying’ the leitmotif of his work in the praxis of the
Landless Workers Movement. However, this identification is only half of the work to be
done in evaluating the influence of Gramsci in Brazil.
Francisco de Oliveira, Armando Boitio Jr, Marcos del Roio, and the MST all engage
in significant innovations around the framework set out within the Prison Notebooks,
whilst remaining true to the leitmotif ingrained in Gramsci’s analysis. In challenging the
nature of hegemony under neoliberalism, as well as the form of social organisation that
will confront this mode of capitalist accumulation, each has made a significant contri-
bution to translating Gramsci to Brazil. The legacy of Gramsci in Brazil suggests that it is
the method of his thought which remains the most important, linking class forces, ideas,
and production in an open and flexible approach that can explore new historical situa-
tions rather than lapsing into dogma.
Despite the positive tone I adopt in the final section of the paper, I want to end on a
note of caution. The danger in identifying the MST as a Gramscian actor is that com-
mentators may do so uncritically. Recent analysis from outside Brazil has identified the
Landless Workers Movement as a ‘counter-hegemonic’ actor (Karriem, 2009). How-
ever, as Gramsci reminds us, study must not be complacent but instead conducted with a
‘heroic fury’, motivated by a practical connection to the subject matter (Gramsci, 1971:
381–2). Accordingly, the study of the influence of Gramsci upon the MST is not merely a
descriptive study. It is an evaluative study. The question is not whether the MST has the
desire or the strategy to become a counter-hegemonic force, but whether or not it has the
capacity or the right tactics. This is not a point to be assumed via an optimism of the will,
but rather to be explored just as equally through the pessimism of the intellect. This task
is in itself the cornerstone of a new research program for Gramscians in Brazil.
74 Thesis Eleven 147(1)

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.

Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.

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Author biography
Philip Roberts is a Political Economist, working in the Department of Politics at the
University of York, UK, with a focus on the politics of development. His research focuses
on the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil during the transition from neoliberalism to
neodevelopmentalism, and its relationship to food production. His theoretical interests are
in the linkages between Gramsci, Lefebvre, and Marx in the study of development.