What makes a movement successful?
Olof Sandell March 22nd, 2010
I’ve looked at Brazil’s Landless Workers Movement (MST) in an attempt to understand which are the keys to their success. MST is the largest social movement in Latin America. Since the beginning of the 80s the movement have spread throughout Brazil, occupying unused estates and established small communities farming the land.
Ever since Brazil was formed by the Portugease in the 16th century, the distribution of land ownership has been severely unequeal and over the last decades the landless movement has decided that enough is enough and taken action to pressure the authorities for a thorough land reform. This goal has not yet been achieved despite that the MST friendly Worker´s Party has been running the country for the last seven years. However, the movement has been very successful in bypassing the authorities and established their own sub society.
How have they managed to carry on despite periods of harsh political climate when others have faded away? In trying to answer this I have looked at a few different movement theories to see in what areas MST is unique. What sets the landless movement apart from other movements in Brazil that also emerged in the 80s is in particual its use of strategy, namely land occupation. Not only is this a way to be less dependent on authority and political cimate, it’s also a way to get rid of the so called “free rider” problem. The free rider problem means that whenever a typical movement achieves benefits for the society, its not merely the activists that benefit but the whole public, for example in the case of improving air quality in a city. This means that the average person is not very tempted to join a movement since one activist more or less won’t make that much of a difference plus he or she would benefit from any achievment anyway. In the case of MST however it’s the people that are actively protesting that are the most likely to reap the benefits.
Of course there are many other factors that contribute to the movements success such as grievance, political opportunity and organizational capacity. However these are not as likely to be uniquely big for the landless movement.
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