Metin Yeğin, Topraksızlar: Brezilya’da Topraksız Köylü Hareketi: MST, Istanbul: İletişim Yayınları, 2004, 221 pp. ISBN: 978-975-05-0202-6.
Metin Yeğin’s Topraksızlar is a field-based account of the struggles, collective production, and forms of social organisation developed by Brazil’s Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (MST) around land occupations. Drawing on Yeğin’s observations and interviews in Brazil, the book was conceived as a “film-book” together with the documentary of the same name. It begins with a foreword by James Petras and a text by Monica Dias Martins that situates the MST in its historical and political context, before moving into Yeğin’s direct field narrative. At the centre of the book is not simply the demand for land, but the organisation of an alternative social life on occupied land, extending from collective agriculture and education to solidarity and healthcare.
The MST’s approach to struggle takes shape in the book through the principle of “Occupy, Resist, Produce.” The organised occupation of large areas of unused or underused land, the defence of these occupations, and the subsequent organisation of production constitute fundamental practices of the movement. For the MST, however, agrarian reform is not simply a matter of redistributing property. Access to land is addressed together with needs such as credit, housing, education, healthcare, and technical support, as well as with the broader reorganisation of production and social relations. Occupation thus becomes not merely an instrument for claiming a right, but a starting point for new forms of collective organisation.
One of the aspects of the book that is particularly important for the Workers’ Control website is the way it makes visible the everyday practices of collective production, cooperativism, and self-management in MST settlements. Yeğin describes through examples from the field how production is organised in different settlements, how individual and collective forms of work can coexist, how cooperatives operate, and how decisions concerning production, investment, credit, and technical needs are made. In the MST experience, economic organisation is not conceived separately from democratic decision-making: local organisations, mass assemblies, and collective discussion occupy a central place in the movement’s functioning.
Another important dimension of this organisation is education and the development of collective capacities. The MST regards political and social education as a fundamental element of the movement’s continuity, developing various forms of education ranging from the training of local organisers and schools to seminars and programmes conducted in cooperation with universities. In the book, education appears not simply as the transmission of knowledge, but as part of a process through which people become actors capable of organising their own lives and struggles. In this respect, the MST experience also demonstrates that self-management is not merely an economic model of management, but a social practice that is collectively learned and reproduced.
Topraksızlar does not present this experience solely as an idealised success story; Yeğin’s narrative also addresses tensions concerning the functioning of cooperatives, possible divisions created by administrative responsibilities, market relations, and the movement’s own organisational problems. The establishment of collective production therefore brings with it economic, political, and organisational problems that cannot be resolved simply by gaining access to land. A distinctive feature of the MST experience is its attempt to address these problems not merely at the level of individual settlements, but within a broader social movement and network of solidarity.
From this perspective, Topraksızlar is an important Turkish-language source that explores self-management, collective production, cooperativism, solidarity, and democratic decision-making through the everyday experience of a social movement. Although the book centres on land struggle rather than the factory and wage-labour relation, the MST’s attempt to collectively reorganise production and social life after occupation makes it possible to consider workers’ control and self-management within a broader social framework. The book thus offers a field-based account of an important experience in the struggle to establish collective and democratic control over the conditions of production and life, extending well beyond the occupation of land itself.