Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality/Journal Millenarian

Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality/Journal

Millenarian movements such as that of the Contestado are a form of rural protest, rooted in material conditions but imbued with a profound religious sensibility. They tend to emerge in moments of societal stress and change. What were the specific disruptions in the lives of rural folk that triggered this particular millenarian response and why did the state react so harshly to repress it?

When the millenarian movement known as the Contestado erupted in 1912 the nation of Brazil had just undergone a profound social and economic disruption. Brazil was shifting to a more impersonal economic system, away from the landlord and tenant relationships that had defined rural life until that point. The stakes were high for the state: there had been an infusion of foreign money to fund a massive connecting railroad. This could be greatly profitable for Brazil, of course, but it also meant the displacement of many workers from their lands and ways of life. It also meant a shift of emigrant labor to formerly isolated areas. Former peasants, once dependant for their livelihood on small plots of land and tilling the soil rose upon in the form of the Contestado movement because it gave legitimacy to the old ideals they believed in: the close relationships between patron and farmer and the religious significance of a life that transcended material profits.

In his analysis of early 20th century Brazil, Todd A. Diacon's Millenarian Vision, Capitalist Reality suggests that the protest movement was spawned by a desire to return to older forms of patronage, not a demand for new and more equitable systems of governance, as some historians have suggested. Once the landowners had protected the peasants, now that support was gone in the new age of capitalism and foreign control of the land. The Contestado movement was not a "political rebellion in which the peasantry rose up to destroy the landlord class" but a movement to resurrect and redefine the peasant-landlord relationship outside of the new capitalist mindset that had been imposed upon the rural society (Diacon 127) Thus, the movement was not a political rebellion: it was more of a local spiritual crisis of meaning (Diacon 143).

One persuasive argument in favor of the idea that the rebellion was not a kind of proto-Marxist uprising is manifested in how strikingly primitive, to modern eyes, the peasants were, largely confined to using mules and cattle to till the soil. These were not workers of the world desiring to unite, rather they resisted industrialization, they did not embrace it, and they rallied together not as a class, but as a religious people with shared indigenous traditions. The earlier type of basic subsistence farming practiced amongst the supporters of the Contestado was also so common that class and social divisions between land-owners and farmers had not been especially noticeable before the incursion of the railroads. There was a limit to how much money could be made from the earlier type of farming, even by the large landowners, and the landowners could be seen side-by-side in the fields with the peasants, thus a rough kind of equity existed. 'Squatter' families on public lands were also often ignored, giving peasants another means of survival.

However, when railways began to be rapidly snake across the nation, the potential for making profits off of the land seismically increased. From 1907-1914 the entrepreneurial capitalist Percival Farquhar began to engage in a massive construction campaign. Huge waves of immigrants to work for the railroad made an influx into formerly homogeneous regions, profoundly destabilizing the lives of residents as well as of these new arrivals. Violent clashes were common between railroad workers and peasants -- although peasants were forced off of their land to work on the railroads as well.

Diacon calls the forces that brought change to Brazil a "deadly triumvirate" of the state government, the Brazil Railway Company, and the landowners looking for a quick profit (Diacon 59). Even many smaller landowners lost tracts to the powerful railroad companies. Regardless, the patron-client relationship was completely severed because now worker labored directly for the railroad companies, with old landowners effectively betraying their old tenants by contracting them out, acting as brokers. The work on the railroad was hard, and provided none of the benefits of tilling the land in terms of feeding the worker's families. Being a pure 'wage slave' was a relatively new concept to the rural people of the region.

Rural Brazilians looked backward in terms of their religious conception: the Contestado rebellion was supposed to bring back a holy city, and a traditional paternalistic relationship between 'good' patrons and farmers that mirrored that of God and his flock of followers. The return of the monarchy was "God's chosen form of government" (Diacon 18). Faith healers and charismatics dominated the movement, not exponents of a coherent political ideology. The Contestado did not see themselves as resisting progress; they saw themselves as resisting evil.