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This article explores the relationship between the agrarian and national questions. It is argued that the ambiguities and gaps in the developmental theories after the Second World War have been progressively unveiled by the more successful processes of capitalist development of the twentieth century, which combined sustainable economic growth, reduction of social inequalities and improvement of political institutions with the progressive inclusion of the working masses. The relevance of the relation between the agrarian and the national questions was often obscured in prescriptive theories, but came to be anticipated in some of them, providing heuristic tools for the development of new projects and new utopias. The article interrogates one of these analysts, Fernando Fajnzylber, key ideologue of the neostructuralism in Latin America, with regard to his vision on development, an explicitly knowledge-based one, and much more rural-based than assumed by the old ECLA structuralism.

An analysis of transformations in the structures of the agrarian sphere in Brazil since 1964 can help to better understand the emergence & expansion of the MST (Movimento Sem Terra). The influence of movements linked to the progressive Catholic Church that have backed the landless rural workers' mobilization, demands & organization, has stepped in where the trade union movement has proven unable to combat the concentration of property & social exclusion. The trajectory of the MST, its specificities, its forms of struggle & organization & the formation of behaviors & alternative values, reveal a socialist ideology blended with religious influences that is now turning toward the alternative globalization movements. Adapted from the source document.