Research - Dr. Bruce Gilbert
Dr. Bruce Gilbert
Department of Philosophy and Liberal Arts
Labour over Capital: Brazil’s Movement of Landless Workers and its Critique of Liberal-Capitalism
Dr. Gilbert’s research has both a philosophical or theoretical wing, and an empirical or practical wing.
Philosophical Foundations:
His research is based in the dialectical political philosophy of authors like Hegel and Marx. "Dialectic" names the process of human learning. Dialectic refers as much to the way a child learns to speak as to the way whole societies learn the imperatives of their own freedom. This means, then, that freedom is not merely “choice”, which is our common-sense understanding, but is rather our capacity to enter into increasingly sophisticated forms of relationship with each other and our environment. While our processes of learning can frequently be diverted, stalled or can even regress, our capacity to learn to relate to each other in better and better ways is a permanent and essential feature of what it means to be human. Dr. Gilbert focuses in particular on the dialectic of society, economy and politics. His recent monograph, The Vitality of Contradiction: Hegel, Politics and the Dialectic of Liberal-Capitalism, articulates the philosophical arguments for this view of dialectic and freedom, holding as its conclusion that further developments in human freedom must move beyond the constraints of contemporary liberal-capitalism.
Empirical Studies:
Dr. Gilbert researches empirical features of this theory by studying social movements in Latin America, and especially the Movement of Landless Rural Workers of Brazil (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra do Brasil, or MST). The MST is a large and very successful social movement made up of people who are, when they first enter the movement, among the poorest and most marginalized people in the world. Members of the MST seize the under-utilized estates of wealthy landowners and build self-sufficient farming cooperatives on them. Of course this strategy meets with serious and often violent resistance. Nonetheless, the MST now has some 1.5 million members, thousands of successful cooperatives, and its own university near São Paulo, where it trains its workers and others who come from across Latin America and the Caribbean to learn the MST’s methods and philosophical principles. Dr. Gilbert’s research focuses on the ways in which the MST attempts to live up to its own mandate, which is to ensure the “supremacy of labour over capital” and to “build socialist values”. This involves studying the MST’s efforts to extend democracy into the sphere of economics and work and, as such, to build forms of community predicated on more sophisticated concepts of freedom than those of the liberal juridical system and capitalist economy that the MST challenges.
