The Daisies’ March: Labour Movements, Feminism and Identity Politics across the Urban-Rural Divide

The Marcha das Margaridas (Daisies' March) started in the year 2000 and has had five editions since then, mobilizing in 2015 100,000 women to Brasília. The organization of the March is driven by the trade union movement of rural workers in partnership with more than ten others movements and organizations, especially women movements. The March is organized at the local, regional and national level through a participatory process. In his last edition, the dialogue between the Brazilian activists and international organizations present resulted in creation of The International Network of Articulation of Daisies of the World, composed by 17 countries. We are concerned with understanding their success in building alliances across old divides such those between different types of rural labour (extractive workers, agrarian workers, fishers), between different types of political organizations (trade unions and other agrarian movements), as well as between rural and urban movements (through feminism). Starting with the challenge identified by Harvey of building bridges across the two types of movements – over expanded reproduction and over accumulation by dispossession – we move on to find theoretical inspirations that develop new languages to make sense of such coalitions. We rely on Gibson-Graham and their intellectual project of a postcapitalist politics to understand how class-, identity-, issue- and community-based movements present at the Daisies’ March have crossed their divides. In this paper we argue that the daisies have built strong political coalitions that respect and articulate difference in order to fight together against multiple inequalities. They have a clear organizational face to make demands on the state and influence the political system. They are a sustained, coordinated, political process of articulation differences to inform and suggest other type of politics, economy and society.