Abstract
Critics of contemporary liberalism question whether the expansion of human and social rights can deliver radical social change. Drawing on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this article challenges this view by analysing how the discourse of rights has been critically redeployed by a radical Homeless Workers’ Movement – the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST). The MTST’s strategic use of a discursive framework of social rights problematises existing scholarship which fails to account for the ways in which activists rework and redeploy ideas of rights in practice. In particular, the article demonstrates the centrality of rights discourse to the formation of radical political subjectivities and the emancipatory goals pursued by the MTST. This counter-hegemonic politics of rights re-signifies liberal discourse, exceeding its conventional juridical boundaries: it creates politicisation in occupations, and it constitutes a strategy of counter-conducts vis-à-vis neoliberal governmentality.
Se o povo soubesse o talento que ele tem, não aturava desaforo de ninguém!
If the people knew the talent they have, they would not tolerate outrage from anyone! MTST chant
Introduction: the Limits of Rights Discourse for Radical Politics
Critics of contemporary liberalism question whether the framework of human rights can deliver radical social change. Many even suggest human, legal and social-rights claims may undermine movements for emancipation and equality by producing forms of political subjectivity that are passive and de-politicised. 1 By contrast, this article shows how a discourse of rights is central to the emancipatory objectives of the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST) – Homeless Workers’ Movement – and helps to facilitate radical political subjectivities that seek to overcome forms of structural discrimination. Towards this end, the article conceptualises the centrality of rights discourse as a form of counter-conduct. Specifically, rather than being the passive subjects of a liberal discourse of rights, MTST activists have drawn on concepts of rights as part of an ongoing resistance to the forms of economic and political subjectivity dictated by neoliberalism. This problematises existing critiques of legal and human-rights discourses, which fail to account for the ways in which social movements actively deploy and rework ideas of legal rights. Despite the fact that rights are part and parcel of the present socio-economic system, it is necessary to analyse how social movements employ the discourse of rights to perform radical politics.
The MTST – one of the largest social movements in Brazil – originated more than 20 years ago from the Landless Workers’ Movement – Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Terra (MST) – but soon became independent from it. The MTST is a radical movement, which struggles for both the transformation of the present capitalist system, and for the recognition of the right to dignified housing in the urban peripheries. The movement employs rights discourse as one of the most important tools of its political strategy. It is this combination that this article explores: the coexistence of radical objectives and rights discourse in the MTST struggle. The movement employs legal and extra-legal strategies simultaneously, developing an approach which goes beyond the forms of state co-optation associated with social movements’ appeals to legal and human rights.
The critique of the idea of rights as being illusionary – as providing only a sort of camouflage to social domination – is as old as Karl Marx. 2 Contemporary critics include the prominent philosophers Wendy Brown 3 and Judith Butler, 4 who argue that asking for legal protection from the state may be just another way of reinforcing its power. The perils for radical movements that employ rights discourse are serious: legal interpellation has an individualising effect on collective struggles; moreover, rights claims may de-radicalise political demands, softening efforts to change the very structure of capitalist socio-economic relationships. A similar concern applies to the idea of human rights, 5 which are seen as an international disciplinary regime aimed at justifying Western interests. 6 The argument of rights’ critics follows this logic: because rights are a crucial aspect of contemporary governmentality, they cannot help collective efforts to limit and counter state power. 7 In contrast, the MTST shows that exactly because rights are part of a liberal/legal framework they can be employed as a political counter-strategy against governmental institutions. Moreover, activists daily reworking of social rights allows them to ground radical subjectivities.
The present article contributes to recent scholarship which looks at how social movements appropriate liberal rights discourse, reshaping it for their own purposes. 8 In critical IR scholarship, Louiza Odysseos, 9 Anna Selmeczi 10 and Bal Sokhi-Bulley 11 convincingly conceptualise rights as techniques of neoliberal government, that can nevertheless be redeployed in strategies of counter-conduct. On the one hand, contemporary governmentality prescribes a kind of self-government which requires freedom and rights. The subject produced on this basis is always bound by juridical and economic rationalities which are expressions of the neoliberal ‘conduct of conducts’. 12 In her work, Selmeczi conceptualises social rights as ‘the backlash effect of the emergence of biopower’: 13 a form of control of individuals which enters the realm of welfare and human flourishing. At the same time, however, these scholars – by looking at the concrete employment of rights discourse – also argue that rights can interrupt socio-economic disposability and can thereby support popular resistance. 14
The MTST employs rights in ways which illuminate the debate about the perils of using liberal tools. For the movement, the right to housing is part and parcel of a broader strategy to face and challenge governmental institutions. The MTST employs liberal discourse to its own advantage: for the sem teto, the demand for dignified housing is an incursion into the opponent’s field, and liberal discourse is appropriated and re-shaped in creative ways. This incursion into the liberal governmental space is fruitfully conceptualised through Foucault’s idea of ‘counter-conduct’: as the contemporary governmentality implies conducting individuals through freedoms and rights, the appropriation of rights discourse represents an effective strategy to ask to be governed differently.
Employing the notion of counter-conducts to conceptualise contemporary protests in different parts of the world has been the focus of recent scholarly work by Carl Death, Louiza Odysseos and Helle Malmvig, who edited a special issue of Global Society under the title ‘Counter-Conduct in Global Politics: Theorising the Subjects and Practices of Contesting Conduct’. 15 Moreover, the concept of counter-conduct has been closely associated with rights by Ben Golder, who wrote a book devoted to deepening the understanding of Foucault’s last works. 16 Golder argues against the allegations of a ‘liberal turn’ in Foucault’s thought by illustrating how Foucault’s employment of the concept of rights can be fruitfully framed in terms of critical counter-conducts. Thus, Foucault’s use of human rights rhetoric hints at ways in which the governed can employ the government’s tools to demand to be governed differently. On a different argumentative axis, but with a similar conclusion, Karen Zivi 17 understands rights claims as enabling a politics of the performative, which uses the liberal language in innovative and transformative ways.
The specificity of MTST’s employment of rights is that it materialises only within a broader strategy of social struggle: the consciousness of a right to housing arises within occupations, where activists learn how to live collectively and the discourse of rights disrupts previous subjectivities creating the possibility of a rebellious politicisation. The movement avoids rights’ de-radicalising peril because housing is not conceived as just a consequence of a legal provision in need of enforcement: activists learn from the beginning that they have years of struggle ahead before they will be able to gain housing. However, part of the commitment needed to conduct this tiring fight comes from the consciousness of being right-worthy. Moreover, the MTST explicitly makes reference to legal rights as determined by the Brazilian constitution. This is because social rights – thanks to the political struggle of leftist parties and movements – were included in the new democratic constitution of 1988. 18 Thus, the MTST takes a legal framework, reworks it and then employs it in the struggle against governmental institutions. Constitutional social rights become a strategy of counter-conduct in the hands of a radical social movement. Furthermore, MTST’s discourse of social rights is part of a counter-hegemonic politics because it never exists outside the social struggle. While the law determines the right to housing, people need to fight for its implementation.
The present article shares the critical concerns with the liberal idea of human and legal rights. However, it looks at the dynamic radical movements’ co-optation. The MTST case suggests that it is possible to fruitfully employ rights discourse and to situate it in a radical strategy. The movement shows how nuanced the relationship is between contemporary forms of government and forms of resistance. One of the major warnings against the employment of liberal tools concerns the risk of activists’ co-optation by governmental institutions. Movements challenging the foundations of the system with the system’s tools run the risk of co-optation. Yet the MTST case shows that rights discourse can go hand in hand with other strategies and that liberal tools can be appropriated and used in progressive ways. The employment of rights discourse does not imply an acritical acceptance of legality: sometimes the struggle requires extra-legal tactics and arguments. Thus, the MTST shows how rights discourse can be part of a radical strategy to challenge institutions, and, furthermore, form part of a counter-hegemonic struggle.
Rethinking Rights Discourse Through the MTST
The MTST is part of a web of different social movements which struggle for housing in Brazil; 19 however, it is the largest organised movement both in the state of São Paulo and at the federal level. Moreover, marking a difference with other groups, 20 it is a movement which struggles both for gaining dignified housing and also to deeply transform Brazilian society. Thus, it informs the discussion of how rights discourse can coexist with more radical objectives. The historical lack of pro-poor housing policies in Brazil is a key factor in determining the development of housing movements as it is in other countries like South Africa; 21 however, more compelling for discussing the limits and potentialities of rights discourse, the Brazilian democratic Constitution of 1988 explicitly recognised social rights. Thus, the disjuncture between the letter of the law and daily reality hints at MTST’s radical re-signification of rights discourse. Finally, Brazil is an apt case to analyse the risks of co-optation and de-radicalisation of radical movements as this phenomena already occurred during the years of Partido dos Trabalhadores [Workers’ Party] (PT) governments. 22
The present article is the result of a four-month-long ethnographic fieldwork in the urban peripheries of São Paulo, the largest Brazilian city and the MTST’s stronghold. Starting to accompany the movement was a complex process, as – understandably – newcomers are treated with caution. Moreover, the positionality of a white Western male researcher is deeply entrenched in a structure of global (and local) domination; 23 therefore, developing a relationship of trust with the movement’s activists was the first and most important focus of the fieldwork. The research started in April 2018, in a period in which the MTST opened itself to the arrival of new activists: I joined the movement with this group of people, always being transparent about my identity and the research project. The whole process was facilitated by my goal of conducting activist research/militant ethnography, 24 therefore showing willingness to join and help the MTST in its daily struggle.
The research started in a crucial phase for the movement and for the whole country. In April 2018, the MTST had just dismantled one of the largest occupations of its history, the occupation Povo sem Medo de São Bernardo do Campo – People without Fear of São Bernardo do Campo, after obtaining from governmental institutions four areas to build social housing. Almost in the same days, the PT’s ex-president, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva, had been imprisoned through a controversial judicial decision. 25 This represented one of the final stages of a political development which expelled PT politicians from power positions. 26 MTST activists went on the streets to protest and to show solidarity to Lula.
By the end of April 2018, the movement started two new occupations, one in the North periphery of São Paulo (called Marielle Vive [Marielle lives]) and one in the South periphery (called Marielle Franco), both dedicated to the memory of Marielle Franco, a Partido Socialismo e Libertade [Socialism and Liberty Party] (PSOL) city councillor in Rio de Janeiro assassinated in March 2018 because of her leftist political work. MTST usually occupies unused land in the peripheries; there, activists build thousands of shacks made of black canvas. Each shack represents a family and its future home. Through the political strength associated with occupations (demonstrations, pressure, traffic blocks, etc.), the MTST negotiates with the municipality and State government on the construction of social housing for the activists. The movement’s most common institutional arrangement to build the apartments is a federal programme created by Lula, called Minha Casa, Minha Vida – Entidades [My Home, My Life – Entities]. Through this governmental programme, the MTST can actively participate in a construction’s organisational issue and the activists can access low interest loans offered by the Brazilian public bank.
Since 2014 – when Brazil hosted the football World Cup – the movement experienced a significant increase in activist numbers. At that time, the occupation Copa do Povo [People’s cup] triggered many new occupations in the East periphery of São Paulo. The key leader of the movement, Guilherme Boulos, ran in the presidential elections of October 2018 as the PSOL candidate. 27 Boulos joined the movement at the beginning of the 2000s and wrote a thesis on the therapeutic effects of occupations on people who suffer from depression. 28 Following the rise in importance of MTST on the national social movements’ scene, it became the focus of Brazilian scholars’ and students’ work. 29 The present article contributes to the literature on the MTST both in Portuguese and in English as it discusses the movement’s radical politics in relation to the employment of rights discourse.
Conducting research with a social movement instead of about it is the most important objective of an activist research perspective. 30 This article is an attempt at developing knowledge which can be useful for the movement itself. During fieldwork, the methodology employed has been participant observation, or, as Katia Valenzuela suggests, ‘observant participation’, which inverts ‘the traditional notion of participant observation’, emphasising ‘engagement rather than detached observation for the exploration of political phenomena’. 31 Given the political problems and dilemmas that a white Western male positionality implicates in a mostly non-white Southern female field, the ethnographic material which follows is mostly the result of the attempt to engage with MTST activists at the occupation Marielle Vive. In the article, unless specified otherwise, all direct quotations are from personal field notes. They were taken during conversations with activists and I reproduce some of them to give an account of the movement.
Although I never continuously lived in the occupation, I spent a considerable number of days and nights there, participating in assemblies, demonstrations and helping with the occupation’s daily routine. Sometimes I helped in the central kitchen or I assisted in cleaning and building new collective shacks; Friday nights I usually watched movies at the occupation’s film screening. I also spent a considerable amount of time just talking and smoking cigarettes with the activists. In the last days of September 2018, both Marielle Vive and Marielle Franco were dismantled, following the achievement of an agreement between the MTST and the state of São Paulo, which, in the next few years, will hopefully guarantee housing for all the families of both occupations. Given its relevance to the research project, I also participated in the MTST Brigada Juridica [juridical brigade] – a movement’s internal group which deals with legal issues and legal formation.
Occupations, Rights and Strategy
Re-signifying liberal rights discourse through the struggle
The MTST takes from the liberal field the discourse of rights and it re-signifies it: right to housing becomes part of a strategy to challenge the government and modify power relationships. 32 Rights discourse is employed beyond its juridical meaning, because rights materialise through the struggle. The idea that the governmental techniques can become forms of resistance is what Foucault conceptualises as counter-conducts. As rights can be thought of as contemporary techniques of government, the MTST’s employment of rights discourse lies within the space of counter-conducts. Interestingly, rights discourse appears when the movement organises demonstrations; it serves the purpose of legitimising the struggle and to spur activists. In contrast, when leaders describe the movement, rights are absent. This shows that they are used strategically and that they represent only one part of MTST’s identity.
In my first encounter with the MTST I went to the movement’s headquarters in the West periphery of São Paulo, a beautiful house surrounded by a green area that has been gained through the struggle. The house provides different spaces for gatherings/assemblies and various bedrooms. The purpose of the meeting was to bring together people who were getting close to the movement and wanted to join it. N.
33
– a key leader – briefly presented the MTST struggle: We are a hybrid movement, it’s political and a people’s movement. Occupying in the peripheries is not a principle, but rather a tactic to mobilise more people. Occupations have two purposes: first to increase our strength and second to change the logic of the city. Inside occupations people organise in communities; they prepare themselves for the possibility of an eviction because it is part of our struggle. The struggle is very intense and also very formative, it helps us to understand who our enemies are.
34
The idea of struggling for the right to housing was not present in N’s account, as it was not in another talk I had with a leader about the political objectives of the MTST. I did not find references to social rights either at the Juridical Brigade’s meetings. In contrast, during demonstrations, many talks employed extensively rights rhetoric. It was not only used by leaders, but also by many rank-and-file members. An activist described the movement in this way: ‘It is the people as a whole who struggle for rights, it is hard work, it is a trabalho de formiga 35 , but this is how the movement is established’. 36 At Marielle Vive, the leaders often used rights discourse to explain the struggle’s political objectives and to spur the activists. Before the start of Marielle Vive’s first demonstration, a leader incited the crowd: ‘We are going to seek our rights today. The rights that have been denied us for a long time; but today is the moment, today is the day. The occupation Marielle Vive will show that we are worthy! Worthy of rights, of housing, of respect’. 37
Sometimes, MTST leaders used the word rights almost as an empty signifier, without pointing at any specific juridical concept. On other occasions, they made more explicit reference to the right to housing as specified by the constitution. In both instances, rights discourse served mainly the tactical purpose of mobilising newcomers, nurturing their political sensibilities. The MTST partly develops its struggle within legal rights discourse, advancing political claims following the idea of ‘having a right to’. Thus, the movement formulates demands according to the rules of the existing socio-legal system. Despite the fact that the right to housing is not guaranteed in São Paulo peripheries, the movement acknowledges the existing political order when claiming a right as ‘it is provided by the constitution’.
When the MTST establishes a new occupation, hundreds come to learn how the process works and get to know the movement. Most often, people who join an occupation do not know about the MTST, and they are also not politically active. Thus, referring to rights is an effective way that leaders have to introduce newcomers to the struggle.
This appropriation of a liberal tool, its re-signification through the movement’s struggle can be understood through the concept of counter-conducts. To conceptualise MTST’s employment of rights discourse through this Foucauldian concept, an initial step is understanding (neo)liberalism as a technique of government rather than an ideology. Instead of the state’s retreat, neoliberalism prescribes the state’s ‘governmentalisation’: which implies ‘shaping human conduct by calculated means’. 38 Government is understood as ‘the conduct of conducts’ and its objective is to bolster human welfare at the level of the population. By educating people’s desires, by configuring their ‘habits, aspirations and beliefs’, 39 the government conducts individuals indirectly, or, individuals start to govern themselves.
Individual rights and freedoms are part and parcel of a governmentality which seeks to direct the conduct of people. 40 However, according to the Foucauldian notion of co-existence between forms of power and forms of resistance, 41 within the ‘conduct of conducts’ there exist possibilities for escaping and subverting the government. These forms of resistance to the ‘power that conducts’ are the ‘counter-conducts’. Similarly, rights can be conceptualised as counter-conducts precisely because they are internal to the liberal form of government. 42 MTST’s demand for an individual’s right to housing does not represent an absolute rejection of the idea of being governed, rather – especially for the working classes of urban peripheries – it depicts a form of resistance, a political strategy to be governed differently.
The MTST employs rights discourse in unexpected ways, developing a politics of rights which closely resembles Foucauldian counter-conducts. Rights become part and parcel of the struggle: they are not just written in the law, people have to fight daily to materialise them. This is reflected in the following extract from the speech of one of leaders before leaving the occupation to march to the local municipality for Marielle Vive’s first demonstration: Comrades, today is a very important day for our struggle here in this land. Today is a day of struggle, it is a day for the people taking the streets, and it is the day in which we demand our rights. We are not going to the municipality to ask any favour, we are going to the municipality to demand what is ours as it is in the law.
43
Here it is clear how rights discourse is part of the MTST struggle. It is a ‘tool of the system’ appropriated by the movement as a tactic against established power structures. The legal right to housing is appropriated by the movement and reworked, becoming a tool of resistance. Despite the interrelation between political fight and rights, I believe it is worth noting here that the legitimacy of MTST’s demands comes from the existing legal system – ‘We demand what is ours as it is in the law’. Thus, the movement does not completely reject the government. Its politics of rights shows that – for the poor in the urban peripheries – having access to dignified housing implies being governed differently.
Developing Resisting Subjectivities through Social Rights
The employment of rights discourse in MTST occupations serves a precise function: it helps to create new political subjectivities. The movement uses rights rhetoric to disrupt a feeling of insecurity and dis-empowerment among peripheries’ residents: being aware of having rights prepares for the hard fight against governmental institutions. To help illustrate how this process of re-subjectification happens, I employ Judith Revel’s theory 44 and construct a parallel with Cesare Di Feliciantonio’s case study. 45
Occupations are the space where these subjectivities are constituted; yet, activists do not confine their awareness to juridical entitlements: in occupations people gain consciousness about different axes of discrimination (e.g. class, race and gender). Thus, rights subjectivities in MTST occupations facilitate the constitution of more radical desires for change. Rights discourse is not only tactically employed to develop a feeling of legitimacy and to urge activists to take to the streets for demonstrations. Discourse of rights affects activists’ identities in more complex ways: to a degree, it ruptures pre-existent subjectivities and it creates new ones. At Marielle Vive, activists often explained: ‘I did not know I had a right to housing before joining the MTST’. The tactical use of rights discourse creates in the activists a political sensibility, an awareness of being worthy – worthy of rights.
The great majority of people living in São Paulo’s peripheries come from the working class, and they enjoy little access to education, health care and transportation. 46 Moreover, they experience serious problems in gaining decent housing, because often their salary is not enough to cover the rent together with other basic expenses. Thus, when activists say they did not know they had a right to housing I believe they express – at least – three ideas. First, they literally do not know that the Brazilian constitution determines a right to housing. Second, they point at the belief that it is not their fault if they do not have decent housing; and third, they imply that if they have a right to housing then it is appropriate to struggle for its implementation.
Rights discourse changes activists’ subjectivities. It dismantles the neoliberal feeling of being responsible for their own socio-economic condition. As D., a young activist at Marielle Vive, once told me: ‘Since I am here I changed a lot. I was much stressed. The occupation changed the way in which I look at life, at the world’. 47 Yet, how are we to characterise rights subjectivities? How are they related to the MTST politics?
Following the recent theoretical and empirical understanding of subjectification 48 offered by Revel and Di Feliciantonio, it is possible to broaden the liberal conceptualisation of rights subjectivities. Revel argues that a nuanced understanding of Foucault’s work on subjects starts with the appreciation of the unresolvable chiasmus of subjectification: subjectivities always emerge as the result of the interaction of ‘objectivising modes of subjectification’ and ‘autonomous modes of subjectification’. 49 Revel’s chiasmus elaborates on Foucault’s analytics of power, in which ‘techniques of government’ and ‘techniques of the self’ represent, on the one hand, ‘the action of power upon the individual’, and on the other hand, ‘the action of individuals upon themselves’. 50
Thus, in Revel’s understanding, the production of subjectivities is always both an objectification and also a free subjectification, an ‘invention of the self’ that can become ‘a radical work on and against subjection’. 51 Although it is not possible to conclusively solve the chiasmus, it is possible to unbalance it and enlarge the possibilities of autonomous subjectification. 52 Di Feliciantonio describes this unbalancing through the actions of Italian housing movements and he characterises the emergence of social contention as ‘ruptures in the process of subjectification’. 53
Di Feliciantonio theorises indebtedness as a neoliberal technique in the dismantling of public welfare and the financialisation of real estate. However, through an ethnographic account of the lives of movements’ activists, Di Feliciantonio shows how collective political action is able to unbalance the indebted subjectivity, producing a collective one which challenges established power relations. According to Di Feliciantonio, there exist two steps in the creation of this new subjectivity: the first is the ‘action/gesture’ of squatting, the second involves deconstructing the ‘indebted identity’. 54 The deconstruction materialises through reversing responsibility for the squatters’ material deprivation. The ‘indebted subject’ has been educated to think that s/he is the only person responsible for the ‘permanent state of anxiety’ caused by debt. In contrast, housing movements’ activists teach new squatters that the real causes are structural conditions of impoverishment and inequality.
At Marielle Vive, rights discourse operated similarly to Di Feliciantonio’s account. The leaders’ rhetorical use served the purpose of deconstructing a narrative which criminalises the poor living in the peripheries. Rights subjectivity arising in the occupation focused on the idea that the poor are worthy of respect (and decent housing) and they are ready to take collective political action. Thus, the sentence: ‘I did not know I had a right to housing before joining the MTST’, turns into a resisting statement of people who are struggling to materialise what they deserve. Activists who were ‘discovering’ their right to housing through the occupation were also going through processes of self-transformation. As Di Feliciantonio suggests, activists first ruptured the criminalising narrative about the poor and social movements. Again from the conversation with D.: I already knew the MTST, but from the media. For me the movement was made up of terrorists. I thought they were slackers. Then, since I started to get closer to the movement, I also started to know the matter, the right to housing, to security, to health care and education. I did not know about all of this.
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Self-transformation at Marielle Vive materialised in different forms. Activists learned how to take care of each other by organising collective kitchens; some of them decided to take more responsibilities and become coordinators, women and youth had some specific moments to discuss collectively the problems they face. Social rights discourse represented a first step in politicisation. In the ‘unresolvable chiasmus of subjectification’, rights subjectivities emerge through ‘autonomous modes of subjectification’. After dismantling the criminalizing narrative against the poor and social movements, activists became political through the idea that it is legitimate to struggle for housing. In this sense, rights discourse, despite being inextricably linked to neoliberal techniques of government, produced resisting subjectivities.
Furthermore, during a different meeting at Marielle Vive, the constitution of more radical subjectivities manifested, and activists problematised the discrimination suffered because of their class, race and gender. S.M. was organising the MTST Youth Camp, Acampamento da Joventude - Fogo no Pavil [Light the Fuse], in which the youth of different occupations gathered for a weekend. S/he called for a preparatory meeting at Marielle Vive.
The atmosphere is much more relaxed than in “official” MTST meetings or assemblies. Although the camp is supposed to be for the youth, there is no strict age limit and some older activists are also attending the gathering. Everyone is talking and interrupting each other, at a certain point a young activist takes the microphone and starts leading a choir of the movement’s slogans. The one of the youth is: “Brazilian revolutionaries! Light the Fuse! Light the Fuse! [Revolucionarios do Brasil! Fogo no pavil! Fogo no pavil!]” When S.M. manages to take again some control over the meeting, s/he talks about the fact that the MTST youth is lacking a space to discuss their problems, this is why they organise the Youth Camp, and everyone is welcome to contribute in the organisation. S/he intentionally uses slang; during the meeting the “people” are called quebrada – a vernacular word which indicates the youth of the periphery. I do not remember how, but people start speaking about the difference between rich and poor youth. “Rich kids are individualistic and selfish, they are protected by their families. It is us, the youth of the quebrada, who actually help old ladies to cross the street!” Someone adds: “they cannot even make coffee for themselves”. L., a black activist who is in the movement since some time, bluntly tells: “when I go to the city centre ladies draw back and hold their bags stronger because they have fear. Not all rich people are like this, but many are, and this is why I want to bother them”.
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The people in occupations are the working class, they are black, they are women. However, the creation of consciousness in MTST occupations is not a process which is explicitly orchestrated. Yet, it takes place in meetings like the ones described above. Rights discourse politicises MTST activists: after some time in the movement and of the collective life in occupations, people do not only problematise the lack of housing, but also the society’s structural conditions of domination and oppression. Thus, the discourse of rights is central to the emancipatory goals of the MTST because it helps to constitute radical political subjectivities that seek to overcome forms of structural discrimination.
At the Edge of Legality: a Radical Politics of Rights
The fact that MTST employs rights discourse does not prevent it from deploying extra-legal strategies and arguments. The law alone does not provide enough traction to gain dignified housing: people have to become activists and to start a collective struggle. Thus, rights discourse is part of a broader strategy. MTST’s strength is based on the ability to mix legal and extra-legal strategies, intervening with the power of the collective where the law alone does not suffice. Rather than activists being co-opted by legalistic discourse, it is actually the movement which – to a certain extent – manages to co-opt governmental institutions and to unbalance the force relations between governed and governors.
The movement exceeds current rules and pushes the boundaries of the existing socio-legal system. To illustrate in detail how the MTST acts at the edge of legalistic discourse, I outline a political formation at Marielle Vive. This meeting was organised by the movement’s Brigada de Formaçao Politica (political education brigade) for group coordinators – MTST occupations are divided into ‘groups’: these are subunits which gather a certain amount of shacks together for political and organisational purposes. Below I provide a glimpse of the meeting.
It is already dark when I enter the big shack close to the collective kitchen at the entrance of the occupation. Marielle Vive is only one month old and the occupation coordinators briefly discuss with the group coordinators a few organisational issues. Then they introduce P., the activist of the political education brigade who came to conduct the meeting. From the beginning, P. is interactive and tries to stimulate a discussion with the coordinators. S/he opens the meeting with an interesting provocation: “suppose you already won the struggle. You gained this land and the process of constructing the apartment is almost completed. But, because of some bureaucratic lengthiness, you have to wait a few weeks before getting the apartment keys. Now, let us suppose that homeless people of the neighbourhood occupy the empty buildings. What would you do?” The provocation is successful: confusion instantly reigns in the shack, multiple voices answer irritated: “they should be evicted!” P. replies: “why should they then not evict us?” P. leaves the question open and moves to another interesting topic: property. S/he draws an analogy between toothbrushes and land asking whether the coordinators would oppose someone who accumulates a huge number of toothbrushes. No one argues against it, as it is always possible to go to a supermarket and buy a new one in case of personal need. “Yet, what about people who like to accumulate land? Can we go to the market and buy a new piece of land? No, land is different, it cannot be produced as toothbrushes”. We now see where s/he was leading: not all properties are the same. I am amazed by P.’s ability to stimulate collective thinking through provocative questions which allow different positions to emerge. Subsequently, P. gives everyone a photocopy of the fifth article of the constitution. Coordinators read it aloud. The first paragraph states that everyone is equal in front of the law. The second one establishes the right to property. The third and fourth paragraphs limit it by stating that property has to carry out a “social function”: otherwise it can be expropriated by the government according to the law. The land on which Marielle Vive has been established was left abandoned for more than forty years; thus it is clearly not fulfilling the social function requirement. P. asks: “then, what are we doing here, with this land left alone?” A coordinator replies: “we are replacing the government!” P. replies: “but we could not do it, isn’t it? Or is it right to take justice into our own hands? Are we going against the law?” A coordinator provides an astute answer: “Yes, maybe we are wrong. But the owner is also wrong in leaving this land abandoned. We are all wrong!” Then P. starts to talk about legality. Just a few days before the meeting, Marielle Vive conducted its first demonstration in front of the local municipality, to start political negotiations with the institutions. “Yet, if we are doing something illegal, why did the first demonstration go to the municipality? I mean, what kind of thief would go to the police station after a robbery?” The paradoxical analogy triggers reflections and debate. Before closing the meeting, P. hands out a newspaper article by Boulos in which he argues against evictions of MTST occupations. Boulos writes about the many private and public buildings which have been constructed illegally: why do the police evict only MTST occupations and not also these other “illegal occupations”? P. suggests the answer: “because the law is not actually equal for all! They have got the power of money…And what have we got?” One coordinator replies: “we have unity!” Another voice: “our belief!”.
57
This meeting illustrates how the MTST’s discourse lies at the edge of legality. Certainly, the very fact of handing out photocopies of the constitution and reading them aloud shows a reference to the existing legal institutions. Rights discourse works here also through the claim on property’s social function requirement. A politicising argument stems from the fact that if the law provides a limitation to property, then activists are protected by this limitation when occupying an abandoned land. Also the paradoxical analogy with a thief going to the police station shows the employment of legalistic argument: the movement is legitimate in what it is doing, why otherwise does it self-report a ‘crime’?
During the meeting, P. employs a legalistic argument when s/he rhetorically asks whether the movement is right in ‘taking justice into its hands’. Yet, by showing the difference between legality and justice, s/he argues that the legitimacy of occupying is not (only) stemming from the legal system. This idea becomes clearer by the end of the meeting, when P. says that the law cannot be trusted because it is not really equal for all: there is one for the rich and one for the poor. Rights discourse is also problematised at the beginning of the meeting. The paradox created by the role reversal (‘should other occupiers be evicted?’), not only shows the complex legal and political situation the movement is facing, but it also suggests there are many more people who are in need of housing, triggering – after the initial dismay – a feeling of solidarity.
The way in which the MTST pushes legality to its boundaries is similar to its relationship with governmental institutions. By re-signifying liberal rights discourse, the movement explores new opportunities for the struggle; while the MTST recognises state officials as interlocutors, it forces them to act in certain ways, for instance, by going to the street and speaking to thousands of protesters.
During the first confrontation between Marielle Vive activists and the local municipality, leaders were asking for the implementation of housing rights, but, at the same time, the demonstration’s purpose was to show political strength, to ask for recognition as a collective political subject. That day proved successful: after a long march, activists reached the local municipality but the mayor had left with the entire staff. activists did not move, arguing that they would have stayed there until a delegation would have been able to speak with the mayor. After hours of waiting, Marielle Vive leaders announced that they had received a phone call: the mayor was coming back to his office. activists were full of joy for this first victory. The delegation met the mayor the following day; but before the demonstration ended, the leaders called on the mayor to give a talk from the movement’s loudspeaker. He accepted and told briefly that he would do his best to improve the living conditions in his neighbourhood.
At various other times MTST leaders came out from negotiations with institutional representatives pushing them to talk to all activists; it is a powerful example of how the MTST is able to change the force relations which constitute power structures: for once, it is the authority who goes to talk to the people. In these instances the movement is managing to co-opt the government for its own purposes. Politically, this is a very important achievement which tackles the system at its very roots. Yet, this result also represents the tension between co-opting and being co-opted: despite the great political effect the movement exercises on government representatives, what at the end activists get from the relationship with the government is an individual housing solution with individual bank loans. The final result does not seem to tackle the political system at its very roots as the intermediate steps do. 58
The day after the demonstration in the local municipality, one of the leaders was reporting to the activists about the meeting with the mayor. S/he told them that the main points the delegation discussed with the mayor were: organising a meeting with the land owner and providing the occupation with some basic services (garbage collection, water connection, etc.). Interestingly, these demands were at any point a right of the movement: land occupations are not protected by the constitution. The request was part of the movement’s effort to change the power relationship with the institutions: indeed, I believe the purpose of the demonstration was to show the strength and unity of Marielle Vive. The rhetoric employed by the leaders to celebrate the first demonstration’s success with the activists is hostile to the government: Did you see the fear that organised people provoke in the institutions? When the people are organised, when the people are united, when the people have faith, nobody can stop the people. Did you see how scared they were? They all left before we arrived, mayor included; but when we arrived there, no way, there was a multitude of fighters, and the mayor was obliged to come out from the hole in which he was hiding to meet the people of the occupation.
59
Again, from this quotation it is possible to understand the complex relationship between the MTST and governmental institutions. Here, it becomes clear that the movement’s discourse often exceeds legality, because it refers to something different. The leader refers to the activists, the multitude of fighters and their ability to scare politicians. It is this mix of legal and extra-legal discourse which constitutes MTST’s radical politics of rights. Activists are not passive subjects of the liberal discourse of rights: as shown through the previous ethnographic study, people read and discuss the constitution to conclude that they need to fight more and more. Rather than internalising an understanding of rights tied to private property, MTST’s discourse of rights spurs activists to critical thinking and solidarity, aiming at resisting the political and economic subjectivities dictated by neoliberalism.
Conclusion
The present discussion explores the significance of rights discourse for contemporary social struggles. Eminent critics argue that rights cannot be emancipatory because they are part and parcel of the capitalist system. In contrast, the MTST shows the collective struggle advances from a strategic employment of the discourse of rights. In occupations, activists develop resisting subjectivities which seek to overcome structural domination. The movement takes legalistic discourse and reworks it. Rather than being passive subjects of the neoliberal logic of rights, activists draw on the opponent’s field to establish strategies of counter-conduct: they struggle against the system with its own tools.
A politics of rights constitutes forms of resistance exactly because rights are neoliberal techniques of government. The MTST offers a compelling empirical contribution to the debate about the limits of rights discourse for radical politics as it successfully employs legal and extra-legal discourse. This article explores MTST politics suggesting three focal points for looking at a progressive employment of rights: first, the movement appropriates and re-signifies liberal discourse. For MTST activists, having a right to housing is understood in deep connection with the political struggle; therefore, rights do not individualise the collective. On the contrary, the idea of ‘having a right to’ stimulates and reinforces the common fight.
Second, rights discourse is a strategic element of politicisation in MTST occupations: by ‘discovering’ their right to housing, activists deconstruct narratives which criminalise the poor and disrupt previous subjectivities. The process of collective learning that happens in occupations constitutes political identities which question structural axes of discrimination. Thus, the present discussion suggests that rights subjectivities represent first steps in the construction of more radical objectives. Third, the MTST employs rights discourse together with other – extra-legal – strategies and discourses. To obtain dignified housing, the movement is ready to deploy a number of tactics which exceed the liberal politics of rights. Thanks to an effective mix of radicalism and legal strategies, the MTST co-opts – to a certain degree – governmental institutions. MTST’s effective strategic mix can be characterised as a ‘counter-hegemonic politics of rights’, although a more thorough exploration of the relationship between the movement and governmental institutions should be the object of further research.
To conclude, two other questions should be highlighted for further reflection. As the positionality of the Western activist researcher strongly impact his/her understanding of the field, it is important to deconstruct classical categories of the left: how do MTST activists understand radical struggles? The second axis of research with the MTST concerns a more thorough characterisation of the radical subjectivities constituted in the occupations: these rebellious identities question the structural racism, sexism and classism of society. Researching how they are related with MTST politics is an important political act which could help the movement in its objective of deeply transforming societal relationships.
Footnotes
Funding
This article was funded with support from the Central European University Foundation, Budapest (CEUBPF).
1.
See Slavoj Žižek, ‘Against Human Rights’, New Left Review 34 (2005): 115–31 and Wendy Brown and Janet Halley, eds., Left Legalism/Left Critique (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2002).
2.
See Karl Marx, ‘On the Jewish Question’, in Selected Writings, ed. David McLellan (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46–70.
3.
See Wendy Brown, ‘Rights and Identity in Modernity: Revisiting the ‘Jewish Question’, in Identities, politics, and rights, eds. Austin Sarat and Thomas R. Kearns (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 85–130; Wendy Brown, ‘Suffering Rights as Paradoxes’, Constellations 7, no. 2 (2000): 230-41.
4.
Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York and London: Routledge, 1997), 23–4.
5.
Costas Douzinas, The End of Human Rights (Oxford: Hart Publishing, 2000).
6.
See for example Tony Evans, ‘International Human Rights Law as Power/Knowledge’, Human Rights Quarterly 27, no. 3 (2005): 1046–68; Ivan Manokha, ‘Foucault’s Concept of Power and the Global Discourse of Human Rights’, Global Society 23, no. 4 (2009): 429–52.
7.
Wendy Brown, ‘“The Most We Can Hope For…”: Human Rights and the Politics of Fatalism’, The South Atlantic Quarterly 103, no. 2/3 (2004): 451–63.
8.
Joe Hoover, ‘The Human Right to Housing and Community Empowerment: Home Occupation, Eviction Defence and Community Land Trusts’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 6 (2015): 1092–109.
9.
Louiza Odysseos, ‘Human Rights, Liberal Ontogenesis and Freedom: Producing a Subject for Neoliberalism?’, Millennium: Journal of International Studies 38, no. 3 (2010): 747–72.
10.
Anna Selmeczi, ‘Who Is the Subject of Neoliberal Rights? Governmentality, Subjectification and the Letter of the Law’, Third World Quarterly 36, no. 6 (2015): 1076–91.
11.
Bal Sokhi-Bulley, ‘Human Rights as Technologies of the Self: Creating the European Governable Subject of Rights’ in Re-reading Foucault: on Law, Power and Rights, ed. Ben Golder (New York: Routledge, 2013), 229–48.
12.
See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1977–1978, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007); Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
13.
Anna Selmeczi, ‘“From Shack to the Constitutional Court”: The Litigious Disruption of Governing Global Cities’, Utrecht Law Review 7, no. 2 (2011): 60–76, 60–1.
14.
See Louiza Odysseos, ‘Human Rights, Self-Formation and Resistance in Struggles against Disposability: Grounding Foucault’s “Theorizing Practice” of Counter-Conduct in Bhopal’, Global Society 30, no. 2 (2016): 179–200; and the second part of Selmeczi, ‘Who is the Subject of Neoliberal Rights?’, 1082–86.
15.
See Global Society 30, no. 2 (2016): 151–386.
16.
Ben Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015).
17.
Karen Zivi, ‘Rights and the Politics of Performativity’, in Judith Butler’s Precarious Politics, eds. Terrell Carver and Samuel A. Chambers (New York and London: Routledge, 2008), 157–70; Karen Zivi, Making Rights Claims: A Practice of Democratic Citizenship (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).
18.
See Varun Gauri and Daniel Brinks, eds., Courting Social Justice: Judicial Enforcement of Social and Economic Rights in the Developing World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), and George Meszaros, Social Movements, Law and the Politics of Land Reform – Lessons from Brazil (Abingdon: Routledge, 2013).
19.
For an example of urban movements in the state of Bahia, see Sergio Belda-Miquel, Jordi Peris Blanes and Alexandre Frediani, ‘Institutionalization and Depoliticisation of the Right to the City: Changing Scenarios for Radical Social Movements’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 40, no. 2 (2016): 321–39.
20.
On the movements of São Paulo’s city center, see Lucy Earle, ‘From Insurgent to Transgressive Citizenship: Housing, Social Movements and the Politics of Rights in São Paulo’, Journal of Latin American Studies 44, no. 1 (2012): 97–126.
21.
Marie Huchzermeyer, Unlawful Occupation: Informal Settlements and Urban Policy in South Africa and Brazil (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2004).
22.
Luciana Tatagiba, ‘Desafios da relação entre movimentos sociais e instituições políticas. O caso do movimento de moradia da cidade de São Paulo – Primeiras reflexões’ [‘Challenges in the Relationship between Social Movements and Political Institutions: The Case of São Paulo’s Housing Movement – First Reflections’], Colombia Internacional 71 (2010): 63–83; Belda-Miquel et al., ‘Institutionalization and Depoliticisation of the Right to the City’, 321–39.
23.
See Birke Otto and Philipp Terhorst, ‘Beyond Differences? Exploring Methodological Dilemmas of Activist Research in the Global South.’, in Social Movements in the Global South: Dispossession, Development and Resistance, eds. Sara C. Motta and Alf Gunvald Nilsen (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 200–23.
24.
See among others, Katia Valenzuela-Fuentes, ‘Militant Ethnography and Autonomous Politics in Latin America’, Qualitative Research. Online first (2018): 1–17; and Laurence Cox, ‘Scholarship and Activism: A Social Movements Perspective’, Studies in Social Justice 9, no. 1 (2015): 34–53.
25.
26.
27.
With more than half a million votes, Boulos got 0.58% of the votes in the first round.
28.
Guilherme Boulos, ‘Estudo sobre a variação de sintomas depressivos relacionada a partecipação coletiva em ocupações de sem-teto em São Paulo’ [Study on the Variation of Depressive Symptoms in Relation to Collective Participation to Homeless Occupations in São Paulo] (Masters diss., Universidade de São Paulo, 2016).
29.
See Debora Goulart, ‘O anticapitalismo do movimento dos Trabalhadores sem teto – MTST’ [The Anti-capitalism of the Homeless Workers’ Movement], (PhD diss., Universidade Estadual Paulista, 2011); on the movement in Fortaleza, see Leonardo Vieira, ‘O Fazer de um Formigueiro: O MTST, os Sem Teto e a Ocupação Povo Sem Medo em Fortaleza’ [Making the Ants’ Nest: The MTST, the Homeless and the People without Fear Occupation in Fortaleza] (Masters diss., Universidade Federal do Ceará, 2017). On the movement in the Federal District, see Gabriel Elias, ‘Criar poder popular: As relações entre o MTST e o Estado no Distrito Federal’, [The Making of People’s Power: The Relationship between the MTST and the State in the Federal District], (Masters diss., Universidade de Brasília, 2014). On the criminalisation of the movement, see Simone Silva, ‘A atualidade da criminalização produzida sobre o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto – MTST: o caso do acampamento Chico Mendes’, [The Criminalisation against the MTST – The Case of the Chico Mendes Occupation] (Masters diss., Universidade Estadual Paulista, 2014).
30.
Otto and Terhorst, ‘Beyond Differences?’; Nicholas Apoifis, ‘Fieldwork in a Furnace: Anarchists, Anti-authoritarians and Militant Ethnography’, Qualitative Research 17, no. 1 (2017): 3–19.
31.
Valenzuela-Fuentes, ‘Militant Ethnography and Autonomous Politics in Latin America’, 8.
32.
Before the MTST, the MST already employed a similar strategy of reworking legality and the discourse of rights. See Anthony Pahnke, ‘From Hostile Skepticism to Strategic Utilization: How the Brazilian Landless Movement Learned from Repression to Use Legislation’, Social Movement Studies 17, no. 2 (2018): 175–88.
33.
For reasons of security I am indicating only the first letters of activists’ names.
34.
N., MTST activist, field notes, 14 April 2018, introductory meeting for new activists at the MTST headquarters in São Paulo.
35.
This Portuguese expression is hard to translate. Literally it means ‘ants’ work’, suggesting that it is a collective, slow-paced work.
36.
Z., MTST activist, field notes, 29 April 2018, conversation happened at Marielle Vive.
37.
M., MTST activist, field notes, 15 May 2018, speech delivered before the start of Marielle Vive’s first demonstration.
38.
Tania Murray Li, ‘Governmentality’, Anthropologica 49, no. 2 (2007): 275–94.
39.
Ibid., 275.
40.
Odysseos, ‘Human Rights, Liberal Ontogenesis and Freedom’, 747–72.
41.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction (New York: Pantheon Books, 1978), 125–7.
42.
Golder, Foucault and the Politics of Rights.
43.
F., MTST activist, field notes, 15 May 2018, speech delivered before the start of Marielle Vive’s first demonstration.
44.
See Judith Revel, ‘Between Politics and Ethics: The Question of Subjectivation’, in Foucault and the Making of Subjects, eds. Laura Cremonesi et al., (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 163–74.
45.
Cesare Di Feliciantonio, ‘Subjectification in Times of Indebtedness and Neoliberal/Austerity Urbanism’, Antipode 48, no. 5 (2016): 1206–27.
46.
According to the Brazilian political scientist André Singer, after more than ten years of PT governments, 40 million people in the country improved their socio-economic condition. However, dissenting from mainstream analyses, he conceptualises this social improvement as a move from ‘sub-proletariat’ to ‘proletariat’. I believe this is the case of the people who join MTST occupation, although – because of the recent economic crisis and the Temer’s right-wing policies – the conditions of the Brazilian proletariat deteriorated. See André Singer, ‘Quatro notas sobre as classes sociais nos dez anos de Lulismo’ [Four Notes about Social Classes during the Ten Years of Lulismo], Psicologia USP 26, no. 1 (2015): 7–14.
47.
D., MTST activist, interview with the author, occupation Marielle Vive, 22 July 2018.
48.
I prefer to use Di Feliciantonio’s term ‘subjectification’ over Revel’s term ‘subjectivation’.
49.
Revel, ‘Between Politics and Ethics’, 166–7.
50.
Laura Cremonesi et al., ‘Introduction: Rethinking Autonomy between Subjection and Subjectivation’, in Foucault and the Making of Subjects, eds. Laura Cremonesi et al., (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield International, 2016), 7.
51.
Ibid., 8.
52.
Revel, ‘Between Politics and Ethics’, 167.
53.
Di Feliciantonio, ‘Subjectification’, 1207.
54.
Ibid., 1221–22.
55.
D., MTST activist, interview with the author, occupation Marielle Vive, 22 July 2018.
56.
Meeting at Marielle Vive to organise the MTST Youth Camp, 9 July 2018.
57.
Meeting organised by MTST’s Political Educational Brigade at Marielle Vive, 28 May 2018.
58.
This is not to decrease the importance of individual housing for MTST activists: getting proper housing is, by itself, an incredible victory which is only possible because of years of tireless struggle.
59.
F., MTST activist, field notes, 16 May 2018, speech delivered during Marielle Vive’s assembly the day after the first demonstration.