Abstract
Marcelo Lopes de Souza puts the social movements under the microscope. He compares urban and rural movements and asks why urban movements in Brazil are so much less significant than those in the countryside. The urban activism of the 1970s and 1980s, lost its importance in the 1990s. The so called “new social movements” that fought the military regime can therefore no longer be seen as influential social movements and the more recent activism of the second generation movements of the 1990s are yet in an embryonic stage. In contrast, in the rural areas, the level of organization of the landless peasant movement MST has grown considerably since the 1980s. Thus, they can exert strong political pressure and have the ability to articulate on a national as well as on an international level. The reasons for this development can be found in the relatively greater complexity of interests in the cities, in addition to the success of the PT in absorbing and channeling the interests of urban civil society towards the political activities of the party and the participative spaces in the local PT governments.
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Notes
- 1.
Sem-teto (or trabalhadores sem-teto) literally means “roofless” (or “roofless worker”) in Portuguese. The sem-teto are different from homeless people in the English sense of the word in that they are squatters (occupying houses and properties).
- 2.
A brief comment on definitions: While certain authors use the term social movement in the narrow sense to describe a specially critical type of collective action, other authors use it in a much broader sense. On this broader definition the term describes both clientelistic and/or “parochial” neighborhood associations, as well as social movements, which consciously pursue deep socio-spatial changes; sometimes the term even includes collective action in the form of riots (quebra-quebras) and looting. I belong to the first tradition.
- 3.
It is self-evident that this varied depending on the city and the nature of the activism. While in São Paulo at the beginning of the 1970s “new actors entered the stage”, to use the title of Eder Sader’s (1995) significant book, the favela movement in Rio de Janeiro experienced their greatest moment of creativity and upheaval in the 1960s. In this period they fought against the clearing of the favelas and suggested as an alternative that they be urbanized (Santos, 1981: 32ff). In general the above-mentioned period of ca. 10 years can be described on the national level as a “great moment” of urban activism that had its origins in the (disadvantaged) neighborhoods (bairros), (precarious) settlements (loteamentos) and favelas. It was the period during which the most important associations of neighborhood organizations (associações de moradores) on the municipal and state level were founded. The protests and demands of these organizations reached their strongest public presence at this point.
- 4.
“Caciques” and personalism refer to the authoritarian and egocentric behavior of quiet a few leaders of neighborhood associations. This helps to expose the contradictions of an activism that even while it covers itself with clearly democratic practices is not immune to the reproduction of socially predominant heteronomy as symbolized by the state apparatus—this is particularly the case with many neighborhood associations (associações de moradores).
- 5.
As some of the articles in the Ribeiro and Iulianelli’s (2000) collection demonstrate, this problem is not unknown in the countryside. However it is less visible here and thus receives less media attention than the large cities.
- 6.
From the 11 or 12 year old (or even younger) boy who usually act as olheiros (guards), vapores (street dealers) and aviõezinhos (little airplanes, meaning distributors), to the soldados (soldiers, meaning security, often also teenagers) and gerentes (managers, meaning those who control the sale points), to the donos (owners or masters), who mostly operate from prison.
- 7.
- 8.
To begin with, one ought to ask: How is citizen participation treated in the Statute? The Statute generally refers to it in an ambiguous way—this allows an interpretation that, depending on the prefecture, allows either a decision-making or merely an advisory role—but a merely advisory tone dominates. Could the City Statute have included better provisions for citizen participation in order to reduce the risk that only pseudo-participation is implemented in order to fulfill the formal requirement of Law 10 257. This would certainly have been possible—even without losing from sight the fact that the Statute as a nationally applicable law cannot get lost in too small details and that this (in the name of common sense and the autonomy of municipalities) is reserved for local laws. Be that as it may, what will probably occur in most cases is a poor imitation of citizen participation and nothing durable or consistent.
- 9.
For example, they express themselves as follows with regard to the civilizing role of the bourgeoisie in the Communist Manifesto: “The bourgeoisie has reduced the land to the master of the city. It has created enormous cities, it has greatly increased the urban population in comparison with that in the country and has thus wrested an important part of the population from the idiocy of country life” (Marx, 1982: 502–503).
- 10.
In view of the tendency of many anarchists in the nineteenth century to relate with the peasantry in a caring and sympathetic manner rather than in a derogatory manner, from the classically anarchistic perspective there is almost no large theoretical embarrassment. Nonetheless, Marxism, and not classical anarchism, offers a significant part of the political-philosophical basis on which the organization operates.
- 11.
The rural-urban settlements would be located on the edges or in the rural-urban belt surrounding the big cities and would allow workers’ families to have an urban occupation and at the same time exercise subsistence farming and cattle economy. A rapid critical analysis of this proposal can be found in Souza (2006a: 307–308).
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de Souza, M.L. (2016). Social Movements in Brazil in Urban and Rural Contexts: Potentials, Limits and “Paradoxes”. In: de la Fontaine, D., Stehnken, T. (eds) The Political System of Brazil. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-40023-0_13
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