What follows is an assignment for our Politics & Development course--it's formatted as if it were a "letter to the editor" in the New York Times as that was the requested form. This paper reflects a lot of what has been on my mind the past few weeks in Sao Paulo and touches on some of my experiences... In preparation for this analysis we visited the Rural Landless Worker's Movement (MST) as well as its urban counterpart the Roofless Worker's Movement (MTST). The MST works to Both operate under Brazil's Statute of the City (a constitutional provision for the right to the city--the right to participate in and appropriate space) and thus both are social movements founded on fundamentally socialist ideologies but both work within the capitalist context of Brazil's emerging economy--it makes for quite the interesting dynamic. Look them up, they're fascinating.
Brazil’s Roofless Movement:
A New Culture of Dynamic Participation in the Americas
The United States has entered into an era of political apathy—swept away by Obama’s rhetoric of social change and revolutionary spirit, we have left it all to our government and forgotten our role in governance as citizens. We are a country in crisis, at risk of losing the participatory democratic process on which our country was founded. A seasoned democracy, we have highly evolved institutional, top-down processes of citizenship participation but what of the bottom-up participatory processes? Have these crucial bottom-up processes been eclipsed? Devalued?
Replaced by institutionalized participatory frameworks?(1) Our democracy must learn how to re-integrate bottom up processes without losing the valuable top-down processes that have developed. Social movements within the United States must take inspiration from existing models of integrated, dynamic negotiation of multiple participatory strategies. The time has come for the US to take its cues from South America rather than vise-versa: Brazil’s Roofless movement has gained international attention for its integrated strategies and merits examination as a model for civic engagement in the United States.
In both the United States and Brazil, the embodied ideological power of legal rights fuels social movements that demand the legal discourse to be actualized in political practice.(2) But the tactics employed by contemporary social movements in Brazil are marked by democracy’s youth as the US’s are marked by democracy’s aging. Brazilian Democracy still knows the dictatorship, still feels its vestiges and still possesses its resistant tools. “When asked specifically about the role of social movements in today’s Brazil, leaders often indicated some continuity between the role of social movements in the struggle against the dictatorship and the function they fulfill in contemporary society in that they continue to promote participation and democratic practice.”(3) This legacy of resistance under a dictatorial regime could be heard in the language used by our guides (4) Cida and Socorro, describing “the fight,” “the struggle” to gain dignified housing for the group that was occupying a vacant downtown warehouse. The skepticism and militancy left over from Brazil’s legacy of repressive regimes is commonly considered a weakness of the movement, an example of their limited potential when in reality it is the opposite.
While the confrontational rhetoric of the MTST makes collaboration with the state more tense and challenging, it also makes the state more responsive, more attentive to their needs and demands. As one member explained, “the government, in its own analysis, is always going to evaluate itself as doing the best job possible. And the role of the social movements is always to be saying that what it is doing isn’t enough”(5). This acknowledgement of the perpetual struggle and the willingness to engage in this struggle is perhaps the backbone of the MTST and the missing element within US social movements where our goal-oriented culture tends to cultivate premature conclusion. For the MTST, there is no expectation that the issue at hand will be resolved and hence there is no point where the movement can be dissolved. Souza advises that, to avoid dissolving into the state apparatus and losing functional autonomy, social movements must “never abdicate of pointing out the limits even of promising institutionalized participatory channels”(6). However, this constant vigilance, skepticism and activism will exhaust its members in the absence of other tactics—direct engagement must be balanced by other channels of participation.
MTST is often criticized for its seemingly paradoxical tactics and yet it is this diversity of tactics that ultimately provides the movement with its resiliency, its flexibility and its adaptability (7). I find it helpful to frame the discussion of the tactics of Brazil’s Roofless Movement in terms of Edgar Pieterse’s model of dynamic democratic process. Pieterse enumerates five channels of participation that facilitate democratization through interaction of the political and public spheres(8). Two of these five are institutionalized, top-down processes: the first being representative political forums and participatory mechanisms and the second being neo-corporatist stakeholder forums. The other three channels are forms of direct participation through bottom-up processes: development practice at the neighborhood scale, symbolic politics through discursive action, and lastly, social mobilization through direct action. Patterns within the United States indicate that political participation occurs through either top-down or bottom-up processes—one can either collaborate with or fight against the state. But the MTST challenges these patterns by taking part in all five channels of participation in a constantly changing balance of political tactics (9).
This political balancing act is not smooth—contradictions arise constantly—but they play off each other generating a more dynamic, responsive movement. The most obvious contradiction within the movement is the use of illegal and legal tactics as part of one coherent strategy: at the squatter’s settlement I visited in downtown Sao Paulo, Cida and Socorro spoke to their conflictual interactions with government—one branch of government was attempting to evict the group for illegal occupation of private land while another branch of government was engaging in collaborative long-term planning for the settlement. The illegal component allows for an articulation of an alternative to the existing social order while the legal component protects that alternative and legitimizes it (10). Neither component is compelling on their own—precarious illegal settlements without staying power or legal arguments without a tested model—but together they create a dynamic, sustaining and adaptable strategy to implement social change.
The roofless movement is not only a crucial organizational and political tool to keep Brazil’s social transition at pace with the legal transition but also an important global model for the orchestration of dynamic, sustainable citizen engagement. In older democracies such as the USA where social rights are far more contested than political rights, this model is of particular importance. The MTST offers a set of tools and processes by which citizens can engage more effectively with their governments, especially in times of demobilization. For social movements to maintain energy and momentum in any country, they must develop confrontational, skeptical internal discourse and employ all five channels of participation—in spite of and because of the paradoxes that come with acting on multiple fronts.
1. P&D Faculty Session, Curitiba.
2. Lucy Earle, "Housing, Citizenship and the Movimento Sem Teto of São Paulo," Thesis, University of Cape Town, 2010, Print, pp 8-9.
3. ibid., p.4
4. ibid., p. 6
5. ibid., p. 17
6. Marcelo Lopes de Souza, 2006, “Together with the State, Despite the State, Against the State: Social Movements as ‘Critical Urban Planning’ Agents,” CITY, Vol. 10, No. 3, p. 335.
7. Guest lecture, Social Movements in Brazil.
8. P&D Faculty Session, Curitiba.
9. Guest Lecture: Social Movements in Brazil; Op. Cit., Earle.
10. Op. Cit., Marcelo, p.332; Visit to Squatters’ Settlement as part of the Coalition in Defense of Tenement Dweller’s Housing Rights.
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