South Atlantic Quarterly 2014 Cava 846 55

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A G A I N S T the D A Y

Bruno Cava

When Lulism Gets out of Control

The June revolution is the ugly revolution, the repulsive revolution, becausedeeds have taken the place of phrases, because the republic uncovered the headof the monster itself by striking off the crown that shielded and concealed it.—Karl Marx, “The June Revolution”

Let’s take a look into the future. It is New Year’s Day 2015. In July 2014, theWorld Cup was a success. That October, Dilma Rousseff was reelected presi-

dent of Brazil in the rst round. The federal government enjoys enviableapproval ratings, as unbeatable as during the Lula era. The national econ-omy is recognized as robust and reliable, parading positive indicators andnancial optimism. Investments, with certain return, continue nding safeharbor in the country and are applied like never before to road works, urbanrevitalization, and large hydroelectric projects in the North. In the elections,the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT) won various state gov-ernments and is at the zenith of its trajectory, with no opposition in view onthe horizon. The future has arrived. The doors have opened to modernity, todevelopment, to a Brazil that is nally proud of itself. The Left is happy. Themarkets are happy. The corporate media are happy.

Only that it is not. Peace is not guaranteed. The happy ending is now adistant dream for the government and markets. The golden dream of aGreater Brazil has given way to the nightmare foretold. The head of the mon-ster has been uncovered. No futurology is necessary to predict that the nextcouple of years will be a “hot” around here. Authorities and business leaders

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seem to regain condence and pride as June approaches, as if the train ofprogress were back on track. The program on the agenda goes back to nor-

mal. But soon after the ofcial appearances and speeches, the representa-tives of order cannot stie a nervous laugh. They know that the end-of-yearlull does not mean pacication and that the silence on the streets does notnecessarily mean that the momentum of mobilization does not continue.There is no lack of symptoms.

In November 2013, an important global soccer convention, which wasgoing to take place in Rio de Janeiro that December, was canceled. 1 The orga-nizers alleged that the government suspended sponsorship due to the ongo-ing civil “unrest.” In August, Dilma had approved the Law of Criminal Orga-

nization. Initially designed to curb paramilitary forces that were ruling overentire neighborhoods, the law gained a new use in October when it began tobe applied to arrest protesters associated with political organizations andmovements, focusing on the Black Bloc and Anonymous. In September, Riode Janeiro state law had prohibited the use of face masks in “political demon-strations.” Based on this law, absolutely peaceful protesters have been takento the police station merely for having their faces covered. Even a Batmancostume would be prohibited by the new law. Congress is now consideringnationalizing the mask ban. In late October 2013, Justice Minister José Edu-ardo Cardozo declared the federalization of monitoring and containmentactions related to protests in the two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and SãoPaulo. According to the federal authority, the objective is to unify proce-dures, efforts, intelligence, and databases.

Making the federal government responsible for security and peace-keeping indicates an escalation of repression; usually, in Brazil, public secu-rity in cities is the direct responsibility of state governments. It also indicatesa political choice made by Dilma’s leftist government. It does not need to

take on the “onus” of repression, and if it does now, it is because it has madea very clear calculation and has resolved to pay the price. A conscious choiceexplains the premise that, for the Left in power, the protests not only consti-tute a serious threat, especially to its electoral plans, but also manifest thedenitive deterioration of a government that, since 2003, has proposed torepresent the most active and dynamic forces of Brazilian society. The dis-tance between the composition of the bases and their representation hasbecome unsustainable, fostering the conditions for political dissatisfactionto be brought to the surface by other means.

A cycle of struggles and revolts of great proportions cannot beexplained only by contingencies and facts taken in isolation: 2 the increase in




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848 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Fall 2014

bus fare, the 2013 Confederation Cup, the spectacle of direct action and BlackBloc tactics, their brutal repression. It is necessary to go beyond the episodic.

Considering the magnitude of protests from June to October 2013, it is nec-essary to understand the latent material bases, which allowed the politicalprocess to escape any model of predictability and achieve such an impres-sively powerful scale effect. This means developing a method of analysis-wager that brings together this widespread dimension generated by thesocial fabric in its transmission to large-scale political action. At issue is thecirculation of struggles, how subjects transform and express themselvesantagonistically against the forms of their integration into the social corpus.This involves, in other words, the autonomist Marxist concept of class com-

position (Altamira 2006): the condensation of refusal, conicts, cooperation,and creativity that strains the structure to a kairological boiling point, wherethese struggles accumulate force, to exceed and break down a social struc-ture. However, to talk about this within the specic reality of Brazilian capi-talism, it is necessary to engage the current debate around Lulism.

The political scientist André Singer (2012) uses the term Lulism torefer to the phenomenon of electoral realignment in Brazil during Luiz Iná-cio Lula da Silva’s presidency (2003–10), inaugurating a cycle of long dura-tion. The term signies the massive electoral migration of the poorest vot-ers, from the Right (principally from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party)toward the Left (the PT) on the ideological party spectrum. The PT govern-ment managed to reverse the poorest voters’ rejection of the Left mainly dueto two factors: First, it achieved the mass implementation of social programsbeneting the poorest, such as the Bolsa Familia program, the real increasein minimum wage, and the offering of micro-credit lines. Second, the orga-nized Left in Brazil was able to resist vilication by the Right (who tradition-ally has controlled the means of mass communication) as the party that pro-

motes wildcat strikes, turmoil, and chaos. Overcoming this representationdepended on both the Left’s capacity to respond to the corporate media’sregime of truth and a set of discursive and programmatic concessions thatLula made during his 2002 electoral campaign with the “Letter to the Bra-zilian People,” a kind of promissory note or “conservative pact” (Lula 2002),which pledged that reforms would be conducted without radicalization. Dur-ing the term, the electoral pact doubled as a politics of alliances. For Singer,Lulism was supported by a new social composition of ever greater mobilityin the world of labor, income, and political capacity. But, according to Singer,it relied on this social composition just enough to enact policies of gradual or




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“weak reformism” (169–75), in other words, those that do not compromisethe classist contract at the base of Brazilian society.

According to sociologist Jessé Souza (2012, 2013), who up to now hasbest researched the social composition of Lulism, the social composition thatdeveloped during Lula’s government cannot be called a “new middle class.”Even with a greater income and power of consumption, this new social com-position still falls short of a middle class in terms of recognition and culturalsigns of status. Moreover, it earns a lower income and is situated more pre-cariously than the old (and thin) Brazilian middle stratum. It should be con-sidered, rather, a new type of proletariat, the social subject corresponding tothe expansion and deepening of capitalism in the country. Lulism’s process

of proletarianization takes place in phases, modulating the social fabric inorder to create still new hierarchies. The “strugglers” ( batalhadores), as Souzahas baptized them, make up the internal markets of labor and consumptionthat developed during the Lulist period; they were already born in precariousconditions, conditions of uncertainty, and they were required to be entrepre-neurs. Souza’s empirical research explains how, in reality, they are workersloaded with an enormous burden of demands, expectations, anxieties, andpains. 3 While they construct a professional or entrepreneurial future inwhich the possibility of success might unfold, they see themselves chargedwith a subjective debt tied to the situation of greater social mobility.

Singer’s analysis is allusively correct but politically insufcient. Lim-ited to the tabulation and reading of electoral results and approval ratings,he fails to undertake an analysis from the class perspective. In his critiqueof Lulism, there is no passage from social composition to political compo-sition. Class composition means “the conictive articulation of the mate-rial position within the productive process and antagonistic forms of sub-jectivation” (Tronti 2008: 66). In other words, what are the political nodes,

their sources of tension, their organizational incrustations that wouldexpress, even in a nascent state, the coagulated dissatisfaction with “grad-ual reform” and the “conservative pact”? What is already being strainedwithin the eminently conservative social contract in the machinery of Lulismby the action of political subjects, even if they are new and nearly invisible?There should be an investigation into the class as struggle against its owninscription into the functioning of capitalism, the class as the productionof subjectivity.

With the sociology of the strugglers, Souza provides relevant ele-ments for understanding the subjectivities that socially compose the Lulist




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phenomenon. However, this taxonomy of social subjects—indeed, thecategorization of the excluded, those who have not yet risen to the precari-

ous condition of ghter, as “rabble”

(Souza 2009) or lumpenproletariat isespecially problematic—is not capable of understanding political com-position. The processes of organizing autonomy and resistance continue tobe a blind spot within Lulism itself. When we speak of class, while a livingand dynamic entity—in this “speaking” a wager is immediately implied, apolitical hypothesis not only to explain the struggles but also to allow us toaddress a line of action amid the movement (Tronti 2008: 69). Therefore, itdoes not make sense to investigate social classes using an analysis that doesnot have in mind the elaboration of a point of view, one that does not allow us

to combine the productive and political dimensions, as a matter of strategyand organization.

In contrast to Souza, Giuseppe Cocco (2013) 4 recognizes the debatearound Lulism—and the social composition corresponding to it—as thegreat pivot point for basing a political strategy on the material bases andliving forces in action. He points to an ambivalence and paradox at the heartof Lulism. The ambivalence consists of a double outcome of Lula’s govern-ment. On one hand, the conservative pact conditioned a politics of alliances,which conserved the classist (and racist) social contract, made little or nothreat to vital points, such as communication policies, the taxation system,the agrarian question, or various corporate oligarchies in key sectors. On theother hand, the massive expansion of social programs opened a constituentbreach, beyond mere reformism, to afrm a basin of living labor and pro-ductive autonomy, with multiplier effects far beyond what was planned. Pro-ductive forces under high pressure, capable of developing new mechanismsand skills, passed through this breach, providing the social compositionwith new capacities.

In other words, within the majoritarian Lulism, the “state Lulism,”exists a “savage Lulism, which opposes neocolonial Brazil with a democrati-zation ‘from below,’ based on minorities and their becomings” (Cocco andCava 2013). Paradoxically, not only have the formulations of governmentideologues ignored the constituent power operating within Lulism, but theyalso see it as an undesired and dangerous effect. With Dilma’s successionin 2011, the interstices effectively wound up being closed, one after theother. While the Lulist social composition was growing and its productiveand political qualities were multiplying, the government was increasinglyxed on a model that was on a path toward obsolescence: national devel-




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opmentalism based on dogmas of industrialization, modernization, formalemployment, and economic management of growth. Gradually, the distance

increased between the living forces—seated, however precariously, withinLulism—and Dilma’s plans for consent and governance. The result was theclosing of loopholes, and it became increasingly clear that the governmentand the PT were restricted only to the conservative pact and its politics of alli-ances. Thus, it became the party of order, of mere artices and representa-tives for reproducing a social contract that, from its material bases, no longercould serve the savage multiplicity. Possibly, because of this acute percep-tion of the exhaustion of Lulism, at the moment when it became a (monova-lent) model, Cocco could glimpse the accumulation of antagonistic political

expressions about to reach their saturation point. In April, he spoke prophet-ically of “uprising” as a wager for the struggles in the Rio conjuncture, whichlater proved valid for Brazil as a whole. 5

In June 2013, many tributaries converged to form the largest protestsin the history of Brazil. The more the mainstream corporate press showedimages of the turmoil and direct confrontations, using Manichean discoursesin an effort to demobilize them through fear, the more strongly arose the cryfor sedition. It was as if the images of clashes with the military police, graftion the facades of public buildings and destruction of bank machines, theres and the barricades—all the iconography of rebellion—surreptitiouslyconvoked revolutionary action, despite the journalistic curtain insistent oncatchphrases about vandals and masked troublemakers. Protesters wouldnot continue “weak reformism.” The “conservative pact” was questioned inits entirety by an Amazon River of indignation, desires, and antagonisms.The ushed pace at which the protests escalated only reafrmed how manygovernment schemes, which presented themselves as adamantine, suppos-edly unbreakable, ended up showing their instability after the rst large-

scale mobilizations.On June 7, there were ve hundred protesters in São Paolo. Ten dayslater, there were ve hundred thousand protesters in dozens of cities. OnJuly 20 in Rio de Janeiro alone, one million protesters occupied the city’scentral artery, covering eight kilometers of President Vargas Avenue. Theconfluence of the tributaries occurred when the Free Fare Movement(Movimento Passe Livre; MPL), a small, but well-organized autonomouscollective,6 organized marches to protest a twenty-cent increase in busfares. The class materialized in the process of struggling against the condi-tion of having to face crowded, slow, and expensive public transportation




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every workday. The class emerged as the desire to act, the desire to con-struct an alternative to a city full of suffering experienced in the world of

metropolitan work.This pororoca7 was also provoked by the determination—demonstratedin living color, through the alternative media’s live streams and televisionreports—of militants whose struggle pierced the night. It was fed by theirspectacular insistence on returning to the streets despite the rain of bombs,gas, and rubber bullets, hundreds of arbitrary arrests and intimidation, edi-torials giving the signal for police brutality, 8 and continuing accusations ofvandalism and hooliganism—the “universal argument” that the elites incharge of mainstream corporate media always use to attack social move-

ments and transformative struggles. This determination of the early daysbroke through the conservative journalistic curtain and was transmitted tothousands of other protesters like a virus. As protesters lled the streets,they lost their fear of state repression, inciting a broad resistance, fromfavela residents to social media activists, from public school students to uni-versity professors to anarcho-punks, from the homeless to militant lawyersto the urban indigenous. The insurgent’s mask guaranteed an explosivemixture. Amid the odor of Molotov cocktails and the police’s tear gas, onecould hear marching, slogans, and demands without room for euphemisms,such as “The love is over / This is going to turn into Turkey,” “I want FIFA-standard schools and hospitals,” or the omnipresent “There won’t be a[World] Cup.” Direct confrontation—whose most mediatized sign was theblack bloc tactic, which in reality was used by less than 1 percent of the pro-testing population—became the hallmark of the Brazilian moment in theglobal cycle of protests.

It is months after June, and the plague has taken over. 9 The govern-ments and markets are being devoured by a disease that they had been

slowly trying to ward off over the last ten years by progressively distancingthemselves from the bases. They had believed they could control the conta-gion with future promises, present accusations, and much ofcial advertis-ing; all of this has now proven useless. The irreducible contingency of socialrelations has spiraled out of control, frustrating capital’s calculations of riskand security. The intensication of repression attests to the desperation ofthe authorities, who, pressured by sponsors, investors, and journalists, losttheir last chance to prevent the plague. To avert the plague would be to acceptit as a reality that cannot be negated simply by treating the symptoms, tointegrate the Amazonian waves, to use the disease itself to create a vaccine to




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inoculate against the political machine’s absence of democracy. The chosenpath, however, seems to be closely monitoring the plague “from within,” 10

waiting for the perfect opportunity to raise new sanitary cordons, andthereby quarantine an uncontrollable evil.But these repressive efforts will probably be in vain. The plague’s

arrival in the city unleashes conicts, unblocks forces, and triggers possibili-ties. The moment when power’s equations, models, and studies lose theirexplanatory force, risks are no longer calculable and the reproduction of thecapitalist model falters. The protests in Brazil triggered the alarm clock ofcolonial sleep, and the year ahead must not inspire a happy ending but,rather, must leave the organization of the future more open, more in dispute

than ever before .

—Translated by Liz Mason-Deese

Notes

1 I refer to the Soccerex Global Convention (see BBC Brasil 2013). 2 “This does not mean that all things are absolutely equal, however, or that politics,

power, and history are reduced to absolute contingency where anything is possible atany moment. Rather, what this means is that the particular possibilities and limitsmust be thought from the ground up, from the particular conjuncture and mode ofproduction” (Read 2003: 56).

3 I refer to Lazzarato 2012 on the economy of subjectivity determined by social inclu-sion in a post-Fordist capitalist horizon, which I understand as perfectly applicable tothe “crisis of growth” in some regions of the southern hemisphere. I utilize this per-spective to analyze the paradoxical production of subjectivity/subjection in an inter-view with IHU online (Cava and IHU Online 2013).

4 In a similar sense, see also Tible 2013 and Pedrosa 2013. 5 Cocco adopted the word uprising as the central idea of his reading of the conjuncture

in various workshops conducted by the Universidade Nômade network between Apriland June 2013.

6 For a panoramic narrative focused on the role and action of the MPL in São Paulo, Irecommend the recently released Judensnaider et al. 2013.

7 Pororocarefers to a tidal bore on the Amazon River. The word comes from the indig-enous Tupi language and means “great roar.”—Trans.

8 For an example, see Opinião 2013. 9 For a broad view of the social contract and its need to calculate risks and avoid con-

tamination, see Mitropoulos 2012. For the positive side of the plague in the context oftheater as an instigator of an effective exception in the city, see Artaud 1988: 23–40.

10 For the modulated control of the plague as a technology of power, in opposition to thesegregational control of leprosy, see Foucault (2003).




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