South Atlantic Quarterly

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, because
deeds have taken the place of phrases, because the republic uncovered the head
of the monster itself by striking off the crown that shielded and concealed it.
Karl Marx, The June Revolution

Lets take a look into the future. It is New Years Day 2015. In July 2014, the

World Cup was a success. That October, Dilma Rousseff was reelected president of Brazil in the first round. The federal government enjoys enviable
approval ratings, as unbeatable as during the Lula era. The national economy is recognized as robust and reliable, parading positive indicators and
financial optimism. Investments, with certain return, continue finding safe
harbor in the country and are applied like never before to road works, urban
revitalization, and large hydroelectric projects in the North. In the elections,
the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores; PT) won various state governments and is at the zenith of its trajectory, with no opposition in view on
the horizon. The future has arrived. The doors have opened to modernity, to
development, to a Brazil that is finally proud of itself. The Left is happy. The
markets are happy. The corporate media are happy.
Only that it is not. Peace is not guaranteed. The happy ending is now a
distant dream for the government and markets. The golden dream of a
Greater Brazil has given way to the nightmare foretold. The head of the monster has been uncovered. No futurology is necessary to predict that the next
couple of years will be a hot around here. Authorities and business leaders

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When Lulism Gets out of Control 847

seem to regain confidence and pride as June approaches, as if the train of

progress were back on track. The program on the agenda goes back to normal. But soon after the official appearances and speeches, the representatives of order cannot stifle a nervous laugh. They know that the end-of-year
lull does not mean pacification and that the silence on the streets does not
necessarily mean that the momentum of mobilization does not continue.
There is no lack of symptoms.
In November 2013, an important global soccer convention, which was
going to take place in Rio de Janeiro that December, was canceled.1 The organizers alleged that the government suspended sponsorship due to the ongoing civil unrest. In August, Dilma had approved the Law of Criminal Organization. Initially designed to curb paramilitary forces that were ruling over
entire neighborhoods, the law gained a new use in October when it began to
be applied to arrest protesters associated with political organizations and
movements, focusing on the Black Bloc and Anonymous. In September, Rio
de Janeiro state law had prohibited the use of face masks in political demonstrations. Based on this law, absolutely peaceful protesters have been taken
to the police station merely for having their faces covered. Even a Batman
costume would be prohibited by the new law. Congress is now considering
nationalizing the mask ban. In late October 2013, Justice Minister Jos Eduardo Cardozo declared the federalization of monitoring and containment
actions related to protests in the two largest cities, Rio de Janeiro and So
Paulo. According to the federal authority, the objective is to unify procedures, efforts, intelligence, and databases.
Making the federal government responsible for security and peacekeeping indicates an escalation of repression; usually, in Brazil, public security in cities is the direct responsibility of state governments. It also indicates
a political choice made by Dilmas leftist government. It does not need to
take on the onus of repression, and if it does now, it is because it has made
a very clear calculation and has resolved to pay the price. A conscious choice
explains the premise that, for the Left in power, the protests not only constitute a serious threat, especially to its electoral plans, but also manifest the
definitive deterioration of a government that, since 2003, has proposed to
represent the most active and dynamic forces of Brazilian society. The distance between the composition of the bases and their representation has
become unsustainable, fostering the conditions for political dissatisfaction
to be brought to the surface by other means.
A cycle of struggles and revolts of great proportions cannot be
explained only by contingencies and facts taken in isolation:2 the increase in

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bus fare, the 2013 Confederation Cup, the spectacle of direct action and Black
Bloc tactics, their brutal repression. It is necessary to go beyond the episodic.
Considering the magnitude of protests from June to October 2013, it is necessary to understand the latent material bases, which allowed the political
process to escape any model of predictability and achieve such an impressively powerful scale effect. This means developing a method of analysiswager that brings together this widespread dimension generated by the
social fabric in its transmission to large-scale political action. At issue is the
circulation of struggles, how subjects transform and express themselves
antagonistically against the forms of their integration into the social corpus.
This involves, in other words, the autonomist Marxist concept of class composition (Altamira 2006): the condensation of refusal, conflicts, cooperation,
and creativity that strains the structure to a kairological boiling point, where
these struggles accumulate force, to exceed and break down a social structure. However, to talk about this within the specific reality of Brazilian capitalism, it is necessary to engage the current debate around Lulism.
The political scientist Andr Singer (2012) uses the term Lulism to
refer to the phenomenon of electoral realignment in Brazil during Luiz Incio Lula da Silvas presidency (200310), inaugurating a cycle of long duration. The term signifies the massive electoral migration of the poorest voters, from the Right (principally from the Brazilian Social Democracy Party)
toward the Left (the PT) on the ideological party spectrum. The PT government managed to reverse the poorest voters rejection of the Left mainly due
to two factors: First, it achieved the mass implementation of social programs
benefiting the poorest, such as the Bolsa Familia program, the real increase
in minimum wage, and the offering of micro-credit lines. Second, the organized Left in Brazil was able to resist vilification by the Right (who traditionally has controlled the means of mass communication) as the party that promotes wildcat strikes, turmoil, and chaos. Overcoming this representation
depended on both the Lefts capacity to respond to the corporate medias
regime of truth and a set of discursive and programmatic concessions that
Lula made during his 2002 electoral campaign with the Letter to the Brazilian People, a kind of promissory note or conservative pact (Lula 2002),
which pledged that reforms would be conducted without radicalization. During the term, the electoral pact doubled as a politics of alliances. For Singer,
Lulism was supported by a new social composition of ever greater mobility
in 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 (16975), in other words, those that do not compromise

the classist contract at the base of Brazilian society.
According to sociologist Jess Souza (2012, 2013), who up to now has
best researched the social composition of Lulism, the social composition that
developed during Lulas government cannot be called a new middle class.
Even with a greater income and power of consumption, this new social composition still falls short of a middle class in terms of recognition and cultural
signs of status. Moreover, it earns a lower income and is situated more precariously than the old (and thin) Brazilian middle stratum. It should be considered, rather, a new type of proletariat, the social subject corresponding to
the expansion and deepening of capitalism in the country. Lulisms process
of proletarianization takes place in phases, modulating the social fabric in
order to create still new hierarchies. The strugglers (batalhadores), as Souza
has baptized them, make up the internal markets of labor and consumption
that developed during the Lulist period; they were already born in precarious
conditions, conditions of uncertainty, and they were required to be entrepreneurs. Souzas empirical research explains how, in reality, they are workers
loaded with an enormous burden of demands, expectations, anxieties, and
pains.3 While they construct a professional or entrepreneurial future in
which the possibility of success might unfold, they see themselves charged
with a subjective debt tied to the situation of greater social mobility.
Singers analysis is allusively correct but politically insufficient. Limited to the tabulation and reading of electoral results and approval ratings,
he fails to undertake an analysis from the class perspective. In his critique
of Lulism, there is no passage from social composition to political composition. Class composition means the conflictive articulation of the material position within the productive process and antagonistic forms of subjectivation (Tronti 2008: 66). In other words, what are the political nodes,
their sources of tension, their organizational incrustations that would
express, even in a nascent state, the coagulated dissatisfaction with gradual reform and the conservative pact? What is already being strained
within the eminently conservative social contract in the machinery of Lulism
by 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 own
inscription into the functioning of capitalism, the class as the production
of subjectivity.
With the sociology of the strugglers, Souza provides relevant elements for understanding the subjectivities that socially compose the Lulist

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phenomenon. However, this taxonomy of social subjectsindeed, the

categorization of the excluded, those who have not yet risen to the precarious condition of fighter, as rabble (Souza 2009) or lumpenproletariat is
especially problematicis not capable of understanding political composition. The processes of organizing autonomy and resistance continue to
be a blind spot within Lulism itself. When we speak of class, while a living
and dynamic entityin this speaking a wager is immediately implied, a
political hypothesis not only to explain the struggles but also to allow us to
address a line of action amid the movement (Tronti 2008: 69). Therefore, it
does not make sense to investigate social classes using an analysis that does
not 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 strategy
and organization.
In contrast to Souza, Giuseppe Cocco (2013)4 recognizes the debate
around Lulismand the social composition corresponding to itas the
great pivot point for basing a political strategy on the material bases and
living forces in action. He points to an ambivalence and paradox at the heart
of Lulism. The ambivalence consists of a double outcome of Lulas government. On one hand, the conservative pact conditioned a politics of alliances,
which conserved the classist (and racist) social contract, made little or no
threat to vital points, such as communication policies, the taxation system,
the agrarian question, or various corporate oligarchies in key sectors. On the
other hand, the massive expansion of social programs opened a constituent
breach, beyond mere reformism, to affirm a basin of living labor and productive autonomy, with multiplier effects far beyond what was planned. Productive forces under high pressure, capable of developing new mechanisms
and skills, passed through this breach, providing the social composition
with new capacities.
In other words, within the majoritarian Lulism, the state Lulism,
exists a savage Lulism, which opposes neocolonial Brazil with a democratization from below, based on minorities and their becomings (Cocco and
Cava 2013). Paradoxically, not only have the formulations of government
ideologues ignored the constituent power operating within Lulism, but they
also see it as an undesired and dangerous effect. With Dilmas succession
in 2011, the interstices effectively wound up being closed, one after the
other. While the Lulist social composition was growing and its productive
and political qualities were multiplying, the government was increasingly
fixed on a model that was on a path toward obsolescence: national devel-

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opmentalism based on dogmas of industrialization, modernization, formal

employment, and economic management of growth. Gradually, the distance
increased between the living forcesseated, however precariously, within
Lulismand Dilmas plans for consent and governance. The result was the
closing of loopholes, and it became increasingly clear that the government
and the PT were restricted only to the conservative pact and its politics of alliances. Thus, it became the party of order, of mere artifices and representatives for reproducing a social contract that, from its material bases, no longer
could serve the savage multiplicity. Possibly, because of this acute perception of the exhaustion of Lulism, at the moment when it became a (monovalent) model, Cocco could glimpse the accumulation of antagonistic political
expressions about to reach their saturation point. In April, he spoke prophetically of uprising as a wager for the struggles in the Rio conjuncture, which
later proved valid for Brazil as a whole.5
In June 2013, many tributaries converged to form the largest protests
in the history of Brazil. The more the mainstream corporate press showed
images of the turmoil and direct confrontations, using Manichean discourses
in an effort to demobilize them through fear, the more strongly arose the cry
for sedition. It was as if the images of clashes with the military police, graffiti
on the facades of public buildings and destruction of bank machines, the
fires and the barricadesall the iconography of rebellionsurreptitiously
convoked revolutionary action, despite the journalistic curtain insistent on
catchphrases about vandals and masked troublemakers. Protesters would
not continue weak reformism. The conservative pact was questioned in
its entirety by an Amazon River of indignation, desires, and antagonisms.
The flushed pace at which the protests escalated only reaffirmed how many
government schemes, which presented themselves as adamantine, supposedly unbreakable, ended up showing their instability after the first largescale mobilizations.
On June 7, there were five hundred protesters in So Paolo. Ten days
later, there were five hundred thousand protesters in dozens of cities. On
July 20 in Rio de Janeiro alone, one million protesters occupied the citys
central artery, covering eight kilometers of President Vargas Avenue. The
conf luence of the tributaries occurred when the Free Fare Movement
(Movimento Passe Livre; MPL), a small, but well-organized autonomous
collective,6 organized marches to protest a twenty-cent increase in bus
fares. The class materialized in the process of struggling against the condition 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 construct an alternative to a city full of suffering experienced in the world of
metropolitan work.
This pororoca7 was also provoked by the determinationdemonstrated
in living color, through the alternative medias live streams and television
reportsof militants whose struggle pierced the night. It was fed by their
spectacular insistence on returning to the streets despite the rain of bombs,
gas, and rubber bullets, hundreds of arbitrary arrests and intimidation, editorials giving the signal for police brutality,8 and continuing accusations of
vandalism and hooliganismthe universal argument that the elites in
charge of mainstream corporate media always use to attack social movements and transformative struggles. This determination of the early days
broke through the conservative journalistic curtain and was transmitted to
thousands of other protesters like a virus. As protesters filled the streets,
they lost their fear of state repression, inciting a broad resistance, from
favela residents to social media activists, from public school students to university professors to anarcho-punks, from the homeless to militant lawyers
to the urban indigenous. The insurgents mask guaranteed an explosive
mixture. Amid the odor of Molotov cocktails and the polices tear gas, one
could hear marching, slogans, and demands without room for euphemisms,
such as The love is over / This is going to turn into Turkey, I want FIFAstandard schools and hospitals, or the omnipresent There wont be a
[World] Cup. Direct confrontationwhose most mediatized sign was the
black bloc tactic, which in reality was used by less than 1 percent of the protesting populationbecame the hallmark of the Brazilian moment in the
global cycle of protests.
It is months after June, and the plague has taken over.9 The governments and markets are being devoured by a disease that they had been
slowly trying to ward off over the last ten years by progressively distancing
themselves from the bases. They had believed they could control the contagion with future promises, present accusations, and much official advertising; all of this has now proven useless. The irreducible contingency of social
relations has spiraled out of control, frustrating capitals calculations of risk
and security. The intensification of repression attests to the desperation of
the authorities, who, pressured by sponsors, investors, and journalists, lost
their last chance to prevent the plague. To avert the plague would be to accept
it as a reality that cannot be negated simply by treating the symptoms, to
integrate the Amazonian waves, to use the disease itself to create a vaccine to

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inoculate against the political machines absence of democracy. The chosen

path, however, seems to be closely monitoring the plague from within,10
waiting for the perfect opportunity to raise new sanitary cordons, and
thereby quarantine an uncontrollable evil.
But these repressive efforts will probably be in vain. The plagues
arrival in the city unleashes conflicts, unblocks forces, and triggers possibilities. The moment when powers equations, models, and studies lose their
explanatory force, risks are no longer calculable and the reproduction of the
capitalist model falters. The protests in Brazil triggered the alarm clock of
colonial 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
2

4
5

6
7
8
9

10

I refer to the Soccerex Global Convention (see BBC Brasil 2013).

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 at
any moment. Rather, what this means is that the particular possibilities and limits
must be thought from the ground up, from the particular conjuncture and mode of
production (Read 2003: 56).
I refer to Lazzarato 2012 on the economy of subjectivity determined by social inclusion in a post-Fordist capitalist horizon, which I understand as perfectly applicable to
the crisis of growth in some regions of the southern hemisphere. I utilize this perspective to analyze the paradoxical production of subjectivity/subjection in an interview with IHU online (Cava and IHU Online 2013).
In a similar sense, see also Tible 2013 and Pedrosa 2013.
Cocco adopted the word uprising as the central idea of his reading of the conjuncture
in various workshops conducted by the Universidade Nmade network between April
and June 2013.
For a panoramic narrative focused on the role and action of the MPL in So Paulo, I
recommend the recently released Judensnaider et al. 2013.
Pororoca refers to a tidal bore on the Amazon River. The word comes from the indigenous Tupi language and means great roar.Trans.
For an example, see Opinio 2013.
For a broad view of the social contract and its need to calculate risks and avoid contamination, see Mitropoulos 2012. For the positive side of the plague in the context of
theater as an instigator of an effective exception in the city, see Artaud 1988: 2340.
For the modulated control of the plague as a technology of power, in opposition to the
segregational control of leprosy, see Foucault (2003).

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