The first common feature is the way in which comparatively ‘privileged’
groups end up relying on the support, strategies and spaces created by more marginalised groups. For the porters’ strike, Reis argues that the role of the broader African community, including women and children, was vital to the success of the struggle, and that people from various levels of local hierarchies
67 A. Nitahara, ‘professores da rede municipal do Rio de Janeiro decidem terminar a greve’, Agência Brasil, 25 Oct. 2013.
68 ‘Após fim da greve dos professores do Rio, site de sindicato sofre ataque hacker’, Portal Fórum (blog), 26 Oct. 2013.
participated to the extent they were able.69 For the vaccination riots, union leaders and community organisers relied on support from capoeira-trained street fighters, streetcar passengers and the homeless.70 The teachers’ strike saw a growing loss of faith by the teachers in traditional union action and a growth in their reliance on the Black Bloc and neighbourhood groups of students and parents.
A second common feature is the way in which each struggle, although ostensibly for a singular, short term goal (the removal of registration, the end of obligatory vaccinations and a pay rise, respectively) also included much broader demands, reflecting the interests of a diverse range of people. This helps to explain why so much popular support was generated, and why more formalised groups earned the support of more marginalised communities. In the porters’ strike, the tags and registration were perceived as the culmination of a series of policies aimed at destroying the independence of the growing cantos community; as Reis argues ‘subordinating it … to the territorial jurisdiction of white officialdom’.71 The tag was seen as particularly humiliating against the legacy of slave shackles, the welded collars of habitual runaway slaves and the significance of bodily adornment in particularly Yoruba religious practices, and this symbolically united resistance between former slaves and slaves.72 Unfortunately, testimonies of those involved are not available, but the strike was certainly perceived by the newspapers of the elites as a ‘revolution’
of people with a range of collective ‘interests’, provoking fears that the city had become ‘governed by Africans’.73 Durães sees the strike as a way in which a diverse group of people who had in common the shared use of the street as a space for survival, sought to resist the controlling influence of the white elite.74 The porters utilised their specific leverage as free workers with an essential role in the running of the city to fight against the racism that affected a much wider group.
Similarly, the vaccination riot is perceived by Needell as the response of a very wide range of people ‘riven by racism and beset by poor housing, constant illness and disease, precarious employment and vagaries in the amount and value of their wages’.75 Meade documents how the riots had been preceded by a range of other struggles, including streetcar driver strikes, food riots, attacks on sanitation workers and campaigns also by ‘propertied’, ‘literate’ people
69 Reis, ‘Urban labour’, p. 485.
70 Meade, ‘Living worse’, p. 249; J.D. Needell, ‘The revolta contra vacina of 1904: the revolt against “modernization” in belle-époque Rio de Janeiro’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 67 (2), (1987): 233–69, at p. 264.
71 Reis, ‘Urban labour’, p. 474.
72 Ibid., p. 484.
73 Ibid., p. 486.
74 Durães, ‘Trabalho de rua’, p. 82.
75 Meade, ‘Civilizing Rio’, p. 254.
concerned about water shortages and sewage.76 She writes that the smallpox vaccination ‘came to symbolise the last, the most feared and poorly explained as well as the most tangible aspect of a plan many had opposed for years’.77
I conducted a number of interviews with those supporting the teachers’
strike, asking for perspectives on the strike as part of the wider 2013–14 protest movement. As Yasmim,78 a street vendor, commented:
the protesters were right because they were protesting not just about health but also education and transport … everything, it’s all linked together. I went out to support the school teachers and the doctors and nurses were protesting too, I think it was good.
The teachers’ strike demonstrates the possibility of alliances between individuals and groupings who do not share the specific pay and working conditions-related demands of the teachers themselves, but who understand them as part of a much wider campaign. The appropriation of buses, as with the vaccine revolt, linked the teachers’ campaign with campaigns against bus fare rises and to the right to city space and public services more broadly, affecting both marginalised and less-marginalised groups.79
These examples show that for two hundred years (at least) workers have found ways to organise political actions that combine the leverage held by formal workers with the ‘unruly’ disruption of street protest, by marginal groups and in marginal spaces. This means that it is difficult to identify where precisely the line lies between the ‘zone of beings’ and ‘non-beings’, between the police order and the ‘sans part’, between ‘unruly’ and formal politics.
Indeed, all three of these mobilisations began with the hope that there might be some formal institutional response to citizen demands. The very form of a strike presumes the potential for negotiation, even where, as in the case of the slaves against the municipal government, the power differential is very great.
Apart from the hope that negotiation might be possible, another reason for retaining an engagement with the state is that it is not particularly possible to stay ‘outside’ it. The state is seen in all three cases as trying to intrude into – and
76 Meade, ‘Living worse’, pp. 243, 247, 249, 250.
77 Ibid., p. 248.
78 Yasmim is a pseudonym. As CAMTRA works particularly with street vendors, many of my interviews were with vendors who had supported the protests in their positions as mothers or former school students.
79 This reflects trends elsewhere. Both the 2011 Egyptian revolution and the 2001 Argentinian protests followed on from ‘social movement’ forms of unionism, where, for example, striking doctors were supported by their patients in Egypt, and unemployed workers were supported by teachers and social workers in Argentina – see M. Abdelrahman, Egypt’s Long Revolution:
Protest Movements and Uprisings (Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 62 and V. Manzano, ‘Dilemmas of trade unionism and the movement of the unemployed under neoliberal and progressive regimes in Argentina’, in S. Lazar (ed.), Where Are the Unions?
Mass Mobilisations and Trade Unions in Latin America, the Middle East, North Africa and Europe, trans. L. McMahon (London: Zed Books, 2017).
deprive – the freedom of each group, but each case also shows cases of (albeit not always chosen) interdependence: of the porters with their clients, of the vaccination rioters on the maintenance of infrastructure in their interests, and of the teachers on their employers and on the educational infrastructure. An example of this ambiguous relationship between protesters and government was evidenced in Salvador in 1858, where there was a big protest against price controls initiated by the provincial government. The porters this time took part alongside the municipal government.80
The ambiguity of the marginalised/non-marginalised divide – or Fanon’s
‘two zones’ – is particularly salient for the teachers’ strike, which shows the difficulty in creating a space that is ‘truly outside’ Rancière’s police order.
Schools are institutions that regulate social relations and reproduce the class relations necessary for the labour market to function, as explored widely for the case of Brazil by Paulo Freire.81 Yet they are also sites of rebellion; since the 2013 strike, Rio has seen a wave of school occupations where students have sought to teach their own classes, ‘decolonising’ their curricula and revolutionising a way of teaching seen as geared towards reproducing the social and political status quo.82 One teacher I interviewed claimed that her participation in the strike and protest movement was part of her professional duty, to lead by example in her encouragement of her students to fight for and participate in a more democratic active politics. The initial reluctance of the police to use tear gas (rarely spared in other protests) suggests a conferral of a certain legitimacy on the teachers, in their status as formal public sector workers. The claim by the teacher that she did not teach the officer to follow orders recalls a previous, though recent, sharing of public space where the teachers rather than the officers held power. Teachers as a group can then be seen as legitimate and rogue; dominant and marginalised.
All three cases also provoked changes in the meaning of marginality, making small cracks in the political status quo. The slight changes in the ordinances demanded by the local government as a result of the porters’ strike meant that the free porters could ‘escape the cycle of dependence on their former masters and enter into a direct relationship with political authorities without intermediaries’.83 Given the racist and highly concentrated power structures of the time, this was not a huge benefit, but Reis argues that the strike showed the ruling classes that the ganhadores were a significant political force, aware of their importance to the running of the city, and not a ‘disorganised mass’.84
80 M.C. Dolci, ‘Revoltas, motins e revoluções no Brasil novecentista’, Projeto História: Revista do Programa de Estudos Pós-Graduados de História, 47 (2014): 453.
81 H. Giroux, ‘Introduction’, in P. Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power, and Liberation (New York, Westport, London: Bergin & Garvey, 1985) p. xi.
82 F. Milanez, ‘Ocupação escolar é momento de aprendizagem – CartaCapital’, 9 Dec. 2015.
83 Reis, ‘Urban labour’, p. 489.
84 Ibid., p. 490.
Durães sees the strike as the emergence of a united ‘subaltern’ class of people who posed a real threat to the white elite, and which by the end of the 19th century had become an important collective of both men and women, fighting for the improvement of their social condition and against oppression, and claiming the city as a site for resistance as well as survival.85
Meade argues that 1904 helped to ‘consolidate a tradition of resistance’ in Rio, and was followed with public transport riots in 1908 and 1910, campaigns against the high cost of living in 1913 and massive city-wide strikes in 1917.
Although none of these campaigns succeeded fully in their aims, Meade argues that together they showed the elite that ‘beautification was not an antidote for profound urban problems’, leading to the first ever debate in congress on social legislation.86
In 2013 the support from the Black Bloc did not serve to discredit the teachers’ protest but rather elevate the profile of the Bloc. The harder the police cracked down on the teachers the more respect was gained by the Bloc. As a result, the goals that were uniting people were revealed to be more radical – more ‘outside’ the existing political imaginary than previously conceived. It created the seemingly incongruous situation where marginal anarchist tactics were seen as necessary in the defence of the welfare state. The trajectory of the officer from school to the police and the trajectory of the teacher from public servant to rioter can be seen as a metaphor for an overarching shift in the state towards increasing prioritisation (and funding) of security over education. But it can also be seen as the radicalisation of both the police and the teachers, towards state-sanctioned violence and civil disobedience respectively.
To some extent, these three labour struggles provide examples of spaces that have broken down Santos’ abyssal line, that – as in Butler’s formulation – build on shared precarity, and form alliances across differentially marginalised actors in order to create a space that refuses the divisions between people imposed by a political and economic structure. Each case evidences the ways in which marginal spaces and actors made significant creative contributions to political practice, perceptions of marginality and, to a certain degree, policy. However, rather than occurring as part of a uniquely marginal struggle, ‘outside’ existing structures of power, these shifts happened as a result of strategic alliances between marginalised and less-marginalised groups.