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NEWS & LETTERS, March-April 2010
Brazil's urban poor for real democracy
Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Teto, the Social Movement of Brazil (MTST) is the homeless workers' movement in Brazil. Their counterpart, the Landless Workers Movement of Brazil, Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), is much better known. The urban poor movement started in the early 1990s. It was not at all known in Europe before we went to Sao Paolo, made the movie City of Favelas and translated the words of the poor into German and English.
Sao Paolo is a huge urban landscape. There are hundreds of unoccupied skyscrapers, while lots of people are homeless. Squatters started the movement in unoccupied apartments. There are communal spaces in the buildings, too: shared kitchen, space for cultural performances once or twice a week, political education, teaching, organizing and so forth.
MTST is probably the largest urban poor people's movement in the world. At least 60,000 people are in organizations related to this expanding movement. It engages in direct action: large scale squatting--20,000 people took over a whole suburb once, running it democratically by the people and for the people. Neoliberals could point to it and say there is no need to help the poor with funds or infrastructure. So the movement also pressures local and national governments to provide facilities for kindergartens and schools, as well as water, electricity, etc.
MTST also addresses the marginalization of poor people. A campaign in 2003 took on the VW factory in Sao Paolo. Big companies buy the cheapest land--right next to favelas (slums)--to set up production. But they don't hire people who live there; they hire workers from 20 kilometers away. MTST took over the VW factory with 4,000 people, pointing to this practice. MTST also disrupted "just-in-time production" by blocking all highways in Sao Paolo, causing hundreds of millions of dollars in lost deliveries.
Because of the geographical separation between the rich and poor, the rich don't need to acknowledge the plight of the poor who might be dying just a few kilometers away. MTST organized a march of 20,000 on Brasilia, the capital, protesting in front of city hall, creating homeless encampments in front of churches, etc. They squatted houses in the center of Rio de Janeiro to make the urban marginality more visible. Poverty, when portrayed in mainstream media, tends to focus on a particular exceptional child, portraying most others as criminals. But social exclusion is real. In a neoliberal system those not needed disappear.
How can homeless people organize? The MTST opens centers in favelas, where people can get together, talk, exchange views, hold political meetings. They learn deliberative forms of democracy. Deliberative democracy is a radical democracy, an active process. Jurgen Habermas' ideas of communicative democracy and collective decision making, as well as Joshua Cohen's, stay within liberal democracy. Their communicative democracy seeks to determine our "life roles" but not in the workplace or in relation to the state. The markets, which run the economy and our working lives, and the bureaucracy, which runs the political state, are excluded from their theories.
We don't accept that. We should take democratic control of companies and of the state. Favela people and their supporters from the outside learn how to make all decisions which affect their lives democratically. Even though literacy levels are pretty low among the socially excluded, they learn to participate in the democratic process. They discuss their problems, their priorities and how to confront the state and the rest of society for what they need.
--Adrian
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