A G A I N S T the D A Y

Erdem Yörük

The Long Summer of Turkey:The Gezi Uprising and Its Historical Roots

In June 2013 a small protest to prevent tbe demolishing of a city park incentral Istanbul was subjected to excessive police violence. Within days,tbe tiny protest bad become a countrywide civil revolt. Tbe Gezi uprising,named after tbe park, bas radically cbanged tbe dynamics of botb eliteand grassroots politics in Turkey, creating an enduring spirit of resistanceamong the millions wbo had never been involved in street activism before,and undermining tbe belief tbat radical popular cballenges to tbe stateemanate today primarily from the Kurdish, not tbe Turkisb, population.

Millions took to the streets to cballenge tbe authoritarianism of Tur-key's leader. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who was widely regarded,at least by tbe international community, as a democratic figure, responsiblefor creating a "Turkisb model" that could potentially act as a beacon for tbeArab world in tbe transition to democracy. Tbe Gezi uprising deconstructedtbis image outside Turkey wbile creating a deep political crisis witbin tbepower bloc inside Turkey. Tbis crisis, combined witb tbe newly vibrant waveof grassroots politics, is likely to alter irreversibly the trajectory of botb parlia-mentary and street politics in Turkey.

In this article, I describe tbe bistory of tbe political and social condi-tions that structured tbe sudden and puzzling explosion of tbe nationwideGezi revolt out of a small protest for an urban park in Istanbul. I first depicttbe macro-level political struggles tbat shaped tbe last decade and then por-tray tbe trajectory of grassroots political activism during the year precedingtbe Gezi uprising. Tbe bistorical analysis is combined witb my insigbts as a

The South Atlantic Quarterly 113:2, Spring 2014

DOI 10.1215/00382876-2644203 © 2014 Duke University Press

42O The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Spring 2014

sociologist living in Istanbul who witnessed the events firsthand. In explain-ing the uprising, I consider the grassroots effects of two political develop-ments: (1) the governing Justice and Development Party (AKP) had beeninvolved in a striking level of intra-elite political competition for nationalpower with the Kemalist establishment, which consisted of the high ranks ofthe military (the army), the civil bureaucracy (jurisdiction), and the Kemalistmain opposition party (Republican People's Party) and their political partyallies, and (2) the level of grassroots political activism, particularly againstthe government, had gradually and dramatically escalated during the yearpreceding the uprising in June 2013.

In its struggle against the Kemalist establishment, the AKP developeda hegemonic strategy of garnering ideological support from a wide array ofliberal and left circles that were also discontented with the Kemalist estab-lishment. Once it had beaten its Kemalist rivals, the AKP gave up its rela-tively liberal and tolerant policies and started to complement its neoliberal-ism with Islamist conservatism and authoritarianism under Erdogan's strictleadership. The AKP defeated its elite rivals, which enabled it to increase itsauthoritarian policies, but this then drove millions into the streets andundermined the party's power from below. I argue, in other words, that theAKP's victory on the elite level led to another, perhaps greater, challengefrom the grassroots level.

The AKP, the Potent Target of the Protest

In the 2002 elections the AKP won two-thirds of the seats in the Turkishparliament. It was able to form a single-party government, a rare thing inTurkey, which has been ruled by coalition governments during most of thelast three decades. The AKP gained wide support from those who were eco-nomically and socially hurt by the harsh economic crisis of 2001. The partyhas closely allied with an emerging provincial conservative bourgeoisie,which competes with the old secularist Istanbul bourgeoisie allied with theKemalist establishment. In this struggle, the AKP was able to garner thenecessary popular support from the poor informal proletariat and the ruralpopulation by combining neoliberalism, populism, and Islamist conserva-tism. This success also brought about a sharp crisis among political elites.

During the long decade of AKP rule, political competition for nationalpower between the AKP and the Kemalist establishment, the close ally of theIstanbul bourgeoisie, has turned into a regime-wide political crisis. TheKemalists organized themselves into a semihegemonic bloc, consisting of

Vorüí; • The Long Summer of Turkey 421

the GHP (Republican People's Party) that was founded by Kemal Atatürk,but is today the main opposition party, and bigb ranks of the military andcivil bureaucracies, media institutions, academics, and several NGOs. TheAKP and tbe Kemalists have done their best to undermine each other's polit-ical leverage by mobilizing every possible judicial, social, and bureaucraticforce (Öni§ 2007; Yörük 2012). In 2007 Kemalists mobilized millions ofmiddle-class Turks into rallies in the largest cities of tbe country against tbealleged threat of Islamic Sharia law (Çenyuva 2009). The same year, tbearmy attempted to stage a coup d'état, and in 2008 tbe Kemalist bureaucracytried to ban tbe AKP with tbe aid of tbe Supreme Gourt. In response, start-ing in 2008, tbe AKP launched police investigations that led to the impris-onment of many civil and military leaders of the Kemalist establishment,accusing tbem of plotting a coup. Gurrently, 13 percent of all army generalsin Turkey bave been imprisoned, indicating the extent of tbe AKP victory intbe struggle. This has been accompanied by successive electoral victories, intbe last of which, in the 2011 general elections, the party gained half of thevotes (Yörük 2012). Tbe Kemalists lost tbe battle—but tbeir hatred for tbeAKP would manifest itself on the streets two years later.

A Year of Political Activism before Cezi

The year leading up to the Gezi protests had already been marked by a seriesof protests by Kurds, women, workers, LGBT individuals, students, and Ale-vis against tbe AKP's unprecedented record of antidemocratic policies: Tur-key alone accounts for one-tbird of all terror convictions in the world after9/11 and has more journalists in jail than any other country, followed by Iranand Ghina (Mendoza 2011; Gommittee to Protect Journalists 2012). Beforetbe Gezi uprising started, Kurdish protesters bad already helped push theAKP into peace negotiations through armed and civil disobedience (includ-ing a sixty-eight-day hunger strike of thousands of Kurdish prisoners fromSeptember to November 2012). In a country wbere women have had tberight to vote since 1930, tbe AKP declared a series of policy cbanges thatwould limit women's vested rights and liberties, including a proposed banon abortion, and monitoring pregnant women and informing tbeir fami-lies about tbe course of pregnancy. Official flgures show that honor killingsof women bave increased fourteenfold between 2002 and 2009 (TurkishParliament Proceedings 2009). This is most likely why women were tbe pio-neers of the Gezi uprising, constituting 51 percent of protestors, according totbe KONDA survey (2013). Women felt tbat tbey bad been losing wbat they

422 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Spring 2014

gained before and that they would lose control over both their bodies andtheir future under the conservative AKP rule.

Women and feminist groups displayed powerful resistance to thesepolicies, and they managed to force the government to withdraw the abor-tion ban. Labor disputes escalated significantly (including the Turkish Air-lines strike and strikes in many textile-producing companies); LGBT protest-ers organized a strong public response against the killings of transgenderedindividuals; the student movement underwent a rapid expansion, especiallyafter the riots at the Middle East Technical University in Ankara in Decem-ber 2012 during the prime minister's visit to the campus. Environmentalistgroups launched several successful campaigns to provoke public reactionagainst government proposals to build nuclear power plants and new hydro-electric power plants. Alevis (a heterodox sect of Islam, whose followers con-stitute 20-25 percent of the population in Turkey) protested the naming ofthe new Bosporus bridge after Sultan Yavuz Suleyman, an Ottoman rulerheld responsible for the deaths of many Alevis in the early sixteenth century.Hundreds of thousands from the secularist middle classes fought againstthe police barricades during the Republic Day celebrations on October 29 inan effort to visit Anitkabir, Atatürk's monumental tomb in Ankara, as a pro-test against the government. Football supporter groups, especially the Car? 1of Be§ikta§, were also among the pioneers of the Gezi protests, and they hadalready and increasingly been involved in violent clashes with the policebefore the Gezi uprising began. Gonsidering this history and the fact thatGezi has been identified by the idea of multiplicity, it is safe to argue that allthe components of this multitude had already been active before the upris-ing. Gezi was but a unique juxtaposition and alliance among these differentgroups on the top of fierce police violence against the most "innocent" ofthese demands: "Don't demolish a city park for a shopping mall."

The Kurdish Conflict and the Gezi Unrest

The Kurdish peace process was critical for the Gezi uprising. The small pro-test over a city park led to countrywide unrest not only because of the "level"of state violence but also because, for the larger public, state violence was nolonger seen as legitimate. The Kurdish political movement has been waginga struggle against the Turkish state for the last three decades. This strugglehas led to a long period of armed conflict, but also to the creation of a vibrantKurdish civil society and the formation of legal Kurdish political parties,HEP, DEP, HADEP, DEHAP, DTP and BDP, which were founded one afteranother when the Supreme Gourt quickly closed parties down for allegedly

Yörük • The Long Summer of Turkey 423

supporting terrorism. In the summer of 2012, the armed conflict betweenthe Kurdistan Workers' Party (PKK) and the Turkish army escalated, yield-ing a stalemate in which neither side attained a clear victory. In the mean-time, the imprisoned leader of the PKK, Abdullah Öcalan, had been kept inisolation and incommunicado on the prison-island of Imrali for more thanone and a half years. To call for an end to Öcalan's isolation and to urge thegovernment to open peace negotiations, in September 2012 over 600 Kurd-ish political prisoners in Turkey (out of about ten thousand) started a hungerstrike that lasted sixty-eight days. By the end of the two months, ten thou-sand Kurdish prisoners had joined the strike at least in part, in addition tosix Kurdish members of the Turkish Parliament and many other Kurdishpoliticians. On November 17 Öcalan sent a message to the prisoners, askingthem to end the strike "without any hesitation," signaling the end of his iso-lation and the start of negotiations.

The hunger strikes of 2012 changed the politieal atmosphere in Turkeyirreversibly. In the long history of hunger strikes in Turkey, this episode wasunique not only beeause of the numbers that partieipated but also beeause ofthe level of larger soeietal mobilization that it generated. The strikes led to anenormous politieal mobilization first among the Kurds and then within theleftist and démocratie publie. After the fortieth day of the strikes, street pro-tests were organized almost every day to support the prisoners, refreshingthe aetivism eapafcity in the opposition in Turkey that had long remainedrelatively silent. Most importantly, the strikes lifted the isolation of Oealanand led to the start of the peaee proeess. In Mareh 2013 Oealan declared anunconditional cease-fire as a response to the opening of offieial peaee nego-tiations between the Turkish state and the PKK, for the first time in threedeeades.

Sinee the 1980s the Turkish state has used the armed eonflict with thePKK to govern Turkey by constantly militarizing the society. Governmentshave used the discourse of terrorism and relied on an eternal enemy-within tocreate and sustain a nation out of a population that otherwise would likelychallenge the authority of a neoliberal state. Once this eternal enemy startedto disappear, Turks were able to question the use of, at least excessive, stateviolence. This was most apparent in the coming together of Turkish national-ists and Oealan supporters in Gezi Park, whieh would have never been pos-sible had the peaee proeess not started. In the same vein, for the first time inTurkish history, Gezi protestors in ethnieally Turkish middle-elass neighbor-hoods marehed in massive numbers to protest the killing by Turkish seeurityforées of a Kurdish aetivist in Liée, a small town in the Kurdish region, show-ing the extent to whieh the peaee proeess and the Gezi uprising fed eaeh

424 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Spring 2014

Other. Eree of the nationalist trap, Turks rebelled against their state and madeit possible to transform from "being a nation into being a people," in tbewords of tbe sociologist Nazan Üstündag (2013).

Gezi and Class

Tbe class composition of Gezi protestors was mucb broader tban any otherpublic protest of any size tbat occurred in tbe last few decades. According totbe Ministry of Interior, 2.5 million people joined tbe protests in all but twocities in tbe country (Cardan 2013). According to AndyAr Research Company,12.1 percent of tbe entire population in Turkey participated in tbe protests,wbicb amounts to more tban 8 million people (Hatem and Ta§tan 2013).According to a survey done by tbe KONDA Research Company (2013) in GeziPark during tbe first week of tbe events, 56 percent of tbe participants holdundergraduate or graduate degrees, wbile tbis rate is 14 percent for tbe Istan-bul population in general.

Tbese findings bave led to a common observation tbat middle-classparticipation was one of tbe defining characteristics of tbe Gezi protests.Two types of middle-class sectors are said to crowd the protests: an emergingnew middle class and a declining/proletarianizing middle class. Accordingto Çaglar Keyder (2013), a new middle class of professionals and would-beprofessionals bas developed extensive economic power and demanded a cor-responding political power to sbape and limit tbe policies of a conservativeand autboritarian government. Tbese new middle classes have been incor-porated into and benefited from the globabzed world by being positionedwitbin an emerging market, and tbey would like to sbare tbe same levels ofpolitical democracy as in otber developed countries. On tbe otber band,Korkut Boratav (2013) argues tbat most of tbe participants considered mid-dle class indeed eitber belong to different segments of tbe working class orare becoming proletarianized. Tbis includes service-sector employees,part-time employees (including call-center employees, interpreters, part-time graduate students, etc.). Tbe second group of middle-class citizensbas suffered from market conditions created by neoliberal capitalismestablished in Turkey after tbe 1980s, and especially during tbe AKP rule;bencefortb, tbeir grievances bave been translated into street activism dur-ing tbe Gezi events. Einally, despite differences in economic well-being,"reclaiming tbe rigbt to tbe city" was a common denominator for botb sec-tors of the middle classes in fighting to protect tbe city park and protestpolicies of commodification and privatization (Kuymulu 2013).

Vörük • The Long Summer of Turkey 425

Against this backdrop of widespread civil unrest against its rule, theAKP has developed a counterstrategy of deepening polarization in the soci-ety. By swiftly increasing the level of discursive and physical intoleranceagainst the protestors (as opposed to what was done by Brazil's ruling Work-er's Party, which faced a similar protest wave), the party managed to crimi-nalize and marginalize Gezi protestors in the eyes of AKP supporters,thereby consolidating and sustaining its support base. This led to a sharpstatus divide, in the Weberian sense, between Gezi supporters and AKPsupporters.

Yet the Gezi protests were more than a middle-class revolt, an argu-ment formulated by Francis Fukuyama (2013) and embraced by the AKP. Theprotest originated from a middle-class habitus but swiftly expanded intoworking-class squatter house areas, especially to ones in which Kurdish andAlevi minorities are highly numerous and the socialist Left is powerful. Mid-dle-class participation was high, yet all of the six protestors who died duringthe protests were from working-class backgrounds in addition to being Alevi,which shows the high level of class heterogeneity in the events. More impor-tantly, one should differentiate between a first and a second wave of Gezi pro-tests: the first wave was the one and a half months after the end of May 2013,and the second wave was the month after mid-September. While the firstwave originated and spread from the middle classes to the working class,from Istanbul to other cities and from the city center to peripheries, the sec-ond wave followed the opposite direction in all manners; from the workingclass to the middle class, and from the peripheries to the center.

In sum, I draw six conclusions from this analysis. First, the socialactors of the Gezi uprising were already on the street during the year leadingup to May 2013; the particularity of Gezi was their unique and sudden alli-ance. Second, the AKP's decade-long victory against the Kemalist cadres leftbehind a dissatisfied middle class, whose disappointment with Kemalistactors' abilities to challenge the authority led to militant street activism asthe sole form of political opposition. Third, the Kurdish peace process under-mined the state's claim that using violence against protesters was both nec-essary and legitimate. Fourth, the AKP's excessive and now less legitimateuse of state violence brought the groups together. Fifth, the AKP's popularbase has been solidified even more at the expense of increasing politicalinstability because of the radicalization of non-AKP supporters. Finally, theGezi uprising shows that the AKP's victory in the realm of elite competitionultimately undermined its power from below in the form of grassrootsradicalism.

426 The South Atlantic Quarterly • Against the Day • Spring 2014

References

Boratav, Korkut. 2013. "'Korkut Boratav, Gezi Direniçi'ni degerlendirdi': Olgunlaçmif birsinifsal ba§kaldiri" ("Korkut Boratav Evaluated the Gezi Resistance: A Matured ClassRevolt"). Sendika.org, June 22. www.sendika.org/2013/06/her-yer-taksim-her-yer-direnis-bu-isci-sinifinin-tarihsel-ozlemi-olan-sinirsiz-dolaysiz-demokrasi-cagrisidir-korkut-boratav/.

Committee to Protect Journalists. 2012. "Journalists in Prison Reach Record High: Turkey,

Iran, and China among Leading Jailers." December 11. https://www.cpj.org/20i2/i2

/journalists-in-prison-reach-record-high-turkey-ira.php.

Fukuyama, Francis. 2013. "The Middle-Class Revolution." Wall Street Journal, June 28. http:

lHatem, Ete, and Coçkun Taftan. 2013. "Gezi Protests between Fiction and Reality" ("Kurgu ile

Gerçeklik Arasinda Gezi Eylemleri"). SETA, September, setav.org/tr/kurgu-ile-gerceklik-arasinda-gezi-eylemleri/kitap/11061.

Keyder, Çaglar. 2013. "Yeni Orta Sinif " In Siyaset ve Toplum Bilim Perspektiflnden Gezi Parki

Olaylari—Calima Grubu Raporu (Cezi Park Events from Sociological and Political

Perspectives—Working Group Report) Tiirkiye Bilimler Akademisi, Ankara, http://

bilimakademisi.org/yeni-orta-sinif-caglar-keyder/.KONDA. 2013. Gezi Park Research, June, www.konda.com.tr.Kuymulu, Mehmet Baric. 2013. "Reclaiming the Right to the City: Refiections on the Urban

Uprisings in Turkey." City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action 17,

no. 3: 274-78.

Mendoza, M. 2011. "Global Terrorism: 35,000 Worldwide Convicted for Terror Offenses

since 11 September Attacks." Hufflngton Post, March 3. www.huffingtonpost.com/2o11/o9/o3/terrorism-convictions-since-sept-ii_n_947865.html.

Öni§, Ziya. 2007. "Conservative Globalism versus Defensive Nationalism: Political Partiesand Paradoxes of Europeanization in Turkey."/ourna/ of Southern Europe and the Bal-

kans 9, no. 3: 247-62.Cardan, T. 2013. "2.5 milyon insan 79 ilde sokaga indi" ("2.5 Million People Took to the

Streets in 79 Provinces"). June 23. http://gundem.milliyet.com.tr/2-5-milyon-insan-79-ilde-sokaga/gundem/detay/i7266oo/default.htm.

genyuva, Ö. 2009. "Opposition for the Sake of Opposition? Polarized Pluralism in TurkishPolitics." Meria Journal 13, no. 24: 51-55.

Turkish Parhament Proceedings. 2009. www2.tbmm.gov.tr/d24/7/7-3307s.pdf.Üstündag, N. 2013. "Gezi Parki Direniçi ve Türklük" ("Gezi Park, Resistance in Turkey").

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The past few years have witnessed successive mass flare-ups in India, Turkey, Brazil; street protests have ricocheted up the Balkans—Zagreb, Sarajevo, Sofia, Bucharest—to Ukraine, where Yanukovich was chased from office last month. Paradoxically, it is not so much in the recession-struck Northern heartlands but in the neo-capitalist Second World, and in the—supposedly booming—brics and emerging economies, that popular anger has made itself felt. The weakness of resistance in the advanced-capitalist zones, despite the provocatively regressive policies of austerity and financial bail-out, remains to be explained—and, hopefully, transcended. But the marginalization since 1990 of capital’s historic antagonist, organized labour, must be part of the answer. In the East and South, what social forces and what politics are in play? In nlr 78, Göran Therborn offered a survey of the global class land-scape, examining the realities of the ‘new middle classes’ of the developing world. In this issue, Therborn analyses the oppositional potential of subordi-nate layers across six continents: pre-capitalist indigenous and peasant forces, ‘surplus’ populations, manufacturing workers, wage-earning middle classes. Under what conditions can defensive protests against the commercialization of public space and services, as in Turkey and Brazil, or popular anger at corrupt, repressive regimes—Ukraine, Maghreb, Mashreq—trigger alliances between them? In Brazil, a bus fare hike sparked demonstrations across the country in June 2013. André Singer examines the social and political complex-ion of the protests, finding a confluence of classes out on the streets: déclassé youth and ‘new proletarians’—a Movimento Passe Livre organizer describes a ‘gigantic quantity’ of the protestors working in telemarketing, with col-lege degrees*—and inflation-hit middle classes. What politics do the cadres of the new resistance movements bring to the fight? Lines of descent can be traced from the alter-globo movements of the 90s—Chiapas, Seattle, Genoa, Porto Alegre—as well as from the Latin American protests of cocaleros and piqueteros, and from the Colour Revolutions of the early 2000s (some with discreet Western embassy backing). But as Singer describes, in Brazil as else-where, sections of the right and centre had major parts to play. Mapping out the contradictory contours of these upsurges will be a central task as future waves of resistance unfold.

new masses?

* Lucas Oliveira, ‘Está em pauta, agora, que modelo de cidade queremos’, interviewed by Maria Caramez Carlotto for Revista Fevereiro, no. 6, 18 October 2013.

new left review 85 jan feb 2014 19

andré singer

REBELLION IN BRAZIL

Social and Political Complexion of the June Events

Several days into the wave of protests that gripped Brazil in mid-2013, I began to hear people referring to the demonstrations—half-joking, half-seriously—as our ‘June Days’. Marx, of course, described the original June Days of 1848 as ‘the

most colossal event in the history of European civil wars’, arguing in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte that, though the proletariat’s uprising was crushed by General Cavaignac, ‘at least it was defeated with the honours attaching to a great world-historical struggle’; ‘not just France’, he wrote, ‘but the whole of Europe trembled in face of the June earthquake’.1 The Brazilian June also produced a tremor, but I would not go so far as to call it an earthquake. Nobody seriously imagined that an attempt at revolution was taking place. Class and property were not at the heart of the demonstrations, and the basic framework of the coun-try’s socio-economic order was not called into question. The political rules of the game, too, were only targeted in a diffuse way; proposals for a constituent assembly and a referendum came to nothing, and were forgotten before the month was out.

Yet the protests acquired such magnitude and energy that it became clear something was happening deep inside Brazilian society. Though mainly concentrated in São Paulo to begin with, over the next fortnight the movement expanded to more than 350 cities and towns, bringing millions onto the streets. The surge forced the authorities to cancel an increase in transport fares, and posed a real threat to the Confederations Cup, the showpiece football tournament then under way across the country—preparation for the World Cup Brazil is hosting in 2014, on which it has lavished billions. The Rousseff government had to throw

20 nlr 85

the emergency switches, rushing to offer what the President billed as a ‘national pact’: a constituent assembly, more stringent punishments for corruption, promises of investment in transport, health and education. Little has come of these ideas, of course, but there have been further flashes of protest since June: thousands marched through the streets in dozens of cities on Brazil’s Independence Day in September 2013, and there were further demonstrations in Rio in early February when its mayor announced that the fare increase cancelled after the June protests would now be implemented after all. The questions posed so urgently in June remain unresolved, and discontent still simmers, with the World Cup now in view. The tectonic plates of Brazilian society appear to have shifted.

If it would be misleading to designate the demonstrations as ‘June Days’, what should they instead be called? Many years after 1968, Sartre is reported to have said he was still trying to understand what had hap-pened that May; I suspect the same is true of Brazil’s June protests, so perhaps we should borrow the French term—les événements—and label them simply as ‘events’. In what follows, after a brief sketch of the course of the protests, I offer some preliminary hypotheses on two dimensions in particular: the social make-up of the demonstrators, and the ideolo-gies that crossed paths in the streets.

Chronicle of revolt

The events can be divided into three phases, each of which lasted approxi-mately a week. The first unfolded between 6 and 13 June, and was largely confined to São Paulo, though there were two small demonstrations in Rio de Janeiro. At this point, the protesters were mostly drawn from a small sector of the middle class, and they had a specific objective: to block an impending rise in the cost of public transport. The Movimento Passe Livre (Movement for Free Passes) played a prominent role in organizing the first protests; emerging from a confluence of pt, anarchist and anti-globalization strands in the early 2000s, it had been centrally involved in earlier struggles over transport, notably in the cities of Salvador in 2003 and Florianópolis the following year, where it secured free trans-port for students. The mpl now mobilized thousands of people on the

1 Karl Marx, ‘The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte’, in Surveys from Exile: Political Writings, vol. 2, London and New York 2010, p. 155.

singer: Brazil 21

same model, notably through the use of social networks. On 6 June, an estimated 2,000 people filled São Paulo’s Avenida Paulista, while a second demonstration on 10 June drew perhaps 5,000 to block major thoroughfares in the west of the city, eventually leading to confronta-tions with the police.2 The third day of protests, called by the mpl for Tuesday 11 June, also drew some 5,000 demonstrators, but this time there were pitched battles with the forces of order; newspapers reported many violent clashes and scenes of property being destroyed. The recur-rence and intensification of the clashes prompted the psdb governor of São Paulo state, Geraldo Alckmin, to adopt a tougher stance for the fourth demonstration, called for Thursday 13 June. On that day, a large number of people—the São Paulo State Military Police put it at 5,000, though the organizers claimed 20,000—marched peacefully from the centre of the city to Rua da Consolação, but were then prevented from reaching Avenida Paulista. From this point on, a tide of violent repres-sion spread across a large part of the São Paulo metropolitan area, with the Military Police attacking demonstrators, passers-by and journalists indiscriminately for several hours. Participants and eyewitnesses spoke of ‘crazed’ policemen and open-air ‘battle scenes’.

Such excessive use of force drew the attention and sympathy of the gen-eral public. This marked the start of the second stage of the movement, which reached its peak with the demonstrations that took place between 17 and 20 June. Now other sectors of society suddenly arrived on the scene, multiplying the protests’ numerical strength many times over while at the same time making their demands more diffuse. The thou-sands in the streets became hundreds of thousands. On Monday 17, when the mpl called a fifth day of action, some 75,000 people marched in São Paulo—participants reported a much higher figure—and the protests were mirrored in all of Brazil’s state capitals. Almost every demonstrator carried a placard, resulting in a profusion of slogans and demands:

‘I don’t care about the World Cup, I want money for health and education’

‘We want fifa-standard hospitals’

‘The giant has woken up’

‘I was goin rite sumfink clevah, but I aint educated’

‘It’s no joke. There’s money for a stadium but what about education?’

2 Unless otherwise indicated, estimates are from the press—the Folha de São Paulo or O Globo. These estimates are, of course, always controversial; I use them simply for reference, with no claims as to their accuracy.

22 nlr 85

400 km0

B R A Z I L

BOLIVIA

COLOMBIA

VENEZUELA

ARGENTINA

CH

ILE

PARAGUAY

GUYANA

SURINAMFRENCHGUIANA

URUGUAY

PERU

Brasília

Rio deJaneiro

São Paulo

Porto Alegre

Fortaleza

MATOGROSSO

MINASGERAIS

GOIÁS

SÃOPAULO

PARANÁ

MATO GROSSODO SUL

BAHIARONDÔNIA

ACRE

RORAIMAAMAPÁ

PIAUÍ

CEARÁMARANHÃO

TOCANTINS

RIO GRANDEDO NORTE

RIO DEJANEIRO

ESPÍRITOSANTO

RIO GRANDEDO SUL

SANTACATARINA

ALAGOAS

SERGIPE

PARAÍBA

PERNAMBUCO

AMAZONASPARÁ

Salvador

Belo Horizonte

Recife

Florianópolis

Rio Branco Maceió

Aracaju

JoãoPessoa

Natal

Macapá

Manaus

Vitória

Goiânia

São Luís

Cuiabá

Campo Grande

Belém

Curitiba

Teresina

PortoVelho

Boa Vista

Palmas

singer: Brazil 23

‘It was a funny country, it had no schools, only stadiums’

‘Everyone against corruption’

‘Dilma out!’

‘pt = Pillage and Treachery’

‘Alckmin out!’

Many other demands were raised, including calls for electoral reform and opposition to Constitutional Amendment Proposal (pec) 37, which would restrict the attorney-general’s power to carry out independent investigations, effectively eliminating an important tool against corrup-tion. A spirit of rejection of all parties and politicians was in the air, similar to the ¡Que se vayan todos!—‘Get rid of them all!’—that gripped Argentina in 2001. The mood was also expressed in seizures of pub-lic buildings: on 17 June, protesters attempted to storm the Legislative Assembly in Rio de Janeiro and thousands occupied the National Congress and Ministerial Esplanade in Brasília.

In this second phase, which coincided with the start of the Confederations Cup on 16 June, São Paulo began to play a less central role. The main focus of protests moved to cities where matches were due to take place: Brasília, Fortaleza, Salvador, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro. In Rio especially the demonstrations took on the character of a popular upris-ing, with mobilizations spreading on 18 June to the municipalities of Duque de Caxias, São Gonçalo and others in the Baixada Fluminense, to the north and east of the city proper. On 19 June in the northeastern city of Fortaleza, some 10,000 students and social-movement activists clashed with the police before and after the game between Brazil and Mexico. That same day, the São Paulo city and state authorities cancelled the increase in transport prices, frightened into accepting the protest-ers’ demands; similar price hikes were cancelled in several other cities, including Rio. On 20 June, when huge demonstrations were held to mark this event, the movement was at its height: gatherings took place in more than 100 cities across the country, involving a total of perhaps 1.5 million people. In response, four days later the President proposed a constituent assembly devoted solely to political reforms, which she sug-gested would subsequently be put to a popular referendum.

In a third and final stage, which ran from 21 June to the end of the month, the protest movement fragmented into a series of demonstrations with specific aims: reduction of traffic tolls, repeal of pec 37, protests against

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the government’s More Doctors programme, and so on. For example, a march against pec 37 brought some 30,000 people onto the streets of São Paulo on 22 June; that same afternoon in Belo Horizonte, as many as 70,000 protested at the amount being spent on the Confederations Cup before the game between Japan and Mexico. Propelled by the momentum gained during the second stage, but now moving in differ-ent directions, the protests began to split, like a river dividing into many tributaries as it flows down a mountain.

Middle class or new proletariat?

There have been two views of the social composition of the June events. The first identifies participants as being mainly of middle-class origin; the second emphasizes instead the predominance of the ‘precariat’—‘the mass formed by unskilled or semi-skilled workers who rapidly enter and leave the labour market’.3 By analysing the available data, I would like to advance a third hypothesis: that the protesters could have been both at the same time.4 In other words, the demonstrations were both the expression of the traditional middle class’s dissatisfaction with vari-ous aspects of the national reality, and a reflex action by what I prefer to call the new proletariat. This group has many of the characteristics attributed to the precariat by authors who prefer that term: it comprises workers, mainly young, who gained formal employment during the dec-ade Lula was in power, 2003–11, but who still suffer from low wages,

3 For an example of the first, see Armando Boito Jr., ‘O impacto das manifestações de junho na política nacional’, Brasil de fato, 2 August 2013; for the second, Ruy Braga, ‘Sob a sombre do precariado’, in Ermínia Maricato et al., Cidades rebeldes, São Paulo 2013, p. 82.4 The data I have relied on in this essay were drawn from the following four sources: (1) two surveys conducted by Datafolha in São Paulo at the demonstrations of 17 June and 20 June (766 and 551 interviews respectively, with a margin of error of 4 percentage points either way), available at www.datafolha.com.br; (2) polls from the demonstration in Rio de Janeiro on 20 June by Plus Marketing (498 inter-views, margin of error 4.2 per cent); (3) a national survey conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Public Opinion and Statistics (ibope) during the demonstrations of 20 June (2,002 interviews in eight cities: São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Porto Alegre, Recife, Fortaleza, Salvador and Brasília; margin of error 2 per cent), available at g1.globo.com; (4) research carried out at the 22 June demonstration in Belo Horizonte by the Instituto Innovare (409 interviews of 5 minutes, margin of error 5 per cent), available at www.innovarepesquisa.com.br. My thanks to Antônio David for alerting me to the ibope poll, and to Plus Marketing and Innovare for sending me their reports.

singer: Brazil 25

high turnover and poor working conditions. The information on which I have drawn relates only to a few demonstrations in a handful of cities, and therefore offers no basis for coming to definitive conclusions as to which view is correct. My intention here is simply to offer an alterna-tive interpretation, through an analysis of the age, educational levels and incomes of the demonstrators.

Table 1 indicates the predominance of young people over other age groups among the demonstrators. Those under the age of 25—often taken as the point at which adult life begins—provided the relative majority of participants in every case, accounting for an absolute majority in São Paulo on 17 and 20 June and in Belo Horizonte on 22 June. Yet the pres-ence of other age groups was far from negligible, at least in the second phase, as the marches increased in size. Looking at the figures provided by Datafolha in São Paulo, we can see that between 17 and 20 June the relative weight of the older age groups also increased, from 12 to 19 per cent. This does not point to a linear progression, however, as the later demonstration in Belo Horizonte had a particularly young profile, with 55 per cent of participants under 25. Despite this tendency towards a greater mix of generations, it is nonetheless clear that the percentage declined as the age of the cohort increased, with minimal participation from adults over 50—5 per cent in São Paulo—or over 60: only 2 per cent in Rio de

São Paulo, 17 June

São Paulo, 20 June

Rio de Janeiro, 20 June

Eight state capitals, 20 June

Belo Horizonte, 22 June

Youngest53

(12–25)

51(12–25)

41(15–24)

43(14–24)

55(to 25)

Intermediate35

(26–35)

31(26–35)

39(25–34)

38 (25–39)

29(26–39)

Older12

(over 36)

19(over 36)

20(over 35)

19 (over 40)

17(over 40)

TOTAL 100 100 100 100 100

Table 1. Demonstrators by age group (%)

Sources: São Paulo: Datafolha surveys; Rio: Plus Marketing research; eight state capitals:

ibope surveys; Belo Horizonte: Instituto Innovare survey.

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Janeiro. This was therefore a movement based predominantly on young people, complemented by a significant number of young adults—roughly, those aged between 26 and 39—and a smaller number of middle-aged and older adults. Taken together, the two main age groups comprised approximately 80 per cent of those on the streets.

As the data in Table 2 indicate, participants on the whole had high levels of education. A very small fraction of them had only primary-school edu-cation, either complete or incomplete: 1–2 per cent at the two São Paulo protests for which we have data, and 4 per cent in Belo Horizonte on 22 June, compared to 54 per cent with only primary education in the overall population.5 The proportion was substantially larger in Rio de Janeiro on 20 June, accounting for 14 per cent of demonstrators, suggesting that lower-income groups played a more significant role; but they were still very much in the minority. Comparable data for the 20 June protests in the eight state capitals was not available, but the low share of participants with incomplete secondary education—8 per cent—confirms that those with little education had a minor presence there too. Taken together, the figures suggest a virtual absence from the protests of the base of the Brazilian social pyramid.

Conversely, the figures show particularly high levels of participation among those with advanced degrees. In the eight state capitals, for example, no fewer than 43 per cent of demonstrators had a university diploma, and the figures for Rio and Belo Horizonte were 34 and 33 per cent respectively (data for São Paulo is lacking). By contrast, among the Brazilian population as a whole the figure was only 8 per cent, according to 2010 census data; even in São Paulo, where university education is more common, it stood at only 18 per cent. If we combine graduates with those currently studying at university, the proportion of demonstrators that fall into this group is even greater: almost 80 per cent in the two São Paulo protests, two-thirds in Belo Horizonte. Again, the national share of the population enrolled in higher education is only 15 per cent; though this has doubled in the last decade, it is clear that those with access to universities had a disproportionate presence in the June events.6 This in

5 The sociologists Amaury de Souza and Bolívar Lamounier argue that having only primary education is characteristic of the two sectors at the base of society, which they call the ‘working class’ and the ‘lower class’, together comprising 54 per cent of the population: A classe média brasileira, Rio de Janeiro 2010, pp. 18–19.6 Demétrio Weber, ‘Brasil tem 6,7 milhões de universitários’, O Globo, 17 October 2012.

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turn makes more plausible the idea that what some analysts have called the ‘traditional middle class’ had a strong influence on the protests. Defined by the late Amaury de Souza and Bolívar Lamounier as a social layer that has ‘achieved its goals in the past and today has consolidated its gains’, this group has held its current status for at least a generation; despite recent changes that have allowed a sizeable number of young people with low incomes to enter higher education, in the majority of cases a university degree remains a distinguishing feature of this ‘tradi-tional middle class’.7 The prominence of students and graduates in the protests thus lends support to the idea that they were the expression of this social sector.

However, an examination of income levels reveals a different picture (Table 3, overleaf). Firstly, the sector with the lowest incomes was a more significant presence than is suggested by their educational levels. In the eight state capitals, 15 per cent of demonstrators had family incomes of two minimum wages or less, and in Belo Horizonte the figure was 20 per cent. (The data for Rio are again strikingly different—and should therefore be treated with some caution: some 34 per cent of protesters apparently had only one family minimum wage per month.) If we

São Paulo, 17 June

São Paulo, 20 June

Rio de Janeiro, 20 June

Eight state capitals, 20 June

Belo Horizonte, 22 June

Lowest1

(Basic)

2(Basic)

14(Basic)

8(Incomplete secondary)

4(Basic)

Intermediate22

(Secondary)

20(Secondary)

52(Secondary /

Higher incomplete)

49(Secondary /

Higher incomplete)

31(Secondary)

High77

(Higher)

78(Higher)

34(Higher complete)

43(Higher complete)

66(Higher)

TOTAL 100 100 100 100 100

Table 2. Demonstrators grouped by education level (%)

Sources: São Paulo: Datafolha surveys; Rio: Plus Marketing research; eight state

capitals: ibope surveys; Belo Horizonte: Instituto Innovare survey.

7 De Souza and Lamounier, A classe média brasileira, p. 215.

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add those who earn between two and five family minimum wages per month, who would still be considered among the lowest income strata in Brazil, we can see that together these groups accounted for around half the demonstrators (and still more in Rio: 88 per cent). In other words, a substantial proportion of the protesters came from the lower half of the country’s income distribution—in marked contrast with the image suggested by the data on education levels, which implied that almost all were in the upper half.

Making some very rough calculations, we could assume a family income of five minimum wages works out as 1.5 to 3.5 minimum wages per wage-earner. This would place the demonstrators among the occu-pations listed by the economist Waldir Quadros in his discussion of Brazil’s ‘middle class’: shop assistant, primary-school teacher, nursing auxiliary, clerk, receptionist, driver, waiter, hairdresser and manicurist.8 If 45 per cent of protesters in the eight state capitals and 56 per cent in Belo Horizonte had a family income of less than five minimum wages,

Rio de Janeiro, 20 June

Eight state capitals, 20 June

Belo Horizonte, 22 June

Lowest(Rio 1 minimum wage, others 2 min. wages)

34 15 20

Intermediate 1(2–5 min. wages)

54 30 36

Intermediate 2(Rio 6–10 min. wages, others 5–10 min. wages)

1 26 24

High

(more than 10 min. wages)

10 23 21

TOTAL 100 100* 100

Table 3. Demonstrators grouped by family income (%)

* 6 per cent did not reply. Sources: Rio: Plus Marketing research; eight state

capitals: ibope surveys; Belo Horizonte: Instituto Innovare survey.

8 This is based on converting (in minimum wages of the time) the classification in Waldir Quadros, ‘Brasil: um país de classe média’, Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil, 1 November 2010.

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a high proportion of them may well have been employed in occupa-tions of this type. If so, they would not belong to the traditional middle class, generally employed in liberal professions or non-manual jobs, as technicians and administrators.9

On the one hand, then, the educational levels of the protesters point to a strong presence of the upper half of the social scale, including the traditional middle class. Yet on the other, the data on incomes and the occupations they imply suggest that the bottom half of Brazil’s social pyramid played a significant role. The combination would tend to confirm the notion that a new proletariat or ‘precariat’ did take to the streets. The hypothesis gains plausibility when we consider that the majority of demonstrators were young, and had recently entered the job market—76 per cent were in employment in the eight state capitals, 71 in Belo Horizonte and 70 in Rio de Janeiro.10 Moreover, the last decade has brought a marked increase in education levels, with an expansion of state university places and an explosion of private-sector institutions; the number of students entering higher education in Brazil more than doubled between 2001 and 2011.11 To resolve the contradiction set out in Tables 1, 2 and 3, then, we may conjecture that the mass of young people taking part in the demonstrations had levels of education higher than their incomes would suggest.

Taking all these factors into consideration, perhaps the best way to describe the social composition of the demonstrations is to envisage two relatively equal blocs. These comprised, on the one hand, middle-class young adults, and on the other, people of the same age but drawn from the lower half of the Brazilian social pyramid. Table 3 indicates that, with the exception of Rio, around half the demonstrators had a monthly family income of more than 5 minimum wages, and over 20 per cent received more than 10 minimum wages, a level more typical of the traditional middle class. This reinforces the impression that, while there was a sizeable middle-class contingent in the demonstrations, it did not account for the whole phenomenon. What the second stage of the protests produced, then, was a crossover of classes.

9 De Souza and Lamounier, A classe média brasileira, p. 164.10 According to surveys by ibope in the eight state capitals, Innovare in Belo Horizonte and Plus Marketing in Rio.11 Weber, ‘Brasil tem 6,7 milhões de universitários’.

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Catalysts

Socially heterogeneous, it should come as no surprise that the June events were also ideologically multifaceted, embracing tendencies rang-ing from eco-socialism to neo-fascism via different kinds of reformism and liberalism. Naturally, the extremes of the spectrum were more vis-ible on the streets than were the points in between. The progressive slant of the demonstrations was immediately apparent, prompting many at the time—myself included—to see them as the possible prelude to a new cycle of workers’ struggles, like the one that began in 1978 and lasted until the end of the 1980s. At the same time, there was clearly also a right-wing element to the protests which aimed to push back the popu-lar forces that have been the pt government’s support base since 2003. Yet it might be easier to understand the June events if we look more closely at the centre. This is the hypothesis I now wish to test.

As we have seen, the June protests can be divided into three stages. The Movimento Passe Livre was the catalyst and connecting thread of the first phase. For the mpl, the protests were part of a larger anti-capitalist struggle: ‘The barricades erected against successive fare increases are the expression of justified anger at a system completely dominated by the logic of the market.’12 In many respects the inheritors of an autono-mist tradition that reached Brazil in the 1980s, the mpl represents a move away from what it terms ‘hierarchical’ models of struggle, in favour of horizontal, decentralized initiatives; in the words of the philosopher Pablo Ortellado, an activist with long-standing links to the movement, the mpl takes ‘enormous care over process’.13 This was apparent, for example, in the interview given by two mpl members, Lucas Monteiro de Oliveira and Nina Cappello, to the ‘Roda Viva’ programme broad-cast by tv Cultura on 17 June. Firm and precise in their responses, the two adhered strictly to their movement’s objective—cancellation of the fare increases—saying only what their assembly had authorized them to say. Asked about trivial aspects of her personal life, such as her leisure pursuits, favourite books and films and so on, Cappello refused to answer, saying ‘We are not here to talk about ourselves’. She and Oliveira refused to project themselves as individual leaders, who could

12 Movimento Passe Livre–São Paulo, ‘Não começou em Salvador, não vai terminar em São Paulo’, in Maricato, Cidades rebeldes, p. 13.13 ‘Pablo Ortellado: experiência do mpl é “aprendizado para o movimento autônomo não só do Brasil como do mundo”’, Coletivo dar, 10 September 2013.

singer: Brazil 31

immediately be absorbed by the star system. In a few short minutes, this absolute respect for the collective and rejection of the opportunity for personal promotion brought a new political ethic into the spotlight—marking the appearance on the Brazilian political scene of a new left, in tune with Occupy Wall Street and the indignados in Spain.

Yet by refusing, in line with their principles, to impose a meaning on the demonstrations from above, the mpl left the way open for views that were very different from theirs. The centre and right rode the torrent unleashed by the new left, and before long there were so many riders that they ended up changing the direction in which it flowed. Sections of the middle class aligned with the centre and right sensed that the protests offered an opportunity to express a vague sense of discontent at the country’s situation. Research carried out by Datafolha at the start of the protests, on 6 and 7 June, indicated that among voters in the high-est income brackets, satisfaction with Dilma Rousseff’s government had already fallen significantly in the three months since March 2013, from 67 to 43 per cent. It seems that the mpl’s call to action, directed mainly at young members of the proletariat, reached the dissatisfied ears of the middle class. But what were they so dissatisfied about?

A poll conducted on 11 June by the Belo Horizonte-based Vox Populi Institute found that, of 2,200 people interviewed in 207 towns, half said they were very concerned about inflation. Economists who otherwise disagree on almost everything concur that there had been a significant rise in prices before the protests. For example, according to Luiz Carlos Mendonça de Barros, a minister in the Cardoso government in the 1990s, retail prices—which have a real impact on consumers—rose by around 10 per cent in the first months of 2013. Marcio Pochmann of the pt, meanwhile, suggested that for those with higher incomes the increases were even greater, since their expenditure is dominated by services, whose cost rose still further.14 The rising cost of living for middle-income groups might explain, at least partially, the dissatisfaction expressed on the streets in June. In my view, however, inflation on its own could not have supplied sufficient fuel for the protests; it may instead have acted as the spark for innumerable criticisms that the middle classes, on both left and right, were making of the pt governments. These had become

14 Luiz Carlos Mendonça de Barros, ‘A nova clase média e o governo’, Folha de São Paulo, 14 June 2013; Pochmann cited in Luiz Antonio Cintra, ‘Brasil, caro pra chuchu’, Carta Capital, 5 June 2013.

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all the sharper because of the difficulties faced by those living in cities, especially with regard to transport and security.

Opposition banners

The reality is that, from the moment a significant portion of the mid-dle class took to the streets, what had begun as a movement of the new left rapidly became a rainbow movement, in which everyone from the extreme left to the extreme right was to be found. Thereafter the protests acquired an oppositional slant they had previously not possessed—both in relation to the federal government and to state and city-level admin-istrations. During the march of 18 June in São Paulo—the fifth in that city—a group with far-right characteristics split off from the main body of protesters and tried to attack City Hall, where the incumbent is a pt politician, Fernando Haddad, who had been directly supported by Lula in the 2012 elections. That night the old city centre, abandoned by the police, was ransacked by a mob. In Rio de Janeiro, a campaign was started against the state governor and the city’s mayor, both pmdb. Brazilian flags were ever-present, alongside placards demanding lower taxes.

The right helped to strengthen the anti-corruption message of the demonstrations. The trials of those indicted after the mensalão vote-buying scandal, which were widely televised, ended six months before the June explosion.15 The affair clearly stuck in many people’s throats, and when the mpl issued its call to occupy the streets, they may have sensed an opportunity to voice their anger. The slogan rouba mas faz, ‘he steals but gets things done’—used in the 1940s to describe São Paulo mayor and later state governor Adhemar de Barros—has recently been levelled, more or less subtly, against the pt under Lula. The great advantage of the anti-corruption banner is that it can draw in all sec-tors of society, as a matter of common sense: who would be in favour of corruption? It is possible, however, that the right’s desire to attack the federal government led them to support a broader que se vayan todos attitude which may have rebounded on local and state administrations led by the psdb. The assault on the Legislative Assembly in Rio, which

15 In 2005 it was revealed that deputies, party leaders, bankers and publicists had been receiving monthly payments in exchange for supporting Lula’s govern-ment. Indictments were made in 2007, but the trial only began in mid-2012. That November, pt leaders José Dirceu, José Genoino and Delúbio Soares were among the 25 the Supreme Court condemned to prison sentences ranging from six to ten years.

singer: Brazil 33

from 17 June onwards took over the leading role in the protests from São Paulo, might be compared to the strategies adopted in Argentina in 2001, though there is no way of knowing for certain who was responsi-ble for the violence.

The anti-corruption slant of the demonstrations was further strength-ened when popular slogans against the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games were taken up, especially in cities where Confederations Cup matches were then being held. The ‘whitening’ of the modern tem-ples of football being built for 2014, with ticket prices that are prohibitive for ‘blacks’—that is, most of the population—spurred a justifiable revolt by those ‘down below’. For example, on 19 June the Homeless Workers’ Movement, a radical urban organization linked with the mst, marched in the south and east of São Paulo to protest against ‘the rise in the cost of living and against the price of the World Cup, which is impossible for the workers’.16 Criticism of the amount being spent on sport gave the left a second banner to raise, alongside that of lower transport prices. Vast sums of public money were being used to build luxury stadiums that will be profitable for business, but will prove of little use after the tournament—and this in a country where the poor have no access to adequate sanitation, medical care, decent transport or public safety. Now, to add insult to injury, they were being excluded from the football as well. Ultimately, the leitmotif of the ‘anti-fifa’ narrative was a critique of Brazil’s persistent inequalities.

The upsurge of protest in Brazil’s major cities was entirely foreseeable. The political temperature of the country’s urban centres had been ris-ing ever since the October 2012 municipal elections, when almost all of the state capitals elected opposition mayors, regardless of which party had previously been in power. The tepid reformism that has character-ized the Lula and now Rousseff governments meets with much greater obstacles in hyper-urban contexts, since any changes here cost much more and are likely to involve class confrontations that are not part of the pt’s model. Moreover, as the architect Ermínia Maricato has observed, in recent years there has been a resumption of violent evictions, which have victimized the poor; and ‘mega-events such as the World Cup and the Olympic Games have added fuel to the fire’.17

16 ‘Atos bloqueiam cinco estradas paulistas’, Folha de São Paulo, 20 June 2013.17 Ermínia Maricato, ‘É a questão urbana, estúpido’, in Cidades rebeldes, p. 24.

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Post-materialist politics?

I would argue, then, that the right brought the problem of corruption to the second phase of the demonstrations, and the left that of the inequi-ties of urban life. This produced an ideological crossover that echoes the mix of classes noted earlier. Perhaps what was most novel, however, was the way the centre behaved. Able to lift either banner—protesting simul-taneously against corruption and the privatization of public funds—it therefore unexpectedly served to generalize the spontaneous political demands of the streets. The condition on which it performed this func-tion was that calls for ‘fifa-standard’ hospitals and schools should not become a genuine challenge to capital, as the left hoped, or a real pursuit of those accused of corruption, as the right proposed. The centre’s will-ingness to raise both banners depended on seeing them as the reflex of a modern society against an antiquated state. This logic served to reduce the conflicts within society that the different demands might generate, instead focusing on the idea of a unified, participatory social fabric taking on an oppressive, backward-looking and corrupt state apparatus in need of renewal. This also explains in part why social networks played such an important role: as well as permitting a kind of participation that ran against standard political practice, the use of the internet and social media served as a token of modernity in comparison to an outmoded state.18

The centre which took to the streets of Brazil from 17 June onwards might be described as ‘post-materialist’, in the sense used by Ronald Inglehart: as societies gradually resolve their material problems, values change, shifting from an emphasis on ‘economic and physical security’ to one on ‘self-expression and quality of life’.19 This is a trans-generational process that takes place as those already socialized in a middle-class milieu, free from the material burdens of previous generations, become the major-ity, producing a sea-change in their manner of political engagement. The analysis of the June events offered by the economist André Lara Resende is a good example of this. Not coincidentally, Resende is one of the intellectuals closest to Marina Silva, the former pt Environment Minister who left the party in 2009 to stand against Dilma Rousseff as

18 For a symptomatic discussion of the importance of the internet in the June events, see the interview with Manuel Castells: ‘Dilma é a primeira líder mundial a ouvir as ruas’, Istoé, 28 June 2013.19 Ronald Inglehart and Christian Welzel, Modernization, Cultural Change and Democracy, Cambridge 2005, esp. ch. 4.

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Green candidate for the presidency. For Resende, the demonstrations were an expression of dissatisfaction with a state that had become a use-less ‘drain on resources’. The signs of this, he wrote, ‘are so obvious that there is no need to know or analyse the numbers. The Executive branch, with 39 ministries absent and non-functioning; the Legislative, which supplies only bad news and frustration; the Judiciary, pompous and exasperatingly slow.’20 The anti-state malaise has been propagated by the internet, running counter to official institutions and the tradi-tional media. This is why the June explosion caused such bewilderment among all the established political actors. According to Resende, it was computers that enabled this cultural shift to take place unnoticed. He describes the underlying transformation in values as follows:

The relation between income and well-being is only clearly positive up to a relatively low level of income, which fulfils the basic necessities. From that point on, increased well-being is associated with what one could call quality of life. The basic elements of this are time with one’s family and friends, a sense of community and trust in fellow-citizens, health and a lack of emotional stress.

The June protests revealed the existence of a new agenda and stance which I believe are typical of what Inglehart terms post-materialism. If so, the second stage of the protests did not represent a hijacking of the movement by the right, but a much more subtle re-positioning by a post-materialist centre, in which both ‘fifa-standard hospitals’ and ‘exemplary punishment for the corrupt’ came to symbolize the ‘mod-ernization of Brazil’. My hypothesis that this broad current of opinion provided the axis for the second stage of the June events is based on polling data on the ideological profile of demonstrators in São Paulo (Table 4, overleaf). Those describing themselves as belonging to the ‘centre’ form a plurality, at 31 per cent; if we consider those categoriz-ing themselves as ‘centre-left’, ‘centre-right’ and ‘don’t know’ as part of a wider centre, 70 per cent of the participants could be said to belong there. It makes sense to think that left and right found themselves in the centre when, coming from opposite directions, they crossed paths on the mainstreets of Brazil.

The presence of middle-class youth among the demonstrators is clearly compatible with the centrist ideology that ended up dominating the

20 André Lara Resende, ‘O mal-estar contemporâneo’, Valor, 5 July 2013.

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movement at its height. One of the most interesting questions arising from the June events is how these post-materialist positions were received by the new proletariat. For low-income workers, of course, a materialist agenda is still very relevant. Left and right have clear pro-posals on this: more state on the one hand, more market on the other. The centre seeks to escape this dilemma by means of ‘greater social participation’—something nobody disagrees with in theory, but which, once it is removed from the realm of distributive conflicts, can only be of interest to those whose material problems have been solved. According to the ibope survey of 20 June, interviewees spontaneously mentioned three main demands. Political change came first, raised by 65 per cent of participants, with 50 per cent making specific refer-ence to corruption; transport came second, mentioned by 54 per cent of respondents, while the cost of the World Cup was third with 40 per cent. It would be interesting in future to research whether there was any connection between these choices and the education and income levels of those interviewed.

It is obvious that there is little in common between ‘poorly paid young workers in precarious working situations’ and ‘ladies in designer clothes, laden with bracelets, brandishing placards calling for an “end to corrup-tion” and broadcasting their opinions on Twitter’.21 Why, then, should the first group be attracted by the ideology of the second? The political scientist Henrique Costa recounts an episode that took place in a metro station in São Paulo during the 17 June demonstration.22 While a group of young people from the city’s outskirts were putting ‘free passes now’ into action by jumping the turnstiles, some middle-class youths were

21 The first description is from Braga, ‘Sob a sombre do precariado’, the second from Marcos Coimbra, ‘O sentido das manifestações’, Voxpopuli.com.br, 11 July 2013.22 Henrique Costa, ‘O presente e o futuro das jornadas de junho’, Carta Maior, 11 August 2013.

Left Centre-Left Centre Centre-Right Right Don’t Know

22 14 31 11 10 13

Table 4. Position of demonstrators on the political spectrum (%)

Source: Datafolha survey, 20 June 2013.

singer: Brazil 37

shouting at them: ‘no vandalism, no vandalism’; the two groups evi-dently came to blows. Judging by this account, there was a latent tension between the two social classes involved in the demonstrations, which occasionally—as in this case—came to the surface. Yet although the world of the post-materialist middle class might be objectively distant from young people in lower-income groups, it may be a desired goal for those who have begun to move towards it thanks to better educational opportunities. Sociology teaches us that, when no strong class subcul-tures exist, individuals can identify with the social position they would like to occupy rather than with the place they come from.

At present it is impossible to say which way the new proletariat is leaning. There could, on the one hand, be an understanding that the problems raised during the protests can only be resolved through greater social spending by the state, as the left maintains; on the other, they could adhere to the view put forward by the right that only a struggle against corruption will lead to greater wealth creation. It is also plausible that the new proletariat is drawn to the idea that the solution to Brazil’s prob-lems lies in a combination of greater social participation and a rollback of the state, as the post-materialist centre believes. It is even possible that they might hold all three views at the same time. What Table 4 shows is that when the demonstrations were at their height, these different ideological currents were all in the streets together. Despite the symbolic expulsion of left parties from the Avenida Paulista on 20 June—possibly by far-right groups, acting with the silent approval of centrist demonstrators—the social left still played a significant role in the protests, even if it was not the majority. The right was also present, though it was much less important than it might at first have appeared to be. But it was the centre that predominated, both numerically, cul-turally and ideologically. The effects of the strange crossover that took place in June are still unfolding, and it is impossible to predict what the long-term outcomes will be. But we can expect further tremors during the World Cup this summer—and after it, as long as the country’s underlying social geology remains unaltered.

Translated by Nicholas Caistor. An earlier version of this essay appeared in Novos Estudos cebrap, no. 97, November 2013.

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Globalizations

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Rising powers, people rising: neo-liberalization andits discontents in the BRICS countries

Alf Gunvald Nilsen & Karl von Holdt

To cite this article: Alf Gunvald Nilsen & Karl von Holdt (2019) Rising powers, people rising:neo-liberalization and its discontents in the BRICS countries, Globalizations, 16:2, 121-136, DOI:10.1080/14747731.2018.1479018

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2018.1479018

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Rising powers, people rising: neo-liberalization and its discontents inthe BRICS countriesAlf Gunvald Nilsena,b and Karl von Holdtb

aDepartment of Global Development and Planning, University of Agder, Kristiansand, Norway; bSociety Work and PoliticsInstitute, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

ABSTRACTThe rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa –has called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets andgeopolitics. However, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries areshot through with socio-economic fault lines that relegate large numbers ofpeople to the margins of current growth processes, where life ischaracterized by multiple and overlapping vulnerabilities. These socio-economic fault lines have, in turn, given rise to political convulsions acrossthe BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained socialmovements oriented towards structural transformation. This article presentsan innovative theoretical framework for theorizing the emerging politicaleconomy of development in the BRICS countries centred on neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggles. It discusses the contributionsto this special issue in terms of how they illuminate the intersection betweenneo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggle in Brazil, Russia, India,China, and South Africa.

KEYWORDSBRICS; inequality; neo-liberalization; precarity;protest; social movements

The onset of the twenty-first century has witnessed substantial shifts in the vectors of economic andpolitical power that undergird and structure the workings of the world-system. Whereas the unra-velling of state-led developmentalism in the Third World and the collapse of communism in EasternEurope in the late twentieth century initially seemed to signal an ‘end of history’ that pivoted aroundAmerican hegemony, developmental shifts in the new millennium have cast doubt on such diag-noses. It is above all the rise of the BRICS countries – Brazil, Russia, China, India, and South Africa– that have called into question the future of Western dominance in world markets and geopolitics(Nayyar, 2016; O’Neill, 2013; Pieterse, 2018). Mainstream narratives of the economic and politicalascent of these emerging powers tend to highlight the potential that this process holds for povertyreduction and progress towards higher levels of human development. Thus, the United NationsDevelopment Programme (UNDP, 2013a) recently celebrated ‘the rise of the South’ – a processspearheaded by China, India, Brazil, and South Africa – as a progressive and hopeful transformation;and Russia has been widely perceived to be regaining significant economic and strategic ground in apost-communist world (Stuermer, 2009).

More critical voices have questioned the assumption that the rise of the BRICS countries pointstowards a tendency of developmental convergence in the world economy (see, for example, Kiely,2007, 2008, 2015, 2016; Starrs, 2014). In part, this scepticism is grounded in the persistence of

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CONTACT Alf Gunvald Nilsen alf.g.nilsen@uia.no

GLOBALIZATIONS2019, VOL. 16, NO. 2, 121–136https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2018.1479018

Northern power and domination in the global economy (see Hickel, 2017a, 2017b). However, anequally important reason for questioning celebratory accounts of the rise of the BRICS countries isthe fact that the changing geography of economic and political power in the world-system is closelyrelated to the emergence of a ‘new geography of global poverty’ (Kanbur & Sumner, 2012) in whichmore than 70% of the world’s poor now live in middle-income countries (see also Sumner, 2012).Despite impressive growth rates, the southern BRICS countries – Brazil, India, China, and SouthAfrica – are home to more than 50% of the world’s poor (Ravallion, 2009). In Russia, poverty hasbeen aggravated by the recent recession, with more than 13% of the population – that is, around19.2 million people – currently living below the poverty threshold (Agence France-Presse, 2016). Per-sistent poverty is coupled with very deep and, in most cases, widening inequalities. South Africa is acase in point with a Gini coefficient of 0.631, but China and India have also seen rapidly escalatinginequalities in recent years (see also Hung, 2016, Chapter 4; Jayadev, Motiram, & Vakulabharanam,2011; Oxfam, 2017; UNDP, 2013b; World Bank, 2016). Indeed, recent research shows that Indianinequality is at its highest levels since the early 1920s, as 22% of all income currently accrues to thetop 1% of earners (Chancel & Piketty, 2017). Brazil is an exception from this trend – its Gini coeffi-cient declined from 0.594 in 2001 to 0.514 in 2014 (see data.worldbank.org) – but remains a deeplyunequal country (World Bank, 2014). And in Russia, the top decile of wealth holders controls 77% ofall household wealth, a level of inequality that is equal to that of the USA (Credit Suisse, 2017).

What these statistics ultimately testify to is the fact that the developmental trajectories of theBRICS countries are shot through with socio-economic fault lines. As a result, large numbers ofpeople are relegated to the margins of current growth processes, where life is characterized by mul-tiple and intersecting vulnerabilities rooted in a lack of access to secure and decent livelihoods, theabsence of basic social protection and essential public services, and often also the exclusion fromestablished political arenas. Moreover, these socio-economic fault lines have given rise to politicalconvulsions across the BRICS countries, ranging from single-issue protests to sustained social move-ments oriented towards structural transformation (see, for example, Braga, 2017; Chen, 2014; Clém-ent, 2008; Gabowitsch, 2016; Lee, 2007; Menon, 2013; Naidoo, 2015; Ness, 2015; Nielsen & Nilsen,2016; Saad-Filho &Morais, 2014; Smith &West, 2012; Von Holdt et al., 2011; Von Schnitzler, 2016).This special issue is dedicated to developing an approach and a set of analyses that can decipher howthe developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries generate distinct forms and patterns of mobil-ization and resistance and, conversely, how popular struggles impact on and shape these trajectories.In doing so, we hope to lay the foundation for a critical conceptualization of the political economy ofdevelopment in the BRICS countries that unearths those economic, social, and political contradic-tions that tend to disappear from view in mainstream narratives. To achieve this, the analysesthat are offered in this special issue are centred on a triad of key concepts: neo-liberalization, precar-ity, and popular struggles. Before outlining and discussing these, we briefly introduce the articles col-lected in this special issue.1

All of the authors examine popular mobilization and movements in relation to large historicalprocesses and across a variety of case studies, sites or periods in order to identify longer-term trends,shifts, and possibilities. Ching Kwan Lee examines the changing forms of worker precarity and resist-ance across three eras of modern Chinese history – state socialism, high-growth market reform, andthe current shift to slow growth and overcapacity. Russia followed a very different path of transitionfrom communism, and Karine Clément explores changing popular responses, from the period ofshock therapy neoliberalism in the 1990s to the period of growing patriotic nationalism underPutin. Gayatri Menon and Aparna Sundar trace changing forms of dispossession and resistancein India through three case studies, the first two in the period of state-led capitalist modernization

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and the third in the period of neo-liberal globalization. Karl von Holdt and Prishani Naidoo frametheir discussion of South African movements with an analysis of the African National Congress(ANC) domination of the movement landscape, and use case studies of four different moments ofmobilization to examine continuities, shifts, and new possibilities. Ruy Braga and Sean Purdydraw out the changing dynamics of popular incorporation and demobilization, followed by bothpopular and middle-class right-wing mobilizations against the Lulista regime of accumulation, toexplain the parliamentary coup against the Workers’ Party (PT) president in Brazil. Fabio Luisexpands the analysis of neo-liberalization and social conflict in Brazil by examining their role inthe expansion of Brazilian companies in the Latin American region, accompanied by super-exploita-tion of workers and the destruction of the environment. Gathering these articles in a special issueallows us to deepen our understanding of neo-liberalization, precarity, and popular struggle, bothconceptually and in terms of the political possibilities they produce.

Neo-liberalization

In many scholarly accounts, the developmental trajectories of the BRICS countries have come to beassociated with the term ‘post–neo-liberalism’ (see, for example, Craig & Porter, 2004; Dale, 2012;Grugel & Riggirozzi, 2012; Harris & Scully, 2015; Sandbrook, 2011; Schmalz & Ebenau, 2012). Cru-cially, the BRICS countries have been seen as drivers of the emergence of a political economy of devel-opment in which market-oriented accumulation strategies are increasingly embedded in modes ofregulation that provide social protection and redistribution (see Ban & Blyth, 2013; Ghai, 2015;Nölke, 2012). Such claims, however, tend to disregard the strong continuities that exist betweenthe projects of neo-liberal restructuring that shaped developmental trajectories both in the globalSouth and in post-communist Europe in the 1980s and 1990s and the regulatory regimes that are cur-rently crystallizing in the BRICS countries (Clarke, 2007; Katz, 2015; Prashad, 2012).

Consequently, our approach to understanding the political economy of the BRICS countries inthis special issue takes a different view, in which we understand recent interventions in the fieldof social policy in terms of the ‘roll-back’ and ‘roll-out’ dynamics that criss-cross particular and con-tingent processes of neo-liberalization (see Peck, 2010; Peck & Tickell, 2002). Roll-back strategies aremost commonly associated with the onset of processes of neo-liberal restructuring, in which theprincipal aim is to dismantle regulatory institutions and policy regimes associated with a previousform of state-centred development in order to extend and deepen the reach of the market logic. Con-versely, roll-out strategies tend to be spawned by the limits and contradictions of deregulation.Therefore, such strategies tend to be oriented towards enmeshing markets in institutional structuresthat mitigate market failures and the detrimental social consequences of initial processes of restruc-turing (see Cammack, 2004; Peck & Tickell, 2007). The extent to which there is an emergent politicaleconomy of development in the BRICS countries that is shaped by the kind of interventions associ-ated with roll-out strategies of neo-liberalization, we suggest, must be understood in terms of thecrucial tension that animates attempts to reconcile the imperatives of accumulation and legitimation.

Offe (1972) of course identified the reconciliation of accumulation and legitimation as an animat-ing dynamic in the workings of the capitalist state. On the one hand, capitalist states have to ensurethat the requirements of accumulation are met by implementing an adequate strategy for economicgrowth and intervening to adjust imbalances and counter stagnation (see also Jessop, 1990, pp. 198–206). But on the other hand, capitalist states must also ensure democratic legitimacy by gaining theconsent and support of their citizens for their mode of governance. As Offe (1984) points out, one of

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the key ways in which legitimation is achieved is through decommodification in the form of access tosocial protection and public goods via welfare regimes (see also Borchert & Lessenich, 2016).

By situating the interplay between accumulation and legitimation at the centre of our approach,we move away from a totalizing account of neo-liberalism as a uniform project that is always andeverywhere the same2 and towards an understanding of neo-liberalization as ‘a variegated form ofregulatory restructuring’ (Brenner, Peck, & Theodore, 2010, p. 330). Such an understandingacknowledges the existence of a common denominator of neo-liberalism – namely, that it is a projectcentred on ‘extending market-based, commodified social relations’ (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 331)through the deregulation of markets, financialization, and privatization. However, at the sametime, it takes cognizance of how neo-liberalization is unevenly developed across ‘places, territories,and scales’ (Brenner et al., 2010, p. 330), in large part as a result of how neo-liberalizing processes arearticulated with the institutional and regulatory legacy of previously hegemonic regimes in the con-text of specific states (see Cahill & Konings, 2017).

The contributions in this special issue centre neo-liberalization in the BRICS countries in differentways and to different degrees. However, what is common across all the articles is an attempt to bringout how the workings of inter-jurisdictional policy transfer and transnational rule regimes aremediated in and through the encounter with pre-existing political economies and state–societyrelations in the BRICS countries. This entails an orientation towards discerning how the makingof market-oriented forms of regulation have been shaped in path-dependent ways by their encoun-ters with the accumulation strategies, state–society relations, modes of governance, and regimes ofcitizenship that were forged by state-led developmentalism in Brazil and India, apartheid in SouthAfrica, and communism in China and Russia. It is in these encounters that actual constellationsof accumulation and legitimation are configured, and it is by studying them that it becomes possibleto unravel how pre-existing political economies and state–society relations have been reworked andtransformed at the same time as market-oriented restructuring has come to be patterned in contex-tually specific ways.

The two post-Communist countries in BRICS have approached the problem of the transform-ation of their sociopolitical orders and their positioning in the globalized economy in very differentways, as Clément and Lee show. While Russia adopted democratic reforms along with ‘violent ultra-liberal reforms’, including privatization of state industry, producing radical atomization, precarity,and social destabilization in the 1990s, China retained a strong authoritarian Communist regimealong with a carefully managed opening to global capital to the 1980s, while retaining state and col-lective enterprises. Thus, as Clément shows, citizens in Russia were subjected very rapidly to the col-lapse of old certainties and to a new ideology of individual responsibility and self-blame for theirfailure to adapt to the new market economy. A revival of rhetoric of patriotic nationalism thatimplies a rebuilding of state–society relations came later, with the presidency of Putin. In contrast,the Chinese regime retained strong state–society relations and paternalist commitments, and hasonly shifted rhetoric to promote a culture of individual self-responsibility based on ‘innovative entre-preneurship’ rather than ‘a culture of employment’ more recently, with the ‘new normal’ of slowergrowth and overcapacity, as Lee argues. These different trajectories have had very different impli-cations for state–society relations and popular mobilization.

India and South Africa were both British colonies, but of very different kinds – the former a col-ony that achieved independence in the late 1940s, the latter a settler colony which achieved indepen-dence under white supremacy in 1910, and national liberation with a black majority governmentonly in 1994. The different character of colonialism in the two countries, and the different periodsin which they attained liberation and majority rule, have had implications for their responses to neo-

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liberalization. India has experienced half a century of state-led modernization and development priorto the era of globalization, while South Africa was plunged into neo-liberalism at the same time as itattained liberation. While India has a strongly established and diversified bourgeoisie which has beenable to control the pace of neo-liberalization, South Africa is characterized by a strong and globalizedwhite corporate sector, and a black elite whose development has been stunted by settler dominationand now the combined domination of white and multinational capital – tensions which have pro-duced the current political crisis in the country. The two articles presented here show how popularmobilization bears the marks of these different histories and processes of neo-liberalization.

Brazil is also a post-colonial society, but with a much longer history of independence than India orSouth Africa. Here the key political transition is from military dictatorship to democracy in the late1980s – roughly coterminous with South Africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy, and withsimilar consequences, as the democratic regime has since its birth been characterized by neo-liberal-ism. In Brazil, the PT was only elected into the presidency a decade later, in contrast to the immediateascendance of the ANC in South Africa. However, in both cases, political movements that embodiedenthusiastic popular aspirations adopted or maintained neo-liberal macroeconomic policies butattempted to retain legitimacy with mildly redistributive policies and the incorporation of movementleaders and activists into state institutions. In Brazil, the contradictions of these developmental pathsare producing shifts and realignments among elites, generating the political crisis of the parliamen-tary coup, as both Braga and Luiz show, and portending a radical intensification of neo-liberal pol-icies unencumbered by concessions to the popular classes.

While each of the five BRICS countries has pursued trajectories of neo-liberalization marked byspecific histories and compromises with existing regimes and social forces – including the popularclasses – these different trajectories have all produced new forms of precarity in society, though againwith distinct features as well as cross-country resonances.

Precarity

Deepening inequalities across the BRICS countries have to be understood as manifestation of howgrowth processes have come to be associated with tenacious and in some cases escalating unemploy-ment, widespread underemployment, and increasingly insecure employment (see Denning, 2010;Foster & McChesney, 2012; Ness, 2015). The multiple insecurities that this entails – not just relatedto inadequate wages and poor working conditions, but also limited access to social protection – havein recent years come to be conceptualized in terms of precarity. As is well known, the concept ofprecarity was brought to the centre of scholarly debates on the contemporary world of work byGuy Standing’s (2011) study of the rise of the ‘precariat’. Precarity is on the rise, Standing argues,as a result of the neo-liberal drive ‘to create a global market economy based on competitivenessand individualism’ (2011, 37).

As much as Standing’s concept has set the terms of debate on the nature of work under neo-lib-eralism, critiques articulated from the point of view of the global South have raised important ques-tions about how precarity is conceptualized. Precarious work, this critique argues, is nothing new inthe global South: indeed, it is not tenable in this context to craft an analysis on the basis of a contrastbetween a precarious present and ‘a non-precarious past’ (Scully, 2016a, p. 161) in which stableemployment, high wages, and access to welfare provisions prevailed (see also Neilson & Rossiter,2008; Paret, 2016). As Breman and van der Linden (2014, p. 926) point out, casualized and part-time jobs, low and stagnant wages, outsourcing and subcontracting, the substitution of wagedwork by self-employment, restricted access to welfare, and poorly regulated working conditions

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have always constituted ‘the dominant mode of employment in the developing world’ – especially inthe informal sector, which is of tremendous importance in many Southern economies (see alsoMosoetsa, Stillerman, & Tilly, 2016; Munck, 2013).

This critique is, of course, relevant to the project that we are attempting to articulate in the currentissue, where the five countries that are subjected to analysis belong to the global South,3 and wherethe emergence of precarious working classes have arguably been absolutely central to recent growthprocesses (Ness, 2015). We, therefore, approach precarity not as something new and unprecedented,but rather as a constant aspect of work under capitalism, which is constituted in particular ways andpresent to different extents in particular historical conjunctures and geographical spheres in theworld-system. The central substantive analytical challenge then becomes that of disinterring whatis specific about precarity in the new political economy that is emerging in the BRICS countriestoday.

In order to move in this direction, the contributions to this special issue are informed by a two-pronged view of precarity. Firstly, precarity is conceptualized as a material reality. Poverty andinequality, in other words, are seen as being directly linked to unemployment, underemployment,and insecure employment, as well as the extent to which precarious workers have access to publicgoods and social protection that can mitigate material deprivation. The production of precarity asa material reality is, in turn, understood as a consequence of how specific groups have come to beadversely incorporated into economic and political power structures across spatial scales – fromthe global, via the national, to the local – as a result of the dynamics of specific processes of neo-lib-eralization (see Hickey & du Toit, 2013; Mosse, 2010). Secondly, precarity is conceptualized in termsof how it is ‘located in the microspaces of everyday life’ as ‘vulnerability relative to contingency andthe inability to predict’ the form and direction of life courses (Ettlinger, 2007, p. 320). This entailsexploring how precarity is experienced as an inability to rely on work-based incomes to sustainwhat is considered to be dignified livelihoods and lifeworlds, underpinned by durable social relationsin specific places and sites. Crucially, our approach emphasizes how people respond to this experi-ence in ways that are shaped by the intersections of gender, race, caste, and region.

Extant work on this dimension of precarity revolves around mapping how precarity engenderssenses of loss, danger, anxiety, and disruption (Han, 2012; Millar, 2014; Neilson, 2015). These areof course very real aspects of precarity as a subjective experience of being in the world. However,abjection does not exclusively define the experiential dimension of precarity. Indeed, life amongthe urban poor in the global South is characterized to a significant extent by ‘quiet encroachments’– that is, the ‘silent, protracted but pervasive advancement of the ordinary people on the propertiedand powerful, in order to survive and improve their lives’ (Bayat, 2000, p. 545). And the significanceof oppositional agency in various forms takes us to the last component of our triad of concepts,namely popular struggles, which we discuss further in the next section of this article.

Several of our authors work with fresh definitions of precarity that broaden and deepen the con-cept. Ching Kwan Lee develops a ‘relational and relative concept of precarity’ as a condition pro-duced by struggle between workers, employers, and the state, rather than a condition to beidentified by a specific set of characteristics. Thus precarity varies over time and in different places.She also extends precarity beyond the traditional focus on the regulation of production to include thepolitics of recognition, that is to say symbolic or classification struggles over status and the legitimacyof claims, as well as the politics of social reproduction, thus including struggles over the dispossessionof land or other means of social security and subsistence. With this concept she is then able todemonstrate that precarity is not a new condition introduced by neo-liberal capitalism, but ratherhas been continuously produced in different forms and in different ways, differentially affecting

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various categories of workers, by the state and employers through the three periods of modern Chi-nese political economy – state socialism, market reform, and the low growth and overcapacity of thecontemporary period. In each of these periods the terrain of struggle has shifted: from a struggle overrecognition under state socialism, when precarious categories of workers struggled for recognition asfull proletarians with all the rights that this entailed; to struggles over the regulation of labour in theperiod of marketization and integration into the global capitalist economy; and, finally, the emer-gence of struggles over social reproduction in the current period characterized by increasing unem-ployment, dispossession, and precarity of livelihoods.

Menon and Sundar undertake a similar move, emphasizing that precarity is a much broader con-cept with multiple layers of meaning than allowed by the Northern concept of precarious labour.Examining it through the lens of a society characterized by very high levels of informal labour, aswell as the attachment of producers to place and the rights of place – land, access to naturalresources, an urban pavement to live on and trade from, a stake in an investment fund which pro-vides for generational reproduction – they argue that what is at stake in struggles over precarity islivelihood, a concept that includes the rights to place through which livelihood may be stabilized.Such a definition points to precarity as including multiple processes of dispossession that afflictthe labouring classes and petty commodity producers. Like Lee, Menon and Sundar demonstratethat such dispossession has a long history, preceding the advent of neo-liberal capitalism. Throughthe concept of precarity they explore three different struggles: of fishing villages, to retain controlover fishing rights in the face of mechanized trawling; of pavement dwellers, against evictionfrom places of living and trading; and of garment workers, against the employer efforts to preventthem from accessing their accumulated savings in provident funds.

Clément deepens the concept of precarity to explore its impact on subjectivity in Russia, devel-oping a concept of desubjectivation to describe the loss of self and agency produced by the extraordi-nary destruction of industry, jobs, and incomes that attended the market transition, as well as thecollapse of the institutions and ideological reference points of communism. As Clément puts it,‘people lost the ground under their feet’ and had trouble making any sense of the society theylived in or of their place in it. Clément argues that Putin’s turn to patriotic nationalism, particularlyafter the annexation of the Crimea and the confrontations with the West, provided the dominatedwith a new language and set of reference points through which to ‘recover the ground beneath theirfeet’ and understand their society and their place in it, thus in a sense reducing precarity despite thecontinuity of neo-liberal policies. Clément thus signals the importance of identity and a sense ofsocial place for the possibility of agency, thus returning us to Lee’s insistence on the importanceof symbolic and classification struggles to the experience of precarity.

The articles on South Africa and Brazil do not directly discuss or redefine the concept of precarity,as do the articles referred to above. However, they implicitly make use of an expanded concept thatincludes public goods and struggles over social reproduction, such as access to housing, urban land,clean water, and electricity. Both Braga and Purdy’s article on Brazil and Von Holdt and Naidoo’s onSouth Africa expand the experience of precarity beyond the marginalized and labouring classes, toinclude middle-class experiences of a decline in living standards (Brazil) and the financial and debtburden of seeking to enter the middle-class through university education (South Africa).

Braga and Purdy reminds us of Ching Kwan Lee’s relational definition of precarity by showingthat neo-liberalization is not necessarily directly accompanied by the spread of precarity. Underthe ‘Lulista regime’ of regulation, workers and the urban poor experienced expanded employmentopportunities, increased wages and expanding social security through the Bolsa-Família programme,leading to modest redistribution and a decreasing inequality. However, many public goods did not

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improve in quality or accessibility, and the international financial crisis and the end of the commod-ity supercycle reversed many of these gains. South Africa exhibits similarly complex dynamics of pre-carity, with deindustrialization, subcontracting, and outsourcing undermining the conditions ofworkers and generating large-scale under- and unemployment, at the same time as social policieshave focused on large-scale free housing programmes and a huge expansion of social grants.

Taken together, these articles deepen and expand our understanding of precarity in the globalSouth to include dimensions not usually considered in the Northern literature, and also delinkthe concept from neo-liberalization to include earlier historical periods and social systems not nor-mally considered to be drivers of precarity – colonialism, state socialism, state-led modernization –identifying significant continuities between past and present in place of the rather simple narrative ofa rupture with the ‘golden era’ of full employment and welfare capitalism.

Popular struggles

The contributions in this special issue focus on how precarious workers and poor urban commu-nities constitute themselves as collective actors to contest precarity, and attempt to decipher howand the extent to which their organizing and mobilizing shape the new political economy that is crys-tallizing in the BRICS countries.

Going beyond the more traditional interest in constituencies, collective identity, and strategicgoals, we develop an approach that maps and analyses both broader movement landscapes andthe internal life of social movements. The former axis of investigation is intended to direct attentionto the way in which specific social movements are embedded in wider ‘movement landscapes’ (Cox,2016) and how this embeddedness shapes the form and trajectory of oppositional collective action.This concept is meant to highlight how social movements cannot be understood in isolation, buthave to be conceptualized in terms of ‘a system of characteristic alliances and oppositions’ (Cox,2016, p. 114) that endure over time and define the context in which both movements and theiropponents operate. The second axis directs attention to the micro-dynamics that animate the collec-tive articulation of grievances and claims in public spheres (see Cox & Nilsen, 2014). This entailsdetailing how objectives, strategies, and tactics emerge through processes of dialogue, debate, anddissent among activists, how forms of leadership and internal hierarchies impact on movementdynamics and, finally, what forms of political skill, knowledge, consciousness, and subjectivity move-ment participation fosters among precarious workers and poor urban communities.

Bringing these two axes of investigation together and drawing on a quintessentially Gramscianconception of hegemony, the analyses that are developed in the contributions to this special issueseek to determine how popular struggles engage and appropriate hegemonic political institutionsand idioms in order to pursue grievances, stake claims, and articulate rights. Simultaneously, we con-sider how responses from dominant groups and state authorities fuse accommodation through pol-icy changes that concede to oppositional demands with various forms and degrees of coercion withthe objective of reproducing a given hegemonic formation (Nilsen, 2015, 2016; see also Nilsen & Roy,2015). Examining protests through this prism brings to the fore the ways in which movement pro-cesses unfold in fields that both enable and constrain oppositional collective action, while simul-taneously illuminating how the reproduction of hegemonic formations has to be constantlynegotiated in the face of contention (see Gramsci, 1998, pp. 52–55, 180–182; Green, 2002; Mallon,1995; Roseberry, 1994).

For example, it becomes possible to ascertain whether policy concessions result in co-optation anddemobilization, and therefore entrench existing power relations between different actors and groups,

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or whether they alter balances of power and add momentum to movement processes. It also becomespossible to determine whether specific movement processes have the potential to give rise to politicaldisruptions or whether hegemony is likely to be reconstituted on different terms, and to detail whenand why some forms of protest become subject to coercion. It is precisely by unravelling the work-ings of these equations in and across particular contexts that the approach that we pursue is able toshed some light on how contemporary popular struggles shape the configurations of accumulationand legitimation that undergird neo-liberalization in the BRICS countries. Moreover, it enables us toassess the impact of popular struggle on the forms of adverse incorporation that yield precarity andto ascertain whether incipient patterns of alternative political economies can be discerned within theclaims and demands that are being voiced within the practices of social movements in Brazil, Russia,India, China, and South Africa.

Turning to the empirical material and arguments presented in the six papers of this special issue,we discuss here the resonances and tensions between the BRICS countries across three themes: thetrajectories of protest and resistance highlighted by each article; the contested languages and claimsmobilized from below in each of the countries, and the process of reciprocal appropriation betweenmovements and authorities, as the former attempt to press the justice and legitimacy of their claims,while the latter attempt to absorb and demobilize them; and the prospects for reinvigorated andexpanded resistance.

Ching Kwan Lee presents shifting trajectories of mobilization from below across the three periodsof Chinese development outlined above. During the authoritarian state socialist period (1949–1979),the categories of workers excluded from the rights and benefits of regular workers (a minority of theworkforce) were acutely aware of the discrimination they faced and inferiority of their positionbecause it contradicted so sharply the official ideology of equality and the leading role of the workingclass, and were able to mobilize their claims during periods of officially sanctioned mass mobilizationof the Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Cultural Revolution. During the period of market open-ing and high growth, the state turned to legal reform and bureaucratic procedures to manage conflict;workers took up these terms to frame their protests and claims, leading to a complex process of col-lective action (marches and occasional strikes), mediation, and negotiation (in some cases assisted bya new generation of NGOs and in others undertaking independent action), countered by selectiverepression by the state. Although the ‘volume and persistence of worker activism’ increased pressureon the state, workers almost invariably avoided moving beyond ‘cellular’ activism – localized andcentred on an individual workplace – avoiding broad mobilization for fear of repression.

Lee thus illuminates a process through which workers appropriated official ideology and insti-tutions – Communist ideology and official campaigns in the first period, legal and bureaucratic pro-cedures and promises in the second – to legitimate their actions and make claims, while authoritiesresponded by incorporating, negotiating, or repressing workers, and on occasion refining forms withnew legislation or promises. With the third shift to a ‘new normal’ of increasing dispossession,indebtedness, disempowerment, and job loss, combined with intensified repression, Lee detects con-tradictory trends: on the one hand, sporadic instances of ‘more violent, volatile and less institution-ally incorporated’ clashes between precarious workers and the state and, on the other, a trendtowards atomization and acquiescence.

Karine Clément detects similar processes through which Russian workers and precarious commu-nities mobilize by framing their protests with the rhetoric presented by authorities, while authoritiesappropriate the resentment and resistance from below, incorporating these into a new rhetoric ofpaternalism.While there are many grassroots and labour protests in Russia, they tend to be ‘scatteredand mostly small-scale’, characterized by ‘everyday activism’ and showing persistent trends towards

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the localization of struggles, as in the case of China, rather than national mobilizations for social jus-tice. The one exception was the wave of spontaneous protests in 2005 against Putin’s attack on thenational social benefits system which began with pensioners, and expanded to include a diversity ofgroups across 100 towns and nearly 80 regions. The Putin regime responded by partially repealingthe reform, adopting a new language of social paternalism and launching a variety of health, housing,and education programmes. The recession that hit Russia in 2014 after the annexation of the Crimeahas produced widespread hardship, and the Kremlin has accelerated its turn towards a populist andpatriotic discourse, successful in mobilizing big demonstrations in its support and against the West.Clément perceives within this the emergence of a new ‘social critical’ populism from below, as citi-zens have appropriated the regime’s new discourse and have begun to use this language to critiquethe current order of things. In Clément’s analysis, popular nationalist rhetoric from above produces anew social imaginary of a society characterized by cleavages between the elite and the wealthy andthe ‘hard-working people’ and the ‘ordinary folk’. The earlier desubjectivation is reversed with a newsubjectivation and sense of agency. Thus, in contrast to Lee’s analysis of China, Clément sees in Rus-sia both the ongoing vitality of everyday activism, and the beginnings of a new social critique frombelow which may provide the foundation for more expansive mobilization that articulates explicitdemands for social justice.

While Lee’s and Clément’s respective prognoses diverge, there is a remarkable similarity in theiranalysis of the ways in which dominated people in the post-Communist states appropriate the rheto-ric of authorities in order to claim justice or rights, while authorities in turn adjust positions inresponse to mobilization, appropriating demands and refashioning them into new policies, newrhetoric, and new promises.

Von Holdt and Naidoo pursue similar themes in their analysis of popular mobilization in SouthAfrica. They develop the concept of ‘movement landscape’ as a terrain structured by institutions,organizations, symbolic fields, and discourses and laid down by formative action both from aboveand below, which both empowers and constrains popular mobilization. Popular forms of engage-ment ‘may reproduce prevailing terms of incorporation, negotiate an alteration to them, or trans-gress them profoundly’ – and it is these dynamics they set out to explore through an analysis offour different cases of popular struggle. Essentially they argue that the movement landscape hasbeen deeply structured by the forms of ANC politics laid down during the liberation struggle, aswell as the terms and rights established by the new constitution. In all the cases they examine, mobil-izations and movements emerge from within the ANC ‘constellation of organizations’ and tend toadopt the repertoires of action and symbolic discourses that have been sanctified by the same forces,but in the process tend to push up against the structures and forms of the landscape and, in somecases, breach them in different ways. For example, the struggles and massacre of platinum mineworkers at Marikana have triggered a process of fragmentation and realignment within the labourmovement, and the emergence of unions and federations outside of the ANC constellation, whilethe #FeesMustFall student mobilizations have proved a fertile crucible for new ideas and symbolicpower outside of the ANC tradition, drawing from previously silenced currents of struggle suchas black consciousness, the emergence of black feminism, and a focus on decolonization.

This remains a contradictory process, however, as dominant currents within both the studentmovement and the new labour formations continue to mobilize the popular rhetoric of the ANC,rich as it is in the themes of struggle and resistance, in articulating grievances and making demands,thus reproducing the practices and symbolic universe characteristic of this constellation of organiz-ations, as do the multitude of community mobilizations that operate almost entirely on the terrain ofthe ANC. This tendency to operate on the terms of the dominant ideology tends to produce multiple

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localized struggles rather than large-scale mass movements challenging the ANC and its neo-liberalpolicy orientation – resonating with the analyses of China and Russia summarized above. Von Holdtand Naidoo make visible as well the ways in which the ANC government actively contests the termsof engagement, absorbing organizational leaderships, and refashioning and appropriating demandsin the form of new policies in some cases, and in others working to delegitimize struggles andorganizations and deploying repressive strategies –most strikingly in the case of the Marikana strikesand massacre, but also in ambivalent ways against the student movement. The authors thus concludethat the high levels of activism and mobilization visible in South Africa ‘demonstrate a complex mixof trends’, with some tending to ‘conserve and reproduce the existing landscape’ while others arebeginning to refashion the landscape, ‘establishing new organizational nodes and repertoires ofstruggle’.

The case of Brazil, as presented by Ruy Braga and Sean Purdy, presents a dramatically differentdynamic of struggle. Whereas in China, Russia, and South Africa our authors analyse tentative andshifting processes of mobilization in the context of politically, ideologically, and institutionally domi-nant regimes, in Brazil the domination of the PT presidency since 2003 appears to have been morefragile, weakened by the compromises it had to make with a congress dominated by right-wing par-ties and an extremely confident capitalist class, and only able to exert what Braga describes as a ‘pre-carious hegemony’ over the subaltern classes. The latter was maintained with the ‘active consent’ ofthe leadership and bureaucracy of the trade union movement and social movements, which wereabsorbed into government and state institutions with the aim of implementing a progressive devel-opmentalism, and the ‘passive consent’ of the mass membership secured through progressive socialpolicies such as substantial increases to the minimum wage, the Bolsa-Família and housing pro-grammes, economic growth, and job creation. As in the case of China, Russia, and South Africa,the Brazilian popular movement had been absorbed into the discourse and practices of the PT.

However, this moderated version of neo-liberalism was only able to succeed for as long as it waspropelled by economic growth premised in large parts on the global commodity supercycle. As theinternational financial crisis worked its way through the global economy and the supercycle faded,the PT government of Dilma Rousseff came under pressure to retreat from these social programmes.The result was growing disaffection from below, culminating in the militant strike wave of 2013/2014and the extraordinary popular mobilization against fare increases in the ‘June days’ of 2013. Whilethis resulted in substantial wage concessions as well as the withdrawal of fare increases across manycities, the PT government proved unable to absorb or appropriate popular discontent as the regimesof the other three governments discussed above have been able to do. The paralysis of the Braziliangovernment in face of pressures from the capitalist classes above and popular pressure from belowexposed the fragility of PT domination, and culminated in a parliamentary coup by right-wing pol-itical parties. Thus, unlike the previous cases, the PT government proved unable to absorb or containpopular pressure beyond the two terms of Lula’s presidency, which – in contrast to the previous cases– led to massive explosions of popular protest, including large-scale right-wing mobilizations ofmiddle-class constituencies against the PT. In this context, the capitalist classes and elites felt confi-dent enough to engineer a coup on very flimsy pretexts, and install an aggressively neo-liberal regimewhich is not only unravelling PT reforms, but attempting to entrench constraints for decades tocome. The corruption scandals – which implicate all political parties – and the blatant hypocrisyand self-interest of the political elite have done much to discredit the Brazilian political system. Itis not clear in this very new situation what form future popular resistance may take.

Fabio Luis fleshes out Braga and Purdy’s analysis of the PT and popular mobilization inBrazil, with an account of its role in the drive to regional integration. Though his project

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focuses on the expansion of Brazilian business and investment into the region rather than theforms of popular mobilization, he does demonstrate that Brazilian business diplomacy hasworked to blunt the radical edge of the Latin American ‘progressive wave’ at governmentlevel, while the environmental devastation, land destruction, and harsh working conditions ofBrazilian-funded megaprojects have provoked widespread militant opposition in several LatinAmerican countries, perhaps in some ways mirroring the processes of leadership incorporationand mass protest evident within Brazil.

Gayatri Menon and Aparna Sundar take their analysis of popular mobilization in India in a differ-ent direction to that pursued in articles summarized above. Rather than attempt to provide an over-view of the development of labour and popular mobilization and its shifting relations with politicalregimes, they zoom in on three moments of struggle by precarious groups that enable them toexplore their specific notion of precarity centred on the concept of livelihoods and place, ratherthan on labour and the workplace (see above). Each of these moments illustrates what they call a‘regime of dispossession’ (following Levien, 2013) – and here they demonstrate that such regimesof dispossession certainly did not make their first appearance with the neo-liberal turn in India,but that they long predated that (no doubt into the colonial period as well). The dispossession oftheir fishing grounds experienced by the fishers in Tamil Nadu in the form of plunder by mechanizedtrawlers represented an enclosure of the village commons defined by local custom and notions ofvillage sovereignty – which were in turn mobilized in resistance as the basis for ostracizing trawlercaptains and merchants, making claims on the state which resulted in legislative changes, and par-ticipating in broader alliances against displacement. The second moment, the eviction in Mumbai ofsome 100,000 pavement traders and dwellers who had previously been displaced from their agricul-tural land, gave rise to constitutional litigation arguing that the right to life (constitutionallyentrenched) included the right of making a livelihood which, in turn, included the right to aplace. While the court accepted this expansion of the definition of the right to life, it also permittedthe eviction to stand.

These first two moments had their origins in the state-centred national development phase inpost-colonial India. The third moment discussed by Menon and Sundar is that of a flash strike of120,000 mostly female garment workers in Bengaluru in 2016. The strikers avoided trade unioninvolvement; nor were they striking over the extremely low wages and poor working conditionsin their industry. Rather, they were striking against a new rule that would have restricted their abilityto withdraw savings from their industry provident fund in order to finance their children’s educationor weddings. Thus, the authors argue, this was not a strike over workplace benefits so much as anentitlement connected to social reproduction, and thus similar to the struggles over livelihood inthe first two moments.

Menon and Sundar reject prevailing analyses that typecast these kinds of struggle as petty bour-geois, amorphous and politically unreliable, or alternatively, citizenship struggles, and argue thatthey constitute ‘incipient or emergent’ ‘forms and languages of contestation’ over precarity thatsuggests a new politics of livelihoods. Finally, they make the important methodological point thatresearchers such as ourselves should pay attention to the dynamics and meanings of what is inthe field of popular resistance, rather than imposing a grid of preconceived conceptions aboutwhat constitutes a genuine movement or moment of resistance and then seeking evidence forsuch a development. This may, to a greater or lesser extent, serve as a kind of manifesto for thework presented in this special issue, as well as to the urgent work of charting and analysing the con-tours and dynamics of the new political economy of development that seems to be crystallizing in theworld-system.

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Notes

1. The authors whose contributions are featured in this special issue met for the first time in Bergen in 2016and collectively developed the orientation outlined in this introduction.

2. Examples of such accounts would arguably be Gill (2003), Harvey (2005), McNally (2010), and Panitchand Gindin (2012).

3. We use the term ‘global South’ loosely so as to include Russia. Clearly reconfigurations of the world-system render the homogeneity of the ‘global South’ moot.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Alf Gunvald Nilsen is an associate professor at the Department of Global Development and Planning at theUniversity of Agder and a Research Associate at the Society, Work and Development Institute at the Universityof the Witwatersrand.

Karl von Holdt is the Director of the Society, Work and Development Programme at the University of theWitwatersrand.

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