Abstract
The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST)—Homeless Workers’ Movement—is a social movement that struggles for housing and for a radical transformation of capitalistic socio-economic relations. The present paper offers a problematization of the movement’s plea to social rights. They are part of the movement’s discourse and strategy. However, the activists’ objective is more radical: they aim at a complete transformation of the Brazilian economy and society. By first discussing two sets of literatures—Critical Legal Theory and Governmentality Studies—this article illustrates the complexity and the ambivalences of a radical politics of rights. Then, by contrasting my ongoing ethnographic research with the work of James Holston and Lucy Earle, I discuss the relevance of a citizenship framework for the MTST’s struggle. Finally, inspired by Foucault’s concept of counter-conducts, the article argues that the movement’s politics of rights represents an effective tactic to contrast neoliberal governmentality and to create radical democratic spaces of struggle and collective resistance.
Highlights
The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST)—Homeless Workers’ Movement—is a social movement that struggles for housing and for a radical transformation of capitalistic socio-economic relations
When I encountered the movement in April 2018, activists were preparing for the presidential campaign of Guilherme Boulos, who ran as presidential candidate for a small leftist party (PSOL—Partido Socialismo e Libertade—Socialism and Liberty Party) in the elections of October 2018
I conducted most of my fieldwork with the MTST at the Marielle Vive occupation—Marielle Lives—in the northern periphery of São Paulo
Summary
Critical Legal scholarship has been sceptically looking at rights and the law, foreseeing deradicalisation and co-optation of protests. In 1978, Stuart Scheingold (2004) coined the term ‘the myth of rights’ to underline how rights are social constructs He shows how legal rights are not directly empowering but rather their effectiveness depends on external socio-political conditions. The hypothetical creation of the right not to be poor would to a certain extent, operate as a reinforcing mechanism of socio-economic inequalities This is because rights discourses can have a regulatory and deradicalising effect through political recognition. In contrast to traditional socio-legal scholars like Scheingold, Brown’s approach to rights considers them from a perspective that incorporates social and political structures Her conclusions resemble that tradition, in which she argues that rights cannot be used to destabilise the system from within and that they are useful only as mobilising tools
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