Work and Revolt at Brazil’s Dead End [II]

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Abandon All Hope

In the leadup to a national truck drivers strike on February 1st, 2021, a video circulated through WhatsApp groups of a driver who had hung himself in a tree by the side of the highway, next to his truck. The scene was shared with mournful messages and warnings about the desperate situation of self-employed truckers, who were trapped between low freight rates and spikes in driving costs, especially fuel. Even so, the movement got nowhere close to achieving the strength of the May 2018 strike, during which the supply chains of the whole country were choked in a matter of days and the government, terrified, offered some immediate relief, through measures that would lose effect in the following years.¹ Lacking the broad — and ambiguous — coalition of the preceding mobilization, which involved owner-operator truckers, small fleet owners, and even several large transportation companies, the irruption in the beginning of 2021 amounted to the scattered initiative of independent truckers who assembled highway blockades in several states, but which were quickly dismantled by highway police.²

Although the strike did not take off, the unrest contaminated other workers who also rely directly on fuel to make a living in the cities. Between February and April, demonstrations by couriers, app drivers, and self-employed school bus drivers took place almost daily throughout Brazil. Alongside new protests by truckers, all of this gave an insurrectionary contour to streets whose daily circulation had been reduced by the peaking second wave of coronavirus. This movement of motorized workers blocked highways and Petrobrás distribution centers; it crammed itself into gas stations, with the tactic of refueling only 1 real to produce queues and cause losses to the retailers; it reignited the organization of the courier strikes, and powered the largest motorcade of Uber drivers in the history of São Paulo, which blocked access to the Guarulhos International Airport for an entire night, demanding the end of low paid promotional rides.³Whereas inflation traditionally translates into demands around the cost of living, in the era of Uberization it leads chiefly to protests over the costs of work, i.e. to struggles over the ability to work. The reproduction of the workforce turns into the management of the microenterprise of oneself — hence the frequent rapprochement between protests against hikes in fuel prices and anti-lockdown campaigns of shop owners during the first months of the year. For many, these strikes were the last resource before abandoning the fight and surrendering all weapons, that is, before returning the car to the rental companies (in some cities, app driver associations estimate that more than half of the drivers registered in the platforms gave up working during the year of 2021).⁴

Between the growing financial inviability of self-employment, on one hand, and the crumbling of formal employment, on the other, there is nowhere to run. The only alternative is the endless rat race, viraçāo [getting by] under more and more adverse conditions. This sensation of being confined to exhausting work with no future found its echo on the other side of the globe in the buzzword nèijuǎn (内卷), used by  Chinese social network users “to describe the evils of their modern lives.”⁵ Before trending in the most populous country in the world, in mid-2020 the term was used by scholars to translate the concept of “involution," a dynamic of stagnation in agrarian societies — but also of big cities in the peripheries of global capitalism — in which the intensification of work does not amount to modernization.⁶Composed by the characters “in” [内] and “to roll” [卷] the expression can be “intuitively understood as “turning inward."⁷While “development," in English, carries the image of an outward unfolding towards something, nèijuǎn suggests a stripped screw revolving around itself: a ceaseless movement in place. Isn’t this, after all, the endless everydayness of viração? Echoing the despair of the daily experience of students and workers in the chinese metropolises, the term condenses

the feeling of being trapped in a miserable cycle of exhausting work that is never sufficient to achieve happiness or lasting improvements, but from which no one may opt out without falling into disgrace. They feel it when they complain that life feels like an endless competition with no victors, and they feel it when they dream of the day that’s coming when they will finally win. But that day never comes. Debts pile up, petitions for help go ignored, remaining options start to dwindle. In a time of involution, when even the smallest reforms seem impossible, all that remains are desperate measures.⁸

If part of the same despair runs through the struggles of freelance drivers in Brazil, it assumes even more dramatic outlines in the Chinese streets and roads. In January 2021, a delivery worker who had his payment refused by the app self-immolated in front of his delivery station in Taizhou. In April, a trucker in Tangshan who had his vehicle seized by the police for being overweight drank a bottle of pesticide and sent a farewell message to his fellow drivers via social media. Over the course of that same month, a man from São Caetano do Sul confined to a wheelchair strapped fake explosives to his body and threatened to blow up a Social Security Institute building if he wasn’t granted access to his disability pension, while the resident of a village in the Southern Chinese district of Panyu — where the state had expropriated the collective lands to sell them to tourism companies — entered a local government building with real bombs and blew himself up, killing five employees.⁹ Fired in the beginning of June, a bricklayer invaded his former employer’s house on the coast of Santa Catarina, held his family hostage for ten hours before being killed by the police after releasing them.¹⁰ The pandemic brought with it even more pressure and desperation, as is evident in the case of the man who crashed his car into the reception desk of an overcrowded public hospital in the metropolitan region of Natal after his wife, infected with Covid, was denied care.¹¹

When a Military Police soldier in Bahia abandoned his post and drove alone for more than 250 kilometers to Farol da Barra (a tourist spot in El Salvador) and opened fired with his rifle into the air while screaming denunciations of the violation of “dignity” and the “honor of the worker," his outburst was celebrated in anti-lockdown networks as an heroic gesture against the “illegal orders” of the governors.¹² The tragic end met by the soldier, who was killed in a shootout with his own colleagues, was instrumentalized by far right congressmen to incite a mutiny among the troops. However, the police motorcade that left the scene the next day ran straight into a traffic jam caused by another demonstration: couriers were denouncing the death of a fellow delivery worker who had been run over by a drunk driver speeding down the wrong way of the road the night before. Accidentally united by their mourning for fallen comrades in a social war with no defined form, the protest routes converged toward the state government’s headquarters.¹³

At the same time the it aggravates the crisis, or rather, widens the cesspool in which we’ve been struggling for decades without moving an inch, Bolsonaro’s scorched earth policing enables him to mobilize despair into suicidal bursts under the promise of a decision¹⁴ — the idea of taking “one final shot.”¹⁵ As much as discontent with the rise in fuel prices has cut into the president’s support among one of his key “bases" (truckers), Bolsonarism was still the chief political force that had any capacity to dispute the social turbulence of these apocalyptic times, by molding diverse dissatisfactions into a “revolt within the order,"¹⁶ diverting them either toward targets aligned with the institutional agenda — whether they be mayors, governors, judiciary, the media, the vaccine, or the electronic ballot box — or else  simply mimicking concrete struggles through aesthetic rituals, as with his Sunday motorcycle trips.

At the peak of the turmoil, the Supreme Court placed a decisive piece back on the board, which its judges had removed from the game a few years earlier. By overturning Lula’s convictions and enabling him to run for elections again, the decision signaled that perhaps it isn’t possible to contain the onslaught of the Bolsonarist insurgency without turning to the commander of the great pacification operation that went practically unchallenged until the blow of June 2013 — presumably with the expectation that everything will go back to its normal functioning once again. However, amidst the current escalation of social warfare, it is worth asking “what tools he will have on hand to pacify” an urban mass in an accelerated trajectory of “downward proletarization”?¹⁷ As much as the judiciary’s maneuver may revive the Left’s vain hope of restoring the dismantled rights, the policymakers of the Workers’ Party economic program for 2022 not only acknowledge labor’s loss of form but also echoes iFood executives in “taking the digital platform workers out of regulatory limbo,"¹⁸ which “doesn’t mean framing them under the old Labor Law but neither leaving as they are today."¹⁹

“A new Lula government will mean, at best, that people can continue to work as Uber drivers”²⁰, with a regulated “partnership” between platform and drivers and more “legal security” for the companies. Even though Bolsonaro’s incendiary government provides fertile grounds for the expansion of business, Brazilian food tech does not dismiss the expertise in dialogue and conflict mediation accumulated in the country during “popular democratic” governments. In order to minimize the negative impact of protests on its brand, iFood — which, by the way, celebrates “the goal of diversity and racial and gender inclusion” within its offices²¹ — has been recruiting cadres forged in NGO’s and social projects in favelas in order to placate the rebellion of its motorized “partners.”²² Throughout 2021, couriers involved in strikes throughout the country were sought out by a “community manager” hired by the company, yet it was not so as to meet their demands but to engage in dialogue, announcing the organization of a “Delivery Worker’s Forum”²³ with digital influencers and alleged strike leaders in the finest style of participatory conferences from yesterday’s Brazil. 

A return of the former metalworker to the presidential palace would not signify a moment of national reconstruction, but a chance to bury the wreckage and consolidate new terrains for accumulation in the country; in other words, to normalize the disaster by giving it the taste of victory — and, for that reason, making it “more perfect than would ever be possible under a conservative politician."²⁴ The expectations for the 2022 elections thus deepen the state of waiting of the big left wing parties and small collectives, which during the pandemic found in the imperative of social isolation the excuse for its political quarantine. In embodying the defense of the public health recommendations, the left conformed itself to the reality of the remote work, in a paralyzing wait with diminished expectations: the wait for the daily count of the dead, hoping for the fall of the contamination numbers; the wait for the arrival of the vaccines to Brazil, followed by the wait — and the dispute²⁵ — for a place in the line; the wait for the end of the “Bozo government," animated by each new deadlock with the Supreme Court or testimony in the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry about the pandemic management; in short, the wait for the worst to pass and for everything to go back to being slightly less bad, like before. By mid 2021, with the slackening of the pandemic this inert hope left the nest and became an aerial photograph. However, if the left wing parades demonstrated the scale of the president’s disapproval in the main cities of the country, they also made the impotence of this opposition flagrant. After gathering hundreds of thousands of people, the rallies gradually dwindled as they entered into the holding pattern of the organizing entities.

The lethargy of the left contrasts with the insurgency of the far-right, which feeds on the mobilization of those who no longer harbor any hopes. And if it is not possible to rule out an unexpected victory of Bolsonaro in the ballots, neither one can dismiss the threats of a rupture of the institutional order, always postponed in order to keep its militancy in an almost paranoid readiness while keeping the opposition on a defensive stance, hypnotized by the imminence of a decisive coup that never comes. Politics remains in a trance, in an eternal preparation for a conflict that never erupts, which is, in itself, already a war tactic in the arsenal of “hybrid” management of territories and populations.

Even though relying only on the same ever faithful crowd, the Bolsonarist demonstrations of September 7th, Brazil’s Independence Day, represented less a sign of impotence²⁶ than a testing ground for military mobilization exercises. In the dawn of the following day, when the highways of fifteen states of the country were blocked by truckers — which, until this point had proven incapable of sustaining a movement around the freight and fuel prices, attesting to the considerable support for the President’s strategic offensive against electronic ballots and the Supreme Court²⁷ — the government was forced to recognize that the call was nothing but a dress rehearsal, provoking the rage of many protesters and displaying a glimpse of a Bolsonarism that already goes beyond Bolsonaro himself. Whether inside or outside of the State, whether commanded by the captain or not, “the revolution through which we are living”²⁸ — which “positions violence, and the use of armed strength, as an essential political resource” — will make itself felt well beyond 2022, as in the almost surrealist scenes of the assault on the United States Capitol and other state legislative houses after Donald Trump's defeat.²⁹

Scheduled for September 11, a new national strike of app delivery has come to be confused with the news of the truckers' strike — less because of the support for the president than because of the significance that the last major strike of that other central category of the logistics sector acquired in the imaginary of the motorcycle couriers.³⁰ Without the same repercussions as the previous year's App Strike, the 2021 strike lingered, here and there, beyond the scheduled date. In a beverage distribution company of the app Zé Delivery, in the south zone of São Paulo, riders decided to start the strike two days earlier to demand late payments.³¹ And in São José dos Campos, in the countryside of São Paulo, the delivery drivers remained on strike for the next five days, in the longest app strike the country had yet seen.³²

Inspired by a video in which motorcycle couriers from the capital city enacted step by step “how to pickett a shopping mall,"³³ the deliverers in the state's fifth largest municipality split into small groups to blockade the city's major establishments, while others circulated on the streets to intercept scabs, as well as distribute water and food to the strikers. Each night, everyone gathered in a square to discuss the directions of the movement and vote on whether to continue the strike. While a smaller app, new to the city, gave in to the pressure by announcing an increase in fees, iFood organized a counter-offensive and promised a meeting to the local leaders, through one of its “community mediators." The news that the largest food delivery platform in Latin America had opened a negotiation — however limited — in the face of the heroic persistence of the “three hundred from São José dos Campos," as memes on the motorcycle couriers' networks portrayed it, gave that defeat the taste of victory and turned it into an example for onlookers. In the following weeks, the hinterlands of São Paulo were swept by an uncoordinated sequence of strikes, which would continue for several days in Jundiaí, Paulínia, Bauru, Rio Claro, São Carlos and Atibaia.³⁴

In the tense moments that marked the end of the mobilization in São José dos Campos, however, the promises of dialogue were combined with another iFood negotiation with local restaurant owners and logistics operators that, in a threatening tone, sent a message to the couriers that the continuity of the movement could lead to “acts of violence” in the city.³⁵ By resorting at once to participationist and militia-like demobilization strategies, Brazil's largest delivery app hints at the future of the country between Lula and Bolsonaro — or simply reminds us that pelegos [sheepskins, union bureaucrats] and jagunços [henchmen, roughnecks] have always crossed paths in the greyzone of popular intermediators.³⁶

Formless Class Struggle

In the first days of March 2019, passengers encountered closed ticket offices at several subway stations in São Paulo. This was not at all strange, since headaches from the card reloading system are a routine part of using public transportation in the city. What looked more like a technical problem from outside the booths was, however, an invisible movement taken by outsourced ticket vendors against illegal cuts in their salaries, among other illicit schemes often used by the service provider to reduce its personnel expenses.³⁷"Exploiting the ambiguous boundary between the precariousness of the already usually dysfunctional system, the winding up [...] and an effective ‘partial stoppage,’" the outsourced ticket takers conducted an intermittent strike in which interruptions and returns to work succeeded each other “at various ticket offices, according to opportunities, the force of the moment," and with no apparent coordination.³⁸ One turnstile away, the conflict passed almost unnoticed in the eyes of most of the subway's permanent employees, known for their intense union activity. Besides exposing the abyss opened by outsourcing within the same workspace, the difficulty in recognizing that strike, completely outside the official rites — without a delimited beginning or end, without a clear announcement, without assemblies or formal negotiations — is a sign of the disappearance of form from social conflicts in a world of formless labor.³⁹

Like the subterranean mobilization in the ticket offices, countless stoppages of delivery workers explode and fall apart without precise contours, in the shadowy spaces geared towards the diffuse work that moves urban logistics: shopping mall docks, motorcycle parking lots, distribution centers, dark kitchens and dark stores⁴⁰, as well as virtual environments. If among the subway outsourced workers the insubordination oscillated from one station to another according to the gaps and the pressure of the moment, among the motorcycle couriers it is usual for the conflict to move from store to store, from one neighborhood to another, or from city to city in a discontinuous and unpredictable manner: while the first strikers reach their limit of strength and resources, a new group announces a strike in another place, propelled by videos and reports that spread in real time.

When high labor turnover is the rule, struggles also tend to revolve: within a city, it is common for those on the frontline of an app strike to have never participated in previous struggles. And if this fact hinders a consistent process of co-optation of leaders, the centrifugal dynamic of the struggles also presents a challenge for any efforts to organize the movement. WhatsApp groups emerge and are abandoned at each mobilization, workers gather and disperse with the same volatility with which a conversation on the sidewalk is interrupted when the notification of a new order arrives: like molecules of gas that condense in a storm, it is only at the moment of confrontation that this cloud-proletariat takes form.

“A ‘base’ that only exists in confrontation," that “dissolves as soon as the action declines…is not capable of being managed."⁴¹ As for the leaders that do emerge publicly, far from leading a cohesive contingent of motorcycle couriers, they count, at best, upon a diffuse network of followers in the cloud. For YouTubers and influencers linked to the movement, who are less leaders than “political entrepreneurs," the commitment to the cause is often confused with a personal career.⁴² Winning the fight is not dissociated from profiting from the fight, which can mean anything from monetizing videos, to collaborating on marketing efforts, or being invited to become the owner or manager of a Logistic Operator. This ambiguity, which describes a zone of indistinction between political action and work, is already to some extent contained in the current vocabulary of delivery drivers: being a “warrior” or “facing the struggle” are expressions that can refer both to the conflict against the platforms and to the low-intensity war experienced in the day-to-day rush on two wheels.⁴³ The profusion of app drivers' candidacies in the 2020 municipal elections, mostly by political machines and right-wing parties, represent much more a path of individual ascension than the deliberate tactics of an articulated movement of the sector, which does not exist.⁴⁴

Today, organizational structures only endure outside the conflict to the extent that they operate as gears of labor itself, such as the countless professional associations, unions and cooperatives that function, for the deliverers, as channels for insertion into the labor market — as well as the large social movements of decades ago, which now subsist as mediators of access to government programs and the market. It’s enough to recall the latest success of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in the financial sector, a partnership with large business groups to raise funds for seven rural workers' cooperatives — among which are some of the largest organic food producers on the continent⁴⁵ — by issuing bonds within the reach of “small and medium investors” on an online platform.⁴⁶ Faced with the insufficiency and dismantling of policies to promote the so-called “family agriculture," MST turned directly to the market, in an operation that raised more than 17 million reais without any mediation by government programs, a move entirely in sync with the growing valuation (and quantification) of the “social impact” investments worldwide.⁴⁷

After all, it’s been quite some time since certain social movements migrated to the cloud. Throughout the 2000s, the challenges of managing land squats with hundreds of families in the metropolitan outskirts, replete with disputes among competing territorial powers and always under threat of eviction, led more and more housing movements (notably the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST)) to recognize their squats as a necessarily provisional moment and to adopt, as a permanent structure, a large registry of families. While other organizations built a base by collecting rent in squatted buildings, the MTST expanded its ranks by demanding engagement rather than money: participation in assemblies and protests yields points that determine access to the rental subsidy program negotiated with the government, and each family's score determines the ranking in the waiting line for the promised house.⁴⁸ In short, the “rank and file work” gave way to the work of the rank and file. With pioneering technology, the movement has digitalized part of this internal logistics of squats and demonstrations into an app, and more recently launched a campaign called “Hire those who struggle," which relies on a WhatsApp bot capable of connecting registered homeless people to clients seeking a range of services.⁴⁹

If “the boundary between forms of association aimed at collective struggle and those intended to further engage the worker in exploitation has blurred,"⁵⁰ it is by no means strange that the conflicts of our time occur outside consolidated organizations, or even against them, but without building any structure in their place. The largest wave of strikes in the country's history, from 2011 to 2018 — and not the 1980s, as one might assume — has so little to do with the cycle of struggles that marked the end of the dictatorship that the comparison becomes almost misplaced.⁵¹ When resurging in relatively stable fordist niches forty years ago, the unionism still nurtured a horizon of expansion of conquests, in which new and important mass organizations were forged, integrated in the general effort of “building democracy” — a mantra that, from then on, would dissipate “in a perpetual present of redoubled work."⁵² Over the last decade, the strikes “increasingly took place in the field of immediate, urgent reactions”⁵³: for the payment of delayed salaries and compliance with legislation, against plant closings and mass layoffs, among other “defensive” claims. Carried out in default of the unions and often hostile to their representatives, such movements sometimes took on insurrectionary features, such as the rebellions at the construction sites of the late Growth Acceleration Program (PAC)⁵⁴ or the wildcats of bus drivers outside the garages on the eve of the World Cup.⁵⁵

Despite its unprecedented scale, the 2010 strike wave left no room for any “accumulation of forces” — neither here, nor in China. Contrary to what one might imagine, the situation was similar in the industrial heartland of the planet, which went through a wave of worker unrest in the same period. Without official channels of representation, the scattered and violent strikes that multiplied in Chinese factories ended up “unable to build a durable organization or articulate political demands.”⁵⁶ With airs of “looting," the strike appeared as a moment to “take-whatever-you-can-get” in exchange for the unbearable day-to-day life in the industrial districts: “obtain back wages, holiday bonuses, unpaid benefits, or simply to get back at managers who had sexually harassed workers, owners who had hired thugs to beat up workers who stand up for themselves, etc.”⁵⁷ Other times, workers would “just take the money and leave” — or rather, “lifting the bucket” and abandoning their lodgings, to use the typical Chinese migrant worker expression that has recently gone viral alongside videos critical of factory life.⁵⁸

Without the old “horizon of 'conquests' to be accumulated, in a broader perspective of progressive integration," what is left to the struggles of our time is to recede little by little or escalate immediately, “assuming insurrectionary forms without any mediation (without before and after).”⁵⁹ Therefore, protests against an increase in transportation fares become, in a few days, earthquakes in the streets of Brazil or Chile; police violence burns cities in Greece, the United States, or Nigeria; an increase in fuel shuts down Ecuador, France, Iran or Kazakhstan. Even if the initial demands provide minimal outlines to these uprisings, their explosion tends to stretch and dilute them into a generalized revolt against the order — which ends up translated in many cases, inaccurately, into a revolt “against the government."⁶⁰

As intense as they are discontinuous, without ever assuming stable forms, the conflicts that proliferate from one end of the globe to the other can be described as “social non-movements."⁶¹ Brought up in debates in certain militant circles, the expression comes in handy in a context of an increasingly atomized “class struggle without class organization"⁶², whose propagation passes not so much through centralized structures as through actions that replicate themselves in a dispersed manner. Non-movements expand through gestures that can be “copied and imitated, accumulating instances of repetition”⁶³ and branching out like memes on the internet — but on the streets, in a dynamic that feeds back into the networks. This was certainly the case with the App Strike, which was neither an organization nor a planned campaign but a replicable gesture spread through videos that followed the same script. The same is true of the shutdowns in the telemarketing industry right after the arrival of the new coronavirus; the blockades of dozens of traffic circles by pedestrians wearing reflective vests in France; the student evasions and the primera línea [frontliners] during the Chilean protests. By multiplying these decentralized acts, conflicts acquire scale without acquiring a stable form (when the form is fixed, the meme loses its momentum and is in danger of becoming a brand, an image that is empty of content, an aestheticization of revolt).⁶⁴

Pushed by diffuse turmoil and with no interlocutors to negotiate with, governments and businesses around the world are challenged to “respond unilaterally and rationally to an 'irrational' insurgency."⁶⁵ The formalization of non-movements — that is, their translation into a grammar legible to institutions — stands as a precondition for their neutralization and incorporation. However, even when revolts are victorious in their immediate demands, the return to normality usually carries the perception that nothing has improved, or even that the situation has worsened. The inability of the state to fully absorb the energy of confrontation leaves a latent dissatisfaction, which can reverse itself into the opposite of the original impulse — wasn't this, after all, the continuity between the June 2013 uprising and the Bolsonarist insurgency?⁶⁶ From the election of politicians who openly assume social violence to the degradation into actual civil wars, non-movements often end up accelerating the destructive tendency of the crisis itself.⁶⁷ Intense and exhausting mobilizations that never really leave their seat: are the conflicts of our time trapped in the infernal cycle of nèijuǎn?

On the charred walls of the subway stations of an uprisen Hong Kong, phrases like “I‘d rather become ashes than dirt” or “If we burn, you burn with us” condensed a precise image not only of the dead end faced by the rioters of that city, but of the suffocating atmosphere that weighs on the uprisings of our time.⁶⁸ If it makes little sense to talk about the accumulation of forces, “the anger certainly accumulates,"⁶⁹ and is always a short step away from descending into violence among the flayed themselves. Without significant changes in working conditions, it is not uncommon to hear motorcycle delivery drivers defending the strikes as a way to at least take revenge on the apps — but the collective hatred can quickly turn against a driver in a traffic fight or a motorcycle thief caught in the act and about to be lynched.⁷⁰ With the same vengeful and suicidal features as these individual outbursts of despair, the confrontations often boil down to an escalation of senseless violence.⁷¹ And someone needs to stick around to clean it up — as occurred the morning after the largest demonstration in Chile's history, when Venezuelan migrants organized to voluntarily clean the streets of downtown Santiago; or in Quito, in that same October 2019, where the clearing of the barricades was left to a task force organized by Ecuador's own National Indigenous Coordination (CONAIE) after an agreement ended the uprising. Seen from this perspective, riots and rebellions of the most varied dimensions become another routine fact of our catastrophic daily life.

Interestingly, the term “non-movements” first appeared in sociological literature to describe the “constant state of insecurity and mobilization” of subaltern urban layers “whose livelihoods and sociocultural reproduction often depend on the illegal use of the public spaces of the street” in a “long war of attrition” with the authorities in contemporary Middle Eastern metropolises.⁷² Not very distant from the rush of hustlers or delivery drivers in the Brazilian streets, always ready to evade a police roadblock, avoid paying bus fares, or cross a red light to get by: “dispersed efforts," individual, daily and continuous, that may involve “collective actions when gains are threatened."⁷³ With just one spark, this desperate routine of work, which transitions at every moment between resistance and engagement, can break down in a desperate explosion — it is well worth remembering that it was the self-immolation of a street vendor whose fruit cart had just been confiscated that served as the trigger for the 2011 protests in Tunisia.

On the street corners where we hustle between “bullshit jobs” and temporary gigs — where there is nothing promising in sight except to escape — insubordination erupts with the same urgency, the same immediacy as just-in-time production. Conflicts explode as a desperate gesture, a cry of “fuck this shit” in which “suffering, frustration, and revolt” are mixed together, often in the form of an act of individual — or at best, collective — revenge.⁷⁴ Like the recent wave of desertions from work in the United States⁷⁵ and other parts of the world, the stampede from call centers in the first days of the pandemic in Brazil was a sign of refusal of a routine that, in order to cope with a collapsing “normality," becomes even more hellish. With each new emergency — health, environmental, economic, social — the screw of work intensification tightens, everyone is fully mobilized in an endless effort in which nothing but “negative experiences” are formed.⁷⁶ If the “non-movements” bring good news, however, it is precisely this: they “signal that the proletariat no longer has any romantic task”: nothing to hope for, but also nothing to lose.⁷⁷ 

March 2022

Translated by the authors, in collaboration with Ill Will.

Images: Adam Magyar