Justification work: The homeless workers’ movement and the pragmatic sociology of dissent in Brazil’s crisis

Abstract

In the late 2000s, a number of analysts were optimistic about Brazil's future. Their expectant analyses did not bear out, however, as a political and economic crisis developed just as Brazil was gearing up to host two mega-events, the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. This paper has two aims. The first is to deepen our understanding of the crisis through examining one of the foremost civil society actors to emerge in this period: the Landless Workers' Movement (Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem-Teto, MTST). The second is to use this case to consider the potential for the sociology of critical capacity-a field of theory that emerged out of the Political and Moral Sociology Research Group in Paris in the 1980s-to contribute to theorising the 'justification work' of social movements.

Full text

Justification work: the homeless workers’movement
and the pragmatic sociology of dissent in Brazil’s
crisis
Victor Albert
a
and Maria Davidenko
b
a
Department of Public Policy, National Research University Higher School of Economics,
Moscow, Russia;
b
The International College of Economics and Finance, National Research
University Higher School of Economics, Moscow, Russia
ABSTRACT
In the late 2000s, a number of analysts were optimistic about Brazil’s future. Their
expectant analyses did not bear out, however, as a political and economic crisis
developed just as Brazil was gearing up to host two mega-events, the World Cup
in 2014 and the Olympic Games in 2016. This paper has two aims. The first is to
deepen our understanding of the crisis through examining one of the foremost
civil society actors to emerge in this period: the Landless Workers’Movement
(Movimento de Trabalhadores Sem-Teto, MTST). The second is to use this case
to consider the potential for the sociology of critical capacity - a field of
theory that emerged out of the Political and Moral Sociology Research Group
in Paris in the 1980s - to contribute to theorising the ‘justification work’of
social movements.
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 21 December 2016; Accepted 12 March 2018
KEYWORDS Brazil; social movements; homeless workers’movement; pragmatic sociology
Introduction
At the end of the 2000s the prognoses of Brazil’s future were optimistic.
This was, it was thought, a ‘New Brazil’(Roett, 2011), one which was
no longer merely a ‘country of the future’, a land of perennially unrealised
potential, but which had stabilised politically, was experiencing strong
economic growth and had taken its place on the global stage (see Eakin,
2013). Even inequality, arguably the most steadfast of Brazil’s problems,
had notably diminished, with a group of economists charting the emer-
gence of a ‘new middle class’that had risen out of the most disenfran-
chised sectors of Brazilian society due to an improving labour market
and government social programmes (Neri, 2010; Neri, Carvalhães, &
CE: SS QA: Coll:
© 2018 European Sociological Association
CONTACT Victor Albert victoralbert@gmail.com
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Monte, 2010; Neri, 2011; however see Pochmann, 2014; Arretche, 2015).
Such expectant analyses helped to form a narrative of progress that
chimed well with the media frames as they first developed around the
World Cup and Olympic Games, which Brazil was soon to host. The nar-
rative did not last, however, as a grave political and economic crisis began
to take shape over the first five years of the following decade.
The unfolding crisis has been principally interpreted according to
macro-political and economic frames. In this paper,we add a qualitative
dimension to the study of the crisis, and do so through an examination of
the politics and activities of one of the most important collective actors to
emerge therein: the Homeless Workers’Movement (Movimento de Tra-
balhadores Sem-Teto, MTST). The MTST separated from the Landless
Peasants Movement (Movimento de Trabalhadores Rurais Sem-Teto,
MST), Brazil’s large agrarian movement, in 1997, with the aim of apply-
ing the land occupation strategies of its agrarian progenitor to urban
regions, initially in Campinas –the State of São Paulo’s third-largest
city –and then in the city of São Paulo itself (Rosa, 2015; Tedesco,
2013
AQ2
¶
, p. 97). During its first decade and a half of existence the MTST
maintained a low public profile, despite engaging in a number of land
occupations in São Paulo. This changed as the movement evolved and
grew as the crisis developed, through combining combative direct-
action tactics, the use of a government housing programme and a
strong media presence.
This paper has two aims. First, it fills in an important gap in existing
analyses of and commentary on the crisis by examining the MTST, one
of the foremost civil society protagonists to contest first the impeachment
of the centre-left Workers’Party President, Dilma Rousseff, and then the
new government led by former Vice-President Michel Temer. Second, we
use this case study to examine how the sociology of critical capacity might
apply to the study of social movements. The sociology of critical capacity
is a field of inquiry that emerged out of the Political and Moral Sociology
Research Group in Paris and which foregrounds the political-moral
dimensions of social life (Blokker, 2011). While the sociology of critical
capacity shares much in common with social movement studies –and
in particular a substantive interest in dispute, contestation,and
cooperation –it has not been comprehensively applied to the study of
social movements (Jasper, 2007, p. 88; see Clément, 2015). Drawing on
the case of the MTST, we argue that the sociology of critical capacity con-
tains a latent theorisation of key elements of the different kinds of ‘justi-
fication work’(Jagd, 2011) in which movement actors are engaged.
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The paper proceeds as follows. In the opening sections,we review the
sociology of critical capacity and examine its potential to contribute to
the study of social movements, before providing a history of the crisis
in Brazil and the MTST. In the substantive sections of the paper we
examine the justification work of the movement in different presenta-
tional forms and social spaces. First, we analyse the broad, publicly avail-
able justifications of the MTST based on written texts, which draw on
principles of justice and develop a social critique of property relations
in Brazil. Second, we examine the way that movement members test com-
mitment to the movement through evaluations of its moral character and
support of their own plans. Third, we examine how the ‘orders of worth’
might apply to the spatiality of contests between the MTST and the auth-
orities, based on a couple of related protests in the early months of 2016.
In the concluding sections,we critically evaluate the possible contribution
of the sociology of critical capacity to the study of social movements.
The sociology of critical capacity and social movements
The research programme initiated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot
three decades ago has gone by various appellations, but the most promis-
ing and relevant for the analysis of social movements is the ‘sociology of
critical capacity’(Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999
AQ3
¶
). This attention to ‘critical
capacity’is often contrasted with the tendency in critical theory to down-
play the critical ability of agents to make judgements, evaluate alternatives
and cooperate with others. The sociology of critical capacity thus sought to
theorise the rationalisation of judgements, the means by which agreement
is reached between disputants and the moral dimensions of cooperation.
In On Justification, the founding text of the approach, Boltanski and Thé-
venot develop a flexible framework for the analysis of disputes and agree-
ments, by elaborating ‘economies of worth’(Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006).
Though often described as ‘ideal types’(e.g. Jagd, 2011), these ‘economies
of worth’are perhaps more productively considered here as moral-cultural
repertoires (Silber, 2003)or‘forms of argumentation’(Ricoeur, 2000,
p. 83) from which actors may draw in the evaluation of everyday
events, actions,and relationships.
A central premise of the economies of worth approach is that in order
to be considered socially legitimate, actors justify actions through drawing
on a notion of the good that extends beyond the self, requiring a ‘rise in
generality’. Boltanski and Thévenot derive six orders of worth (or ‘poli-
ties’) from key texts of political philosophy (2006, p. 67) which specify a
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plurality of public goods. These include: the market polity (whose key the-
oretician is Adam Smith), the inspired polity (St. Augustine), the polity of
renown (Hobbes), the civic polity (Rousseau), and the industrial polity
(Saint-Simon). Subsequent research has also expanded these to include
the networked order of worth (Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005) and a
green order of worth, which has accompanied the spread of environment-
alism (Thévenot et al., 2000).
The sociology of critical capacity is not only concerned with discursive
legitimacy, however. Orders of worth have common requirements for
inclusion (Thévenot, 2011, p. 44) and correspond to different sets of ‘qua-
lified objects’, which are used in the course of evaluation and the pursuit of
public legitimacy. Boltanski and Thévenot use the term ‘worlds’for the
combination of the orders of worth and their qualified objects and con-
ventions. The industrial world is composed of factories and manpower
(objects), for instance, whose products may be compared according to
accepted criteria. There may also be compromises between the orders in
any particular evaluation. A product made in a factory, to take one
example, may function excellently but be energy inefficient and thus sus-
ceptible to criticism according to green evaluative criteria. Further, any
evaluation is impermanent, for instance when the product breaks down,
revealing a hitherto unacknowledged flaw in the industrial quality of the
machine (e.g. Thévenot, 2002
AQ4
¶
, p. 61). There thus may be compromises
and uncertainties revealed in the process of evaluation which unfold
over time.
Social movements may stake claims in terms of public goods that cor-
respond to the orders of worth, perhaps most commonly the egalitarian-
ism of the civic order. But the contestations in which they are engaged may
only be partially captured by a framework that is, for our purposes, too
narrowly focused on ‘the critical practices evident in everyday life’(Bol-
tanski, 2013, p. 47). Boltanski and Thévenot have pursued independent
research programmes following the publication of On Justification,
however, that extend the scope for social movement theorising in quite
different ways.
Boltanski’s interest in the situated ideologies and characteristic cri-
tiques of capitalism is particularly relevant for the left-wing movement
we analyse here (Boltanski, 2011,2013; Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005; see
also Chiapello, 2013). This is so because social movement claims may
be justified through critiques of capitalist relations, the inequalities they
generate, or the unjust behaviour of elites, rather than in terms of explicitly
articulated public goods. Or rather, the public goods which they pursue
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may only be implicit in their critiques of injustice, particularly as prin-
cipled demands become embedded in more polarised forms of political
contestation. Boltanski and Chiapello identify two principal critiques of
capitalism as it has developed since the nineteenth century (2005). The
first is a social critique that denounces the material inequalities that are
generated through capital accumulation, while the second is an artistic cri-
tique that takes aim at the alienation and inauthenticity created through
the commoditisation of human labour. Boltanski and Chiapello then his-
toricise the social and historical critiques, arguing that both the artistic
and the social critiques lost relevance as capitalism entered a new phase
of development after the 1970s.
While Boltanski and Chiapello argue that a new critique of capitalism
has been observable from the 1990s on –an argument further elaborated
by Blokker (2014)–it is important to recognise the plurality of modern
capitalisms (Bruff, Ebenau, & May, 2015) and acknowledge that locally
developed critiques –social or otherwise –are often historically specific.
In this respect,Brazil’s history of colonialism and elite rule is especially
relevant. The elitist and exclusionary nature of Brazilian capitalism is pro-
saically recognised in much sociological work and forms a core ingredient
of social movement discourse on the left. While there may be debate over
the imprint of colonialism on the current moment, it will suffice here to
note that social movements and many on the left combine elements of
colonialism in their critiques of actually existing capitalism, and in par-
ticular imagery that derives from the old slavocracy (such as the slave-
owner’s mansion ‘a casa grande’). Using elements of this legacy, the
MTST articulates a social critique of Brazilian capitalism that urges prac-
tical welfare reforms while also underscoring the foundational injustice of
Brazilian society.
While Boltanski pursued a broader engagement with capitalism and
social critique, Thévenot theorised pragmatic engagements that obtain
below the level of public justification and the tensions that emerge as indi-
vidual actors justify their own actions to others. This quite different line of
theorising enables a nuanced analysis of the more intimate and personal
dimensions of participation in the MTST than is possible by exclusively
focusing on public contestation and critique. We thus complement the
orders of worth approach and Boltanski’s analysis of critiques with Thé-
venot’s theorisation of ‘regimes of engagement’, which is a tripartite for-
mulation of agency that broaches the intimate and publicly legitimate
forms of pragmatic engagement. This is an important complement to
the orders of worth approach, since it allows us to theorise the role of
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the movement in rendering individual action plans publicly justifiable –or
rather, in moving from ‘engagement in a plan’to ‘engagement in a justifi-
able action’(Thévenot, 2006). In terms of its contribution to the study of
social movements, this allows us to theorise how individual actors become
caught up in the larger chains of public critique and justification in which
social movements are engaged.
This bridging between the personal and intimate and the publicly legit-
imate is important for setting out our use of ‘tests’, another key element of
the approach developed by Boltanski and Thévenot (2006, p. 40). Though
there are many potential applications to our study, two examples became
salient and concern the tests that are employed by activists to critically
evaluate the worth of the movement as they reflect on their motivations
for joining and remaining active in it. The first refers to the evaluations
of actors concerning their participation in the social movement –that
is, interrogations concerning whether the social movement belongs to
the world of civic solidarity. The second is a test that concerns the individ-
ual action plans of the actors –their ‘engagement in a plan’–that arises in
moments of doubt over whether the movement complements the actor’s
own plans. This is a quite different form of test, insofar as it concerns a
regime of engagement that is less public than the order of worth (Théve-
not, 2012, p. 249). The results of both tests, rather than occurring at ‘peak
moments’, were revealed over time, mediating the strengthening of bonds
of solidarity and influencing the recruitment and retention of activists in
the movement.
Methods
This paper draws on eight months of cooperative ethnographic research
from December 2015 to August 2016 between the two authors, which
included participant-observation of social movement meetings at the
MTST’s headquarters, participation in public protests and site visits to
land occupations (Esperença Vermelha and Rosa Luxemburgo in São
Paulo and the Glória Occupation in Uberlândia, Minas Gerais).
However, the interviews for this paper were selected from among residents
in João Candido, a housing complex in Taboão da Serra, on the outskirts
of São Paulo and the first formal settlement that had been constructed by
the MTST through a government programme called My House My Life
(Minha Casa Minha Vida, MCMV). These were chosen to show how
experienced participants in the movement thought and felt about the
MTST even after achieving their goal of permanent housing (many of
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the other interviewees, that is, those in the new land occupations, were
new to the movement). The text also draws on the writings of the move-
ment leader Guilerme Boulos and 25 in-depth interviews with movement
activists, coordinators, and ethnographic field notes. In the section below,
we provide some historical background to the crisis and the MTST before
turning to the critiques developed by Guilerme Boulos.
Sources of the crisis
The crisis is partly the result of shifts in the country’s political economy
over the past decade. Over a period of three terms in office –Luis
Ignacio ‘Lula’da Silva from 2002 to 2006 and 2006 to 2010 and Dilma
Rousseff from 2011 to 2014 –Presidents of the centre-left Workers’
Party led efforts to marry a neo-developmentalist agenda and progressive
policies with the neoliberal policy settings inherited from previous admin-
istrations. The result, particularly in Lula’s second term, was impressive: a
commodities boom helped to fund distributive policies such as Bolsa
Família (Family Grant), a conditional cash transfer scheme that provides
financial support for low-income families. The minimum wage was
increased and the labour market became more formalised, delivering
important benefits for workers such as domestic labourers. Affirmative
action policies were also pursued, such as quotas which were introduced
for the admission of black students to federal universities. But even
though Brazil initially rode out the Global Financial Crisis well (Fernandes
& Novy, 2010), Dilma’s plans to improve domestic, rather than export-
based, investment and development failed as the broader global economic
downturn that followed it began to bite (Saad-Filho & Boito, 2016,
pp. 217–219). Brazil’s external accounts suffered because of the ongoing
commodity crisis and in particular falling demand for soy, iron ore and
oil, in part due to China’s cooling economy. Further, quantitative easing
in the Eurozone, the UK,and the US provoked capital outflows and con-
tributed to the falling value of the real (Saad-Filho, 2013, p. 663).
If the country’s economic woes provided the tinder, a corruption inves-
tigation dubbed Lava Jato (or ‘Car Wash’investigation) helped to set it
alight. Lava Jato is an ongoing investigation into Brazil’s state-owned oil
and gas giant, Petrobras, which awarded over-valued contracts to a
cartel of companies and redistributed the kickbacks into politicians’cam-
paign finances and personal accounts. Though Rousseff herself was not
named in the scandal she was the chairwoman of Petrobras from 2003
to 2010, leading to widespread media speculation on her complicity in
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the scheme. An economic downturn, a corruption scandal that directly
implicated many of her close allies, and low public approval ratings pro-
vided propitious conditions for her political enemies. Thus, the fact that
Dilma had window-dressed the public accounts in the lead-up to her suc-
cessful 2014 Presidential election campaign allowed for impeachment pro-
ceedings to be launched by the President of the Lower House, Eduardo
Cunha, who was in fact named in the Lava Jato investigation. Cunha’s
push for impeachment was ultimately successful, as Rousseff was sus-
pended from office on 12 May 2016.
The MTST has been a key actor in the political opposition to the
impeachment of Dilma Rouseff and the policies pursued by her successor,
Michel Temer. We outline its emergence below.
The homeless workers’movement and my house my life
From 1997 to 2011, the MTST pursued a practice similar to the Landless
Peasants Movement (MST) from which it emerged: it would mobilise a
group of movement affiliates and occupy unused land, generally on the
periphery of São Paulo, on which it would construct temporary accommo-
dation, with the aim of making more permanent settlements once land
ownership had been awarded. This changed in 2011 when the movement
decided to no longer advocate for the construction of informal housing,
but rather use the land occupation as a symbolic act and political lever
which would help in negotiations with the government to construct
formal housing using a federal housing programme, My House My Life
(MCMV). Temporary plastic and canvas shacks would be erected on
the occupied land, each allocated to a registered movement member,
but these served only to formalise the occupation while negotiations
would take place with public authorities. This strategy achieved renown
when in 2014 the MTST occupied land near São Paulo’s World Cup
stadium amidst a wave of discontent with preparations for a sporting
event that was widely held to be the reserve of the middle/upper classes,
and claimed it for development via MCMV. The occupation –called
‘World Cup of the People’–was accompanied by a strong media cam-
paign, which bolstered the MTST’s public profile (see Magnani, 2015).
MCMV is a large federal housing programme that incurs high public
debt (see Dias, 2015), but that works through market actors –effecting a
compromise between market and civic world (e.g. Thévenot, 2014,
p. 17). This put a high value on land in peripheral areas of the city that
would be suitable for MCMV developments, which predictably led to
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increased speculation and an inflation of land prices, as developers could be
virtually guaranteed strong returns on cheap housing produced in dormi-
tory zones on the periphery. MCMV Entities (Minha Casa Minha Vida,
Entidades) is a branch of the MCMV programme and applies uniquely
to the lowest income bracket applicable (up to 1600 BRL per family per
month). The ‘entity’, be it a social movement, civic association, or coopera-
tive, would take on broad-ranging responsibilities: everything from select-
ing possible building sites, negotiating with developers, managing possible
residents,and delivering the keys to the new occupiers (Rizek, Santo
Amore, & de Camargo, 2014, p. 532). While the ‘Entities’branch of
MCMW
AQ5
¶
has in general produced better-quality developments than when
the coordinating role is provided by real-estate developers –a point that
allows for claims of industrial worth –the broader pattern for low-
income housing that is produced is easy to make out: almost all of the
low-income housing settlements occur on the periphery of the city
(Hirata & Oliveira, 2012; Marques & Rodrigues, 2015; Rolnik, 2015, p. 313).
In the following section we examine some of the key texts that justify
the movement’s occupation of under-utilised land.
Justifying land occupations
As the principal tactic of the movement is the occupation of unused land,
the MTST must challenge dominant norms concerning property acqui-
sition. In the preface to his short text Why We Occupy, Boulos (2014)
acknowledges the popular expectation that since the property owners of
unused land were likely to have legally purchased the land, then so too
ought the social movement. This is the ‘principal of equivalence’on
which property relations are founded in the market world: that the
same processes for the exchange of ownership should apply to all
parties. The capacity of the movement to legitimate its own claims and
tactics rests on an ability to demonstrate that these same rules should
not apply to the poor, that equivalent rules for property acquisition
reinforces inequalities and the disenfranchisement of the homeless.
The move throughout the text is to reveal the housing deficiencies in
the country and the sources of socio-economic inequality that gave rise
to them. Boulos often references the right to dignified housing which is
specified in Article 6 of the 1988 Federal Constitution and critiques the
realisation of this right through the real-estate market. The MCMV pro-
gramme is, Boulos recognises through quoting ex-President Lula, an
attempt to reconcile the right to housing and the jobs provided through
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the construction industry (Boulos, 2014, p. 22). But it is a failed reconci-
liation because the programme deepens dependence on the market, which
has led to the overvaluation of land, and encourages the construction of
housing far from places of work and basic public amenities (Marques &
Rodrigues, 2015).
Boulos analyses the strategies of property speculators, who have in
some cases obtained the land through falsely claiming land ownership
via manufactured legal claims, a practice called ‘grilhagem’(see Holston,
1991,2008, pp. 139–142); who strategically purchase land around new
commercial developments in anticipation of increasing demand; and
who, through demolishing and rebuilding in central areas of the city,
have raised rents and thrust the poor onto the periphery (Boulos, 2014,
pp. 27–28). In doing so, Boulos advances theories that are common in
studies of Brazilian inequality and indeed in other critiques of capitalism
(Boltanski & Chiapello, 2005, pp. 36–37; Boltanski, 2011, p. 11), by
unearthing how the formally egalitarian instruments of the Brazilian
state are used for private ends. Another recurrent theme is the association
of the state and large capital. This is another important trope in left poli-
tics in Brazil as elsewhere, just as it is quite inevitable. The MCMV pro-
gramme, for instance, was specifically designed to jumpstart the
economy through providing jobs, many of which, at least in the initial
phase of the programme, have gone to large- and medium-size construc-
tion companies (Hirata, 2009; Dias, 2015, p. 771; Rolnik, 2015: 305).
The direct-action tactics of the MTST, however, are often criticised by
those who draw on their own experiences to argue that land acquisition
should be mediated exclusively via market exchanges. For example,
Boulos gives one example where a neighbour of an occupation asks
how, after working his whole life to pay for his home, a social movement
can come and occupy land without having to work for it: ‘Do you think
that it is just to invade this land and take me off it? It is the same thing’
(our translation, Boulos, 2014, p. 42). The justificatory response is a his-
torical one. The original land invaders were the Portuguese who divided
Brazil into ‘capitanias’, which were then distributed to aristocrats with
the aim of channelling profits made therein back to Portugal. The
tactics pursued by the elites in urban regions was, for Boulos, quite
similar: powerful families seized lands via ‘grilhagem’, which then
became the source of profits which prejudiced the interests of workers.
Landownership, according to this analysis, has routinely been based on
occupation, but through its alliance with the state the landowning elite
has acquired the legitimising seal of legality.
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This land invasion could not be justified through reference to the indi-
vidual neighbour who had worked hard to purchase neighbouring land
and construct his home. It needed to be cast in a ‘higher level of generality’
(Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 33), if there was to be no awkward recog-
nition that the neighbour life’s work had helped to prop up an inherently
unjust regime of property relations and socio-spatial inequality. The cor-
responding text thus makes no mention of the neighbour’s life choices, or
his complicity in this regime, and only mentions the ideological effect of
mass media, which demonises the organisation of the poor and those who
resist the political status quo (Boulos, 2014, pp. 42–44). However, this ‘rise
in generality’does not draw on principles of justice, but rather gives an
historical account that undermines the claims of the market order, as it
generally applies to Brazilian society, in addition to advancing a metacri-
tique of mainstream media.
The regime of private property rights is further critiqued through
showing how it is only variably upheld by the legal establishment (see
Nash, 2014, p. 356). For example, in an article entitled ‘Who are the inva-
ders?’, Boulos identifies several instances where companies, private clubs,
shopping centres, banks,and supermarkets have been established through
the ‘irregular use of land’(2015, pp. 34–35). Citing a Parliamentary Com-
mission into the Irregular Use of Public Land, Boulos mentions the Con-
tinental, Eldorado and Centre North Shopping Centres, which all
irregularly occupied public land and which were legitimised by judges
after the fact, occasionally to the shock of other legal observers. Major
bank agencies in prime locations in the west of São Paulo were also con-
structed on lots which illegally extended into public lands. Even the head-
quarters of the State Association of Magistrates was constructed with
‘irregularities in the concession of use’, prompting Boulos to ask
whether ‘rubber bullets will be fired on the illustrious judges’(our trans-
lation, 2015, p. 35). Here the justificatory tactic is to challenge the univers-
alism of the law through satirically drawing on examples that liken the
transgressive moves of the MTST with the actions of other major commer-
cial and professional actors.
Such writings and their iterations in other presentational forms seek to
publicly legitimise land occupations by building on established social cri-
tiques of inequality in Brazil. These serve to break down the ‘principle of
equivalence’on which market exchanges are based, through outlining the
long history of land seizures by elites and by showing how differently the
privileged are treated for similar legal infractions. The activities of the
movement are thus justified both through intermittently employing
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principles of justice and by undermining the universal claims of the
market order, as part of a larger metacritique of Brazilian property
relations.
Next,we examine some of the more personal ways by which movement
activists interrogate the worth of the movement and give their own, more
intimate justifications of continued participation in the MTST.
Nested plans and movement tests
The broad, publicly available frames of the MTST are articulated by the
movement leadership, who are active on social media and in constant
touch with political events on the national and international scene.
Boulos’s analysis is one which, despite the odd rhetorical flourish,
would be at home in historical analyses of Brazilian inequality (see
Abreu, 2014; Secco, 2014), anchoring the movement’s claims in shared
understandings with some public legitimacy. But how are such framings
of the movement goals, and justifications of its transgressive nature,
shared by rank-and-file movement members, who must negotiate
between their own individual action plans and the justificatory frames ela-
borated by the movement leadership? In this section, movement activists
give their own justifications of continued participation in the movement,
even after they have acquired apartments through MCMV.
Many of the movement participants had had little prior experience in a
social movement. Luciano, for instance, gives a narrative of initiation into
the movement that was typical in its apolitical nature:
I had never heard of the MTST and not even of this kind of movement. My
intention was just to invade [vacant land] and construct an informal shack,
and go there to live. This was my intention. One day I was leaving work and
I passed an area that the MTST had invaded, on which it had constructed a
camp. I saw a lot of people there, camped out, and didn’t understand what it
was about.
Participation in the MTST complemented Luciano’s existing plan of
making a home for himself. While he had never heard of the movement
before becoming involved, he remained active in the movement even
after obtaining an apartment in João Candido, for the shared sense of
purpose with others involved in the MTST and also because his brothers
were now involved but had not yet secured housing.
I was able to get housing and I want others to get it as well. My brothers are
involved as well and they participate. So when there is a protest I go because
12 V. ALBERT AND M. DAVIDENKO
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450
455
460
465
470
475
480

I want them to get it as well. Many still have not got an apartment because there
weren’t opportunities for everyone, and others didn’t get it because they didn’t
believe in it. Then when they see that the movement really is honest and func-
tions, everyone wants to return [our emphases].
Faith in the ‘honesty’of the movement was not something, for Luciano,
which was granted spontaneously. Rather, Luciano reflects elsewhere in
the interview that he initially doubted the intentions of the movement
and only after proof of its moral character was provided did he begin to
believe, and a more trusting relationship ensued. However, faith in the
movement did not mean that Luciano explicitly espoused the Marxist
aims of the MTST, that is, its critique of unequal property relations and
capitalism in Brazil more broadly –something he suggested should be
left to ‘great men and women’(grandões). His involvement was thus
linked to faith in the integrity of the movement and its ability to secure
housing rather than the larger anti-capitalist ideology espoused by the
leaders. But what might this ‘honesty’mean, more specifically?
Eduardo speaks much more directly about his doubts concerning the
moral character of the movement when he observes:
So when I stayed in the camp, I began to think that the movement will want to
swallow our money [of the people camped out]; but Guilerme came to us and
said ‘We don’t want one real from you; we don’t want money from anyone,’and
from then until now no-one ever asked for one cent from anyone. Then I
started to believe in the movement, which is not interested in money, only in
the struggle …And I stayed and believed. The movement never took one
cent from my wallet; the ideal is only to struggle.
While the same idea was implied by Luciano, Eduardo more directly
states his concern that the leaders may have merely been seeking to
advance their own monetary interests. In Eduardo’s comment, ‘money’
is in clear opposition to ‘struggle’. That is, the test that the movement
must pass requires the separation of values that belong to the two different
orders of worth –the profiteering of the market world and the egalitarian
solidarity of the civic world. The test was not a kind of ‘peak moment’
when insight into the character of the movement could be gleaned;
rather it was a test over time, in ongoing engagements in which the
moral character of the movement was revealed in practice.
The pecuniary interests of the leaders were not the only, or indeed the
main, concern of the participants. Eduardo, for example, had grave doubts
about his continued participation in the movement, which arose through
the hardships he experienced in the camp and the length of time it took to
secure housing.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 13
485
490
495
500
505
510
515
520

I thought more than once about quitting because I lost my job, I was unem-
ployed, I was struggling. Have you ever thought about going two or three
days without taking a shower, in the bush, with that kind of difficulty? You
have to have a lot of determination. It is not easy. You need to have courage
and to be really needy …It was not only I [who thought about quitting]; every-
one thought about it.
Here Eduardo reveals some of the hardships he endured and the doubts
that he had over the movement’s ability to make good on its (and his)
plan to provide formal housing. This is another form of test, one that con-
cerns the pursuit of ‘individual plans of engagement’, aggregated through
movement activity, which were also revealed over time. Eduardo’s account
underscores the temporal dimension of personal justifications, and the
constant interplay among evaluations of everyday experiences, faith that
objectives will be attained and the diffusion of discursive justifications
by the movement coordinators (see Green, 2004
AQ6
¶
, p. 658).
Since the movement explicitly seeks to provide housing for its
members, it is little surprise that questions about its ability to deliver
were constantly raised by movement members. But there were also inter-
rogations about its moral character, whether it did indeed belong to the
world of civic solidarity, or whether it constituted a source of profit for
the leaders. The successful responses to both of these questions among
many of the residents of João Candido ensured their continued partici-
pation in the movement even after they had achieved their own apart-
ment. They did not necessarily espouse the formal aims of the
movement, or its broader critique of inequality, but rather rationalised
their own involvement in the movement in ways that were compatible
with these broader aims by identifying it as part of the civic world.
Tests and justifications in public space
The critical evaluations of the capacity of the MTST to provide housing
furnish one possible reason for the movement’s vehement opposition to
the impeachment; namely, the possibility that the Temer government
would weaken or end the MCMV programme, which had become
central to the movement’s ability to provide housing for its members.
But it was clearly not the only reason, since the impeachment process,
to which we now turn, was seen as a political threat to the goals of
social movements and the left more broadly. In this section,we
examine tensions between the civic and domestic worlds in a couple of
key interactions between the MTST and the public authorities.
14 V. ALBERT AND M. DAVIDENKO
525
530
535
540
545
550
555
560

On 19 April 2016, the day when the Chamber of Deputies was sched-
uled to vote on Dilma Rousseff’s impeachment, Paulista Avenue –São
Paulo’s main thoroughfare –was awash with the green, gold,and blue
of the Brazilian flag, the symbol adopted by the pro-impeachment move-
ment. The anti-impeachment protestors congregated on another large
space in the city, Valé do Anhangabaú, where the Workers’Party, the
MTST and other large unions and social movements held an alternative
event. However, as it became clear that the impeachment process would
be approved, the groups in Anhangabaú disbanded early. Those on Pau-
lista, however, celebrated into the early morning as the impeachment
process was supported by over two-thirds of the 513 representatives in
the Chamber of Deputies.
Dilma and the impeachment vote
The vote in the Chamber of Deputies was to approve the impeachment
process for financial window-dressing and was based on the notion that
intentionally delayed payments from the National Treasury to Banks
such as the INSS (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social, the administrating
body for pension payments) constituted a ‘crime of responsibility’— the
constitutional trigger for impeachment proceedings. The vote was tele-
vised and the deputies played to the national (and international) audience,
brandishing the flag and also holding placards with the condescending
mantra: ‘See you, dear’[tchau querida]. During these speeches no-one
seemed particularly concerned by the so-called window-dressing of
national accounts, a fact noted even by international publications (for
example,The Economist, 2016, 18 April).
The formal process of impeachment relied on an institutional test.
However, the indifference towards the formal infraction, indicated in
the performances in the Chamber of Deputies during the vote, suggested
a preoccupation with other commitments (Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006,
p. 231). Evidence of these other commitments and the fact that previous
Presidents had similarly manipulated the appearance of the national
accounts without congressional censure, bolstered denunciations of the
impeachment process as a coup (e.g. Singer et al., 2016). Following the
impeachment decision, the MTST played a leading role in the protests
against the new Temer government, particularly when it reneged on its
earlier commitment to maintain the social policies championed by the
Workers’Party. Of most interest to the MTST, it suspended all new
works which would be made through the MCMV Entities programme.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 15
565
570
575
580
585
590
595
600

A protest was organised by a popular front People Without Fear (Povo
sem Medo) that the MTST co-founded, which would lead from Largo
de Batata –a large public space in the city’s west –to Temer’s residence
in the upper-class neighbourhood of Alto de Pinheiros, with the plan to
establish a protest camp there. The march took place on 22 May 2016
and attracted between twenty and thirty thousand protestors, ending in
front of the acting-President’s house. The MTST constructed black
plastic shacks in front of the President’s dwelling –a form of protest
that contrasted the neighbourhood’s upper-class environs with the raw
aesthetics of the periphery. In the early hours of the morning, however,
the police dispersed the camp with tear gas and water cannon, giving
the reason that as a residential area –part of the domestic world –it
was inappropriate for such a protest.
The following week another protest was planned by the MTST on Pau-
lista Av. and would lead from the modern art museum (MASP) towards
the Office of the President in São Paulo. The movement left at around 2
pm and headed towards the President’s office, where it occupied the
foyer. The sound car which led the protest parked in front; speeches
were given by MTST activists who argued that since the movement had
been kicked out of a residential area, it had decided to occupy a decidedly
public, non-residential area (e.g. Boltanski & Thévenot, 2006, p. 186).
Soon after arriving movement members constructed a black plastic settle-
ment. More than mere symbolic adornments, these camps helped to set
the scene for the protest in such a way as to motivate fellow activists
and legitimate activities that might otherwise have seemed improper or
out of place (see Burke, 1945
AQ7
¶
: 11, 15) (see photo below).
AQ16
¶
While several activists were arrested and some tear gas was used, the
occupation remained until the morning, when in response to the encamp-
ment, the new Minister of the Cities, responsible for the MCMV pro-
gramme, reversed the government’s suspension of the programme. It
was a key tactical victory for the MTST that restored the MCMV pro-
gramme, though one which was widely felt to be merely temporary and
tenuous.
The protests which the MTST either fully or partially organised were
strategically oriented to confront opponents of the movement, while
also maintaining the peace and thus avoiding repression and refraining
from tarnishing the standing of the movement among the broader
public. They were also designed to underscore inconsistencies in the pro-
nouncements of public authorities. For instance, by occupying the Office
of the President, the MTST complied with the instructions of the police,
16 V. ALBERT AND M. DAVIDENKO
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610
615
620
625
630
635
640

returned to the public space of the civic world, and this also allowed the
movement to liken its occupation to that of a group of pro-impeachment
protestors, who had also been camped on Paulista Avenue in front of São
Paulo’s chamber of industries. Had the authorities dismantled the MTST
camp and ejected the participants, it would have given the movement a
powerful basis for criticising the hypocrisy and selectivity of the police.
This interconnected series of protests are thus part of a larger attempt
to probe the authorities’public rationalisations and to underscore the
movement’s moral standing.
In the following section,we consider the possible contributions of prag-
matic sociology, as applied here, to the study of social movements.
Justification work and the sociology of critical capacity
In the previous sections we showed how the MTST combined principles of
justice and equal treatment with a broader social critique of property
relations in Brazil. However, the movement did not weave these critiques
into a larger conception of justice based around rights to property, which
would require a thorough elaboration of the tests necessary for the main-
tenance of property rights. In this regard,Kate Nash’s critique of the
absence of a treatment of human rights and the state in Boltanski and Thé-
venot’s work is relevant (2014). Nash holds that human rights constitute a
vital polity in modern life and that they meet important criteria for orders
of worth set out in On Justification. Human rights discourse meets the cri-
terion of applying to humanity in general, with ‘no human being left out’,
but it does not meet the criterion of having gradations of eligibility.
However, where human rights posit a set of fundamental expectations
that govern one’s treatment by the state and should not be subject to qua-
lification, social rights are often subject to gradations, or criteria of eligi-
bility, based on the common good, such as geographic location, means
testing of income, and so on. This kind of qualified specification may be
advocated by more institutionalised social movements or political
actors. But the MTST does not specifically advocate for other standardised
tests for property use, other than that they be in productive use. Rather,
the MTST identifies unused land as symptomatic of broader structures
of socio-political injustice –taking aim at the ‘totality of the existing
order’(Blokker & Brighenti, 2011, p. 294) –which can be locally alleviated
through land occupation and the construction of housing. The justifica-
tions employed by movement organisers are thus not easily captured by
the orders of worth approach.
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 17
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650
655
660
665
670
675
680

Blokker and Brighenti (2011) have provided a relevant addition to Bol-
tanski and Thévenot’s project in two ways: first, by bringing it into greater
dialogue with political institutionalisation or politics-as-constitution; and
second, by positing dissent and resistance as contributions to Boltanski’s
work, as ‘dimensions of critique’. Dissent refers to a critical posture
towards institutionalised politics, as it critiques existing ‘narratives of
foundation’or other attempts at achieving semantic closure, or the
casting of the liberal-democratic project as the finished product. Dissent
works towards the correction not merely of existing democratic pro-
cedures but also ‘structural problems’that may not be compatible with
dominant legal discourses and associated forms of control. Resistance,
Blokker and Bringhenti hold, can be considered the work of hampering
and resisting what others accept. Further, resistance is associated with vio-
lence and violent acts, since they involve transgressions of social and poss-
ibly legal norms (Blokker & Brighenti, 2011, pp. 296–6)
AQ8
¶
.
According to this contribution, the MTST works at the interstices of
resistance and dissent, through a confrontational kind of politics that
changes conditions on the ground and then seeks peaceful resolution
through negotiation and the use of government programmes. However,
the ‘localised revolts’organised by the movement are oriented towards
negotiations that may draw on different orders of worth. For example,
settlements with landowners often come about through the valuation of
land and securing financing through the state (market), which may also
take into account the need to preserve environmental conditions
(green), and finally the government and other actors may take positions
based on the common good (civic). In these negotiations, the use of
tests can come into play, such as the financial standing of the landowner
vis-à-vis the state, which can facilitate the purchase of land by the govern-
ment and enhance the bargaining position of the movement. There are
thus moments of totalising critique, but also localised acts of resistance
that are geared towards negotiation that may involve justifications that
draw on orders of worth.
Concluding remarks
This case study of the MTST has considered the potential for the sociology
of critical capacity to account for the justification work of social move-
ments. A key contribution of the approach to social movement scholar-
ship is the range and scale of justifications that are theorised across
diverse social spaces. Operating below the level of public justification,
18 V. ALBERT AND M. DAVIDENKO
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690
695
700
705
710
715
720

Thévenot accounts for how individual actors act and organise life in their
familiar milieu (or regime) away from the scrutiny of others, and how they
pursue plans, which are future-oriented and which involve coordination
with others and with oneself. This theorisation of planning as a kind of
strategic investment expands the notion of instrumental rationality that
has currency in social movement studies (e.g. Klandermans, 2005
AQ9
¶
). It
also enables us to examine how people’s action plans become entangled
with social collectivities that may espouse quite different aims, providing
the ‘imperative for justification’required of public discourse. The soci-
ology of critical capacity thus allows for a complex account of how
demands that emerge in civil society come to be expressed on the
public stage (see Alexander, 1996).
And yet we believe that much of the analysis of public disputes inspired
by this tradition would rankle social movement scholars. In part this is due
to the developed framework found in On Justification, the use of which
implies a sacrifice, directing attention away from the emergent to the
established and inviting interpretations of social movement action accord-
ing to existing moral-political repertoires. This kind of moral-political
modelling enables comparison, but it may have limited relevance to sub-
altern actors who critique and undermine –rather than invoke –conven-
tional forms of justification that are drawn, however indirectly, from the
Western philosophical canon. The rise in generality required by justifica-
tion may draw on histories and experiences of inequity and exclusion
rather than principles of justice, narrowly defined. Rather than the invo-
cation of existing moral principles, social movement campaigns –particu-
larly in the times of crisis examined here –consist in an ongoing struggle
in which actors dynamically employ an array of tactics and discourses that
justify their own positions (see Jasper, 1997). These may have established
components, such as denunciations of the injustices produced by the
market world, while also creatively engaging with events as they unfold
and revealing inconsistencies in the pronouncements of opponents.
In contrast to interactionist justifications, we argue for a more expan-
sive incorporation of temporality into the analysis of the justification
work of social movements. This temporality is evident in the MTST’s
metacritique of capitalism, since it identifies modern inequities as contem-
porary correlates of the foundational injustice of Brazilian society. In the
case examined here, individual actors engage with these critiques in quite
different ways, often as a result of what Luc Boltanski calls ‘experiential
tests’, or those intimate hardships which may be overcome by more far-
ranging resolutions and that provide entry points into worlds (Boltanski,
EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF CULTURAL AND POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY 19
725
730
735
740
745
750
755
760

2011, p. 108; see also Clément, 2015). But the movement also provides
entry points for those who see the MTST as a corrective to the injustices
of Brazilian society and an ethical counterpoint to the corruption-riddled
Temer government. These individual plans of engagement draw from and
help shape the always-emergent moral worlds co-produced by others in
the movement, thus inviting support from different social classes, an
enterprise supported by alternative media partners, such as Media
Ninja. The testimony from interviewees, however, suggests that these
moral worlds –the sources of justification work –are always contingent
and tested according to practical and ethical criteria. The success of the
movement, as it negotiates the shifting terrain of the crisis, depends in
good measure on the responses to these tests, for they are the means by
which it holds together.
Acknowledgements
An earlier draft of this paper was presented by Victor Albert at Cidades Liminares, at
the Federal University of São Carlos, Brazil, in August 2016. We would like to thank
the attendees there –and in particular Gabriel Feltran –for their helpful comments. A
revised version was presented at a workshop in Helsinki, Finland, in September 2016.
We would like to thank the organisers and other participants of this event, including
Nelly Bekus and Oleg Zhuravlev for their suggestions. Tuomas Ylä-Anttila’s close
reading of the text was especially useful as we re-edited it for submission. The two
anonymous reviewers at EJCPS also gave insightful critiques and thoughtful feedback
that decisively improved the quality of the text. Victor would like to acknowledge
Marta Arretche, Shirley, and the Centre for Metropolitan Studies at the University
of São Paulo, for their support of this project
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authorsAQ10
¶
.
Funding
AQ1
¶
Victor received funding via the São Paulo Research Foundation [grant number 2015/
14474-0]; Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo.
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