This book is the English translation, with some updating, of a volume of essays published in Brazil in 1988. Like an earlier collection, São Paulo: o povo em movimento (1980), edited by Paul Singer and Vinícius Caldeira Brant, it proposes to examine social movements based in and expressive of the city’s working and lower classes. A classical Marxist approach would see such movements originating in the workplace, at the point of production, and taking the form of unions and organized labor. The events of the 1970s and 1980s, however, made clear to the current volume’s contributors the equal importance of neighborhood- and community-based movements as vehicles of working-class mobilization. These essays therefore focus on the “link between workplace demands and community demands for improvement” (p. 36) and the evolving relationship between labor- and community-based movements over the last 50 years.
The first hundred pages examine structural and historical aspects of urbanization in São Paulo over the course of the 1900s. The study of social movements begins with Nabil Bonduki’s excellent essay, “The Housing Crisis in the Postwar Years,” and the efforts by neighborhood committees linked to the Communist Party to fight for tenants’ rights. Those struggles came to an end with the outlawing of the party in 1947. Bonduki and Lúcio Kowarick then describe how workers were forced out of the central city during the 1940s and 1950s and into the desolate bedroom suburbs of the periferia. Pressing for such basic amenities as water, electricity, schools, and transportation, workers formed Sociedades de Amigos do Bairro, which became an integral part of the populist politics of the Second Republic.
Laís Wendel Abramo returns the focus to the labor movement in her essay on the metalworkers of São Bernardo. She argues that the famous strikes of 1978-80 were motivated not just by wage demands but also by workers’ desire for “dignity at the workplace,” as well as freedom from the intrusive and demeaning discipline to which they were subjected, both inside and outside the factories, during the years of the Brazilian Miracle. Vera da Silva Telles and Sílvio Caccia Bava examine the relations and interactions between unions and neighborhood movements in the 1970s; and Kowarick and André Singer close with a thoughtful analysis (not included in the original Brazilian volume) of the Workers’ Party administration of Mayor Luiza Erundina (1989-91).
These essays raise difficult analytical and political questions. Can neighborhood associations, which by definition pursue the interests of relatively small and specific social groups, truly represent the interests of the working class as a whole? On what terms can mass popular movements participate in the highly centralized, top-down administration of a massive conurbation such as São Paulo? Is it even possible to govern a twenty-first-century megalopolis democratically? These are urgent issues, not just for São Paulo and Brazil but for every modern society, including the United States. São Paulo’s experience has much to teach us, and we owe thanks to Monthly Review Press for making this volume available to an English-speaking audience.
