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

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.

At the end of the 2000s the prognoses for 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 emergence of a ‘new middle class’ that had risen out of the most disenfranchised sectors of Brazilian society due to an improving labour market and government social programmes (Neri, 2010; Neri, Carvalhães, & 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 narrative 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 Trabalhadores 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 applying 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, 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 contains a latent theorisation of key elements of the different kinds of ‘justification work’ (Jagd, 2011) in which movement actors are engaged.

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 presentational forms and social spaces. First, we analyse the broad, publicly available 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 commitment 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 authorities, 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 research programme initiated by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot three decades ago has gone by various appellations, but the most promising and relevant for the analysis of social movements is the ‘sociology of critical capacity’ (Boltanski & Thévenot, 1999). This attention to ‘critical capacity’ is often contrasted with the tendency in critical theory to downplay 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 Thévenot develop a flexible framework for the analysis of disputes and agreements, 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 ‘polities’) from key texts of political philosophy (2006, p. 67) which specify a plurality of public goods. These include: the market polity (whose key theoretician 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 environmentalism (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 ‘qualified 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 conventions. 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 susceptible 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, 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 correspond to the orders of worth, perhaps most commonly the egalitarianism 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’ (Boltanski, 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 critiques 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 may only be implicit in their critiques of injustice, particularly as principled 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 critique that takes aim at the alienation and inauthenticity created through the commoditisation of human labour. Boltanski and Chiapello then historicise 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 prosaically 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 particular 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 practical 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 individual 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 Thévenot’s theorisation of ‘regimes of engagement’, which is a tripartite formulation 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 the movement in rendering individual action plans publicly justifiable – or rather, in moving from ‘engagement in a plan’ to ‘engagement in a justifiable 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 legitimate 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 individual 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 (Thévenot, 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.

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 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 movement 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.

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 2003 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 administrations. 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 contributed to the falling value of the real (Saad-Filho, 2013, p. 663).

If the country’s economic woes provided the tinder, a corruption investigation 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’ campaign 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 the scheme. An economic downturn, a corruption scandal that directly implicated many of her close allies, and low public approval ratings provided propitious conditions for her political enemies. Thus, the fact that Dilma had window-dressed the public accounts in the lead-up to her successful 2014 Presidential election campaign allowed for impeachment proceedings 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 suspended 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.

From 1997 to 2011, the MTST pursued a practice similar to that employed by 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 accommodation, 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 campaign, 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 increased speculation and an inflation of land prices, as developers could be virtually guaranteed strong returns on cheap housing produced in dormitory 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 cooperative, would take on broad-ranging responsibilities: everything from selecting possible building sites, negotiating with developers, managing possible residents, to delivering the keys to the new occupiers (Rizek, Santo Amore, & de Camargo, 2014, p. 532). While the ‘Entities’ branch of MCMV 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.

As the principal tactic of the movement is the occupation of unused land, the MTST must challenge dominant norms concerning property acquisition. 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 programme is, Boulos recognises through quoting ex-President Lula, an attempt to reconcile the right to housing and the jobs provided through the construction industry (Boulos, 2014, p. 22). But it is a failed reconciliation 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).¹ 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 politics in Brazil as elsewhere, just as it is quite inevitable. The MCMV programme, 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 construction 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 historical 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.

This land invasion could not be justified through reference to the individual 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 recognition that the neighbour life’s work had helped to prop up an inherently unjust regime of property relations and socio-spatial inequality. The corresponding 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 metacritique 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 invaders?’, 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 Commission into the Irregular Use of Public Land, Boulos mentions the Continental, 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 constructed on lots which illegally extended into public lands. Even the headquarters 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 translation, 2015, p. 35). Here the justificatory tactic is to challenge the universalism of the law through satirically drawing on examples that liken the transgressive moves of the MTST to the actions of other major commercial and professional actors.

Such writings and their iterations in other presentational forms seek to publicly legitimise land occupations by building on established social critiques 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 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 for continued participation in the MTST.

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 for its transgressive nature, shared by rank-and-file movement members, who must negotiate between their own individual action plans and the justificatory frames elaborated by the movement leadership? In this section, movement activists give their own justifications for 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:

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. 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:

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.

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 concerns 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, 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 interrogations 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 participation in the movement even after they had achieved their own apartment. 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.

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.

On 19 April 2016, the day when the Chamber of Deputies was scheduled 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 movement. 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 Paulista, 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.

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 televised 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. 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 (see Veja 2016, 23 May).

The following week another protest was planned by the MTST on Paulista 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 settlement. 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 to legitimate activities that might otherwise have seemed improper or out of place (see Burke, 1945: 11, 15) (see photo below).

While several activists were arrested and some tear gas was used, the occupation remained until the morning, when in response to the encampment, the new Minister of the Cities, responsible for the MCMV programme, reversed the government’s suspension of the programme. It was a key tactical victory for the MTST that restored the MCMV programme, 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 pronouncements of public authorities. For instance, by occupying the Office of the President, the MTST complied with the instructions of the police, 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 is 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 pragmatic sociology, as applied here to the study of social movements.

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 maintenance 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 Thévenot’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 criterion 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 qualification, social rights are often subject to gradations, or criteria of eligibility, 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 justifications employed by movement organisers are thus not easily captured by the orders of worth approach.

Blokker and Brighenti (2011) have provided a relevant addition to Boltanski 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 procedures 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 violence and violent acts, since they involve transgressions of social and possibly legal norms (Blokker & Brighenti, 2011, pp. 296).

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 government 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.

This case study of the MTST has considered the potential for the sociology of critical capacity to account for the justification work of social movements. A key contribution of this approach to social movement scholarship is the range and scale of justifications that are theorised across diverse social spaces. Operating below the level of public justification, 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). 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 sociology 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 with 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 according to existing moral-political repertoires. This kind of moral-political modelling enables comparison, but it may have limited relevance to subaltern actors who critique and undermine – rather than invoke – conventional forms of justification that are drawn, however indirectly, from the Western philosophical canon. The rise in generality required by justification may draw on histories and experiences of inequity and exclusion rather than principles of justice, narrowly defined. Rather than the invocation of existing moral principles, social movement campaigns – particularly 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 expansive 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 contemporary 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, 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. 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.

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

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Victor Alberthttp://orcid.org/0000-0003-4356-6162