boaventura de souza santos, lawa, state and urban striggles in recife

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1992 1: 235Social & Legal StudiesBoaventura De Sousa Santos

Law, State and Urban Struggles in Recife, Brazil

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LAW, STATE AND URBANSTRUGGLES IN RECIFE, BRAZIL

BOAVENTURA DE SOUSA SANTOS

University of Coimbra, Portugal

INTRODUCTION

Y INTEREST in the urban struggles in Brazil dates back to 1970, whenI studied some aspects of the inside life of one of the largest squatterM settlements in Rio. I was interested at the time in analyzing the social

processes by which these settlements consolidated themselves as urban com-munities, in spite of the fact that they were constantly victimized bydiscriminatory administrative measures on the part of the state and recurrentlythreatened with expulsion on the grounds that they had no legal title to theoccupied land. More specifically, I studied the legal and judicial practicescentered around the neighborhood association by which a variety of disputesamong residents were settled by the president of the association through aninformal and unofficial legal process which I called Pasargada law (Santos, 1974,1977).

It was a period in which the legitimacy claims of the military regime, if neversignificant among the popular classes, were at their lowest, a period of brutalrepression on the part of a state power which seemed not to have yet exhausted itscapacity for internal development. The removal of large squatter settlements andthe resulting destruction of the communities could be executed overnight withthe massive mobilization of the police and armed forces. The popular classeswere disorganized and isolated and there was no point in trying to struggle fortheir collective rights as urban residents in the official courts. The popular classeswere on the defensive and I then conceived of the development of an internallegal system in the settlement as a defensive struggle, among others.



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When, ten years later, I initiated the research in Recife, with Joaquim Falcaoand Alexandrina Moura, the study was quite different, as were the political andsocial contexts in which it was to be conducted. The focus, however, was onceagain on subordinate classes in the squatter settlements of a large city.’

In contrast with the Pasargada study, the Recife study did not focus on theinternal legality of the settlements, but rather on the use of the state legality by theresidents of these settlements in defense of their socio-political right to adequatehousing. It did not focus on legal conflicts between individuals but rather onconflicts that, though having an individual dimension, were collectivized in thedevelopment of the struggle. It did not focus on intraclass conflicts (conflictsbetween residents of the settlements), but rather on interclass conflicts (conflictsbetween the urban poor on the one hand and the big landowners, real estatedevelopers and the state, on the other).The political and social context of the study was also different. The military

regime seemed to have exhausted the conditions of its own reproduction and itslegitimacy claims centered around the political process of its own demise, thequestion being the control of this process;2 in other words, the question of howmuch of the present regime would reappear in the next one. It was a period ofintense social struggles between workers and industrial capital in Sio Paulo,between peasants and big landowners in the rural hinterland, and between theurban subordinate classes in squatter settlements in large cities and real estatedevelopers and state agencies.The popular classes were not as isolated as in the previous period. The process

of redemocratization had permitted a certain return of the old populist politicsbut had also given rise to a new generation of political leaders with a potentiallymore genuine relationship with the popular classes. Just as important, the darkyears of the dictatorship had witnessed the re-emergence of a political agentwhose oppositional work on the side of the popular classes had contributed tonew forms of political mobilization. I am referring to the Brazilian CatholicChurch.3

In the following, after providing some background information on Recife, Iwill briefly describe three urban conflicts.4 Thereafter, I will provide a

hermeneutical account of the microphysics of the political legality of theseconflicts, and will then try to locate such an account in a broader structuralcontext.

THE PRODUCTION OF URBAN SPACE IN RECIFE

The Metropolitan Region of Recife is one of nine macro-regional poles in Brazilwith a total population of 2,200,OCO inhabitants, 58 percent of whom live in thecity of Recife.’ The constant ’swelling’ of the city is basically due to the migrationfluxes converging on it.’ As happens in any other large city of the capitalistperiphery, the city cannot adequately incorporate these migrations, either inproduction terms (employment), or in reproduction terms (housing). Accordingto employment statistics of 1976, 78 percent of the active population is in the



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tertiary sector and most of it in the so-called informal sector. It is also calculatedthat more than 60 percent of the urban population lives in squatter settlements.

In Recife, the production of the urban space structure has been shaped by twomain factors.’ The first one is the sugar cane economy and the plantation systemin force since the sixteenth century. According to Recife geographer, M. C. deAndrade, forty years ago the sugar cane fields covered areas which are today fullyurbanized (1979: 58). Still comprising more than 52 percent of the total area ofRecife Metropolitan Region, the big estates of the traditional landed bourgeoisie(the urban latifundios as they are called) are the main cause of difficulties of accessto urban land in Recife.The second factor is the ecological features of the land: located on the coast

between the mouths of two rivers, the city is for the most part built upon landsubject to the influence of the ocean tides. This land is state property and theconcession of rights to the use of land through perpetual leases has traditionallybeen tied up with the processes of local politics, political influence andadministrative corruption. The destruction of genuine legal documents and theproduction of forged ones have been common and account in part for theambiguity of the legal status of urban land in Recife. Another factor contributingto this ambiguity is that part of the land was in fact produced by the popularclasses through landfill. They were allowed to build their shacks upon stilts,would do the landfill, and, once it was done, would be expelled from the area sothat holders of the rights to the use of the land could benefit from the differentialground rent thus produced. This explains why, in some of the conflicts includedin our research, the urban poor claim to have a legal right to the land, since they ortheir ancestors carried out the landfill. Indeed, many legal titles to a declared areain the Register of Deeds do not correspond to the real area or shape of the land,which have been changed by landfill.The ambiguity of the legal status of the land has caused many land disputes.

Their number has increased dramatically in recent years, due mainly to thespeculation on the land market brought about by a profitable associationbetween the traditional landowning families (in Recife, mainly three) and the realestate and housing developers. This process has created a new scarcity of urbanland in Recife, and has increased the pressure on the land occupied by the popularclasses sometimes for more than a century. This scarcity and this pressure,associated with the constant migration flows to the city, have also producedimportant changes inside the existing popular settlements. The increase in thedemographic density inside these has created new forms of internal socialstratification and spatial segregation. It has also multiplied lease contracts inwhich the rents for shacks, or rooms in shacks, may be priced beyond the reachof the poorest poor. This is indeed a decisive factor in triggering new invasionsand new occupations of the still unused land. Of the nine conflicts originallyincluded in the research four involved recent occupations. In a survey conductedin six of the nine urban conflicts initially selected, 72 percent indicated as the mainreason for having participated in the invasion the fact that they could not affordto pay the rents in the settlements they came from.These aspects of the changing nature of the capitalist production of the urban



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space in Recife are the background to the social struggles on which I willconcentrate below.

THE URBAN CONFLICTS

THE CHILDREN’S TO WN

In October 1979 300 families invaded a tract of land (3 acres) which had beenunused for more than thirty years. The land was located in a middle-classneighborhood and had been recently bought by a commercial company, asubsidiary of a multinational corporation specializing in cosmetics with its mainheadquarters in Sao Paulo. One month later, the directors of the company heardof the occupation and immediately hired a couple of lawyers from the Recife barand brought a lawsuit against the invaders. Since to file a complaint the personalidentification of each of the defendants was necessary, and since the lawyersanticipated that the residents would resist being identified for a court actionagainst them, they obtained the names by deception, claiming that they would beneeded for the company to compensate the residents should they voluntarilyabandon the land. The lawsuit was a summary one, and the judge deliveredjudgment solely on the evidence brought by the plaintiff and without thepresence of the defendants. In spite of court congestion the decision waspromptly given and quite anomalously was executed on a Saturday and Sunday.The residents were brutally treated when they tried to resist expulsion. Theytried to obtain outside support, but because it was the weekend their efforts werein vain.

THE SKYLAB

In July 1979 some 200 families invaded 5 acres on a steep hillside owned by a localreal estate developer with strong connections with the traditional landed

bourgeoisie.’ The invasion started on a Friday night. A drunkard passing by andseeing all the work being done to prepare the land, asked whether the Skylab hadfallen there. The new settlement was thus baptized. The next morning the areawas divided into 300 plots of land. During that same day the owners heard of theoccupation. They immediately requested from the State Secretary of PublicSecurity the intervention of the police to expel the invaders from their land. Theywere told that they would have to wait until Monday, since the services wereclosed for the weekend. The owners then talked to the people, and proposed thatthey abandon the area voluntarily so that the land could be adequately urbanizedby the company and then leased to them legally. The invaders suspected the trapin this proposal and rejected it.The following Monday morning the directors of the company arrived with

two trucks and twenty employees, escorted by several police cars. Theydestroyed some shacks already built at the bottom of the hill, but the men



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barricaded themselves on the hill and sent the women, children and old peopleinside the remaining shacks. In the meantime, some of them contacted the legaloffice of the Justice and Peace Commission set up by the Archbishop of Recifeand Olinda, D. Helder Camara. The lawyers there promptly agreed on theirdefensive strategy. First, they asked the residents to go back to the Skylab and tryto maintain the occupation by all possible peaceful means. Second, theycontacted the mass media and alerted them to the massive display of police forceprotecting landowners in their violent actions against poor people struggling forshelter. Third, they contacted the State Secretary of Public Security and proposeda 24-hour truce during which no demolition or construction of shacks wouldtake place. Finally, they invited the high officials of the State Secretary ofHousing to visit the locale. This they did, and came to the conclusion that, giventhe low market value of the land, the state should expropriate it and distribute itamong the invaders. But later on, back in their offices, they retreated from thisproposal which, as they said, could undermine private property - and proposedinstead a legal agreement between landowners and residents. The truce wasaccepted and when the owners tried to violate it a few hours later, they werestopped by the police. Nevertheless the tension grew. The lawyers called themass media, informed politicians from the opposition parties and asked D.Helder to visit the settlement to show his solidarity with the settlers and preventthe likely outbreak of violence. D. Helder was enthusiastically welcomed by theresidents and preached to them on peaceful active resistance and on popularorganization.The landowners, for their part, argued that the lawyers and priests were

communist agitators, and refused any negotiations until the invaders left the site.However, due to the insistence of the state officials, they agreed to a meeting withrepresentatives of the state and Church lawyers, as well as the residents’committee which had in the meantime been elected in a widely attended generalassembly held in a parish house nearby. After several meetings an agreement wasreached and a protocol was signed by all the participants. According to the termsof the agreement, which were ratified by the people in general assemblies, theowners and the residents would enter into a land-lease contract for a maximum

period of five years.

THE PEASANTS’ TOWN

In November 1979 several hundred people invaded 14 acres of land owned by agovernment corporation which produces and distributes electricity in Recife.This area is covered with the poles of high voltage wires. Soon after theoccupation 2000 families were living under the wires.As soon as the corporation was aware of the occupation, their lawyers visited

the area several times, in unsuccessful attempts to convince the residents to leavethis dangerous place. The residents, of course, as they said, had lookeddownwards (on the land) for a place to live, not upwards (to the wires). Given theneed for personal identification of the defendants for the court action, the



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lawyers managed to obtain 135 names through very much the same deceptivedevices that had been used in the Children’s Town case.

In February of the following year the residents were summoned by thejudge for a hearing. Having then realized that they were being sued in court,the residents assembled in a nearby church with the support of their parishpriest and decided to struggle for their rights. They elected a residents’committee and decided to get the legal assistance of the Justice and PeaceCommission. At the meeting the priest advised them - as later on the lawyersalso did - not to give their names under any circumstances, in order to makeit difficult, if not impossible, for the electricity company to sue the rest ofthem.The lawyers of the Church Commission decided to take the case and started

participating in the general assemblies. At one of these assemblies it was decidedthat the residents were to be present en masse at the court hearing. Hundreds ofthem filled the courtroom, and indeed the courthouse, singing popular andreligious songs and holding posters with slogans such as ’Who bought the landfrom God?’ and ’The people united won’t be defeated’. In a very tenseatmosphere the court proceedings started with several motions by the defenselawyers. Shortly after, the proceedings were suspended and adjourned by thejudge. The people marched to the Governor’s palace where they were latergranted a meeting with both the State Governor and the State Secretary ofHousing, and eventually they were promised another tract of land where theywould be relocated. In view of this the defense lawyers asked for a suspension ofthe court proceedings for another thirty days in the hope that an extra-judicialsolution would, in the meantime, be found. As it would take months to have thenew location ready, the electricity company pressed the charges against theresidents. By means of sophisticated legal arguments, however, the defenselawyers managed to persuade the court to defer its decision until February 1981.On the new date set for the hearing, Adolfo Esquivel, the Nobel Peace PrizeWinner of 1980, was in Recife and, at the suggestion of the defense lawyers,decided to be present in the courtroom along with the Archbishop and thousandsof residents. But the general public were not allowed to follow the proceedings:the microphones were disconnected and only the legal professionals around thejudge could hear what was going on. Commenting on this fact for the press, D.Helder said: ’This disconnection of microphones is symbolic of a justice thatdoesn’t know how to speak to the people’.The judge delivered judgment in favor of the company and the crowd was

informed in the square in front of the courthouse by the defense lawyers.Gathered in a general meeting, the residents decided to resist eviction. Thedefense lawyers then filed an appeal based on constitutional grounds, a highlyexceptional type of legal measure. According to the main argument, the right toprivate property should yield in face of the socio-political right to decenthousing. Moreover, the eviction would affect only 135 of the 2000 families andthe court of appeals was made aware of the social tension involved in theexecution of the decision of the lower court. To the surprise of the defense, theappeal was upheld and the execution of the eviction was suspended.



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THE MICROPHYSICS OF POLITICAL LEGALITY IN URBAN STRUGGLES

I will try in the following to analyze the microphysics of political legality in theurban struggles in Recife and to locate it later in the broader concerns of the stateand world-system.At the end of Whigs and Hunters, E. P. Thompson, reflecting upon his

historical research on the Black Act and its evolution, comments that fromcertain viewpoints his ’concern with the rights and wrongs of law of a few men in1723 is concern with trivia’ {1975: 259), and the same could be said of my concernwith the struggles of the poor in Recife. What can these small-scale socialstruggles tell us about law and the state in contemporary societies which has notalready been told by the sweeping social transformations of our time, the RussianRevolution, Fascism and Nazism, two world wars, the struggles for nationalliberation against colonialism and imperialism and, in the closer and more recentcontext of Latin America, the Cuban Revolution and its evolution, the rise anddemise of Allende’s regime in Chile, the Nicaraguan experience, the struggles inEl Salvador?However, it is my contention that a concern with the urban struggles in Recife

is not a trivial one. First, because, in my view, the grandiose processes of socialtransformation, be they revolutions or counter-revolutions, are the end productsof long and, for the most part, invisible processes of gradual transformation,small-scale oppressions, struggles, victories and defeats. Second, because aninbuilt bias in our social sciences has drawn our attention to the why and how ofradical change, while very little attention is given to the social processes by whichthe grand events of discontinuity are deconstructed, after they occur, into aninfinity of small events and practices within which old continuities reappear handin hand (or fist against fist) with the new continuities.

For these two reasons I think that it is up to the social scientist to uncover, oreven help to create, the link between the small-scale local developments andglobal historical processes. This link, more than what is connected, provides thekey to an understanding of social transformation.The three conflicts I have described do not raise all the important issues of our

research. But they do raise most of them. They are legal, but also social andpolitical conflicts; they are interclass conflicts, though they are also individuallegal conflicts between individualized legal subjects. All of them involve theurban subordinate classes and their allies, the landowning classes, and the state inits quadruple face of government, bureaucratic administration, courts and police.All these social forces use legal (and sometimes illegal) political and ideologicalresources in complex and dynamic combinations. Since these combinations aresocially structured each one of those social forces produces a specific profile ofaction.As to the urban subordinate classes, the most striking feature of their strategy

in urban conflicts is the extent to which they rely on their alliance with theCatholic Church of Recife. In most of the struggles included in our research, theChurch tends to assume an important role in organizing the communities,providing them with the legal, political and ideological resources required by the



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strategies called for, which, indeed the Church also helps to shape. As a matter offact we are dealing here with a wide range of grassroots religious actions amongthe rural and urban poor involving hundreds of priests and nuns who live amongthe oppressed and help them organize in hundreds of lay organizations andassociations with thousands of members. All this under the inspiring spiritualleadership of D. Helder Camara, the charismatic Archbishop of Olinda andRecife.The Church has recognized the law as a privileged arena of struggle and has

channeled important financial and organizational resources to provide thecollective conflicts of the poor with engaged and professionally competent legalcounsel. The Justice and Peace Commission has been active mostly through itslegal office, staffed by highly qualified lawyers.The general characteristic of the legal strategies designed in those legal offices is

that the legal defense must always be articulated with a political defense, so thatboth defenses are mutually reinforced. It is up to the political action toreconstruct the conflict in such a way as to facilitate the investment of

sophisticated legal resources which should produce outcomes that will in turnfeed back into the political development of the conflict. This strategy is adoptedfor two reasons. First, given the overall class character of the law, the initial legalposition of the urban poor is, in most conflicts, and in strict legal terms, a ratherweak one. If the legal system alone is allowed to control the definition of theconflict, there is very little that can be done on this terrain to defend the interestsof the urban poor, and less so in view of the conservative ideology of thejudiciary. It is thus imperative to transform the dispute, to reconstruct theconflict in political and social terms, before the legal system gets a grip. In otherwords, the legal conflict has to be politicized before it is legalized.The second reason is that this strategy is indeed structurally homologous to

that of the ruling classes in their conflicts among themselves and with thedominated classes. The apparent absence of political mobilization of the law inthis case is due to the fact that the political factors they invoke in their favor arecongealed in the legal forms themselves and are, by this process, naturalized ordepoliticized (for instance, the legal recognition of possessive individualismthrough the extensive protection of property and property rights).The political mobilization of the law by the urban poor in Recife comprises a

complex set of practices and three main phases, which I have called: the politics ofthe fait accompli; the social reconstruction of the conflict; and the seizing of thelaw.

THE POLITICS OF THE FAIT ACCOMPLI

The first phase consists, in general, in producing and defending a given statusquo, no matter how legal or illegal. In this phase, the political-legal strategyconsists in inverting the relations of production of social and legal time in favor ofthe residents, and comprises a combination of social actions, which I cannotanalyze here for lack of space. They have mainly to do with the fact that the state



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as a living bureaucracy has specific reproductive needs and cannot functiontwenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. This fact is an arena of struggle andcan be appropriated, either by the landowners as in the Children’s Town case, orby the urban popular classes, as in the Skylab case. The politics of the faitaccompli has also to do with other kinds of management of the timing of stateactions, be they administrative or judicial.

THE SOCIAL RECONSTRUCTION OF THE CONFLICT

This phase is aimed at supplementing the politics of the fait accompli and involvesa set of actions which redefine the conflict in such a way as to redistribute its

legalities and illegalities in favor of the residents. This is indeed a crucial phase andconsists in transforming the conflict, from a legal dispute on land titles betweenindividual legal subjects, into a social and political conflict between antagonisticclasses with antagonistic class interests, in which thousands of people struggle forthe minimal conditions of survival which the state should, if nothing else, at leastguarantee. The symbolic expansion of the conflict takes place in differentdirections: from individuals to classes; from private matters to social and politicalissues; from concrete grievances to a general indictment of an unjust socialorganization; from an isolated dispute to a series of conflicts resulting from thesame social conditions. This symbolic expansion is nonetheless real and material;it is in fact constitutive of the social practices of the actors involved in the conflict;it is accomplished through an articulated set of actions which include the massmedia and both downward and upward politicization.The mass media play a crucial role, their availability being explained by the

process of redemocratization hesitantly in course. The symbolic creation of aclass enemy by the mass media was quite striking in the case of Skylab. Theyproduced negative images of the landowners capable of damaging their businessreputation as real estate developers. The interviews with the landowners revealhow well aware they were of this risk and how this fact conditioned theirstrategy. They ended up by accepting a negotiated agreement with the residentsbecause, as they said, though they would win in court, such a course of action,because of its delays and publicity, would favor the interests of communistagitators.Downward politicization consists basically of the mobilization and organiz-

ation of the communities to struggle effectively for their collective rights. Thisgrassroots or base work, in which the Catholic Church again plays a central role,is the least visible, but also the richest social phenomenon emerging from theurban conflicts in Recife. Residents’ associations are set up, general meetings areconvened, rhymes are written on the topic of the struggle very much in thetradition of the romance de cordel, so popular in the Northeast, comics areprepared and widely distributed most of the time by the mass organizations ofthe Church. This is particularly remarkable in the older settlements (like thewell-known Movement of Nobody’s Lands in the Yellow House Hills) but evenin the new settlements downward politicization is also possible, as we saw in the



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Skylab and in the Peasants’ Town cases. This politicization enables the poor tounderstand the deep causes of their misery, to identify the enemy and toredefine their interests in struggling against it. When such politicization is notpossible, as in the Children’s Town case, the behavior of the urban poor isdesperate, chaotic and self-defeating. In this particular case, some of theresidents, upon seeing their shacks destroyed, agreed to be hired by thelandowners to help to destroy the other shacks for a daily wage and two meals aday. In contrast, in the Skylab case, the residents talked to the companyemployees in charge of the demolition and showed them their commoninterests (as urban dominated classes). Some of the employees refused to go ondemolishing the shacks and as a consequence were fired on the spot by thelandowner.The level of downward politicization is also crucial to understand the types

of concessions obtained from the state, as can be illustrated by the differentquality and value of the land promised by the state to the residents in theChildren’s Town case and in the Peasants’ Town case.

Upward politicization consists in the immediate and direct action of thedefense lawyers to mobilize, in favor of the residents, the state administrativeagencies to which they have access. It involves many actions I cannot describein detail here, and reaches beyond the state towards the Archbishops,opposition politicians and even a Nobel prize winner.Through all the practices I have referred to, the conflict is socially

reconstructed as a political and collective conflict and it is then that its

legalization takes place. Hence the third phase of the political legal strategy.

THE SEIZING OF THE LAW

The principle that the political and the legal development of the conflict shouldgo hand in hand is the key to understanding the legal and judicial strategies ofdefense lawyers. In some instances, the political and legal actions are keptseparate, though they feed back upon each other. In other instances, however,they are so intimately intertwined in concrete judicial practices that they canhardly be distinguished. These practices are complex action formations inwhich political and judicial elements are structurally interpenetrated, and theyare the realm of the political mobilization of the law in the narrow sense. Idistinguish three of such practices: the production and distribution of judicialtime; the reindividualization of collectivized conflacts; the politicization of thetrial.

THE PRODUCTION AND DISTRI$UTION OF JUDICIAL TIME This political-legal practice can be summarized in one comment of a defense lawyer in thePeasants’ Town case, ’Thank God justice is delayed’. Judicial time is an arena ofstruggle and can be effectively appropriated by the landowners, as in theChildren’s Town case, where the objective of the plaintiff was to control thelegal development of the conflict before it could become politicized. To this



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end, the control of court bureaucracy was obtained by both legal and illegalmeans.

THE REINDIVIDUALIZATION OF COLLECTIVIZED CONFLICTS This practice isparticularly important. Legal conflicts are individual conflicts between legalsubjects. Both Marxism and critical legal theories have claimed that this is acrucial feature in understanding how class relations and class inequities arereproduced by the legal system.’ The individuals (be they urban invaders orlandowners) appear before the law as formally equal citizens, abstracted from thesocial differences between them, in view of which their formal equality is littlemore than a sham.

Though there is much truth in this critique, it seems to me that in reality thingsare much more complex and the process of legal individualization is more

contradictory than it appears to be. In the Children’s Town case, the legalindividualization took place before the conflict could be politicized, andaccordingly, it produced all the expected disorganization and atomization of theurban poor. In the Peasants’ Town case, on the contrary, the landowningcompany lost control of the process of legal individualization before it wasconcluded. Hence it could only identify 135 of the 2000 families. In this case, thelegal individualization of the conflict, initiated in the landowners’ interests,turned against them as the legal conflict developed side by side with the politicalconflict. The defense lawyers were skillful in exploring this contradiction:anyone even vaguely familiar with life in a squatter settlement will understandthe social and practical problems that would have been involved in finding thenames of the people (a minority of residents) that were to be evicted.

In the Skylab case the individualization of the conflict took place not in thejudicial arena, but rather in the contract arena. But here also the conflict wasmade political and collective before it was made legal. The landowners signedindividual contracts with the residents only after having negotiated with themcollectively.

This shows that the political development of the conflict makes it possible forthe factor of atomization to be transformed into a factor of polarization.

THE POLITICIZATION OF THE TRIAL The political reconstruction of theconflict is also the political reconstruction of the actions of parties brought totrial. For the defense lawyers, the actions of the urban dominated classes, be theynew invasions or resistance against eviction from old settlements, are social andpolitical actions, irrespective of their legal or illegal status. The actions for whichthey are tried are not ordinary illegal or criminal actions; they are social andpolitical actions in which they are more victims than aggressors.

This political reconstruction permeates all the substantive and proceduralarguments of defense lawyers. However, to be tried for a political action is onething and to make the trial itself political is another. The highest form of politicalreconstruction is where the two are combined. As Bankowski and Munghamhave shown, there are different strategies for politicizing the trials though they



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involve in general the breaking up of the consensus in the courtroom and thepresentation of an alternative world view (1976).The politicization of trials themselves is a relatively uncommon phenomenon

in our research, but it did occur to a certain extent in the Peasants’ Town case.Twice the crowd jammed the courtroom, singing, shouting and carryingbanners. The objective was not so much to transform the court scene from a legalscene into a political scene, but to allow the legal scene to be played inside apolitical scene and both inside the same courtroom. The defense lawyers nevertried to proceed entirely outside the court process and never neglected theobjective of obtaining a legal victory (in contrast, for instance, with the Chicagoconspiracy trial). Indeed, they hoped that, through this dramatization of a playwithin a play, the legal scene would rebel against its political shell and wouldconfirm its primacy by granting legally to the defendants what they could notobtain politically.On the surface at least, it seems that this strategy failed. In both instances, the

legal scene knew well how to insulate itself from the political scene. In one case,the judge suspended the proceedings and postponed the moment of decision, andin the other the microphones were disconnected.On further reflection, an interpenetration of the two scenes may indeed have

taken place, not in the trial court but later in the court of appeals. It was in thiscase that for the first time the Recife courts recognized the socio-political right toadequate housing as a legal right. Legal enough, at least, to stop the right ofproperty from aggravating the misery of 8000 people for a three-month period.

CONTRADICTIONS OF STATE PRACTICE

The discourse of the microphysics of the political legality in class conflicts I havejust recounted contains another underground discourse, with much broaderboundaries, in which the state and the world system are the privileged focalpoints. For many years, the sociology of law, particularly the functionalistsociology of law, both in its phenomenological and positivist versions, could notlocate the state within the social text of the law, a failure that had the mostdetrimental effects on our knowledge of both the state and the law in

contemporary societies. But, if I am allowed to paraphrase a Brazilian protestsong here: ’We have learned a lot in these years’.

I’ve written elsewhere that in capitalist societies at least, state power and statedomination are neither monolithic nor stable. Unable to solve the structural classcontradictions in society, the state limits its activity to solving the social tensionsthat derive from such contradictions - a complex process which I have called thenegative dialectics of the State. This process is activated by a variety of measuresand non-measures which operate as mechanisms for the dispersal of socialcontradictions. These mechanisms, though very diversified, tend to operatethrough law. Now, law is a complex social process in which I identify threestructural components, articulated in different ways: rhetoric, bureaucracy and



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violence. From all this results an unstable, asymmetric, fragmented and indeeddynamic form of political domination (Santos, 1980).The Recife research shows that in periods of institutional crisis such as those

which usually accompany the process of regime transformation, state action isparticularly unstable and contradictory and this is reflected in the relativelyadvanced forms of political action by the subordinate classes. This is not to saythat there is a relative equilibrium between the ruling classes and the dominatedclasses and that, as a result, the state assumes a particularly high level of

autonomy to fulfil its own interests as in the so-called Bonapartist state.In our case, the autonomy of the state is less the purposeful affirmation of

well-defined policies than the end result of cross-neutralizations of state action, anegative autonomy as it were, a lumpen bonapartism if you prefer.The analysis of the conflicts reveals contradictions, both within the different

levels of the state (city, state, federal), and within the different state apparatuses,and even within the same state apparatus, from conflict to conflict, and evenwithin the same conflict at different times. For example the urban poor may be’treated like dogs’ by the state agency as they said in the Children’s Town case,and they may be granted meetings with the Governor, as in the Peasants’ Townconflict. The police may act brutally in the first case, or intervene in favor of thepoor - even though they had been summoned to protect the landowners - as inthe Skylab case. In this particular case, the Secretary of Housing started out byproposing the expropriation of the land and then retreated to a lease contractbetween the landowners and the residents. Even the courts behaved differently inthe Children’s Town and in the Peasants’ Town case.

This high level of contradiction in state action becomes constitutive of thesocial practices of the different classes in conflict. As to the urban poor, it confersa great flexibility to their social and political practices. They keep testing the stateby increasingly polarizing their struggles and then trying to stop short of thepoint at which the state will activate the mechanisms of dispersal of contra-dictions which are most detrimental to their interests, that is, in my terminology,the mechanisms of repression and exclusion.As to the landowners, it gives a defensive character to their practices as in their

view they cannot take the state for granted anymore, most absurdly (again intheir view) not because the state is not globally on their side, but because it isdisorganized, incompetent or infiltrated.The emphasis on the contradictions of state action should not imply that such

contradictions are either infinite or random. As a matter of fact they arestructured in specific ways and even though social struggles can dislocate thestructural limitations of the state action, as Erik O. Wright would put it (1978),these will continue to exist and to shape the social practices of classes and groups.One of such structural limitations, particularly relevant to our research, is the

principle of private property. This takes us for a brief moment to the landquestion and more specifically to the urban land question. On the basis of bothmy research on the urban question in Recife and the research on the ruralquestion in Portugal, conducted at the Center for Social Studies (Coimbra)(Hespanha, 1981, 1990; Reis, 1981), I have come to the conclusion that, contrary



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to the view of some urban sociologists (Lipietz, 1974; Topalov, 1974, 1977), thetheory of the ground rent as developed by Marx for agriculture (in part followingRicardo yo is also valid in the urban context, and that it is valid in its triple form ofabsolute rent, differential rent and monopoly rent. However, contrary to Marx,&dquo;I maintain that because the ground rent is not an exclusively economic factor, itdoesn’t operate alone, either in the rural or in the urban context (Santos,1982: 35 ff). It operates in articulation with the different forms of land property. 12Though I cannot go into details on this issue here, the articulation of ground rentwith the different forms of land property might help us to unravel the logicunderlying the contradictions of state action, at least in some cases.

In the Children’s Town conflict, for instance, the land had a very high marketvalue and was owned by the subsidiary of a multinational corporation which hadbought it recently to expand its headquarters in Recife. In this case, state justicemoved swiftly and efficiently in favor of the landowner. In the Skylab conflict,on the contrary, the land had very low market value and there was no reasonable

expectation of dramatic increases in the differential rent in the near future. Theland was owned by an old local real estate development company with variousties with the traditional landed bourgeoisie. In this case the state was much moreambiguous in its defense of land property. First, it proposed expropriation andthen a negotiated solution between landowners and residents. That is, the statesought a compromise that would minimally satisfy the interests of the residentswithout undermining the right of private property. In the Peasants’ Townconflict the land was state owned and, given the specific public use of the land,ground rent only operated marginally. This was also the case in which the stateshowed a more specific interest in protecting the rights of the residents.Ground rent however, only provides a partial structuring of the contradictions

of state action. These contradictions, in the urban context, will not be fullyunderstood unless we take into account other patterns of state action in otherfields of social life, both in Recife and in the State of Pernambuco, and indeed inthe whole country. Just as an illustration, I will mention the distinction betweensocial production and social reproduction as an important structural factor ofcontradictory state action. It is in my view most significant that, at the time of thefield research, the same state of Pernambuco, which showed a relative concernfor the urban poor and made important concessions at times, even if underpressure, could, at the same time, exercise a brutal repression against the sugarcane workers, who, just a few kilometers outside the city, were fighting the sugarcane growers and sugar mill owners for better wages and a labor contract. Thetruth of the matter is that the struggle of the urban poor was a struggle forhousing, that is, for social reproduction, while the struggle of the rural workerswas for wages, that is, for social production. The primacy of the relations ofsocial production over the relations of social reproduction in capitalist societiesprovides the explanation of contrasting and apparently contradictory stateactions in the two fields of social life.

But the structuring factors of state action should not be sought for exclusivelyat the socio-economic level, but rather at the political and cultural levels as well.Recife, the cruel city as it has been called, and the state of Pernambuco have a



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distinctive tradition of social struggles across time and regardless of regimechanges, which constitute a symbolic capital invested in the social practices, bothof the different classes, and the state itself. Since any action of the state is also anaction on the state, there are processes of state accumulation that run deep, likeunderground rivers, in the state practices across time, and that survive untouchedthe dramatic explosions of changes of regime.

LAW, STATE AND THE WORLD-SYSTEM

In the preceding analysis I have tried to locate the microphysics of the politicallegality of urban struggles in Recife in the context of the state. In this way, wegained a deeper understanding of our object. It seems to me, however, that inview of the state of development of our social sciences today, we cannot becontent to stop here. This in itself is dramatic, because the state of development ofsocial sciences is such that, though it tells us very clearly not to stop here, it tellsus very little about how to move on. For many decades, sociological studies oflaw and the state defined the nation-state as the privileged, indeed the natural unitof analysis. Today, we have come to the conclusion that this unit of analysis isunnatural and rather narrow. We live in a world in which nation-states are notisolated and autonomous, but rather integrated in a complex and hierarchical setof unequal exchanges, which Wallerstein has called the world-system (1974).This expansion from the nation-state to the world-system is both a spatial and atemporal expansion because, as we also begin to understand, this world-system isnot a creation of our time: it has been in force in changing forms since thesixteenth century.

It would be a gigantic task to try to locate the urban struggles in Recife in thecontext of the world-system. But I can, at least, raise a few interesting questions.For instance: these struggles, which were not possible ten years ago, are theyonly the result of increased popular organization or are they related to thechanges occurring in the position of the Brazilian economy and state in the worldeconomy? Did these changes produce structural spaces which were then filled bythe popular struggles? Can the changing role of the Church in these struggles beexplained in national terms only, or is it related to changes in its role on a worldscale, as if it were a multinational of religious services? Can we separate the role ofthe Catholic Church in Recife from its role in Poland?

In the social sciences, we often ask questions which are almost answers. In thiscase, the questions are not even fully formulated, because we lack the

methodological tools to be able to ask them in adequate forms. But, we mustconfess, it would be fascinating enough merely to ask them in precise terms.

This expansion of the unit of analysis leads us also to change the nature of ourscientific and political interests in the aspects of social life we analyze in differentcountries as these analyses become directly relevant to understanding in oursocial life in each one of our countries.As a matter of fact we are reaching the conclusion that most of our general

theories on law, power and the state (and probably general theories in general),



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are indeed far from general and reflect our specific form of ethnocentrism: that is,centercentrism. Just as, according to Durkheim (1964), the most developedsocieties, the ones organized in terms of organic solidarity, were ceasing to beruled by criminal law (that is, by repression and coercion), and were increasinglybeing ruled by restitutive law (contracts, reciprocity), at the same time these samesocieties launched in their colonies the most sweeping wave of criminalization ofsocial behavior, criminalizing not only a whole range of types of social conduct,until then accepted or even recommended by custom, but also new types of socialconduct originating in the unequal exchanges between the native cultures and thecolonial cultures.At a time in which, according to Foucault, Europe developed a radically new

form of social control based not on torture and physical destruction but on thedisciplinary use of social scientific knowledge to create a total order of docilebodies, which he called panopticism (1976, 1977, 1980), at that time and indeedmuch later, in the European periphery, panopticism was imported not to bringabout significant changes in the material practices of social control, but to serve asan ideology to legitimize broader political concerns of the modernizing elites.At a time in which Marx celebrated the victories of the British working class in

securing, through factory legislation, a better life and the decriminalization ofboth labor organization and the labor process ( 1970: T, Ch. 10), at that time, andindeed much later, the same British legislators legislated the global crimina-lization of the labor force and the labor process, for example in the Rhodesianmines, a process impressively described by van Onselen (1976), and of such abrutal character that our own traditional centercentric distinctions betweencriminal law and labor law totally collapse.

These disturbing facts of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries shouldcaution us against the new forms of centercentrism and thus of unwarrantedgeneralizations in which we might stray today. It is true that we don’t haveempires anymore but we still have, and probably more than ever, a worldeconomy based on interdependence and on exploitation.The sociological studies of the periphery are thus more and more relevant for

the studies of the center. This relevance, however, is not exhausted in establishingdifferences. There may be also important similarities. In this perspective, and torestrict myself to the field of the sociology of law, two points should be broughtout as a way of conclusion.

I think I have shown in this paper that the social struggles in Recife are practiceformations in which both legal and illegal moments or elements coexist: legalstruggles and struggles for law but also direct action, illegal mass behavior andother forms of social action whose legal status is dubious and which, for thatreason, I may label as a-legal. It seems to me that this finding is of universalsignificance. The distinction among social practices lies not so much on whetherthey are legal or illegal but on how the legal and illegal elements are present andarticulated. In some practice formations, the illegal moments may be dominant;in others, the legal ones.

This leads me to the conclusion that for a long time and for reasons that Icannot go into here, we have reified the distinction between law and revolution



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or between reform and revolution in such a way that makes it rather inadequatefor us to understand in concrete terms the concrete transformative practices ofour time. In reality, these practices comprise heterogeneous elements in termsof their legal status and form of legitimation. In an encapsulated form, Marxsomehow expressed this idea in referring to the factory legislation, when he saidthat this legal ’creation was the product of a protracted civil war’ {1970: I, 299).

But this articulation of legal and illegal elements in social practice is notexclusive of the transformative actions by the oppressed classes in our time.Indeed, and contrary to overt appearances, the social practices of the dominantclasses, even in the most stabilized democracies, have always involved legal andillegal elements. Indeed, class struggles are today, probably more than ever,struggles for the redistribution of legalities and illegalities produced in socialconflict. In the course of the development of legal strategies, illegalities areproduced, and vice versa, and the struggle is for the appropriation of suchproduction. The dominant classes have always tried to control for their ownbenefit the distribution of the legalities and illegalities produced in society.For instance, they have tried to make illegal the most powerful forms of

resistance against class oppression by the dominated classes, and at the sametime to conventionalize their own illegalities, be they tax evasion or breach oflabor safety regulations. They have also tried, since factory legislation at least -to stick to the same example - to bargain over their illegalities in such a way thatmajor illegalities will not be punished, provided that the minor illegalities arepromptly and voluntarily eliminated (Marx, 1970, I: 280 ff).’3

These processes are, of course, contradictory. The fact that the dominantclasses are forced to frame their social practices in terms of legality and illegalityis in itself significant. It creates the social and normative space within which thesubordinate classes try to operate a redistribution of legalities and illegalities totheir benefit, as when they try to effectively make ruling class practices illegal,be they concerned with pollutant industries or land tenure.

Every legal society is thus composed of legalities and illegalities and the socialstruggles within it aim at moving the threshold of illegality upward ordownward, according to the concrete interests of the classes in conflict.

But law in society is not only both legality and illegality. It is also both

ideology and utopia and this is my second and final point of conclusion. Law isorder and disorder, retrospection and anticipation, nostalgia and desire,oppression and emancipation. In order to capture the ideological and utopiandimensions of the law, and indeed of any cultural artifact, we need, methodo-logically, to combine Marxist negative hermeneutics with positive hermeneu-tics.

In this way we will be able to uncover the objective conditions accountingfor the fact that, though law is both ideology and utopia, it is not equally bothin all societies and at all times. Moreover it is not merely a question of equal orunequal presence of both elements. It is also a question of the mode of presenceor absence. Indeed, I think that these modes vary, among other things,according to the position of the national law and state in the world-system andthis is related to the distinct forms in which two modes of power - the cosmic



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power and the chaosmic power, as I have called them elsewhere (1980: 390)’4 -are articulated in the central and in the peripheral countries.

In the center, the ideological and utopian sides of the law are like the two sidesof a coin which has been polished so thinly as to become almost transparentlyside-less, like Western polyphonic music. In the periphery, the ideological andutopian sides of the law are the two sides of a coin which has been disputed insuch a way as to become almost two coins; rather like the two movements ofConstruçäo, the song of the Brazilian singer, Chico Buarque de Holanda.My closing metaphor is obviously not value-free: we all know that in our

world-system coins don’t flow to all pockets in the same quantities at the sametime.

NOTES

1. This research project was part of a larger project on urban land invasions in Recifeconducted by J. Falcao. My own project developed out of an invitation extended tome by Falcão to assist in the field research and in the data analysis of his project. Sincesome of the analytical issues in which I was particularly interested were not central tothe larger project, I developed a separate research project, for which I was fullysupported by Falcão. To him and to his research assistant Alexandrina Moura, whoalso assisted me in my research, I express my thanks. Though I used extensively thedata already collected for the larger project, I collected new data during my fieldresearch in September and October of 1980. Thirteen urban conflicts were analyzed,most of them having taken place between 1977 and 1980. The field research consistedbasically of in-depth interviews (with squatter settlers, community leaders, lawyers,priests, state officials, etc.) and document analysis. For an overview of the largerproject see Falcão (1984). Falcão’s project inspired other studies on urban conflicts inRecife throughout the decade. See, for instance, Moura (1986).

2. See, among others, two influential books on the military regime by F. H. Cardoso(1977,1979).

3. There is an immense bibliography on the role of the Catholic Church in

contemporary Brazil. See among others, Cava (1975), Alves (1979), Krischke(1979), Rolim (1980).

4. Though the research project involved thirteen urban conflicts, the ones analyzedhere illustrate particularly well most of the theoretical issues raised in the study.

5. These data as well as other official data mentioned below were those available at thetime of the field research.

6. The term ’swelling’ (’inchação’) was coined by Freyre in 1938 (1951).7. There is an extensive bibliography on the history of Recife, e.g. Castro (1945),

Freyre (1951), Bezerra (1965), Melo (1978), Andrade (1974,1979).8. For a more detailed analysis of the Skylab, see Santos (1983).9. Among the Marxist analyses in which law is specifically dealt with see, Reich

(1972), Bankowski and Mungham (1976), Brandes et al. (1977), Holloway andPicciotto (1978), Pashukanis (1978), Poulantzas (1978), Cain and Hunt (1979),Beirne and Quinney (1982), Sugarman (1983), Jessop (1980, 1990). On the criticallegal studies see three important overviews: Kairys (1982), Critical Legal StudiesSymposium (1984), Kelman (1987).

10. On the debate over the similarities and differences between Marx’s and Ricardo’s

theory of rent see, for two opposing views, Lipietz (1974: 257 ff) and Ball(1977: 380 ff).



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11. Marx develops his theory of the ground rent in Vol. III of Capital (1970).12. See Santos (1982:51 ff). The question of the articulation between the ground rent

and the forms of land property is very complex. While in the case of the absoluteground rent it is generally agreed that it is an effect of the private appropriation ofland, in the case of the differential ground rent it is debatable whether it is a purelyeconomic category (an effect of unequal conditions of production - fertility,localization - as they are valorized by the capitalist mode of production) or rather asocio-political category (given the fact that the amount of the rent cannot becalculated regardless of the form of property, that is, regardless of socio-politicalfactors). In my view, the second, non-economistic, perspective is the correct one.See, among others, Coulomb (1973), Ball (1977), Massey (1977), Bentivegna (1980),Lojkine (1981).

13. For another analysis of the factory legislation, developing out of Marx’s analysis,see Carson (1979).

14. Cosmic power is centralized, ’physically’ located in formal institutions andhierarchically organized. This is the traditional conception of juridical power. It is amacropower that, since the seventeenth century, has found its most completeembodiment in state power. Chaosmic power is the power emerging whereversocial relations and interactions are unequal, in the family, at school, on the street,etc. It is a micropower. It is eccentric, atomized, multiple, without specific location,mobile - in sum, chaotic.

Liberal political theory is based on a militant refusal to recognize this dualisticpower structure by reducing it to a unity, namely, state or juridical power. What Icall chaosmic power echoes Foucault. But whereas he identifies it as the generalform of power, in my conception the coexistence of two forms of power, and thedialectical relations between them, are what constitute the ’deep structure’ of socialdomination in modem societies. Foucault merely inverts liberal political theory(which identifies cosmic power as the general form) and therefore remains inside itsintellectual universe, no matter how radical his formulation.

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boaventura de souza santos, lawa, state and urban striggles in recife

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