![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/5.jpg\")
Anti-fascists in Belo Horizonte blockade the street in front of a burning barricade.
\nAhead of the 2022 elections, Brazil is now reprising the same dramatic showdown that the United States faced in 2020. As the pandemic intensifies alongside corruption scandals and the unrestrained plundering of Indigenous lands, Jair Bolsonaro’s government faces pressure from the streets and the left wing of the state. But what will it take to unseat him and break out of the patterns that brought him to power?
\n\nThe parallels between Brazil and the United States run deep. Both are settler colonial states founded on slavery. The United States has largely completed its frontier phase, while Brazil continues to expand extraction efforts into Indigenous territories. In both cases, the state has become a battleground between the far right, represented by Donald Trump and Bolsonaro, and a centrist technocracy seeking to transition to a slightly more “sustainable” and “inclusive” form of capitalism. Globally speaking, these represent competing models regarding how to preserve capitalism in the face of climate change and global economic crisis—barefaced violence versus the likes of the “Green New Deal.” Though Trump narrowly failed to hold on to power in 2020, it is entirely possible that the struggle in Brazil could turn out differently, setting a precedent for the spread of fascism in the 21st century.
\n\nOf course, neither of these models points the way out of the current nightmare of exploitation and police violence. If we want to have any hope of changing the world for the better, we have to build social movements outside the logic of reaction and reform. Had there not been four years of intense grassroots struggles under Trump, he would likely have succeeded in holding onto power one way or another—and if those struggles do not continue under Biden and whoever succeeds Bolsonaro, far-right politicians will once again be able to present themselves as the only alternative to the status quo.
\n\nIn the following report, Brazilian anarchists frame the government’s genocidal approach to COVID-19 in the context of a legacy of military rule, explore the latest wave of combative protests, and show how the institutional left functions as the first line of defense to preserve the existing order. They make the case that the conditions they face can only be fundamentally changed by means of autonomous organization and revolt.
\n\nAn earlier version of this text appeared in Portuguese here.
\n\n Anti-fascists in Belo Horizonte blockade the street in front of a burning barricade.
\nBrazil is facing a dire situation. With no federal plan to vaccinate the population, the COVID-19 death toll—already the highest average in the world at more than 1000 per day—continues to grow.
\n\nPeople across the country are once again taking the streets to face a government more dangerous than the virus. In addition to exacerbating the pandemic, the federal government and Congress are facilitating attacks on Indigenous populations, threatening their continued existence on their lands and turning over what is left of the forests to mining and agribusiness.
\n\nAt the same time, the opposition within the Senate is leading a Congressional Inquiry Commission (CPI) seeking to prove that the federal government’s negligence was intentionally designed to spread COVID-19, with a particularly deadly impact on poor, Black, and Indigenous people. The investigation has found evidence confirming this, alongside corruption scandals in the purchase of vaccines.
\n\nIn this context, many people have renewed their hope that the existing institutions might punish those responsible for more than half a million deaths. Yet those who choose to protest in the streets face unions and center-left parties that seek to channel the revolt solely towards improving their prospects the next elections. With our loved ones dying, it makes no sense to wait for verdicts or elections.
\n\nBolsonaro’s administration and the reactionary populist movement around it have doubled down on genocidal and ecocidal responses to the current crises. The institutional left and the “moderate” sectors of the social movements are actively undermining grassroots efforts by attempting to dictate what forms of struggle are legitimate and by cooperating with the state to advance their own political goals. Facing this dual threat, the only way out is through autonomous organization and revolt, as demonstrated by pockets of Indigenous, Black, anarchist, and unaffiliated resistance.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/7.jpg\")
The official number of COVID-19 deaths in Brazil has surpassed 560,000. The slogan on the Brazilian flag translates to “Order and Progress”—a fitting slogan for the genocidal government of a colonial slave state.
\nDemocracy is typically presented as the antithesis of dictatorship and fascism. Yet as we have seen in Spain, Greece, Chile, and elsewhere, these two forms of governance often transition smoothly from one to the other according to the needs of those who rule. The Congressional Inquiry investigations may offer hope to some, but we cannot afford to rely on these sorts of democratic rituals that ultimately exist to lend false legitimacy to a destructive system. Especially in the Americas, where the foundational violence of Black slavery and Indigenous genocide continue in every country, we must confront the problems at their roots.
\n\nCopying Donald Trump’s playbook, Bolsonaro and his militias are promising to contest the result of the 2022 elections if the electronic system is not replaced by printed ballots. He has appointed more than 6000 active high-ranking military officers, many of them generals, to high civilian government positions—more than the 1964-1985 dictatorship—and bought the support of the Military Police with prestige, immunity for crimes committed on duty, and real estate credits. He is conducting an ongoing campaign to arm his supporters, which has already doubled the number of weapons in circulation in Brazil. Angry gangs of white men help him construct an image of popular support and to threaten the opposition.
\n\nThere are important parallels here with the political situation in the United States preceding the 2020 elections. During the investigations that began in 2017 and the first Trump impeachment process starting in December 2019, part of the US population waited to see if the institutions would fulfill their promise to punish President Trump. The protests that had taken place against the administration since its inauguration subsided while people waited to see if the authorities would solve the problem. It was only after police murdered George Floyd in May 2020 that the streets again became the main stage for people’s action.
\n\nProminent Democratic Party figures and liberal news outlets like the New York Times accused the insurgent elements of the George Floyd rebellion of frightening the public, offering the perfect image of an “internal enemy” for Trump to use to present himself as a solution to political chaos and the health crisis. However, as it turned out, a significant part of the population identified with the militant protests against police violence and racism, and as a result, Trump’s popularity plummeted.
\n\nIt was not democratic institutions but rather the courage of the people facing the police and white supremacist militias in the streets that isolated Trump and undermined his political viability, succeeding where every investigation and impeachment had failed. If the few who had no choice but to take action in the streets had been left to fight alone, the far right could have gained even more momentum by occupying the streets alongside the police. Together, police and militias would have gained more legitimacy and control of the situation, helping Trump to dominate the public debate ahead of the election.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/06/17/header-2.jpg\")
Protesters in front of the burning Third Precinct of the Minneapolis Police after the murder of George Floyd in May 2020.
\nTo understand Trump and Bolsonaro in the politics of our time, we have to grasp that they do not represent the death of democracy. Rather, they foreground the elements that democratic governments have always shared with fascist regimes: police and prisons, racism and patriarchy, genocide. Winning the popular vote and amassing enough support in parliament to act with impunity have sufficed to enable them to carry out their authoritarian plans. This is explicit in Brazil, where the military faced no consequences for the persecutions, arrests, tortures, disappearances, and murders perpetrated during the last dictatorship.1 Bolsonaro is just the current representative of this project, the “military party” that has controlled the Republic since its foundation in 1889.
\n\n“Brazilian Military Party” - with subtitles.
\nLong before he became president, Bolsonaro represented a violent project threatening the freedom and lives of poor and excluded people—but we could not imagine the dimensions that this would assume during the pandemic. With 2.7% of the world population, Brazil already accounts for 13% of COVID-19 deaths globally. Indigenous peoples face not only the pandemic, but also fires in the Amazon and the Pantanal as well as the advance of agribusiness, illegal mining, and unregulated logging. Lawmakers are determined to hand over Indigenous reserves to large estates and extractive projects in the name of GDP growth.
\n\nTo date, this extermination plan has cost more than half a million lives under the guise of “saving the economy” by packing people into workplaces, schools, and crowded public transit to catch COVID-19. This is not a fringe conspiracy theory about a secret plan to spread the virus. A study of thousands of federal and state laws, conducted by Conectas Human Rights and the University of São Paulo, concluded that the Bolsonaro government had knowingly enabled the pandemic to spread. The CPI investigations also included testimony showing how at least 400,000 deaths could have been avoided if people had taken basic measures to promote prevention.
\n\nAt the same time, studies attesting to the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on Black and Indigenous populations have faced institutional censorship, while civil servants who tried to apply health recommendations that have worked around the world have experienced retaliation. Bolsonaro has supported a campaign to boycott vaccinations, promoted ineffective medicines, and, more recently, deliberately delayed purchasing vaccines in order to buy overpriced vaccines through tax havens.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/8.jpg\")
“Bolsonaro Out! And take Mourão, the military officers, Guedes, and the vaccine thieves with you.” General Mourão and Guedes are the vice-president and economy minister of Brazil, respectively.
\nDuring the CPI, Senator Alessandro Vieira compared the search for those responsible for the deaths in the pandemic to the trial of Adolf Eichmann, the Nazi official responsible for the logistics of Hitler’s concentration camps. Others discussed the city of Manaus during the oxygen crisis in the state of Amazonas, when hundreds of people with severe COVID-19 suffocated in hospitals without care, the dead were buried in mass graves, and, in the phrasing of Senator Otto Alencar, the city was used as a “testing ground” for mass treatment via ineffective drugs like chloroquine.
\n\nThe investigation in the Senate has attracted the attention of those who do not want to “just wait for the 2022 elections”—they are anxiously awaiting the results, just as millions in the United States waited in vain for Trump to be convicted. But the Brazilian colonial project is more alive than ever: the same Congress that is investigating the Bolsonaro administration is doing nothing to stop the laws that pave the way for the destruction of biomes and peoples.
\n\nSince early June 2021, Indigenous people from at least 25 ethnic groups have been gathering in Brasilia to protest against a bill known as PL 490, which hands over their territories to predatory economic exploitation, weakens Indigenous land rights, and encourages the assimilation of native people who have chosen to live in isolation from whites and urban societies. To assert the right to their lands, Indigenous people will need to prove their ownership status up until the day the 1988 Federal Constitution was passed, at the very end of the dictatorship. This attack on Indigenous peoples is one of the worst of the Bolsonaro administration, but it was drafted in 2007 and advanced considerably under the Workers’ Party. It is a step towards the “point of no return” of devastation in the Amazon, the largest tropical forest in the world, which suffered the greatest deforestation of the decade in 2020 and may never fully recover.
\n\n“The Uprising Is for the Earth” - with subtitles
\nOn June 8, 800 Indigenous people gathered to pressure the Constitution and Justice Commission (CCJ) of the House of Representatives, which could approve or reject PL/490. At the door of the FUNAI (the National Indian Foundation, the Brazilian government body that establishes and implements policies relating to Indigenous peoples), police attacked the protesters with rubber bullets and other less-lethal munitions while they were gathering and singing traditional songs.
\n\nOn July 22, the day of the vote on the law, the police again attacked the protesters outside the Chamber of Deputies, who shot back with arrows and hit two policemen. The confrontation postponed the vote to July 23, when it was approved by the majority of lawmakers. The camps in Brasilia persist; as of this writing, they include almost 2000 Indigenous people from 52 ethnic groups.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/zumpanoandressa/status/1407451700999430149\n\n\n
Police attack Indigenous groups in front of the Chamber.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/andrevallias/status/1407669832070410242\n\n\n
Chief Kretã Kaingang made a necklace with tear gas canisters fired against Indigenous people in Brasília on July 22.
\n\nThe Indigenous people who have remained in their territories have organized solidarity actions together with other autonomous movements to support and echo the struggle in Brasilia. On June 25, Guaranis from the Jaraguá Indigenous Land used tires and burning barricades to block highways in São Paulo. On June 28, Guajajaras, Puris, and Xoklengs blocked an avenue in Rio de Janeiro. The Pataxó people in the south of Bahia blockaded the BR101 highway on July 22 to the chants of “Let’s sing, dance the catimbó, to bring Bolsonaro back bound in vines.”
\n\nMore resistance is expected in August when PL/490 faces the courts. These Indigenous efforts demonstrate that combative actions and solidarity among diverse peoples and movements are fundamental to the struggle against a genocidal state.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/felipedjeguaka/status/1408174920673251330\n\n\n
“Bahia terra de côco e azeite de dendê A água do côco é doce, eu também quero beber. Vamos cantar, dançar o catimbó, pra trazer o bolsonaro amarrado no cipó.” – “Let’s sing, dance the catimbó, to bring Bolsonaro bound in vines.”
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Midia1508/status/1409467019787964417\n\n\n
On the morning of Monday, June 28, Indigenous people blocked Avenida Presidente Castelo Branco to protest bill 490.
\n\nWhile the criminal justice system is oppressive under any government, repression targeting ideological opponents has intensified considerably under Bolsonaro. On March 18, in Brasília, Federal Police arrested the PT (Workers’ Party, Partido dos Trabalhadores) militant Rodrigo Pilha for carrying a banner reading “Bolsonaro Genocida” (“Bolsonaro is genocidal”). Pilha was held for more than 100 days until he began a hunger strike protesting isolation, torture, and his continued imprisonment even after being entitled to transfer to a semi-open facility. He and four other defendants are being prosecuted under the National Security Law, a legal remnant from the dictatorship era. Similarly, during protests on July 3 in São Paulo, Matheus Machado was arbitrarily arrested and imprisoned for ten days, accused of stealing a police helmet he found on the ground. Machado is free under severe legal conditions. Both were only released after intense public pressure.
\n\nThese legal devices for targeting protesters are not new tools. Dilma Roussef and the Workers’ Party administration used them in 2013. However, police persecution is advancing and harsher laws are on the way, such as a bill inspired by the Patriot Act written by Bolsonaro himself in 2016 when he was still a congressman.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/1.jpg\")
Blockade of a viaduct in Belo Horizonte, July 3, 2021.
\nAnother law in the works, PL272, would directly attack social movements by criminalizing strikes and protests and introducing vetoed passages from the Anti-Terrorism Law signed by Dilma Roussef and her Workers’ Party government just before her fall in 2016.
\n\nJust as Trump utilized executive privileges that were vastly expanded under Obama, a right-wing government is once again building on the legislative and administrative tools of repression passed by previous administrations further to the left. In this case, the president’s intention to carry out a coup is obvious and long predates his election. If he knows there will be no resistance, this is virtually an invitation for him to go ahead. As he himself claimed, it is the military that “decides whether the people will live in a democracy or a dictatorship.” While military leaders before the Dilma administration generally refrained from commenting on politics and claimed to be “totally committed to democracy,” today they routinely release statements that add to Bolsonaro’s threats. The head of the Air Force reacted to the CPI investigations into the corruption of military personnel by saying that “an armed man does not make threats”—itself a threat.
\n\nBolsonaro’s administration has a well-known penchant for positive references to the Nazis. On July 22, Bolsonaro proudly hosted Beatrix von Storch from the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD). Storch, the granddaughter of Hitler’s finance minister Lutz Graf von Krosigk, has already claimed to be in favor of “shooting refugees.” She represents an ultra-nationalist, neo-fascist, and partly neo-Nazi party. When necessary, Bolsonaro and his family draw closer to Israel and religious fundamentalism, but when it’s convenient, he dog-whistles anti-Semitic and neo-Nazi rhetoric.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/eixopolitico/status/1419624144950468613\n\n\n
Bolsonaro hosted Beatrix von Storch from the far-right party Alternative for Germany (AfD) on July 22.
\n\nIn this context, pro-Bolsonaro populist organizing including rallies, motorcades, and motorcycle rides, alongside militarized police forces and military control of most of the executive branch, represent an authoritarian offensive stretching from the street to the top of the security apparatus and the government. The current rigging of the military police, which was previously controlled at the state level, and the precedent of a coup orchestrated by the police in Bolivia in 2019 make a new Brazilian coup a very real threat.
\n\nIt would be a terrible mistake not to take the streets the way people have done from north to south, hoping instead to defeat Bolsonaro and his supporters in the 2022 elections or with a conviction through the CPI. Remember, Trump never faced consequences for his crimes from within the institutions, and he only lost the election in a context of widespread revolt. We can’t rely on the parliament that approves the Bolsonaro administration’s projects or the same political and economic elites that opened the doors for Bolsonaro’s militarism. Even if we managed to restore liberal democratic politics that way, that would not eliminate fascism—it would only return with it to the barracks from which it will be recruited again the next time it is useful to the powerful.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/6.jpg\")
“Bolsonaro Out!” Indigenous people form the front line of a demonstration in Brasília on June 19.
\nFrom May 29 through June and July 2021, social movements and unions called for demonstrations around the country protesting Jair Bolsonaro’s government. These protests brought tens of thousands of people into the streets in major capitals. Many people attended carrying the names and photos of loved ones lost to the pandemic. In many cities, autonomous blocs involving anarchists, Indigenous people, football fans, and anti-fascists took the lead. Some of the protests were combative, involving barricades, blockades, graffiti, and attacks on the property of the wealthy.
\n\nAt the same time, center-left parties continue to spread the dangerous idea that the 2022 elections offer the only way to get rid of Bolsonaro and his government. Lula (Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, former president of Brazil) became eligible to run after charges against him were dropped due to lack of evidence; he is a favorite in the polls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/2.jpg\")
An autonomous bloc in São Paulo, July 3.
\nAfter police brutally attacked a peaceful demonstration on May 29 in Recife with tear gas and rubber bullets, and clashes in São Paulo marked the protests of June 19, these organizations called for a new action for July 24—more than one month later. However, corruption scandals involving top members of the government buying overpriced vaccines imparted a sense of urgency, and the demonstrations were moved to the beginning of July. Capitalizing on renewed hopes that the institutions would come through to handle the crises Bolsonaro has created, the trade union federations, parties, and movements organized by the center-left tried to monopolize control over decisions about when and how the demonstrations would take place.
\n\nMany people criticized the attempt to postpone the demonstrations in order to temper the momentum of the participants for fear that it could compromise their electoral agenda. When trade union central committees and political parties decide that everyone must wait more than a month for the next demonstration to protest hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, then opportunistically change their decision when a corruption scandal emerges, they reveal a commitment to the same legalism that enabled the far-right to take power in the first place. Mass murder is part of our daily lives, they are saying—but corruption, now that is unacceptable!
\n\nIf we want to defend ourselves against such rulers, we have to do it ourselves. Even if we only achieve half victories, like an impeachment or the electoral defeat of Bolsonaro, those will hardly happen without the streets on fire. We must confront the legalistic and centralizing tendencies within our own movements and abandon any desire to govern the revolt. When someone tries to centralize influence over the movement, dividing those who take action in the streets into legitimate and illegitimate actors, the next step is always police repression.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/RedeInfoA/status/1411434924645752837\n\n\n
Many social movements in Brazil claim to be inspired by the recent struggles in Colombia, the United States and Chile, even if they only extract specific aspects out of context—such as the new Chilean constitution or the struggle of the Colombian people to stop Ivan Duque’s tax reform. But the social strength we have seen in those struggles is only possible because a critical mass of the participants respect a diversity of actions on the streets and within each kind of organization.
\n\nJust like Workers’ Party militants in their delusions about the 2013 uprising in Brazil, or Democrats in the United States in 2020, the reformist left in Brazil is spreading paranoia that the recent social unrest is the work of “infiltrators.” The outside agitator is the perennial mythical character invoked by those who have never visited a street protest, who fear revolt more than they fear the police. In addition to rejecting the narrative that blames those who rebel for repression, we must also challenge the notion that if we wish to be safe from the pandemic, then rather than protesting, we must stay home—after crowding together at work and on public transport, under the reign of a government that seeks to kill us off!
\n\nOn June 19, in São Paulo, we saw what happens when we do not confront tendencies towards centralization in social movements that promote electoralism, when members of the MTST (Homeless Workers Movement) physically attacked an autonomous bloc including Indigenous people, unions, individuals, and anarchist collectives. The members of the MTST were trying to break up barricades on the avenue and to report people to the police, repeating the errors of 2014 when they violently unmasked participants in a black bloc and handed them over to police.
\n\nBlack, Indigenous, and anarchist movements condemned this episode. The MTST is one of the largest movements in the country and it is not fair to judge all the participants, many of whom are also Indigenous and Black. The problem here is structural. Similar incidents recurred in the July 13 protests in Rio de Janeiro, when members of a Stalinist party tried to commandeer the front of the march by expelling the autonomous bloc involving Indigenous people and anarchists, and again on July 24, when members of PCB (the Brazilian Communist Party) made a human chain to expel and assault a group of transgender and homeless people from the squat Casa Nem.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/cmi_saopaulo/status/1411441806298996740/photo/2\n\n\n
We must never accept those who criminalize protesters or seek to dispute their legitimacy by citing laws and parroting the talking points of the police. It is even worse to actively collaborate with the police, as occurred in São Paulo days before the July 24 demonstration, when representatives of the PCB, the National Union of Students (UNE), the Workers’ Cause Party (PCO), and the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) sat down at the table with police to agree on what would happen at the protest, when and where, who would be a legitimate part of the demonstration and who the police should target.
\n\nThe records of that meeting were published online, exposing the process of criminalizing anarchists and autonomous movements. The movements and parties agreed on using fines to punish demonstrators with opposing ideologies occupying the same area or organizing simultaneous actions. Of course, this would restrict anti-fascists from organizing counter demonstrations against fascists, giving the far right a free pass to attack oppressed people. In signing this agreement, the PCB, PCO, and PSDB became ideologically equivalent in repudiating direct action and the “violent” acts they attribute to infiltrators. They also became complicit in any subsequent police repression.
\n\nThese attempts to stifle autonomous, Indigenous, and anarchist organizations in the streets show the dangers of hierarchical practices and methods. If people acting autonomously to express their rage over the loss of the dead and the misery of the living are disturbing not only to the police, but also to those marching alongside us, then the movements will likely stifle any rebellion long before the police themselves do. The choice to attack fellow protesters, as well as total silence on the part of the leadership of the groups that perpetrated the attacks, exposes the authoritarianism of the segments of the left that only accept revolt when they can control it. Taking the streets to exert real pressure is not a priority when they seek only to create an image of revolt directed toward the only form of social transformation they see as legitimate: the ballot box.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/rede_genocidio/status/1406732177191079938\n\n\n
Note of repudiation by the Rede de Proteção e Resistência ao Genocídio (Network for Protection and Resistance to Genocide) on the action of the MTST.
\n\nHistorically, far-right movements like Integralism (an old fascist Brazilian movement) were not stopped by voting or petitioning, but by direct action. We can see this in the episode in 1934 that became known as the “Battle of Praça da Sé,” when anarchists, socialists, and communists broke up an Integralist gathering in downtown São Paulo, stole a police machine gun, and violently dispersed the fascists, burying their movement for decades to come.
\n\n\n\n \n\n\n\n \n\n \n
Belo Horizonte: a blockade on July 24.
\nIn 2020, demonstrators in Brazil realized that direct action was necessary and anti-fascist soccer fans published calls to block right-wing motorcades and rallies, later denouncing racism and police violence. The movement gained momentum and inspiration from the George Floyd protests in the US. Many organizations and public figures said that they would not join the demonstrations and recommended that people stay home, claiming that the demonstrations would “offer the Bolsonaro government the pretext for even greater repression” or even “a coup” (or a “self-coup”). As we saw during the uprisings in the US, this narrative is reactionary, willfully imposing weakness on social movements, as it places the responsibility for repression on the oppressed.
\n\nIt is foolish to imagine that passivity will mollify authoritarians rather than embolden them. Submission is not an effective strategy against despots like Bolsonaro or Trump.
\n\nMovements in the US, Colombia, and Chile have illuminated how we can move forward by breaking the façade of social tranquility, generalizing rebellion and organization across a range of social sectors, and avoiding management and confinement by hierarchical left groups. Of course, we should not settle for concessions. A new constitution in Chile or a police reform in the US might only make it more difficult to pursue meaningful social change in the long run. Still, it is obvious that we will not achieve even a partial victory, such as the immediate fall of Bolsonaro, if the forces that seek to pacify and criminalize the revolt gain ground within our movements.
\n\nWe are certain that not all the people who participate in a mass popular uprising will be part of a formal organization, nor should they be. Not every form of action is foreseen and planned by social movements. Instead of questioning the “organization” or the “legitimacy” of those who take action, we should ask ourselves how to support them, how to offer tools so that the revolt can become more dangerous, how we can help to build lasting alternatives.
\n\nAs for the dangers of combative actions in the streets, we recall that on May 29, the Recife police needed no pretext whatsoever to attack a peaceful protest and blind two people who were not even participating. If an organized bloc had been present to protect protesters with shields, keeping the riot police at a distance by combative means as the front lines in Chile and Hong Kong have done, the presence of elderly people, families, and people with reduced mobility would not have served as a pretext to promote pacifism and get beaten by police. According to the “revolutionary clock” of those who seek centralization, control, and pacification, it is never the right time to build barricades and fight back. But when fascism is flourishing, taking over both the streets and the institutions, this is a sign that our clock is running late and fiercer forms of action are long overdue.
\n\nDismantling fascism involves disrupting its grassroots organization, blocking its marches and rallies so that they can’t occupy the streets to recruit more members, and neutralizing its strategies for spreading its ideology. The actions of June and July show that thousands of people are willing to take the streets and impose consequences on the rich and powerful. Indigenous peoples have been organizing against the most destructive government they have faced in decades; they show a willingness to build popular and radical alliances.
\n\nAs a result of the dialogue between social struggles in the city, countryside, and Indigenous lands, on July 24, the day of the last great national protest against Bolsonaro that month, people set fire to a statue of the pioneer Borba Gato, a symbol of wealth built on Indigenous extermination and black slavery. In an action signed by the Revolução Periférica collective, people surrounded the 42-foot statue with burning tires. Some activists accused of participating in the group were arrested a few days later, including Paulo Galo, a member of the Entregadores Antifascistas (an antifascist delivery workers’ informal organization) and his wife Géssica Barbosa. Barbosa was released on July 30, but Galo remains illegally imprisoned.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1419138055877931011\n\n\n
When we occupy the streets en masse, learning from our mistakes and successes, sharing tools for resistance and self-defense, we advance further towards our revolutionary goals than when we count on leaders and bureaucrats to do the work for us. Now, in the face of crises that are continuing to worsen, some on the left would back down and give in to the delusion that this murderous government can correct itself via its own institutional mechnisms. The opposite is true. We must fight even harder, more intelligently, and more creatively for the new world we carry in our hearts.
\n\nLet us be the ones who build the barricades in the streets to confront fascism, not the pacifying hands that tear them down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/08/12/4.jpg\")
“Robbed us and killed us—impeachment is too little!” It takes fire in the streets to achieve even partial victories.
\nThe first criminal conviction of an officer from the dictatorship occurred in 2021, 36 years after the regime’s end, when one Civil Police chief was sentenced to two years in a “semi-open” facility (essentially a halfway house without fences or guards) for kidnapping and imprisonment. ↩
\nIn the following analysis, anarchists in Brazil examine how the pandemic and rising far-right populism coincide in a colonial extraction economy, surveying a society headed for catastrophic collapse. In this context, self-organized mutual aid and collective defense projects involving delivery drivers, football fans, Indigenous organizers, squatters, residents of the favelas and the urban periphery, anti-fascists, and other targeted populations may indeed represent our only hope of survival.
\n\nLeia o texto em português aqui.
\n\n\n\n\n“History isn’t made by a handful of activists with the correct ideology, but through the unpredictable actions of countless proletarians learning to fight together against what they perceive (however inaccurately) to threaten their future. They come into these struggles with contradictory ideas, and these are only worked through in the material process of sustaining such movements and pushing them forward.”
\n\n \n
In dystopian literature and films in which a catastrophic event causes civilization to collapse, we often see humans living in groups afterwards, planning to “rebuild the lost world,” as if restoring that same social organization and economic structure that dragged them to collapse would be the answer to their misery. To these characters—and to their leaders with their epic speeches—the problem was not the normal functioning of the system, but its end. We see this in 28 Days Later (2002), Children of Men (2006), Dawn Planet of the Apes (2014), and several other films that flirt with our desires and fears about the possibilities that would follow a disaster with the potential to irreparably unsettle our way of life—be it a nuclear apocalypse, a deadly virus, or human infertility.
\n\nThe word “dés-astre,” from French, indicates detachment from celestial bodies—a disruption in our relationship with the cosmos, with our destiny. Many people can only imagine the end of capitalism as a disastrous event that would leave us desperate and astray, as in those dystopias: ruined cities, infertile soil, extreme pollution, endless wars, hunger, and, of course, deadly diseases spreading freely. Yet for those of us surviving the real world crises of disasters and pandemics caused by capitalism, normality is the problem. For us, crisis has already started and disaster—the real disaster—is for everything to continue as it is. Inequality, privatization, pollution, oppression, and violence do not represent a break with the normality of the system we live in; rather, they are the conditions of its continuation.
\n\nCapitalism isn’t the first unequal and brutal system in history. But it is the first to endanger lives worldwide so that a minority can prosper in a globally unified system. We struggle to understand it because it is the world we inhabit, the world that we share with the people we love, that we get our sustenance from—though at the expense of much suffering. In this world, tragedies are unequally distributed, to say the least: a dozen billionaires continue to determine our futures, our lives and our deaths, as they control and benefit from the majority of our planet’s resources. The rest of us compete for jobs that are becoming more and more precarious, struggling to hold on to our homes, to survive racist police—not to end up in the crowded hospitals, refrigerated trucks, or mass graves that constitute the new stage set of the pandemic.
\n\n“While hundreds of thousands of people fall victim to COVID-19 throughout the territory occupied by the Brazilian state, Bolsonaro is using Trump’s playbook to consolidate control: spreading propaganda about electoral fraud, arming his supporters, and seeking to gain more leverage over the police. How do we stop him?”
\nWe must be done with the idea that the death of capitalism is the death of something that bears life. Capitalism is what is threatening our survival, imposing artificial competition within artificial scarcity. Even fiction authors are increasingly incapable of depicting the future as progress or a promise of “better days.” There are enough resources, food, and land for all people, but those who control them would rather destroy them than share with us. A social organization that launches satellites to explore galaxies but cannot feed the earthly population, that produces advanced medicine but intentionally renders it inaccessible to most people, is a social organization that will inevitably bring about its own collapse. We will not stop repeating: the true disaster is not the end of capitalism, but its continuation.
\n\nScientists and official institutions like the World Health Organization are taking from environmentalist and anti-capitalist movements the “alarmist” role of announcing the global crises caused by untrammeled economic expansion. In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change (IPCC) declared that we’re steadily approaching a catastrophic rise in the temperature of the Earth, with a maximum of twelve years to stop this process. At the beginning of the 2019, the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) released a report showing that at least one million species will vanish from our planet’s surface in the coming decades—this includes a great deal of familiar flora and fauna, and also insects and micro-organisms that are necessary for the agriculture that feeds all of us. In August 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, scientists from around the world published the State of the Climate 2019 report, warning that this decade has been the hottest on record. In his 2016 book Big Farms Make Big Flu, Rob Wallace had already pointed out the concrete connections between capitalism, industry, agribusiness, and epidemiological outbreaks like the one in which we live now.
\n\nAmid all this tragedy, we see that left-wing governments in the Americas and around the world are unable to contain the rise of populism. They could not refrain from corruption; they failed to fulfill their promises to “include the excluded” while protecting the privileges of the rich and the frail comfort of the so-called “middle class”—a stratum that generally identifies with the desires and ideologies of the ruling class. This is not a matter of moral judgment, but an indication that corruption is inherent in all states and capitalism, as both serve to maintain the division between those who control and those who obey, those who flaunt and those who starve. Left governments have been driven out by elections or coups led by the far right, which assume different forms in each country—whether populist, fascist, or authoritarian—but capture generalized dissatisfaction and disappointment on a global level.
\n\nDemocracy keeps swinging back and forth like a pendulum, taking power from the left to give to the right and back again without any change in the political and economic structure. For each Lula or Dilma who fails to pacify rebellion by means of concessions and increased investment in repressive apparatuses and laws, new Bolsonaros and Trumps appear, ready to double down and declare themselves the new leaders who “rebel within the order” and defy the limits of democracy, stretching them to the border of totalitarianism. In this respect, we could say that the ones who call for a reactionary “revolution” today are the extreme right, while the left wallows in attempts to preserve the paltry economic, political, and social advances they used to appease us long ago, while governing to manage our misery.
\n\nWe see the result from Brazil and the United States to Russia, Hungary, and India: new populist autocrats who subvert their own laws with impunity, leading governments that mire their populations in the deadly tragedy of the COVID-19 pandemic. The only thing worse than living in a society in which petty leaders monopolize all the power and resources to impose decisions on our lives and our health is living in a society in which those leaders use their concentrated powers to let sickness and death stalk us without hindrance.
\n\nAs we compose this text, Brazil is burying 240,000 of the 2.5 million people killed around the world and is home to over 10 million cases of infection according to official data. The coronavirus crisis is the most faithful portrait of a predictable and preventable global disaster.
\n\nThe worst pandemic in over a century is not “pedagogical,” not a message from Gaia, not a divine punishment. But it is also not unrelated to human action across the world, like the meteor in the film Armageddon (1998) or the planet en route to collision with the Earth in Melancholia (2011). It is the direct result of the advance of capitalism, agribusiness and urbanization over biomes and wildlife. It is the material, political and subjective effect of an event yet to be elaborated.
\n\nWe now seem to be closer to The Turin Horse (2011) by Bela Tarr, for whom the end of the world is at the same time both strange and routine, monotonous in a life reduced to survival—the slow cancellation of the future.
\n\n\n\n\n“The way I see the end of the world is very simple, very quiet, without any spectacle, without fireworks, without apocalypse. It goes down until it gets weaker and weaker and in the end, it ends.”
\n\n-Bela Tarr
\n
It no longer seems possible—or even preferable—to postpone the end. It is already here. The big question now is how to deal with an ending that does not precipitate itself as a revolution but as a perpetual crisis. We start by setting out for another end of the world in the midst of the disaster. It is only by beginning there that we can act.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/28.jpg\")
Disinfecting a shopping mall in Caxias do Sul, Rio Grande do Sul.
\n\n\n\n“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation. It is the slavery of other men that sets up a barrier to my freedom, or what amounts to the same thing, it is their bestiality which is the negation of my humanity. For my dignity as a man, my human right which consists of refusing to obey any other man, and to determine my own acts in conformity with my convictions is reflected by the equally free conscience of all and confirmed by the consent of all humanity. My personal freedom, confirmed by the liberty of all, extends to infinity.”
\n\n–Mikhail Bakunin, “Man, Society, and Freedom”
\n
In May 2020, asked about limiting the economy and putting rules for social distancing into practice, Bolsonaro compared Brazil to Sweden, saying that the Nordic country “didn’t stop,” representing a good example of a country that kept its “normality” in the face of the pandemic. Brazil had 13,000 deaths from the coronavirus by then, and Sweden just over three thousand.
\n\nComparing these two countries might seem ludicrous, considering that the Swedish population is 21 times smaller than the Brazilian, in fact smaller than the 12 million people who live in the city of São Paulo. Besides, the 10 million Swedes are well-supported by state welfare and social and economic inclusion the likes of which most of the 210 million Brazilians can’t even dream of. We don’t want to pay any naïve compliments to the Nordic capitalist model, which might be better described as “the world’s biggest gated community.” The existence of these global “condominiums” in the Swedens and Norways of the world necessitates the global margins in Latin America, Africa, and Asia that serve as cheap labor reserves, natural resource extraction zones, and garbage dumps with conveniently loose regulations. This helps explain why Brazil is incapable of controlling the pandemic and its effects, despite having the largest public health system in the world, exacerbating longstanding inequalities and forms of exclusion.
\n\nBrazil is a nation of continental dimensions with a substantial production economy. However, it is still characterized by profound social inequality and a compliant role in the global market as a producer and exporter of agricultural and primary products such as grain, minerals, and oil. Fully 14 of the top 15 exports are primary. Abounding in various biomes, water, and arable land, food production on Brazilian soil is the third largest in the world, feeding 1.5 billion people worldwide. But this economy treats forests, rivers, soil, and all human and animal lives as nothing more than sources of income in the external market. It is based on individual property, concentration of wealth and land, deforestation, pollution, violence, enslaved labor, and the appropriation of Indigenous lands—a process that has not slowed since the European invasion in 1500, not even during the pandemic.
\n\nWhile Bolsonaro exhorts Brazilians to pretend to be Swedish, a considerable part of the population lacks access to water or sewage treatment, or even to the documents needed to apply for those services. For 35 million Brazilians, ordinary sanitation is not even possible, as there is no access to clean water. Almost 100 million people—47% of the Brazilian population—have no access to a sewage system. Unlike Sweden, where the government subsidized 90% of wages to keep people at home, approximately 46 million Brazilians in 2020 were living without any documents, bank account, or internet access, invisible to the eyes of the state and excluded from receiving emergency aid—which amounts to just over half of the Brazilian minimum wage, but four times more than the minimum of Lula’s celebrated Bolsa Familia aid. This exclusion is directly reflected in statistics about the impact of COVID-19, just as it affects those same people in the “normal” times, whether by misery or by the violence that comes along with it.
\n\nThe disastrous scene of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil would not be set without the permanent state of calamity imposed by security forces. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, even with businesses closed and stay-home recommendations, murders by police rose 43% in April, the first month of lockdown and quarantine. Among the 177 people killed by Rio de Janeiro police in April 2020 were 14-year-old João Pedro, shot at home by police, and 18-year-old João Vitor, killed by police while social movement groups delivered boxes of food in Cidade de Deus. After the STF (Brazilian Federal Supreme Court) prohibited police operations during the pandemic on June 5, deaths dropped 70% throughout the entire city. Rafaela Coutinho, João Pedro’s mother, summarized the situation thus: “I was protecting João Pedro from a virus and he was a victim of an even more dreadful virus: the virus of a murdering state.”
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/17.jpg\")
“Black lives and lives from the favelas matter”: A protest against police violence and racism in Rio de Janeiro, May 2020.
\nEnvironmental devastation, seizures of Indigenous land, police murders, the political persecution of educators—crises don’t ever come alone. Furthermore, they often become opportunities to get certain measures passed, measures that would draw much more attention—or resistance—in other times. The current environment minister stated on video that the pandemic was an opportune moment to pass laws facilitating environmental degradation, “while the media only covers COVID.” Indeed, we have seen rapid legal measures to dismantle environmental protection legislation. The halt of inspections during the pandemic and isolation period allowed cattle ranchers, timber merchants, and miners to penetrate further into the Amazon and Pantanal forests, causing a 28% increase in fires compared to last year.
\n\nAt the same time, Indigenous and quilombolas movements and groups denounced Bolsonaro’s government for putting into practice a “genocidal plan to clear the area” by permitting COVID-19 to reach communities that lack the bare minimum to resist. Even STF minister Gilmar Mendes used the word “genocide” to describe the politics of this president who vetoed measures to increase access to potable water, hygiene supplies, internet connection, and educational supplies about disease prevention in Indigenous languages in July. Bolsonaro also vetoed a measure affirming the state’s obligation to provide medical treatment to Indigenous peoples. Before the end of July, 70 thousand Indigenous people had been infected and more than 2000 had died of COVID-19 across the Americas. In the 21st century, this is the new face of a colonial project that, when it doesn’t strike Indigenous peoples directly with weapons, once more employs diseases and neglect to kill off individuals and exterminate entire communities—whether it be the Chilean state against the Mapuche people in the Araucania region or the Brazilian state against the Guarani-Kaiowa in Mato Grosso do Sul.
\n\nState surveillance measures now include innovative methods such as phone monitoring, facial recognition, and thermal camera control. We have not yet experienced such intense surveillance as the completely locked down neighborhoods in Madrid, or robots monitoring people in the streets as in Tunis, or individual phone monitoring and facial recognition tracking citizens as in China. But wherever state control gets a foothold, it can only intensify.
\n\nIsolation measures and police intervention to suppress meetings and gatherings remind us of the years of the military dictatorship (1964-1985), when there were curfews and any meeting of more than two people, however casual, was disbanded by police as potentially conspiratorial. For those who remember that time—or who still experience the police and military state in the outskirts of the cities or in rural areas—such measures always take the form of hostile enforcement, even if they are “for everyone’s health.” The classic example of why such measures can arouse people’s fury is the well-known “Revolta da Vacina” (Vaccine Revolt) of 1904, when the government of Rio de Janeiro—Brazil’s capital at the time—imposed a vaccination plan to fight smallpox by force, with cops breaking into people’s houses to make them take the vaccine. At the same time, a violent hygiene urbanization project demolished whole streets and forced the poor to move to the outskirts.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/21.jpg\")
A tram overturned in Rio de Janeiro during the Vaccine Uprising of 1904.
\nToday, such revolts are not necessarily directed against science, medicine, or the preservation of health, but against authoritarianism and the power of those who aim to force us to accept their decisions without dialogue as a way to suppress self-organization. For example, in 2019, the governor of São Paulo, João Dória of the PSDB, re-enacted the 2014 law prohibiting masks in demonstrations in order to prevent black blocs. A year later, the same governor mandated the use of masks across the state for all people who go out to the streets for any purpose. This irony illustrates how vulnerable and alienated we are from our agency when we count on politicians and laws to determine what is best or safest for us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/12.jpg\")
Doria, the governor of São Paulo, prohibited masks in 2019 and made them mandatory in 2020.
\nIt is difficult to implement remote learning where students do not have a computer or Internet access or live with several family members in dwellings of one or two rooms. The pandemic has only exacerbated the tremendous inequalities between students from public and private schools. The rise in domestic violence during the lockdowns has shed some light on patriarchy and sexism in our society. Prison revolts protesting the violation of human rights and carelessness with which prison officials permit COVID-19 to spread show the brutality of an overcrowded and murderous prison system. The new dangers threatening the lives of people in the countryside, Indigenous peoples, and the elderly reveal the social exclusion these groups have already been subjected to for centuries.
\n\nThe pandemic is no different from other disasters that disproportionately affect the poor and excluded. When winter or a storm hits a city and homeless people die of cold and houses built in high-risk areas collapse, it is obvious that the problem is not the cold or rain, but that people are left without the basic resources they need to face those situations. As long as capitalism persists, the people at the bottom of the pyramid will always suffer the most in any crisis or catastrophe. Like the tragedies before it, this health crisis has an age, but also a color and an address: in April, the number of Black people killed by COVID-19 in Brazil was already five times higher than the number of white casualties. Recent studies indicate that, in São Paulo, housewives, self-employed professionals, and people using public transportation are the chief victims of the pandemic, while employers have almost no chance of infection.
\n\nAs some of the anarchists who fought the cholera epidemic in Italy in 1884 put it, “The true cause of cholera is poverty, and the true medicine to prevent its return can be nothing less than social revolution.” With just a few adjustments, we can say the same thing about our situation in the 21st century. The geopolitical disparities—Brazil feeds 20% of the planet, but does not guarantee basic resources, such as water and sewage, to almost 50% of its population—prove that the problem is not scarcity of resources, but the concentration of all land, money, infrastructure, and power in the hands of fewer and fewer people. The problem with capitalism is distribution, and the cause is the very logic of its economics and politics.
\n\nIf the COVID-19 pandemic has shown us anything, it is that capitalism is full of bottlenecks that block access to resources. A crisis that threatens the health of all people on all continents, exposing the poorest and most vulnerable to preventable deaths—and by endangering them, enabling the virus to continue spreading and threatening others as well—confirms that this economic system is unable to sustain everyone. As Bakunin1 might have put it, my health depends on the health of everyone else, everywhere on the planet. Anarchists and other radicals have always held that freedom must be for everyone if anyone is to be truly free. This pandemic confirms that, while some lack freedom, while some lack equal access to resources and the autonomy to cooperate and support each other, a single sick person poses a risk to everyone’s health. Until we destroy these lines of exclusion, we will all be at risk.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/13.jpg\")
A gravedigger in a section of Caju Cemetery exclusively for victims of COVID-19 in Rio de Janeiro, May 14, 2020.
\n\n\n\n“Professional politicians, seeing that they are losing ground, because the state falters with capitalism, become professional bandits to continue in the same positions of power and the assault on the public purse. Primitive expeditions arise. It is fascism.”
\n\n–Maria Lacerda de Moura, “Fascismo: Filho Dileto da Igreja e do Capital,” 1934
\n
The 2013 uprisings in Brazil shook up the fragile stability built by the PT government, showing that popular unrest could not be pacified by class conciliation. Democracy does not represent anyone or anything other than the interests of the elites, and when the population reaches the limits that democracy imposes on their ability to meet their needs and make their voices heard, the burning streets become their channel of expression once more.
\n\nMovements for free transportation, such as the MPL (Movimento Passe Livre), continued the tradition of the autonomous movements that emerged at the turn of the century; their constant organizing for over a decade was fundamental to the revolt that broke out in 2013. That revolt escaped any form of control, whether from the movements themselves or from traditional parties, unions, or organizations. But when these autonomous and anti-capitalist groups were effectively repressed by the PT government, the right wing took advantage of the situation to gain prominence in street demonstrations and on the Internet.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/23.jpg\")
The “bacillus of the plague” in Brasilia, March 15, 2015.
\nAt the end of 2014, the PT won its fourth consecutive election, Dilma Rousseff’s second victory. Defeated, the candidate of the PSDB [Brazilian Social Democracy Party], the country’s second largest party, called for one of the first protests under the slogans “Fora Dilma” (“Dilma out!”) and “in defense of democracy,” helping to catalyze the massive protests for the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff that took place over the following years. Without an opportunity to win an election, the conservative parties organized their representatives in parliament, widely supported by the media and the business elite. In 2016, they managed to push through an impeachment that ended 13 years of PT governments. Michel Temer of the PMDB (now MDB—Brazilian Democratic Movement) took over.
\n\nTemer’s government pursued its conservative agenda, accelerating the neoliberal project that was already underway under the PT. Temer, too, encountered a lot of popular resistance: building occupations against the dissolution of the Ministry of Culture, the occupations of more than a thousand schools and a hundred universities, violent demonstrations and confrontations in Brasilia against the budget freeze on health and education in 2016, calls for a general strike in 2017, and a major demonstration that took over the center of the country’s capital and ended with the burnings of two ministries. All of these were important episodes of struggle and resistance that pushed back against the state, but they did not slow the growth of the right wing on the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/25.jpg\")
Protesters occupying Paraná State College against Temer’s PEC 241 in 2016.
\nOn the eve of the 2018 presidential election, protests from the #EleNão (“Not Him”) campaign, organized chiefly by women’s movements against Bolsonaro, showed that thousands of people were still willing to demonstrate on the streets. But they were unable to radicalize their actions and agendas the way the movements of 2013 had, or to compromise Bolsonaro’s victory at the polls.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/22.jpg\")
“Ele Não”(Not Him”): feminist movements gather thousands in São Paulo against Bolsonaro’s election in 2018.
\nIn other words, it wasn’t just the autonomous movements that gained momentum; reactionaries also learned how to recruit more and more people on the streets. When the mainstream left fled the popular uprising of 2013 to continue chasing state power and control, the result was that the right was able to present itself as an electoral solution to the bankruptcy of the democratic system itself. Bolsonaro won the 2018 presidential election because he understood better than much of the left that the model of representative democracy was worn out. Fascism is fueled by the state reaction against popular revolts.
\n\nBolsonaro defeated the PT with 55% of the vote in the second round. But before that, in the first round, polarization crushed the PSDB, the PT’s biggest rival and the main party representing the Brazilian neoliberal right since the end of the dictatorship. The party that ruled for two consecutive terms before the PT got a measly 4% of the vote in the 2018 election. The effects of polarization and radicalization promoted by right-wing movements imposed profound changes on the political landscape in the country, putting Bolsonaro’s personality in place of an entire party as the pole alternative to the PT.
\n\nThe worst of the effects of Bolsonarism were yet to come. As the Italian anarchist Malatesta warned, the Spanish militant Durruti demonstrated, and the Brazilian anarchist Maria Lacerda de Moura confirmed, every elite and every government keeps fascism as a weapon always within arm’s reach to contain or prevent the advances of the working class. In times of economic and political crisis, fascistic personalities and programs can seduce the elites and the electorate with the promise of a solution. The new populist wave that we see around the world today represents this strategy. Even though they are not technically fascists—or currently lack the capacity to be—politicians like Bolsonaro engage fascist dynamics by channeling the resentment of the middle classes and their desire to regain control of the state into hatred of minorities and what few rights they have won. Neo-Nazi cells and websites have increased considerably since Bolsonaro’s election. The more offensive, racist, and sexist they are, the more successful they have been engaging people in their campaigns. In this context, the internet has been fundamental in deepening the polarization between a left reduced to focusing on the electoral competition between Lula’s PT against Bolsonaro, on the one side, and the conservative, evangelical, and neo-liberal movements that supported Bolsonaro on the other.
\n\nA year after the election, Bolsonaro was expelled from his party. He remains the only president without a party in Brazilian history. After using the Internet to win the election, Bolsonaro continued to govern by using it as a stage, becoming the first president to make announcements through weekly livestreams on Facebook. Like Trump, Bolsonaro maintained the warlike tone of a man waging an eternal electoral campaign even after victory, heralding his project of management by destruction.
\n\nBut it’s not just the Internet, television, and the use of bots in social media. Bolsonaro’s political career is over three decades old; his whole family has deep ties to the militias that control part of the organized crime market in Rio de Janeiro. His three sons, who all have careers as parliamentarians, have employed militiamen and their relatives in their offices, including the known murderer Adriano da Nóbrega. Da Nóbrega received a medal from Flávio Bolsonaro in parliament; his imprisoned militia colleagues were accused of murdering councilwoman Marielle Franco. One of these colleagues was a neighbor of Jair Bolsonaro’s family, living in the same elite condominium.
\n\nThese milícias or milicianos are common in the state of Rio de Janeiro: paramilitary groups of police, ex-policemen, firefighters and security agents who take the place of criminal organizations to sell “security services” to residents and merchants and to monopolize illegal private transportation companies along with access to real estate, Internet connection, electricity, and other resources. These groups have their origins in the death squads that emerged in the 1960s to act as hired killers under the military dictatorship. By the 1980s, these groups already dominated several sectors, consolidated by terror and, over the following decade, the connivance of elected councilors, deputies, and mayors in several cities in Rio. They do not only operate “where the state does not reach”—rather, they represent a symbiosis of organized crime with the state. Whatever corruption emerged from the 14 years of PT governments cannot compare to 50 years of these groups’ activity—which helped the Bolsonaro family secure their positions as parliamentarians and Jair Bolsonaro as president.
\n\nCombining distorted military doctrines, obscurantism mixed with an ultra-neoliberal agenda, and campaign strategies imported from Steve Bannon and his cronies, Bolsonaro introduced a new way of governing—governing to destroy—lowering Brazilian democracy to levels similar to those of 1964. The Secretary of Culture has quoted Joseph Goebbels in a TV address, among several other allusions to the Nazi regime. Bolsonaro is a strong competitor in the field of global populism, and Brazil is the best candidate to be the new epicenter of this lethal virus and its death cult.
\n\nIt is not surprising that a president who defends the military dictatorship, torture, and death squads and maintains close family relations with the militias treats a health crisis that kills hundreds of thousands with total indifference. When the pandemic hit Brazil, Bolsonaro followed the same script as his master, Donald Trump. First, he downplayed the risks of the disease and contradicted scientists and health institutions; then, he opposed the closing of businesses and other lockdown measures, refusing to work with other elements of the government or to release funds to the states and cities to contain the disease. When asked about the number of deaths, he shocked public opinion with responses like “So what?” and “I am not an grave-digger.” At a time when the severity of the pandemic was undeniable, he promoted the use of hydroxychloroquine as a miracle drug, just like his idol in the USA. His government proposed a R $200.00 monthly allowance for unemployed workers or workers unable to work informally during the isolation period—and then when left-wing parliamentarians approved a new R $600.00 proposal, Bolsonaro took credit for it, gaining popularity among Brazil’s poorest groups and regions. In August 2020, with 3.5 million people infected, Bolsonaro continued to spread disinformation alleging that “the majority of the population is immune to the coronavirus.” Regarding the deaths of over 100,000 people, he said “Let’s move on with life.”
\n\nIn other decades, statesmen facing a pandemic would make empty speeches to the effect that protecting the population is the top priority. Today, we see far-right populist leaders who are proud to speak with “authenticity,” stupidity “without filters” and “without demagogy.” Leaders like Bolsonaro and Trump break with the decorum previously expected of those in office or in the media. They openly proclaim their ignorance about specific fields of economic management (“I am not an economist!”) or pander to their base with racist, misogynist and classist vulgarities. To embody this air of “novelty,” “anti-system,” and “authenticity” is to venture where not even the greatest political figures on the left or right go.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/14.jpg\")
Graves at the Vila Formosa Cemetery in São Paulo, the largest in Latin America.
\nAlongside threats to send troops to close the Supreme Court and other sensationalist statements, while other governments introduced forced lockdowns and martial law, the federal government of Brazil organized its own version of extremism, permitting death on a genocidal scale. This is not just a matter of ignoring science, but rather of using scientific management to implement targeted eugenics and genocide. In accepting that 70% of the population would “inevitably” contract COVID-19, Bolsonaro and his government have risked up to two million casualties, chiefly from among those who are already at risk due to class, age, gender, ethnicity, and locality.
\n\nIn the face of this, movements for social transformation must show what it means to be truly rebellious, reclaiming tools for struggle that have been appropriated and distorted by our enemies. Populist bases are rejecting institutions that, at the turn of the century, only anti-capitalists dared to question. A slogan from the anti-globalization movements, “hate the media? Be the media,” has been corrupted into a right-wing version based in discounting verifiable facts and spreading false information to achieve political objectives. Challenging the way that pharmaceutical conglomerates monopolize the field of science is no longer a step towards increasing popular access to knowledge, but a means to promote potentially lethal obscurantism. Now the ones seeking to subvert political institutions are not self-organized political initiatives, but those who aim to establish a form of government based on rumors and authoritarianism.
\n\nWhen we imagine a future beyond capitalist democracy, we must picture a social revolution and the end of social classes, implying a permanent confrontation with all hierarchies—not just the obviously authoritarian figures like Trump, Bolsonaro, and Orbán. The alternative will be an even more brutal and unequal state kneeling on our necks forever as we struggle to breathe.
\n\n\n\n\n“…the progressive statist recomposition was a step backwards. A setback. For those who bet on collective emancipation, the reference point must always be the highest level reached by social struggle, and never what it is possible to achieve. The possible is always the State, the party, the existing institutions. But emancipation cannot stop there.”
\n\n–Raul Zibechi e Decio Machado, Os Limites do Progressismo
\n
\n\n\n“History forgets the moderates.”
\n\n–Andrew Bird
\n
Since the 2018 elections, people and social movements have wondered what form radical resistance to the government of Jair Bolsonaro would take. How can we resist an enemy that seems to transform all controversy into momentum and all resistance into a pretext for further repression? How can we mobilize an opposition that is not incapacitated by a pacifying and conciliatory left that has become accustomed to state management, seeing popular revolt as a threat to the order that they identify with? A few episodes have shown that many people are willing to take the first step—for example, in 2019, when anti-fascists clashed with groups celebrating the anniversary of the 1964 military coup.
\n\nDuring the first months of the pandemic, the best answers emerged in the daily activities of social movements, anti-fascists, and organized soccer fans who confronted and blocked pro-government street actions, couriers who organized unprecedented strikes across the country, and residents of favelas and occupations who organized solidarity actions. We see a promising model in these examples of mutual aid between poor and excluded people and of direct action confronting the reigning order and those who support it. Such struggles did not limit themselves to what politicians deem possible—which is simply the catastrophic management of the disaster. They did not wait, but dealt with the situation, refusing be paralyzed. This is what we are betting on.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/27.jpg\")
“Bolsonaro out—We are the resistance!” Anti-fascists in Porto Alegre, May 17, 2020.
\n\n\n\n“Without the hierarchical, hegemonic nature of the state, which monopolizes the use of force, the economy, official ideology, information, and culture; without the omnipresent security apparatuses that penetrate all aspects of life, from the media to the bedroom; without the disciplinary hand of the state as God on Earth, no system of exploitation or violence could survive.”
\n\n–Dilar Dirik, Radical Democracy: The First Line Against Fascism
\n
The anti-fascist struggle that emerged in the media and in the agendas of these movements had not been seen in Brazil for decades; there was widespread coverage of protests, but also threats of criminalization and repression. Starting in 2015, the right wing expanded their street presence with marches on Sundays to demand the impeachment of the PT, and then, in 2018, to elect Bolsonaro. After the election, right-wing groups revised this model again, staging “protests” in favor of the government. They organized these on weekends so as not to hinder the flow of vehicles and commerce on weekdays—the opposite of the anti-capitalist movements that organize with the aim of paralyzing urban circulation during the rush hour in the middle of the week.
\n\nThis was not a triumph of grassroots right-wing organizing; rather, it was built with the direct support of police and security agencies. Military police files leaked to the press showed that the police command treats pro-government demonstrations as harmless, praising them even when they violate health measures like the mandate to wear masks. Although it is unconstitutional to discriminate against political demonstrations on an ideological basis, linking certain organizations and even political parties to crimes such as vandalism, police did not even monitor the actions of the right, while opposition protests were classified as a “threat to order” and forcefully repressed. Once again, we see the lines of exclusion at work in the way that repression is concentrated on popular demonstrations of the left, peripheral, Black, and poor majority, while police officers escort, protect, and take photos with the mostly white Bolsonaro supporters from upscale neighborhoods driving caravans of luxury vehicles. The state seeks to determine which political actions will gain space on the streets and which will be crushed.
\n\nDefying this, football fans and precarious workers organized several public demonstrations in 2020. On May 3 and 17, anti-fascists in Porto Alegre interrupted Bolsonarist protests calling for the return of the military dictatorship, chanting “Step Back, Fascists.” These were some of the first demonstrations of the year—and after many months—to challenge Bolsonarist hegemony on the streets.
\n\nAs elsewhere in the world, the media debated whether it was “essential” to meet in public spaces to confront demonstrations in support of Bolsonaro and for the reopening of businesses. Bosses and pundits see no problem in crowding us onto buses, into queues, into the precarious workplaces and delivery service jobs that have been expanding while we suffer from the virus and privation—so we consider it necessary to get together to block the defenders of this murderous economic system and the circulation of labor for production and goods for consumption.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/18.jpg\")
Soccer fans at Av. Paulista in São Paulo, on May 31, 2020.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/11.jpg\")
An app delivery worker joins front-line protests against police repression.
\nOn May 9, about 70 Corinthians fans in the city of São Paulo organized a small action at the same time and place as a pro-government rally. The action blocked the Bolsonarista protest; along with images of something similar happening in Porto Alegre on May 17, this drew attention on social media and brought more people out into the street. Fans of different football teams took to the streets in São Paulo to thwart protests by supporters of the president on May 31, the day that these actions spread to a national scale. Fans of Gaviões da Fiel, one of the biggest groups in the country, with a political history dating from the worst years of the dictatorship, called for demonstrations with rival fan groups such as Palmeiras, São Paulo, and Santos. This moment of unity between different football clubs and other anti-fascist groups drew a crowd almost ten times bigger than the Bolsonarista side. The police tried to form lines to keep them isolated, but a clash took place when anti-fascists responded to provocations from protesters carrying US flags and flags from the Ukrainian neo-Nazi group Pravy Sektor. The police intervened, attacking anti-fascists and protecting the neo-Nazis on Paulista Avenue. Anti-fascists resisted, erecting barricades and blocking roads for a long time.
\n\nThe scenes reverberated across the country, especially a photo of a gig economy delivery worker throwing stones at the police. Under the slogan “Somos Democracia” (“We are Democracy”), chanted by many participants, this example of a combative and organized opposition spread. The wave of revolts that spread across the United States after the assassination of George Floyd on May 25 further strengthened the anti-racist protests in Brazil. The barricades that appeared on May 31 showed that the fights against racism, governments that flirt with fascism, and their repressive lackeys are fundamentally the same from the north to south of the globe.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antimdia1/status/1267870123039305731\n\n\n
This tweet shows anti-fascists in São Paulo facing nationalists with Ukrainian neo-Nazi symbols and United States flags. The Military Police are protecting the nationalists.
\n\nAltogether, more than 15 cities saw protests on May 31. In Rio de Janeiro, anarchists and anti-fascists showed up to confront a pro-Bolsonaro action in Copacabana, and a physical confrontation ensued between anti-fascists and nationalists. In Belo Horizonte, the actions also began with small calls and became large demonstrations. In many cases, it was possible to block, delay, or even prevent caravans supporting Bolsonaro and demanding the reopening of business. The soccer members of Resistência Alvinegra made the first call for a rally in Praça do Papa; the weekly demonstrations that started with a dozen became thousands of people on May 31 and June 7, with many supporters and social movements marching to block the right-wing caravans, carrying anti-fascist flags and songs, honoring George Floyd and also João Vitor and Rodrigo Ciqueira who had been murdered by police in Rio de Janeiro, as well as councilor and black-feminist militant Marielle Franco, who was murdered in 2018 by militiamen.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/15.jpg\")
Belo Horizonte, May 31.
\nIn the following weeks, more cities joined these protests. In Salvador, the wave of protests in Brazil and the US inspired groups including Reação Antifascista Salvador, organized football clubs, labor unions, and Quilombos to organize a mass demonstration on June 7. In Curitiba, a demonstration including a massive anti-fascist turnout marched through the city center on June 1, burned the gigantic national flag in front of the government palace, and clashed with police.
\n\nDespite all their problems and internal conflicts, football clubs possess an enormous capacity to mobilize people and open dialogue between different sectors of society. We see this in the recent example of organized football fans in Chile joining the front lines to defend the 2019 protests. In 2013, the occupation in defense of Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey also drew fans who left internal rivalries aside to defend the park and the people occupying Taksim Square. In his Antifa Handbook, Mark Bray argues that “some of the most ferocious anti-fascist conflicts have happened in the context of football.” This tradition goes back to the 1970s, when fascist groups used football clubs and games as a venue to recruit new members and anti-fascists responded to prevent this.
\n\nUnfortunately, the protests dwindled, especially in São Paulo, the city with the biggest football organizations participating. After the clashes of May 31, the state government and police officials tried to mediate between anti-fascists and the organizers of pro-government rallies so that they would not organize protests at the same time on Paulista Avenue again. Movements like the “Povo Sem Medo,” linked to the leftist mayor candidate Guilherme Boulos, the Somos Democracia network, and other Black movements decided to respect the court decision that prohibited rallies at the same time and place on June 7. After that, it didn’t make sense to organize a counter-protest against fascists when it would not mean actually confronting them.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/crimethinc/status/1269707749434314752\n\n\n
The backlash took other forms in other states. Soccer matches were taking place without audiences, but football clubs were permitted to decorate the stadium with their flags. In Belo Horizonte, however, the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) banned the Resistência Alvinegra members after they displayed a flag with the image of Marielle Franco and the word “Antifa,” the same flag that had been present in street protests over the previous months. The explanation of the CBF showed that, by its rules, the word “antifa” is the same as racist and xenophobic expressions.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/16.jpg\")
Massive anti-fascist flags banned from Mineirão stadium.
\nThe authorities’ fear of combative expressions and movements is obvious. We have seen a wave of upheavals in Latin America, with Ecuador, Colombia, and Chile rising against police violence, the cost of living, and neoliberal austerity measures. Some of the Brazilian left and many anti-capitalists take inspiration from those struggles, wondering if uprisings could start here too. Jair Bolsonaro himself expressed in 2019 that the government is apprehensive about the wave of protests in neighboring countries; in 2020, he showed his concern about the radicalization on the streets and his fear of Brazil “turning into a Chile” in response to the effects of the social crisis created by the pandemic. However, the government’s maneuvers indicate a desire to imitate the Chilean neoliberal model, giving total freedom for capitalists to intensify the exploitation of labor and the environment while the state reduces social services for the population. Indeed, both the crisis caused by the pandemic and the killings carried out by police have generated protests and clashes, such as the one that took place on June 15 after police officers working as private security guards murdered young Guilherme Guedes.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/Antimdia1/status/1273062370164834313\n\n\n
Bolsonaro and his allied lawmakers sought to imitate Donald Trump, declaring anti-fascists a “domestic terrorist threat.” They may not actually use the law to ban anti-fascism, but history shows us that Bolsonaro can accomplish his goal directly by catalyzing his base into street violence . Extreme right groups are already doing the dirty work legitimized by the president’s speech: invading hospitals to try to “prove” that, as Bolsonaro insinuated, they are not full of patients, violating coffins to check rumors that there are no dead people but just stones inside them to simulate funerals, assaulting health professionals in hospitals or organizing protests for more resources to assist patients. We saw groups like “300 Pelo Brasil” (“300 for Brazil) camping in Brasilia and marching to the Supreme Court with torches and aesthetics explicitly inspired by the fascist “Unite the Right” mobilization in the US in August 2017. Despite suffering some arrests, both the “300” (who have no more than 30 members) and other less organized groups show that the impact of the Bolsonaro government goes beyond the damage that state institutions can do—it is bringing organized fascism and racism to the streets.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/4.jpg\")
Bolsonaro fans emulating the worst of Trump fans, May 31, 2020.
\nBut everywhere in the Americas, people are sending a clear message: we will not tolerate the rise of fascism, nor the murders perpetrated by police, the most fascist institution in our society. The streets do not belong to those who “protest in favor of the government” and do the dirty work that the police are not (yet) able to do on camera. We will continue taking the streets, with the soccer fans and others, even when traditional parties and social movements lack the courage to join us.
\n\n\n\n\n“Nobody in the world, nobody in history, has ever gotten their freedom by appealing to the moral sense of the people who were oppressing them.”
\n\n-Assata Shakur
\n
During the pandemic, workers organized strikes to halt the erosion of employee rights and working conditions. Deemed essential yet overworked and without any PPE or protective supplies, workers from crucial sectors like the subway and the postal service participated in successful strikes. Tenants associations also came together to call for a rent strike and relief, drawing less response from the media but still playing a crucial role. One new group stood out for its size, strength, and organizational creativity in uniting to defy one of the most successful businesses during the pandemic: Entregadores Antifascistas, “Anti-Fascist Couriers.”
\n\nProfessionals working with their own bikes or motorbikes for food delivery apps and the like saw a significant increase in demand for their services. Their labor was declared essential so others could stay home. Meanwhile, those who weren’t able to stay home, like the nine million people who became unemployed in the first half of 2020, tried to make ends meet in the informal labor market—which already employed more than 40% of the Brazilian workforce. International companies such as Uber and Rappi and the Brazilian Ifood have grown up to 50%, absorbing services and taking in masses of laid-off workers from companies that interrupted their activities or went bankrupt due to the pandemic, which raised the country’s unemployment rate to 13.3%. Nevertheless, more orders didn’t mean more earnings for those who work. In addition to receiving less pay, app couriers were subjected to higher health risks.
\n\nThe Entregadores Antifascistas group first emerged in São Paulo to oppose the opportunistic logic of digital businesses that individualize labor relations. Galo, who was to become one of the founding members, recorded a video on his birthday in March 2020 in which he vented his frustration after getting blocked by the app for not being able to complete a delivery because of a flat tire. The video went viral and this encouraged him to make a petition demanding meals, protective equipment, and other basic rights denied by the companies who handle couriers as if they are “entrepreneurs” and “partners” rather than employees (to such an extent that companies claim that they are the actual users’ employees). It received more than 600,000 signatures. When others joined the cause nationwide, the group came together under the name Entregadores Antifascistas as an informal union and a movement aiming to become an autonomous cooperative. Dozens of them took part in the antifascist protests of June 7, when they made a video calling for other couriers to join the movement.
\n\nEntregadores Antifascistas in the anti-fascist protests of June 7, 2020.
\nAfter attending the protests of organized soccer fan clubs and anti-fascist movements, the group called for a one-day strike (the “Breque dos App”) fro using delivery apps on July 1. This national couriers strike took place in thirteen states, demanding rights including better wages and working conditions. The only way to hinder the apps’ punitive measures towards groups or individuals who participated was to expand the movement further. They blocked avenues with hundreds of motorcycles and blockaded the delivery app companies’ main offices. A second strike occurred on July 24.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/19.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/20.jpg\")
The “App Strike” in São Paulo.
\nThe example of Entregadores Antifascistas shows how the “uberization” of employment agreements intensifies employee precarity amid the already dominant informality. Those who sell their labor power are not autonomous entrepreneurs on a level playing field with the companies that employ them. In Galo’s words, “We’re not entrepreneurs, we’re workforce!” Becoming dependent upon these apps and their algorithms, workers have only lost control. The old class division remains between elite and proletariat, employers and employees. The modernization introduced by these companies and their “gig economy” is a digital feudalism that takes advantage of the lack of regulations to do away with fixed payments, labor rights, job security, and retirement, only paying drivers, couriers, and other app workers for the kilometers they ride or for the deliveries they complete, with no established rules. Only a grassroots struggle built from the ground up that allows diffuse and isolated individuals to gather to create a language of action can strike, inflict costs upon the bosses, and achieve real changes.
\n\nIn addition to the direct impact on the health and lives of millions of people, forecasts indicate that the pandemic will subject up to 66 million more people to hunger worldwide. In Brazil, in addition to the nine million jobs lost, hunger has been one of the first problems to emerge with the economy partially closed and many people staying at home. The Bolsonaro administration contributed to creating this situation: in his first act as president, Bolsonaro eliminated organizations responsible for fighting hunger, such as the National Council for Food and Nutrition Security (Consea). The following year, he told members of the international press that “There is no hunger in Brazil.”
\n\nAlong with the health and economic crisis, there was an increase of up to 40% in the price of food. In São Paulo, for example, producers saw a drop of up to 80% in the sale of vegetables to bars and restaurants in the first months of the pandemic. Up to 70% of some products were thrown in the trash while thousands of people in the cities had no way to feed their families. The logic of the market causes producers to throw away food rather than sharing it with those who are starving and hampers the rational distribution of resources in times of crisis. If there are no profit returns, it is not useful for them to bring food to those who need it most.
\n\nMany companies have tried to advertise in the guise of charity by donating processed and industrialized food products in order to get their brand mentioned in TV reports. They used Brazilian corporate journalism to occupy prime-time millionaire minutes, getting free publicity and an image of “solidarity” for their brands.
\n\nBy contrast, between March and July, the MST (Movement of Landless Rural Workers) managed to donate 2300 tons of food to communities across the country. Family farming is responsible for up to 80% of fruit production and 60% of vegetables consumed by the population. The MST used the same model to produce and sell food below the market price, donating rice, beans, pine nuts, yerba mate, cornmeal, fruits, and vegetables on a national scale during the pandemic.2
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/9.jpg\")
Three tons of food that the MST donated during the pandemic.
\nOther initiatives demonstrated the anarchist principles of mutual aid in the urban peripheries, in squats, and in the favelas, distributing food and even offering community aseptic cleaning. In the Paraisópolis, one of the largest favelas in São Paulo, residents organized their own health care network, training and equipping 240 residents in 60 bases to act as first responders in emergencies. In addition, they distributed meals to support those who were sick, those who stayed home unable to work, and those who had no option but to go out to earn a living.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/2.jpg\")
The autonomous movement MOB [Movimento Organização de Base] carrying out a solidarity action in the Macacos community.
\nSolidarity is not a service or a “job”—rather, it is a way of changing the world together. It has been an essential activity for every revolutionary movement throughout history. People educated within capitalism know only the scarcity model created by individualized property rights. In health or economic crises, they believe that the solution is an even more intense competition for resources, for money, even for health itself. Only direct, voluntary, mutually supportive, and autonomous actions can overcome this tendency towards competition and isolation.
\n\nComrades from the Federation of Revolutionary Union Organizations in Brazil (FOB) argue that the Spanish Flu, the last global pandemic, can teach us about anti-capitalist values for the current crisis. A century ago, the Spanish Flu killed more people than the four years of World War I had. It devastated Brazilian cities, killing 35,000 people, whose bodies piled up in the streets and in mass graves in cities like Rio de Janeiro. During this period, the first significant general strike exploded—the General Strike of 1917—followed by the Anarchist Insurrection of November 1918 in Rio de Janeiro, ultimately winning rights for the whole working class. Both were led by the anarchist union movements that were hegemonic at the time.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/10.jpg\")
FOB members in community hygiene action. “Only the people save the people.”
\nStaying healthy is both a defensive and an offensive task, just like the organization we saw during the protests against racism and the police in the US and in the occupation movements of squares and buildings in the preceding years. We need forms of care that nourish the oppressed classes while undermining the state and capitalism—not just a crutch to make up for the intentional precariousness of their services. Football fans have already learned this lesson, organizing the distribution of food baskets at protests.
\n\nPandemics, social conflict, and solidarity among the poor and excluded are nothing new in these lands. Acting with a revolutionary perspective, collectives and movements can do more than simply “filling” the void of state services. We intend to show that new relations and principles can solve the problems caused by capitalist tyranny and to overcome the logic that causes such problems.
\n\n\n\n\n“For us, politics is something else. These are the words of Omama and the Xapiri people that he left us. These are the words that we hear in the time of dreams and that we prefer, because they are ours. Whites don’t dream as far as we do. They sleep a lot, but only dream of themselves.”
\n\n–Davi Kopenawa Yanomami, “A queda do céu,” 2016
\n
\n\n\n“When engineers told me they were going to use technology to recover the Doce River, they asked my opinion. I replied: ‘My suggestion is very difficult to put into practice. For we would have to stop all human activities that affect the body of the river, a hundred kilometers on the right and left banks, until it came back to life.’ Then one of them said to me: ‘But that is impossible.’ The world cannot stop. And the world stopped.”
\n\n–Ailton Krenak, “O Amanhã Não Está à Venda,” 2020
\n
Despite the advice and ancestral wisdom of the Krenak people, capitalism has not stopped, though we have seen the effect of the brief slowdown on economic and industrial activity in large cities during some moments of the lockdown. Still, there is no “new normal.” The next normality will not be “new,” but rather, a reissue of the old corruption, greed, authoritarianism, and crises of a system condemned to make crisis its form of rule.
\n\nWe watched Donald Trump lose the election in the United States to another racist and sexist who chose a police officer as his vice president.;As predicted, on January 6, 2021, we saw Trump attempt to resist defeat at the ballot box, exhorting his base to invade the Capitol. Trump’s defeat directly affects the future of Bolsonaro’s foreign policy, which is always subservient to US imperialist interests in Latin America. The Brazilian president is the last remaining declared supporter of Trump’s delusions, reproducing his narrative of electoral fraud and being practically the only head of state to justify the fascists’ invasion of US Congress on January 6. Bolsonaro is insinuating that there will be electoral fraud in 2022, emulating Trump’s speech to prepare to contest his defeat at the polls.
\n\nIn one of the many scandals involving Bolsonaro and his government, 7.5 million reais (U$1.4 million) raised to produce COVID-19 tests was given to an organization involving the president’s wife and the deputy government leader in the senate. The new normal, whether with regards to the pandemic or Bolsonaro populism, is similar to normality under other governments and crises. The same goes for business: 33 Brazilians became billionaires and the super rich expanded their fortunes during the pandemic, while fully half of the working population is unemployed for the first time in the country’s history. People die without care or tests while corrupt managers live a life of luxury financed by money intended to fight the coronavirus.
\n\nHistory does not follow a straight line of “natural progress.” The tyrannical specters that some believe had been left behind with the arrival of modernity continue to haunt us as the “plague bacillus” Albert Camus warned us of. We did not rid the world of totalitarian and obscurantist ghosts, nor of infectious pandemics—both are threatening us in the same way that they were centuries ago. Like the rise of fascism, the coming epidemics are already underway; according to experts, they can be triggered by viruses contained in threatened biomes, such as the Amazon. The disaster that we live in and that connects everyone in the world today is not a discontinued chapter in history. It is the product of capitalist exploitation and agribusiness, domestication, and the devastation of animal and plant life, from the cosmic to the microbiological level. The authoritarian forces that are capitalizing on this moment to refine their tactics and make their laws more brutal had already emerged over the past few decades; right-wing nationalist populism engulfs all continents, casting a shadow over all. From politicians like Trump and Bolsonaro to authoritarian groups like the Islamic State and fascist gangs, authoritarians aim to divide the world into a nationalist global civil war.
\n\nUnlike much of the left, who long for a “new normal” rather than paying attention to the disruptions that were already underway, we believe that if we don’t use our skills to strengthen our communities and our organizational capacity for social struggle, fascist governments, militias, and gangs will outpace us in developing theirs. The solidarity actions between communities and the fight against fascism on the streets foreshadow possible scenarios for any anti-authoritarian struggle, now or in the future; the means by which we search for a new world already show what this new world should be like. Those who organize in their neighborhoods and in the countryside to produce food will not go hungry when the centers of capitalism face global collapse. Whoever promotes solidarity will not need to compete for resources that rendered scarce only by a system that individualizes and concentrates property. Whoever organizes self-defense will not be at the mercy of police, armies, and other mercenaries, begging for defense against fascist aggressors.
\n\nThe European invasion of this land in the year 1500 generated several deadly pandemics in the Americas—which the Europeans often intentionally used as biological weapons. Probably the Incas, Guaranis, Krenaks, and Mapuches who inhabited this land also asked themselves: “When will everything return to normal?” Five centuries later, we have seen no return to what capitalism destroyed. These landscapes will always bear the marks left by all the worlds that have been destroyed here. If there is one thing we can learn from the past, it is not to hope for the “return” of what existed, but to face and overcome what is threatening us today.
\n\nHere, we remember the film Serras da Desordem (2016) directed by Andrea Tonacci, which mixes fiction and documentary to accompany Carapirú, a survivor of the massacre that gunmen inflicted upon the Awá-Guaja people in 1978. Carapirú wandered alone for 10 years, traveling 2000 kilometers. The catastrophe evoked in the film is the loss of a world without another being able to replace it. At one point in the film, we read the headline of a newspaper from the time of a meeting with Carapirú: “He dances, paints, and laughs. But it is sad.”
\n\nThe pandemic was something that many expected as a catastrophe—but when the plague finally arrived, it was like nothing anyone had imagined. The world does not behave according to our expectations, as those who seek revolution should know by now. We still do not and cannot know how to confront this epoch, because our previous way of life has been lost forever. We try daily to confront the unthinkable—to mourn the deaths of relatives, friends, strangers—to continue in our jobs—to survive—to embrace someone—to deal with destruction and anguish. We still try to be together, however separated, absorbing the experiences of individuals and collectives in this process, fighting and learning to fight until we can finally breathe again.
\n\n\n\n\n“The plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; it can lie dormant for years and years in furniture and linen-chests; it bides its time in bedrooms, cellars, trunks, and bookshelves; and perhaps the day would come when, for the bane and enlightenment of men, it will rouse up its rats again and send them forth to die in a happy city.”
\n\n–Albert Camus, The Plague
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2021/02/21/26.jpg\")
“Peace for Black people. Fire for the racists.”
\n“I am truly free only when all human beings, men and women, are equally free. The freedom of other men, far from negating or limiting my freedom, is, on the contrary, its necessary premise and confirmation.” –Mikhail Bakunin ↩
\nThe MST remains one of the main targets of the federal government and the states. In Minas Gerais, the eviction of the Quilombo Campo Grande settlement on August 13 displaced 450 families that had lived and farmed that land for more than 20 years after it was abandoned by its owner, who owed a fortune in taxes. Military police wrecked the community school and set the fields on fire, similar to the tactics the Islamic State used to expel farmers from their lands in Syria. ↩
\nThrough interviews with the founders and participants, we explore how an occupied social center and housing collective in Brazil has continued to function as a hub for mutual aid through the pandemic. This is the third installment in a series exploring mutual aid projects around the world in the era of COVID-19.
\n\nThe Zapatistas have said the best solidarity anyone can offer is to start their own social centers, projects, movements, and revolutions wherever they are based. In Belo Horizonte, the capital city of the state of Minas Gerais in southeastern Brazil, a collective called Kasa Invisível (Portuguese for “Invisible House”) has heeded that proposal, and hopes to inspire you to do the same.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/28/2.jpg\")
The flagship occupation of Kasa Invisível.
\nThe three formerly abandoned houses now occupied by this autonomous, anti-capitalist collective serve as a home for people in need, a social and cultural center for the community, and a meeting and organizing space for anti-authoritarian resistance and mutual aid. While there are hundreds of building and land occupations in Minas Gerais alone, Kasa is one of only a few squats in the region that explicitly exist to support struggles against the state and capitalism. As they refocus their efforts to meet their neighbors’ needs during the COVID-19 pandemic, the collective maintains a consistent relationship of mutual aid with the surrounding community, both giving support to and receiving support from those who live and work there. While they aim to be a reference and inspiration for similar projects throughout Brazil for a long time to come, recent circumstances have put the future of their occupation in question, prompting them to call for solidarity from the international community to keep this vital center of resistance active.
\n\nSince 2013, the collective has occupied three houses in the center of the city, using two as living spaces and keeping the third open to the community as a free space for meetings, workshops, movie screenings, study groups, debates, fundraisers, and other social and cultural events. The squat houses a free library, cinema, and urban garden, and offers space for movements, collectives, and unions that do not have their own headquarters to hold internal meetings or open events.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/28/4.jpg\")
“Against capital: occupy everything!” A music performance during one of the 2019 Carnival gatherings at Kasa Invisível, before the COVID-19 pandemic.
\nThe project began when a handful of anarchist political organizers formed an affinity group. Most of them knew each other from participating in other social centers such as Loja Grátis (Free Shop) and Ocupação Guarani Kaiowá, as well as groups like the Passe Livre Movement, which advocates for free urban transportation.
\n\nZ, who has lived in the squat since the group first occupied the property, says the idea of creating a social center that would function as a home, a cultural center, and a structure for anti-capitalist political organization had long been an ambition they shared. “Since the beginning, the purpose of the occupation is to be a space that supports your community,” he says. “Housing is important, but occupied spaces are much more alive when they become social centers, which can feed and be fed by the community.”
\n\nAfter researching empty houses in the city, they discovered a house in downtown Belo Horizonte that had sat abandoned for more than 20 years. Built in 1938, the two-story art deco house had previously been a restaurant—and before that, the home of a wealthy family. The group set about making the place habitable: cleaning, removing debris, rebuilding the floors, painting the walls, putting in new pipes for the water and electrical systems. They held fundraising events to pay for these repairs, all of which they performed themselves in weekly work parties. After three years of hard work to make the house safe to welcome guests], they finally opened to the community on November 27, 2016 with a\nstreet festival they called the Okupa Skina Fair
\n\nThere are currently more than 6 million abandoned properties in Brazil, a country where the housing deficit is estimated at 7 million units and 20 percent of the population lives in inadequate housing. Kasa Invisível’s desire to call attention to this disproportion is represented in the collective’s name. “It has a lot to do with abandoned properties being invisible spaces, as well as people with no place to live,” Z explains. “Other people pass by both on the streets as if they were lifeless objects. And they only become visible when we decide to take direct action and show that there is no reason to have empty houses while there are people without a home.”
\n\nBrazil’s urban squatter movement emerged in the late twentieth century as a response to its deeply entrenched homelessness crisis. This issue, however, can be traced back to the colonial era, when access to land was restricted to wealthy citizens who received land grants from the Portuguese Crown. After Brazil gained independence from Portugal in 1822, the government’s new land policies severely limited poorer citizens’ access to land, particularly immigrants and freed slaves of African descent. Today, almost half of the land in Brazil is owned by 1 percent of the population, a grouping that includes families descended from Portuguese nobility. Initiatives such as the Rural Landless Workers Movement, which has approximately 1.5 million members, have risen up to reform this unequal distribution by successfully occupying unused plots of land since the 1980s. These efforts inspired grassroots groups of homeless people in the country’s urban areas to begin systematically occupying vacant buildings, starting in Sao Paulo, Brazil’s largest city. Today, homeless organizations like these exist in at least 14 major cities across the country.
\n\nMore recent history has seen Brazil’s economy enter its second worst recession ever, which began in mid-2014 as a result of failed macroeconomic policies and was exacerbated by corruption scandals and right-wing parliamentary maneuvers that paved the way for the impeachment and dismissal of former President Dilma Rousseff, a member of the social democratic Workers’ Party (PT). The ensuing economic crisis has since increased the country’s wealth gap by a continually widening margin that peaked in 2019, and fueled a general swell of anger and distrust of the government, and specifically the PT, among Brazilian voters. In 2018, reactionary populist candidate Jair Bolsonaro was elected president after a campaign in which he presented himself as a political outsider and appealed to the far right with racist, misogynist, and homophobic comments and rhetoric in favor of the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. Dubbed the “Trump of the Tropics” by the Brazilian media, Bolsonaro has promised to “cleanse” the country of leftists.
\n\nBecause solidarity is so important in this economic and political climate, Kasa and other urban occupations, such as Casa da Resistência in Bahia, Brazil, act as an informal network of support for one other. “We have several squats in our town, mostly buildings with many floors and dozens—or hundreds—of families,” says Z. “We try to keep in touch and build mutual support, especially with the small squats, houses like ours, where people have less connections and many needs.”
\n\nUnder the current circumstances, in which social distancing is necessary to stay safe from COVID-19 infection, Kasa’s role as a home for people in precarious economic situations has become its most crucial function. The squat currently houses six families, ranging from young children to middle-aged women and men. The collective also includes people who don’t live in the house; before the pandemic, some were able to operate self-managed cooperative businesses there, enabling them to be more self-sufficient.
\n\nA support video explaining what Kasa Invisível is and does.
\n“One of our first intentions has always been to create a safe space for collectives that don’t have their own place to come together,” says L, who joined Kasa Invisível in 2016 after she met several members while working with the Passe Livre Movement. “Often, these collectives met in public spaces, or in spaces managed by the city, and both have their flaws on security and bureaucracies.” Before the pandemic, other collectives frequently used Kasa’s space for closed meetings and open events, many of which L says they wouldn’t be able to hold in other places that require payment or don’t have the necessary structure. “Another need that we certainly meet is that of a meeting place for people with libertarian and anarchist ideals,” she says. “Often people who felt alone with certain thoughts or studies find Kasa to find others who think alike, and are strengthened as a community.”
\n\nIn addition to serving the community as a meeting and event space, Kasa has housed a community kitchen, a screen-printing workshop, and a vegan food cooperative. In the early days of the occupation, the collective operated a Free Store in the house and on the sidewalk, gathering clothes, tools, books and other materials to share freely. “This allowed us to meet and support many people, especially homeless people in our neighborhood, who were the main users,” says Z.
\n\nHaving already established solid relationships with their neighbors, the people at Kasa Invisível have been uniquely prepared to respond to the needs of the most vulnerable in their community during the current global crisis. “Even before the pandemic, we already walked through the streets around the squat, and we already talked to the people on the streets,” says L. “We are able to maintain a dialogue that allows us to organize our action based on the real necessities of the people.”
\n\nBrazil’s count of confirmed COVID-19 cases has now passed three million, with more than 100,000 deaths. As of this month, Brazil has the third highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases in the world. In spite of this, Bolsonaro has continually opposed quarantine measures such as closing businesses and restricting public transportation, claiming they would hurt the national economy, and has downplayed the danger posed by the virus, dismissing the warnings of health experts and the media as “hysteria” and fantasy.” In June, Brazil’s Ministry of Health took down a website showing the country’s total numbers of COVID-19 infections and related deaths and began to only publish numbers for the previous 24 hours. Three days later, the Supreme Court ordered the ministry to resume reporting the cumulative figures, following accusations of data manipulation and censorship. Even when Bolsonaro announced in July that he had tested positive for the virus, he continued to defend his stance against isolation measures.
\n\nDespite the federal government’s attempts to obfuscate the impacts of coronavirus, L says the substantial number of deaths has caused an inescapable feeling of grief among the people of Brazil. “And they can’t even process this in a healthy way, because they have to worry about money, rent, what they are going to eat, and how they will be able to protect themselves from the virus, knowing they can’t afford to stop working, stop taking the crowded buses. The impact of this on the mental health of the general population is immeasurable.”
\n\nWhile adapting to the pandemic has meant Kasa Invisível can no longer host meetings in the occupation and has suspended all events for the foreseeable future, in other ways, the situation has made their function as a hub of support for the community more meaningful than ever. “In Belo Horizonte, we saw the population who live on the streets increase,” says L. “This is visible for anyone who gets out of their house.” In March, they started a campaign, inspired by the campaigns organized by other collectives in countries like Chile and the US, to support the area’s homeless population, having seen that they were among those most affected by the crisis. They began to collect donations of money and materials including food, clothing, masks, and hygiene products to produce kits, which they distribute to their homeless neighbors and other occupations in the neighborhood on a weekly basis.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/28/1.jpg\")
“Against capital and the authorities: solidarity, direct action, and self-determination”—aid kits packed to distribute in the neighborhood of Kasa Invisível.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2020/09/28/3.jpg\")
Distributing aid kits in the neighborhood of Kasa Invisível.
\n“All of this fits together and only deepens the proposal that we have brought from the beginning, which is to use the house as a tool for the community,” says Z. He believes these direct actions have made more people aware not only of the collective’s presence in the neighborhood, but of why they are there. “Many people already knew Kasa Invisível, but not all people noticed all the fronts on which we operate. Some thought it was just a cultural or music place where you can go for free. It was great to see the response of new people knowing about the space for the first time due to the campaign, and others realizing that Kasa is much more than a place for gathering, but also a tool of action in our territory.”
\n\nThroughout this crisis, the collective itself has also benefited from solidarity with the surrounding community. “The relationship with the people who attend and support Kasa, in addition to other movements, was also fundamental,” says Z. “Not least because all residents were unable to work, and mutual support was essential for us to have something to eat too.” More recently, this solidarity has become particularly crucial as they contend with specific challenges to their occupation of these three houses.
\n\nA video about the mutual aid projects organized out of Kasa Invisível, courtesy of the Brazilian media collective Antimídia.
\nKasa Invisível has been threatened with eviction since a judge authorized the “repossession” of the house on March 18, 2020 and the court denied the collective’s request for a suspension of the decision. “Without the support of lawyers and a collective of UFMG [state university] jurists in solidarity with the space, we would be in a complicated situation,” says Z. The online petition they have organized, which has now collected more than half its goal of 5000 signatures, calls on the Belo Horizonte City Hall to suspend the repossession of the Kasa and, for the duration of the current health crisis, prohibit all evictions of those in similarly precarious housing situations throughout the city.
\n\nIn July, the collective put out a call for solidarity, asking for financial and material support to keep the houses safe and habitable for the occupants, and their doors open as a free space for the community in the future. The region’s intense rainy season has caused flooding throughout southeastern Brazil; as Z has pointed out, squatting means being responsible for managing and repairing one’s own living space. To prepare for the next rainy season, they need to fix Kasa’s roof and gutters, which were severely damaged by the last rains in addition to the deterioration the house suffered during its two decades of abandonment; they also have to improve the electricity and pipes, repair floors and walls, and expand doors and hallways for accessibility. So far, they have been able to raise 30% of the full amount (US $6000) needed for materials, labor, and transportation costs.
\n\n\nhttps://twitter.com/kasainvisivel/status/1300801399190704133\n\n\n
Z believes that establishing a comprehensive relationship with the surrounding community, not limited to specific groups or scenes, has been fundamental both to making an impact and to generating the support that sustains the initiative. For people who want to start similar projects, he stresses how important it is to demonstrate anarchist principles, rather than simply talk about them. “Disseminating messages and theories is very important, but proposing actions and putting them into practice is even more important for us to be taken seriously.”
\n\nBecause they know this kind of work can only change the world if other people and groups replicate it wherever they are, the collective members continue to hope their campaigns will inspire similar efforts, as they’ve been inspired by campaigns in other parts of the world. “I think I speak for everyone when I say that one of our big dreams is that spaces like Kasa Invisível multiply everywhere in Brazil, especially in those places that lack spaces like that,” says L. “May it serve as inspiration and proof that this is possible to occupy an abandoned house, or many together. It is possible to maintain it from a horizontal management, without the help of companies or state apparatus.”
\n\nPrevious articles in this series have explored whether or not mutual aid should always be political, particularly in times of crisis such as a global pandemic. Asked if he considers the work of Kasa Invisível to be political, Z says, “If being political is a broad relationship of action and social transformation, yes, certainly. The relationship between direct actions of mutual aid or other forms of organization and a radical vision of social transformation is not always obvious, because even bourgeois charities can do actions that look very similar to ours. It is in the organizing, in long-term visions and in daily practice, that we will design and make obvious the relationship of emergency or spontaneous actions with revolutionary practice and visions.”
\n\nYou can donate to Kasa Invisível via PayPal: kasainvisivel@gmail.com
\nOr visit abre.ai/kasainvisivel.
\nComrades in the US have produced shirts and posters to support Kasa Invisível.
\nYou can sign a petition against the eviction here.
\nYou can read more about the support campaign for Kasa Invisível here.
\nSquatting activism in Brazil and Spain: Articulations between the right to housing and the right to the city - Article about squatting in Belo Horizonte and Spain (6th chapter of the book).
\nAs the fires in the Amazon rainforest continue to burn, our comrades in Brazil have sent us this analysis of the causes of the catastrophe and how it should inform our vision of the future.
\n\n\n\n\n“I worry about whether the whites will resist. We have been resisting for 500 years.”
\n\n \n
The scene is gloomy. On August 19, 2019, smoke covers cities across the state of São Paulo, turning day into night at 3 pm. The previous day, in Iceland, people organized the first funeral, complete with a gravestone and a minute of silence, for a glacier declared dead. The smoke that engulfed São Paulo is caused by forest fires in the Amazon Forest far away in the North of Brazil; the glacier has disappeared due to rising temperatures related to the carbon dioxide accumulating in the atmosphere.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/24/1.jpg\")
Chief of the Tenharim people of southern Amazonas fighting wildfire.
\nThese tragic scenes—almost picturesque, almost absurd—could sound comical if they weren’t real. They are so extreme that they remind us of fictional scenarios such as those described in the novel And Still the Earth, a Brazilian environmental dystopia by Ignácio de Loyloa Brandão. Written in the 1970s during the military dictatorship in Brazil, the book describes a fictitious dictatorial regime known as “Civiltar,” which celebrates cutting down the last tree in the Amazon with a jingoistic declaration that it has created “a desert greater than that of the Sahara.” In this story, all the Brazilian rivers are dead; jugs of water from each of the extinct rivers are displayed in a hydrographic museum. Aluminum can dunes and highways permanently blocked by the shells of abandoned cars are the backdrop of São Paulo. The city itself suffers from sudden heat pockets capable of killing any unsuspecting person; mysterious diseases consume the citizens, especially the homeless.
\n\nThe author claims that he was inspired by real events that seemed absurd and unusual at the time. Today, these are becoming ever more ordinary.
\n\nNews of the increased burning of the Amazon has sent shockwaves around the world. Burns rose 82% in 2019 over the same period last year in Brazil, according to the National Institute for Space Research, and new outbreaks of fire are still being reported as we write. The catastrophic images of destruction have fueled the indignation of people around the world who are concerned about the future of life on earth, seeing how important the Amazon rainforest is for climate regulation and global biodiversity. Images of the fires compelled French President Emmanuel Macron to bring the subject to the G7 summit and to exchange barbs with President Jair Bolsonaro in the media after France offered millions of dollars in funds to fight forest fires.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/24/2.jpg\")
Protest against deforestation in the Amazon, in São Paulo, August 23, 2019.
\nSince the end of 2018, half a billion bees have been found dead in four Brazilian states. The death of these insects that are essential to fertilizing 75% of the vegetables we eat is linked to the use of pesticides banned in Europe but permitted in Brazil. In August 2019, the court dismissed the charges against a farmer who used pesticides thrown from a plane as a chemical weapon against Guyra Kambi’y indigenous community in Mato Grosso do Sul in 2015. The same month, groups of farmers, “land grabbers” [people who falsify documents in order to obtain ownership of land], union members, and traders used a Whatsapp group to coordinate setting fires in the municipality of Altamira, Pará, the epicenter of fires consuming the Amazon rainforest. As reported in Folha do Progresso, the “day of the fire” was organized by people encouraged by the words of Jair Bolsonaro: “The goal, according to one of the leaders speaking anonymously, is to show the president that they want to work.”
\n\nThe recent wave of fires linking President Jair Bolsonaro’s policies to attacks against forests, peasant farmers, and indigenous peoples is an intensification of a process as old as the colonization of the Americas. While the Workers’ Party (PT) was still in power, many projects were introduced to expand and accelerate growth, including the construction of the Belo Monte plant, which displaced and impacted indigenous communities and thousands of other people living in the countryside. The approval of the Forest Code in 2012 enabled farmers to advance over indigenous territories and nature reserves with impunity, while suspending the demarcation of new protected lands.
\n\nBoth left and right governments see nature and human life chiefly as resources with which to produce commodities and profit. The government of Bolsonaro, a declared enemy of the common people, women, and indigenous groups, doesn’t just threaten us with the physical violence of police repression. In declaring that he will no longer recognize any indigenous land, Bolsonaro is intensifying a war on the ecosystems that make human life possible—a war that long precedes him.
\n\nFor centuries, we have struggled to survive the greatest disaster of our time, a disaster that threatens the sustainability of all the biomes and communities on this planet. Its name is capitalism—the cruelest, most inequitable, and destructive economic system in history. This threat is not the result of the inevitable forces of nature. Humans created it and humans can eliminate it.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/24/3.jpg\")
Anarchists in Sao Paulo on August 23, 2019 protesting against the government and against the deforestation of the Amazon: “Burn fascists, not forests!”
\nIn Brazil, we have witnessed firsthand how this system exploits people, promotes genocide, and degrades and pollutes the earth, water, and air. Even if we ultimately manage to abolish it, we will still have to survive the consequences of letting it go on for so long. The destruction of entire ecosystems, the poisons in rivers and in our own bodies, the species that have gone extinct, the glaciers that have disappeared, the forests that have been cut down and paved over—these consequences will remain for many years to come. In the future, we will have to survive by gathering what we need from the ruins and waste that this system has left in its wake. All the material that has been torn from the ground to be strewn across the earth’s surface and dumped into the seas will not return overnight to the depths it came from.
\n\nRecognizing this should inform how we envision our revolutionary prospects. It is foolish to imagine that the abolition of capitalism will expand the consumer activities that are currently available to the global bourgeoisie to the entire human population; we must stop fantasizing about a regulated post-capitalist world with infinite resources to generate the sort of commodities that capitalist propaganda has led us to desire. Rather, we will have to experiment in ways to share the self-management of our lives amid the recovery of our biomes, our relationships, and our bodies after centuries of aggression and exploitation—organizing life in regions that have become hostile to it.
\n\nThe ways we organize our resistance today should be informed by the fact that our revolutionary experiments will not be taking place in a world of peace, stability, and balance. We will be struggling to survive in the midst of the consequences of centuries of pollution and environmental degradation. The best-case scenario for the future will look like the situation in Kobanê in 2015: a victorious revolution in a bombed-out city full of mines.
\n\nNo one need imagine an apocalypse when the worst of dystopias is already part of reality. In the cities of Mariana and Brumadinho, in the state of Minas Gerais, dams managed by the mining companies Samarco and Vale collapsed due to lack of maintenance and neglect of human life, wildlife, and the environment. In Mariana, 19 people were killed as a consequence of an accident in 2015; In Brumadinho, at least 248 people have died and dozens are still missing following a disaster in January 2019. For the sake of profit, these companies and their managers inflicted one of the worst environmental disasters in the country, affecting thousands of people from the relatives of the dead to the indigenous and rural communities that depend on the rivers that were devastated by the toxic mud that was trapped in the dams.
\n\nSuch examples make it easy to see that the worst tragedy is not the end of the capitalist order but the fact that it exists in the first place. As Buenaventura Durruti said in an interview during the Spanish Civil War:
\n\n\n\n\n“We, the workers, can build others to take their place, and better ones! We are not in the least afraid of ruins. We are going to inherit the earth; there is not the slightest doubt about that. The bourgeoisie might blast and ruin its own world before it leaves the stage of history. We carry a new world here, in our hearts. That world is growing in this minute.”
\n
![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/24/4.jpg\")
Last stand: neither utopias nor dystopias—revolution!
\nThere is a consensus among scientific researchers, government institutions, social movements, and rural and urban peoples regarding the impacts and risks of global warming and increasing industrialization and urbanization. Some of these consequences are about to become irreversible. The deforestation of the Amazon itself may become irreparable if it reaches 40% of its total area.
\n\nIt has never worked to demand that governments solve these problems for us—and it never will. This is especially foolish when we are talking about the environmental disasters caused by their own policies. Land seizures and the deforestation of the Amazon are inextricably interlinked with the organized criminal enterprises that smuggle and kill in the countryside. Fully 90% of the timber harvested is contraband supported by a vast apparatus of illegal capitalism involving armed militias and the state itself.
\n\nPopulist leaders like Bolsonaro aim to benefit from the unfolding ecological catastrophe at the same time that they deny it is occurring. On the one hand, they claim that there is no need for action to curb global warming—alongside Trump, Bosonaro was the only other leader who threatened to abandon the Paris Agreement, claiming that global warming is a “fable for environmentalists.” This helps to mobilize the far-right base, which admires and celebrates outright dishonesty as a demonstration of political power. On the other hand, as the consequences of climate chaos and environmental imbalances become obvious undeniable facts, these leaders will opportunistically take advantage of environmental crises, product shortages, refugee migrations, and climate disasters such as hurricanes as pretexts to accelerate the implementation of ever more authoritarian measures in the fields of health, transportation and security. Using authoritarian and militarized means to determine who can have access to the resources they need to survive in a context of widespread scarcity is what many theorists have called ecofascism.
\n\nThe intervention of foreign states in the Amazon forests according to their own economic interests is simply the continuation of the colonialism that began in 1492. No government will solve the problem of fires and deforestation. At best, they might slow the impact of the exploitation they have always engaged in. Neoliberal capitalism demands endless growth, mandating the transformation of forests and soil into competitive consumer goods on the global market.
\n\nSo what is burning the Amazon—and the entire planet? The answer is clear: the pursuit of land, profit (legal or not), and private property. None of this will be changed by any elected or imposed government. The only truly environmental perspective is a revolutionary perspective seeking the end of capitalism and the state itself.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/24/5.jpg\")
Mundurukus warriors without state support set out for direct action to expel loggers from the Sawré Mybu Indigenous Land in Pará.
\nThe dystopian images of And Still the Earth and George Orwell’s novel 1984 were intended as warnings: exaggerated projections of the worst that can happen if we fail to change the course of history. Today, with cameras around every corner and our own TVs and cell phones carrying out surveillance on us, it is as if these dystopian novels are being used as a handbook for governments and corporations to bring our worst nightmares into reality.
\n\nDystopias are warnings; but utopias, by definition, represent places that do not exist. We need other places, places that are possible. We need to be able to imagine a different world—and to imagine ourselves, our desires, and our relationships being different as well.
\n\nWe should use the creativity that enables us to picture zombie apocalypses and other literary or cinematic calamities to imagine a reality beyond capitalism right now and begin building it. Today, as reality surpasses fiction, our activities are largely characterized by disbelief and passivity. But you cannot be neutral on a moving train—especially not one that is accelerating on a track into the abyss. Crossing your arms is complicity. Likewise, acting individually is insufficient because it maintains the logic that has brought us here.
\n\nWe have to rediscover revolutionary reference points for self-organized and egalitarian collective life. We need to share examples of real societies that have resisted the state and capitalism, such as the anarchist experiments during the Russian and Ukrainian Revolutions of 1917 and the Spanish Revolution of 1936. We should remember, also, that all of these were ultimately betrayed and crushed by, or with the connivance of, the Bolshevik Party and the Stalinist dictatorship that followed it, which carried out unprecedented industrialization and the mass displacement of agrarian peoples. This illustrates why it is so important to develop a way of imagining that does not simply replicate the visions of capitalist industrialism.
\n\nWe can also look to contemporary examples like the Zapatista Uprising in Mexico since 1994 and the ongoing revolution in Rojava in northern Syria. But in addition to the examples offered by anarchists or people influenced by anarchist principles, we should learn from the many indigenous nations around us: Guaranis, Mundurukus, Tapajós, Krenaks, and many others who have ceaselessly resisted European and capitalist colonial expansion for five centuries. They are all living examples from whom anarchists can learn about life, organization, and resistance without and against the state.
\n\nIf there is any fundamental basis for solidarity in response to the attack on the foundation of all life in the Amazon, it is the potential that we can build connections between the social movements, the poor, and excluded of the world and the indigenous and peasant peoples of all Latin America. To put a halt to the deforestation underway in the Amazon and countless similar forms of destruction that are taking place across the planet, we must nourish grassroots movements that reject the neoliberal resource management of soil, forests, waters, and people.
\n\nFor a solidarity between all peoples and exploited classes, not between paternalism and the colonialism of governments! The only way to address the environmental crisis and global climate change is to abolish capitalism!
\n\nAnother end of the world is possible!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/09/24/6.jpg\")
\nThroughout June and July 2019, CrimethInc. operatives from South and North America visited fifteen cities in seven different Brazilian states to present the print edition of Da Democracia à Liberdade, the Portuguese version of our book From Democracy to Freedom. The tour also served as an opportunity to compare notes about resistance to the Trump regime and the far-right populist government of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. This report from our trip also offers an overview of the some of the social centers and organizing going on in Brazil today. We have been publishing reports and analysis of social struggles from Brazil for many years; you can read some of our articles here.
\n\nWe participated in a total of 21 events, hosted by social centers, occupations, union headquarters, universities, autonomous research centers, and a few more unusual venues. The idea was to present the ideas in the book, but also to exchange experiences with those participating in social struggles in all the places we visited.
\n\nA video from one of the presentations in Porto Alegre, edited down to the English parts, summarizing anarchist resistance at the outset of the Trump administration.
\nEverywhere we went, we met people who were eager to discuss anarchist perspectives on democracy and exchange experiences of resisting capitalism and the far-right governments that hold power in the Americas and elsewhere around the world. It was also helpful that we brought hundreds of copies of the To Change Everything pamphlet in Portuguese, an accessible introduction to anarchist ideas.
\n\nWe built new ties and strengthened longstanding relationships between movements, collectives, and social centers and occupations throughout the cities we visited. There are many differences between Brazil and the United States, but the differences that exist within each country are much greater than the differences between the countries. Borders and nationality are among the constructs that our rulers employ in hopes of preventing solidarity from emerging between the oppressed of all countries. For this reason, one of our chief objectives has always been to foster dialogue on an international basis.
\n\nThe book From Democracy to Freedom was translated collectively. Digital and zine versions have been available in Portuguese since 2017. Now, thanks to the efforts of independent editorial collectives including No Gods No Masters, Subta, and Facção Fictícia, there is a high-quality print run of a thousand copies.
\n\nHere follows a short account of what we saw and learned on this tour, as a means to keep building these connections. Due to limited time and resources, it was only possible to visit three of the five major regions of Brazil. Next time, we aim to visit the North and Northeast regions of Brazil as well, in order to continue to broaden our exchange of experiences and solidarity.
\n\nStarting in São Paulo, we flew with our bags full of books and zines to the events in Goiânia and Brasilia. Lacking access to a vehicle for much of the trip, we depended on busses, planes, taxis, various metros, rideshares, and, of course, long treks on foot. All this, carrying hundreds of books and zines. We destroyed the wheels on several bags and carts along the way.
\n\nOur first stop was in Goiânia, at Casa Liberté, a social center that hosts activities organized by different collectives and anarchist movements in the region, such as the Autonomous Workers Federation (FAT). The event was organized in conjunction with the independent music label Two Beers or Not Two Beers Records.
\n\nBefore the discussion, the organizers showed the documentary “Parque Oeste, Story of a Struggle for Housing in Goiânia,” which chronicles the illegal and lethally violent eviction of the Sonho Real occupation in 2005 and the victorious housing struggle of the families that survived. The police operation left 14,000 people homeless; they also executed at least two people in cold blood.
\n\nThe event was attended by the film’s director and also by activist Eronildes Nascimento, a survivor of the eviction. Pedro Nascimento, Eronildes’s husband and the father of her son, was one of the people murdered by police during the eviction.
\n\nOver 100 people attended the event. We shared a panel with Eronildes, who expanded on the story told in the documentary and spoke about the struggles of the families who occupy a new area today known as Real Conquista, also in Goiânia.
\n\nAnarchists from all over Brazil participated in or supported the defense of the Sonho Real neighborhood. Brad Will, an anarchist and Indymedia journalist from the United States known to some of us personally, filmed the occupation and the eviction. His footage is included in the Parque Oeste documentary that was screened that night. Brad was murdered in Mexico in 2006 while filming the popular uprising in Oaxaca, one year after the eviction in Goiânia.
\n\nEronildes knew Brad. She spoke about how his footage helped to corroborate reports about the violence of the state; without his courage, there would be considerably less evidence of what happened during the eviction. She told us that residents have had two plazas named for the two people known to have been murdered during the eviction, and are attempting to have another plaza named for Brad Will. We were deeply moved to learn this. We owe a lot to Brad for demonstrating that it is possible for activists from the United States to offer meaningful solidarity to people in much more targeted communities in the Global South and giving poor people in Brazil cause to trust anarchists from our circles.
\n\nAlso, if we had not made our way to Goiânia, Brad’s friends in the United States might never have learned of this documentary made with his footage, or of the ways he is remembered in Brazil. It is poignant to imagine that there might have been a plaza in Goiânia named for a murdered US anarchist without news of this ever reaching his home. We will never know all of the ways that our efforts impact the world.
\n\nToday, Eronildes is one of the most important leaders in housing struggles in Goiânia. She explained that every day she is more inclined to anarchism because she has seen that it is only possible to obtain meaningful victories through grassroots organizing and struggle. She described how, in her experience, political representatives and parties always pursue their own interests.
\n\nDocumentary trailer for Parque Oeste.
\nThe next evening, in Brasilia, we held a lively discussion in an unusual venue: a video game arcade and bar. We met a lot of new people and exchanged materials and ideas about local struggles; we also discussed future publishing projects together. We had heard a lot about the buildings designed by communist architect Oscar Niemeyer for Brasilia, which was constructed as a planned city to become the capital of Brazil in 1960, but we didn’t have time to go downtown to see them on our tight schedule. The next morning, we flew back to São Paulo and took a bus the same evening to Maringá in the state of Paraná.
\n\nIn Maringá, we spent the day with comrades in the city and got to know a little about its local history and spaces. We visited a delicious vegetarian and vegan establishment run by comrades, the Vaca Louca Café, where the doors of the restrooms are painted with the design from our classic gender poster, and walked past a venue where protesters gathered to oppose a Bolsonaro rally in early 2018. In the evening, we set up a table in front of the State University Student Directory, where many people were already waiting for the presentation and others gathered as they passed by.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/2.jpg\")
The artwork from our gender poster on the restrooms at the Vaca Louca Café in Maringá.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/3.jpg\")
A stencil at the university in Maringá.
\nIn Curitiba, we spoke at another café, Veg Veg, which also had delicious vegan food and the artwork from our gender poster painted on their wall.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/18.jpg\")
The artwork from our gender poster at the Vaca Louca Café in Curitiba.
\nIn Florianópolis, we spoke on the campus of the Federal University of Santa Catarina at the Tarrafa Hacker Club, a community laboratory dedicated to disseminating skills in technology, digital security, science, and digital art. Despite several interesting political activities going on that night at USFC, dozens of people packed into the room, including many experienced activists. We had a lively discussion drawing on participants’ experiences in the Brazilian movements of 2013, indigenous organizing contexts, and experimenting with both democratic and autonomous decision-making models. Afterwards, we set up our literature table by a samba band performing for a large crowd in the center of campus.
\n\nThe event in Criciúma was organized by Anarchists Against Racism at the Sociedade Recreativa União Operária club, a space run by seven collectives from the city’s Black liberation movements. The social center is the result of many people’s hard work to reclaim a longstanding community space, a Black community club founded in the 1930s. Since many people in Criciúma did not feel welcome in the predominantly white clubs at the time, they founded their own club for culture, recreation, socializing, and resistance. The massive building is set in a broad square with two grassy soccer fields in the middle of what is now considered a wealthy area. The participants are working hard to revitalize the space after years of abandonment. It was inspiring to exchange experiences of grassroots organizing and struggle with our hosts. We hope to do more to support their projects in the future.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/20.jpg\")
Banners from Anarchists Against Racism at the Sociedade Recreativa União Operária club, a space run by Black liberation movements, in Criciúma.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/21.jpg\")
Another banner at the Sociedade Recreativa União Operária club in Criciúma.
\nWe took three days in Porto Alegre to offer both of the presentations we were doing on the tour and to learn about many of the projects that our comrades there maintain. On Saturday, June 29, we spoke about From Democracy to Freedom at the Humanities Research and Practice Association (Associação de Pesquisa e Práticas em Humanidades, APPH). We were excited to see another independent space dedicated to research and practical forms of anti-capitalist organizaing. APPH is a community space offering free or affordable workshops, lectures, and courses, dedicated to making the knowledge from universities and social movements accessible to all. Earlier in the morning, before our presentation, the philosopher Debora Danowski had spoken on climate change and the Anthropocene.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/4.jpg\")
Tabling at the APPH in Porto Alegre. The poster says “When in Rome, do as the Vandals do.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/22.jpg\")
Artwork from Days of War, Nights of Love at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/26.jpg\")
Artwork from Days of War, Nights of Love at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/27.jpg\")
Artwork from Days of War, Nights of Love at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/23.jpg\")
A Brazilian edition of Expect Resistance at Café Bonobo in Porto Alegre.
\nThe next day, Sunday, we presented “Anarchist Resistance in the Trump Era” for the first time on the tour, at Café Bonobo, a vegan, anarchic, self-managed space. It was one of the most crowded events of the tour. In Porto Alegre, there are many cooperative initiatives such as this, at which people organize their labor, their schedules, and their plans without bosses or hierarchies. Another example is the Aurora space, which offers lunch without fixed prices—diners pay however much they choose to and take as much as they want from the tray of paçoca, the delicious peanut snack local to southern Brazil.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/7.jpg\")
The Aurora Café in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/6.jpg\")
Artwork at the Aurora Café, next to a flag of the MST, one of the world’s most powerful land occupation movements.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/5.jpg\")
The ceiling of the Aurora Café in Porto Alegre.
\nMonday was the first day off on the tour. Our generous hosts loaned us their bikes to see the city. We visited the anarchist bookstore Taverna, returned to the aforementioned Aurora, and received a tour of the occupation Utopia e Luta one of the largest squatted residential buildings in the Americas. This amazing space in the city center includes 43 apartments, a huge roof garden, a screenprinting workshop, a capoeira studio, and many other resources. The visit took a long time and unfortunately we could not visit the Ateneu Libertário of the Gaucha Anarchist Federation. Next time!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/24.jpg\")
The façade of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/25.jpg\")
The façade of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/29.jpg\")
The foyer of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre: “You are entering a territory of popular self-determination.”
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/8.jpg\")
Banners hanging in one of the common spaces of the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/28.jpg\")
All of the stairwells are decorated with artwork like this in the occupation Utopia e Luta in Porto Alegre.
\nIn São Paulo, in addition to consuming liters of açai, going to the museum to see a painting by Hieronymus Bosch, and sneaking onto the university campus to see capybara, we spoke in many venues, including a room in the Copam building, the Casa Plana bookstore, and the Centro de Cultura Social (CCS). Active since 1933, the CCS is one of the oldest anarchist spaces in Brazil; it hosts an archive that goes back over a century, having survived the military dictatorship of 1964-1985. Looking through it’s holdings, we found a picture depicting the lantern of knowledge driving off the representatives of the Church, then found a photograph from the very beginning of the 20th century showing the picture hanging behind a group of anarchists from that era. It was heartening to be among objects that bear witness to the indomitable spirit of Brazilian anarchists across the decades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/9.jpg\")
A figurine representing the anarchist fighters in the Spanish Civil War at the longstanding Centro de Cultura Social (CCS) in São Paulo.
\nAfter the talk at CCS, we hurried to the Casa da Lagartixa Preta pizza party in Santo André. Run by the Activism ABC Collective, the Lagartixa Preta has been around for over 15 years; it is one of the major projects that materialized in a social center after the end of the anti-globalization movements of the early 2000s. During the pizza party, we heard a series of spoken word performances and looked through their archive of anarchist literature.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/30.jpg\")
The “Wash Your Own Dishes” poster in Portuguese over the sink at the Casa da Lagartixa Preta in Santo André.
\nHaving eaten our fill of delicious vegan pizza, we visited Semente Negra, the beautiful ecological space where the annual No Gods No Masters festival takes place, near the tiny town of Peruíbe. There, we restocked our bags with books and zines and attended the little town’s Festa Junina Fair. Our hosts also took us to visit their comrades at the Tapirema Village on recently reclaimed Tupi Guarani territory. This is one of 12 villages that have been reestablished on ancestral land at precisely the location where the colonization of so-called Brazil first began. Anarchists from the coast of São Paulo having been working in solidarity with the Guarani peoples as they reconstitute their traditional settlements and defend the forests and water from the latest capitalist and state assaults. For a few hours, we compared notes with them and saw the results of the inspiring work they have been doing.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/10.jpg\")
The gate of Semente Negra, an ecological land project where the annual No Gods No Masters festival takes place, near the tiny town of Peruíbe.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/32.jpg\")
A view of a pool at Semente Negra, an anarchist sustainable ecological project that organizes in solidarity with local indigenous groups.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/33.jpg\")
Another part of the Semente Negra project, which extends across a broad area.
\nThe last event in the state of São Paulo was in the town of Santos, at the Cinemateca de Santos, an autonomous space that maintains a huge collection of films and hosts movie clubs and discussions. The event was organized by anarchist comrades from the Carlo Aldegheri Library. A serendipitous moment occurred during the discussion, when one of the speakers drew an example from an assembly during the protests in Miami against the 2003 Ministerial regarding the proposed Free Trade Area of the Americas, at which a representative from the official labor unions had duplicitously attempted to persuade anarchists and other activists to cancel their protest completely. It turned out that one of the older Brazilians in the audience had also attended that same assembly in Miami, and also experienced this infuriating betrayal from the labor unions.
\n\nIn the small city of Divinópolis, we spoke at SINPRO, the headquarters of the state teachers’ union. The audience was comprised of an unusual mix of fierce union members and Stirnerist punks. We enjoyed an in-depth conversation about the relationship between democracy and racial issues in the Brazilian and US contexts. Some participants expressed the intention to deliver a copy of the book to each teachers’ union in the city and to the libraries of as many schools as possible.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/39.jpg\")
Cover of the album of the band Malespero, from Divinópolis, which summarizes one of the themes we discussed on the tour.
\nThe next day, we spoke at a bar in Itaúna, like old-fashioned labor agitators, then hit the road early to Belo Horizonte.
\n\nIn Belo Horizonte, we spoke at two venues. The first was at the Federal University School of Architecture, where we joined in a panel alongside two participants in social movements and local politics. One of the speakers was a militant involved in the housing movements (Popular Brigades) and a councilwoman of the Muitas/PSOL platform, which, like other parties such as Podemos in Spain or Syriza in Greece, emerged from social movements and popular unrest and managed to get candidates from a long trajectory of grassroots social movements elected to legislative positions. Another person on the panel was a member of the Popular Unit, a newly formed socialist party that also focuses on militant housing struggles (MLB / PCR).
\n\nEach of the three participants presented their reflections on democracy based on the struggles and movements in which they participate. We spoke last, opening up a lively debate about the uses and limits of democratic discourse and electoral strategies. Unlike many cities in Brazil, during the June 2013 uprising Belo Horizonte saw various spectra of the left, anarchists, Trotskyists, Stalinists, socialists, and independent individuals all attend the Horizontal People’s Assembly (APH) and take the streets together, creating a common conviviality. This is why such a panel was possible at all.
\n\nFor our part, we sought to identify the differences between principles and projects that seek to employ the state apparatus and those that refuse and delegitimize it. We want to see participants in our movements critically evaluate the costs of participating in institutional politics, as well as the apparent benefits. It seems that our colleagues, although they participate in political parties and exercise legislative mandates, agree—at least in theory—that the most effective and efficient way to promote social change is via self-organized direct action. Likewise, they were all quick to agree that democracy has failed to deliver on its promises. Yet they continue to legitimize the idea of government itself and to invest in strategies that take for granted that political power must be centralized in monolithic institutions. All around the world, we see that faith in democracy has eroded, but nothing else has taken its place. This leaves organizers struggling to squeeze diminishing returns out of discredited rhetoric and rituals, while authoritarians endeavor to fill the resulting vacuum. That is why we consider it so important to popularize a robust anarchist alternative to democratic discourse, emphasizing the importance of horizontality, decentralization, and solidarity.
\n\nThe next day, on Friday, we spoke at Kasa Invisível about anarchist resistance to the Trump administration. In Belo Horizonte, like almost all major Brazilian cities, there are occupied neighborhoods and buildings in which hundreds or thousands of people live. However, Kasa Invisível is currently the foremost occupation in Belo Horizonte based on the framework of the international okupa/squatting movements. Composed of three houses located where the city center abuts one of the wealthiest areas, it is the longest occupation of its kind in the city. It serves as residential housing and as a cultural center open to the community, providing space for meetings, seminars, and events for collectives and social movements that do not have their own space. It remains an autonomous space, unconnected with parties or other institutions, operating according to the principles of horizontality, self-management, and opposition to capitalism.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/42.jpg\")
Kasa Invisível in Belo Horizonte.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/43.jpg\")
Kasa Invisível.
\nShortly after Friday’s presentation in Belo Horizonte, we caught a series of buses to reach the FLIPEI book fair in Paraty, just in time to participate in a panel early Saturday afternoon about insurrection in Brazil and the release of Chamada, a collection of calls and manifestos. That night, we participated in another panel about anarchist and anti-fascist resistance. We shared the latter panel with Acácio Augusto, an anarchist comrade and university professor from São Paulo State University, and with Mark Bray, who was in Brazil to see his book Antifa: The Anti-Fascist Handbook launched in Portuguese.
\n\nFLIPEI, the Literary Party of Independent Publishers, is organized by left and independent publishers; it takes place in Paraty at the same time as FLIP, a longstanding literary fair that is among the largest in the Americas. Dozens of debates and lectures occur at FLIPEI, with the speakers presenting from atop a pirate boat docked in the port. The first floor of the boat functions as a bookstore offering a wide range of publications. Big names from social movements, intellectuals, and all sorts of activists, left-wing activists, and anarchists attended the five days of the meeting. Unfortunately, due to our demanding schedule, we were only able to be there on Saturday.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/11.jpg\")
The FLIPEI by day in Paraty.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/12.jpg\")
The boat from which the speakers present at the FLIPEI by night.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/13.jpg\")
The audience listening from the shore at FLIPEI by night.
\nAt night, the scene was enchanting. The crowd listened from on dry land while we swayed in the river, just 500 meters from where it meets the sea. After so many airplanes, buses, trains, cars, and bicycles, all that remained was for us to catch a boat to complete our tour of different modes of travel in Brazil.
\n\nOn Sunday, we hurried to the city of Rio de Janeiro for the penultimate event of the tour: a full evening of presentations at the Fosso space in Santa Tereza. The neighborhood looks out over the city, between Morro dos Prazeres and Fallet. The view is breathtaking—the metropolis spread out before us like a toy set. Sometimes we saw tiny monkeys hopping from tree to tree in front of us. From the balcony, we could hear all the sounds of the various neighborhoods of Rio below: raucous socializing, live music, car engines, dogs barking, and—occasionally—gunfire.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/14.jpg\")
The view of Rio de Janeiro from the balcony of at the Fosso space in Santa Tereza.
\nOur last activity was scheduled for Tuesday, July 16: a discussion at Morro da Providência, the oldest favela in Rio de Janeiro, in the heart of downtown. Our hosts were the Organização Anarquista Terra e Liberdade (OATL) and the Rede de Informações Anarquistas (RIA). The presentation took place in front of the location of the Pré-Vestibular Comunitário Machado de Assis, where since 2009 anarchists have offered the community a popular preparatory course to equip young people from Providência and the surrounding areas to take college entrance exams.
\n\nThe first speaker was a former student in the program, who is graduating from college today and is now a teacher in the project. The discussion that followed was one of the liveliest of the tour. It felt good to end the tour in the company of all the students, teachers, and activists from various groups who attended, hosted by a lasting and important project. Several younger people spoke eloquently about different forms of resistance, about the mechanisms of repression in Brazil and specifically in the favelas, about organization and social movements, drawing parallels between the conditions of the oppressed and Black populations and the forms of struggle in the United States and Brazil.
\n\nAs we said, what unites us in our struggle against oppression is far greater than the borders, language, and contextual differences that might separate us.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/37.jpg\")
\nWe would like to thank everyone who helped to make this tour possible, whether by organizing events, helping us to spread the books, posters, and zines we brought, or sharing ideas, food, mattresses, and space with us. We are also grateful for all the publications and other materials we obtained on this trip. This support network is what makes it possible for us to cross countries and continents and to establish lasting connections between anarchist and anti-capitalist movements and social centers.
\n\nOur struggle for freedom depends on us building bonds, solidarity, and dialogue, breaking down every fence and border that could divide us.
\n\nAté a próxima! See you in the fight!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/38.jpg\")
Some of the books, zines, posters, and CDs we acquired in the course of our trip.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/40.jpg\")
More books and zines we acquired in the course of our trip.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/41.jpg\")
Still more of our acquisitions.
\nCompared to the United States, the streets of Brazil are filled with unpermitted expression, from the intentionally anti-aesthetic pixação scrawls to breathtaking compositions the span of a full city block. Here are just a couple examples that caught our attention.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/1.jpg\")
Wall art Casa Liberté in Goiânia.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/15.jpg\")
We for ourselves.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/16.jpg\")
Vandal love.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/17.jpg\")
Capitalism will destroy itself—but first, it will make you destroy yourself for it.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/19.jpg\")
A cryptic poster at the Federal University of Santa Catarina in Florianópolis.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/31.jpg\")
Anarchist artwork in one of the venues we visited.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/34.jpg\")
Street art in Belo Horizonte.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/35.jpg\")
Anti-fascist graffiti in Rio de Janeiro.
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/08/04/36.jpg\")
Classic anarchist graffiti in Rio de Janeiro from the movements of half a decade ago, which still remains today.
\nNas próximas quatro semanas, agentes do coletivo Crimethinc. estarão em turnê pelo Brasil, passando por mais de uma dúzia de cidades debatendo o recém traduzido livro Da Democracia à Liberdade e comparando experiências sobre lutas contra os governos de Jair Bolsonaro e Donald Trump. Muitos outros texto do Crimethinc foram preparados antes dessa turnê e em breve postaremos cada um deles. Fiquem de olho aqui para mais novidades.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/12.jpg\")
\nDemocracia é o ideal político mais universal de nossos dias: George Bush o usou para justificar a invasão do Iraque; Dilma Rousseff parabenizou as pessoas que tomaram às ruas em 2013 por se manifestarem “democraticamente”; o movimento Occupy Wall Street alegou praticar a democracia em sua forma mais pura. Da República Popular Democrática da Coreia do Norte até a região autônoma de Rojava, praticamente todo governo e movimento popular diz ser democrático.
\n\nE, no entanto, foi a democracia que levou tanto Donald Trump como Jair Bolsonaro ao poder. Isso para não mencionar Adolf Hitler e o partido Nazista.
\n\nImpelidos por nossas experiências em movimentos sociais, retornamos essas questões. Nossa conclusão é que os dramáticos desequilíbrios nos poderes políticos e econômicos que levaram as pessoas às desde a Primavera Árabe não são defeitos incidentais em democracias específicas, mas características estruturais que datam das próprias origens da democracia; elas aparecem em praticamente todo exemplo de governo democrático da história. A democracia representativa preservou todo o aparato burocrático que foi originalmente inventado para servir aos reis; a democracia direta tende a recriá-los em escalas menores, mesmo fora das estruturas formais do estado. Democracia não é o mesmo que auto-determinação.
\n\nMas que é democracia precisamente? Como podemos nos defender contra tiranos democraticamente eleitos? Existe uma diferença entre governo e autodeterminação? Existem outras maneiras de descrever o que estamos fazendo juntos quando tomamos decisões? Com base em Da Democracia à Liberdade, o último livro da CrimethInc., vamos explorar essas questões e muito mais. Junte-se a nós para uma discussão animada!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/11.jpg\")
\nComo Donald Trump chegou ao poder e o que sua ascensão nos diz sobre os tempos em que vivemos? Quais estratégias os anarquistas nos Estados Unidos estão usando para combater a agenda de Trump e a ascensão de uma base social para a direita e para o nacionalismo? Como isso se relaciona com a situação no Brasil comandado por Jair Bolsonaro?
\n\nContextualizando o governo de Trump em um contexto global, discutiremos as novas condições para a luta social e exploraremos as abordagens de auto-organização e autodefesa que anarquistas empregaram nos Estados Unidos desde o final de 2016.
\n\nDa Democracia à Liberdade é uma coleção que examina as características que conectam as várias formas de democracia, buscando sua origem clássicas até suas variantes contemporâneas – representativa, direta e baseada em consenso – avaliando como o discurso e os procedimentos democráticos servem aos movimentos sociais que os adotam. No caminho, explora como seria se buscássemos a liberdade diretamente e não através de um governo democrático.
\n\nO texto conta com análises dos movimentos que ocuparam as ruas e praças pelo mundo nessa última década: o 15M na Espanha, o Movimento Occupy nos Estados Unidos, a insurreição popular na Eslovênia e na Bósnia em 2014, os levantes na Grécia e uma análise sobre Democracia e a Primavera dos Povos que varreu Paris de 1848.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/7.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/6.jpg\")
\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/8.jpg\")
\nAo longo de 25 anos, CrimethInc. se consolidou como uma rede internacional anarquista publicando notícias, análises, jornais, revistas, vídeos, panfletos e vários livros, incluindo alguns dos títulos anarquistas contemporâneos mais vendidos no mundo, como Dias de Guerra e Noites de Amor. Outros títulos importantes lançados em português são: Trabalho, uma breve análise do trabalho no Capitalismo do século XXI.
\n\nRespondendo às várias ondas de levantes populares que invadiram os quatro continentes desde a Primavera Árabe, passando pelo movimento Occupy e os levantes de 2013 no Brasil, CrimethInc. convidou coletivos de uma dúzia de países para produzir um guia impresso introdutório ao anarquismo. O projeto Para Mudar Tudo (tochangeeverything.com ou paramudartudo.com) foi lançado em conjunto em mais de 30 línguas e distribuído gratuitamente. Por aqui, circulam quase 20 mil cópias da publicação impressa, utilizadas para atingir novos públicos interessados e movimentos anticapitalistas e até mesmo em escolas e centros sociais como forma de debater políticas anarquistas numa abordagem atual e de fácil acesso. A nova turnê e os debates apresentados servem para dar continuidade a esse intercâmbio mundial sobre como vencer os limites democráticos à libertação das pessoas e do planeta e como resistir a um governo conservador eleito através do voto – mesmo contra a vontade da maioria das pessoas.
\n\nPara saber mais sobre o coletivo acesse: crimethinc.com
\n\nPara materiais traduzidos para o português: crimepensar.noblogs.org
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2019/06/22/10.jpg\")
In the field.
\nOn January 1, 2019, Jair Bolsonaro will assume the presidency of Brazil. His candidacy, his government, and his allies represent the worst in any society: authoritarianism, sexism, racism, homophobia, and xenophobia. Capitalism combined with strong fascist tendencies! We are calling on everyone to resist.
\n\nThe new president has already shown that his government sees political minorities as their primary targets. He will attack the rights of workers, of women, of the poor, the black and suburban populations, the entire LGBTTIQ community, indigenous peoples, and immigrants, putting their lives put at risk.
\n\nUsing fake news, rumors, and distortions of the facts, Bolsonaro and his supporters have influenced millions of people, evading debate about their intentions.
\n\nThey are threatening the environment with their agenda of repealing ecological protections, their refusal to acknowledge global warming, and their plan to deliver ecological reserves and indigenous lands to agribusiness and the international market. The scandals involving his aides show that Bolsonaro’s administration will be just as corrupt as the previous governments.
\n\nBolsonaro’s politics have been praised by white supremacists including David Duke of the Ku Klux Klan; his campaign received support from Steve Bannon, the strategist for Donald Trump—the American president to whom Bolsonaro promises total subservience.
\n\nSo we can’t wait: 2019 must be a year of even more intense struggle for everyone who wants a world of justice and equality.
\n\nWe invite all communities, movements, collectives, associations, students, workers, and unemployed people to organize a broad struggle outside and beyond any party. The false opposition of right and left parties functions as a distraction, obscuring everything these symmetrical institutions of power have in common while leaving the root of the problem intact: the domination of the state and the capitalist structure of of society.
\n\nRemember, the anti-terrorist laws that criminalize protests and social movements were introduced under the supposedly left-wing governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff. Now, the Bolsonaro government hopes to use them to suppress any popular opposition on the streets.
\n\nBolsonaro himself has promised to eliminate all forms of opposition and activism. Police violence will intensify even further and the mobs influenced by the hatred that emerged over the last five years will grow even more rabid. They too will be on the streets.
\n\nWe must not back down.
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/12/27/2.jpg\")
Fight capitalism, destroy oppression, abolish fascism!
\nWe were on the streets against the increase of bus tickets and the Confederations Cup in 2013, against the impact of the World Cup in 2014 and the Olympics in 2016. We were in the school occupations in 2015 opposing the education cuts. We occupied schools and cultural institutions against Michel Temer in 2016. We were in all the strikes, occupations, and marches of 2017 and 2018. Now we will take the streets again to resist, delegitimize, and expose the absurdities defended by Bolsonaro as a threat to all people, the environment, and future generations.
\n\nWe will respond with protests, popular organization, and direct action. We call on everyone who has been systematically harmed by governments and capitalism throughout their lives, and will be impacted even more now; we call on everyone who recognizes that we have to fight the authoritarian, conservative, neo-liberal, and fascist groups that have sought to capture the streets and political institutions over the past several years.
\n\nFrom the day of his inauguration, January 1, we will take action against every measure imposed by his government. The struggles for land, for housing, for justice and equality, for our very existence will be more intense than ever. We must also turn out in force for the days that mark popular struggles:
\n\nMarch 8, International Women’s Day; April 19, the day of Indigenous Resistance; May First, International Workers’ Day; June 28, LGBTTIQ Pride Day; September 7, the Cry of the Excluded against so-called Independence Day; November 20, Black Consciousness Day.
\n\nWe must seize every opportunity to demonstrate that there is no consensus. Most of the population did not vote for this authoritarian government that is opening the door for the further militarization of society—for fascism and for patriarchal white supremacy.
\n\nFor those outside of Brazil who want to show solidarity, mobilize in front of Brazilian embassies! Support the struggles in Brazil with demonstrations, banners, and direct action. The new president’s xenophobic and nationalist policies will affect people outside Brazil as well. The rise of right-wing and fascist governments is an international phenomenon that demands a global response.
\n\nWe will not stop fighting until the state and capitalism fall throughout the entire world!
\n\nNo rest for Bolsonaro and his minions in 2019!
\n\n![](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/articles/2018/12/27/flier-en.jpg\")
\n![a bombed-out city](\"https://cdn.crimethinc.com/assets/features/kobane/images/overlook1370.jpg\"){kind=link}