End of the world masterclass

Social conflicts in Brazil under the pandemic

by a group of militants in the fog

March 2022

“Brazil is not an open ground where we intend to build things for our people. We have a lot to deconstruct. Many things to undo. And then we can start doing something. May I serve at least as a tipping point.” With these words, Jair Bolsonaro started the dinner hosted by the Brazilian embassy during his first visit to Washington in March 2019.¹

Exactly one year later, the first death from Covid-19 was confirmed in Brazil. The apocalyptic panorama announced by news of the pandemic coming from abroad still contrasted, here, with the unchanged continuity of the daily routine. The blurred scenario created an apprehensive atmosphere that grew day by day. Unavoidable crowding in closed workplaces such as factories, shopping malls, and offices, as well as in invariably packed buses and wagons, provided the harrowing picture of a still unknown disease being spread. It was in a telemarketing company in Bahia that the tension first overflowed: the workers abandoned their workstations and took to the streets demanding quarantine measures. Within a few hours, the scene replicated itself in call centers in Teresina, Curitiba, Goiânia, and other cities. The videos of the walkouts, which went viral in WhatsApp and Facebook groups, indicated a very concrete solution to that desperate situation: literally, to leave!²

The coronavirus gave premonitory outlines to the terms of the anonymous letter – more exactly a “last cry for help” – that a group of employees of a bookstore chain had released in February 2020, after an overwhelming session of harassment. It is symptomatic that, even before the pandemic, they described the experience inside the company as an “end of the world masterclass”. However, “the big problem with the end of the world”, they concluded, “is that someone will have to stay after to clean”.³ Actually, when we found ourselves facing a biological calamity a few weeks later, “bullshit jobs” continued to take hostages⁴ to keep business running.

The comparison between call centers and slave quarters and prisons, so common in the workers' jokes, now found brutal confirmation. For many, escape from work⁵ would appear as a last resort so as not to die at the workplace. Despite the presidential decree that included the sector among the essential services shortly after the beginning of lockdowns, what was seen in the following weeks were empty call centers. While many workers began to present medical certificates (real or defrauded), skip work without justification, or quit; companies responded with poor solutions such as remote work, collective vacations, and layoffs.⁶ The pressure of the protests was diluted in the breakdown that was already a trend in the industry and was accelerated by the virus.⁷

As quickly as the pandemic eroded working conditions in the most different areas, life conformed itself to the “new normal”. Therefore, we have witnessed workers returning from furlough and being exposed to the infection, but grateful that they still had jobs in a scenario of factory closures; teachers who objected to distance learning proactively engaging in the new routine; and a significant part of those whose remained after the avalanche of layoffs in the service sector submitting themselves to the wage and working hours reduction program, tailored by the federal government (although, the working hours in the companies did not actually change). And if strikes by bus drivers and fare collectors have become more recurrent around the country in every month of 2020, it was because the strikes were the only way left to guarantee wages in a context of reduced passenger numbers and crisis in the sector.⁸

The destructive power of the coronavirus was combined, here, with the wave of devastation that was already underway. This “movement of destruction of productive forces”, an emergency exit triggered by capital in response to the social revolt unleashed in 2013, found an embodiment in the incendiary figure of a retired army captain in the 2018 elections.⁹ If it is impossible to manage the crisis, it is the crisis itself that becomes a management method. Where one could see an inefficient government, our self-proclaimed agent of deconstruction reveals a negative efficiency: chaos is already a method¹⁰ and “not governing is a form of government”¹¹. By systematically creating obstacles to scientific recommendations for the control of the pandemic, Bolsonaro has never been properly a “denialist”; on the contrary, “he is rather a vector of the virus itself, he is fully identified with virus”¹². “I'm an army captain, my specialty is killing, not saving anyone”, he said in 2017.¹³

In August 2020, when Brazil was still approaching the figure of one hundred thousand recorded deaths by Covid-19, surveys warned of another worrying index, revealing that less than half of the working-age population was actually working.¹⁴ If the decrease of the employment-to-population ratio to the lowest levels in recent history could be seen as an acceleration of the elimination of disposable workers, under a different perspective, however, the same devastating picture was producing something new... “we were already observing in Brazil a promising scenario for this new way of working and the pandemic has made more people look for other ways to carry out their activities and generate income”, explained the vice president of international expansion of an application used by companies to hire freelancers in 160 countries, now arriving in Brazil.¹⁵ After the apocalypse, Uber?

Brazil Is Online¹⁶

“We want to work!", dozens of hawkers demanded, in February 2020, while they invaded the tracks of Estação da Luz train station, downtown São Paulo, in a protest against the operation of the newly outsourced security company to suppress trade in train wagons – an activity that, according to the rules of the suburban railway, is irregular.¹⁷ In a few weeks, with the arrival of the new virus, the same slogan would echo again amid the horns of motorcades called by Bolsonaro to demand the reopening of businesses. By opposing the isolation policies implemented by mayors and governors, Bolsonaro not only met the wishes of small bosses but also gambled with the situation of “workers who depend on small gigs to survive and who do not see anything but misery when facing the pandemic”.¹⁸

If the perspective of struggle shown in call centers did not become widespread, it is because the demand for quarantine measures would not easily assume the features of a strike where work has long escaped from the physical limits of the company. Among the most qualified professions, it would not take long for the rapid transition to remote work transform the “stay at home” into a cue to work twice as hard. On the other hand, as the streets emptied, the same slogan began to sound like a threat of loss and hunger to those whose livelihood depends on the daily movement of the city: street vendors, manicurists, waiters, flanelinhas [irregular parking attendants], drivers, etc.

Coronavirus containment measures have thrown at the center of the debate the condition of work without defined form, i.e. informal work, which is a recurrent but fundamental political imbroglio in the composition of the capitalist economy in Brazil. Bicos [gigs], gambiarras [kludges, DIY, MacGyver], mutirões [communal work] and all forms of trambiques [con jobs] have compensated, throughout our history, the precariousness of urban services and the necessary infrastructure for capitalist accumulation. The “jeitinho brasileiro” [Brazilian way] improvised by those at the bottom to handle life at the city's margins, mixing formality and legality, was the fuel of the industrialization and urbanization “miracle” in the country. Deciphered by Brazilian sociology in the 1970s¹⁹, such magical formulas fed the hope of a national development towards a stable wage society; a model that, at the same time, was already showing signs of exhaustion at the heart of the system. Since that time, it was the rest of the world that approached the Brazilian work flexibility²⁰ – and it no longer points to any future. In the center of capitalism, there is also the dissolution of the “socially stable, contractual, recognizable” work forms, which defined what is and “what is not working time, workplace, remuneration, labor costs”.²¹

Even at its peak, during the Workers' Party (PT) governments, formal work would not reach much more than half of the employed population in Brazil, in an expansion based on low-paid jobs that – despite the recurrent neo-developmentalist litany – expressed less a tendency towards universalization of formal employment than its reduction to one among other strategies of viração [getting by]²². By stating that labor legislation “has to come closer to informality”,²³ Bolsonaro finally adjusted the parameter and recognized the unregulated as a rule.

It would be only due to the economic calamity caused by the coronavirus that informal work would receive, for the first time in the country's history, a legal definition – and it was as broad as possible, negatively delimited: informal is any worker without a formal employment contract, “whether employed, self-employed or unemployed”.²⁴ During the brief period of discussions on the law that instituted the “Emergency Financial Aid”, it was difficult to accurately anticipate the real scope of that criteria. Sanctioned at the beginning of April 2020, the assistance program would reach almost 68 million people – about 32% of the Brazilian population – of whom 38 million were until then outside the reach of income transfer programs. The devastation suddenly opened up a historic opportunity for “inclusion”:

The president of Caixa Econômica Federal called these people "invisible", most of whom did not have one or more means to access the specific social visibility features determined by the state: active Social Security Number, mobile (with access to the internet), and bank account. Those people are not registered in Bolsa Familia (...), which reached the farthest corners of the country, making visible to the government about 30 million people. These were already known. Invisible, oddly enough, was a significant portion of the population whose social metabolism was structurally linked to urban metabolism. It is the portion of the population that survives out of “getting by”, not of public benefits (…). They are presupposed in their consequence, but invisible in their existence. When the city stops, this portion claims state visibility through registration in the Federal Government Unified Register. The pandemic reveals them but also submits them, setting the rules for their visibility.²⁵

Of course, all this invisible contingent was already included up to their necks – that is, the consequences of their shapeless work are presupposed by the functioning of the economy as a whole – but now these people can be subjected to mechanisms that allow a more complete control over their existence. Bank account, a smartphone with access to the internet, and registration in an application: the means to collect the Emergency Aid are the same ones to create an account in Uber, a sign that we are facing fundamental parts of this “new way of working”. Years ago, it was already possible to identify in the Bolsa Família program, whose dimensions were small in face of the 2020 financial aid program, the objective of forming a unified workforce more deeply subjected to capitalist relations²⁶. The “bancarization” promoted by the program contributed to expanding the reach of microcredit systems, in a process of financialization of informality – which was deepened in recent years with the dissemination of increasingly agile and easy payment terminals and electronic payment systems, such as Pix²⁷ [quicker and tax-free money transfer method]. The phenomenon reached unprecedented intensity due to the Emergency Aid: the state-owned bank Caixa Econômica Federal absorbed 30 million customers in ten days, in what was possibly the fastest bancarization process in world history,²⁸ thus reaching a record profit in 2020.

Access to credit is essential for the emergence of a precarious workforce to which capital costs and risks are transferred, while interest rates charge a new level of productivity to the old getting by, now directly connected to the global financial market. Thus, the focus of these income policies would be less on expanding the consumption capacity of the beneficiaries (as in the Keynesian distributive model), and more on expanding their investment capacity, financing the acquisition of work instruments, and “self-valuing” their “human capital”²⁹. Enthusiasts of such programs openly claim that “the financial cushion that the basic income provides can represent enough stability for people to be able to spend their own savings or other capital on starting a business”.³⁰ A report that interviewed residents of some capitals in the Northeast region points out that “in many cases, the money [from the Emergency Aid] served as working capital for informal businesses”: finishing building a small apartment for rent, acquiring goods for street trade, opening a small store or buying “a used bike from the neighbor to make deliveries through apps”³¹. However, in large urban centers, the payments do not cover the cost of living for many families, which have to look for other sources of income. “The money would go away only to pay rent. There would have other bills and the food”, explains an unemployed man forced to sleep on the street.³² Even before considering renting a room again, when receiving the first installments of the financial assistance, another interviewee says that he bought a mobile phone. When it was not invested in means of production, the money became means of reproduction: it paid for home renovations and household appliances. Right in the middle of these two fields, there is the mobile phone³³.

Bringing together leisure, work, socialization, and control functions in the same apparatus, smartphones materialize the contemporary lack of distinction between free and working time. Apps that connect a multitude of people to the same server have made it possible for capital to incorporate and organize directly, through algorithms that process millions of data in real-time, that shapeless work that is a constitutive part of the Brazilian economy. The notorious “uberization” of work means, in tupiniquim lands, a kind of “real subsumption of getting by”³⁴.

Throughout the pandemic, the number of Brazilians who resorted to apps as a way to work grew, reaching one in five workers.³⁵ And it is important to remember that the first step to obtaining Emergency Aid was also to download an application and answer a questionnaire. The program accelerated the process of digitizing this invisible crowd: "those who did not have a mobile phone had to get, borrow or ask for one” and “those who did not know how to use had to learn” or seek help.³⁶ Even so, the flood of problems in the online registration during the first week ended up in Caixa's physical branches, resulting in queues that stretched for blocks. In addition to overloading employees, the crowding in front of the banks at the beginning of the pandemic gave concrete features to the dire dilemma of choosing to be infected by the virus or to go hungry. For a few days, that desperate delay turned into revolt: in cities across the country, the population protested, depredated bank branches, and obstructed avenues.³⁷

While Caixa managers reorganized the in-person attendance schedule to avoid chaos, WhatsApp and Facebook groups were formed due to the financial assistance. With hundreds of thousands of members, these self-organized forums occupied the place left vacant by the precariousness of banking services: participants reported their problems, exchanged experiences, solved questions, etc. The only political actor to try to surf on this immense invisible engagement was an incognito parliamentarian from the same avalanche as Bolsonaro, elected because of his videos in selfie format recorded on roadblocks during the 2018 truck drivers' strike. At the moment when he began to follow the procedures of the Emergency Aid daily on his Facebook profile, Andre Janones, a federal congressman from Minas Gerais rose from the lower ranks of the lower house, transmitting the most-watched livestreams in Western Hemisphere internet history.³⁸

On the other hand, the start of the 600 reais per month payments during the first wave of the pandemic seems to have contributed to delaying the convergence between informal workers and entrepreneurs sought by the Bolsonaro and other critics of social distancing. At that time, the anti-lockdown demonstrations were limited to the militant core of the far-right and the blackmail of small and medium bosses, who tried to coerce their employees to protest, under the threat of dismissal in the event of bankruptcy³⁹. At the same time, the flow of money provided by the Emergency Aid to families and popular neighborhoods provided some backup to those who, amid the chaos of the pandemic and despite the increase in unemployment, refused to work under such conditions. After manifesting itself in the dungeons of call centers, insubordination would not be long in coming to appear outside, on the streets, increasingly crowded with app delivery workers and drivers.

Storming The Cloud

Fortaleza, January 6th 2020. In the city's financial center, traffic dawns interrupted by an unusual colorful barricade. Piled up bags with iFood, Rappi or UberEats logos blocked different spots of the avenue: it was a protest moved by app couriers denouncing the running over of a colleague the night before. This scene would become more and more frequent around the country the following months. In March, a group of militants could already believe that “a spectre haunts the Brazilian cities, and this specter rides on two wheels.”⁴⁰

It was not today, however, that a key part of the Brazilian urban metabolism started moving on two wheels. In the chaotic expansion of cities, where transportation came in tow, mending the parts, the price of that precariousness was always paid by the daily rush of those who had to arrive on time. While the lack of mobility punishes the workforce with overtime hours of effort in the packed collective transports⁴¹, the other commodities don't get by on their own account and demand an increasingly fast circulation. Hence the appearance, in the late 1980's – long before any online platforms –, of an army of motoboys [motorcycle couriers], progressively growing in number, capable of crossing the traffic jams in between the cars and thus guaranteeing, at risk of death, the acceleration of capitalist flows in our collapsed metropolises. The “informal and mortal motorcycle aisles” enable the circulation of what cannot stop amidst blocked traffic and serve, at the same time, to increase productivity in the mobility of workers made hostage of urban immobility, who then find in the motorcycles the emergency exit which “equates low cost with high speed”.⁴²

As the expansion of microcredit during Workers Party’s governments turned the financing of low cylinder power motorcycles easier and the fleet grew rampant, small outsourced delivery enterprises – the so-called “express companies”, in which the costs of the main working tool fell back over workers – multiplied. The popularization of mobile phones over the years 2000 would allow a continuous and direct communication between the office and the couriers on the streets, diminishing “pores of non-working throughout the journey” and cheapening the service for the contractors. Later on, with the arrival of smartphones with internet and GPS access, it is the very mediation performed by those companies that may be discarded and substituted by an app, that promises to connect the crowd of deliverers “directly” to clients' demands and liberate them from the exploitation of third-party companies. Reducing the labor contracts to a virtual register and the worker to a just-in-time workforce, the platforms are capable of recruiting couriers who've been in the streets for thirty years, the worker with a steady job who makes after-hours deliveries or the unemployed youth who has or rents a bike in order to do a side hustle. It is this heterogeneous mob “which in dispersed, inconstant and with different intensities”, ensures the distribution of a significant part of the goods in the cities.

When app couriers went on strike for the first time in the country, opposing the payment reduction of Loggi rides in late 2016, the sector's union – while watching its ranks evaporate into the “cloud” – interceded along with the Labor Court defending the recognition of an employment bond with the platform. It ended up, for this very reason, being rejected by the strikers themselves, who would carry to the following protests a banner with a clear message: “no to the CLT [Brazilian Labor Law] contract”! It seems paradoxical that workers struggling for better work conditions openly reject the formalization of their activity. However, it is precisely in this refusal that lies the engine of the haunting which continues to prowl Brazilian cities.⁴³

For most of the left, the answer to the enigma would come down to the workers' biased consciousness, seduced by the entrepreneurial song of the neoliberal siren. How to explain, however, that the rejection towards regulation often comes associated with a declaration of “war against the apps”? You don't have to talk much with a motorcycle courier to realize that the aversion to employment relationship carries with it a refusal towards the infernal universe of “shitty jobs”: hours to be worked, low pay, and a boss to make your life harder⁴⁴. Beyond higher costs with paperwork and bureaucracies, the future promised by the discourse of regulation sounds fake.⁴⁵

In the formless labor world, the reformist agenda acquires a new sense: one that seeks to recover the lost form, it is re-formist, as the defense of the maintenance of the Labor Law – in other words, “progressivism” becomes restorative. Contrary to the mirage of reconstructing a wage society within the keynesian-fordist framework (which in Brazil, as we know, existed only halfway), the chant of entrepreneurship finds an echo in the experience lived by the uberized worker. After signing up to an App, it is the “worker, on his own account, who assumes the risks and costs of his work, who defines his own journey, who decides on his own dedication to work”⁴⁶. It is precisely for being real, and not mere rhetoric, that autonomy can operate as a central piece in the gears of subordination: while transferring to workers the task of managing their own work, capital also transfer the necessity to extend and intensify their journey, as well as dealing with the unpredicted and with demand fluctuations.

Each courier self-manages his working process, but does it within the conditions imposed by the companies in a unilateral and often unpredictable way, starting with the form of remuneration and the values fixed via algorithm. Punctuation and ranking systems limit the number of races which can be rejected; promotions encourage couriers to work in regions and periods of high demand, like rainy days, or even to accept all races during a certain period; automatic blockages, temporary or definitive, punish supposed irregularities defected by the software; and, more recently, scheduling mechanisms encourage previous definition of working hours. Faced with the ceaseless pressure towards the margins of independence which characterizes their occupation, couriers are forced to create strategies to resist and fool the control mechanisms of the applications – as well of those from traffic authorities and shop managers, who police their workspace – in a permanent conflict.

To earn a living as courier, it isn't rare to need to use (or even rent) someone else's profile, bypassing an account block; to run red lights or exceed the speed limit in order to increase productivity, covering the license plate when passing a speed camera; to dodge a police road blocks which can lead to the seizure of a motorcycle that is irregular for lack of money; or even to embezzle a client's meal as a means of guaranteeing a special snack between one race and the other. But as constantly breaking the rules is not only part of the game but ensures the functioning of the app – and the city as a whole –, the mad dog's [as Brazilian couriers refer to themselves]⁴⁷ insubordination proves itself ambiguous. WhatsApp groups, as well as YouTube channels and Facebook forums assumes a key role in this dynamic, whilst spreading successful strategies and establishing cooperation nets indispensable for work, as well as for the functioning of the service:

There are infinite couriers' WhatsApp groups that are used to share information about the streets, police operations, assaults, accidents; motorcycle, bags or jackets sellings or exchanges, drivers' license, work, any kind of stuff. These groups end up being an informal structure for work organization by workers themselves, parallel to the apps'. At the same time, as it contributes to the apps better functioning (couriers tell one another in which parts of the city they can get more races, if there is any bug in the system, help each other with problems with the support, or with account blocking…), the WhatsApp groups are also the space where sometimes memes mocking the work come out, or where they vent their frustrations, and also organize protests.⁴⁸

It was mainly around those informal networks that, since the beginning of 2020, numerous couriers' protests were organized. When coronavirus spread around Brasil, they also multiplied around the country. Quarantine measure revealed the centrality of the delivery workers in urban logistics – it was, after all, the permanent mobilization of this motorized army which produced part of the conditions necessary to the home office of more qualified contingents. However, counterbalanced by the vertiginous expansion of “partners'” registration on the platforms⁴⁹, the demand for delivery services didn't translate into increased remuneration. Amidst the avalanche of layoffs in other sectors, the apps started operating as a type of perverse “unemployment insurance”, and, as the total number of riders raised, the values of the fees and the frequency of races followed the opposite movement. Combined with the influx of new workers for whom this was only an extra or temporary source of income, the falling earnings of those who already depended on the apps would drive the eruption of wild movements all around the country.

On a night of high demand, a group of couriers blocks the drive-thru entrance to a fast food restaurant, forcing it to prioritize the release of the meals meant for delivery.⁵⁰ Huddled in a supermarket's parking lot while waiting for their orders, couriers get angry and start a honking demonstration to press for the fast removal of packages.⁵¹ After the outburst caused by an episode of humiliation or a scam attempt spreads through WhatsApp, the scoundrel client is surprised by the noise of a motorcycle convoy at his doorstep. While couriers in one city gather to reclaim more safety from the authorities after a hit-and-run accident or a robbery, in another place episodes of police violence and arbitrary traffic control trigger protests.⁵² From major state capitals to small towns, last-minute demonstrations scheduled through social media demanding raises in delivery payment and other improvements are seething. On the verge of the first wave of the coronavirus, riders from Acre paralyze their rides to demand the supply of masks and hand sanitizer from Rio Branco's City Hall.⁵³ A strike of motorcycle and car couriers from Loggi, against the abrupt reduction in the value of the freight, extends throughout the state of Rio de Janeiro, reaching Baixada Santista the next day.⁵⁴ In São Paulo, bikers assemble more than once in Avenida Paulista against Rappi's punctuation system, which restricted access to zones of higher demand.⁵⁵

With volatile and scattered demonstrations that could form and dissolve in the interval between one race and the other the “specter on two wheels” that prowled the country would soon make its first public appearance. The call for a strike – named “National Apps Brake” – channeled this latent movement into a single date, July 1st, 2020, marking the debut of these underground struggles on the stage of major political events. As the idea of a nationwide strike began to take shape in WhatsApp groups, video selfies recorded by couriers from all over the country announced the participation of crews from all over the country. As the mobilization gained visibility, supporters began to publicize a campaign to boycott the platforms on the day of the strike, leftist parties and organizations released notes of support, and major media outlets reported on the call. By gaining a public face, the spontaneous and diffuse agitation of the previous months was translated into a more readable form by the institutions: “in many cities, the usual unions tried to take the front of the movement and self-proclaimed leaders were embraced by parties and institutions, as well as by the press”⁵⁶. On the tail end of a timid wave of demonstrations against the federal government at the same time, the press media produced the image of the “anti-fascist courier”, while the left and Labor Law operators framed the movement in the grammar of labor rights.⁵⁷

Although big and noisy, many of the motorcades that took over several avenues around the country on July 1st – well before the convoys strategically headed by Bolsonaro the following year – ended up tamed by representative entities. In São Paulo, the union's loudspeaker truck overrode the horns of the motorized crowd that drove from the Regional Labor Court to the Estaiada Bridge. Staying within the boundaries of a specific sector of workers and of the demand for better working conditions, the App Brake did not manage to go significantly beyond the script of what is still left of unionism. That was, in Brazil, the most visible and organized – and therefore, in a certain sense, more behaved – episode of a movement that crossed the whole period of the pandemic and is still going on, both here and in other corners of the planet.⁵⁸

Something, however, escaped that script. At seven o'clock in the morning, a video recorded in front of one of Loggi's many warehouses in São Paulo – from where thousands of products bought over the internet leave for the homes of consumers, aboard cars and motorcycles – was already circulating on WhatsApp: around a speaker playing 1990s pagode music, about ten couriers were getting ready to spend the day there, promising to have a barbecue and block the delivery of any packages. Blockades in other warehouses, shopping malls and restaurants around the city extended throughout the day, reaching until dinner in fast food stores in ABC Paulista Region and other points of the metropolis. It is curious that, right there where it is difficult to define a “workplace” – because it is spread all over the city –, real pickets, like we hadn't seen for a long time, proliferated. They were, in a certain sense, inverted pickets: the aim was less to prevent the workers from entering the production space than to stop the exit of goods for circulation.⁵⁹

The organization of many of these blockades went through local networks of motorcycle couriers who, while a new race hasn't yet rung on the app or the order hasn't become ready at the restaurant, wait in the same parking lot. At the same time that they provide a precise image of the permanent availability required of the just-in-time worker – who, when not racing against time, has to remain on standby⁶⁰, waiting for the app to ring – , these “waiting zones”⁶¹ scattered throughout the urban space become places of confraternization and, eventually, of organization. It was like this on July 1st, when many parking lots were converted into blocking points. Several fast food store attendants and even managers expressed their support to the strikers, with whom they live every day, allowing the use of the restrooms, offering coffee, and even donating meals that were piling up on the counter with no one to carry them. At the doors of shopping malls and restaurants, the tacit – or even explicit – support of security guards of outsourced security companies proved to be fundamental, blocking or stalling to authorize the entrance of the most frantic scabs.

In the parking lot located in front of a liquor distributor that, respecting the strike day, had announced the suspension of the delivery service through apps, one could hear in the distance, around eleven o'clock in the morning, the arrival of a large convoy of delivery drivers, joining their colleagues who had concentrated there since early morning. A short time later, the swarm of motorcycles was again shooting through the city streets, without a defined route. Honking their horns and roaring engines all the time, this squadron produced a deafening noise and assaulted the docks of the malls they found along the way in a lightning raid to expel the riders who were taking orders and forcing the shopkeepers, frightened, to lower their doors for a while. Flexible and replicable, the mobile blockades brought with them a threat of unmanageability that contrasted with the predictability and plastering of the motorcades led by the sound trucks of the unions. When the city itself is the workplace, the strike can take on the features of social revolt.

The explosion, however, did not happen. The mobile pickets were confronted with the flexibility of the applications – which, in addition to launching promotions for deliveries in the regions most affected by the strike, relied on the size of its gigantic network of “partner restaurants” in order not to lose the customers of the day – and the agility of the strikebreakers themselves, equally capable of moving through the urban fabric in search of open establishments. It is significant that many of those who insisted on working were couriers linked to iFood's outsourced “Logistics Operators” (OLs). In addition to the “cloud” modality – the much-celebrated “new way of working” in which the courier turns on the application on whenever he wants and organizes his journey, accepting or not the races that appear on the screen – iFood relies on another less known, and (at least apparently) less innovative system to manage its workforce. A “logistics operator is a smaller company subcontracted by iFood to organize and manage a fleet of fixed delivery drivers”, sometimes in a limited area.⁶² According to the platform, these contractors account for at least 25% of the contingent of “partners” – a proportion that many couriers believes to be growing⁶³ – and “contribute in various scenarios, such as serving specific locations” and malls, the “opening of new regions” and the “complementing of the fleet on certain days and times”. Some of these companies have fleets of “up to 400 people running around São Paulo” and charge a weekly fee for the rental of scooters and bicycles by their delivery drivers.⁶⁴

With the promise of receiving more orders than the “cloud couriers” and without having to face the waiting line to sign up for the most popular mode, the “OL courier” has predetermined work schedules, gets paid through a third-party company, to which the app passes on the value of the races, and is supervised by a station leader who acts as a middleman for the platform. The impersonal and automatic control of the algorithm thus combines with the management of a boss in the flesh who, filling in the gaps left by the former, closely controls the productivity of the workers, with powers to interfere in the distribution of orders, apply sanctions and dismiss: the worst of the job with a formal contract, without any of the guarantees it offers.

Does the latest word in labor management, the ultra-modern “algorithmic management” of platforms like iFood, then rhyme with the archaic methods of the foreman? On the one hand, it is the pre-existing market in Brazil that explains the phenomenon: many of the logistics operators are the old express companies, motorcycle delivery firms that lost space to the apps, now incorporated by iFood in a subordinate position. On the other hand, the combination does not exist only here. China's two largest app delivery companies divides their workforce in a similar way: while the “gig workers” are usually part-time riders who can choose which races to accept, the “direct hired” couriers work full-time and are tied to a “station”, controlled by a manager – but none of them have formal employment ties to the platform.⁶⁵

By combining the data processing capacity and impersonal surveillance of artificial intelligence with the direct and personal coercion of the good old foreman, duly outsourced, this bastard form of uberization may represent a trend toward labor management, much more efficient than robots left to their own devices: “the algorithm whistles a lot, but it's dumb”.⁶⁶ In the contemporary labor hell, foremen, middlemen and gunmen have a guaranteed place. As some of the cogs in the apparent truce of the past decades rust, those new old mediators are proving more topical than ever – and, despite the efforts of polished and detached CEOs to keep them in the shade, it is no wonder they want to come out into the sun.⁶⁷ In this renewed economy of getting by, there is no longer any prospect that open violence ceases to be the central social nexus, as becomes clear in the warlike vocabulary of the motorcycle couriers – soldiers in the daily battle of traffic whose productivity “is measured by speed, that is, by the risk of imminent death”⁶⁸. The “civil war (...) increasingly coordinated by what we call the henchmen system in Brazil”⁶⁹ becomes even clearer where some of its links are made explicit, as is the case of the growing evidence of ties between iFood OLs and illegal businesses in the outskirts of São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro.

On July 4th, 2021, after a new period of protests and stoppages scattered across the country, couriers in Curitiba, Goiânia, Campo Grande and Itajaí mobilized for improvements, including the end of the need for prior scheduling of work hours imposed by iFood in some of the cities where it operates. On the same day, the expansion of the work area for OL drivers, drastically reducing the supply of orders for others, would lead couriers from a popular neighborhood in the west zone of Rio de Janeiro to down tools and block the outflow of orders in a mall. Reports of the strike, which quickly spread to other regions of the city and lasted four days, mention, besides the already recurrent threats from OL leaders to the strikers⁷⁰ , the presence of militia members in front of restaurants to prevent picketing.⁷¹ The obscure and notorious relations between the presidential family and armed groups that exercise this type of “privatized and monopolized control of the territory” are not mere coincidence: in tune with the most advanced management of the flexible labor force spread throughout the urban space, the captain's “militia government” is both a symptom and an agent of the Brazilian uberization.⁷²

Surviving Purgatory

Heavy rain fell in Macapá on November 3rd, 2020, when, between the sounds of one and another thunder, the lights went out and cellphones lost service. The substation that provides energy to the entire state of Amapá, which had been operating with part of its structure damaged for the last year, had collapsed. That was the beginning of the most prolonged blackout in the country's history, that would go on for three weeks. The lack of electric energy affected the water distribution in large part of the city, leading many to wash their clothes and do their dishes on rivers; the instability in telecommunication networks left residents unable to communicate; at ATMs, it was impossible to withdraw cash; lines formed at gas stations, and the shelves soon ran empty at the markets and grocery shops. Meanwhile, covid deaths were growing exponentially. After four days in the dark, the connection was re-established with a rationing system that was absolutely unstable and uneven between the elite condominiums and the lower class neighborhoods. The oscillation led to overloads: appliances went out, street lights exploded and houses caught fire.

As the crisis stretched on and despair became more widespread, “barricades, demonstrations all over the city, many streets with burned tires”⁷³ appeared. Besides mitigating the darkness of the night, going out onto the avenue and lighting a bonfire with rubble was the last resort of the crowds waiting for the normalization of the power supply or the repair of a damaged transformer to pressure the authorities. The Military Police, who followed the movement closely, repressing and persecuting residents, counted more than 120 protests throughout Amapá when, suddenly, the pandemic was again an object of concern. “With the purpose of reducing the risks of transmission of the new Coronavirus”, the state government decreed a curfew during the night and vetoed “any kind of political activity of people in streets, squares, (...) even if outdoors, (...) such as meetings, walks, motorcade, rallies etc.”⁷⁴ The overlapping of collapses in Amapa completes the Brazilian dystopia, in which the state at once sabotages social isolation measures in the name of labor discipline, but sets off a lockdown to contain social revolt.

“What was done in Amapá, the question of electricity, has nothing to do with the federal government”, the President would affirm in the following days. It was clear from the beginning that the government would not assume any responsibility for the blackout – which was, after all, the result of the negligence of a private company: with the announcement that any damage to personal property would not be compensated, the population itself started to organize crowdfundings to help rebuild the homes of those who lost everything. Around the hashtag #SOSAmapá, initiatives to donate groceries to the poorest neighborhoods spread during the shortage.⁷⁵

Self-organization to survive hell thus navigated in an ambiguous zone between solidarity and transference of the damages of the disaster to the population. A few months later, when the health system collapsed in Amazonas, the commotion on the Internet raised donations all over the country. Trying to get around the overcrowding and lack of supplies in the ICUs, families improvised treatment beds at home to take care of their sick relatives. Networks of friends and volunteers mobilized to obtain oxygen cylinders directly from the industries in the Manaus Free Trade Zone, which were redistributed to home patients all over the city. If the daily count of the pandemic's dead in the news highlights the disposability to which a great part of the population is condemned, this same nightmare shows itself productive to the extent that it conforms the living to a regime of total availability to any work: “We are becoming doctors. That's what we have left to do”, told a newspaper a young woman, who had just learned to administer oxygen at home to family members who weren't admitted to the hospital due to lack of available beds.⁷⁶ Shock after shock, the permanent catastrophe in which we have been suspended for two years, potentiates and normalizes the old strategies – informal, improvised, unsafe, illegal – of survival in the daily war. But this formless overwork, previously revealed by Brazilian sociologists as the hidden engine of our capitalist modernization, has long since failed to foster any developmental hope: in the midst of collapse, it only constantly resets the negative horizon of confinement to a desperate, exhausting, and never-ending wait.

At the same time that it radicalizes the “run-for-your-lives periferic way of living”⁷⁷, the “deconstruction” as a form of government⁷⁸ prepares the ground for the movements of Capital that have been thickening the meshes of control and giving “scale to this nebulous zone”⁷⁹ of informality. From this point of view, the emergency aid is far from the proposal of an “income without counterpart”, so celebrated by economic analysts⁸⁰. The experiment of money transfer made possible throughout 2020 is closely linked to another transfer: the transfer of costs and risks from the state and companies to a population that is properly registered and remunerated in limited doses⁸¹. When the authorities' actions in the pandemic boil down to “greater or lesser leniency or (small) reinforcement to a self-organized quarantine by workers”⁸² it is because the very management of the health emergency has been outsourced to the crowd. That “subordinate self-management”⁸³ characteristic of platform work is shown here to be a tendency for general survival through the catastrophe. From the cloth masks made at home and sold on the street – a source of income for those who always find a way to get by – to the sanitary barriers where volunteer residents took turns at the entrances of small towns and tourist areas⁸⁴, the quarantine could only exist as a bricolage⁸⁵, in a sum of uncoordinated (and often conflicting) efforts that resulted, in the end, in a gigantic amount of dirty work⁸⁶. While the dead were being buried, we all collaborated – in isolation or in the hustle – to keep the urban machine running.⁸⁷

In the last months of 2020, the emergency aid was gradually interrupted – with the progressive exclusion of millions of beneficiaries and the reduction of the value of the last installments – until the expiration, in December, of the state of public calamity and, with it, of the “war budget” that made possible the largest direct income transfer trial ever carried out in Brazil.⁸⁸ With the advance of the second wave of contamination, from the beginning of 2021, states and municipalities would again resort to measures to restrict commerce and services to contain the virus – and informal workers, now without the same economic support, would be pushed to the edge. The situation has become even more alarming in tourist regions, where summer is the chance to build up savings for the rest of the year.⁸⁹

The numerous anti-lockdown demonstrations that took place from December 2020 had a different social composition than the Bolsonarist rallies at the beginning of the pandemic. Faced with the judicial determination that closed beaches, restricted commerce, and banned tourists a few days before New Year's Eve, the city of Búzios was taken over by protests: hundreds of people surrounded the courthouse until the measure fell. In Angra dos Reis, workers blocked the Rio-Santos highway and shopkeepers occupied the city hall building against the tightening of restrictions.⁹⁰ Around the country, small employers mingled in the streets with their employees, but also with hawkers, artists, market vendors, motorcycle taxi drivers, musicians, app drivers and so on. In a certain way, this movement expressed a reaction to the end of the emergency aid, reverted, however, to the orbit of Bolsonarism, by targeting the health measures of local governments. In Amazonas, where 52% of the labor force is informal, the lockdown decree of December 23rd expressly vetoed the “sale of products by itinerant vendors” and “handicraft fairs and exhibitions”⁹¹. It would be revoked three days later, after a demonstration escalated out of the control of its organizers and triggered a night of barricades in Manaus⁹².

And it was precisely in the following weeks that the whole world watched in distress as news of deaths due to lack of oxygen in Amazonian hospitals, plagued by a new and more contagious variant of the virus, broke out. How to support a claim which obvious consequence is the death of more people? In the words of an app driver who organized the protests, the movement “is not led by denialists, everyone knows that the disease exists and unfortunately many people have died”, but “we need to coexist and develop means or strategies that can guarantee the continuity of all economic activities”⁹³. Seeking a “stability between economy and health”, the demonstrations called for at the height of the hospital catastrophe also started to demand the distribution of “free covid kits”. In a new turn to the right in the screw, the fight against the lockdown engaged in the defense of the so-called “early treatment”, a generic reference to the prescription of drugs with no proven efficacy against the new coronavirus (and with possible harmful side effects to health), but widely adopted during the pandemic in the country.

Encouraged by the president in his speeches, administered in public hospitals and indicated by health insurers and private doctors, the “prophylaxis” with drugs for malaria, lice and worms available in the drugstores’ shelves was still, in mid-2021, recognized by almost half of the Brazilian doctors as useful in combating the coronavirus⁹⁴. The amazing capillarity of this miraculous cure, sold by opportunists of all kinds more than a year after the pandemic began, was a sign that its appeal found echoes in the frontline of the hospitals. Now, if the “alternative methods” were never efficient for the recovery of the sick, they certainly were to provide some relief to desperate patients and to soothe the impotence of the health workers themselves, on the verge of burnout in the face of that unknown and deadly disease. From improvised alternatives in the crisis, such procedures became popularized precisely as a “Collapse Protocol” – title of one of the livestreams in which doctors from Pará shared their dramatic experience during the first half of 2020. When “Belém's health system collapsed and drugstores ran out of medicine stock,

doctors had to improvise to save the lives of patients. Case reports are abundant on live streams, experiences of healthcare plans and public clinics, which would confirm that early treatment saves lives, and which suggest that those who did not have access to treatment took the worst. (...) At the same time, the cases of patients that end up dying are seen as natural: after all, ‘no treatment is infallible’.⁹⁵

In closed forums on Facebook and Telegram, doctors shared the results of experimental and homemade therapies, such as nebulization of hydroxychloroquine tablets in sick relatives; discussed how to legally shield themselves when performing this type of clandestine procedure; organized campaigns for the recognition of their methods; and, most importantly, formed a huge network of professionals and patients. More than a simple prescription – and a free pack as a gift in the hopes of building loyalty – the ivermectin prescription was often accompanied by an invitation to a WhatsApp group.⁹⁶

In a country where self-medication is widespread,⁹⁷ it is not surprising that big part of the population has not hesitated to add another pack to the medicine cabinet. Also for the other workers tormented every day by the fear of contagion – surrounded by the death of acquaintances, friends, and family members, and forced to take the risk every day in crowded buses⁹⁸, closed offices, and cafeterias – the “early treatment” movement provided a “community” of care and security, a macabre network of mutual aid that offered them some support to keep their sanity amidst the chaos. Just as for health care workers, the belief in the “covid kit” serves as a subjective defense mechanism to “tolerate the intolerable”: the hardship of working in the new normal⁹⁹. This mechanism helped to appease despair and cope with fear in a context of the dramatic deepening of the negative experience of work, from which it was impossible to desert. In this sense, the widespread resort to drugs with no proven efficacy seems to have had less to do with an ideological refusal of the known measures to combat the pandemic than with the suffering generated by their unviability. The engagement of the patients themselves – actual or potential – in the cause of “life-saving drugs” not only added to the psychic defense strategies of thousands of people forced to disregard the most basic sanitary protocols in order to survive, but also conformed a political meaning to the indifference to which necessity compelled them.¹⁰⁰

While many doctors voluntarily joined the cause of “early treatment”, others were coerced into prescribing it and taking part in this sinister “field of experimentation and dissemination of social cruelty”¹⁰¹. Subjecting patients to experimental research without their consent, prescribing the “covid kit” to postpone hospitalizations, or advancing the release of beds by prescribing “celestial discharges” (i.e., turning off equipment and administering a "palliative treatment")¹⁰² was dirty work needed to balance the books of a handful of health care providers, in a grim demonstration of how perversity can become a management system.¹⁰³

One can see that the green and yellow calamity served, on multiple fronts, as an advanced laboratory of collapse management. For what could be, according to General Edson Pujol, the most important mission of his generation, the Brazilian Army increased the production of chloroquine in its facilities a hundredfold, after making a huge purchase of supplies.¹⁰⁴ In the battle against the virus, the subjective defense mechanisms represented national defense weapons in an operation that the Armed Forces admitted was essentially psychological: more than a cure for the disease, says an Army statement, it was about “producing hope to millions of hearts afflicted with the advance and the impacts of the disease in Brazil and in the world”.¹⁰⁵

The fact that the war effort required by the pandemic would escape the patterns of conventional combat has always been evident to the global chain of command of the response to the new virus: “more than a war, it is guerrilla warfare”, announced the director of the World Health Organization back in March 2020. The statement echoes the paradigm of irregular conflict that has long guided military manuals, attentive to the multiplication of asymmetric and fragmented disputes, in which it is not possible to clearly distinguish the forces in confrontation as in the classic model of “two national armies, one against the other”. And the loss of form of contemporary warfare – which increasingly takes on an “informal, dynamic, flexible character”, as a Brazilian colonel explains¹⁰⁶ – is perhaps not foreign to the loss of form of labor, but an indication that the very boundary between war and labor has blurred…

A new trend in military academies around the world, the jargon “hybrid warfare” describes the mingling between military combat operations – overt or covert, conducted by outsourced forces – and civilian crowd engagement on social networks and in the streets, as has occurred over the past decade in Syria or Ukraine.¹⁰⁷ Interestingly enough, another combination of algorithmic crowd management and direct coercion by outsourced operators characterize the work regime of some of the app couriers. Have we discovered a “hybrid” labor management, between software and foremen?

No less “hybrid” are the outlines taken by the administration of the increasingly ungovernable territories and populations around here: it is difficult to distinguish the insurgents from the forces of order, and governing is confused with demolishing. In its successful operation to ensure law and order in a collapsed country, the federal government relied on a huge network to spread “early treatment”, with social movements supporting the reopening of businesses, churches and schools, and with the community and corporate donations for the most vulnerable, without ever dismissing, however, the firepower of the official and unofficial squads: Brazilian police set a new record for lethality in the first year of the pandemic.¹⁰⁸

All in all, the fear that had led Congress to defend an emergency aid higher in value and broader in scale than any other program of its kind in the country was no longer justified: the population's ability “to get by in crisis situations”¹⁰⁹ transformed the devastated scenario into a “new normal”, even with free-falling labor income, soaring inflation, and skyrocketing hunger¹¹⁰. In the face of this, the payment of the aid would be resumed after months of indefinition, at more “realistic” levels – with reduced scope and lower amounts – and finally replaced by a redesigned Bolsa Família and special credit lines¹¹¹. Recalibrated, the money transfer policy continues to function as the “working capital” of the getting by (in which, by default, it is impossible to “separate what is business and what is household money”¹¹²) in the arsenal of this total mobilization for work.

Even those away from the dangers of the battlefront, the experience of being confined at home – telecommuting, attending remote classes, not having a job, or even monetizing their performance on videogames – did not escape the war effort.¹¹³ On the one hand, social isolation deepened the historical divide between the qualified contingent and the rest of the workforce, as the security of the home office was not an option for more than 80% of the employed population. On the other hand, the improvised office or classroom within people's homes, bearing costs that once would have been borne by employers, indicates that the characteristics of informality have been reaching all strata of the labor force. From silent resistance to the surveillance and overload regime of remote learning¹¹⁴ to unprecedented streamers’ strikes¹¹⁵, the tensions of this formless telework between four walls have also produced conflicts throughout the pandemic. With the boundary between work and rest spaces blurred, life in quarantine is pressured by a relentless demand to stay productive – between online courses to improve the résumé and physical exercises to stay in shape – “in a mix of a slaughterhouse pace with online lectures on the challenges of parenthood and teachings on ‘how to live alone and remain happy’”¹¹⁶.

On the streets or at home, anyone who goes through life as a war, “working at the pace of death” – succumbing a little each day – is already half dead. And “there is no lockdown of the undead: they cross barriers, they don't care about dying again”.¹¹⁷ But the zombie apocalypse, in Hollywood cosmology, is also the image of insurrection.¹¹⁸

Abandon All Hope

In the same weeks that a call for a new national strike of truck drivers, set to start on the 1st of February of 2021, was spreading, a video of a driver that hanged himself next to his truck in a tree by the side of the highway was circulating in WhatsApp groups. The scene was shared together with mourning messages and warnings to the desperate situation of the self-employed truckers, trapped between low freight rates and successive rises of driving costs, especially fuel. Even so, the movement got far from achieving the strength of the May 2018 strike, when the supply chains of the whole country were choked in a few days and the government, terrified, offered some immediate relief, with measures that would lose effect in the following years.¹¹⁹ Without the broad – and ambiguous – coalition of the preceding mobilization, which involved drivers with their own truck, owners of small fleets and big transportation companies, the irruption in the beginning of 2021 boiled down to scattered initiatives of independent truckers, who tried to block highways on several states, but that where rapidly dismantled by highway police.¹²⁰

Although the strike did not take off on the roads, the unrest contaminated other workers who also relied directly on fuel to make a living in the cities. Between February and April, couriers, app drivers and self-employed school bus drivers demonstrations, in addition to new protests by truckers, took place almost daily throughout Brazil, giving insurrectionary contours to the streets where daily circulation was reduced by the peak of coronavirus second wave. This movement of motorized workers blocked highways and Petrobrás’ distributions centers; it packed gas stations, with the tactic of refueling only 1 real to produce queues and cause losses to the retailers; it reignited the organization of the courier brakes; and powered the largest motorcade of Uber drivers in the history of São Paulo, which interdicted the access to the Guarulhos International Airport for an entire night, demanding the end of low payed promotional rides.¹²¹

In the era of uberization, inflation – which was traditionally translated into demands around the cost of life – causes, in first place, protests aiming at the costs of work, i.e. struggles to be able to work. The reproduction of the workforce turns into the management of the microenterprise of oneself, hence the frequent rapprochement between the protest against the rise of fuel prices and the anti-lockdown campaigns of shop owners in the first months of the year. To many, the strikes were the last resource before abandoning the fight and surrendering all weapons, that is, before returning the car to the rental companies (in some cities, app driver associations estimate that more than half of the drivers registered in the platforms gave up working during the year of 2021).¹²²

Between the growing financial inviability of self-employment, on one hand, and the crumbling of formal employment, on the other, there is nowhere to run. The only alternative is the endless rat race, getting by under more and more adverse conditions. This sensation of confinement to an exhaustive work with no future finds echo in the other side of the globe, summarized by the buzzword among Chinese social network users “to describe the evils of their modern lives”: nèijuǎn (内卷).¹²³ Before trending in the most populous country in the world, in mid-2020, the term was used by scholars to translate the concept of “involution”, a dynamic of stagnation in agrarian societies – but also of big cities in the peripheries of global capitalism – in which the intensification of work does not amount to modernization¹²⁴. Composed by the characters “in” (内) and “to roll” (卷) the expression can be “intuitively understood as “turning inward”.¹²⁵ While “development”, in English, carries the image of a unfolding outward, towards something, nèijuǎn suggests a stripped screw revolving around itself. An incessant movement, without leaving its place – Isn’t this, afterall, the endless viração [getting by] of everyday? Reverberating the despair of the daily experience of students and workers in the chinese metropolises, the term condenses

the feeling of being trapped in a miserable cycle of exhausting work that is never sufficient to achieve happiness or lasting improvements, but from which no one may opt out without falling into disgrace. They feel it when they complain that life feels like an endless competition with no victors, and they feel it when they dream of the day that’s coming when they will finally win. But that day never comes. Debts pile up, petitions for help go ignored, remaining options start to dwindle. In a time of involution, when even the smallest reforms seem impossible, all that remains are desperate measures.¹²⁶

If part of the same despair runs through the struggles of freelance drivers in Brazil, it assumes even more dramatic outlines in the Chinese streets and roads. In January 2021, a delivery worker who had his payment refused by the app immolated himself in front of his delivery station in Taizhou. In April, a trucker who had his vehicle seized by the police in Tangshan for being overweight took a bottle of pesticide and sent a farewell message to his fellow drivers via social media. In the same month that a disabled man from São Caetano do Sul using a wheelchair strapped fake explosives to his body and threatened to blow up a Social Security Institute building if he wasn’t granted access to his invalidity pension¹²⁷, the resident of a village in the Southern Chinese district of Panyu, where the state had expropriated the collective lands to sell them to tourism companies, came to blows in a local government building: with real bombs, he exploded himself together with five employees. Fired in the beginning of June, a bricklayer invaded his former employer’s house on the coast of Santa Catarina, held his family hostage for ten hours and ended up killed by the police after releasing them.¹²⁸ And the pandemic would entail even more pressure and desperation, as is evident in the case of the man who crashed his car against the reception desk of a overcrowded public hospital in the metropolitan region of Natal after his wife, infected with Covid, was denied care.¹²⁹

When a Military Police soldier of Bahia abandoned his post and drove alone for more than 250 km until the Farol da Barra, a tourist spot in Salvador, where he fired his rifle in the air amidst cries against the violation of “dignity” and the “honor of the worker”, his outburst was celebrated in anti-lockdown networks as an heroic gesture against the “illegal orders” of the governors.¹³⁰ The tragic end of the soldier, killed in a shootout by his own colleagues, was used by the far right congressmen to incite a mutiny in the troop. The policemen motorcade that left the scene the next day, however, found the traffic jammed by another demonstration: couriers were denouncing the death of a fellow delivery worker who had been ran over by a drunk driver speeding on the wrong way of the road the night before. Accidentally united by the mourning for fallen comrades in a social war with no defined form, the protests converged their route toward the state government’s headquarters.¹³¹

At the same time the it aggravates the crisis, or rather, widens the cesspool in which we’ve been struggling for decades without moving an inch, Bolsonaro’s scorched earth police enables him to mobilize despair, in suicidal moves, under the promise of a decision¹³² – of a “final shot” being taken.¹³³ As much as the discontent with the rise in fuel prices has scratched the support of the president in one of his main support “bases”, i.e. the truckers, Bolsonarism continued to be the main political force with some capacity to dispute the social turbulence of these apocalyptic times, acting to conform the most varied insatisfactions into a “revolt within the order”,¹³⁴ diverting them to attach the target in the agenda within the institutions – be they the mayors, the governors, the judiciary, the media, the vaccine or the electronic ballot box – or simply mimicking the concrete struggles into aesthetic rituals, as in his Sunday motorcycle trips.

At the peak of the turmoil, the Supreme Court brought back to the chessboard a decisive piece that the same judges had removed from the game a few years earlier. By overturning Lula’s convictions and enabling him to run for elections again, the decision signals that perhaps it isn’t possible to contain the onslaught of the Bolsonarist insurgency without turning to the commander of the great pacification operation that went on practically unchallenged until the blow of June 2013, in the expectation that everything goes back to functioning once again. It is worth asking, however, “which technology he will have at hand to pacify” a urban mass in an accelerated trajectory of “downward proletarization” amidst the current escalation of social warfare.¹³⁵ As much as the judiciary’s maneuver may revive the Left’s vain hope of restoring the dismantled rights, the policy makers of the Workers’ Party economic program for 2022 not only acknowledge the loss of labor’s form but also echoes iFood’s executives in “taking the digital platform workers from the regulatory limbo”,¹³⁶ which “doesn’t mean framing them under the old Labor Law but neither leaving as they are today”.¹³⁷

“A new Lula government will mean, at best, that people can continue to work as Uber drivers”¹³⁸, with the regulamentation of the “partnership” between platform and drivers and more “legal security” for the companies. And even though Bolsonaro’s incendiary government provides fertile grounds for the expansion of its business, the Brazilian foodtechs do not dismiss the expertise in dialogue and conflict mediation accumulated in the country during “popular democratic” governments. In order to minimize the negative impact of the protests on its brand, iFood – which, by the way, celebrates “diversity goals and racial and gender inclusion” within its offices¹³⁹ – has been recruiting cadres forged in NGO’s and social projects in favelas to placate the rebellion of its motorized “partners”¹⁴⁰. Throughout the year of 2021, couriers involved in brakes throughout the country where sought out by a “community manager” hired by the company, not exactly to meet their demands, but to engage in dialogue, announcing the organization of a “Delivery Worker’s Forum”¹⁴¹ with digital influencers and alleged leaders of the strikes, in the best style of participatory conferences from yesterday Brazil.

A return of the former metalworker to the presidential palace should represent not a moment of national reconstruction, but the chance of burying the wreckage and consolidating the new terrains for accumulation in the country; the normalization of the disaster with a taste of victory – and, for that reason, “more perfect than would be possible under any conservative politician”.¹⁴² The expectation for the 2022 elections thus deepens the state of waiting of the big left wing parties and small collectives, which during the pandemic found in the imperative of social isolation the excuse for its political quarantine. In embodying the defense of the sanitary recommendations, the left conformed itself to the reality of the remote work, in a paralyzing wait with diminished expectations: the wait for the daily count of the dead, hoping for the fall of the contamination numbers; the wait for the arrival of the vaccines to Brazil, followed by the wait – and the dispute¹⁴³ – for a place in the line; the wait for the end of the “Bozo government”, animated by each new deadlock with the Supreme Court or testimony in the Parliamentary Commission of Inquiry about the pandemic management; in short, the wait for the worst to pass and everything going back to being less worse, like before. With the slackening of the pandemic, by mid 2021, this inert hope left home and became an aerial photograph. However, if the left wing parades demonstrated the size of the disapproval for the president in the main cities of the country, they also made the impotence of this opposition flagrant. After gathering hundreds of thousands of people, the rallies gradually dwindled as they entered into the holding pattern of the organizing entities.

The lethargy of the left contrasts with the insurgency of the far-right, which feeds on the mobilization of those who no longer carry any expectations. And if it is not possible to rule out an unexpected victory of Bolsonaro in the ballots, neither one can dismiss the threats of a rupture of the institutional order, always postponed in order to keep its militancy in an almost paranoid readiness while keeping the opposition on a defensive stance, hypnotized by the imminence of a decisive coup which never comes. Politics remains in a trance, in an eternal preparation for a conflict that is never conflagrated, which is, in itself, is already a war tactic in the arsenal of “hybrid” management of territories and populations.

Even though relying only on the same ever faithful crowd, the Bolsonarist demonstrations of September 7th, the Independence Day in Brazil, represented less a sign of impotence¹⁴⁴ than a testing site of military mobilization exercises. In the dawn of the following day, when the highways of fifteen states of the country were blocked by truckers – that, until then incapable of sustaining a mobilizating around the freight and fuel prices, showed considerable strength in support to the president strategic offensive against the electronic ballots and the Supreme Court¹⁴⁵ –, the government was forced to recognize that the call was nothing but a dress rehearsal, provoking the rage of many protesters and displaying a glimpse of a Bolsonarism that already goes beyond Bolsonaro himself. Through the inside or the outside of the State, commanded by the captain or not, “the revolution we are living”¹⁴⁶ – which “resets violence, as the use of armed strength, as an essential political resource” – will make itself felt well beyond 2022, as in the almost surrealist scenes of the assault on th Capitol and other state legislative houses after Donald Trump's defeat in the United States.¹⁴⁷

Scheduled for September 11, a new national strike of app delivery has come to be confused with the news of the truckers' strike – less because of the support for the president than because of the significance that the last major strike of that other central category of the logistics sector acquired in the imaginary of the motorcycle couriers.¹⁴⁸ Without the same repercussions as the previous year's App Brake, the 2021 strike lingered, here and there, beyond the scheduled date. In a beverage distribution company of the app Zé Delivery, in the south zone of São Paulo, riders decided to start the strike two days earlier to demand late payments.¹⁴⁹ And in São José dos Campos, in the countryside of São Paulo, the delivery drivers remained paralyzed for the next five days, in the longest app strike in the country's history until then.¹⁵⁰

Inspired by a video in which motorcycle couriers from the capital city enacted step by step “how to pickett a shopping mall”,¹⁵¹ the deliverers in the state's fifth largest municipality split into small groups to blockade the city's major establishments, while others circulated on the streets to intercept scabs, as well as distribute water and food to the strikers. Each night, everyone gathered in a square to discuss the directions of the movement and vote on whether to continue the strike. While a smaller app, new to the city, gave in to the pressure by announcing an increase in fees, iFood organized a counter-offensive and promised a meeting to the local leaders, through one of its “community mediators”. The news that the largest food delivery platform in Latin America had opened a negotiation – however limited – in the face of the heroic persistence of the “three hundred from São José dos Campos”, as memes on the motorcycle couriers' networks portrayed it, gave that defeat a taste of victory and turned it into an example for the surroundings. In the following weeks, the hinterlands of São Paulo were swept by an uncoordinated sequence of strikes, which would continue for several days in Jundiaí, Paulínia, Bauru, Rio Claro, São Carlos and Atibaia.¹⁵²

In the tense moments that marked the end of the mobilization in São José dos Campos, however, the promises of dialogue were combined with another iFood negotiation with local restaurant owners and logistics operators that, in a threatening tone, sent a message to the couriers that the continuity of the movement could lead to “acts of violence” in the city.¹⁵³ By resorting at once to participationist and militia-like demobilization strategies, Brazil's largest delivery app hints at the future of the country between Lula and Bolsonaro – or simply reminds us that pelegos [sheepskins, union bureaucrats] and jagunços [henchmen, roughnecks] have always crossed paths in the greyzone of popular intermediators.¹⁵⁴

Formless Class Struggle

In the first days of March 2019, passengers came across closed ticket offices at several subway stations in São Paulo. It was not at all strange, since headaches with the card reloading system are part of the routine of those who use public transportation in the city. What looked more like a technical problem from outside the booths was, however, an invisible movement of the outsourced ticket vendors against illegal discounts in their salaries, among other illicit expedients often used by the service provider to reduce its personnel expenses.¹⁵⁵ "Exploiting the ambiguous boundary between the precariousness of the already usually dysfunctional system, the winding up (...) and a effective ‘partial stoppage’”, the outsourced ticket takers conducted an intermittent strike in which interruptions and returns to work succeeded each other “at various ticket offices, according to opportunities, the force of the moment”, and with no apparent coordination.¹⁵⁶ One turnstile away, the conflict passed almost unnoticed in the eyes of most of the subway's permanent employees, known for their intense union activity. Besides exposing the abyss opened by outsourcing within the same workspace, the difficulty in recognizing that strike, completely outside the official rite – without a delimited beginning or end, without a clear announcement, without assemblies or formal negotiations – is a sign of the loss of form of social conflict in a formless labor world.¹⁵⁷

Like the subterranean mobilization in the ticket offices, countless stoppages of delivery workers explode and fall apart without precise contours, in the shadow spaces geared towards the diffuse work that moves urban logistics: shopping mall docks, motorcycle parking lots, distribution centers, dark kitchens and dark stores¹⁵⁸ , besides virtual environments. If among the subway outsourced workers the insubordination oscillated from one station to another according to the gaps and the pressure of the moment, among the motorcycle couriers it is usual that the conflict moves from store to store, from one neighborhood to another, or from city to city in a discontinuous and unpredictable manner: while the first strikers reach their limit of strength and resources, a new group announces a strike in another place, propelled by videos and reports that spread in real time.

When high labor turnover is the rule, the struggles also become highly revolving: within a city, it is usual for the frontline strikers of an app brake not to have participated in previous struggles. And if it hinders a consistent process of co-optation of leaders, the centrifugal dynamic of the struggles also challenges any effort to organize the movement. WhatsApp groups emerge and are abandoned at each mobilization, workers gather and disperse with the same volatility with which a conversation on the sidewalk is interrupted when a new order rings: like gas molecules that condense at the time of a storm, it is only at the moment of confrontation that this cloud-proletariat takes form.

“A ‘base’ that only exists in a confrontation process”, that “dissolves as soon as the action declines”, “is not available to be managed”.¹⁵⁹ Even the leaders that emerge publicly, far from leading a cohesive contingent of motorcycle couriers, count, at best, with a diffuse network of followers, also in the cloud. For youtubers and influencers linked to the movement, less leaders than “political entrepreneurs”,¹⁶⁰ the commitment to the cause is often confused with a personal career. Winning the fight is not dissociated from gaining from the fight, which can mean anything from monetizing videos, to collaborating on marketing efforts, or being invited to become the owner or manager of a Logistic Operator. The ambiguity, which describes a zone of indistinction between political action and work, is already to some extent contained in the current vocabulary of delivery drivers: being a “warrior” or “facing the struggle” are expressions that can refer both to the conflict against the platforms and to the low-intensity war experienced in the day-to-day rush on two wheels.¹⁶¹ The profusion of app drivers' candidacies in the 2020 municipal elections,¹⁶² mostly by political machines and right-wing parties, represent much more a path of individual ascension than the deliberate tactics of an articulated movement of the sector, which does not exist.

Today, organizational structures only endure outside the conflict to the extent that they operate as gears of labor itself, such as the countless professional associations, unions and cooperatives that function, for the deliverers, as channels for insertion into the labor market – as well as the large social movements of decades ago, which now subsist as mediators of access to government programs and the market. Suffice it to recall the latest success of the Landless Workers Movement (MST) in the financial sector, a partnership with large business groups to raise funds for seven rural workers' cooperatives – among which are some of the largest organic food producers on the continent¹⁶³ – by issuing bonds within the reach of “small and medium investors” on an online platform.¹⁶⁴ Faced with the insufficiency and dismantling of policies to promote the so-called “family agriculture”, MST turned directly to the market, in an operation that raised more than 17 million reais, without the mediation of government programs, in tune with the growing valuation (and quantification) of the “social impact” of investments worldwide.¹⁶⁵

By the way, it has been some time since certain social movements migrated to the cloud. Throughout the 2000s, the challenges of managing land squats with hundreds of families in the metropolitan outskirts, crossed by disputes with competing territorial powers and always in the imminence of eviction, led more and more housing movements – notably the Homeless Workers' Movement (MTST) – to recognize their squats as a necessarily provisional moment and to adopt, as a permanent structure, a large registry of families. While other organizations built a base by collecting rent in squatted buildings, the MTST expanded its ranks by demanding engagement rather than money: participation in assemblies and protests yields points that determine access to the rental subsidy program negotiated with the government, and each family's score determines the ranking in the waiting line for the promised house.¹⁶⁶ In short, the “rank and file work” gave way to the work of the rank and file. With a pioneering technology core, the movement has digitalized part of this internal logistics of squats and demonstrations into an app, and more recently launched a campaign called “Hire those who struggle”, which relies on a WhatsApp bot capable of connecting registered homeless people to clients seeking a range of services.¹⁶⁷

If “the boundary between forms of association aimed at collective struggle and those intended to further engage the worker in exploitation has blurred”,¹⁶⁸ it is not strange that the conflicts of our time occur outside consolidated organizations, or even against them, but without building any structure in their place. The largest wave of strikes in the country's history, from 2011 to 2018 – and not the 1980s, as one might assume – has so little to do with the cycle of struggles that marked the end of the dictatorship that the comparison becomes almost misplaced.¹⁶⁹ When resurging in relatively stable fordist niches forty years ago, the unionism still nurtured a horizon of expansion of conquests, in which new and important mass organizations were forged, integrated in the general effort of “building democracy” – a mantra that, from then on, would dissipate “in a perpetual present of redoubled work”.¹⁷⁰ Over the last decade, the strikes “increasingly took place in the field of immediate, urgent reactions”¹⁷¹: for the payment of delayed salaries and compliance with legislation, against plant closings and mass layoffs, among other “defensive” claims. Carried out in default of the unions and often hostile to their representatives, such movements sometimes assumed insurrectionary traits, such as the rebellions at the construction sites of the late Growth Acceleration Program (PAC)¹⁷² or the wildcats of bus drivers outside the garages on the eve of the World Cup¹⁷³.

Despite its unprecedented scale, the 2010 flood of strikes left no room for any “accumulation of forces” – neither here, nor in China. Contrary to what one might imagine, the situation was similar in the industrial heartland of the planet, which went through a wave of worker unrest in the same period. Without official channels of representation, the scattered and violent strikes that multiplied in Chinese factories ended up “unable to build a durable organization or articulate political demands”¹⁷⁴. With airs of “looting”, the strike appeared as a moment to “take-whatever-you-can-get” in exchange for the unbearable day-to-day life in the industrial districts: “obtain back wages, holiday bonuses, unpaid benefits, or simply to get back at managers who had sexually harassed workers, owners who had hired thugs to beat up workers who stand up for themselves, etc.”¹⁷⁵ Other times, workers would “just take the money and leave” – or rather, “lifting the bucket” and abandoning their lodgings, to use the typical Chinese migrant worker expression that has recently gone viral alongside videos critical of factory life.¹⁷⁶

Without the old “horizon of 'conquests' to be accumulated, in a broader perspective of progressive integration”, what is left to the struggles of our time is to recede little by little or escalate immediately, “assuming insurrectionary forms without any mediation (without before and after).”¹⁷⁷ Therefore, protests against an increase in transportation fares become, in a few days, earthquakes in the streets of Brazil or Chile; police violence burns cities in Greece, the United States or Nigeria; an increase in fuel shuts down Ecuador, France, Iran or Kazakhstan. Even if the initial demands provide minimal outlines to these uprisings, their explosion tends to stretch and dilute them into a generalized revolt against the order – which ends up translated in many cases, inaccurately, into a revolt “against the government”.¹⁷⁸

As intense as they are discontinuous, without ever assuming stable forms, the conflicts that proliferate from one end of the globe to the other can be described as “social non-movements”.¹⁷⁹ Brought up in debates in certain militant circles, the expression comes in handy in a context of “class struggle without class organization”,¹⁸⁰ increasingly atomized, whose propagation passes not so much through centralized structures as through actions that replicate themselves in a dispersed manner. Non-movements expand through gestures that can be “copied and imitated, accumulating instances of repetition”¹⁸¹ and branching out like memes on the internet – but on the streets, in a dynamic that feeds back into the networks. This is the case of the App Brake, which was neither an organization nor a planned campaign, but a replicable gesture spread through videos that followed the same script. And also the shutdowns in the telemarketing industry right after the arrival of the new coronavirus here; the blockades of dozens of traffic circles by pedestrians wearing reflective vests in France; the student evasions and the primera línea [frontline] in the Chilean protests... By multiplying these decentralized acts, conflicts acquire scale without acquiring a stable form (when the form is fixed, the meme loses its momentum and is in danger of becoming a brand, an image that is empty of content, an aestheticization of revolt).¹⁸²

Pushed by diffuse turmoil and with no interlocutors to negotiate with, governments and businesses around the world are challenged to “respond unilaterally and rationally to an 'irrational' insurgency”.¹⁸³ The formalization of non-movements – that is, their translation into a grammar legible to institutions – stands as a precondition for their neutralization and incorporation. However, even when revolts are victorious in their immediate demands, the return to normality usually carries the perception that nothing has improved, or even that the situation has worsened. The inability of the state to fully absorb the energy of confrontation leaves a latent dissatisfaction, which can reverse itself into the opposite of the original impulse – wasn't this, after all, the continuity between the June 2013 uprising and the Bolsonarist insurgency?¹⁸⁴ From the election of politicians who openly assume social violence to the degradation into actual civil wars, non-movements often end up accelerating the destructive tendency of the crisis itself.¹⁸⁵ Intense and exhausting mobilizations that never really get out of place: are the conflicts of our time also caught in the infernal cycle of nèijuǎn?

On the charred walls of the subway stations of an uprisen Hong Kong, phrases like “I‘d rather become ashes than dirt” or “If we burn, you burn with us” condensed a precise image not only of the dead end faced by the rioters of that city, but of the suffocating atmosphere that weighs on the uprisings of our time.¹⁸⁶ If it makes little sense to talk about the accumulation of forces, “the anger certainly accumulates”,¹⁸⁷ and is always a short step away from descending into violence among the flayed themselves. Without significant changes in working conditions, it is not uncommon to hear motorcycle delivery drivers defending the brakes as a way to at least take revenge on the apps¹⁸⁸ – but the collective hatred can quickly turn against a driver in a traffic fight or a motorcycle thief caught in the act and about to be lynched. With the same vengeful and suicidal features as individual outbursts of despair, the confrontations often boil down to an escalation of senseless violence.¹⁸⁹ And someone needs to be left to sweep up – as occurred the morning after the largest demonstration in Chile's history, when Venezuelan migrants organized to voluntarily clean the streets of downtown Santiago; or in Quito, in that same October 2019, where the cleaning of the barricades was left to a task force organized by Ecuador's own National Indigenous Coordination (CONAIE) after the agreement that ended the uprising. Seen from this perspective, riots and rebellions of the most varied dimensions become another routine fact of our catastrophic daily life.

Interestingly, the term “non-movements” first appeared in sociological literature to describe the “constant state of insecurity and mobilization” of subaltern urban layers “whose livelihoods and sociocultural reproduction often depend on the illegal use of the public spaces of the street” in a “long war of attrition” with the authorities in contemporary Middle Eastern metropolises.¹⁹⁰ Not very distant from the rush of hustlers or delivery drivers in the Brazilian streets, always ready to evade a police road block, avoid paying bus fares, or cross a red light to get by: “dispersed efforts”, individual, daily and continuous, that may involve “collective actions when gains are threatened”.¹⁹¹ With just one spark, this desperate routine of work, which transitions at every moment between resistance and engagement, can break down in a desperate explosion – it is well worth remembering that it was the self-immolation of a street vendor whose fruit cart had just been confiscated that served as the trigger for the 2011 protests in Tunisia.

On the street corners hustle, between “bullshit jobs” and temporary gigs – where there is nothing promising in sight but to brush off – insubordination erupts with the same urgency, the same immediacy of just-in-time production. Conflicts explode as a desperate gesture, a cry of “fuck this shit” in which “suffering, frustration, and revolt”¹⁹² are mixed together, often in the form of an act of individual – or at best, collective – revenge. Like the recent wave of desertions from work in the United States¹⁹³ and other parts of the world, the stampede from call centers in the first days of the pandemic in Brazil was a sign of refusal to a routine that, to cope with the collapsing “normality”, becomes even more hellish. With each new emergency – health, environmental, economic, social – the screw of work intensification turns, everyone is fully mobilized in an endless effort in which nothing but “negative experiences”¹⁹⁴ are formed. If the “non-movements” bring good news, however, it is precisely this: they “signal that the proletariat no longer has any romantic task”,¹⁹⁵ with nothing to hope for and also nothing to lose.

Notes