Random Variable

Last week I visited the ICA in order to catch Academy Award-nominated documentary,Favela Rising. Having witnessed the murder of his brother, one time low level drug pusher, Anderson Sa, formed a new cultural movement in his home Favela, Vigario Giral – AfroReggae. Starting off a newspaper, it grew into a youth programme teaching kids music and dance, with its leaders forming Banda AfroReggae, eventually signing a deal with Universal Music and using all the money to fund their programmes. All of this takes place against a backdrop of a drugs war involving multiple cartels and brutal military police. The results have been impressive, as Jose Junior points out: “If you compare the Vigario Geral of today with what it used to be, there is less suffering. There are fewer killings, more jobs, more happiness. And most importantly, there is hope.” The documentary’s is definitely well worth watching. There’s no voiceover, letting the participants speak for themselves, and little of the “oh look, isn’t it terrible” pandering we sometimes get when the North looks at the South.

However, I first heard of favelas and barrios from the Camp for Climate Action in Leeds earlier this year, as it was proposed that each regional group formed their own “barrio” on the site. This leaves a somewhat bitter taste in my mouth. Should we emulate slums created by people with no money, land and hope in England, to be inhabited by white hippies? It seems somewhat similar to the argument by Tyler Cowen that “shantytowns might well be more creative than a dead city core. Some of the best Brazilian music came from the favelas of Salvador and Rio.” As Anderson Sa rightly says, the AfroReggae model can’t be applied everywhere; otherwise it ends up as packaged as McDonalds. This recourse to “shanty culture” or “anarchist solidarity” hides a number of features of their history (thanks to Space & Culture) and economy (from Marginal Revolution).

Rents are a factor driving people to participate in land invasions. Only 2% of the Brazilian population can afford to own their own apartments or houses (Relat rio Global sobre Assentamentos Urbanos 2005). Typically, rent requires half of a ‘good’ wage of around USD200 per month. Others rent a single room and bathroom at around USD30.

Poverty drives land invasions, not a vague notion of anarchist syndicalism.

The vigilante militias are made up of off-duty police officers and former police officers. They work to expel drug traffickers and other criminals from favelas, known as Brazil’s poorest and roughest neighborhoods, to set up protection rackets themselves. According to Rio De Janeiro’s public security department, 92 favelas are now controlled by militias, up from 42 in April 2005. They take over a new neighborhood at an average of 12 days. Sociologist Ignacio Cano, who works for the Rio de Janeiro State University, said that the root of the phenomenon is a quest by corrupt police officers for more money, against the backdrop of falling drug profits and a drop in bribery. These officers have decided to take direct control of the areas and seek other ways to extract cash from Rio’s poorest, he said. Militias then demand protection money from the neighborhood they have captured: taxing residents five to seven U.S. dollars per head for living in the area; demanding two dollars for each tank of natural gas, the most common source of heat for cooking; and charging local taxis for entering the area.

I fail to see how this is preferable to living in a city with decent state infrastructure.

The cost of threading services through informal neighbourhoods is much higher than laying services into undeveloped land (Gordilho, Conder). Municipal authorities - to whom development funds only trickle down in minor quantities - struggle to replace latrines and open sewers with municipal services and to install lighting and staircases to navigate the city’s steep slopes. Drinking water and gas cannisters are delivered by hand (there are no gas mains as far as I can tell, gas is delivered everywhere in cylinders and most apartment buildings do not have gas lines). These services are topped off by the mobile phone network

Rob Shields concludes “Favellas are less alternative “counterspaces” to capitalism and more a product of global flows of capital and neocolonial relations of ruling.” This history is largely missing from the romanticised notions held by Europeans. However, if there’s something positive we can take from the favelas, it is everything that AfroReggae stands for: A participatory culture. Do Anderson Sa and his movement offer us a glimpse of what is possible if we publicly apply our private minds as Habermas wishes us to? Almost certainly. But the means for us are going to be different. In this case, the work of people like Lawrence Lessig and the Creative Commons is going to be instrumental in how we reform our conception of what we can and can’t do with already existing popular culture. Additionally, Peter Levine’s assertion that

Populism is not only about laws and policies, but also a way of representing ourselves. In a populist culture, many people are involved in celebrating, memorializing, and debating their common values and hopes through cultural products such as music, graphic arts, folklore, historical narratives, and videos. The results are diverse but serious; people use the arts to define and address public problems. Today, in my opinion, the biggest obstacle to cultural populism is mass culture (which is popular but not participatory), and the greatest hope lies in collective voluntary work.

The problem for us Greens is that we need to envisage what form this collective voluntary work will take and how we can institute it into the fabric of civil society. Reworking our Intellectual Property schemes along the lines that Lessig proposes in his 23C3 talk seems like a good start for us.