against people like Alvin and Norris and the police that protect them. Cumulus expresses neither Norris’ white nor Alvin’s black, but he says another, radically different “white” (in this case, “security”).
Cumulus thinks that blowing up a restaurant where Norris or Alvin might be is a concrete step in the fight for the liberty and safety of his people. Security for his people will only be achieved through a struggle for justice and liberation, historical reparation, and a commitment to the present. From his perspective, Cumulus is on the side of his people. His people are not a collection of citizens but a community, bonded by a blood, and a nature, and an identity. Cumulus sees that those who look like him are excluded, while those who look like Alvin or Norris are much better placed. Those who look like Cumulus are caretakers or street sweepers and those who look like Norris are doctors, financial market agents. Exceptions are really rare and Cumulus has no more patience.
When he appears and says everything he thinks, the foundations of the conflict between Norris and Alvin dissolve and a much stronger conflict emerges on the previous “political” arena. But it is when Cumulus appears armed that the scene really changes: he propels Norris and Alvin to the same side of a new political conflict, in which the old differences between them are hardly relevant. This new political conflict is much more radical and can, in a short period of time, lead to violent outcomes. Cumulus, far more than the bearer of the contents of a divergent, and even radical, political position, is in itself, as a subject, a violent threat to social order and the state.
Cumulus arrived in São Paulo at least three decades ago disguised as the PCC. In such a divided governmental landscape, the act of describing (how the city is) begins to require different categorical grids depending on the perspective through which one sees the city (Feltran 2017). But to think about the normative problem (how the city should be) is to face immense disagreement and sometimes even violence. In São Paulo, for journalists, lawyers, doctors, the middle classes, and even for many workers in the outskirts, security means living far from thieves, bandits, and the PCC in vertical and horizontal gated communities. But for some groups in the favelas, it is precisely the thieves and bandits who bring them security and other resources such as income, justice, and a sense of belonging.
This is why the word “thief” is an offense in the middle classes but an exaltation of intelligence and insight in the world of crime. The divide manifests itself in many ways – including material ones, money, and violence – but also in the common language. The word “thief” and many others have an essential, well-defined content in each of these places, but this understanding is very different in each context. Both say “thief,” both say “white,” but they do not agree on what it means. It is a polysemous word, susceptible to various meanings, because it can be filled with different contents. Its use requires content and context. Meaning occurs with usage, as Wittgenstein (2009) already warned us in his Philosophical Investigations.
We dare to say this conflict is not unique to São Paulo. For decades, the world saw republics and multiculturalism as promising or successful alternatives to equalize differences, but today these are clearly insufficient. The problem is that we do not seem to have better ones. The countries of the Global South to which the modern world order has been promised (Ferguson 1999), such as Brazil, have huge masses that never even belonged to their own nation: indigenous Brazilians, blacks, and the favelados of São Paulo are just three examples. It so happens that these groups, without the mediation of national politics, and therefore of the political communities that protect them, are projected into national politics and globalization through other doors, those of informal and illegal transnational markets. They are confronted daily with the problem of understanding the order that allows them to exist, in a changing scenario and in deep disagreement about who they are, thieves or entrepreneurs, outlaws or legislators.
The PCC represents “crime,” the government represents the state. The PCC is not a “counter-public” (Fraser 1992; Habermas 1992) or an alternative “public arena” that would tend to a synthesis of future assumptions. The world of crime in São Paulo represents an alternative power regime, incapable of synthesis because of the impossibility of plausible communication with the State order (Feltran 2020a). When the impossibility of any rational, argumentative or modern communication marks the very relation between these regimes, what remains is violence. Negotiated solutions to urban conflict, in theory achievable by administrative means, are unlikely. Since the 1980s, São Paulo, like other Brazilian and Latin American cities, has descended into snowballing urban conflict manifested as violence, understood as manageable only by the use of force or the threat of it (Caldeira 2000; Misse 2006). Thus began, on what was a newborn, formally democratic territory, a discussion about what we should do about them, or rather, against them.
Don’t think they didn’t do it too. “We” cannot, of course, accept Cumulus’ contention that theft is a form of justice. Theft is a crime and crime must be punished, period. It was precisely at this limit of the admissible, the plausible, that terror, raw violence, became the fundamental relationship between the parties. Brazilian police have killed 10,000 to 15,000 people every year for four decades and incarcerate millions (in 2020 there are 750,000 prisoners and 6 million former prisoners out of a population of 220 million people). Criminal groups are responsible for at least 50,000 deaths a year in the country, mostly shot dead in internal wars.
Brazil has the largest number of armored cars in the world and they are a common sight in São Paulo. Armed robberies continue to happen, regardless. Assumptions are not negotiated and, in the fracture between sets of irreconcilable assumptions, self-contained territories of perception of what the world should be can be understood as formal structures of thought and action (Simmel 2010). This is what we have conceptually called a normative regime (Feltran 2020a). Empirical action is something else, much more varied and variable. Normative regimes serve as a plausible guideline for suitable empirical action, in other words, for the guideline sought for by one’s peers (Boltanski and Thevenot 1991) guaranteed by material and objective means of governance. These safe actions internally, while accepted by one’s peers and having resources to spread, are incomprehensible outside due to their implausibility to those who oppose their existence (Cavell 2006). This essential political fracture has been in place in São Paulo ever since the promise of integration of migrants into the modern city was, with rare exceptions, frustrated. It laid down roots once there was no social counterpart to urban wage earning, and especially for those excluded from urban wage earning. Time did its work and the limits of the plausible on either side of the divide settled into place.
In the following chapters, we will see that (il)legal markets are regulated both by the laws of governments and guidelines for conduct laid down by organized criminal groups, militias and market collectives willing to circumvent laws. Our approach assumes that ordinary life structures urban life and its social forms, as per Agier (2001), Amit and Knowles (2017), Blokland (2017), Das (2007b), Certeau (2012), Duneier and Carter (1999), and Feltran (2016a), Simone (2004), but ordinary life is plural, conceived through an original political fracture.
This explicitly inductive approach of social order informs how we construct our own spheres of meaning. Our theoretical framework is based on researching everyday routines and the meanings that actors give to their social interactions, giving inferential consequences to them. Without accounting for these plural urban orders, authors tend to read the social circuits around illegal markets in a deductive fashion and see them as resulting from delinquency, misbehavior, neoliberalism, or incomplete development.6 Such approaches often fail to understand inequalities within large cities, as aggregated data tend to conceal the fact of the radical difference within the city or the neighborhood. Important ethnographic studies on informal markets in Africa, from Keith Hart (1973) to Jane Guyer (1995, 2004), have helped to counter such narratives, in spite of having barely touched on the world of crime as a power regime. Nonetheless, the literature still lacks inductive empirical work that could enhance our understanding of this contemporary phenomenon, which is present in every major city and surely most visible in the Global South.
Contrary to normative theories, recent
