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26 Swyngedouw, E. (2014). Where is the political? Insurgent mobilisations and the incipient ‘return of the political’. Space and Polity 18 (2): 122–136.
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2 June 2013 A Moment in the Struggle for Public Transport in the City
Marina Capusso and Matheus Preis 1
The June 2013 ‘revolts’ that occurred throughout Brazil have become one of the most controversial political events in the country’s recent history. These enormous protests, which took issue with all of the main national political parties and overturned public transport fare increases for buses and trains in over 100 cities and towns, have had a tremendous impact on the context of Brazilian national conflicts, and have been referred to by the left and the right, whether by way of celebration or vilification. Political differences, disputes over the interpretation of these events, and opportunist discourses framing them, continue the struggle over the meaning of the past and obscure possibilities for the future.
The impact of the revolts is unsurprising given the vast importance of this collective experience for the formation of Brazil’s national politics; many of those who protested throughout the country in June 2013 did so for the first time. The confusion about the nature and the cause of the demonstrations, as well as the major news channels’ and newspapers’ reaction, which announced the unprecedented nature of what was taking place appears to have resulted from a widespread lack of understanding about these specific protests, as well as an absence of knowledge of the historical context of urban struggle in Brazil. The June 2013 demonstrations were the result of a long battle led by organized social movements in different regions of the country, which had been taking place in other Brazilian cities 10 years before 2013. It is undeniable that the events of June 2013 were triggered by bus and train fare increases in the country’s major cities and by the resistance against this that ensued, and that their national repercussion was principally due to the visibility and intensity of the protests over the rise in transport costs in the city of São Paulo.2 But focusing only on opposition to the rise of public transport fares runs the risk of unveiling the old, covert, class struggle, reminding us that social classes still exist in Brazil, and that conflicts are not resolved by ‘specialists’ or ‘rationality.’ The plight of the oppressed classes is only altered via struggle.
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In order to understand the protests that take to the streets of Brazil’s big cities year after year, it is important to acknowledge the centrality of public transport in the lives of its urban population. Whilst the land-ownership logic of capitalism bestows great value on a city’s best-located and best-equipped areas (with high concentrations of urban patrimony, public facilities, services, and employment), the capitalist logic of exploitation displaces the working women and men – who produce this wealth day after day – to its outskirts. The majority of the urban population is pushed to the fringes of the city, where the cost of housing is more accessible. Public transport connects all wage earners to their workplace and links the outlying ghettos to the city centre. At the same time, it connects wage earners to each other in their everyday experience of the city, regardless of their specific labour. Most wage earners spend many hours a day on expensive and overcrowded public transport. In São Paulo, workers spend up to the equivalent of two-thirds of their working day (six hours) on their daily commute and spend R$11.84 doing so.3 According to statistics from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística, IBGE), a family’s expenditure on public transport is similar to that spent on food, and is exceeded only by the cost of housing (GI, 2012). That this situation led to protests in 2013 should thus be no surprise.
In the 1930s, the impossibility of paying for public transport was the subject of a popular carnival song called ‘Não pago o bonde’ (I won’t pay the tram fare):
I won’t pay the tram fare
Because I can’t afford to
I have very little
Not enough to get by
I live in those houses
Over there, on the other side of the city,
I have a door and a window
Tell the tram company to come and get the
money from me!4
In order to live in the city, everyone has to use the public transport ticket turnstiles, not only to make a living – to go from home to work and back again – but to actually experience the city, to make use of everything that continues to be produced by the urban workforce every day.
In a big city, all social rights, such as health and education, necessarily depend on the right to transportation. However, this right is effectively denied to many in virtually all Brazilian cities. Research by the Institute of Applied Economic Research (Instituto de Pesquisa Econômica Aplicada, IPEA) from 2010 found that 38 million Brazilians (almost 20% of the entire national population) do not use collective transport because they cannot afford it. To fully grasp these limitations on urban mobility in Brazil, we have to consider the journeys that people with some access to the transport system fail to make, as well as those that they do not even contemplate making because they lack access to transportation. Day trips, medical treatment, supplementary educational courses, visiting family members or friends, and taking part in political events and acts, become extremely expensive depending on one’s income bracket. Even benefits that have been obtained after lengthy political struggles, like transport vouchers (which are only provided for registered workers, in other words, approximately 50% of the economically active population of Brazil), or the free student pass (obtained in just a few of the country’s big cities), still do not rupture this exclusivity caused by the market logic of collective transportation systems. The only mobility which is guaranteed is that of workers as commodities, as a workforce sold for wages (to go to and from the workplace),
