6º Anniversary of the Protests of June of 2013

                       Last Thursday, June 20th, the second biggest protest in Brazil history will complete six years. The reason why this protest is studied until now and other though bigger, like the one what happened in March 2016, for example, is not so much studied, it was its character totally spontaneous and unexpected. It was as, if suddenly, the Brazilian people realized that they deserve a much better governance, a better return for so many taxes the Brazilian people pay. Besides, we want respect for our most basic human rights and justice when they are violated, this meaning due compensation for any harm, humiliation, loss of freedom, death, persecution, etc. We want a country where goodness is exalted and evil, lies and hipocrisy combated.  We want a fair, transparent and inclusive electoral and political systems.  We want honesty, efficiency, productivity, solidarity and accountability from our politicians and authorities. In short, we want a country that really works for the progress, justice and happiness of its citizens. This post is a summary of a report. It was published at  https://www.gold.ac.uk/media/documents-by-section/departments/anthropology/Revolutions.pdf

                The June Revolution that shook Brazil in 2013 took everybody by surprise. It started in Sao Paulo as a small gathering protesting a looming rise in the cost of public transport, and in two weeks it spread across 400 cities and towns, bringing millions of people into the streets and forcing President Dilma Roussef to start a process of constitutional reform. For many political observers this "movement of movement" was essential a new form of working-class articulation of diverse social forces including the urban poor, workers and the middle class. The June revolution started when the Free Fare Movement (Movimento Passe Livre) led a demonstration against the impending rise in public transport fares. The MPL emerged from the student movement in 2000s. The small protest by a few thousand demonstrators quickly escalated. This led to a second phase of the struggle, which reached its apex between June 17 and 20 when the movement counted hundreds of thousands people. By now the demands had widened and included health and education and opposition to PEC 37, which would restrict the attorney general's power to carry out independent investigations, de facto eliminating an important anticorruption tool. For Saad Filho, the movement was "out of control" and captured by a strong anti-left middle class. Another view holds that this was a moment of convergence between the "old and "new" left. More generally, the popular discontent seemed to stem from the contradictions of neo-developmentalism in its combination of income distribution, labor deregulation, and cuts in public spending. The Roussef government responded swiftly to the mounting criticism against the government. Already at the end of June, the president had proposed a national "pact" to reduce corruption and to expand public services, to be funded in part by the sovereign oil fund.  Later, Roussefproposed to call a plebiscite to reform the electoral and party legislations and boost basic health services. But how did a brooding political discontent become a full-fledged urban revolution? So, was "the movement of the movement" led by the middle class or by precariat? The answer is not straightforward because the political and economic threshold beween precariat and the middle class is fuzzy. For instance, their main common enemies are inflation and corruption. At the beginning of 2013, the 10% increase in prices hit the working class hard. By the time of the demonstrations, a vociferous anti-inflation movement, bringing together middle calss and working class, had emerged. People lamented the astronomical price of durables and high-tech goods, due to protective duties and high corporation taxes. Singer' analysisof the June demonstratiros' socioeconomic profile confirms the porosity between the middle class and the precariat in Brazil The majority of the demonstrators were young. That is to say, 80% were under the age of 39. Moreover, participamts had high levels of education. In most cities, no less than 43% of demonstrators had a university degree (against a national average of 8%). Cities nest within themselves different scales of political economy, each of them with different temporal dynamics. Such experiential disconnect between economy and life in the urban context makes it difficult to develop class solidarity and sustained political action. As much as economics is an ideological construction, politics does not exist in a vacuum. The focus on rents and incomes associated with the abstract logics of finance and services is only one aspect of it. Invisible labor labor infrastructures and grassroots economies, informal trade, small and illegal production, street markets, need to be unveiled too. In spite of the damaging effect of the events in june 2013, Roussef was re-elected a year later. But a recent investigation in the kickback schemes of Petrobras, Brazil's mighty state-run oil company, is triggering a new wave of mass protests against the president. How can the events of June 2013 be reassessed in the light of these contemporary developments?