Barricade fighting and illicit extraction: Everyday and effervescent forms
of resistance to marginalization in Maputo, Mozambique
It is a great pleasure to be here in the honour of Alcinda Honwana, and my presentation today
is both inspired by her work and indirect a commentary to it.
In her keynote at ECAS, Honwana describes how young people are caught in a transitory
moment of what she calls waithood: waiting to be able to become proper adults, to reacg
adulthood they are stuck in a waiting position where attaining the properties of adulthood is
almost impossible. Unemployment is massive and being able to support their families or
paying the bride price enabling them to get married is out of reach. What do they do? They
wait, but they also protest. Young Africans are struggling with unemployment, the difficulty of
finding sustainable livelihoods, political instability, and failed neo-liberal social and economic
policies have exacerbated societal problems and diminished young people’s ability to support
themselves and their families. The recent wave of youth protests can best be understood in
the context of this generation’s struggles for economic, social, and political emancipation
Question is how to play an active role in politics and governance, beyond street protests, and
how to create space for a new kind of politics?
I will go in the opposite direction today, looking at potential of riots and well as the more
mundane forms of resistance. Do so in dialogue with theories of power and resistance,
capitalism and informal markets, state and social forms. Marxism,
.. and a critique of state
power and markets.
Show photo, describe the scene..
Are they passive underclass, mere victims of commodification and alienation? DO they have
nothing to sell but themselves? From Harvey to Ferguson, Sumich talk about working class.
Such riots are just destructive,
My main argument is as follows: youngsters are not merely a passive and disposed underclass
or a destructive bunch of gangsters. Instead of seeing them as exploited by markets,
commodified, or controlled by states – see them as excluded from market and state. Not need
by either. They are abject, bare life, as Agambem would have it. This they must fight they way
into the market and the state not by becoming part of either but by exploited their periphearal
status to ensnare, bluff, seduce and attachment to people with power and capital. Not just
because 70 percent do not have formal employment, or that they goods and services are
hardly need or in great demand. Investments by foreign companies and state does not ask for
their labor, they are not even being exploited as labor, their life is too bare to be exploited.
think outside of the state, not just tactics as de certau have it, as the state draws back peopke
fall back on existing structures of redistribution through family networks or patronage, what
if we see them as collective strategies, and resistances to exclusion.
Rather than being mere victims to global and local oppression, passive underclass serving the
1
demands of middle class consumers, I suggest we see them as collective actors of everyday
resistance, that are at once social, autonomous and distributive, highly gendered, competitive,
sometimes violent and disruptive to the first order. Sassen describe how women enter into
global survival circuits, or what she calls counter-geographies of globalization, includes
migration and human trafficking. They are not selling themselves, they are seducing middle
class and extracting from them, they are resisting death, social death and unworthiness.
Redistribution outside of state and formal markets and employment occurs via informal
transactional relationships, sometimes involves migration to South Africa, but also to Europe,
US, Brazil. Women work as sex workers, as lovers or wives to Europeans, or via low paid jobs
as cleaners, bartenders, waiters, nannies or maids. Men trade in drugs, counterfeits more
rarely as husbands or sex workers.
Not just extraction, also attachment, they become integrated part of the middle class body.
Illicit forms of social mobility, of acquiring wealth, stealing, ensnaring, bluffing, manipulating.
(Newell)
The idea of desenrascar a vida or débrouillage situates the waithood experience in
the realm of improvisation, or “making it up as you go along,” and entails a
conscious effort to assess challenges and possibilities and plot scenarios conducive to
the achievement of specific goals (Vigh 2009). These young people operate like
Lévi-Strauss’s (1962/1966) bricoleur, a ‘jack-of-all-trades’ who manipulates and
takes advantage of circumstances whenever possible to attain his/her own ends. Their
actions sound like Michel de Certeau’s (1984) tactics, or daily struggles that respond
to immediate needs rather than longer-term strategies designed to achieve broader
ends (Honwana 2006).
(((based on Marx notion of primitive accumulation Harvey talks of accumulation by
dispossession, the process where capitalist forces in alliance with the state commodification and
privatization land, expulsion of peasant populations; conversion of various forms
of property rights – common, collective, state, etc. – into exclusive private property. Commodification of
labour power and the suppression of alternative, indigenous, forms of production and consumption;
While I agree with the first part, land and property rights – state, collective etc - are in a process of
privatization. But Harvey also represents a tendency in Marxist analysis to ignore the agency of the
marginalized, and the importance of alternative forms of production and consumption.
In fact, he ignored the processes of informal markets, of extraction and of redistribution. As many other
structural marxists he )))
(((Hardt and Negri:
Taking their cue from Althusser, they maintain that Machiavelli invoked
the masses in the transcendent form of an ideal prince because he
assumed that collective action could only be imagined in the mediated
form of a singular agent; but the task now is to demystify these ossified
mediations—leaders, parties and unions—and reclaim their absconded
power for the multitude. This is the politics of the society of the
2
spectacle, in which the masses seek only the most immediate
experiences of empowerment and agency, even if these are only ever
episodic.Destabilising the system, destablisgin the empire, or the
nervous sytem as Taussig calls it. )))
Example one: Barricade fighting
Thousands of young Mozambicans staged riots in Maputo in early September 2010,
to protest a substantial rise in the prices of bread, water, and fuel. Using text
messaging to mobilize their age-mates, they blocked the streets, burned tires, and
confronted the police. The escalation of these protests forced the government to
concede and reverse the price hikes
Riots on the other hand are direct engagements with the state, but not mimicking, as
Bejnamin says they are
Benjamin
Haussmann attempted to shore up his dictatorship and to place Paris
under an emergency régime. In 1864 he expressed his hatred for the
rootless population of the great city in a speech in the Assembly.
The increase of rents drove the proletariat into the suburbs. The Paris quartiers thereby
lost their characteristic physiognomy. The red belt appeared.
The real aim of Haussmann’s works was the securing of the city against
civil war. He wished to make the erection of barricades in Paris impossible
for all time. Haussmann intended to put a
stop to it in two ways. The breadth of the streets was to make the
erection of barricades impossible, and new streets were to provide the
shortest route between the barracks and the working-class areas.
Benjamin illustrated that the strategy of rebels and outcasts was based, not on invasion and overthrow of
government but of cutting off the connection between the city/state and the suburbs, its ability to rule by force,
blocking roads for police and military, and its ability to transport goods for the capitalist consumers, and for
consumers to roam freely, the blocking the free market for the few.
Engels
Even in the classic time of street fighting, therefore, the barricade produced more of a moral than a
material effect. It was a means of shaking the steadfastness of the military. If it held out until this
was attained, then victory was won; if not, there was defea
For them it was solely a question of making the troops yield to moral influences,
Mutual support; the disposition and employment of reserves; in short, the cooperation and
harmonious working of the individual detachments, indispensable even for the defense of one
quarter of the town, not to speak of the whole of a large town, are at best defective,
Hence the passive defense is the prevailing form of fight: the attack will rise here and there, but
only by way of exception, to occasional advances and flank assaults
3
(Engels intro to Karl Marx
The Class Struggles In France)
Bataille talks of expenditure, sacrifice, the symbolic victory of transgression, transgression of
boundaries, sovereignty, ….
Læs Rasmussen,
inside the system, but outside the law.
African cities have often been characterised as highly informal and largely ungoverned.
City infrastructures are under-resourced and the public administration is often
outdated. Despite such inconsistencies, Abdoumaliq Simone argues that African
cities do work, and that we gain a better understanding of cities by investigating
how things work
However, Christian Lund has argued in favour of looking at how the
state works, or how alternative institutions make things work by acquiring degrees of
stateness
Agamben,
Scott,
A key idea in Scott's book is that the 'hidden tran-scripts' of subordinate groups will articulate ideas and values that
'reverse and negate' (1990: 44) those which are generated by the dominant group and which struc-ture normal
social interaction between the two groups.
understand underclass politics. In Weapons of the Weak (Yale University Press, 1985), Scott made clear his
conviction that it is essential to explore the subjective side of class relations -the experience of subordination and
the cultural vocabulary in terms of which subordination is lived in particular social circumstances. In this book,
Scott furthers this concern through a careful analysis of the symbolic politics of resistance. Scott's central innovation in this work is his distinction between public transcripts ("the open interaction between subordinates and
those who dominate," p. 2) and hidden transcripts ("discourse that takes place 'offstage,' beyond direct
observation by powerholders," p. 4). Postulating that there is a sharp divide between the behavior, language, and
customs that dominated groups assume in public and the language, jokes, and criticisms that structure their lives
within the back streets, slave quarters, or rice paddies of their within-group experience, Scott attempts to
provide tools for excavating the latter. Both public transcripts and hidden transcripts have effects on the
everyday politics of power. The public transcript is by way of a libretto for the dominated, a stylized public
performance through which they adopt the forms of deference and respect for the powerful that are needed to
avoid punish- ment. But Scott maintains that this performance is only skin-deep. The dominated are by no means
taken in by their own affirmations of the justice and good manners of their masters, and behind the scenes we
may expect to hear much raucous laughing, merciless lampooning, and bitter criticism. "Offstage, where
subordinates may gather outside the intimidating gaze of power, a sharply dissonant political culture is possible.
Slaves in the relative safety of their quarters can speak the words of anger, revenge, self-assertion that they must
normally choke back when in the presence of the masters and mistresses" (p. 18). It is Scott's aim to shed light
on this hidden transcript, This content downloaded from 130.226.230.9 on Fri, 4 Apr 2014 10:10:36 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
4
154 POLMCAL THEORY / February 1993 with the idea that an understanding of this level of consciousness of the
dominated is much closer to the reality of their lived experience and provides a better basis for understanding
their political behavior. A particularly striking feature of this book is Scott's deliberate effort to couch the
argument at a distance from primary source material. Scott's previous books were strongly rooted in Southeast
Asia and extensive rural fieldwork. This book is not about Malaysian land tenure or American slavery; it is about
the experience of domination and resistance, with striking illus- trations drawn from a broad range of social
settings. This approach allows Scott the level of abstraction needed to make the general points he wants to make;
at the same time, it is convincingly connected to a wealth of historical material on slavery, feudalism, and peasant
life. Crucial in this context is Scott's ability to use both Asian and European historical materials. Scott has
succeeded in arriving at a level of discussion that allows him to fruitfully analyze and interpret processes of
social life drawn from Malaysia, Russia, India, England, Chile, and the United States without a Eurocentric slant.
The framework of public and hidden transcripts imposes a serious meth- odological constraint, however: how is
the investigator to gain access to the hidden transcript, as it is generally members of the dominating group who
observe and record the behavior of the dominated groups? Is it not inevitable, then, that historical sources will
present only the public transcript, leaving the hidden transcript permanently unavailable to the investigator?
Scott demonstrates (as other scholars concerned with popular culture and under- class politics have shown as
well) that the voice of the powerless is audible, if faint, in the historical record. He draws fluently on a mass of
empirical and historical material concerning a variety of social arrangements embodying the fabric of
domination and resistance-European feudalism, American slavery, Asian land tenancy relations, and prisons,
labor camps, and public schools. And he makes effective use of available sources that give relatively direct
expression to the voices of dominated groups -slave narratives, peas- ant testimony, and folk stories and legends.
In addition to these varied empirical sources, Scott skillfully employs a number of literary works to better
understand the "feel" of the hidden transcript. Scott has identified dozens of texts-works by George Eliot, George
Orwell, Euripides, Brer Rabbit, Milan Kundera, Jean Genet, Emile Zola, and many others -in which the divide
between the public and hidden transcripts is directly at issue. These sources have some evidentiary value - for
example, Scott writes of George Eliot: "Such were Eliot's powers of ob- servation and insight into her rural
society that many of the key issues of domination and resistance can be teased from her story of Mrs. Poyser's This
content downloaded from 130.226.230.9 on Fri, 4 Apr 2014 10:10:36 AM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions
BOOKS IN REVIEW 155 encounter with the squire" (p. 7)-but more important is their expository value. They permit
Scott to communicate to the reader his view of the way the hidden transcript works; this rich understanding can
then be deployed to interpret the empirical and historical evidence. Scott's contention that the hidden transcript
is clear-sightedly critical of existing relations of domination inevitably comes into conflict with theories of
ideology and hegemony, according to which dominated groups come to share the values and perceptions of the
dominant group. Scott argues - successfully, in my view - that what is taken as hegemony of dominant-group ideas
is in fact often only an uncritical observation of the performance of the public transcript and that the dominated
are perfectly capable of formulating their own criticisms of the social relations in which they find themselves. "A
combination of adaptive strategic behavior and the dialogue implicit in most power relations ensures that public
action will provide a constant stream of evidence that appears to support an interpreta- tion of ideological
hegemony" (p. 70). Scott's discussion of alternative theories of quiescence (chap. 4) is substantial and
convincing; if his argu- ments are accepted, then a major
Carlos serra, mundo problematico, nao-problematico
5 sider, an experiment.
“resistance”; a recurrent social phenomenon that has often been ignored, feared, demonized or
romanticized. A clear problem with the concept of “everyday resistance” is that is used to refer to
all kinds of activities interpreted as subversive, all expressions of difference, deviation, or
individuality should not, we think, be labeled “resistance”.
5
Yet, it can serve as useful metaphor for addressing power and marginalization, state formal sector
vs informal organization, capitalist market vs informal markets in African cities.
We are often disappointed with protests, if they do not lead to turnovers or if turnovers become
tragedies such as when people are disappointed by outcomes of the Arab spring.
When there are no working class hero, leaders, linear story lines with a just and peaceful ending.
But should we ignore such events or practices or condemn them as destructive, leading nowhere, as
meaningless? I think not.
Deleuze and Guattri: resistance works by breaking down, produces new realities…it is
rhisomatic….against the state, the ordering, but as they mentor Clastres argued, against the state
does not mean anarchy isn the sense of chaos and disorganization, it can also imply organization ,
but of a different orde.r . Organisation and redistribution is also resistance, it is resistance to
individual competition, gang wars, disorganization, to riots. Therefore riots and redistribution must
be separated, spatially and practically. The logic in one must not affect the logic of the other.
Resistance is often masculinized, just as power is. The revolutionary heroes are all men.
In everyday resistance, women and older women play a central role.
Jones (2005) argues that we need to pay more attention to the social conditions for
resistance and broader movements for change when analysing the subversive
potential of impoverished people. She illustrates her point with reference to
Mozambican sociologist Carlos Serra’s distinction between struggles of middleclass
Maputo citizens within the realm of the ‘mundo na˜o proble´matico’ (the
non-problematic world) and the struggle of marginalized inhabitants of the
‘mundo proble´matico’ (the problematic world) (Jones 2005: 59).
In the former world the structural violence of today’s neoliberal reforms is
resisted by journalists, lawyers and researchers who provide critiques of parasitic
and corrupt practices and illicit forms of accumulation. Such organized critiques,
which in some cases have led to persecution by people in power, can arise because
this middle-class segment has its basic necessities covered, a good education and
relative freedom of speech.
In the latter world the resistance of the dispossessed is directed at everyday
suff ering, hunger and exclusion from the realm of the state and ordinary society.
These forms of resistance are tied to an experience of disenfranchisement which is
often personal and highly individualized. In their desperate struggles as beggars,
street children, lixeiros (rubbish collectors), street vendors, prostitutes and mentally
ill vagabonds, the people in the problematic world use all their energy and waking
hours to search for means of daily survival because, eloquently put, ‘hunger does
400 Anthropological Theory 10(4)
Downloaded from ant.sagepub.com at Statsbiblioteket on February 6, 2012
not take holidays’ (Jones 2005: 68). Jones goes on to ask what forms of resistance
can arise in such conditions and what forms of organized struggle can emerge
among persons who are hungry, desperate, unacknowledged and basically invisible
and dispensable to society. Clearly, these are not the social segments that we will
see rise in revolts and, she rightly adds, in some cases salvation is instead sought for
in evangelical churches or visits to curandeiros (witch doctors) while others turn to
alcohol, glue-sniffi ng, drugs and crime (Jones 2005).
I largely agree with this excellent delineation of the socially segregated world of
urban and suburban Mozambique. However, Jones’s description of these practices
6
as a form of escape or as signs of desperation in a world of insecurity does not
entirely fit the impression that the moluwenes gave me of their situation. While we
will certainly not see the moluwenes take part in any organized political overthrow
of the elite, they did take part in the more spontaneous riots in Maputo in 2008 as
well as in 2010 and could potentially participate in future
Abstract: (if very short). In recent years social inequalities, poverty
and unemployment has deepened in the Mozambican capital of Maputo. This
desperate situation where youth are reduced to what Agamben calls 'bare
life', experienced by local youth as 'being stepped on' by the rich or
'cheated by the government', is explored by addressing how young men
called 'moluwenes' (wild boys) and young women called 'curtidoras' (women enjoying life)
use different strategies to resist or survive the current situation. In a social and cultural
science where critiques of power, if present at all, have been directed towards structures,
discourses and materialities, but without acknowledging people’s responses to or ways to
negotiate such powers. It time to revitalize resistance concept….
As if the state comes firt, now lets see how people mimmick this entity, well did the state ever
completely control the periphery, was it even relevant in there? In recent times it has become
less and less relevant…
Kritik af Harvey…2005, Negri – Marx
When Weber writes that capitalism forms an "Iron Cage” that will persist until the last ton of
fossilized coal is burnt” or Marx writes that “All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is
profaned”, the global commodification of things and people is inevitable, capitalism continues
the extraction human and material resources until all that is human and all morals have
disappeared in an ever expanding economy of investment, accumulation and exploitation.
the turning of Africa into a warren for the commercial hunting of black-skins, signaled the
rosy dawn of the era of capitalist production. the great majority that, despite all its labour, has
up to now nothing to sell but itself
But is capitalism a one-way street? Do people really loose their moral principles, of
distribution, reciprocity and mutual support? Are people reduced to serfs? No says Marx,
emancipation is possible but only if and when peasant and petty traders become workers,
proletarians with a class consciousness and the ability and willingness to organize and create
unions and parties. So what about the lumpenproletariat?
In The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), Marx gives this description of the
lumpenproletariat: included
vagabonds, discharged soldiers, discharged jailbirds, swindlers, lazzaroni, pickpockets,
tricksters, gamblers, maquereaux [pimps], brothel keepers, porters, beggars, prostitutes — in
short, the whole indefinite, disintegrated mass, thrown hither and thither, which the French
call la bohème.[2]
These people have no direct interest in productive enterprises, unlikely to ever achieve class
consciousness and is therefore lost to socially useful production, of no use to the
7
revolutionary struggle, and may actually be an impediment to the realization of a better
society.
Are these agents of unproductive enterprises? Of asocial accumulation? Or are they agents of
extraction and redistribution? Are they a dangerous lumpenproletariat impeding social
change or do they represent productive forms of collective resistance? Versus work and
education as FRELIMO ideals and ideals of the global neoliberal order? Counter-geographies
of globalization? Jones. Brug orgies!!!!!!!
As Serra says we have organized and un-organized…journalists, opposition parties,
intellectuals…and popular more mundane forms of resistance.
Instead of taking for granted that cultural life as already capitalized in practice and morality I
look at moral economies of kinship and gender, that do not slavishly follow capitalist logics.
(if longer) While moluwenes enter the informal and illicit economy of
theft, counterfeiting, handling stolen goods or illegal street trade,
curtidoras enter the informal sexual economy of 'patrocinadores'
(sponsors), strip clubs and street walking. Everyday forms of resistance
rely on a certain gendered division of labor, where men extract money by
pushing goods while women extract money through bodily intimacy. Yet, in
times of confrontation with authorities, such as during major food and
fuel riots in 2008 and 2010, young men are more directly involved in what Walter Benjamin
called 'barricade fighting', than young women.
Nevertheless, I argue that everyday (James Scott) and effervescent (Emilie Durkheim) forms
of resistance are equally significant and offer
alternative spaces and moments of freedom. Drawing on postcolonial
feminism, James Scott and Franz Fanon I argue that everyday resistance
outside of the male organised proletariat, by the social segment which
Marx called the 'lumpenproletariat' of thieves, tricksters, street walkers and loose women, can
and should receive more attention in studies of youth, gender and protest in Africa. In
particular, we need to find ways to conceptualise and understand the potential of illicit
extraction in informal economies.
Barricade fighting, as Walter Benjamin says, is conquering space, blocking space and free
movement, of police, the state, of middle class in cars, stalling society, acting against the state
and the market, terrorizing the state, provoking and forcing politician to act, to subsidize
bread and fuel, or with violence that reveals its weakness, lack of control…. resist negative
effects of market, and the deterioration of conditions, and insisting that the state can interfere.
Fighting. Sovereignty only temporary, elusive, momentary, sense of sovereignty – not
escapism, self-destruction or passive resistance, active resistance. Fra orgies.
There has in recent years been at growing attention to and concern about the effects of
neoliberal reforms in africa, how imf and world bank has assisted governments in
implementing strucutral adjustment, leading to privatization of nationa companies, massive
8
layoffs and subsequent rise in unemployment and social ineqialities, especially in urban
centers. Urbanization has only made situation worse. This concern is highly relevant in most
places, also in maputo, were i have done fieldwork. The question howecer is how to
understand marginalized young men and womens reaction to this and their possibilities to act
under these tragic circumstances. Some scholar talk of incresed commoditization,
passification, fragmentation of social frabric, in particular as the so-alled working class
diminishes and with that the power of unions and mass mobilization of workers. As talk about
the sexualization of women and reduction of these to commodities for male consumption, and
how young men become brutalized and selfcentered. Examples of this is the growing sexual
economy in sputhern africa and te growing informal market and black markets of drugs,
counterfeits, and theft. By have youngster actually become so demoralized, comodified and
uninterested in changing society for the better and going up against these greater local and
global economic forces creTing hardship and reproducing poverty? What i wil argue here is
that these youngster do have potential to change, and that they already change. In opposition
to a fatalist standpoint of classic marxism, .... Argue for everyday forms of resistance, and what
i call effervecent forms of resistance where ....young not just seen as commodified, passified,
they are actors on their own situation, chalenging neoliberal logics of accumulation,
extraction and exploitation. Resistance to a market and a state, global society, that shuts them
out, reduce them to bare life.
Also they are involuntarily immobilized, shut out from South Africa, Europe other rich
countries by strict immigration laws, border surveillance. They resist these barriers,
exclusions, break through boundaries, ‘forcere’ barricader set up by markets, states, their own
and foreign more powerful and affluent nation states and supra-national institutions.
There is demand for sex and cheap goods, but the demand is produced, strategies for being
supported. Surely, they are also forced to succumb to this logic, but they do not passively
accept exclusion, resorting only to given forms of patronage, or to cultivating the land,
escaping the city to rural districts etc.
On e such logic is extraction....intimate and informal. And redistribution.
Education is not seen as gateway to social mobility, jobs or status. In Moz high percentage in
school, advantage in terms of expanding networks, knowing the city, learning language and
common references, but access to higher education and the better jobs is almost non-existing
for poor youngsters due to high fees at universities, corruption, class inequalities, hierarchies
of knowledge reproduction, unequal distribution of symbolic and cultural capital that
Bourdieu has described.
Many men are lais off, more pressure as well as power to women...
Many are sacrificed or become sacrificed in this economy, children work for kin selling nuts,
handicrafts and vetables downtown, younger women's sexual capital is strategically used by
kin. But women also use this by the,selves, extracting money from the expanding ex pat and
middle class communities of men able and willing to support them in intimate or
transactional relatioships.
This not only reminds us of the absence of state and indeed of a market with formal jobs, it
9
also reminds us that we are infact players in this global economy, and tat our lack of support,
complicity in world bank reforms and failed foregn aid programs in africa is part the problem.
We could play a bigger role in the redistribution of ressources and soxial support so tjat
children no longer have to be the main soirces of income or that te sexual economy is the only
way to social mobility for women and families, or that being sold is a one gateway to survival.
But until we do that we should take their forms of resistance serious and acknowledge the
value of local moralities of redistribution, which might actually remind us that human activity
in many of these lower strata of society are no less altruist or prone to change than we are.
10