1. Introduction

“Thesis 12: ‘We need history, but we need it differently from the spoiled lazy-bones in the garden of knowledge.’

—Nietzsche, On the Use and Abuse of History for Life. The subject of historical cognition is the battling, oppressed class itself. In Marx it steps forwards as the final enslaved and avenging class, which carries out the work of emancipation in the name of generations of downtrodden to its conclusion. This consciousness, which for a short time made itself felt in the ‘Spartacus’ [Spartacist splinter group, the forerunner to the German Communist Party], was objectionable to social democracy from the very beginning. In the course of three decades it succeeded in almost completely erasing the name of Blanqui, whose distant thunder [Erzklang] had made the preceding century tremble. It contented itself with assigning the working class the role of the saviour of future generations. It thereby severed the sinews of its greatest power. Through this schooling the class forgot its hate as much as its spirit of sacrifice. For both nourish themselves on the picture of enslaved forebears, not on the ideal of the emancipated heirs” (Benjamin 1974).

It is interesting that two contemporary scholars of an explicitly anti-capitalist postcolonial or decolonial position emphasise that theoreticians and scholars should not understand themselves or act as a vanguard, but rather as allies to social movements (De Santos 2014, 44: Chandra 2016, 3). While both authors explain with a different emphasis what such a vanguard role of intellectuals would be or who exactly claims to assume such a position, both accounts differ significantly from my understanding of the vanguard consisting of those engaged in mass struggles. I will come back to the question of the role of researcher vis-à-vis the social actors—whose agency is the object of study in this book—later on in this introduction.

In Brazil, these tactics are often referred to as ‘quebra-quebra’ (destroy-destroy) or ‘quebrar e quemar’ (destroy and burn). For construction sites in Brazil, these tactics are not new at all, but their mass occurrence was unprecedented between the years 2011 and 2014.

This is inspired by Antonio Gramsci who uses the term ‘corporatist unions’ for those trade unions that focus to improve the wages and conditions of work within the given conditions of society (2000, 92ff).

Struggles are inscribed into structures; thus their action is mediated/filtered by this inscription: “To sum up, popular struggles are inscribed in the institutional materiality of the State, even though they are not concluded in it, it is a materiality that carries the traces of these muted and multiform struggles” (Poulantzas 1980, 144). Nonetheless, struggles in general (which includes the struggle of the bourgeoisie) have primacy over structures; thus change and conflict are primary vis-à-vis the status quo and consensus: “In their material basis, struggles always have primacy over the institutions-apparatuses of power (especially the State), even though they are invariably inscribed within their field” (ibid., 149; see also 133, 143).

I apply the notion of structures consisting in the inscription of struggles and social relations to the spatial dimension, inspired by Nicos Poulantzas’ theory of the state: “(…) the State is through and through constituted-divided by class contradictions. (…) Class contradictions are the very stuff of the State: they are present in its material framework and pattern its organization; while the State’s policy is the result of their functioning within the State” (1980, 132). These citations make clear that to speak of structuralism is not at all adequate in this case: Structures are understood as aspects of agency, pointing far beyond the endless debates about structure versus agency in bourgeois sociology. It is the merit of Bob Jessop (2007) that he developed this notion of Poulantzas’ theory into the strategic-relational account of social formations.

More specifically, Chandra asserts that James Scott (1976) and Guha ascribe in a universalising manner to rural uprisings in Asia that they were of an anti-colonial nature—a claim that Chandra investigates in detail in other works and against which he raises considerable and quite convincing doubts (Chandra 2016).

“Pure spontaneity does not exist” (Gramsci 1971b, 196).

I will use the terminology of ‘core and non-core countries’ against other alternatives like ‘Global South/North, developing/developed countries’ or ‘centre and periphery’. I think the idea of a core of countries which dominate global capitalism describes the current constellation of global rule most adequate. The distinction between South and North gives ample room for misunderstandings since geography does not exactly match structures of domination. The distinction developing/developed countries originally referred to industrialised versus agrarian countries which does not make much sense today when almost all countries are industrialised to some extent. It also contains a questionable idea of non-core countries being able to ‘catch up’ via industrialisation. Finally, the terms ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ create some uneasiness with the claim that the majority of the world population lives in the periphery, although this notion does give some impression about the global distribution of power and resources.