Self-management in Brazil. Homo faber and the social sciences.

Autogesto no Brasil. Homo Faber e as cincias sociais.

Ana Lcia Marques Camargo Ferraz

Universidade Federal Fluminense

Resumo

Abstract

Keywords: Work, self-management, Brazil, social movements, ethnographic

film, participatory research.

By following self-management activities through ethnographic research among

different groups of workers, I was able to observe an increasing heterogeneity within the
Brazilian working class. Such heterogeneity seems to be associated with socialization
processes and the rise of new social networks. The research made use of ethnographic
video recordings in which the subjects were invited to relate their life experiences on
camera. The videos promoted further reflections on the ways ethnography can broaden
our understanding of heterogeneity.
Sharing knowledge production was a key to the research. The scope of my
project was established with the inclusion of four groups I had been studying for over a
decade. They constitute dynamic scenarios in which four pertinent social forms

industrial work, unemployment, social movements and self-production have

undergone relevant changes. These situations reveal different experiences of the
Brazilian working class throughout the last several decades. The core of this research,
transition in social forms, develops through the analyses of historical processes
experienced by the social groups at stake, where change cannot be dissociated from
the life of labor.
The making of political subjects can be understood through long term
ethnographic research. In Revisits: An Outline of a Theory of Reflexive Ethnography,
Burawoy (2003:648) highlights the importance of (1) the observer as participant, (2)
the reconstruction of theory, (3) internal processes, and (4) external forces. These
themes serve as a basis for my study of the groups presented in this paper. By
investigating the processes which led to the construction of a political subject, I was
able to recognize changes in life conditions of the working class. Also, I took into
account the notion of praxis, which Ortner identifies as an historical turn in the
social sciences, dating back in the 1970s and 1980s. As Raymond Williams stated in
1977, hegemonies had to be understood not as structures external to individuals but
as the whole lived social process (cited by Ortner 2006:8).
Unions have formed and become institutionalized through the
autonomous pursuits of acting subjects in the class struggles of their
daily lives. The experience of this process produces a constant
negotiation of meanings. To understand the establishment of a political working
subject in Brazil, it is necessary to outline the underlying values, which at the same time
contribute to a definition of class identity.

The act of working is

perceived not only as an economic value but also as a symbolic value. Aside from being
the source of an individuals material support, work generates social inclusion in the
form of social networking activated in daily life contacts (Colbari, 1995, Guimares,
2006). The act of working is an ethical value carried out in moments of selfconstruction by the subject as a member of a social class. Examples of such moments
can be seen in urban movements which bring groups together to build houses in the
community, to create neighborhood associations, and carry out other cooperative
ventures.

However, in existing approaches to labor studies - especially in sociology, or

even more clearly in economics - I have found only a limited understanding of some
specific forms of subsistence among some groups of workers. Their intra-class
networking are spaces of creation of a political identity as well as a sense of belonging.
Other studies of labor and unemployment also have pointed out the importance of a
broader perspective in the social sciences: Assuming the existence of those forms of
work is major if one wants to determine the boundaries of social reproduction not
connected to the market. Doing so makes it possible to perceive not only the uncovered
dimensions of laboring but also the social and economic contributions of those people
(...). Understanding labor as an occupation gives it an economic function, although its
effects become real only through processes of social reproduction (Dedecca et al.,
2003:20).
The ethnographic research methods of anthropology offer a way to go beyond
the analysis centred in the concept of productive restructuring. The key is to
acknowledge the role of the workers in such processes and to understand their practices.
The notion of praxis - with the possibility of its observation through ethnographic
research - reveals interactions in the field as a space to produce shared knowledge.
Engagement in the Fieldwork Settings in a Time of Crisis
My fieldwork was carried out in So Paolo at a Ford car assembly plant in So
Bernardo do Campo, two small-scale steel industries and a plastic products
manufacturer, and in following the activities of a social movement fighting for housing
in Osasco. At these sites, I found ways to turn the ethnographic research into a space
where reflection can be shared by those who were involved in this process of knowledge
production. The history is lived as if in a drama, and the social spaces where the
workers live in turn transfigured.
In writing Dramas of Autonomy (Ferraz, 2009), I reconstructed the history of
experiences once lived by the groups of workers I kept close to in So Paulo. By
tracking events and watching the transfiguration of the social order, I was able to come
across different experiences. In some cases, my position as a pedagogical coordinator at
Central Unica dos Trabalhadores CUT, (Brazils United Workers Confederation)
facilitated my access to these groups. As Field and Fox (2007) point out, the possibility

of co-theorizing is settled by the time we set complex relations with the subjects we
study. The fieldwork, more often than not, ended up as workshops for reflexive
exercises about the situations which had been lived, and sometimes

also for

collectively designing projects.

Factory Bankruptcies, Worker Takeovers, and the Formation of Cooperatives

Different people at the Ford site told me their versions of the history of the
workers self-organization practices. The workers fought to control the rhythm and
intensity of production on the assembly lines, a dispute which continued for decades. At
the time of my fieldwork in the factory, the company had fired 2800 workers.
Remembering important past moments, they talked about worker movements which had
formed during the military dictatorship, with demands hat the corporation and the state
acknowledge them as political subjects having their own political rights. The workers
remarks make clear the opposition between a micro-politics, in which the rhythm of
work is disputed, and a macro-politics, in which the State is a realm lacking in content
and a place to be taken over. As the decades passed, the Factory Commission brought
into existence autonomously by the workers evolved into an institutionalized
organization. Since that time, retirements among the old generation of workers, as well
as massive firings, have led to an unforeseen employee-employer partnership. However,
a quality policy set by the company has been revealed to amount to an increased
workload and layoffs.
The workers talk about the process with a sense of time full of elipsis. Bachelard
(1994[1936]), in La dialectique de la dure, proposes an analyses of pacing where
time is perceived as a phenomenon shaped by memory. A senior worker talked about
his participation in several political achievements, such as when workers associations
were first being formed at his workplace through bargaining with the managerial
hierarchy over the control of the production process. Back during the 1970s through the
mid-80s, the transition to democracy was a constant topic in the voices of the public
opinion outside the factory walls (during the dictatorial regime that started with a coup
in 1964 and lingered for 20 years. Inside the factories, on the other hand, there were
constant layoffs. At that time the shop stewards were excluded from the arena of
political action, and they could not return to the floor factory as employee
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representatives until the mid-1990s. Taking this situation into account, one can better
understand not only the foundations of recent labor movements but an entire perspective
on the political history of Brazil. The fight for democracy took place in several social
spaces as well as worksites. It was then and there that those who would found the
Workers Party came together.

It is possible to recognize different groups as

representing types, according to ways the Brazilian working class is configured.

Unlike the Ford factory, a multinational heavy industry with advanced technology and
located in the capital city, there are small-scale national enterprises operating with
minimal capital, which together employ massive numbers of workers. For example, I
carried out research in a steel factory where workers manufacture small items, such as
wheel barrows and ironing boards. When they received notification of the firms
bankruptcy, they self-organized teams at the larger machines to constitute a cooperative
and to continue working together. A group of women, who manually assembled dropper
covers, did the same when the plastic products manufacturer they worked for declared
bankruptcy.
I was able to track situations where threats to wage labor, either by layoffs or by
imminent bankruptcy, led to the formation of cooperative bonds. There are also
contradictory cases of projects supposedly aiming at workers managing production but
leading to exploitation, with both more bureaucratized control and greater surplus
extraction. Restrictions of worker representation reveal the gaps disguised by the
concept of self-management. The point of departure for my research was the moment
when employers were cast aside, disclosing an unexpected void. The cooperative unions
which were studied had confronted the dilemma of simultaneous reductions of labor
rights and employers responsibility over workers.

Video Recording as a Tool for Ethnographic Research and Worker Organization

Research workshops were held in factories where self-management is a reality.
In collective sessions the workers themselves produced and contributed the materials:
recordings of events and gatherings, television reports, interviews, and the like. In these
moments they could review all the experiences they have been through and, in doing
so, think through their present circumstances. This is a crucial process inside factories
which have recently been taken over by workers and labor relations are being
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reorganized. They can analyze cathartic moments when the power produced by memory
generates reassurance of a new identity for the group. By going through their past and
selecting dramatic events, the workers managed to tell their collective history from a
new perspective. In this way, a new group identity was born and old personal
differences were cast aside. The research constituted a collective moment for the
recognition of the subjects mutual knowledge and understanding.
Being in front of the camera encouraged some of those workers to discourse
freely. They would not have felt comfortable speaking in plenary sessions or other
formal meetings or with the cooperatives board of directors. Furthermore, the genre of
speech used in decision making forums suppresses other forms of speech, especially for
those reluctant to voice their opinions. Participants in the workshops had opportunities
to voice their positions in a setting that welcomed individual assessments and not
simply the collective/ impersonal consensus. Those without a sophisticated or formal
level of speaking managed to express themselves without inhibitions.
A group of homeless favela inhabitants occupied abandoned urban areas to
construct their own houses, forming a social movement called the Movimento de Luta
Popular. https://vimeo.com/channels/filmeetnografico/26268437 . They began their
workshops by discussing themes involving the acquisition of dwellings. Participants
were invited to bring their own ideas, which were represented through drawings and
other forms of expression, as well as verbally. The presence of a video camera, which
initially was operated only by the researcher, became a familiar object that stimulated
the group to produce several recordings. After being instructed on how to operate the
camera, group members adopted it as an essential tool to record the proceedings
whenever they gathered events which were inaccessible to the researcher. Eventually,
they turned to productions about their daily lives.
The images captured in the recordings transmit the group members attitude towards the
State. Their entire history - which includes property occupations, houses building and
the discovery of alternative kinds of work are constituted by relations of alterity. The
content of these videos, begun when the people who made them were homeless, is
indicated by the title of the edited and combined version, It was Due to Necessity:
History

of

the

Movement

for

Housing

in

Osasco

(Ferraz

2003).

The film, produced with the contribution of members of the movement for
housing, returned to the group as a form of feedback, and enabled the people to assess
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their own past experiences. They could criticize the power concentrated on the hands of
the so-called board of leaders. The video encouraged other regular members to
participate and voice their opinions. This shows how learning is an individual process
and, when divisions appear within the group its members are more capable of
constructing their own autonomy from the experiences they had shared while together.
In one of the cases introduced earlier, workers who had been dismissed from the
Ford automobile manufacturing plant made use of my documentary video called Happy
New Year, Mate! (Ferraz 1999). https://vimeo.com/channels/filmeetnografico/26306666
In a protest demonstration against the layoffs, one can witness the use of cameras to
draw media attention to their cause. In addition to this event, along with my own and
the unions cameras, press cameras captured the daily life of the movement throughout
its six-month duration. It is worth emphasizing that elements of the ethos of the group
can be recognized in these events as eloquent sources for branding the workers
collective identity. Among other visual images, the presence of families with women
and children standing by the factory door the sharing of bread, and the picture of
Christ at religious ceremonies were attempts to reach out to create awareness and
sympathy in the broader society regarding the importance of work and employment to
the identity of the workers. These are icons of a way of being and performances of
values. Happy New Year, Mate an earlier product of the research was reproduced by
the workers themselves and then watched during the mobilizations by those who took a
stand against the mass termination of employment. In exercising their agency by being
shown voicing their own positions the workers were able to go beyond the condition
of merely being represented anonymously by a confederation.
These experiences deconstruct existing social forms. The same happened in
Argentina at the beginning of the decade, when factories were taken over by the
workers in situations similar to those in Brazil.

Active Subjects, Knowledge Production, and Participatory Research

I dare say that my understanding of what the experience lived by the group
meant to its members was revealed in a certain conception of laboring, which amounts
to the value of sociability - their place in this world. I believe that the sense of work

that appears in my research can be more accurately characterized as poiesis as an

expressive creation by workers who have clear notion of how valuable their labor is and
see in it the possibilities for growing bonds and sharing their lives with each other. It
seems important to understand what Richard Sennett (2009:18) meant when he wrote,
in The Craftsman, that reason and feelings are contained into the process of making. It
is necessarily a better and broader understanding of the ways people produce things; a
more materialistic involvement to understand that public action and public policy
emerge in groups while they are planning how to produce the everyday life together.
Not only could I observe definite growth of heterogeneity within the working
class but also the affirmation of laboring as a symbolic value capable of forming class
identity and multiplicity which are blended into a universe of shared values. Thus, what
emerges is the importance of the concept of practical life in the development of a
broader notion of the working class. For anthropologists it is imperative to get across
this common sense way of producing knowledge, so that our work is not only about
but also with the subjects whose lives are described and interpreted; or as Trinh T.
Minh-ha (1991) states, it is necessary to speak nearby.
At stake is an intense process of knowledge sharing and use, in which the entire
group participates. This remarkable practice contributes to the creation of new political
subjects, as the workers construct groups, and open schools and other new spaces. The
anthropological challenge has been to act side by side with the movements studied,
being guided by a modest and receptive posture, capable of reformulating hypotheses
and contributing to the production of narratives about social life. This

research

is

regarded as a way to distill new kinds of relations, as well as a tool to recall, relive and
learn from past experiences. For this purpose, ethnographic videos are a medium which
makes it possible to look back to memories and to be ready for the future. In sum,
ethnographic videos have served as a tool for documenting and sharing knowledge
produced by the group. The research demonstrates the feasibility of collaborating in
theorizing, understanding social forms, making ways of thinking and acting more
explicit, and ultimately contributing to the formation of a new kind of subject.

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Ferraz, Ana Lucia 2003. It was due to necessity. History of the movement for housing
in Osasco LISA/USP, 20.
___________

1999. Happy New Year, mate! LISA/USP, 40.

Minibiografia:
Ana Lcia Marques Camargo Ferraz professora no Departamento de Antropologia da
Universidade Federal Fluminense, em Niteri, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, onde coordena o
Laboratrio do Filme Etnogrfico/UFF. Atua no Programa de Ps Graduao em
Cultura e Territorialidades/UFF. Publicou o livro Dramaturgias da Autonomia.
Pesquisa etnogrfica entre grupos de trabalhadores (Editora Perspectiva, 2009);
entre outros artigos e captulos.
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Estuda manifestaes culturais e trajetrias populares, sendo tambm realizadora de

filmes etnogrficos. Email: analu01@uol.com.br

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