5. An Overview of Urban Associated Labour in Brazil: Positive and Negative Aspects of Self-Management in the Productive Microcosm

T.N. The adoption of industrial practices inspired by the Toyota Production System.

The fundamental difference between contingent class consciousness and necessary class consciousness is that while the former simply perceives some isolated aspects of society’s contradictions, the latter understands them in their interrelationships, that is, as necessary features of the global system of capitalism. The former remains entangled in local conflicts, even when the scale of operation is relatively large, while the latter, by focusing its attention on the strategically central theme of social control, is concerned with comprehensive solutions, even when its immediate goals seem limited (e.g., an attempt to keep a factory that is succumbing to capitalist “rationalization” alive under workers’ control) (Mészáros 2008: 89).

There is also the Movement of Occupied Factories, which fights for nationalisation under workers’ control and today is represented by the Flaskô factory.

T.N.: Federación Uruguaya das Cooperativas de Vivienda por Ayuda Mútua, Uruguayan Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives.

According to information obtained on the institution’s website, the Usina group was established in 1990 by professionals from various fields of activity as a self-managed architecture collective. In these 20 years, Usina has been working mainly with social movements aiming to build territorial experiences of another order, involving the ability to plan, design and build by the workers themselves, mobilising public funds in a context of social struggle and urban reform. Usina’s team intends to overcome the authorial and strictly commercial production of architecture and knowledge, therefore, it seeks to integrate and engender processes that possibly subvert the logic of capital through counter-hegemonic spatial, social, technical, and aesthetic experience. Usina has already participated in the design and construction of over 4300 housing units, community centres, schools and daycare centres in several cities and rural settlements, mainly in the states of São Paulo and Paraná. They also worked in the development of urban plans, favela urbanisation projects and assisted in the formation and organisation of work cooperatives. Usina uses new forms of organisation both in its own team and externally; it seeks to establish new practices with the perspective of overcoming the traditional division of labour and the separation between the moments of conception, production and social appropriation of space.

For a history of the “entry” of the theme into the popular movements of the 1960s, the influences they received from Uruguay and from popular architects, the case of favelas in Fortaleza (1959), Rio de Janeiro (1965), Belo Horizonte (1979), and São Paulo, see Lopes and Rizek (2005).

In the aesthetic field, we could also highlight the film Extraordinary Garbage. This film follows the Brazilian artist Vick Muniz, who takes photos of the waste pickers and builds backdrops using their work material (recyclable waste). For our purpose the commodification of this art in auctions eager to conform to capital/financialization of capital does not matter so much, rather we care about the meaning that this art has for humanity.

See also Singer (2002), Quijano (2002), Schiochet (2012) and the Solidarity Economy Census finally socialised in August 2013. www.​senaes.​gov.​br.