Recognizing crosscutting forms of hierarchical inequality, the Ativismo abc anarchist collective, to which I belong, has been reviewing its agendas and organizational practices, becoming more inclusive “for those who are not ‘white cisgendered middle-class heterosexual males’”, that is, black cisgender women and men, transgender people or lower class favela residents.
These changes coincided with a process of internal crisis involving disputes viewed as gendered and racialized by some. Others saw them, however, as motivated by a lack of interest, participation and work of those considered unwilling to cope with a formally equalized division of tasks relating to the management of our rented social center, the Casa da Lagartixa Preta “Malagueña Salerosa” (in Santo André, Brazil). We survived this crisis after a high withdrawal of members thanks to the firm engagement of younger people highly affected by race, class and gender oppression.
Now, the variations in task distribution and participation are being accepted as a result of personal limitations that are also influenced by those inequalities. Even so, such inequalities and racist or sexist attitudes (at times unrealized by those who perpetrate them), do not simply vanish, and conflicts can remain latent. At present, as new collective members have strengthened their cooperation and mutual aid as their diverse agenda is being valued, remarkable references to people’s star signs have started to pop up, notably as a way to release tension and to understand people’s behaviour through a different perspective besides their race, class and gender conditions.
Astrology seems to be used as a “spectral” counterpower (Graeber, 2004), since forces are not simply working out internal contradictions, but operating a swing between different perspectives, so as to attenuate conflict by dislocating its axes from a hierarchical classification of differences − as would be the case from a concentric perspective (see Dumont, 1966) − to a zodiacal circuit of peripheral perspectives, where none of them stands for a global view. This is the core argument of this article.
Nowadays in Brazil, together with a strong appeal to race, class, gender and other inequality markers in the current popular political agenda (cf. Ribeiro, 2016), there seems to be a growing interest in astrology by people from the leftist political spectrum. People still talk about their sun signs as they used to when I first learned about this back in the eighties − when it was not considered a manly topic of conversation, delegated to “women’s magazines” and similar media − but now, a growing number of people (including cisgender heterosexual men) happen to know more details about their astrological birth charts, ascendants, moon signs and planets signs than ever.
Many leftist people talk about such things in their daily lives or on the Internet (especially on Facebook) almost as much as they talk about gender oppression and racism. As a form of etiquette for closer and informal relationships, when people are getting to know each other better, unless they refute astrology completely, not only do they ask about each other’s solar signs − as used to be the case a couple of decades ago − but may also exchange information on ascendants and lunar signs, in a varying mixture of seriousness and play, as Johan Huizinga’s Homo ludens would
On the other hand, contentions about race, class and gender do not fit to this “seriousness/play” duality: there is an absence of reciprocal playfulness in this sort of dispute, as Huizinga evokes with regard to that kind of fight happening “outside the sphere of equals, against groups not recognized as human” (Huizinga, 1949: 90). In other words, people who suffer race, class and gender oppressions are subjected to inequalities that privilege white patriarchy as the prototype of humanity in a very violent way, often in the form of socially accepted murder against black people, queer people and others (see Carneiro, 2003; Baroque & Eanelli, 2011). While star signs are something that people willingly reveal to each other in a moment of sharing, inequality markers such as race and gender are stigmas that, most of the time, cannot be willingly hidden.
Both are forms of classification, but only the latter is a stratification in the hierarchical sense that social classes are is widespread in contemporary pop culture (consider, for instance, the fame of the Knights of the Zodiac cartoon), and also as a part of an overall movement of dialogue with a reanimated cosmos (Willis & Curry, 2004).
Astrology in Brazil may have its own specificities due to how it was deemed in the colonizing Portuguese tradition, not only given Arabic influence on the Iberian Peninsula (Almeida, 2015), but also because of the Molinist doctrine in the Portuguese Inquisition, based on Luis de Molina’s positive views on the “grace” of Brazilian indigenous people, considering the influence of the heavens on human actions not opposed to free will, but in concert with it (Pastore, 2014). I, however, will only deal with an account of how a small group of people, crosscut by networks in the leftist/anarchist spectrum, happen to apply knowledge about popular astrology in their lives.
Astrology was once used by European courts to help princes predict their auspices for power. Machiavelli used to consider astrological influence on humor in the genesis of conflicts between sovereigns who desired to rule, and the people who would not obey (Parel, 1992). In turn, Copernicus, who had political experience in the same troubled diplomatic context as Machiavelli (cf. Westman, 2013; Blumenthal, 2014; Bignotto, 2014), is said to have been aware of political persecutions and personal dangers for astrologers if they made wrong astrological predictions, so he may have considered its political usage as a problem that should be evaded, while focusing on mathematical astronomy (Blumenthal, 2014). However, at that time, political counseling with no direct reference to the heavens was also dangerous, as it was for Machiavelli, who was tortured and exiled, as it is widely known. Nevertheless, the study of the cosmos and the study of politics were to be set apart.
Machiavelli, among others, brought humankind back to the heart of political analysis − even though he did not discard the “heavens” influence on politics, showing an ambiguous view on “humans” rational control of the world (Pocock, 1975). Astrology made sense, even though disputably, to followers of Copernicus: Kepler considered cosmological effects on climate and mass phenomena such as wars and plagues (Feyerabend, 1978); events related to the renascent interest in astrology during Copernican and Machiavellian times (Westman, 2013). The Copernican turn on cosmology decentralized humankind from the cosmos, considering the Earth to be just another planet among others around the Sun. While not entirely disinterested in the influence of the stars on earthlings, the works of both authors were a turning point, ushering in an era in which humans, not accurately knowing how and if they were being taken good care by the cosmos, believed it better to focus on their own care, causes and effects.
Referring to such times and authors is not a matter of authoritative classicism, but a recollection of a cosmical “Machiavellian moment”, that is, not only the moment when one republic confronted the problem of its instability (Pocock, 1975), but when the whole cosmology started to uprise and divide − a Copernican-Machiavellian moment − until the “modern Constitution” set apart the science of things from the politics of humans (Latour, 1991). It is also interesting to refer to Machiavelli since, long before the socialist theorists, he was a critical updater of Aristotle’s notions on political history being made of class struggle − to be dealt with through mixed government (Mulgan, 1981, 2000; Cardoso, 2016).
Now, as the humanist era gives way to the Anthropocene era, in which the great divide of the “modern Constitution” appears to crash (Latour, 2013), the world is edging towards the beginning of a new Saturn-Pluto synodic cycle − associated by astrologers (Fiorenza, 2009; Souza, 2017) with radical geopolitical clashes. Will we be living a revolution in the Copernican-Machiavellian moment when politics becomes entangled again with the stars and planets? After being abandoned by European science in the 17th century (Thomas, 1971; Willis & Curry, 2004), astrology reappeared in popular Euro-American culture during the 20th century, and has been the object of scholarly study in the humanities.
It has not yet been associated again with astronomy, even though it could, as long as astrology elaborates something more than the “caricatures” it has produced, throughout revitalized research programmes (Feyerabend, 1978). So the knowledge divide in cosmology persists. Notwithstanding, some anarchists may care less than scientists about unorthodox epistemologies, starting their own cosmic revolution.
In Brazil we may well be far from Feyerabend’s suggestion, since public research funding is being cut and science is being deprived since a white coup took place in the country’s federal government, imposing neoliberal policies (and continuing the former government’s anti-ecological ones), while social inequalities rise. At the same time, some indomitable local anarchists are dealing with these “mood” struggles and inequalities through a mixed counter-government in which star signs play a special role.
This is a kind of double “Copernican Turn”: it is similar to Pierre Clastres’ twist on political anthropology (Cardoso, 1995), which refers to the Copernican heliocentric maneuver in a figurative way (like the “State” was the “Earth”) by bringing the counter-State to the center of the matter; but it gives it another twist, in a prefigurative way, by dispersing politics towards cosmological agencies; a cosmopolitical turn (Stengers, 1996; Sztutman, 2013).
Class was the cornerstone of 19th century socialist movement and the First International, formally named the “International Workingmen’s Association”, which disbanded when anarchist and Marxist movements split. The male gendering of the workers to whom the organization name refers can be related to the fact that only one woman, Harriet Law, was admitted to its General Council (Fauré, 2003). Federations and associations alike were seen by followers of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon as a rupture with political cycles of domination, and as the prefiguration of an anarchic socialist way of life, or an agro-industrial federalism, organizing collective force in ways to bear the agonism that moves history. However, Proudhon did openly prefigurate a submissive role for women, and was criticized through his own thinking by feminists of the time, such as Jenny D’Héricourt (Falleiros, 2015).
But class and gender did not suffice, for late 20th and early 21th century political movements raised questions about the diversity of forms of domination and oppression – such as racism − and the struggles against them, as north-American black feminists pointed to the importance of the intersectional approach (cf. Lorde, 1984; Crenshaw, 1989). In its basic sense, intersectionality means that a person is affected by different intersecting social inequalities imposed by white patriarchy, which may affect their lives more or less significantly, not only quantitatively, but qualitatively too. For instance, being a black lesbian cisgender woman like Audre Lorde equated not just to a sum of racism and sexism, but to suffering a specific kind of oppression, mixed with others (such as age, place of origin, body type, and so on), constituting inequalities that are hard to quantify.
If one adds to this the fact that, if social classifications and markers of difference are not stable, but change as new forms of freedom arise – such as the multiple forms of sexuality and transgender identities, each of which face oppression in specific ways −, attention to social experience is a good method for researching these issues (Rodó-de-Zárate & Jorba, 2012).
Today, this intersectional approach is seen to have affinities with early anarchists’ concerns, including those towards species (White, 2015; Ferretti, 2017), but many anarchists still dismiss feminism and focus mainly on class struggle, which makes intersectionality necessary inside the very anarchist movement (Shannon & Rogue, 2009). Despite certain views that intersectionality is only of interest for those fighting for rights defending identity under the State (cf. “Pink and Black Attack” in Baroque & Eanelli, 2011), then, anarchists can offer not only a critical view of the State and other institutionalized systems of domination, but also the organization of non-hierarchical political forms.
Based on that, a Brazilian ethnographic account of the Slut Walk organization in Florianópolis (Dothling Reis, 2014), suggests that the background anarchist and feminist experience of the members of the group, and its self‑management and self-representation practices, opened it up to a changing plurality of agendas in a non-hierarchical way, even though the author was resentful of the limited presence of black people like her. Elsewhere in North America, intersectionality as a framework for organizational tools and anarchist prefiguration has been studied in anti-oppression political tendencies, involving critical approaches to power and privilege inside the movement. It goes against rigid organizational practices, providing the possibility to learn through the many perspectives at stake and enhancing the capacity to struggle against multiple oppressions.
The Great abc industrial area (part of the Great São Paulo metropolitan area) is the birthplace of leftist movements that, during the eighties, gave rise to the figure of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, elected President of Brazil two decades later (2002). A few years before Lula’s first presidential election, the radical left was regrouping within alter-globalization organizations, with punks, university students, teachers, apartidary socialists, the street kids’ movement and black people’s movements. One of the groups born then, with which I am involved, was Ativismo abc, formed mainly by white low-class and middle-class people, congregating anarchists and other socialists whose plurality of tendencies was based on Peoples Global Action’s principles.
In it, we kept an anti-government position after Lula’s election, while street protests dissipated, taking us from demonstrations to local practices and the creation of an anarchist social center. Called the Casa da Lagartixa Preta “Malagueña Salerosa” (“the Black Gecko’s House”), it turned thirteen years old in March 2017, in an ever-changing history of collective self-management, mutual aid, solidarity, free education, permaculture and agroecology, anti-capitalism and fighting against oppression and domination, in search for equitable participation and positive appreciation of differences.
The house promotes mutual aid and is open to other people and like-minded groups. We take part in anarchist and popular organization networks, locally and worldwide. In the house, we have a community library, a community garden (our “mini-agroforest”), free gift shelves, a free organic seed bank, rainwater harvesting, a monthly anarchist producers’ fair, movie sessions, debates, collective bike fixing and other ventures. By 2017, we were giving an experimental free monthly course on anarchism and intersectionality, approaching general themes (organization, body, mutual aid, ecology, colonization, self-defense, alternative economy), crosscut by race, class, gender and other axes – such as the zodiac one.
Our house is a rented property, so we hold a monthly vegan rodizio de pizza (“the cheapest all-you-can-eat vegan pizza in Brazil”) to pay the rent and other bills. We also sell books given to us by friends and anarchist organizations (Editora Deriva, Centro de Cultura Social de São Paulo, Biblioteca Terra Livre, Biblioteca Carlo Aldegheri), fanzines and t-shirts. Our finances are in difficulty, since our public is increasingly composed of poorer young people affected by the economic crisis, so we have been organizing fund-raising campaigns on the Internet. We are also facing a new danger (especially concerning our “mini-agroforest” that cannot be transposed): gentrification and property speculation in the neighbouring area, as old houses like “ours” are being torn down to build car sellers showrooms and apartment buildings.
Since its creation, the number of group members has fluctuated at around a dozen people. The highest number of group members was thirty, mainly punks, at the time of the assembly when we decided to rent the house, back in 2003. Our lowest number of members was in the beginning of 2016, during the height of the Brazilian political crisis and our own.
This crisis began in 2013, when big demonstrations against public transportation price hikes in took to the streets. Given our critical view of the failure of the street demonstrations in 2002, hijacked by the mood of that presidential election, Ativismo abc maintained a cautious attitude towards these mass protests, especially in the face of the nationalistic sentiment that began to be demonstrated; we would, for instance, go to street demonstrations to distribute flyers against the chauvinistic agenda, inviting people to adopt local self-management organization). Then the political‑economical crisis reached the anarchist organization and people started to be unable to cope with collective participation, losing their spare time and their spare money, and scared with the growth of conservative movements. By 2015, the internal conflict reached its climax and, in 2016, only three of us remained. Since then, we have been aggregating new members.
Today, white heterosexual cis-gendered men like me are the minority and, together with many black people, cis-women and transgender people, there are fifteen members; not our highest number, but certainly one that we are delighted about.
Considering the theoretical background already exposed, Ativismo abc has just lived a sort of Machiavellian moment, facing instability and the possibility of demise, further rearranging its constitution in an anti-institutionalized way. Our principles of self-managing, mutual aid, ecology, anarchist education and anti-capitalism do not suffice anymore, as transfeminist and black agendas raise new issues, challenging our power balance. It is a process of becoming aware of power relations inside the collective itself, criticizing previous formal equality (what we use to call the “minimum requirements” for membership), which dismissed intersecting inequalities.
For the A’uwe-Xavante people with whom I carried out ethnographic research, the leaders have to be (...) 19Here, Machiavelli’s class theory does not fit well. For the Florentine author, the elite has its own particular humor, namely the desire to dominate, whilst popular humor was the desire to be free. Elite’s and people’s points of view cannot be measured by a general equivalent, for the people supposedly avoid disputing power positions, favoring freedom. Despite the fact that many Machiavellian commentators argue that it is possible that both desires become the same, they do not agree on how.
Machiavelli proposes two different perspectives on the same political relation, showing similarities to perspectivist views found in Amerindian cosmopolitics, as regarded by Clastrian and Lévi‑Straussian readings, especially through the dialectics of Proudhon (Falleiros, 2015), although important disparities must be signaled. While desiring freedom, Machiavelli’s republican people accept the government of the great. The key for such acceptance, found in the Roman Republic, was for the great to give the people some power: the power of arms, mixing the people’s humor to the elite’s wish for conquest (Ferreira, 2016), and allowing periods of stabilized conflict.
Far from the Romans, Pierre Clastres also highlights the need for people-in-arms in indigenous America, but “against the State” (Clastres, 2003, 2004), in a similar way to Proudhon’s political dialectics: freedom stands out over authority, even though authority may never be destroyed (see Falleiros, 2015). That is the reverse of what happens to Machiavelli’s republic, where the authority of the great overwhelms people’s freedom (without destroying it).
Something similar happens in Ativismo abc’s intersectional counter-government: a hierarchical inversion in which the privileged are decreasing their authority, in favor of freedom and difference. Here, classes’ humors intersect depending on the variety of differences and related inequalities. There are not two clearly distinguished perspectives towards power, since forms of domination crosscut popular organization in intricate ways. For instance, not just a white cisgender man like myself can reproduce elitist humor; a white cisgender woman and a black cisgender man may intersectionally oppress each other too.
In indigenous America, war is internalized and sedition is the guarantee of freedom, leading to a pendular historicity “against the stable” (Macedo, 2011), swinging between great confederacies and their fragmentation into smaller groups (Perrone‑Moisés & Sztutman, 2010). Another feature of Amerindian power relations addressed by Clastrian and Lévi-Straussian studies is the reversion of the authority of the leaders, who are not sovereigns but necessarily generous figures refusing to cumulate power and possessions. Leaders are those who go first to work, party and war (Sztutman, 2012), acting as hosts (Perrone-Moisés, 2015), who usually acquire nothing but prestige through their ability to congregate people – which can be lost to sedition if collective differences do not speak through their mouths.
So So, could a conflict between collective members resemble a power dispute, especially when the collective agenda is at stake, for example dealing with complaints of racism and sexism among anarchists, or focusing on a global view towards equalized tasks for self-management expansion? There are many perspectives crossing alternating hierarchies, while the global colonizing perspective of white patriarchy has its authority questioned in the name of freedom in an unstable organization of powers: a swing between the multipole and the counterpole. Nonetheless, besides these poles, there are points of view affected by humors swayed from beyond the global.
The previous short account of Ativismo abc’s evolution in time is from my perspective as the sole remaining member of its first generation. I am also the oldest of the present members, and the closest to the prototype middle-class white cisgender man. Other members deal with the sort of authority I represent to them by questioning my patriarchic privileges, demanding a hierarchical reversal similar to what I experienced among the A’uwe-Xavante people with whom I did ethnographic research: I have to (re)learn how to be a person of the people, redistributing my power (Falleiros, 2013), which means distributing resources, such asthe use of my car or my home, but also my force of action, working, cleaning, cooking, cooperating like the others, so as not to reproduce racism and sexism in my actions.
But some intersectional anarchist demands go further than the Amerindian ones: they also ask for silence. As my person points to a lasting dominance of white men’s political discourse, I have to learn how to be silent, so to be a better listener when other issues are raised and put into practice. It was by listening to my comrades while noticing the way they act towards me that I realized how astrology was being applied to attenuate conflict.
There are some comrades who have come to be very close to me, notably a transgender black woman and a non-binary transgender white person, who talk a lot about star signs and have knowledge about the planets and houses of the zodiac. My friend who is a transgender woman has even seen my birth chart to give me some hints about the meaning of my planet signs. Both are also very belligerent people, prone to communicate their critiques and disagreements publicly, notably towards privilege unawareness − and towards me.
Perhaps the transgender woman can only be friendly when facing conflict − especially when mediating it − because her Mars is in Libra, she says. Another associate, who is a young woman and a favela resident, only speaks to hit the nail on the head, perhaps thanks to her solar sign in Scorpio, says our non-binary friend. He2 also affectionately recognizes that his angry communication with me may be under the influence of his Mercury sign in Leo, while my Mercury sign is in Virgo, which tends to make my communication detailed and my speech complex. Since my awareness of privilege is always at stake, given the importance he gives to transfeminist issues in daily conversation, I imply that, by saying this, he now comprehends − after having learned this atribute of mine − that I may be not mansplaining (overtalking about platitudes as if the person who is not a cisgender man is ignorant of them) when I talk this way.
Concerning people’s participation in our collective work, although our black female transgender comrade mentioned above has brought much young fierceness to Ativismo abc, she sometimes needs stimuli to action, given that her solar sign is in Taurus, says our non-binary friend. In turn, many comrades say that people whose solar sign is in Pisces may easily lose concentration on tasks, like another of our companions, a young white punk. This can get a little messy, as happens with my partner, who is a Piscean black woman (and who, out of this zodiacal awareness, has been trying to be more organized). It is also important to point out that Brazilian people tend to be frequently late in their schedules, which used to be a motive of rebukes and disapproving looks before the collective crisis in Ativismo abc, but is forgiven more easily nowadays…despite the punctuality of those whose solar signs are in Sagittarius − who were, at that time, a black cisgender man and a white lesbian cisgender young woman, who used to come far from the poor side of another town.
Other intersectional issues, such as oppression towards animals, may take zodiacal factors into consideration. When we were on a road trip to a meeting in another town and a white lesbian comrade of ours, who is not vegan, was hungry and made comments about some outdoor fast-food, it disturbed our vegan non-binary transgender comrade, who complained and argued. So another friend of ours came to her defense by saying he should consider her Taurus solar sign humors when talking about food if he wanted to convince her.
Sometimes race, class and gender may also intersect with zodiac signs. For instance, we have been talking together about the dynamic leading behavior of people born under the Aries solar sign, as there were a high number of them in the group before its crisis, which may have had an excessive weight on our humors, considering their authoritative behavior, as they where white or middle-class people. However, the only person whose solar sign is in Aries who joined Ativismo abc after its crisis is a black lesbian woman, whose drive probably faces a lot of oppression, preventing her from becoming bossy to the group. She is very conscious of group dynamics and once told us that, while she was speaking during a certain debate, she apologized when she noticed she was talking too much, then added that her ascendant was in Aquarius. As I am a person whose solar sign is in Libra, and thus considered conciliatory in character, it took me a long time to be disturbed by those Aries comrades from before, as our solar signs complement each other, as opposite poles of the same zodiac axis. As for the new comrade, I admire her assertive character and the drive she has given to the group, though she is away now, since she has had a new educational opportunity. As a person who did not have many opportunities before, she could not let this go. Still, she gives us help whenever she has any time to spare.
Theorizing about power in an anarchist organization has been a topic of concern for some time, and its debate was brought to Ativismo abc meetings right in the middle of our crisis, when we collectively read Anarquia Viva! − “Anarchy Alive!” (Gordon, 2015) − together with our friend who translated it, months before the final withdrawal of older members.
Uri Gordon’s approach to power in anarchist organization criticizes structures of task distribution like the one we had (that were in vogue in feminist and anarchist movements), especially denouncing their supposed capacity to face unrealized hierarchies. He considers differences in personal involvement and participation, as well as ways to redistribute personal resources, while being aware of intersectional criticism on anarchist organization. As an answer to that, he rightly proposes a culture of solidarity.
My argument adds to that, paying attention to how those intersections affect people’s participation, influencing collective agendas against a variety of oppressions, by means of conflicting perspectives. In this way, conflict is as necessary as a culture of generosity and solidarity, expressed here in zodiacal terms. It is not avoiding struggle and war, but facing it, while seriously playing with other cosmic perspectives. Ativismo abc may offer, today, a culture of warlike joy, transforming ancient cosmologies − like astrology − into a weapon for friendship.
There is a local music band, Ba-boom, some of whose members were founders of Casa da Lagartixa Preta and who left our collective many years before its crisis, remaining our friends. One of their songs says: no abc a amizade prevalece − “in abc friendship prevails”. We even took part in its music video in 2011. But there is another song by the same band that some of us have learned to sing aloud after our collective crisis: Batalha − “Battle”. In short, it recalls those days when black enslaved people served in the Brazilian army during an imperialist war against Paraguay. It recalls that history is not over, since present conditions of inequality have not changed. As far as Ativismo abc is concerned today, the battling will not be over, I believe, until we reach the stars.