derway to examine how the new stadiums in Manaus , Brasilia , Cuiabá and Natal could be turned into prisons .
The World Cup is therefore an operation of social cleansing . The State and Capital are getting rid of the undesirables , the segments of the population that have become superfluous in commodity circulation and can only become sources of unrest . All the same it would be a mistake to consider this operation an “ exception ” that democracies legitimize through the World Cup : it is well and truly a restructuring and intensification of social control and exploitation . World Cup or crisis , war or reconstruction , natural disasters or emergencies … power has us dangling from “ emergency situations ” that are in fact the very core of capitalist and State progress .
The World Cup ceremony opens up every conceivable market . And this does not only concern real estate speculation or the security industry . For months farmers have been reporting that trucks full of cocaine have been coming and going from Colombia to meet the “ needs ” of the three million tourists expected . Just as happened during the World Cup in South Africa in 2010 , prostitution will grow vertiginously . On the construction sites of the stadiums numerous immigrant workers work under particularly hard conditions , the companies flogging them in order to meet deadlines . Not to mention the different power factions in Brasil that are negotiating and entering into agreements with the government : the drug gangs are taking care of the dirty work of expelling people who resist the urbanization programs too much , whereas the paramilitaries are employed by companies to ensure security on construction sites and to crush strikes and protests through blackmail and murder .
But the new order of things is not just this horror . The new order of things is how in June 2013 Brasil was in flames for almost a month . What began as a movement against an increase in the price of bus tickets turned into uncontrolled widespread revolt against power . Since that month of revolt there have been more and more conflicts around the evictions , resistance against austerity plans , protests against police killings , or even antipatriotic disorders such as on the national holiday of 7 September etc ., which have degenerated and escaped the control of classical political mediation . Over the past few months a social imagination has been created in Brasil that could set the streets alight again .
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While power and its contenders are trying to stop the wave of uprisings in Syria and the revolts that are infecting more and more areas of the world , drowning them in a pool of blood ; while in Greece the population has been oppressed and terrorized to erase the memory of the uprising of December 2008 ; while in
Ukraine , an uprising of the people sees itself trampled by a macabre game between different fractions of power ; while in Egypt , Turkey , Bosnia , Libya , etc .. order seems to be reorganizing and re-establishing itself , the World Cup in Brasil presents itself as an attempt to put the social contradictions that are traversing Latin America in a straight jacket .
Taking different forms according to the various contexts and conditions , a restructuring of Capital and the State is underway everywhere in the world . National boundaries are revealing themselves to be more than ever what they have always been : fences and walls to manage the potential revolt of the disinherited . So it is no coincidence if in the face of the obvious contagion between the various revolts of the past few years – a contagion not so much based on similar conditions , but rather on a new non-mediated imagination of the possibility to rise up , of another life – the State is playing on nationalism and reactionary sentiments : from fascist movements in ascension in the European continent to the revival of patriotism in countries that experienced “ the Arab spring ”, or the cheap anti-imperialism of former leaders like Chavez , right to the fever for national football teams .
But instead of going into the movements of international reaction further , let us rather look at those of revolt and the possibilities they are opening up . During the revolt of June 2013 in Brasil , the rebels shouted , “ after Greece after Turkey now it is Brasil ’ s turn ! ” The revolts that we have known in recent years have opened the way to putting an end to here and there . Links between national States on the question of repression have certainly been reinforced at breakneck speed , but that should neither surprise nor frighten us . Given growing social instability and the total intermingling of economies and State systems , one can imagine that when something happens in one place , it could also have consequences elsewhere . And this movement is already in act in the imagination , this particularly fertile ground for rebellion . It is now time to introduce this imagination into our projects of struggle and to seize the opportunities that arise .
There is no such thing as a science of insurrection . Many recent examples – from the riots in London in 2011 to the uprisings in the Arab world – show us the unpredictable character of insurrection . The pretexts might even be quite “ trivial ”. This unpredictability , however , should not push us into a waiting position for the “ next one ” somewhere in the world ; rather it affirms the need for permanent conflictuality , a preparation in ideas and acts . This is the only way we can hope to not find ourselves unprepared at such moments : it matters little where one is on the planet , one can attempt to give qualitative contributions to pushing the revolts in course in a radically emancipatory direction , making them strike the fundamental structures of modern do-
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