Where I live

Where I live, the dominant/dominated relationship is absurdly effective in its violence and, I'm not exaggerating, it's present in every corner of this very city; in every piece of sidewalk or street corner; in its spaces and even in what doesn't yet exist materially. I affirm without fear of being wrong that never has a social relationship been so clear and so intensely unequal. However, I recognize the intelligence of the local elites, who fully hold the economic, political, and social mobilization power in the city.

They, our local elites, are oblivious to what happens in the city, they don't care about neighborhoods, villages, and outskirts. They say nothing about the health dramas that amplify the already commonplace human suffering to barbaric levels; they say nothing about the perverse and subterranean quality of education offered to these "strange people" of the urban slums. They are not surprised by the crimes committed in the outskirts of the city, in the shantytowns, or near the garbage dumps.

The elites, always festive, and rightfully so, love gatherings and celebrations, especially among themselves. They enjoy the finest drinks and the best food, and their children, always beautiful and healthy, are often disturbed by the poor and "threatening" people of the city.

They are constantly aggressive in the way they consume, produce, are, and exist in the city; however, it is necessary to consider that the fundamental violence practiced at all times by these "respectable people" is above all and primarily symbolic. Their gestures are significant, their silences, warnings and alerts. Their aristocratic and selective way of being is the living and objective expression of social differentiation.

They do not study to understand the multitude of misfortunes that plague the city daily, but to impose their difference, to establish hierarchies and foster the servitude that, not coincidentally, serves them abundantly and routinely.

They manipulate the ideas and perceptions of others solely for the purpose of maintaining class power. These local elites haven't yet realized that they govern the city. They want us to believe that the city is run by the mayor. Not at all!

Where I live, the City Hall is nothing! Those who call the shots, govern and misgovern, do whatever they want in the urban space, in whatever way they please, are the elite, not coincidentally, white, light-eyed, and, of course, right-wing.

Otherwise, it is important to be clear that the environmental disasters that make the city this unviable and ungoverned agglomeration, the high levels of violence that it generates and degenerates all sorts of sociability, or the deplorable decay of everything that is public, are the result and work of the existential movement of this very same elite.

Understanding urban problems, whatever they may be, requires understanding the elites who govern these same urban areas, their style, their bureaucracies, and the relationships they establish with companies and governments. Their economic choices result in the current precarious quality of jobs for the poor; from the productive relationships that they, the elites, establish, arises the slum-like, degraded, and dreadful periphery.

In short, the elite is the one that generates, shapes, gives form, structures, produces concepts, ideology, behavior, future, ways of being, destiny, and types of existence. Is that enough, or do you want more?

I don't operate with sociological Manichaeism and I don't believe in that type of theoretical horizon, but the local elite is the great breeding ground for the main and most decisive ills that make the average or large Brazilian city a living and virulent attack on human rights in all its aspects.

The poor? Obviously, they have responsibilities. Through apathy, discouragement, or alienation, they refuse to appropriate what they themselves have created. They deny themselves when they deny the fruits of their own labor, when they surrender to the massifying and homogenizing routines of urban life. It is this complementary and essential contradiction that makes the elite the force of the anti-city.