Critics of contemporary liberalism question whether the expansion of human and social rights can deliver radical social change. Drawing on ethnographic research in São Paulo, this article challenges this view by analysing how the discourse of rights has been critically redeployed by a radical Homeless Workers’ Movement – the Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST). The MTST’s strategic use of a discursive framework of social rights problematises existing scholarship which fails to account for the ways in which activists rework and redeploy ideas of rights in practice. In particular, the article demonstrates the centrality of rights discourse to the formation of radical political subjectivities and the emancipatory goals pursued by the MTST. This counter-hegemonic politics of rights re-signifies liberal discourse, exceeding its conventional juridical boundaries: it creates politicisation in occupations, and it constitutes a strategy of counter-conducts vis-à-vis neoliberal governmentality.

The Brazilian Movimento dos Trabalhadores sem Teto (MTST)-Homeless Workers' Movement-is a social movement that struggles for housing and for a radical transformation of capitalistic socioeconomic relations. The present paper offers a problematization of the movement's plea to social rights. They are part of the movement's discourse and strategy. However, the activists' objective is more radical: they aim at a complete transformation of the Brazilian economy and society. By first discussing two sets of literatures-Critical Legal Theory and Governmentality Studies-this article illustrates the complexity and the ambivalences of a radical politics of rights. Then, by contrasting my ongoing ethnographic research with the work of James Holston and Lucy Earle, I discuss the relevance of a citizenship framework for the MTST's struggle. Finally, inspired by Foucault's concept of counter-conducts, the article argues that the movement's politics of rights represents an effective tactic to contrast neoliberal governmentality and to create radical democratic spaces of struggle and collective resistance.

This paper elaborates an analytical template to problematize the politics of legal strategies and rights. In the literature, scholars have been arguing that courts have an individualizing effect on collective struggles, or that (human) rights constitute neoliberal subjects. Yet, it is possible to open this theoretical understanding to further complexities: the inclusion of movements into certain governmentalities may have positive effects for their struggle. The discussion follows two main argumentative axes: first, social movements using legal tools and rights language are possibly deploying strategies of ‘counter-conducts’: exactly because the law is part and parcel of neoliberal governmentalities, it can constitute a strategic element to redirect and subvert established power relationships. Second, rights in the socio-economic domain (e.g. labor, housing and land) have specific properties which work against economic neoliberalism. Following a classic Polanyian argument, the idea of socio-economic rights pulls away these goods from the market domain. This creates difficulties to the capitalist economic system, which is based on a rather strict conception of land and housing as commodities.