The war machine against the toxic state

Capture and state conjuring in a struggle for rights of homeless people

Abstract

The aim of this text is to highlight a native theory of the State, based on a set of mechanisms used by militants of the Movimento Nacional da População de Rua, in Porto Alegre (RS), to mitigate the perverse effects of the state presence in the struggle for rights. For such purpose, I analyze the ethnographic experiences to highlight the relations between the militants and the agents who are dangerously near to the State. Considering the contributions of Gilles Deleuze, Félix Guattari and Piero Leirner on simultaneous phenomena of capture and escape, I propose to think the action of the homeless people as a war machine whose main reason lies in its aversion to the neoliberal logic of public policies and in the opposition to the toxic State, from which one must keep a safe distance.