Internal Legitimacy and its Instrumental Value to Political Inclusion: The Case of The Homeless Workers Movement in Brazil

Having the Homeless Workers Movement (MTST) in Brazil as a study case, this work is aimed at exploring the internal categories of legitimacy, as they are reported by the movement's participants, and the instrumental value of the emerging accounts for the normative ideal of political inclusion.This article is the result of an empirical research conducted in 2018, with the Homeless Workers in Brazil where I mainly observed how the political relationships are developed inside the movement mainly by taking into consideration the procedural aspects from MTST's political organization that were most valued by my informants. By means of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, I focus on capturing the internal criteria of validity, activated by the grassroots participants of the movement, that justify not only MTST's political strategy, but their own participation at the movement. The empirical work gave birth to three main categories, that I refer to as legitimacy accounts: recognition, empowerment and politics of affection. Additionally to exposing how these categories have to do specifically to the procedural aspects of the political relationship enacted by the movement as an organization, I explore the instrumental value of each of this categories to the normative ideal of political inclusion. This ideal is the guiding democratic notion for this work, that given the subaltern conditions present in the movement basis, are essential to explore the democratising potential of this movement to a more general, but also to the current state of the political scenario in Brazil.