Iwas born in São Paulo in 1982, into a middle-class family. My father’s family background is Lebanese, my mother’s family is from Brazil’s Northeast. My parents are both doctors and teach at the University of São Paulo. They were political, with progressive ideas—they work in Brazil’s public-health sector, the sus, and always vote for the left—but not militants. That background gave me opportunities that most Brazilians lack. I didn’t have to start working in my teens; instead I was able to dedicate myself to my studies, to have access to books and, later on, to get a good university education.

My militancy began at a pretty young age. I would say it sprang from two sources. First, from my sense of indignation: in Brazil, it is enough to have eyes to be indignant about the gaping inequalities here. São Paulo, in particular, is a deeply segregated city, full of contradictions—on the one hand, a city of extreme wealth, where the bulk of Brazil’s gdp is concentrated; and on the other, of extreme poverty, of people living on the streets, of millions out of work or under-employed. This troubled me, it was like a call to action.

And second, my militancy came from reading, which led me, like many young people, to the left. I joined the youth wing of the Brazilian Communist Party when I was sixteen, while still studying at a fee-paying school. Then I moved to a state school, as a political choice, feeling that my commitment would make more sense in a working-class environment—it would be more coherent in terms of the positions I was coming to defend. At the new school, I worked with the other kids to fight for better teaching conditions. We organized groups—study groups, groups to demand a voice for students in the school board’s decisions. One time we organized a strike, when the school tried to impose school uniforms, but without giving the students the means to buy them—their families had no money. One day, the school barred entry to those not wearing a uniform. So we organized a student strike and succeeded in getting the rule reversed.

When I joined, in 1997, the pcb had just been through a devastating split. It was founded in 1922, and for decades, up to the military coup of 1964, it was the hegemonic force on the Brazilian left. From the coup through to the 1980s, it was still an important reference point. With the restoration of democracy, it began to adopt increasingly moderate positions, until eventually the leadership changed the Party’s name and, in effect, refounded it as a different party altogether. A minority of members tried to maintain a formation in the tradition of the pcb. By the time I joined, it was a small organization, and the youth wing, the ujc, was even smaller. We were trying to rebuild a fighting party.

I began to see the contradiction between the doctrinal position of the Party, speaking in the name of ‘the people’, and its not being willing to build something with the workers themselves. It was a vanguardist idea, detached from reality. I began to understand that if we wanted to work towards a broad social transformation, it was more coherent to build something that directly involved the popular layers. It wasn’t just my decision. There was a group of us in the ujc and we left it together. We had a period of discussion about what to do next—not everyone took the same path. Some of us made the decision to join the mtst, the struggle of the sem teto—those without a roof—because it expressed the extreme of Brazilian poverty: those without even a place to rest their head.

It was already in existence—we joined in 2001. The mtst had been set up in 1997 by a group of militants from the Movimento Sem Terra (mst), the rural landless workers’ movement, who saw the need to go beyond the countryside and organize in the cities—today, 87 per cent of the Brazilian population is urbanized. From that grew the work of the mtst. I first got involved by going along to one of the mtst occupations and helping to carry out political education sessions there, having discussions with the militants. And from that time on, I got more and more involved, to the point of living in one of the occupation sites. I was twenty years old at that point.

At the same time, you started studying philosophy at the University of São Paulo, where you took part in a study group on Hegel. Why was that?