Conclusion

The expansion of the First Command of the Capital (PCC), making it the most powerful criminal network in Brazil, happened after the addition of “Equality” to its “ideals”. This incorporation provoked a series of mechanisms and strategies to produce a “Command” between “equals”, nourishing a tension that infiltrates and spreads out across all the political dimensions of the PCC. This chapter examines the diverse plans through whichPCC politics operates. One of these plans mentions the PCC as transcendence, something that only exists because of their immanent forces. This approach reflects an immanentist anthropology on a transcendent construction, an anthropology that permits one to think about transcendence without imagining that it pre-exists. This PCC-as-transcendence, produced in the immanence and mixed to it, results on a decentered, non-hierarchical social formation. The PCC is thus presented as a creative social formation that challenges the concept of organized crime and offers another approach to the notion of the prison gang.

The Politics of Transcendence

The fragile consistency generated by the politics described in chapter 3 gains stability when it takes on a transcendent form that is both the product and the producer of the immanence that permeates it. Hence, the ways that “de-individualizing” processes operate in the materialization of a power that gains autonomy from and superiority over its producers are the subject of chapter 4. This chapter makes clear the efficacy and strength of a force field called the First Command of Capital (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) by offering an analysis of territorializing processes that take place alongside the phenomenon of de-individualization. Most importantly, this chapter seeks to describe the construction of a localized form of transcendence, or the establishment of an imaginative figure whose perplexing concreteness avoids ultimate transcendence by working as a machine that seeks liberty and resists all subjectification in its avoidance of the constitution of power as put forth by the state.

Politics and Pedagogy

This chapter describes First Command of Capital (PCC) politics in prison. These politics are put in place by means of political positions that are not tied to those who occupy them, but that do carry with them serious responsibilities. At the center of this process are techniques aimed at directing the prison population and putting into practice the ideals of the PCC without establishing any hierarchical relation. The tension between political action and the practice of equality thus gives rise to an incessant assembly of often competing political theories that speak not simply to the goals of the PCC, but to all aspects of the existence and survival of all prisoners related to PCC. This political production is directly related to the PCC’s discipline, intrinsic to the functioning of a group that seeks to eliminate from its networks any hierarchies and thus become a Command without commanders.

The PCC

This chapter presents a short and fairly standard history of the First Command of Capital (Primeiro Comando da Capital - PCC) and the individuals and spaces that will follow in successive chapters. Some official characteristics of the penitentiary system in São Paulo, Brazil, are intertwined with the everyday operation of the prisons and its informal (although sometimes official) aspects. This chapter introduces the way inmates rules are taught and learned by the prisoners, in order to absorb everyday practices and come to understand the importance and the central characteristics of the PCC. Biondi focuses on how to practice equality and humility without confusing it with weakness, and how it is coherent with the ideals of the PCC. The knowledge produced in these practices constitutes trul theories of prison life, and the specialists in these theories are invited to join the PCC.

The Politics of Immanence

This chapter presents the micropolitics that support the existence of the First Command of Capital (Primeiro Comando da Capital - PCC). These micropolitics includes projects, manipulative efforts, strategies, but also improvisations, unexpected and random possibilities. The ethnography of these practices reveals that those who participate in PCC arrive at their destinations not because of the organization of the PCC, but because of their "dispositions". The dynamic that emanates from these dispositions bears remarkable difference to more standard concepts of "organized crime" or "criminal organization". The role of the PCC, even though it includes baskets of strategies and projects, is permeated instead by chance and is made real and powerful by the dispositions of its participants, who make do in relation to that chance.

Introduction

In this introduction, the author presents the conditions of her fieldwork, conducted inside the prison where her husband was waiting for a judgment. She explores the gains and consequences of her insider-outsider status as a visitor and the way she transformed her involvement into a calibrated instrument of knowledge production. This chapter presents the ethnographical questions that became the central issues of the book, as well as the theoretical problems that carry. The central question is the presence of the First Command of Capital (Primeiro Comando da Capital – PCC) even where it is absent, or, in other words, even where it does not encounter any of its members. This matter is put in dialogue with some criticism concerning the concepts of society, culture, group and individual made by anthropology, philosophy, Melanesian and Amerindian studies, as well as the limits of this criticism.