“Nothing to lose but their chains”

The expression “Nothing to lose but their chains” condenses a political possibility and a social deprivation into one phrase. Applied to slum dwellers, it marks their exclusion from the protections and benefits of citizenship while suggesting that being uprooted and dispossessed may create conditions for new forms of collective life. The book stresses that this possibility should not be mistaken for a guarantee of revolution.

The Expression in Context

The phrase appears in an account of slums as possible sites of political rupture. Slum dwellers are described as a supernumerary population, excluded from citizenship and dispossessed of established attachments. In this context, the expression does not mean that they have literally nothing: many participate in the global economy as informal wage-workers or self-employed entrepreneurs, often without adequate health or social security. It points instead to their precarious position outside the protections associated with full civic membership.

The surrounding argument also cautions against romanticizing this position. The book explicitly resists elevating slum dwellers into a new revolutionary class simply because they are marginalized. Their exclusion may make a political opening possible, but it does not settle what they will do with it or what collective form they may create.

A Different Kind of Political Subject

The text distinguishes slum dwellers from the classic Marxist working class. That class is defined economically through exploitation: workers must sell their labor-power, and surplus value is appropriated from their labor. Slum dwellers, by contrast, are defined chiefly by their sociopolitical non-integration into the legal space of citizenship and its rights. The phrase therefore invokes a revolutionary possibility without collapsing these distinct conditions into one.

Their potential lies partly in a double sense of being “free”: loosened from substantial ties, and situated in spaces beyond ordinary state regulation. They are also a large collective forcibly brought together, with limited support from inherited religious or ethnic ways of life. Under these conditions, the task is not simply to recover an existing community but to invent some mode of being together. “Nothing to lose” thus names both a loss of social and civic security and the possibility, still unresolved, of collective self-organization.

Political Possibility and Its Limits

Pentecostal Christianity is identified as a hegemonic form of ideology in slums, combining charismatic miracles and spectacle with practical social programs such as community kitchens and care for children and the elderly. This detail complicates any reading of the phrase as a simple call to revolutionary action: the social life of slum communities includes religious practices and forms of mutual support, not just exclusion or political potential.

The expression’s force is consequently conditional. The book presents slums as among the few possible sites of an event because their inhabitants occupy a position of exclusion and are compelled to find ways of living together. It does not claim that deprivation itself produces emancipation. The phrase holds open the tension between a population cast outside the benefits of citizenship and the possibility that collective organization could emerge from that very position.