About the Brazilian situation: Between progressist neoliberalism and an eminent far-right-wing coup:
By Daniel Albuquerque Abramo
Brazil is in a dangerous situation. This is well known to a lot of people around the globe.
But what’s happening there? In this essay, I will explain, in general lines, the roots and the present moment of the Brazilian crisis.
First of all, is necessary to say that English is not my primary language. Since I’m a Brazilian, a proud Portuguese speaker, I may ask for the benevolence of the readers. If you can’t understand something in the text, feel free to ask in the comments section. Second, but no less important, I’d like to thank all the readers who have an interest in the Brazilian situation, especially the socialist comrades.
First things first. The colonization:
If we want to understand the Brazilian crisis, first it's necessary to understand Brazil’s background. His history, his culture, his society, and in the center of importance, his economy through eras.
Brazil’s colonization, by Portugal, slowly started after the 16 century in the year 1500 after Christ. The originary populations who lived centuries in the region before the Portuguese arrival now started to be in severe danger. At that time, Portugal and Spanish were navy potencies, and were on the lead of the pillage of the “new world”. A “new world”, that was nothing new. Only for the invasors, of course.
The Portuguese presence was getting stronger in the region, and Portugal, at the first moment, managed to impose power by marriage. Using the originary people’s traditions, who’d valued collectivism, and solidarity, the colonizing power tricked and enslaved them and made them work in a wood extraction economic cycle. This abject pratic was named “Cunhadismo” by portugueses.
Years later, almost all nations of originary people, many of them were warrior’s nations, were in a war against Portugal. Some of them because they wanted revenge against these humiliating practices, others because they wanted to protect their territory. Even when not engaging in a direct battle against Portugal, they refused to be enslaved. Because they knew the geography, the flora and fauna, and the secrets of the region, they imposed a great blow on Portugal’s intention in his “new colony”. The European country wanted, at first, to use the local man work, to minimize the costs of importing slaves.
After the first defeat was clear when originary nations not only refused to surrender but started to act more and more annoyed with the Portuguese presence in the region. In a rare example of “timing”, colonial powers and the Pope, now, have declared and fixated that originary people had “soul”.
This led us to the first big change in the colony’s structure. Portugal started, slowly in the 16 century, to divide the lands in the hands of a little few landlords, in the way they called “Capitanias Hereditárias”, in which the landlord was called “Capitão Donatário”, and had hereditary power of managing, and autonomy to loan some part of that land, in the name of the Portuguese crown.
After the consolidation of the land division of the Brazilian coast, Portugal realized that was not going to achieve to enslave the original nations, and started to use the kind of slavery that is well known today. Not only invaded and colonized a part of the African continent, to impose horror on his population and steal raw material, but to become a slave trader country, and also started to use the same population as slaves in the Brazilian colony.
After this, the production model, of plantation with slave man work, brutally kidnapped from the African continent, will turn hegemonic in all the colony. This is very important to understand, because the adoption of these two production modes, at the early beginning of Brazil’s colonization still hard impact on the way Brazilian society is shaped, and in the way power and wealth are distributed in Brazilian society.
The sugar cane, the “pau brasil”, the coffee, and later the gold race. In all of these economic cycles, the colony was doing something that will be someday, the curse of modern Brazil, producing for the sake of the metropolis, Portugal, at the time. The colonial pact, of course, forbidden Brazil to sell to another country, or create its industry.
And that’s how it was the colonial phase in a brief resume. Let’s talk about Brazilian Empire:
After the Paraguayan War, which lasted from 1864 to March 1870, the Brazilian Empire gained a new and relevant agent in its internal political game. Before this war, Dom Pedro I and Dom Pedro II were reluctant to invest in the Armed Forces of Brazil, although they had a competent navy, the ground Armed Forces, formally founded in 1822, were neglected, because the monarchy observed that an alliance between an ascending bourgeoisie, merchants, and salaried workers, servants, and artisans, with Regular National Armed Forces, supported mostly by taxes taken from the aforementioned agents, that is, not paid directly by the European monarchies, formed the hardcore of the end of several dynasties, empires, and reigns on the old continent, during and after the French Revolution, giving rise to the new Era of Republics in the west.
With the need generated by the size of the dispute that took place between Brazil and Paraguay, despite the dislike of the Brazilian monarchy, which preferred to use mercenaries rather than risk the stability of its position, the Army of Brazil was strengthened. After the end of that war, this institution returned to the country with prestige among the dominant political forces, which sanctified the continuity of its existence at the same level of importance, without returning to its previous condition. As much as the monarch was not comfortable with it, now it would be impossible to simply undo the Armed Forces, or diminish them, under penalty of risking his stability in office.
The late deployment of the Brazilian Army, already in the late nineteenth century, at a time when most of the National States in Europe, and some countries in the Americas, already had modern and organized armed forces, demonstrates that the Brazilian case, in many facets, it has its peculiarities. Brazil, a former colony of Portuguese exploration, which, due to a contingency of fate, had become a refuge for the Portuguese royal family, located in South America, had proclaimed political independence in 1822.
This, however, did not mean total independence, on the contrary, political independence from Portugal did not even come close to shaking our deep economic dependence inherited from the more than 300 years of existence as a colony. Dependence not only on Portugal but above all on credit and financing networks, most of them coming from London, the epicenter of capitalism at the time.
The so-called “Colonial Pact”, a kind of “clause”, imposed forcibly by the metropolis, from top to bottom, on the colony, prevented the development of manufactures, and all industrial development in Brazil while it was still a colony. Be well observed when we analyze eighteenth-century Brazil.
In a century of extreme relevance for several countries in the world that actively participated in the technological race provided by the phenomenon of the first industrial revolution in Europe [18th and 19th century]. While the industrial revolution turned the entire old continent upside down, 18th-century colony Brazil was experiencing the explosion of the gold cycle. While the European powers developed their industries, modernized their National-States, strengthened their armed forces, and began preparations for a new round of frantic imperialist sacks on the third world, as we would see in the 19th century, Brazil, colonized, had all its bureaucratic apparatus, its State organization, the State-Factory organization, its form and organization of work, all aimed only at sending wealth and raw materials to its metropolis. That was his only reason for being.
It is evident that a heavy restriction such as the "Colonial Pact" and other measures of the colonial period such as the system of the land division known as "Hereditary Captaincies", generated further deformations that shaped the Brazilian Empire, which existed during the 19th century, and which they are also present in the Federative Republic of Brazil to this day. In this sense, a very important distortion to analyze until the present day is how the economic-political strength of landlords develops, as a function of the two measures mentioned above.
During the period of the Brazilian Empire, the already empowered class of landlords got even more powers. The characteristic of monarchic liberalism of concession after the French revolution, and the fact that the Brazilian Empire has been a Constitutional Monarchy since its birth, provided even more political power to those who were already the economic engine of the Empire. In this sense, the former power of landlords and their opposition to an industrial nation project joined the aversion, generated by the trauma of the French revolution in all monarchies in the world, which were also present in the Brazilian monarchy, the fear of the creation of a possible alliance between armed forces and a rising industrial bourgeoisie and merchants This led the Brazilian Empire to an alliance that further empowered the landlords, at the expense of maintaining the stability of the royal family in power. This option ended up accentuating our underdevelopment even more, as it reinforced the old colonial model of the State-Factory, exporter of primary products, now under the guise of its National-State.
The first half of the 19th century. After the Paraguayan War, with the rise of the Brazilian Army to an important domestic political actor, in an environment of constant internal fights between the perfidious and already weakened monarchy, and the abject landlords, now more powerful than the royal family itself, having as “apparent fuse” after dozens of slave revolts, and the adhesion of certain layers of the middle class in the cities to the abolitionist movement, the promulgation of the “Golden Law”, the law which ended slavery, an alliance between the Brazilian Army and landlords occurs, against the monarchy and the empire, and in favor of the foundation of a Republic. The fake republic of the rich and imperialism. The whose only function was to maintain the dominance of the powerful over the same underdogs as always. After the abolition of slavery, the new Republic made no effort to absorb and integrate such a contingent. On the contrary, it practiced a systematic policy of eugenics and whitening with a policy to encourage the immigration of Europeans to work in the fields.
In political disputes between landlords and the monarchy, the royal family’s only bargain was the maintenance of slavery, which was a desire of most landlords. After the abolition of slavery, with an understanding that the only use of the royal family had vanished since in economic terms the landlords were already supporting the country and the armed forces, liberals, conservatives, and positivists, each with their motives, of regional group and class, united in this alliance between the landlord class and the Armed Forces of Brazil, against the Empire and the Brazilian Monarchy. These events culminated in the proclamation of the Federative Republic of Brazil, which will now demonstrate new, and not so new, important contradictions.
It is noteworthy that, if the Brazilian monarchy, due to the reactionary trauma of the French revolution, was enormously afraid of the approximation of an Industrial Bourgeoisie, Merchants, Workers, and Armed Forces, and for that reason it favored the Land Lords class, keeping an agrarian-exporting economic model, slavery-based, as opposed to the industrial economic model, with salaried labor, this ended it, strengthening the class that later, in association with the Armed Forces, would overthrow the Empire.
Particularly popular art as a mechanism for revolt and a panacea.
The key to understanding this entire phenomenon is to understand Brazil’s double dependence. If at the international level we depended on capital flows to finance the nation’s crops and income, at the national level we had, and this was accentuated, the economic dependence that our economic model and the entire regime had on the Land Lords class.
And that’s how it was the Imperial phase in a brief resume. Let’s talk about the Brazilian Republic:
The beginning of the Brazilian Republic [1889] was marked by the dispute between the forces that previously plotted to end the Empire and start the Republican era: the Military and the Land Lords. The first period of the Brazilian Republic, which lasted ten years, is known as the Republic of the Sword, in which the military-ruled with an iron hand and brutality, under the ideology of positivism, implemented important reforms, but even with support among the urban middle classes, had to leave power and give the place to representatives of rural Brazilian oligarchies. It was the beginning of the Oligarchic Republic, where landlords, especially from São Paulo, a coffee-producing state, and Minas Gerais, a milk-producing state, alternated in power in a false democracy, a theater, where only the rich voted, and the results were combined and fraudulent.
The “Theatrical Republic”, however, although idealized by those above, as an illusion, being moved by the needs and achievements of our working class, it did not take long to believe in its farce and want to become a real Republic, or that is, in the materialization of the union of our work and spirit, in the form of collective infrastructure, socialized for the benefit of all our people and our fellow human beings around the globe. This battle, between the forces that wanted a republic for Brazilians and those that intended to keep the old order under the face of a theatrical republic, was precisely the central nexus of our history throughout the 20th century. Since the false Republic did not meet or intend to meet the interests and needs of society, it did not take long for huge social movements, strikes, separatist uprisings to begin to take place. Workers had no rights, the social issue was a matter for the police. Slavery had been formally abolished, but it still existed. Nothing had been done by the ex-slaves.
From the year 1922, after the echoes of the Russian Revolution of 1917, a series of military movements took over Brazil, in what became known as Tenentismo. Young revolutionary lieutenants, some socialists, but the vast majority nationalists, rose against the existing system and claimed rights for themselves and the people. Such movement took the sleep of the agrarian and military oligarchies, as it found immense popular support, and served as a catalyst for a series of revolts, which had in the Prestes Column, a military march that traveled through the interior of Brazil, rallying troops and insurgents, while they were carrying out a mini agrarian reform by force. Brazil was a powder keg, and its people knew they would need a revolution. Though didn’t know what kind. Even so, at that moment [1922–1927], such a move would still not find the ideal scenario to overthrow the government. Something that began to change with the 1929 global economic crisis with the New York stock market crash. Then all the conditions for a revolutionary period were in place.
In 1930, after the rigged elections, an alliance was formed between rebel sectors of the armed forces and dissident rural oligarchies. Together, with the support of the population, especially in the middle class and in the most popular sectors of society, they overthrew the Oligarchic Republic. Leading this movement was Getúlio Dornelles Vargas, leader of the dissident oligarchy of the state of Rio Grande do Sul. Getúlio was an important Brazilian leader, often described as the greatest Brazilian political leader of the 20th century, one of the inventors of modern Brazil, and a patron of the ideology known as Trabalhismo Brasileiro[ Brazilian Laborism].
Often when people criticize Getúlio Vargas, the barrier of the idealist view of history is not overcome, that is, a view based on the individual and great figures, as if the whole historical process depended on their will. This is a misinterpretation. However, Getúlio is not, of course, immune to criticism for this. In reality, as Mao Zedong himself, an avid connoisseur of the Sun Tzu, left us to teach us, few opportunities teach us more than when we analyze the virtues and mistakes of our enemies. This is exactly why we owe our most famous class enemy the correctness of the analysis so that our movement and the very level of political consciousness of the Brazilian working class can advance towards a scientific interpretation of the oppression it suffers, and of the system of production that governs and regulates all this.
To do so, it is up to us to escape the urge to use the lens of the idea and focus on the analysis of reality. Always reminding us that it is impossible and inconsistent to judge an apple tree because it does not bear oranges. Historical characters are, therefore, always slaves of their context. It is unreal and unfair to historical judgment to judge a positivist oligarch by training and with an idealist and utopian interpretation of socialism, which only fully matures in the act of his suicide note, for not having been what, imbued in our beliefs and methods of a posteriori analysis, we would like, today, that this had been.
In this sense, Getúlio Vargas, who many often treat in a pejorative and superficial way with the adjective “Machiavellian”, which, unlike having total control of the situation at any time during this period, was balanced in an extremely complicated game of forces related to the 30 processes itself and has never been positioned completely securely.
As the Marxist genius Nelson Werneck Sodré, who by the way worked in the culture magazine of the Estado Novo press and propaganda agency, explained in his book called Capitalism and Bourgeois Revolution in Brazil, Vargas was, at the limit, an instrument of history and the most enlightened member of the Brazilian ruling class until that period. For those who are shocked by the brutality of the period from 1930 to 1945, when reading these words, by today’s standards, you must understand that the history of our country, in addition to a history that holds many joys and beautiful moments for us, is a history of misery, suffering, violence, and brutality for most of those who lived here, especially before the 1930s.
In the period from 1930 to 1945, as the historian Moniz Bandeira tells us, Brazil experienced the first relatively fair election with outstanding popular participation in its history. Arbitration and violence, for most of our history, on behalf of external entities, is, therefore, the natural form of government here. The juridical ornament used as the dress of this or that tyranny has always mattered less in this process, being only the appearance, which relates to the essence of our central problem for more than two centuries.
The method of formalism, of enlightened liberal theater, has been perfected, reaching almost perfection of its cruelty that by appearance hides the essence of and relationship of these, during the Oligarchic Republic that was broken by the revolution of 1930, and which is very similar to the New Republic of 1988, it is worth saying.
Vargas was anchored in the working class by protecting the application of his agenda, expansion of the right to vote, female suffrage, social rights, and labor rights, but also, in the military, in the clergy, and in the dissident oligarchies to submit the old pole of national political-economic power to some defeats that are still important for the fate of Brazil.
In the international sphere, it tried to introduce our country into the great geopolitical game, in a safe way, and it balanced itself between the Allies and the Axis. As a matter of fact, as the Marxist historian, Moniz Bandeira asserts in his book entitled “The presence of the United States in Brazil.”, the largest fraction of the military was sympathetic to the Axis, while the civil bureaucracy, as a rule, nourished admiration for the Allies.
In this sense, contrary to what some claim based on the old sources of the former PCB (Brazilian Communist Party), there has long been proven to be incorrect on this topic, including the study of Brazilian Marxists such as Moniz Bandeira who gained access to secret documents from the period, both the US and England had sabotaged the 1930 insurrectionary process, both by nurturing the dominant Oligarchies of equipment and by denying international legitimacy to the provisional government as much as possible. In addition, both the USA and England also helped the 1932 Paulista Revolt to recover a situation similar to the one before 1930, where their interests were assured without any concern.
In 1937, on the verge of being removed from power, without the popular support he needed, one of the greatest tricks in the history of the Brazilian Republic took place. As explained by the Marxist historian Moniz Bandeira, in his book “Trabalhismo e Socialismo no Brasil”, and Alzira Vargas in his book that portrays the memories of his father, Vargas anticipates and steals the “momentum” of the coup by General Góes Monteiro, which it had direct links with the Krupp, Nazi, and arms-oriented industries, as expressed in another book by the same author, entitled “The Presence of the United States in Brazil”, a coup that would be unequivocal of an Integralist character and would place Brazil in almost certain alliance with the Axis. Giving the Estado Novo coup, according to Moniz Bandeira, a Bonapartist character. Had Kerensky had the fortune and virtue of our exotic Menshevik national leader, Lenin would have gone to far more trouble than he had to lead the Soviet working class towards his liberation. Not acknowledging this is a gross misunderstanding that can only be the fruit of the self-phobia of our history. When Brazilian liberals today do not recognize this fact, it makes it clear why they support today, and at other times in our history, fascist solutions, ruling class shock troops, apparent revolt to essentially maintain order, for the national submission to the empire.
As a mere historical curiosity, the Cohen plan, that gave rise to the coup of the Estado Novo, one of the greatest examples of false flags in our history, which many attributes to Getúlio Vargas, was produced by Olímpio Mourão, an Integralist [Brazilian Fascists], at the request of Plínio Salgado, to be used by them. In the process, Mourão, who was known to another military man, who also knew Góes Monteiro, ended up leaving a copy with the latter, who instantly thought of using the document for their benefit. The Estado-Novo’s coup was, therefore, a coup on top of a coup stolen from another coup.
The attempt at an integralist coup with the support of the military in 1938 was a retaliation, specifically for the closure of all political parties, which, among other points, such as the constitutional provision for two annual meetings in a parliament elected by indirect vote and the constitutional provision of plebiscites, denounces the Castilhist influence of the 1937 constitution, so they won’t let me lie, just compare the constitution that became known as “Polish” with the Castilhist constitution in the Rio Grande do Sul of 1889. After the failure of the 1938 Integralist coup, Vargas achieved hegemony in society, and even support from constrained military sectors, to violently purge Integralists [Brazilian fascists], Nazis, and Fascists. Shortly before this, the Nazi ambassador, Ritter, was made persona non grata.
The misunderstanding of the initial repression of the ANL proved particularly serious in this period and became clearer as Brazil aligned itself with the Allied side in World War II. In the book “The presence of the United States in Brazil”, Moniz Bandeira reports that Prestes, in prison, communicated with Vargas by telegram at the end of Brazil’s declaration of war against Germany. Shortly before the fall of the Estado Novo in 1945, when it became more democratic and unveiled its national-popular character, the insurgents of 35, already amnesty, contrary to what the vain Euro-centered logic could imagine, above all the communists supported the continuation of the regime and joined the chorus with the Queremista movement, towards its wide popularization and democratization.
Furthermore, it is evident from the report of PCB militants, and even in official foreign documents, that during the period in which Dutra again banned the PCB in the post-1945 years, many communists acted secretly within the PTB (Brazilian Labor Party), and they were part of the campaign for Vargas’ return in 1950.
Both Prestes and Getúlio were seriously mistaken from 1930 to 1945. Of these, we must be nourished by their virtues, without ever forgetting and failing to learn from their mistakes. The end of this story, in 1954, with the suicide of Getúlio Vargas, is well known. The will letter, his final declaration is a rare example of an official document that brings us an absurd number of truths. The 1964 coup as a delayed reaction to the same spirit that lies in the letter of testament, when carried out by João Goulart, who learned from the mistake made by Vargas and always refused to repress the communists, but still failed through sabotage and treason of the submissive and dependent national bourgeoisie founded precisely with the revolution of 1930, reinforces this understanding.
After the Second World War, especially during the reorganization of the distribution of power around the globe, the restructuring of the world order, and the consolidation of new dominant powers in global geopolitics, Latin America experienced a period of change. Being facilitated by low regard for the economic liberalism of the “laissez-faire”, ostracized since the 1929 crisis, and also by the conditions imposed during the Second World War on countries in Europe, the United States, and other industrialized countries that had to center their production in the military sector, consequently drastically reducing the importation of so-called consumer goods, new political currents and their theoretical-analytical counterpart will gain relevance in the Latin American continent.
If the mostly agrarian-exporting State model with oligarchic roots that prevailed in much of the region, of liberal economic inspiration to favor agrarian elites, came into disrepute, the experiences of industrial boom for import substitution, or even scarcity of “industrialized goods”, lived during the Second World War, exposed in the material reality, to the eyes and ears, a series of contradictions inherent to the organizational forms, in the aspects related to the distribution, both of political power and wealth, but above all in the low economic diversity of the countries in the region. Perhaps not by chance, these new political currents and their theoretical counterparts, although distinct from each other, are linked to at least one thing: in their diagnosis of reality, they conclude, regardless of their respective particularities, that their countries were facing a process of “lag ”, and that, therefore, “modernization”, a concept that in this context is strongly linked to the industrialization process, would also be a form of redemption.
If before, the State was almost entirely focused on meeting the needs of the agro-export elites, and other local oligarchs, the depositaries of this “new tradition”, the developmentalists, postulated that the State should plan rationally, within what would have been a bias in that period. modern capitalist, a process of social, economic, and political transformation, profound, and to a greater or lesser degree, changing its organizational configurations and moving structures, to foster a late industrialization process, aiming both internal supply and insertion in the world market. In short, for them, the State would be a central pole of “modernization”, and the tool for achieving redemption.
It is not surprising, therefore, given the context of that exotic historical period, of technological revolution and post-war, where there was a space for rearrangements, that in general the real manifestations of such economic trend have been linked to ideologies of a national-popular character. That was a period in which the countries of the region looked forward to taking the best advantage of the geopolitical reorganization of the globe. Not necessarily of her “in-itself”, but of her “becoming”. From this perception that in the brief hiatus of hegemonic forces, before postulating new rules to the geopolitical game on a global scale, it would be possible to decide on a course that would change the geopolitical insertion of the countries in the region, escaping from an economic, semi-colonial and submissive relationship, with developed countries, issues relating to sovereignty and national interest also come to the fore.
As an example of this, Brazil, which, aware of the turnaround that would take place after the Second World War, conditioned its participation in this to help and sponsorship in the creation of its steel industry. With this in mind, not only to achieve a certain international political prestige, but also to safeguard their sovereignty and national interests, and above all to postulate a future global position more relevant than that of an exporter of primary products.
In criticizing the current philosophy of history known as historicism, Walter Benjamin, in his first appendix, in his theses on the concept of history, argues that:
“Historicism is content to establish a causal link between various moments in history. But no fact, merely because it is a cause, is for that reason a historical fact. It becomes a historical fact posthumously, thanks to events that may be separated from it by millennia. The historian, aware of this, refuses to unravel the events between his fingers, like the beads of a rosary. He captures the configuration, in which his own epoch came into contact with an earlier, perfectly determined epoch. With this, he founds a concept of the present as a “now” in which shrapnel of the Messianic infiltrated.”
In this sense, the historical period of geopolitical rearrangement mentioned above could be seen, in Benjaminian terms, as “the messianic”, that is, a revolutionary opportunity to fight for an oppressed past, in this case, the colonial past, economic submission, backwardness, and underdevelopment. It remained to be seen, however, which future was in dispute, which was the concept of development in question, and especially what the notion of progress would be at stake.
Even if they managed to perceive the “messianic”, this skillful space for maneuver, the depositaries of developmental economic theory in its democratic form, and its political counterpart, represented in 20th century Brazil by the tradition of Brazilian Labour, may have been betrayed, still that unconsciously, by the historicist, linear, and progressive foundation, of his perception of how the historical movement operated, and of what development and progress consisted of.
It is true, however, that this was given to them, as a kind of conceptual trojan, by the tradition heir to the Enlightenment itself, strongly influenced by a metaphysical, categorizing, and static view of reality, which they judged, to a greater or lesser degree, fight. This, added to the fact that they believe it to be “backward”, with a greater focus on the technological lag of the productive forces, their particular antichrist, collaborated so that such trends often ended up walking through the forest of mechanistic interpretations of social transformation. This meant that, despite aiming for a profound social and economic reorganization, in some cases, such as in Brazil, aiming to combine the notion of democracy with the concept of social rights, and social justice, economic transformation, and reorganization was privileged, to the detriment of the distribution of power and wealth to a greater degree, which culminated in a greater advance in the form of industrialization, infrastructure works, and in the structuring of a state bureaucratic apparatus compatible with the modern capitalism they intended to create.
Although they were far from having a one-dimensional and static interpretation of the concept of development, they were often based on a mechanical, stepwise, linear, progressive interpretation of history, certainly also influenced by the enormous need found by all of them to develop the productive forces of their respective countries, these ended up opening a pandora’s box, by helping to spread and popularize a technicist vision of progress that has an intimate relationship with the notion of industrialization.
This may have been since they were the fathers of industrialization in their respective countries, it is natural to assume that much of their propaganda was centered on a kind of praise for technical-industrial knowledge, and on the domain of nature by man.
In this sense, unfortunately, the history of Latin America in the 20th century seems to demonstrate this. Often under geopolitical pretexts linked to the context of the cold war, democratic developmental governments were overthrown to make way for dictatorial, economically developmental, authoritarian governments, often linked to military summits allied to the geopolitical West. Governments that pursued their well-intentioned predecessors, imputing to them the sign of “enemies of progress” and perverted and tore the majestic masterpiece of their rationality, to crush their people, in repression and labor exploitation, by foreign interests and in favor of the accumulation of capital from its now more diversified ruling class.
We can also highlight the “Comício da Central do Brasil” and the “Basic Reforms Project” proposed by President João Goulart in 1964, which aimed to deepen the theoretical and material legacy left by the national-developmentalists and labor after criticism of their past practices and projects and our country’s historical structural problems.
By analyzing and comparing both models, Vargas’ in his synthesis, his second term, and Goulart’s, exposed in the “basic reforms”, which dealt with agrarian reform and the creation of an internal consumer market, we can find the notion of the developmental project as a living and mutating organism, in constant re-reading of itself, due to criticism of possible undesirable or bad practical results obtained in the past, as well as changes influenced by the change in the national and international situation, but still, fond of key points, in our case, we can cite the perception and notion that we are an underdeveloped country, with peripheral capitalism, with enormous technological backwardness and terrible quality of life for the majority of our people, and that therefore there is a need for a project, collective, rational, organized, to overcome these conditions and “develop” economically, politically and socially.
It should be understood that developing something in this sense is, in the most abstract of the term and process, taking something that “is” in the present, observing its contradictions, its flaws, and its patterns over a certain period of time, postulating an “ideal future” using an ethical system, to develop a rational transition plan based on the data obtained, and execute it using the necessary tools that are adequate to the reality of the process, in order to achieve this previously idealized final goal.
Following this superficial analogy, the developmental project of each nation would be this model of transition between what “is”, the instantaneous present, commonly referred to in the philosophical tradition as “being”, and what can “come-to-be”, the future, and the Developmental State would be the tool, which must itself be reformed, to fulfill its purpose of shaping and shaping the development process, which is always a process of building a future.
It is worth noting that when the object to be “developed” is a nation or a society, the process proves to be much more complex than in the simple previous analogy, as it is remarkable that in this case, the object itself has themselves, internally, several distinct and opposing agendas, small opinions and private interests, and the desire for popular participation of excluded majorities in building their future, which often contrasts with the interests of powerful private groups that form or others may monopolize or influence the process. Yet, roughly speaking, comparison, albeit simplistic, becomes a valid way of exposing its limitations to communicate about the mechanics of abstract theoretical concepts in their most general superficiality.
It is important to highlight that the “come-to-be”, the ideal future, depends on those who think it, as individuals and mainly as a collective construction with social class influences, causing the concept of development to be in constant dispute, by different groups, whose utopian places — ideal futures — are divergent and mutually exclusive. This discussion proves to be very pertinent in the next historical event of relevance to the analysis of the proposed themes.
It is worth highlighting the unfortunate historical event known as the civic-military coup of 1964 and its subsequent authoritarian regime, the dictatorship.
The military coup of 1964 did not abruptly alter the economic model, although it destroyed a generation of intellectuals who were eager to assemble it, many were killed and others were exiled. This dictatorial regime demonstrated authoritarianism in imposing, without the people’s right to choose, the biggest beneficiaries and the main excluded, in an arrangement made within the parameters of the old model, now carried forward in a much more one-dimensional way, serving only the domestic dominant class and the imperialism.
This is related to the dispute over the concept of “development”. The military dictatorship was a regime of agreement between the military, internal elites, and the interests of foreign powers, to sabotage the development project of President João Goulart, coming from an agenda built together with the people, and in its place, passing on the agenda of the elites.
This becomes more evident and more impactful, as the regime degenerates more and more, and starts to take the brunt of its economic ruin, from those excluded from profit sharing, in the period of the “economic miracle”. Brazil had grown a lot in terms of GDP and advanced in terms of other indicators. And? What did it matter now that it was clear who had gotten rich, at the expense of the majority of the population, who had only participated in the experience of economic growth in the “idea”, never in reality?
The current period, New Republic:
Since the gradual process of implementation of the neo-liberal creed in the old continent, there have been transformations related to this transition from the social-democratic model, albeit corrupt, to neo-liberalism. One of them is the increasing decentralization of production.
This fact does not happen by chance, and it happens for at least five reasons:
1- In the context of the cold war, the dominant classes of the central countries of capitalism did not feel safer to house large industrial parks, because this implied the existence of greater organization among workers, and, therefore, generate risk to the dominant classes of such countries.
2- If they maintained most of the industrial workers and other forms of work that facilitate the organization of workers in third world countries, they could internally swell their service sector, as well as outsourced jobs, which provide less organization of workers. With that, they could focus all cutting-edge investment in a small and controllable industrial sector that produces high-tech parts with enormous added scientific value, which they “sell” to the huge myriad of third-world branches of their multinational scheme, where such parts are assembled into the final product.
3- As the central countries of capitalism are geopolitically stronger than third world countries, their bourgeoisie could impose the predatory policies of their multinationals on more fragile countries, destroying their National-State, at times making spurious agreements with tiny elites that represent entire populations, imposing ideologies of total opening to foreign capital, a minimum state, with the swelling of the public security forces, for the repression of the local population and “demanding higher rates of productivity”.
It was not rare the most extreme example, of opening new markets for imperialism, based on force. This is because, in such a form of organization of the very globalized capitalist system, it is not just the national armies, the formal militias of the national bourgeoisie, but super-national military blocs, extremely complex. These, initially mobilized for the cold war, after its end, act only as a formal militia of a group of the associated bourgeoisie, from the central countries of capitalism, disciplining and imposing order on rebellious third world countries, or pursuing new markets and more corpses.
Aware that all the exploitation, added to the insertion of industrial parks, will probably generate strikes and the organization and mobilization of workers, they destroy the entire National-State and turn it only towards the repression of labor, since once predated, such a nation and its people, are seen as a mere production object of the ruling class coalition of the core countries.
Note the similarity of what is described above, with the famous strikes of the ABC Paulista, in the 1980s, which were harshly repressed by the Brazilian Entrepreneurial-Military Dictatorship. This is not by chance, as Brazil received a large part of the transfusion of automobile manufacturers, notably from FIAT, the result of this “new form” of the global capitalist mode of production.
4- “It is not man’s conscience that determines his being, but, on the contrary, his social being that determines his conscience.” — Karl Marx
The transition, albeit gradual, to a new organization of the mode of production and its consequences, implies new forms of “being²”, new and worsened work relations, new and worsened relations with the Nation-State.
The small collective consciousness, already damaged, but still reinforced by social relations and work relations related to the previous organization of the mode of production, began to give way to new forms of consciousness increasingly atomized and individualistic, as an ideological counterpart, or that is, super-structural, of the new way of organizing the mode of production, the infrastructure.
5- Needless to say, we can never forget that, under the dictatorship of the ruling class, all scientific-technological advances, especially those that most impact on the advancement of productive forces, and, therefore, on the organization of the mode of production, do not demonstrate the emancipatory character of breaking away from the capitalist mode of production, but rather of increasing exploitation. Such countries, by having a high level of advancement of the productive forces, could gradually further automate their productions, “reducing costs” and reducing the organization of the working class, so as not to need more low-skilled human labor in a series of areas of its economy, causing many people to lose their jobs and become service sector workers, outsourced workers, or self-employed.
The problem, of course, is not in the technical-scientific advance, nor technologies, but the key issue:
“Which class has control over the means of production?”
Once this movement of change in the organization of the mode of production, its motivations, and its context is explained, we can analyze how it had an impact in the late 90s and early 21st century.
As mentioned earlier, this process did not happen overnight, but occurred more or less gradually, since the mid-1960s, and began to intensify very sharply in the 1980s.
At the end of the 1990s, this economic model undergoes a reform, which marks its post-dissolution movement of the USSR to take over all political systems in the world on two fronts, merging into two ideological sides, one with “progressive” characteristics and rhetoric diffuse” but economically neo-liberal, and another with a conservative character and rhetoric, but economically neo-liberal.
Such theater, a true simulacrum of political dispute, a great “telecatch³” where economic neo-liberalism always wins, has prevailed since the beginning of the 21st century in most of the western world.
As examples, we can see the cases of the George W. Bush and Barack Obama administrations, the former as being the politically conservative facet of economic neoliberalism, while Obama would represent the politically progressive facet of economic neoliberalism. Both equally bad, both internally, at home, and externally, but one being the raw truth and bitter to digest, and the other being a kind of the same medicine, only much sweeter and easier to devise while bombing third-world nations at random.
With this, neo-liberal orthodoxy has become the “absolute standard” in the period that contemplates the end of the USSR and the beginning of the 21st century, the height of “Fukuyama’s golden dream”, of absolute domination by neo-liberalism and capital over the globe.
Such a process marks the total empire of appearance and rhetoric over informal or parliamentary political disputes and debates, since, in the absence of possibilities of real dispute in terms of the economic model, since both sides will almost always defend variations of economic orthodoxy, what is left for the political struggle are mere appearances and insubstantial issues.
The Brazilian case in particular:
“One can have a term of comparison in the sphere of industrial technique: the industrialization of a country is measured by its capacity to build machines that build machines and in the manufacture of increasingly precise instruments to build machines and instruments that build machines, etc. . The country that has the best capacity to build instruments for scientists’ laboratories and to build instruments that manufacture these instruments, this country can be considered the most complex in the technical-industrial field.” — Intellectuals and the organization of culture — Gramsci.
In 1984 in the campaign known as Direct Already [ Diretas Já].
Brazil is a case apart, even without having satisfactorily completed its industrial revolution, that is, being able to compete at the forefront of technological and scientific development, it went through a process in which, at the same time, it was the destination of the industrial parks of assemblers and multinationals, being a developing country, started to sabotage its autonomous industrial growth, something that had been its goal for a long time, and to apply the “fashionable ideology and economic policy”, in the progressive version, as if it were a central country.
In reality, they intended with this to re-edit in a new species the already old “associated development”, that is, dependence, but this time, in new terms. For that, they thought that it was enough to follow all the guidelines of the international organizations, committed up to their necks, with neo-liberalism, playing the role that the Brazilian professor Nildo Ouriques likes to call “the good international guy”.
Needless to say, that’s not how things work, and if the model that was created since FHC’s first term, and then reissued with new guise by the Workers’ Party, managed to maintain itself based on high internal consumption and massive exportation of commodities, exchanging in practice massive tons of primary products with low added technological value, for complex products of the most varied types, only remained until the first economic crisis of global capitalism it faced.
The 2008 crisis made it very clear that the ruling class linked to imperialism can choose which strand and which profile of management over our countries they prefer. After the 2008 crisis, progressive neo-liberalism was no longer an option for the ruling classes, both the smaller local associates and the international ones linked to imperialism. The chosen representative manager of the other facet of neo-liberalism was Michel Temer.
Later, Bolsonaro, an ultra-repressive militarist, came, not by chance, to take over the government, with the economy being ruled by an ultra-liberal. In other words, it is the most aggressive face of the same system. This is not by chance, but because the ruling class linked to imperialism wants to increase productivity, step up to the counter-revolution, and ensure that the losses of the 2008 crisis, and now even more so with the crisis accentuated by the pandemic, be paid with the blood and sweat of subject nations and populations.
A historic opportunity, so far, not taken advantage of by the radical left:
Such processes generated a unique picture, but which in itself does not present anything so innovative. As is well known, it is the contradictions of the systems themselves that bring them down.
With the takeover of neo-liberalism across almost the entire globe, and with the progressive version coming to power in many countries at the beginning of the 21st century, in a period that coincided with the period of greater globalization and decentralization of production, part of the negative effects for the working class, it began to break out at the hands of the managers of the “progressive” facet of neo-liberalism.
A striking example was the fact that structural unemployment and the level of informal workers tend to grow with this type of organization adopted in the neo-liberal system. Many people resented losing the stability they had in their old jobs. All of this came to be placed on the account of those who carried the neo-liberal reforms forward.
Often these were leftist governments with rhetoric, aesthetics, and garb, but only as a simulacrum. Since they applied neo-liberal economic policies that completely betrayed the class, even in the most puerile reformist perspectives. This generated, due to this contradiction, an evident frustration in sectors of the working class against the party left that assumed the neo-liberal dogmas.
On the other hand, after all the repression suffered by the Communist Parties in each country, throughout the cold war, and with their loss of power, with the dissolution of the USSR, they were not in a position to capture or channel the frustrations of the working class and fractions of the petty-bourgeoisie, which swelled more and more, often in a disorganized and immature way as a political movement, in contestation against hegemony and the “establishment”.
Such a process will be a fundamental aspect in the rebirth of the far-right, which especially in Europe and the US, takes advantage of the non-existence of organized socialist movements to capitalize on the entire anti-hegemonic discourse and ascend to power with the support of the masses.
On the ideology in this particular organization of the capitalist mode of production:
As explained above, the change in the organization of the mode of production and the organization of society in relation to it, generated new forms of “being” and, of course, new forms and social arrangements. All of this, of course, is related to this new way of producing and its working relationships. This, as was briefly exposed above, provided the emergence of ideologies, with an idealist and irrationalist matrix, and increasingly atomized, egoic, and individualized consciences.
It is not by chance that the 21st century was notable for the advancement of the “identity” way of doing politics, that is, political positions based on the interests and perspectives of social groups, with which citizens identify, with a tendency to be increasingly fractioned, as it emanates from the infrastructure, through the form of organization of the mode of production, reinforcement and stimulus to the production of new identities that operate linked to increasingly specific and “personalized” niches and markets. Even though this is more visible in groups that orbit progressive neoliberalism, it would be naive and short-sighted to think that right-wing identity does not exist.
The ideology of neo-liberalism fits the fluidity of the decentralized organization of the contemporary capitalist mode of production. Consciousnesses are available goods and identities, and, at the same time, in another dimension, a super-structural counterpart for the creation of new markets, for the flow of goods, which are material, that relate to such identity sold as a product.
Take as an example, the right-wing identity of the “good man” type is a reasonably common commodity in the “identities” market, sold in all sorts of cinematographic, literary, and general media products. This identity brings with it the symbology, rhetoric, and mentality of the “warrior” and the “military”, but it does so as a decoy, to associate this impulse with an armament desire and fetish. This is very interesting for the huge lobby and arms market and its associates like shooting clubs and other establishments that extract money from those who have the fetish for militarism, which greatly increase their profits, whenever this “identity” is high on the market.
The same occurs on the other side of the coin, with the respective consciences and identities of progressive neoliberalism, and the markets and products related to these, such as “environmentally friendly” products, or an entire market of vegan products, produced and cultivated on a large scale, not to mention the cultivation of cannabis, which could leave extensive soy plantations and their landowners flushed with their smallness before this young market, which certainly has an identity for itself, available in the large market of identities of neoliberal ideology.
Not even the glorious Marxism is immune from this phenomenon, since they already exist, even operating in our country, a so-called Marxist identity, which, more than an attachment to the method of analysis and history of the philosophical tradition and practice of Marxism, is based on a game of appearances, signs, and symbols, that is, it is nothing more than a fetish. Such an identity is nothing more than one of the many anti-hegemonic identities available in the set of possible identities in such a super-structural system, one of its left-wing versions. Needless to say, there are several markets for products and goods such as t-shirts, buttons, games, music, and all kinds of paid content, or that revert values to economic groups or companies.
The superstructure, that is, the political, ideological, cultural, and legal counterpart of the material infrastructure in this new form of organization of the capitalist mode of production, in fact, as always, could not work in a sense other than that of illusion as the weaknesses of such ways of producing and the labor relations inherent to them. Illusion is nothing more than throwing light on something, particular and unfocused while hiding a central truth. Not by chance in an era in which “identities” are fluid and flexible goods, existing in abundance with the advancement of social networks and ways of “being” to interact and produce with them, markedly noted by an enormous degree of exposure, are enormous the hordes of true Invisibles, outsourcers, application workers, self-employed service providers, direct victims of the organization’s change of mode of production.
An example of this occurred in Brazil, even during the pandemic it became clear that the battered Brazilian National-State, under the domination of neo-liberalism and its theatrical battle between strands of different guises, could not even find such workers in its registers, to all ends, they didn’t exist.
Bibliography and sources:
Trabalhismo e Socialismo no Brasil — Moniz Bandeira.
Presença dos Estados Unidos no Brasil — Moniz Bandeira.
Capitalismo e Revolução Burguesa no Brasil — Nelson Werneck Sodré.
A Desordem Mundial: O espectro total de dominação — Moniz Bandeira.
Brasil-Estados Unidos: A rivalidade emergente — Moniz Bandeira.
O Governo João Goulart e as Lutas Sociais no Brasil 1916–1964 — Moniz Bandeira.
Síntese de história da cultura brasileira — Nelson Werneck Sodré.
O Povo Brasileiro — Darcy Ribeiro.
Teses sobre a história — Walter Benjamin.
Note:
— The captions of the first three photos were translated into English directly from this site: https://pib.socioambiental.org/pt/Rituais
-The subtitle explaining about Tiradentes can be found, in Portuguese, In Brazilian Wikipedia.
-All photos were found on the internet in search engines.
