By GIOVANNI ALVES*
Excerpts, selected by the author, from the introduction of the recently released book
The misery of politics in neoliberal Brazil
The purpose of the book The Neoliberal State in Brazil: A Historical Tragedy is to explain the genesis, affirmation and consolidation of the neoliberal capitalist State in Brazil, a political structure that prevents the nation from offering effective responses to the crisis of civilization that afflicts it. This State model is incapable of combating social inequality, building a project for a free and sovereign nation and effectively facing the challenges of the climate, demographic and epidemiological transitions, which are expected to shake Brazilian society in the coming decades. This is an undeniable truth.
In Part 1, I present important concepts from Marxist political theory that explain Brazilian political misery, responsible for the collapse of the New Republic and the consolidation of the power of the financial oligarchy – the class fraction that organizes the power bloc of the neoliberal State in Brazil.
Part 2 deals with the systems that sustain the neoliberal state in Brazil: the system of financial oligarchy, the system of super-exploitation of labor, and the system of production of cultural ignorance in the country. Finally, I elaborate on the construction of neoliberal civil society, the basis of the bourgeois hegemony that maintains the dominant power.
The neoliberal state is the political state of capital in the phase of global capitalism. As a country of dependent capitalism and subordinate to the globalization of capital, the neoliberal state was reproduced in Brazil on the historical basis of the oligarchic-bourgeois state, strengthened and perpetuated by the civil-military dictatorship (1964-1984).
The perpetuation of the oligarchic-bourgeois State is secular, historically reflecting the social power of the Brazilian ruling classes: (i) the agrarian-industrial, parasitic financial-rentier and commercial patronage; and (ii) the state (political-military and technocratic) and civil (eminences, leaders and celebrities) patriciate. As historical allies of the ruling classes, we have the intermediate sectors (autonomous and dependent).[I]
In the field of ideological and political dispute for the maintenance of the neoliberal oligarchic-bourgeois state form, we have the subordinate classes (working class, service workers and peasantry) and the oppressed classes (the poor or the rabble). Since we have never had a social revolution in Brazil, the power of the oligarchy and the patrician classes has become entrenched in the material structure of the Brazilian state, being reproduced over the centuries by the political way of making history in Brazil (negotiation, clientelism, conciliation).
Since Brazil’s Independence 200 years ago, the oligarchic-bourgeois state form of class domination reflects the ideological-political and cultural hegemony of capital, both in “political society” (the State itself) and in “civil society”. The dominant class (employers and patriarchs) is also the ruling class, insofar as it produces and reproduces the ideological-mental metabolism appropriate to class domination.
The ideology of the ruling class is the dominant ideology in society – this is the historical law. Historically, the subaltern and oppressed classes have never been able to dispute intellectual and moral hegemony in civil society or the political and moral direction of the State itself. Brazilian ideas, culture and social thought have reflected, to a certain extent, the moods, idiosyncrasies and the bourgeois oligarchic-seigneurial worldview of our dependent capitalist formation.
This was even reflected in the thinking of the social and political left, which was unable to effectively go beyond the distorted structures of the liberal worldview reproduced by those in power. Our objective is to criticize the neoliberal state as an expanded political materiality of capital: neoliberal political society and civil society. It is this political materiality of the expanded neoliberal state, as we will present here, that reproduces bourgeois domination in Brazil under the historical conditions of the structural crisis of Brazilian capitalism.
In this introduction, we will present the main characteristics that configure political misery under neoliberal capitalism: politicism, physiologism, tacticism, pragmatism and bureaucratism. All of them make up the complex of petty politics. It was not the neoliberal State that created the misery of politics, but it exacerbated, with the empire of petty politics, the alienated determinations of the alienated politicality of capital. In fact, the misery of politics in the historical conditions of hyperlate and dependent peripheral capitalism, of colonial-slave extraction, is historically part of the structure of Brazilian political materiality and of the mode of political domination of the Brazilian oligarchy.
In the 1980st century, with the structural crisis of capital and the decline of the bourgeois civilizing project, the crisis of liberal democracy was exacerbated – in the center and in the periphery – due to the historical failure of the social and political left (the great transformism) and the inability of the center-right to solve the problems of capitalism adrift. As a power structure, the neoliberal State became the expression of the historical tragedy of Brazil. Brazil, a country of peripheral capitalism dependent and subordinate to the world order of capital, from 1950 onwards – with the foreign debt crisis –, sank its civilizing project built since the 1990s, surrendering itself once and for all, from XNUMX onwards, to the neoliberal program.
In fact, this was the political choice of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, organically subordinated to the interests of the US imperial power – the same bourgeoisie that carried out the 1964 Coup and supported the autocratic military regime until its accelerated decrepitude with the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s. It was the same bourgeoisie associated with imperialism that operated the slow, gradual and safe transition to political democracy – a transition from above, agreed with the military in the 1980s.
The 1988 Constitution was the product of the correlation of social and political forces in the 1980s in Brazil. It materialized bourgeois hegemony under the name of a democratic state governed by the rule of law, creating, at that time, a political system that could reproduce the complex of political misery that we will describe in this chapter. It was the autocratic bourgeoisie with a slave-colonial background that – with the ontogenetic fear of the Brazilian people – produced and supported the candidate who, from 1990 onwards, would implement the neoliberal program in Brazil: Fernando Collor de Mello (PRN).[ii]).
But the New Republic, established with the 1988 Constitution, lasted until 2016. With the deep crisis of global capitalism from 2008 onwards and the long depression of the 2010s, the Brazilian bourgeoisie, the dominant class and leader of the neoliberal State, carried out – once again – a coup d'état – no longer in military form (as in 1964), but in legal-parliamentary form (lawfare[iii]), aiming to remove President Dilma Rousseff (PT), a political obstacle to the ruling class and its factions being able to restructure Brazilian capitalism in their own way, by increasing the rate of exploitation and the plundering of national wealth.
This is how the neoliberal state was consolidated in Brazil. We understand the neoliberal state as the political materiality of the decline of civilization in Brazil. Thirty years of the neoliberal state were more than enough to confirm the results of the policy of reinforcing the public debt system (permanent neoliberal austerity), the system of overexploitation of the workforce (predominance of low wages) and the system of production of cultural ignorance (media manipulation on an intensity never before seen in Brazilian history).
The 1990s were marked by neoliberal counter-reforms in the State and the economy, as well as by the strengthening of ethos neoliberal influence on civil society through media manipulation. This is how the neoliberal State was established, a power structure reproduced in the following decades by all governments – right-wing or left-wing – of the Brazilian Republic. The PT, a historic party of the Brazilian left, underwent a Great Transformation[iv] and conformed to the reproduction of the dominant order.
During the PT governments, under the spirit of Lulaism, the neoliberal State was established. Neoliberalism eliminated politics, but this only occurred due to the elimination of the antagonistic role of the social and political left against the bourgeois order.[v]. As much as neoliberalism, the Great Transformism was responsible for deepening political misery in Brazilian life. Thus, the death of politics by neoliberalism is the death of the social and political left capable of criticizing the bourgeois order. This contributed to consolidating the neoliberal State, which in 2024 completes thirty years of effective domination of neoliberal capitalism in the country – with the support of the Brazilian left represented by the charismatic figure of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (PT).
The methodological distinction between State and government
It is crucial to distinguish between State and government. The government is a part of the State. Electoral parties aim only to administer the materiality of the political State of capital, thus aspiring to government in order to occupy positions and manage the establishment, that is, the power of the bourgeoisie. The difference between government and state is, in fact, a complex issue that has been the subject of debate in political science for centuries.
In general, it can be stated that the State is the sovereign entity that holds the monopoly of legitimate force, with the objective of guaranteeing the property relations of the dominant class. It is the product of a historical-social construction of the propertied classes, arising from the need to organize (dominate/direct) society and ensure its order and security as prerequisites for social reproduction.
The State is made up of a set of institutions, including the government, as well as the army, the police and the judicial system. The State also has a defined territory, a population and sovereignty, while the government is the set of institutions that administer the State. The government, in turn, is the institution that exercises political power within the State, formed by a group of people, generally elected, responsible for making the decisions that govern society.
The government can be divided into three branches: executive, legislative and judiciary. Therefore, the main difference between government and state is that the government administers the state, that is, it is responsible for making the decisions that govern society, while the state is the political materiality that guarantees order and security in capitalist society. The state is a permanent institution, while the government is temporary, elected for a specific period. The monopoly of legitimate force is a characteristic of the state, not of the government.[vi]
In Brazil, the State is a federative republic, which means that it is divided into three levels of government: federal, state and municipal. Each level has its own powers and responsibilities. The federal government is responsible for national policies, such as defense, economy and diplomacy. State governments are responsible for state policies, such as education, health and public safety. Municipal governments deal with local policies, such as basic sanitation, public transportation and culture. All governments elected during the New Republic period in Brazil – whether right-wing or left-wing – merely reproduced and consolidated the neoliberal State. Due to pressure from the bloc in power, these governments accepted the limits of their administrative function.
Even the governments of the PT, the country's main left-wing party, have renounced a strategy of power that goes beyond the political materiality of the Brazilian capitalist state, which, since 1990, has been constituted as a neoliberal state. For example, the approval of the Fiscal Responsibility Law[vii] It became a fixed clause of the Brazilian State, which all governments chose to obey.
If they defied this law, they would not only face legal penalties, but also those imposed by the financial market, which would force them to submit to another unbreakable clause: the public debt system or the financial oligarchy system. The left-wing governments elected since 2002 have only sought to make the best use of the new neoliberal order, implementing social compensation measures for the poorest, while always respecting the interests of the property-owning class. This is the spirit of class collaboration that has characterized left-wing governments since then.
As the neoliberal state, with its systems of class domination, consolidated itself, it overcame and subordinated civil society. In short, the political leaders of the largest left-wing party in Brazil renounced a project of power that would overcome the neoliberal state and, instead, sought to reinforce it. When elected in 2022, the political left, represented by the PT, was paralyzed by the consolidated power of the neoliberal state, being unable to implement its program of social change due to the lack of room for maneuver. This was the result of more than 20 years of class conciliation and accommodation to the neoliberal state, which today has rendered the social and political left inoperative.
Neoliberal State and the Tragedy of Politics
In addition to clarifying what the neoliberal state is, our book seeks to criticize the Brazilian left, which has renounced criticism of the neoliberal state, limiting itself to operating the dominant order, administering it and, as a supposed left, trying to make it more humane, but without promoting a counter-hegemonic project (or action). This political stance of the social-liberal left, represented by the PT (Workers' Party), has run its course and is now surrendered to the neoliberal state.
The horizon of the political struggle of this social-liberal left – as we will call it – is limited to electoral victory and governability within the neoliberal order. While the neoliberal right and the extreme right are counter-reformists, the social-liberal left manages the new political and social materiality resulting from the new neoliberal order, limiting itself to “low-intensity reforms”. Basically, it does not have a strategy of counter-power, but rather dedicates itself to tactics of political struggle focused on elections, re-elections and occupation of positions in state institutions.
The neoliberal left is not a reformist left, as the social-democratic left was, but rather a counter-reformist left. Therefore, we can say that the Brazilian left has failed once and for all, as its entire politically relevant spectrum – PT and PSOL – has incorporated the structural characteristics of bourgeois politics in Brazil, as we will describe below. This is Brazil's greatest historical tragedy. The ideological forms of the misery of the practice alienated politics, which have characterized our political system, serve to reproduce the order of capital.
These alienated forms of capital's politicality adhered to the practice politics, causing an irremediable distortion. By incorporating these determinations of the alienated politicality of capital, the social-liberal left contributed to the death of politics and liberal democracy, by identifying itself with its historical opponents. Although it presents itself as an alternative to the neoliberal right, the social-liberal left has become increasingly incapable of changing the bourgeois order, which today is unable to meet the demands of civilization.
The death of politics – which is also the death of the left – is a fundamental operation of capital’s neoliberal offensive. Capital has subsumed left-wing politics, degrading it in the same way it has degraded work, consumption, culture and society. This configures the new sociometabolism of capital or the sociometabolism of barbarism in the realm of political praxis. Incapable of offering a civilizing project, capital produces the sociometabolism of barbarism.
In the case of countries with dependent, hyper-late capitalism and a slave-colonial formation, the degradation of politics has always been a strategy of domination by the ruling class. However, in past decades, there were left-wing opposition movements capable of envisioning grand politics. In the 1980s, when the PT was created, for example, there was a horizon for grand politics, supported by an organized class base. As capital dismantled the working class, it also dismantled its political representation. This is what changed with capital's neoliberal offensive – the subsumption of left-wing politics to capital.
The misery of Brazilian politics was not created by neoliberal capitalism. Our oligarchic and coup-plotting political tradition has, for centuries, degraded the political activity of the masses, emptying them of their fundamental value. Petty politics, with its constellation of alienated attributes, has dominated political praxis since the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889. Therefore, the culture of opportunism and opportunism, a practice of the national conservative right, permeated by tacticism, is nothing new.
Politics has been reduced to a game of interests devoid of ideology, shaped by the conveniences of the moment. The autocratic form of bourgeois domination in Brazil has contributed to emptying the value of politics as an instance for social transformation. This explains the ontogenetic depoliticization of Brazilian society. “Politics is not discussed,” says the popular saying. The culture of depoliticization, which permeates the popular imagination, reinforces the physiologism (or political metabolism) of oligarchic-bourgeois domination.
The tragedy of Brazil is that, after a decade of transition to political democracy, the country surrendered to the neoliberal offensive, which, by nature, is hostile to the socialization of politics and the democratization of society. The New Republic was doomed from the start. Thus, Brazilian political misery rose to a higher level, with the social-liberal left joining it by renouncing the transformation of the neoliberal State, limiting itself to a government project. The era of neoliberal capitalism is the era of historical decline of capital, due to its structural crisis.
In this way, all the values dear to bourgeois civilization, originating from the French Revolution, lose their meaning. Liberal democracy, emptied of its real meaning, faced with the structural precariousness of work, enters a deep crisis, along with the political system. The rise of the extreme right is the death certificate of liberal democracy.
After the neoliberal decade, politics entered an era of indeterminacy.[viii] Terminal capitalism, turned farcical, has reduced political democracy to what it really is: a powerful but powerless signifier in the face of income concentration and social inequality, the gap between rich and poor. Bourgeois democracy loses its value in the neoliberal era because it becomes irrelevant in the face of the neoliberal state's visceral inability to resolve the social question in the 21st century.
Because it is not a substantive democracy of universal value, it becomes an accessory democracy, devalued by the dissatisfied masses, who, on the contrary, cultivate hatred towards democracy.[ix]
Small politics and alienated political praxis
The distinction between “big politics” and “small politics” is a concept from Antonio Gramsci’s Marxism, fundamental to characterizing not only politics in the neoliberal era, but also the politics that has historically dominated Brazil since the founding of the Republic. Small politics has always been present, and what made the difference was the actions of the left. Small politics represents the misery of political practice, around which various alienated attributes gravitate. It is an ideology of political praxis that the Brazilian ruling class has always cultivated and disseminated in both civil and political society.
The concepts of “petty politics” and “big politics” form a conceptual pair that serves not only to define decisive features of the general concept of politics, but also appears as an essential element in what Gramsci calls the “analysis of situations” and “power relations”. The predominance of one or another form of political action – whether “petty” or “big” politics – is decisive in determining which class or group of classes exercises domination or hegemony in a concrete situation, and in what way it does so.
According to Antonio Gramsci: “Big politics (high politics) and small politics (everyday politics, parliamentary politics, backroom politics, intrigues). Big politics encompasses issues related to the foundation of new States, the struggle for the destruction, defense or preservation of certain organic economic and social structures. Small politics encompasses the partial and everyday issues that arise within an already established structure, resulting from struggles for predominance between the various fractions of the same political class.”[X]
The ancestral hegemony of the Brazilian bourgeoisie has historically degraded political practice, obstructing any movement of catharsis, a central element of political practice according to Gramsci. Recalling Gramsci's concept of “catharsis”, we can affirm that only “great politics” achieves the “cathartic moment”, that is, the passage from the particular to the universal, from the economic-corporate to the ethical-political, from necessity to freedom. Gramsci warns us, however, that “it is great politics to try to exclude great politics from the internal sphere of state life and reduce everything to petty politics.”[xi]. This is what the Brazilian bourgeoisie has done historically: exclude major politics from the practical and sensitive horizon of the masses.
In other words, for the subaltern classes, the predominance of petty politics is always a sign of defeat. However, this predominance can be – and often is – the condition for the supremacy of the dominant classes. When the social-liberal left, from the 1990s onwards, gave up on operating the transition from the particular to the universal, from the economic-corporate to the ethical-political, and from necessity to freedom – by giving up, for example, the fight for socialism – it consolidated the supremacy of petty politics. This was the great historical defeat that allowed the consolidation of the neoliberal State.
The opposition between “big politics” and “small politics” also applies to the actions of intellectuals. “Big Transformism” was not limited to political praxis, but also involved intellectual action. The core of big transformism was precisely this: the predominance of small politics to the detriment of big politics, in the sense of abandoning the perspective of social totality and social class that would allow a horizon beyond capitalism and the elaboration of a socialist perspective.
The fact that the left has been reduced to petty politics does not prevent the bourgeoisie from being forced to practice grand politics. Petty and grand politics are not limited to a distinction between reaction and progress. In the era of neoliberal capitalism, the bourgeoisie has led grand politics towards capitalist restructuring, operating counter-reforms and processes of cathartic subjectivation in reverse.
If the “cathartic moment” represents the passage from the particular to the universal, from the economic-corporate to the ethical-political, from necessity to freedom, the reverse cathartic moment represents the production of particularist subjectivities, incapable of acting from an ethical-political perspective, resulting in the sociometabolism of barbarism. By involving the proletarian masses and the political and social left in petty politics, with the narrowness of its programs and the weakness of its national consciousness, the bourgeoisie demonstrated an immense effort to prevent any radical change. And this immense effort by the bourgeoisie is, in itself, a great policy.[xii]
*Giovanni Alves He is a retired professor of sociology at the Universidade Estadual Paulista (UNESP). Author, among other books, of Work and value: the new (and precarious) world of work in the 21st century (Praxis editorial project). [https://amzn.to/3RxyWJh]
Reference
Giovanni Alves. The Neoliberal State in Brazil: A Historical Tragedy. Marília, Praxis Publishing Project, 2024, 302 pages. [https://amzn.to/415qoPp]
Notes
[I] RIBEIRO, Darcy. The Brazilians: 1. Theory of Brazil. Voices: Rio de Janeiro, p. 97.
[ii] The National Reconstruction Party (PRN) was founded in 1989. It emerged from a split in the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) and its most prominent figure was Fernando Collor de Mello, who would be elected president of Brazil in the same year the party was founded.
[iii]lawfare is a term that combines the words “law” and “warfare” to describe the strategic use of legislation and legal processes as a form of warfare. In essence, lawfare involves the use (or abuse) of the legal system to achieve political, economic, or military goals by harming adversaries, weakening opponents, or discrediting public figures. This concept applies in both national and international contexts.
[iv] We understand the “Great Transformism” as the process of ideological and political change experienced by the Workers’ Party (PT) in the 1990s. This transformation resulted in the party becoming an administrator of the neoliberal bourgeois order, leading it to abandon comprehensive social reform policies in favor of targeted public policies and income transfer programs. This phenomenon was not limited to Brazil, but was part of a global trend that affected left-wing social democratic and labor parties in several countries. Notable examples include the British Labor Party under the leadership of Tony Blair and the German Social Democratic Party under Gerhard Schröder. The Great Transformism thus represented a significant shift in the political orientation and practices of these parties, aligning them more closely with neoliberal economic policies and moving them away from their original ideological roots. Antonio Gramsci used the term “transformism” to refer to the gradual co-optation of elements of the political opposition by the ruling class or group in power. Gramsci developed this concept by analyzing Italian politics in the late XNUMXth and early XNUMXth centuries, particularly during the Risorgimento (Italian unification) period. Transformism is a mechanism by which the ruling class maintains its power by absorbing and neutralizing potential leaders of the lower classes. By co-opting individuals or groups from the opposition, transformism weakens movements of resistance and social change. The main objective is to preserve the existing social order, avoiding significant structural changes. It can occur through political concessions, offers of positions, or partial incorporation of opposition demands. Transformism affects the formation of a national-popular collective will, hindering the organization of the lower classes, and is a strategy to maintain the cultural and political hegemony of the ruling class. Gramsci saw transformism as a way to avoid substantial reforms by maintaining superficial changes.
[v] This death of the left is what Francisco de Oliveira called “hegemony in reverse” in the 2010 book of the same name (OLIVEIRA, Francisco; BRAGA, Ruy; RIZEK, Cibele (Org.) Hegemony in Reverse: Economics, Politics and Culture in the Age of Financial Servitude. Boitempo editorial: São Paulo, 2010, p. 21). In this same book, Carlos Nélson Coutinho appears with the chapter entitled “The hegemony of small politics”.
[vi] BOBBIO, Norberto. State, government, society: Fragments of a political dictionary. Peace and Land, Rio de Janeiro. p.69-84
[vii] The Fiscal Responsibility Law (LRF) is a Brazilian law that was enacted on May 4, 2000, with the objective of establishing public finance standards focused on the responsibility in the fiscal management of federative entities, that is, the Union, states, Federal District and municipalities. Officially known as Complementary Law No. 101/2000, the LRF's main goal is to ensure the balance of public accounts, promoting a more responsible, transparent and efficient administration of public resources.
[viii] Francisco de Oliveira used the concept of “age of indeterminacy” to describe a historical period in which the old certainties and traditional analytical categories, especially those related to politics, economy and society, became insufficient to explain the complexity of the neoliberal capitalist world. This concept appears in his reflections on globalized capitalism and the impact of neoliberalism, particularly in the Brazilian and Latin American context. The book entitled “The Age of Indetermination” published in 2007 was organized by Franscisco de Oliveira and Cibele Saliba Rizek. In the “age of indeterminacy”, according to Francisco de Oliveira, there is a crisis in the traditional structures that previously guided society, such as the nation-state, forms of work, political ideologies and democratic institutions. Indeterminacy refers to a state of uncertainty and transition, in which old models no longer fully apply, but new models have not yet been clearly established. Some main points of the concept presented in the book are as follows include: (1). Collapse of Ideological and Political Certainties: Oliveira argues that, in the age of indeterminacy, traditional distinctions between left and right lose clarity, especially as left-wing movements adopt neoliberal practices (what he later – in 2011 – called “hegemony in reverse”). This generates a crisis of political identity, where traditional ideological categories can no longer adequately describe reality. (2) Subordination of Politics to Capital: A crucial aspect of the age of indeterminacy is the increasing subordination of politics to capital, particularly finance capital. Oliveira saw neoliberalism as a force that reconfigured politics, making it increasingly incapable of controlling or moderating market forces. This leads to a crisis of politics, where economic decisions dominate the agenda, leaving little space for transformative political projects. (3) Fragility of Democratic Institutions: In the era of indeterminacy, democratic institutions become fragile, with their ability to represent and respond to social demands being questioned. This fragility is exacerbated by the concentration of economic power and social inequality, which undermine the legitimacy and effectiveness of democracies. The age of indeterminacy is characterized by a widespread feeling of uncertainty and transience. The rules and norms that previously regulated social and economic relations seem increasingly volatile and unpredictable. This is reflected in phenomena such as job insecurity, volatility in financial markets and political instability. (4) Crisis of Representation and Work: Another central point in Oliveira's analysis is the crisis of work, especially in its traditional form. Globalization and technological advances have transformed labor relations, creating new forms of exploitation and precariousness. At the same time, workers' representation structures, such as unions and parties, are proving incapable of dealing with these new realities. In Brazil, the era of indeterminacy is marked by the adoption of neoliberalism, the weakening of social movements and the crisis of traditional political institutions. For Oliveira, this era reflects the inability of the political and economic system to offer adequate responses to society's demands, leading to widespread disorientation. On a global level, the age of indeterminacy reflects the collapse of old orders, such as the welfare state, and the rise of a globalized capitalism that escapes the control of nation states.
[ix] Rancière, Jacques. Hatred of Democracy. Boitempo Publishing: Sao Paulo, 2014.
[X] GRAMSCI, Antonio. Prison Notebooks, Volume 3, Machiavelli. Notes on the State and Politics. Brazilian Civilization, 2000: p. 21
[xi] GRAMSCI, Antonio. op.cit. p. 21
[xii] COUTINHO, Carlos Nelson. From Rousseau to Gramsci: Essays on Political Theory. pp. 124-125.
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