By LUIZ CARLOS BRESSER-PEREIRA*

Fábio Mascaro Querido has just made a notable contribution to the intellectual history of Brazil by publishing “Lugar peripheral, ideias moderna” (Peripheral Place, Modern Ideas), in which he studies what he calls “USP’s academic Marxism”

Fábio Mascaro Querido has just published Peripheral place, modern ideas, where he studies what he calls “USP academic Marxism” – a group of intellectuals who, in the 1960s, approached Marxism, which had emerged strongly in Europe after the war and reached Brazil. These intellectuals, mainly sociologists, created the “Marx Seminar” or “Capital Group” to study Marx, which, under the leadership of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, had two versions: the first, in 1958, purely academic, and the second, of a more political nature, after the military coup of 1964.

When Fernando Henrique Cardoso took office as President of the Republic in 1995, the seminar became famous, always cited in a sympathetic light by the conservative press, because the authors involved had long since abandoned Marxism. Fábio Mascaro Querido says that this was the “founding myth” of the group.

The core of the group – those I propose to call “neoliberal Marxists” – was made up of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, José Arthur Giannotti and Francisco Weffort. This is an oxymoron that applies well to them, who became enchanted by Marxism in the 1960s, when hope for a socialist revolution was still alive. They made this Marxism less contradictory and revolutionary, and defined the two most important sociologists of the 1950s, Gilberto Freyre in Pernambuco and Guerreiro Ramos in Rio de Janeiro, as their adversaries. In 1963, Guerreiro Ramos expressed his “astonishment at the unusual fact that a counterrevolutionary ‘left’ had been formed in Brazil, whose support is the metaphysics of revolution” (Guerreiro, 1963: 15). He was referring to the final phase of ISEB, but it also applied to the neoliberal Marxism of USP at that time.[1]

A classic case of university competition. They focused their attack on Guerreiro Ramos because he was a developmentalist, as were Celso Furtado, Helio Jaguaribe and Ignacio Rangel – all from ISEB.[2] In 1963, Fernando Henrique Cardoso defended his livre-docência – a book written especially to demonstrate that in Brazil there was no national bourgeoisie – a central thesis of the developmentalists who defended a coalition of classes associating nationalist industrial entrepreneurs, urban workers and the modern public bureaucracy.

In the late 1960s, Fernando Henrique Cardoso abandoned Marxism and developed the “theory of associated dependency”, which defended Brazil's subordination to the Empire, although he did not make this clear.[3] But the Americans understood this very well, which allowed associated dependence to gain international repercussions, although many of those who disseminated it did not understand its “associated” character. In short, at the end of the 1960s, they considered themselves Marxists but were already almost liberals, and in the 1990s they became neoliberals.  

The term neoliberal Marxism naturally does not apply to Roberto Schwarz and Chico de Oliveira, who were part of the group, nor to Octávio Ianni and Florestan Fernandes, who were not really part of the group. Florestan Fernandes was the master of them all; he was the greatest sociologist that USP has ever had; he initially associated himself with the sociology of modernization, and later, outraged by what he saw in Brazil, he became a revolutionary Marxist. Fábio Mascaro Querido naturally does not use this expression because he was more an admirer than a critic of neoliberal Marxism.

Fábio Mascaro Querido distinguishes Roberto Schwarz from the others, who remained a Marxist throughout the years and, as he states, “radicalized the ‘negative’ dimension of criticism.” As a literary critic and writer, he did not worry about proposing policies, nor did he make concessions to be accepted by his circle. Unlike the hard core of the group, Roberto Schwartz remained a nationalist, as his great master, Antonio Candido, had been before him. And he associated himself with Paulo Arantes, a critic of neoliberal Marxism. Among them all, he is the only one who, on a theoretical level, is internationally recognized.[4]

Fábio Mascaro Querido used Roberto Schwarz's thinking as a reference or guiding thread in the book and dedicated two excellent chapters to him. He highlighted the broad role that Theodor Adorno played in his thinking, as well as the critique of modernization carried out by Robert Kurz in 1991, at a time when the Soviet Union was collapsing.[5] Fábio Mascaro Querido gave little importance to the critic's nationalism, which contradicts his negative perspective, but at the end of the second essay he cited a significant text: “the last word does not belong to the nation, nor to international ideological hegemony, but belongs to the conflicted present that crosses them”.[6] This conflicting present is that of the class struggle of specific interest groups for this or that problem.

In the 1960s and 1970s, the neoliberal-Marxist core and, more broadly, the anti-Vargas left fought nationalist developmentalism because they intended to be revolutionary, while developmentalism implied a compromise between the working class and the social-democratic left and the bourgeoisie. The neoliberal-Marxist academic core followed the same path; contrary to the developmentalist vision, it intended not to make concessions; it ended up conceding everything in the 1990s, when it became neoliberal. And the anti-Vargas left fought it because it identified an “internal culprit” for the defeat: it was the developmentalists, who, instead of being revolutionary, had bet on an agreement between the working class and the industrial bourgeoisie, brokered by the public bureaucracy.

The core group only became relevant after the military coup of 1964 – the great defeat of the developmentalist social democracy that occurred at that time. With their adversaries defeated thanks to the coup, it was now time for the sociologists from USP to take over the intellectual leadership of the left. Which they did, even though they were on the way to ceasing to be left-wing. In chapter 2, “The Revenge of the Paulistas,” Fábio Mascaro Querido describes the new phase. In the previous game, the developmentalists were in power, the neoliberal Marxists were simply out of the game. In 1964, they entered the game, became well-known, led a large part of the left, and the left stopped being nationalist. It is important to consider, however, that the left has always had difficulty adopting nationalist or developmentalist positions, since it believed in the possibility of a socialist revolution in the short term.

They were out of the game, but desperate to get in, especially to defeat the two most important sociologists of the 1950s, Guerreiro Ramos and Gilberto Freyre. The military coup took charge of defeating Guerreiro by revoking his mandate as a federal deputy and, for ten years, his right to run for re-election. While Celso Furtado was exiled, he and his colleagues from ISEB, Jaguaribe and Rangel, were subjected to intense attack by the alienated left, for whom the national-developmentalism associated with Getúlio Vargas was unacceptable. This, in addition to the attack from the right.

The next step was the book by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and development in Latin America (1969)[7] in which dependency becomes the cause of development rather than the obstacle. This was the “theory of associated dependency” that was emerging. The new truth, which spread rapidly throughout the intellectual left, categorically stated that a developmentalist class coalition associating industrial entrepreneurs with the left and the working class was impossible. The bourgeoisie did not exist and could not exist. (In fact, the developmentalist industrial bourgeoisie existed in Brazil in two brief periods [1950-1964 and 1967-1980]).

But the lack of a nationalist bourgeoisie was not a problem, because the so-called Empire was in fact just a benevolent hegemon; its multinational companies were contributing to the country's development, and Brazil only had to join it for development to occur. This is not what happened: in 1990, submission took place; in 1995, it deepened, and the country entered a state of near-stagnation.

However, one should not imagine that nationalist and developmentalist intellectuals escaped the attack by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, even though this attack was not perfectly clear. At first, Raúl Prebisch and Celso Furtado's CEPAL realized that it was under attack and did not want to publish the book through ILPES; later, however, it adapted to the criticism, accommodated itself to the Empire and lost any relevance in the realm of ideas. CEPAL only existed as an idea – that of classical structuralist developmentalism focused on industrialization – between 1949 and 1960 under the leadership of Raúl Prebisch. In 1964, the developmentalists were defeated and forced to remain silent. In the early 1970s, CEPAL abandoned developmentalism.

In the 1970s, this same left, unaware, allowed itself to be taken in by the ideas proposed by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto. In economic terms, these ideas were accepted, probably because the idea of ​​association with the Empire was not clear in the book and in the works that followed. And because the left was resentful of the 1964 coup.

On the other hand, the truly Marxist version of dependency theory, by André Gunder Frank, Ruy Mauro Marini and Theotônio dos Santos, is also mistaken because it counted on a socialist revolution in Latin America in the short term. This version was subject to a violent and unfair attack in an article written by José Serra and Fernando Henrique Cardoso himself.[8] I believe that the initiative was more José Serra's than Fernando Henrique's, because the latter is a man of the highest quality whose personality is incompatible with an attitude like that.

In 1970, under the leadership of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and with the support of Ford Foundation, Cebrap was created. It soon became a major center for studies in defense of democracy and criticism of inequality. It was at this time that I was invited to be a member of the Board of the new research entity, and I joined them. I was isolated at the Getúlio Vargas Foundation and needed dialogue. I realized that my developmentalist ideas were not well received there, but I was very well received, I shared with them the fight against the dictatorship and for the reduction of inequality, and I felt at home at Cebrap, where in addition to the intellectuals already mentioned, there were notable figures such as Chico de Oliveira and Paul Singer. We were all fighting against the military regime.

At that time, however, many of the things I am describing here were not clear to me. Between 1995 and 1999, I was part of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, I was the minister of Federal Administration and State Reform and of Science and Technology and, under the influence of the ideas that surrounded me, my developmentalist convictions and my interest in Marxism lost strength (but only for a while). I was, however, disappointed by the neoliberal character that had taken over the direction of the economy, and finally in 2003, I finally reconsidered my position in relation to my friend Fernando Henrique, I read his book with Enzo Faletto again, I understood its anti-national character, and I wrote the essay “From ISEB and CEPAL to the theory of dependency”, published in 2005, the first copy of which I gave to him. It was not a personal break, but an intellectual one; after all, I had understood the meaning of his work and his thinking.

Stimulated by the excellent book by Fábio Mascaro Querido, I decided to return to the theme of intellectual history in this review. A more critical review than the 2005 article – a critique of neoliberal Marxism. After all, I ask myself, what was the contribution to Brazil of this group of sociologists, political scientists and philosophers? How can it be compared with the contribution of the social-democratic developmentalists? The developmentalists associated themselves with Vargas, even though he was a dictator between 1937 and 1945; they associated themselves because he was the great statesman who promoted industrialization and the great economic development of Brazil.

The leading developmentalists had a significant influence on the realization of the Brazilian capitalist revolution, which took place between 1930 and 1980. Some of them were socialists, but they knew that socialist revolution was not a realistic possibility. Meanwhile, our neoliberal Marxists flirted with revolution without much commitment, and later associated themselves with the Empire and became neoliberals.

In the conclusion of the book, Fábio Mascaro Querido states that while the intellectuals of the national-developmentalist-popular cycle of the 1950s and 1960s were interested in a project of national modernization (anti-imperialist, I would add), “the São Paulo academics expressed the redefinition between intellectuals and politics that occurred in the wake of the transformations that both Brazilian society and universities underwent, starting in the 1970s (p. 261)”.

In other words, they managed to adapt to the social and political reality that surrounded them, instead of trying to change it. I sometimes saw Fernando Henrique, as President of the Republic, act by trying to adapt to what was happening instead of trying to shape it. He and his companions were more sociologists than republican agents. Fábio Mascaro Querido's book is a notable contribution to the intellectual history of Brazil.

* Luiz Carlos Bresser-Pereira Professor Emeritus at Fundação Getúlio Vargas (FGV-SP). Author, among other books, of In search of lost development: a new-developmentalist project for Brazil (FGV Publishing House) [https://amzn.to/4c1Nadj]

Extended version of article published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.

Reference

Fabio Mascaro Dear. Peripheral place, modern ideas – to the intellectuals of São Paulo, the potatoes. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2024, 288 pages. [https://amzn.to/3CtWtX9]

Notes

[1] Guerreiro Ramos (1963) Myth and Truth about the Brazilian Revolution, Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores.

[2] Furtado was associated with ISEB; the other three were part of ISEB – the institute that brought together the main nationalist intellectuals of the 1950s.

[3] Do not confuse the associated dependency theory with the dependency theory of Andre Gunder Frank and Ruy Mauro Marini, who was actually a Marxist.

[4] The theory of associated dependency had international repercussions, but besides being mistaken, it cannot be considered a theory – it is just a sophisticated (and unclear) justification of subordination.

[5] Robert Kurz (1991 [1992]) The Collapse of Modernization, São Paulo: Peace and Land. Original German, 1991.

[6] Dear, p. 246. Taken from “Readings in competition”, New Cebrap Studies, 75, July.

[7] Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Enzo Faletto (1969 [1970]) Dependency and Development in Latin America, São Paulo: European Book Diffusion. Original in Spanish, 1969.

[8] José Serra and Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1979) “The misfortunes of the dialectic of dependence”, CEBRAP Studies, no. 23.

Reference

Fabio Mascaro Dear. Peripheral place, modern ideas – potatoes for São Paulo intellectuals. New York, New York, 2024, 288 pages.https://amzn.to/4loCSt4]

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