By RENATO NUCCI JR. & LEONARDO SACRAMENTO*
The term poor on the right is a way for segments of the left to free themselves from the responsibility they have for the political and social situation we find ourselves in.
A threatening specter is haunting Brazilian reality: the specter of the right-wing poor. Against this specter are the progressive intelligentsia, the middle classes that are awakening to political struggle, and even part of the institutional left, who have found in the term a way to free themselves from the responsibility they bear for the political and social situation in which we find ourselves. They have seen in the term an effective way to hide their role as the left wing of the great conservative arrangement that dominates the Brazilian economy, politics, and culture.[I]
But who is the right-wing poor person? In short, they would be a person who, despite their exploited condition, would vote for or support, even with a certain degree of awareness, measures and political projects that are contrary to their interests. The right-wing poor person would be the main person responsible for the reproduction of their own misery.
It was not possible to know who invented the term, but it began to circulate on social media at least since 2018. It was most widely spread by left-wing blogs and websites that began to use it as a kind of resentment against the popular sectors that supported Dilma's impeachment, Temer's regressive reforms and Bolsonaro's election. However, the idea of using it as a scientific category comes from Jessé Souza, who believes that there is an ideology beforehand for the working class. Here we have the first mistake, a plunge into idealism full of moralistic aspects.
When has the ideology of the ruling class not been the hegemonic ideology? Idealist parallelism assumes that the working class should necessarily vote for candidates that Jessé considers to be left-wing – which has a different meaning for the author, as we will see below. If this parallelism, this exact correspondence, existed, the surprise would be with the middle class, which lives well in its condominium or building with a doorman in the city center and proposes to be of a limited left in processes of transformation. If it lives well, it should be of the right, and not of a left, even a politically limited one. Under this meaningless parallelism, if the poor on the right are an excrescence, the middle class on the left is an even greater excrescence.
This paradox can only be resolved if the author considers that consciousness is the determining factor for adopting an ideology. Therefore, the subject studied would be a conscious being who would break with everyday alienation, leaving precarious workers to be “right-wing poor” while the white middle class walks towards paradise.
Even if it is given almost scientific status, the fact is that the right-wing concept of the poor is a non-concept. It is useless for explaining reality, because it basically expresses a moral condemnation: the blame for the poverty and misery of the masses would not lie with capitalism, but with the right-wing poor themselves, who are primarily responsible for the reproduction of their misery. Its intrinsic premise is that of the adjudicated condition of class consciousness, imputing to them a certain way of interpreting and acting upon reality.
It is much more about an expectation created by middle-class sectors of the intelligentsia about how social classes, especially the poor, who are not a class but a condition of life that exists in greater or lesser numbers according to the reality of the working class in each country, should behave politically and electorally. If the poor do not behave as expected by the intelligentsia, this is attributed to irrational behavior, like a collective moral deviation of a pathological nature.
Blogs, websites and publishers are specializing in this anti-science because, like self-help and coaching, it has a captive audience that morally claims to be naturally endowed with moral superiority. In addition, it protects the government's economic policy from criticism, placing social movements and the working class as scapegoats for the failures of the social democratic left.
However, those who have been involved in class-based political activism for a long time are not surprised by the existence of politically conservative positions within the working class. This is the most common situation. Most of the time, confusion, apathy and depoliticization reign. Some struggles for immediate demands for wages and other improvements are even carried out. However, class consciousness for itself, which assumes a revolutionary condition whose symptom appears when those below no longer want to live as they used to and those above can no longer command as they used to, only appears in very specific historical conditions. And this is because the working class, by the simple fact of having to work, is incapable of living in a state of permanent mobilization. It only reaches this stage when it fights for state power.
Those who expressed surprise at this supposedly anomalous behavior were middle-class segments influenced by left-wing liberalism, which awakened to political struggle following the June 2013 protests. This awakening was accompanied, at the same time, by a decline in workers' and popular struggles, as a result of the union reform and the profound deregulation of the labor market that it caused, the devastating consequence of which is the high degree of informality, precariousness, and individualization of labor relations. The space of popular struggle was occupied by these middle-class sectors, with demands of a democratic nature that were not closely linked to the capital vs. labor conflict, or for the expansion of universal public policies such as education and health. The coup against Dilma in 2016 and Bolsonaro's electoral victory in 2018 heightened awareness around democratic issues.
For these segments, when they emerged into the social struggle, it was incomprehensible to them that the poor could express right-wing positions. That is why a few lines above we identified in the use of the non-concept poor on the right the idea of the adjudicated condition of consciousness. Because any manifestation outside the pertinent effects that it should generate can only be explained by a moral or even pathological deviation. The poor on the right would be yet another Brazilian jabuticaba; a typical product of national iconoclasm.
However, Piketty (Capital and Ideology, 2020) demonstrates that the phenomenon of the “poor right” is not a Brazilian peculiarity. In both Europe and the United States, a change in the sociological profile of social democratic voters has been observed since the 1980s/1990s. From a party largely supported by the working class vote, it has become “the party of higher education graduates” (2020, p. 47).
The reasons for this change are complex. But his hypothesis for this shift is that “the popular categories gradually felt abandoned by the left-wing parties, which would have progressively turned to other social categories (and, above all, to those with a higher level of education)” (2020, p. 653).
As a classical social democrat, Piketty does not delve deeply into the underlying causes of this divorce. But the fact, which he partially admits, is that social democracy has shifted even further to the right of the political spectrum since the debacle of the socialist camp. In a context of constant neoliberal adjustment policies, social democracy has become a key player in the implementation of measures that have caused an increase in social inequality.
The economist attributes the shift of the working classes to the right to the fact that they feel “abandoned by the left-wing parties”. The responsibility of the left-wing parties in this situation is diluted, as the distancing of these and the working classes is the result of a “feeling” of abandonment.
Without the threat of the socialist camp, which, when it disappeared in several countries, caused the anti-capitalist perspective represented by the communist movement to fade, social democracy no longer needed to fulfill its role as a political force to contain the workers' movement through economic concessions. If there was a shift to the right of the popular classes and the most precarious and impoverished segments of the working class, it is because there is an identical shift of social democracy, which has become a kind of administrator of the neoliberal adjustment with a more human face, transformed into a political-ideological expression of middle-income segments and of a certain intellectuality guided by a liberal left-wing ideology.
The role played by parties that seek to reform capitalism, but that reform it not in favor of labor but of capital, seems to be where the functionality of the right-wing non-concept of the poor lies. Because if the phenomenon is described as segments of the people who vote for or support candidates and policies that are contrary to their interests, they do so because social democracy, when it comes to government, governs against the interests of the people. Political differences are diluted and even alternatives for breaking away from neoliberalism are blocked.
Image: Jasmine Pang
How and why Jessé Souza became a representative of the “enlightened left”
The PT has made an epistemological shift in the last thirty years. It replaced workers with the poor, making the intervention project of the Brazilian left, starting in 2006, especially after the real estate crisis of 2008 and the increase in commodities due to Chinese growth from 2000 onwards, in an income problem. The marketing of the “new middle class” took hold, propagating to the four corners the dream of “individualistic entrepreneurship” that promised the worker to leave the working class, or from the perspective of Prosperity Theology, to leave the suffering class.
Inequality is a product of exploitation. Ignoring categorization, one can easily treat exploitation as a result of inequality and poverty, as was the case with the most widely accepted explanations of the Workers' Party. Exploitation would be super-exploitation beyond the limits considered socially acceptable, and not the relationship between capital and labor. As an example of this trend, one can analyze the case of Jessé Souza, for whom the bourgeoisie does not have a national project.
It is important to note that Jessé Souza is not a Marxist. He considers himself an anti-socialist social democrat, as he expressly stated in the book Delay Elite. To this end, the author treats Germany as an idealization of society, a kind of social democratic utopia. However, Germany is Germany only because it consolidated itself as an imperialist power in the 19th century and then in the 20th century through its industrial-financial complexes. Despite the soft neoliberalism of conservative and social democratic governments, it still manages to maintain healthy relations between its citizens within its borders, having mechanisms for workers to participate in the control and decision-making of its companies.
But what would have become of Volkswagen in Brazil without its cooperation with the Civil-Military Dictatorship and its disregard for the mechanisms for the participation of Brazilian workers in control and decision-making, far from the German “democratic” standard? What would have become of the impeccable Swiss and the semi-private Swiss social democracy throughout the 20th century if it were not for the money laundering resources of almost the entire planetary bourgeoisie and its banking participation in financing the trafficking of Africans in previous centuries? Or what would have become of the efficiency of the French State without its genocidal experience in Algeria, Vietnam and the systematic robbery of African countries, such as Ivory Coast and Senegal? Would the energy security of the French in the second half of the 20th century have existed without Niger, Burkina Faso and Mali, countries that had their uranium and other minerals stolen for decades?
This type of analysis survives if the concepts of imperialism, international division of labor and exploitation are ignored. According to the author, it was from his personal experience na Germany that formed its theoretical foundation, its ideal type: “regulated capitalism and not state-controlled socialism was the most perfect form of social organization” (SOUZA, 2017, p. 158).
Interestingly, his individual experience produces distortions due to the idealization of the German and the progressive middle class. This is a distortion that leads to political positions not very different from Buarque's, as if there were a historical heredity, an original sin, which is different from understanding which structures in slavery superstructure the capitalist mode of production and how: “Slavery, as we have seen, made it difficult to form black families and fought any form of independence and autonomy of the slave. It is no coincidence, therefore, that our poor have single-parent families and have difficulty developing a pattern that satisfactorily reproduces the roles of son, father and brother of every middle-class family” (SOUZA, 2017, p. 99).
In addition to subverting Bourdean analysis, Jessé Souza makes a counter-analysis: family composition as a founding element of reproduction, and not reproduction as a founding and structural element of family composition. There is anthropological research that demonstrates the role of economic relations in the family composition of workers, such as that carried out on the effects of Bolsa Família on the reduction of the birth rate and the empowerment of women.
The founding element of the reproduction of slavery is the right to property and objectification, reproduced in the family or in the non-family, since everyone was property. However, this is not the founding element of the contemporary capitalist mode of production. Jessé concludes that the difficulty of black families in “developing a pattern that satisfactorily reproduces the roles of son, father and brother of every middle-class family” is due to a legacy of slavery, a legacy of history embodied in the difficulties and behavior of black people, as if it were the transmission of an imperative created in slavery that continues as a collective unconscious in black people.
To this end, it ends up ignoring the mechanisms of control over the mobility of the bourgeoisie and the middle class over black workers. Here we have a poor use of Bourdieu and a racialized perception of black workers based on an intangible and unproven hypothesis, that of the cognitive-behavioral transmission from slaves to blacks, for generations, with regard to family composition.
Jessé's need to prove that liberalism and Marxism share the same starting point, the battered “economism” (SOUZA, 2017, p. 87), made him construct a compartmentalized analysis in a mechanistic Weberianism. He does not do what Bourdieu did, the critique of the transformation of the dominant culture, one among many, in The culture, which structures all cultures, transforming them into subcultures or non-cultures. In other words, it is not possible to separate culture and ideas from material relations. Denaturalization depends on economic analysis, or “economism,” as the author says, which he does not do because he understands reality as a great struggle of ideas and moralities.
And this is where we have Jessé’s greatest falsification. His defense of social democracy is based on an individual experience when, as a young man, he lived in Germany. For him, what he saw was what he considered to be the most perfect society, in which the “president of Mercedes-Benz could have been my doctor too”, expressing himself in the “pride of the Germans in not having differentiated health care for each social class”.
This without “compromising the efficiency and dynamism of the economy as a whole”, differentiating himself from Brazilian economists: “The mantra of our conservative economists, that it is necessary to flatten workers’ wages in order to have economic growth, has shown its fallacy. The Germany that I knew as a young man reflected wealth everywhere. The country had, as it still has today, four to five large high-tech corporations in all important industrial sectors. Almost always with capital divided between the State and private capital. For me, all of that was like the concrete realization of Karl Marx’s ‘communist paradise’: to each according to his needs. I learned that regulated capitalism, not state-controlled socialism, was the most perfect form of social organization” (JESSÉ, 2017, p. 157-158).
Regulated capitalism can only work in a country if it subordinates the capital and labor forces of other countries through the export of capital, rentierism, and the deregulation of the capital-labor relationship in the peripheral country. During the same period that Jessé had his transcendental experience, practically all large German companies participated in the Brazilian Civil-Military Dictatorship. This conclusion is only possible because imperialism does not exist as an analytical category. Consequently, there is no movement of capital, no inequality in the value of the labor force, and, if it does exist, it is as if it were the exclusive work of the morality of its local elites.
His personal experience in Germany, which would have shaped his political thinking, made him believe that German social democracy was based on the intelligence of its elite while the Brazilian elite represented its opposite, which, as he stated in The Folly of Brazilian Intelligence (2015), would attribute pre-modern behavior to Brazilian workers, preventing the emergence of a “democratic and competitive” order. Therefore, in Germany there would be a “democratic and competitive” order, even if its companies exploited people around the world, as in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s – could it be that the Germans saw pre-modern behavior in Brazilians, as did the Brazilian elite, while Jessé lived his social democratic dream of a “democratic and competitive” society?
Brazil's problem would be the constitution of a peripheral modernity based on a set of socio-moral values, or a habitus disconnected from the “prior existence of an explicit, articulated and autonomous cognitive and moral context that can oppose, limiting or stimulating, the logic of the functional imperatives that emanate from consolidated institutional practices” (2006, p. 100). In short, there was a lack of values that could build, with the Proclamation of the Republic of 1889, a “competitive” society.
In contrast, Jessé idealizes European societies and the “belle époque”, object of criticism by Thomas Picketty for not having any factual relation to processes of reducing inequality and income concentration. In Capital in the XNUMXst Century, Picketty concludes that “the formal nature of the regime carries little weight compared to the inequality relation r > g” (2014, p. 356), in which r is capital income and g is economic growth.
The Frenchman concludes that only exogenous ruptures can effectively act against concentration. In the European case, there were two major wars and the fear of communism. There was no intelligence, morality, competitiveness or rationality. If war is understood humanitarianly as irrationality, it remains to be concluded that irrationality was left. The idealization, as we have seen, involves a happy adolescence in Heidelberg and the forgetting of the action of German capital throughout the world, including in Brazil.
What Jessé has, deep down, is a resentment that there is no Brazilian elite like he idealistically projects, that could be comparable to the German elite he saw for the Germans. Deep down, it is a mongrelism that he claims to fight so much. The same German elite exploited and killed around the planet without any embarrassment, as we saw with Volkswagen in Brazil, its alliance with the civil-military dictatorship and its slave farm during the 1970s and 1980s, now being prosecuted by the Public Ministry of Labor.[ii] Siemens established its factories in Brazil during the dictatorship, with the bonus of not having a union movement and having absolute control over the value of the workforce. BAYER supported Pinochet and BASF consolidated itself in Brazil in a context identical to Siemens. It is easy to build a “perfect” society, as Jessé stated, when capital from other countries, produced by enslavement and absolute control over the waged workforce, is transferred to the Germans to finance their “social democracy” for white Germans.
For Jessé, the persistence of a model that highly concentrates resources would be explained by the Brazilian elites based on justifications that attribute its causes to the pre-modern behavior of the majority of the population. Therefore, this would be the main reason why a “democratic and competitive” order has not been forged in our country, thus naturalizing social inequalities. Therefore, it would be a problem of a bad and backward elite. Once again, moralism is the analytical parameter.
That is why Jessé was consistent in his analysis of black families, because “our poor” would have difficulty forming families because slavery had shaped something in their minds that would impose itself on blacks regardless of social conditions. “Our” poor is an interesting slip of the tongue by someone who is not poor and sees himself on another pole, whether in terms of class or in terms of consciousness. It is just another racist and conservative position disguised as progressive, like almost all progressivism. Is it different from what the Brazilian elite would conclude?
Jessé did not stop there. Realizing that his German social democratic dream was in ruins in the face of the advance of neoliberalism, he blamed feminist leaders: “The great allies in the war against the unions were unemployment that became structural, enabling the ‘flexibilization’ of the work regime, on the one hand, and the massive entry of women into the workforce, which was perceived as ‘liberation’ by many feminist leaders” (SOUZA, 2017, p. 158-159). The problem is that it was. Capital moves towards the universalization of the workforce without eliminating its social differences – reproducing them in inequality –, which allows capital to strengthen the industrial reserve army and distribute itself among the different rates of exploitation, since the differences/inequalities must be crystallized in the reproduction of the workforce. It is the unequal uniformity of the workforce. A mere mention of the export of German capital or even the implementation of German policies in favor of capital would be enough to not hold the feminist movement responsible for the end of the social democratic dream in Germany.
But it is in his most recent book, The Poor Right: Revenge of the Bastards, that this whole prejudiced conception about the Brazilian worker is revealed. Jessé has an a priori conclusion: the problem of the left lies in the white worker from the South and the black evangelical worker. Why? Because they were the stronghold of Bolsonarism in the last election. For this reason, he ignores the Northeast, a region that throughout the 1990s voted for the PSDB, while the South and Southeast regions voted heavily for the PT. His premise would need to answer why workers from the Northeast voted for the PSDB and then started to vote for the PT and how workers from the South and Southeast started to vote heavily for candidates opposing the PT, including in industrial centers. But the data in Jessé are treated in an immobile and static way.
Without established criteria and overcoming contradictions and paradoxes in the choice of variables, he records the interviews in the chapters themselves, a mere six interviews with Southerners, one of whom was a woman, and six interviews with Evangelicals, two of whom were women. Obviously, the tiny number of interviews does not allow for any generalization about the country.
In any case, ignoring these issues, Jessé's central argument is based on the resentment of the white southerner and the moralism of the black evangelical from the outskirts, disconnecting their votes from the economic issue. The PT, therefore, would represent the black and poor, while the resentful white southerner would identify with Bolsonaro. Once again, this hypothesis should have faced the fact that the Northeast has always voted for the PSDB, from the redemocratization to 2002. By itself, his hypothesis would not pass a rigorous master's degree examination, for example. There is clearly an error in not confronting a basic fact. What would have happened to the Northeast? This is what Jessé ignores. And it doesn't matter if it is by mistake or on purpose. The lack of confrontation completely invalidates his hypothesis.
At no point in the book does Jessé make any analysis of the crisis of capitalism, financialization, deindustrialization, precariousness and the rise of the far right, nor does he criticize the PT for not confronting the financial market. On the contrary, he treats the PT, without making any explicit reference, as if it were a party that necessarily opposed the financiers, ignoring all the adjustments to the 2023 fiscal framework and the cuts in social investments in 2024.
If before the moral problem was the elite, now the moral problem is the “poor right-winger”, the worker who does not see how good the financial social democratic left is for him. And why does he not see it? Because the worker is a moralist. For Jessé, we have a working class that is morally and intellectually inferior to the enlightened left that lives in the centers of Brazilian capitals.
In participation in the program On the Line, on December 13, Jessé Souza states: “The main political struggle is the struggle over the hegemony of dominant ideas. What makes me desperate is that we have leaders on the left, in the democratic field, who don’t seem to understand this. The guy can’t see beyond his own nose, he doesn’t have anything long-term […] The issue of knowledge is fundamental and this battle has to be fought.”[iii]
It is coherent. If there is no imperialism, no export of capital, and no appropriation of capital from central countries over peripheral ones, why would there be a class struggle? There is primarily a struggle of ideas. Which ideas? The ideas related to German social democracy? If the dominant ideas are those of the ruling class, it is a fortuitous and irrelevant detail. The sociologist therefore becomes the main representation of a middle class that declares itself progressive and left-wing, regardless of its real political significance, that would fight in the field of ideas in favor of the working class, despite the working class. As I said 18 years ago, it is a cognitive problem that would be expressed in a complete lack of “cognitive preconditions for an adequate performance to meet the demands (variable in time and space) of the role of producer, as direct reflections in the role of citizen” (2006, p. 170). If it is a cognitive problem, it is a moral problem, now directed at the working class.
The non-concept of “right-wing poor” mimics a kind of self-redemption of this middle class over Brazilian society, purging its political sins in the name of a more conciliatory position, especially in the realm of political economy. The extreme right would therefore advance through morality and ideas, as if they had been created by spontaneous generation, without any connection to social and economic relations, but with an enormous capacity to impose itself on those same social and economic relations.
This idealistic and moralistic vision finds space in the niches of the wealthiest left that cannot, materially, be classified as “poor right-wing.” Jessé ignores or does not dedicate even a single line to analyzing how the majority forces of the Brazilian left, in recent decades, have given up on leading even a reformist project worthy of the name. He does not have a revolutionary theory of Brazil, a fundamental condition for a practice that is at least reformist, which deprives him of the strategy to carry out profound political and social transformations. His political horizon is limited to managing in a “humanized” way the application of the endless cycles of ultraliberal adjustment.
The consequence of this conversion to the center of the ideological spectrum makes the left move according to the ebbs and flows of the political scene and situation. Its historical horizon is short. It moves exclusively according to the electoral calendar, guided by common sense, intellectual fads, clichés, and a lack of critical thinking. In short, it moves guided by electoral opportunism and defends, according to the situation, the agendas and debates of the moment, but from a conservative bias.
Finally, the non-concept “right-wing poor” has been used to justify a new shift to the right by the Brazilian left, in which it seeks reconciliation with a supposed and phantasmagorical conservatism of the “Brazilian people,” which would be natural and inherent to workers, who are excessively religious, resentful, and moralistic. In practice, the use of the non-concept defends a kind of ontology of Brazilian workers, as Sérgio Buarque de Holanda did, while empowering more right-wing groups that inhabit, for various reasons, the Brazilian institutional left.
*Renato Nucci Jr. He is an activist with the communist organization Arma da Crítica.
Leonardo Sacramento is a teacher of basic education and pedagogue at IFSP. Author, among other books, of Discourse on Whiteness: Notes on Racism and the Apocalypse of Liberalism (Alameda). [https://amzn.to/3ClPH5p]
References
PIKETTY, Thomas. Capital in the XNUMXst century. Translation Monica Baumbarten de Bolle. Rio de Janeiro: Intrínseca, 2014. [https://amzn.to/4grpWj6]
PIKETTY, Thomas. Capital and Ideology. Translation: Maria de Fátima Oliva do Coutto. New York: Intrínseca, 2020. [https://amzn.to/3BQmgZ3]
SOUZA, Jesse. The Social Construction of Sub-Citizenship. Belo Horizonte, UFMG, 2006. [https://amzn.to/3ZPeN4m]
SOUZA, Jesse. The foolishness of Brazilian intelligence. Leya Publishing, Sao Paulo, 2015. [https://amzn.to/3VNqHuu]
SOUZA, Jesse. The backward elite: from slavery to Lava Jato. New York: Routledge, 2017. [https://amzn.to/3BtqqpT]
SOUZA, Jesse. The Poor Right: Revenge of the Bastards. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 2024. [https://amzn.to/41J8r9i]
Notes
[I] This text was prepared based on the writings of Nucci Jr (2016) and Sacramento (2023, chap. VI). Available, respectively, here e here.
[iii] Available in stock here.
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