By VALERIO ARCARY*
What prevailed in Brazil, over many generations, were transitions from above, or concertations between bourgeois fractions
“You don’t go far slowly” (Chico Buarque).
1.
All nations have their distinctions, originalities, greatness and miseries. Brazil is the country with the largest economy on the periphery of capitalism, it has a continental dimension and extends from the Amazon to the Pampa, it accounts for half of the population of South America, a little more than half of the people are black, and an image friendly international hotel built in the second half of the 20th century.
But, perhaps, the three political peculiarities are: (a) the absurdly large degree of social inequality that persists almost intact; (b) the historical capacity of the ruling class to seek solutions to social and political conflicts through negotiated agreements; (c) the existence of a gigantic working class, and one of the most influential lefts in the world.
Brazilian “exceptionality” results from these peculiarities and results in a paradox: the disconcerting slowness of any social transformation that reduces the terrible injustice that oppresses the nation. What prevailed in Brazil, over many generations, were transitions from above, or concertations between bourgeois factions.
Conflicts within the ruling class are resolved through compromise, long and detailed negotiations with mutual concessions. We don't know of civil war, except in Rio Grande do Sul, and a hundred years ago. The only rupture was an exception: the military coup of 1964. Many reasons explain our exceptionality. It's not simple.
2.
There are objective and subjective factors that help to understand this exceptionality. This is a paradox because chronic social inequality in the country that has the largest GDP and, at the same time, proportionally, the largest and most concentrated working class in the peripheral world, gigantic urban centers, more than 20 cities with a million people , should drive a very high level of social tension. Which favors changes, through reforms or revolution.
But it's not like that. All of Brazil's main neighboring countries – Argentina (2001/02), Venezuela (2002), Chile (2019), as well as Peru, Ecuador, and Bolivia – experienced pre-revolutionary situations in this century. Brazil doesn't. What prevailed in Brazil was the experience of Lulism. The PT has won five presidential elections since 2002. And it took an institutional coup, that is, a “cold” overthrow of the Dilma Rousseff government to pave the way for the election of a neo-fascist like Jair Bolsonaro.
And it could get worse. In the country's main city, a histrionic neo-fascist idiot, Pablo Marçal has just assumed leadership of the far-right movement in dizzying dynamics. Confirming that the danger is real and immediate. And no one can underestimate the danger of them returning to national power.
Different hypotheses to explain the paradox emerged. Two are the most important and have a “grain of truth”: (i) the ultra-objectivist theory refers, essentially, to the strength of the bourgeoisie; (ii) the ultra-subjectivist theory refers, symmetrically, to the fragility of popular consciousness. Perhaps the synthesis between them would be a more productive hypothesis. After all, the gigantic wealth and power, associated with the extreme reactionism of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, comparable only to its strategic intelligence, was very important in containing social pressure for change.
The subjective weakness of a very heterogeneous working class also explains the limits of its capacity for self-organization and union, and the astonishing political patience and reluctant illusions in concerted solutions. But one should not forget the presence of a third factor. The role of the middle layers.
The middle class in Brazil has always been smaller, in comparison, than in Argentina. But it is, as in all urbanized countries, the social cushion that offers stability to bourgeois domination. The middle class is traditionally the highest sectors of the world of salaried work who have risen through education, and share a way of life of the middle classes. But in Brazil, a racially fractured country, they are not black, and whiteness enjoys a privileged status. That matters.
3.
Today's Brazil has changed compared to that of the late 1970s. Throughout this historical cycle there were many oscillations in the power relations between classes, some favorable, others unfavorable for workers and their allies. But not once did a revolutionary situation arise. Here is a sketch of the periodization of the period up to Lula's first election.
What should interest us is that whenever the possibility of rupture existed, it was circumvented: (a) we had a rise in proletarian and student struggles, between 1978/81, followed by a fragile stabilization, after the defeat of the ABC strike from 1981 until the end of 1983, when the failure of Delfim Netto's “Asian” plan to boost exports, due to exchange rate devaluation, caused inflation to soar without recovering growth. (b) In 1984, a new wave infected the nation with the campaign for Diretas Já, and sealed the end of the military dictatorship, but João Figueiredo's government did not fall; (c) a new stabilization between 1985/86 with the inauguration of Tancredo/Sarney and the Cruzado Plan, and a new peak of popular mobilizations against superinflation that culminated in the electoral campaign that took Lula to the 1989 second round.
(d) A new brief stabilization, with the expectations generated by the Collor Plan, and a new wave from May 1992, boosted by unemployment and, now, the hyperinflation that culminated in the Fora Collor campaign; (e) a much more lasting stabilization with the possession of Itamar and the Real Plan, an unfavorable inflection towards a defensive situation following the defeat of the oil workers' strike in 1995.
(f) Resistance struggles between 1995/99, and a resumption of mobilization capacity that grew, in August of that year, with the demonstration of the hundred thousand for Fora FHC, interrupted by the expectation of the PT and CUT leadership that A victory in the 2002 electoral horizon would require a policy of alliances, which would not be possible in a context of social radicalization.
Social stabilization prevailed throughout the ten years of Lula and Dilma's governments, between 2003 and June 2013, when an explosion of headless popular protest took millions to the streets, a process interrupted in the first half of 2014. But the most important thing was the very unfavorable reversal with the giant reactionary mobilizations of the middle class fueled by the Lava Jato allegations, between March 2015 and March 2016, when a few million offered support for the legal-parliamentary coup that overthrew Dilma Rousseff. It seemed that the historical cycle was over. But no. Brazil is slow.
This cycle was the last phase of the late, but accelerated transformation of agrarian Brazil into an urban society; the transition from military dictatorship to a democratic-electoral regime; and the history of the genesis, rise and apogee of the influence of PTism, later transfigured into Lulism, on workers; Throughout these three processes, the ruling class managed, through “fits and starts”, to avoid the opening of a revolutionary situation in Brazil like those that Argentina, Venezuela and Bolivia experienced, although, more than once, situations had opened up that could have evolved in this direction, but were interrupted.
The election in 2002 of a working-class president in a semi-peripheral capitalist country, such as Brazil, was an atypical event. From the point of view of the bourgeoisie, it was an anomaly, but it was not a surprise. The PT no longer worried the ruling class, as in 1989. An assessment of these thirteen years seems irrefutable: Brazilian capitalism was never threatened by the PT governments. But that didn't stop the entire ruling class from coming together, in 2016, to overthrow Dilma Rousseff with outrageous accusations. This political operation, a conspiracy led by Vice President Michel Temer, reveals something of strategic importance about what the Brazilian ruling class is.
4.
PT governments were class collaboration governments. They favored some progressive reforms, such as the reduction of unemployment, the increase in the minimum wage, the Bolsa Família, and the expansion of Universities and Federal Institutes. But they benefited, above all, the richest, keeping the liberal macroeconomic tripod intact until 2011: the guarantee of a primary surplus above 3% of GDP, the floating exchange rate around R$2,00 per dollar and the target of controlling inflation below of 6,5% per year.
The silence of the bourgeois opposition, and the undisguised public support of bankers, industrialists, landowners and foreign investors, should not be surprising, while the external situation was favorable. When the impact of the international crisis opened in 2011 arrived in 12/2008, the unconditional support of the ruling class collapsed. There was no hesitation after Aécio Neves' defeat in 2014. They went for the coup. The denunciation of the “petrolão” by Lava Jato was just an instrumental flag.
Therefore, although Brazil is less poor and ignorant than forty years ago, it is no less unfair. The historical balance is devastating. The country has changed very little. Everything is dramatically, slow. Worse, what doesn't advance, retreats. Because the Lulista leadership allowed itself to become prey to the Lava Jato operation, it became demoralized in the face of large sections of the working class and youth, and left the exasperated middle classes (due to allegations of corruption, inflation in services, increased taxes, etc.) in the hands of the power of Avenida Paulista, opening the way for an ultra-reactionary Temer government. And then Michel Temer handed it into the hands of the extreme right and Jair Bolsonaro. This is not what a generation fought so hard for.
Between 1978 and 1989, Lula won the trust of the immense majority of the working-class and popular vanguard. Lula's prominence was an expression of the social greatness of the Brazilian proletariat and, paradoxically, of its simplicity or political innocence. A young and poorly educated working class, recently displaced from the miserable confines of the poorest regions, with no experience of previous union struggle, no tradition of independent political organization, however, concentrated in large metropolitan regions from north to south and, in the most organized, with an indomitable fighting spirit.
The reformist illusions that it would be possible to change society without a major conflict, without a break with the ruling class, were in the majority and the “Lula there” strategy rocked the expectations of a generation. This historical experience has not yet been overcome. But the Lula III government cannot benefit from the atypical situation of twenty years ago. There are many differences. But the main thing is that there is a far-right current led by neo-fascists who want to return to power. In addition to being slow, Brazil is a dangerous country.
* Valerio Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc]
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