Victor Peredo - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Victor Peredo

Global Labour Journal, 2021

Crises and Social Regression in Brazil is an exemplary exercise in the interpretive synthesis of ... more Crises and Social Regression in Brazil is an exemplary exercise in the interpretive synthesis of transformations; scrupulously sequenced, it reconstructs the socioeconomic and structural basis of the historical and current problem of social and economic development in Brazil, and of the neoliberal logic that underlies its scheme of reproduction. Although not omitting the theoretical approaches that have traditionally inspired the debate on the "Latin American Problem", such as for example development theory, the author makes a precise selection of the lines of analysis that allow him to successfully locate and delimit the singularities of the case of Brazil. Placing the genesis of inequality in the legacy of slavery and other injustices, which we also find in other countries with a similar context, Véras de Oliveira establishes an unequivocal descriptive analytical target: the failure of successive attempts to consolidate a system of labour regulation that benefits the working class and, by derivation, its expansion to Brazilian society as a whole as a culmination of the development process. However, the weight of the non-capitalist production relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to industrial backwardness, strongly tied to the expansion of export agriculture. This constellation emerged as a centre of gravity which acted as a drag on development. From the beginning of industrialisation in the 1930s, this dynamic acted as a spur for the establishment of a segmented structure. This structure evolved throughout the twentieth century based on economic dynamics, but also had, and in a particularly decisive way, a social nature. The result of these constant obstacles and evasive turns with regard to the construction of a welfare state presents itself as a scenario of unparalleled inequalities. The timid attempts to establish an entry point for the legal regulation of the labour market recognised the status of salaried workers and the access to welfare that is inherent in the formal labour relation. However, this went along with largely excluding a whole range of workers, including agricultural workers, from the protection of the state. This imbalance has been widely observed and registered, as Véras de Oliveira points out, by dualist paradigms, strongly conditioned by a dichotomous interpretation of the social structure. By characterising the labour market based on opposite realities of different parts of the working class, these approaches place the problem of development in Brazil in a controversial perspective. This binary understanding of Brazilian reality facilitated a negative perception of the working class, since it has been attributed with individualistic behaviour with little inclination to enter into relations of waged work. This theoretical focus was inspired by the few empirical studies on the Brazilian social

Global Labour Journal, 2021

Crises and Social Regression in Brazil is an exemplary exercise in the interpretive synthesis of ... more Crises and Social Regression in Brazil is an exemplary exercise in the interpretive synthesis of transformations; scrupulously sequenced, it reconstructs the socioeconomic and structural basis of the historical and current problem of social and economic development in Brazil, and of the neoliberal logic that underlies its scheme of reproduction. Although not omitting the theoretical approaches that have traditionally inspired the debate on the "Latin American Problem", such as for example development theory, the author makes a precise selection of the lines of analysis that allow him to successfully locate and delimit the singularities of the case of Brazil. Placing the genesis of inequality in the legacy of slavery and other injustices, which we also find in other countries with a similar context, Véras de Oliveira establishes an unequivocal descriptive analytical target: the failure of successive attempts to consolidate a system of labour regulation that benefits the working class and, by derivation, its expansion to Brazilian society as a whole as a culmination of the development process. However, the weight of the non-capitalist production relations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries contributed to industrial backwardness, strongly tied to the expansion of export agriculture. This constellation emerged as a centre of gravity which acted as a drag on development. From the beginning of industrialisation in the 1930s, this dynamic acted as a spur for the establishment of a segmented structure. This structure evolved throughout the twentieth century based on economic dynamics, but also had, and in a particularly decisive way, a social nature. The result of these constant obstacles and evasive turns with regard to the construction of a welfare state presents itself as a scenario of unparalleled inequalities. The timid attempts to establish an entry point for the legal regulation of the labour market recognised the status of salaried workers and the access to welfare that is inherent in the formal labour relation. However, this went along with largely excluding a whole range of workers, including agricultural workers, from the protection of the state. This imbalance has been widely observed and registered, as Véras de Oliveira points out, by dualist paradigms, strongly conditioned by a dichotomous interpretation of the social structure. By characterising the labour market based on opposite realities of different parts of the working class, these approaches place the problem of development in Brazil in a controversial perspective. This binary understanding of Brazilian reality facilitated a negative perception of the working class, since it has been attributed with individualistic behaviour with little inclination to enter into relations of waged work. This theoretical focus was inspired by the few empirical studies on the Brazilian social