Social movements and emancipation in Brazil (original) (raw)
Notes on Inequality and Poverty in Brazil: Current Situation and Challenges
2008
Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world. The paper analyses the causes of this inequality in terms of Brazil's development process, which has traditionally 'managed poverty' without making efforts to promote change in the socioeconomic order: what the author terms 'conservative modernisation'. Accordingly, universal education and social security were not prioritised, and urban segregation, rural exclusion, and regressive taxation were reinforced. Since 2001, levels of inequality and extreme poverty in Brazil have fallen, the result of various socioeconomic factors. The paper particularly notes the positive impact of policies supporting wealth redistribution, such as increases in the minimum wage, expansion in social security coverage, and support for small-scale agriculture. Yet, a stubborn concentration of income, wealth, and assets amongst a minority remains. The author concludes that further progress will require radical urban, land, and fiscal reforms, along with greater political efforts to combat gender and racial discrimination. This background paper was written as a contribution to the development of From Poverty to Power: How Active Citizens and Effective States Can Change the World, Oxfam International 2008. It is published in order to share widely the results of commissioned research and programme experience. The views it expresses are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect those of Oxfam International or its affiliate organisations.
Journal of Latin American Studies, 2021
common tendency to see them as opposite and mutually exclusive is a mistake. The Brazilian case shows repeatedly that even normative power, the core of corporatist complaints against labour justice, does not lead to workers' loss of control and autonomy. In fact, the evidence presented in Workers before the Court suggests the opposite: labour courts incited workers to strike and fight for their rights, and they represented a recognition of the existence of class conflict. The path that leads to labour justice generally implies a failure of negotiations and even strikesor the threat thereofto get a good deal in court. The labour courts also played an important role in underwriting private agreements between the parties, presenting two models simultaneously: legislated labour relations with heteronomy; negotiated labour relations with autonomy. Workers before the Courts challenges established ideas about labour justice in Brazil, and in doing so also defies preconceived ideas about the links between models of industrial relations and political systems. By placing debates about the nature of labour justice in their historical context and restoring the voices of the protagonistsespecially those of workers-Teixeira dismantles a long-held ideological consensus linking labour justice with a corporatist political project and workers' subjection. This book is both a point of arrival for the author and an inescapable departure point for those approaching the study of work and workers in the future.
Brazilian Perspectives: Society, Stratification and Income Distribution
Asian Journal of Applied Sciences, 2020
This paper aims to present a general evaluation on the inequality, income distribution and social mobility in Brazil between 2002 and 2014, under the governments of the Workers' Party. In this way, from the methodological point view, it is based on both a review of the literature about that subject and an investigation of the primary sources of the Brazilian social policies. Among the results found out, it can be highlighting the following sample: 1) historically, Brazilian society has been marked by inequality in several ways, and this is probably a consequence of his colonial legacy; 2) In the period between 2002 and 2014, Brazilian social inequality declined; 3) the decline of inequality can be explained by income growth, higher schooling levels and labor formalization, but the targeted social program, Bolsa Familia, also contributed to income convergence; 4) Brazil slashed poverty from 25 percent of the population in 2004 to 8.5 percent in 2014, and extreme poverty declined ...
Globalizations, 2012
During the past 15 years, the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) has changed from a party with a mission of radical social transformation through democratic representation to a party which accepts and has integrated itself into the dominant political and economic regimes of the day. Concurrently, many social movements have come to depend on PT governments to express and successfully achieve their existential and program claims while others have abandoned their goals of social transformation for specific social programs which they call the "struggle for the possible". The result is that social movements, in their relationship to the ruling national party, contribute to reproducing the structure of power, but concurrently open a political space for the excluded populations they represent. This article analyzes the relationship between social movements and political parties through a comparative study of three Brazilian social movements (São Paulo housing movement, the women's movement and the MST) and their relationship with the Workers' Party since it gained power at the national level in 2003. It describes how these social movements participate in party politics, how their political strategy relates to overall movement goals and mission, how they interact with political parties during elections and if their political participation advances their claims.
Global Labour Journal, 2021
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
Development as Freedom in Brazil
The search for socioeconomic development has been one of the main objectives to guide government policies in different countries. The deepening of the environmental crisis and the demand for well-being have led governments and society to discuss new models of development and instruments capable of measuring them. The present work is part of this theme by structuring an index of development backed by the studies of Amartya Sen, whose theory is based on the expansion of individual freedoms and the extinction of deprivations that restrict their opportunities. The main objective of this article is to analyze the socioeconomic reality of Brazilian federative units and regions by means of a Development as Freedom Index (DFI; Índice de Desenvolvimento como Liberdade-IDL) and sub-indices of Instrumental Freedoms advocated by Amartya Sen. To that end, the theoretical assumptions for defining and survey of variables, the protection of freedoms that reflect national values is identified in Brazilian legislation, and the sub-indices and the index are tested, applying them to understand the national, regional and State reality. The results showed that Brazil is in a "regular" condition of development, with an IDL of 0.50. It was evident the strong social vulnerability in the Northeast and North regions and the non-fulfillment of social needs by governmental spheres at the demanded level, an affirmation reinforced by the low and the regular sub-index they obtained for Social Opportunities. There is a concentration of wealth in the South, Southeast and Midwest of the country and more access to the opportunities, and in the Northeast there are a greater number of States with low socioeconomic performance.
Becoming-Brazil: The Savage Rise of the Class without Name
South Atlantic Quarterly, 2014
This article discusses the protests that shook Brazil in 2013. The argument grounds itself in the hypothesis that the protests can only be understood by analyzing the current scenario of the country’s class composition, history, and relationship to the civilizational paradigm adopted since the beginning of the country’s republican regime (1889)—a regime that can be summarized succinctly as proceeding from colonialism to positivism.