The Long Brazilian Crisis: A Forum (original) (raw)
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Historical Materialism (2019) 1-63 The Long Brazilian Crisis: A Forum
The coming to office of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil has brought to the fore the need to understand the rise of the far right and to come to terms with the conflicted legacies of more than a decade of rule under the Workers' Party. This forum brings together six leading intellectuals from different traditions on the left and introduces their reflections on the contradictions and complexities of the Workers' Party, the 2008 crisis, the June 2013 protests, the weakness of the Brazilian left, corruption, and on how to char-acterise Bolsonaro's regime. Their interventions offer crucial insights that are relevant today not just to Brazil, or even Latin America, but to the politics of the left worldwide.
2019
This book aims to reconstruct the role played by left movements and organizations in Brazil from their process of renewal in the 1980s as they fought against the civil-military dictatorship, going through the Workers' Party's governments in the 2000s, until the Party’s dramatic defeat with a parliamentary coup in 2016. Henceforth, there have been attacks on social and political rights that severely affect the lower classes and reverted progressive policies on various issues. Through a historical reconstruction, this book analyzes how different left movements and organizations contributed to the democratization of Brazilian society, and how their contradictions contributed to the actual conservative turn. The essays also focus the development of Brazilian Left in the light of socialist politics and especially Marxism, both in terms of political organizations and theory. In this sense, the essays in this collection represent an effort to rethink some aspects of the history of the Brazilian left and how it can reorganize itself after the conservative turn.
Brazil: The Failure of the PT and the Rise of the ‘New Right’
The 2015 protests were very different from the previous wave of demonstrations in mid-2013. The latter were ignited by radical left workers and students contesting a public transport fare increase, although the movement was soon captured by an odd amalgam of the middle class, anarchist ‘black blocks’ and the far right. The 2015 protests were far more cohesive and better organized. Their demands, moreover, unambiguously aligned with the political right, and primarily included the country’s upper middle class and the bourgeoisie. The 2015 demonstrations erupted in the political vacuum created by the paralysis of Dilma’s administration because of its own failings and Brazil’s worsening economy. Those difficulties were compounded by aggressive media reporting of the Lava Jato corruption scandal. That scandal focused on a network of firms channelling vast sums to assorted individuals and political parties through the state-owned oil company Petrobras. Yet, at a deeper level, the economic and political crises in Brazil are due to the achievements and limitations of the administrations led by Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (2003-2006 and 2007-2010) and Dilma Rousseff (2011-2014 and 2015-present). They led a partial economic and social break with neoliberalism that delivered significant gains in employment and distribution, but also entrenched poor economic performance and left Brazil vulnerable to the continuing global downturn. In the political domain, the PT transformed the social policies of the Brazilian state, while simultaneously accepting a fragile hold on power as a condition of power itself.
Bolsonaro and the unmaking of Brazil
Hot Spots/Fieldsights, 2020
Recently Brazil became an example of the destructive forces of populist extreme-right-wing governments. Indigenous and traditional populations, the environment, the few welfare state services (such as public health care and the higher education system) became obstacles for the reactionary agenda proposed by Jair Bolsonaro’s government. With the motto that “the institutions are working properly” other democratic powers such as the legislative branch and the judiciary granted a state of normalcy for what was clearly exceptional and anti-democratic, given the frequency with which Jair Bolsonaro runs over the Brazilian Constitution. In this context, many of the once hidden conservative groups that exist in the country felt entitled to make their stance through discourse and action. For some intellectuals, this showed the fallacy of the once praised cordiality of Brazilian people. For others, particularly those who have been historically subject to state’s structural violence, this was all too familiar. With this in mind, we asked a group of social scientists to elaborate on this political figure that is so hard to grasp. From his post-truth strategies to the forms of resisting his actions, the authors gathered here carefully analyze the consequences of Bolsonaro’s government as well as what can be already seen as something that may survive his own term as a political trope, named bolsonarismo.
2017. Crisis of Praxis: Depoliticization and Leftist Fragmentation in Brazil
PHD DISSERTATION This dissertation project focuses on two problems in Brazilian left politics: fragmentation and depoliticization. There is consensus inside the Brazilian left regarding its fragmentation, but little analysis has been done beyond the perception of the organizations and activists involved. The same can be said about depoliticization, explained here through the phenomena of post-politics and ultra-politics, and which is arguably the mark of the difficulties the left has found to mobilize the working class even as it is under attack. This dissertation fills the gap in the literature by addressing these two problems from the Gramscian perspective of a crisis of praxis. The concept of a crisis of praxis is proposed to attend to the misalignment between theory and practice at the leftist organizational level that has led to melancholia and distance from the consciousness of the class. It is argued that without properly addressing fragmentation and depoliticization, the left will have trouble appealing to the working class, especially given the conclusions of a crisis of representation that was exposed in Brazil in June 2013. This project was made possible through the support of SSHRC, the Ontario Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities, Mitacs, Carleton University (GRIT), and OPIRG-Carleton.