Rememorias: Entrevistas sobre o Brasil do seculo XX (review) (original) (raw)
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Notes for a historical interpretation of the trajectory of the Brasilian Workers Party
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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.
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In Latin America of the 1960s, the “historical necessity” of a revolutionary rupture was imposed in such a way that, at times, even conservative parties found themselves compelled to propose a “revolution in liberty”. The assaults of the counterrevolution would provoke inversions: if, in the 1960s, the “revolution” was the hegemonic discourse, in the 1980s, the dominant motto was “democracy”. Being an ineluctable topic of debates in Latin-American intellectual circles and party organizations during the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, the “issue of democracy” belongs to the semantic field of an essential category for the study of political and cultural journals published in Latin America during that period, that is to say, democracy per se. In this context of transition, a significant fraction of the battle of ideas, in Latin America and other regions of the West, was centered on the notion of democracy, broadly claimed by almost all the ideological trends. Taking into account this context of transition, I propose to analyze, within the corpus of texts published in three political and cultural Latin American journals, the frictions and nexus between two major narratives of modernity: democracy and socialism.
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This article analyzes recent Brazilian scholarship on workers and trade unions during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), emphasizing the relative absence of studies and the neglect of worker organization. By focusing on working-class agency and the dilemmas the labor movement faced due to the regime's economic policies and fierce repression, this essay offers a better understanding of the political scenario after 1964. The second part of the article examines the themes of the most recent studies about workers and the labor movement during the military regime, emphasizing existing blind spots and future challenges for scholarship. In 1967, almost three years after Brazil's civilian-military coup, director Glauber Rocha, icon of the 1960s Brazilian cinematographic movement known as New Cinema (Cinema Novo), released his film Terra em Transe. The film provides an important glimpse into how the role of workers in the dictatorship was interpreted by intellectuals, politicians, leftist militants, and conservatives. In one scene from the renowned film, there is a striking dialog between a journalist, an aide to a populist politician, and a union leader, while they are surrounded by a priest, young activists, and politicians. The journalist enthusiastically calls on the union leader, Jerônimo, saying, "The people are Jerônimo. Speak, Jerônimo, speak!" Silence. A machine gun fires shots into the air. The populist politician adds his condescending plea. "Don't be afraid, my son. Speak, you are the people. Speak!" he implores. Jerônimo looks at the people around him, trying to force a word out, but he is unable to break the deafening silence that the long and uncomfortable scene has established. Finally, he turns to the camera and says, "I am a poor man, a worker, I am president of the union, I am engaged in the class struggle, and I think that everything is messed up, and I really don't know what to do. The country is going through a huge crisis, and the best thing to do is await the orders of the President." But his speech is interrupted when Paulo Martins, journalist, poet, and aide to the populist politician, representative of the intellectual class, puts his hands over Jerônimo's mouth and says, "You see what the people are like? Imbeciles, illiterate, depoliticized. Can you imagine what it would be like with Jerônimo running things?" 1 This important dialog from Glauber Rocha's film, which sought to tell a cinematographic parable of the history of Brazil at the start of the 1960s, is the point of departure for this article to reflect on the role of workers in studies of Brazil's military dictatorship. Despite some progress in the last few years,
The ideology of capitalism in Brazilian social movements: the " nós-do-governo " 1
The aim of this work is to understand the ideological processes in the relationship between Brazilian State and social movements during Lula and Dilma Rousseff Governments until June 2013. For this purpose, we will see that there are some subjects that enjoy themselves when join any cynical apparatuses in the capitalist society, and also identified themselves with this lifestyle. On the other side, there are subjects that are indignant with this situation and seek to politically organize themselves, in this case in social movements. The article discusses these politically organized subjects, since the Brazilian State uses the " engodo " to put them in the cynical logic of capitalist social control. In this logic, the " engodo " is a discursive formation that puts at stake a symbolic and imaginary dimension for one to take cynically the other as object of his satisfaction.