Rememorias: Entrevistas sobre o Brasil do seculo XX (review) (original) (raw)
Notes for a historical interpretation of the trajectory of the Brasilian Workers Party
There was something splendid and touching, but also terrible in PT’s history. In order to refer to the vocabulary coined by the classical Greek, there was the moment of epopee, the tragic one, and even some of a comedy in the trajectory in which petism was transformed into lulism. The PT was the biggest party of the Brazilian working class in the 20th century. In the 1980s, Lula and the leadership of the PT (that has organized the internal tendency Articulação) were capable of enrapturing a party, which, in ten years, evolved from an organization of a few thousands to one with hundreds of thousands of activists. And that moved from 10% of the votes for governor in the State of São Paulo in 1982 (and less than 3% in average in the other States), to a very tight race in the ballotage for the presidential elections of 1989, counting only on voluntary contributions. The PT of 2011 is, evidently, another party, although the leading fraction being, essentially, the same. In three decades, the PT has elected many thousands of city councilors, and several hundreds of state and federal deputies, having arrived to the government of more than a thousand of city-halls, many State governors, and is the head of the presidency for the third time. The PT of 2011 is Brazil’s most professional electoral machine, being, therefore, integrated into to the regime’s institutions and closely associated to some of the most powerful entrepreneurial groups. Paradoxically, Lula’s authority has not diminished.
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.
Tempo, 2015
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.
References to Brazil in the Portuguese Fascist Newspaper Revolução
Revista Análise Social, 2025
References to Brazil in the Portuguese Fascist Newspaper Revolução. This paper aims to analyze how the political events in Brazil after the 1930 revolution, which brought Vargas to power, were interpreted by the Portuguese fascist newspaper "Revolution". The rise of Salazar in Portugal and Vargas in Brazil raised expectations around the fascistization of politics in both countries due to the insurgence of extremist right-wing parties and/or political factions in their quests for power. From a distance, the Portuguese National-Syndicalism movement and its periodical, Revolução [Revolution], which had no correspondents in Brazil, sought to understand what was happening and somehow influence the course of events. By analyzing the many references to Brazil over the nearly two years when this Portuguese periodical was published, we are able to perceive the difficulties the Portuguese fascists had in understanding the Brazilian political conjuncture. As their disappointment grew, especially regarding Vargas' approximation with the liberals, they joined dissident Varguist groups, who likewise had no ties to fascism.
Brazilian Political Science Review, 2021
The aim of this paper is to examine how, in the context of the Cold War and Latin America’s National Security dictatorships, conservative Brazilian intellectuals turned to history to demonstrate the country’s ‘incompatibility’ with progressive values and left-wing government. It analyzes a selection of lectures given by acclaimed conservative intellectuals at the National War College during the 1960s and 70s. An examination of these lectures demonstrates that many of the elements chosen to define ‘national identity’ under the ‘Estado Novo’ [...]
106) The Politics of Economic Regime Change in Brazilian History (2014)
The Drama of Brazilian Politics: From Dom João to Marina Silva , 2014
In: Ted Goertzel and Paulo Roberto de Almeida (eds.), The Drama of Brazilian Politics: From Dom João to Marina Silva (Kindle Book, 2014; ISBN: 978-1-4951-2981-0), p. 84-124. Relação de Originais n. 2680; published works: 1142
From the Streets to the Government: Socialist Militants and Labour Law in Brazil
International Review of Social History, Volume 62, Special Issue S25 (Brazilian Labour History: New Perspectives in Global Context), 2017
This article analyses and compares the careers of a group of socialist militants who were active in several regions of Brazil in the final decades of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century. It underscores their similarities and differences with a view to understanding the various ways of being a socialist in that context. This includes examining their wide-ranging activities, the main ideas they upheld, and their role in the development of Brazilian labour laws in the 1930s and 1940s.