⇱ Index page

The Internationalist Archive

Alex Hochuli is a writer and political analyst based in São Paulo, Brazil. He is the co-author of The End of the End of History and  has published articles in Jacobin, American Affairs, Compact, and The Brazilian Report, on global and Brazilian politics, film, and urbanism. In addition to his writing, Hochuli is the editor and co-host of the global politics podcast Bungacast. He is working on a book on the “Brazilianization” of the world.

In this essay for The Internationalist, Hochuli offers his analysis of the present conjecture of Brazilian political economy as Bolsonaro departs from the presidency.

Brazil faces an ongoing, grave weakening of democracy; increasingly oligarchic politics; and a cataclysmic weakening of state capacity, visible in everything from the defunding of scientific research, undermining an underfunded health system, and further increase in dependence on primary exports on the one hand and financialisation on the other – thereby increasing external dependency – and a vision in which “progress” is represented only by the unproductive despoliation of wild nature and commodification of human life. 

The fact that Bolsonaro is gone from office does not change these matters. He represented an acceleration of these tendencies. The incoming Lula government – a broad coalition including forces of the mainstream right – may move quickly to contain some of these crises, but the question remains whether they will reverse them.

And isn’t this situation what developed countries increasingly face too? Any complacent rich-world smugness – concerning middle-income countries such as Brazil – that there might have been is vanishing. Take any example: the energy crisis, increasing cost of living, war, growing political violence, exacerbated inequality, political paralysis, or culture war, all of these are good examples of what I’ve discussed elsewhere as “Brazilianisation” where I propose that rather than countries, of what used to be called the “Third World”, gradually catching up with the political West, it seems like the latter is sliding back into conditions resembling the former. Brazil presents an acute picture of this contradiction. This is because Brazil is a modern, industrialised, highly urbanised country, which at the same time is not modern enough, prematurely deindustrialised, and where the urban crisis looms large.

Let us take each of these items in turn. 

What does it mean to be modern but not modern enough? Brazil appears burdened by patrimonial and clientelist politics, by a ruling class that has not changed for centuries – never overthrown or castrated by war or revolution as in so many other countries – and by the weight of traditional attitudes and mores (see Bolsonaro’s sexism and homophobia, for instance). But none of these are mere holdovers from a semi-feudal past. Brazil was born modern, it did not have a feudal past from which it grew; from the very beginning, it was thrown into the nexus of global capitalism. 

Moreover, it is Brazil’s very development that has reproduced many of these seemingly unmodern forms of domination. Fast growth rates without substantial reform, let alone revolution, fortified the elite. Re-democratisation in the late 80s saw a settlement that, rather than marginalising or divesting the military and local bosses of power, ended up preserving their privileges. And Bolsonaro’s self-portrayal as a defender of the family was not rooted in Catholic traditionalism, but instead played to the former president’s evangelical base. The latter’s faith is rooted much more in a New Age ethos and capitalist acquisitiveness than old-time religion. 

The Brazilian state also appears modern but not modern enough. It can and has achieved many great things, such as efficient vaccination campaigns and a national health system, or the development of ground-breaking agricultural techniques which massively increased yield as well as the exploitation of deep-sea oil reserves. But a decadent big bourgeoisie that expands its capital on financial markets has little need for a national, developmental state. Venal mainstream politicians are happy to suckle at the state’s teat rather than improve its capacities for driving the economy or reforming society.

Brazil has undergone severe deindustrialisation at an income level well below what rich Western countries had obtained when the industry was outsourced to Mexico or China. The declining share of workers in manufacturing has chipped away at one of the PT’s (Partido dos Trabalhadores or Workers’ Party) major sources of power; since winning the presidency for the first time in 2002, the party has relied more on assisting the disorganised poor with benefits, than in being propelled by the organised working class. That “assistentialism” sits nicely within a broader neoliberal set-up, where the rich get richer, but even a few scraps to the poor can make a huge difference to their lives. But the deeper crisis goes unresolved. 

The service sector represents an ever-greater share of output, with much employment in precarious, low-paid jobs (sound familiar?). At the same time, agriculture and extractive industries account for a greater share of exports, which for all the bluster about commodity booms, represent a step backwards. Bolsonaro stood as an avatar of this, loosening environmental protection and intensifying the free-for-all in the Amazon. If it represented real development, that would be one thing, but it did not. 

As to the urban question, even someone who has never visited Brazil will have a picture of what this refers to. The gaping inequality is visible in the fabric of the city: ramshackle favelas and high-rise gated condominiums. Drug trafficking and gang-driven violence plague many cities, with murderous police action becoming the norm. The insecurity of the Brazilian city provides an open goal for punitivists such as Bolsonaro. His proposals solved nothing and only increased overall violence, but it is an issue on which the left has little to say. And with growing insecurity comes growing defensiveness and a desire to retreat into the only safe haven left: the family. 

While many of these features may seem too extreme compared to developed societies in the global North, the deeper tendencies are the same. Without mass political action to democratise society, things will only deteriorate further. 

As to Brazil itself, Lula’s promises to increase investment in scientific research or revoke many of the counter-reforms instituted over the past few years (such as withdrawal of labour rights) are at once highly welcome, as well as inadequate. They will serve only to reset Brazil to, say, 2014. Given an international economic scenario far more unfavourable than that which the PT benefited from in the 2000s and early 2010s, what does Lula’s return signify? A definitive end to the interlocking political, economic, social and legitimacy crises that have riven Brazil for the past decade? That seems unlikely.

Bolsonaro is gone, so Brazil may have avoided a more dramatic anti-democratic turn along the lines suffered by Hungary under Orban, Turkey under Erdogan, or India under Modi. But with no resolution to the crisis on the horizon, the violent, exclusionary politics that Bolsonaro represented will continue to present themselves as a “solution.” Meanwhile, a more radical seizing control of our collective destiny still goes wanting.

The Internationalist Archive