Abstract, The New Far-Right in Brazil and the Construction of a Right-Wing Order

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The New Far-Right in Brazil and the Construction of a Right-Wing Order

by Ariel Alejandro Goldstein

Michel Temer’s government produced a new right-wing order in Brazil that might be called an “armored democracy.” The main characteristics of this order are the construction of a “leftist” enemy to justify repression of activists and social movements, preserving a loyal base and manipulating the anger if no economic achievements are made; a political partisan role for the judicial powers with strong interference of lobbying and military consultants; a weak democracy without political participation; the establishment of a market-friendly order against the platform voted for by the majority of Brazilians in the 2014 election; right-wing advances in public discourse that have reframed the political culture and discussion; and the accession of a far-right contender to the presidency for the first time since re-democratization began in 1985. Brazil seems to be repeating its history because it has not reflected on and judged its past. The most important threat to democracy is not only this new president but the country’s own elitist, corrupt, and restricted democratic system.

Abstract, Beasts of Prey or Rational Animals? Private Governance in Brazil’s Jogo do Bicho

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Beasts of Prey or Rational Animals? Private Governance in Brazil’s Jogo do Bicho

by Danilo Freire

A rational-choice account of Brazil’s jogo do bicho (animal game), possibly the largest illegal lottery game in the world, examines the mechanisms that have fostered the lottery’s notable growth outside the boundaries of Brazilian law and reveals how animal-game financiers combine costly signals and selective incentives to induce cooperation from members of the community and exploit the fragmentation of Brazil’s political system to advance their long-term interests.

Abstract, Community-Based Tourism and Political Communitarianism in Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil

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Community-Based Tourism and Political Communitarianism in Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil
by Francisco Javier Ullán de la Rosa, Antonio Aledo Tur, and Hugo García Andreu

Community-based tourism is advocated by indigenous organizations and leftist actors throughout Latin America as a tool for furthering their political and cultural agenda. The ideological biases and structural weaknesses of this model become apparent in a case study of the fishing village of Prainha do Canto Verde, Brazil. The communitarian agenda currently being implemented by means of the community-based tourism project in Prainha is based upon an ideological construct and being imposed through political engineering upon what is simply a local segment of Brazilian rural society. As a result, it is encountering strong resistance. There is also structural tension between the inevitable sociocultural change caused by the development of tourism and the rigidity and essentialism of a community-based tourism model offering a “traditional way of life” as a touristic product. The model is ultimately conflictual and unstable, and there is serious doubt about its long-term sustainability.

Abstract, Interrupted Constructions: The Brazilian Health-Industrial Complex in Historical Perspective

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Interrupted Constructions: The Brazilian Health-Industrial Complex in Historical Perspective
by Valbona Muzaka

Officially launched in 2007, Brazil’s health-industrial complex can be seen as an institutional innovation that seeks to overcome social inequality in health care, dependency on foreign technology, and weaknesses in the national innovation and productive structures. An analysis adopting a historical perspective and deploying Celso Furtado’s concept of the marginalization-modernization polarity shows how misarticulated social and economic policies hindered earlier efforts to construct a robust domestic health-pharmaceutical sector. To the extent that this polarity persists, an understanding of the trajectory of this (indeed, any) high-tech sector can be achieved only by considering the social and economic dynamics that continue to shape Brazil’s development. Despite its promise, the rise of the hybrid neodevelopmentalist state has not succeeded in overcoming the marginalization-modernization polarity. Without resolving old inconsistencies between industrial, macroeconomic, and social policies, it has introduced new ones that, as in the past, risk hindering the success of this institutional experiment.

Abstract, Lula, Dilma, and Temer: The Rise and Fall of Brazilian Foreign Policy

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Lula, Dilma, and Temer: The Rise and Fall of Brazilian Foreign Policy
by André Luiz Reis da Silva and José O. Pérez

The rapid rise and fall of Brazilian foreign policy initiatives and capacities across the Lula (2003–2010), Dilma (2011–2016), and Temer (2016–2018) governments cannot be attributed solely to any of these presidential administrations but was also affected by domestic variables, international events, and economic factors. Furthermore, identity, corporations, the media, corruption scandals, and other variables influenced each president’s ability to conduct foreign policy. Process tracing of these three governments reveals the way policies and programs such as the BRICS and IBSA can be understood in this context. In short, analyses of Brazilian foreign policy must be balanced between agent and structure.

Abstract, Brazilians in London: Ideology, Social Class, and Motivations for Migration, Settlement, and Return

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Brazilians in London: Ideology, Social Class, and Motivations for Migration, Settlement, and Return
by Daniel Robins

The United Kingdom now boasts the largest Brazilian population in Europe, but so far the processes behind this relatively new migration stream remain undertheorized. An examination of Brazilian migration to London suggests that, although increased access to economic capital certainly plays a role in it, what migrants do with this capital may vary significantly and, further, that these differences are related to social class and ideology. The likelihood that they will settle or return is also linked to the degree to which they identify with the dominant ideology of the destination society.

Abstract, Interpretations of Brazil and Global Capitalism

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Interpretations of Brazil and Global Capitalism

by Victor Coutinho Lage

Certain interpretations of Brazil may be read as texts providing theorizations of global capitalism. Study of a set of these texts focusing on Florestan Fernandes’s A revolução burguesa no Brasil exposes the connections between the internal and the external and the articulations of past, present, and future in the production of inequality within and among countries. Renewed attention to them is likely to be fruitful for debates on global capitalism that are not of exclusive interest to the Brazilian case and to challenge a certain global division of intellectual labor.

Abstract, Territory and Public Policy in Brazil

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Territory and Public Policy in Brazil

by Kilma Gonçalves Cezar and Elimar Pinheiro do Nascimento

A new, territorial focus, replacing the regionalization of the past. emerged in state planning in Brazil between 1950 and 1970 and again between 1995 and 2010. From the traditional conception of the region predominant throughout the twentieth century, a shift occurred in public policy making to application of the notion of differentiated territories, with two dominant perspectives: one based on the economic potentials of territories, under the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government, and the other, under the Lula government, based on the concept of socially vulnerable territories. The causes of this change have to do with the reduction of the importance of regional inequality in favor of social inequality, with the risk of separatism being replaced by the loss of social cohesion. The new territorial focus in government planning seemed to point to a loss of power of regional oligarchies, but this practice was interrupted for political reasons in 2007.

Abstract, Rural Brazil during the Lula Administrations: Agreements with Agribusiness and Disputes in Agrarian Policies

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Rural Brazil during the Lula Administrations: Agreements with Agribusiness and Disputes in Agrarian Policies

by Sérgio Sauer

President Lula’s two terms were maintained—and President Dilma Rousseff was elected—by a broad alliance that included backward sectors of the agrarian ruling class. This elite’s influence extended to the cabinet, and it partially ensured support of the rural caucus and agribusiness but prevented government action on land policies from producing more significant advances. The Workers’ Party administrations were marked by mistrust of the agrarian elite because Lula—and also Dilma—maintained a contradictory but friendly relationship with the agrarian social movements. Coupled with economic concessions and incentives granted to agribusiness, this alliance was critical in neutralizing and derailing structural land policies such as the expansion of land expropriation and settling landless families, resulting in an increase in monocropping and economic dependence on the export of raw materials. Such alliances did not prevent the agrarian elite from supporting the removal of President Dilma and allying themselves with the new government, demanding the elimination of the Ministry of Agrarian Development and openly denying land rights to indigenous people and traditional communities.

Abstract, Sodré and the Dialectics of Brazil’s Social Formation

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Sodré and the Dialectics of Brazil’s Social Formation

by Marcos Del Roio

In the early 1960s, Nelson Werneck Sodré developed a complex and sophisticated theory of Brazilian reality and its historical dynamics. In the light of the criticism and distortion of his views of the intervening years, a clarifying summary of his most important work is in order. Such a summary suggests that the new absolute truths of Brazilian historiography and political sciences have elements that can be questioned and that in interpretations of Brazil one can never forget that science is also expressed as ideology and political practice.

Abstract, From Euphoria to Retreat: Formal Employment in Twenty-first-Century Brazil

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From Euphoria to Retreat: Formal Employment in Twenty-first-Century Brazil

by Jacqueline Aslan Souen and Guilherme Caldas de Souza Campos

In the 1990s the Brazilian labor market underwent a destructuring process that had profound consequences for Brazilian society. This situation, characterized by high levels of unemployment and informality, began to be modified only with the rise of a government focused on reconciling workers’ interests with the interests of capital associated with the economic growth that began with the international commodity cycle in the early 2000s. The result was a new phenomenon for the labor market—the strong growth of formal employment and labor income and the decline of other types of occupation—that was one of the pillars of social transformation of the country in this period. In recent years, however, a deep economic, political, and institutional crisis has reversed the favorable conditions that allowed this advance, producing a change in the labor market structuring of the previous period. Analysis of the labor market regression of these years using information from the Monthly Employment Survey (PME) and the new continuous National Household Sample Survey (PNAD) helps clarify the determinants and consequences of the recent economic crisis.

Abstract, The 2014 World Cup and the Construction Workers: Global Strategies, Local Mobilizations

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The 2014 World Cup and the Construction Workers: Global Strategies, Local Mobilizations

by Mauricio Rombaldi

An action developed by the Building and Wood Workers’ International during the 2014 World Cup in Brazil internationalized the country’s construction unions. The strategies adopted, aimed at large-scale sports events, the efforts to negotiate with the World Cup organizers, and the lack of national coordination among Brazilian unions all contributed to the willingness of the latter to take part in the international campaign and strengthen their ties with the global federation. The result was an unprecedented national agenda of negotiations that influenced the development of local bargaining. The outcomes of this campaign demonstrate that the priority that unions give to local negotiations may not just hinder the internationalization of union practices but also enhance the possibilities for such internationalization.

Abstract, The Politics of Strolling

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The Politics of Strolling

by Pedro Erber

The large gatherings of youths from impoverished urban peripheries in the shopping malls of São Paulo and Rio, known as rolezinhos (little strolls), in the first two months of 2014 and their disputed relation to the wave of political protests in Brazilian cities since June 2013 became the topic of heated debates among intellectuals and journalists in Brazil. Historical parallels ranging from nineteenth-century Paris to colonial Korea help situate the rolezinho phenomenon in a transnational history of urban strolling and to problematize its ambiguous politicality between ostentatious consumerism and revolutionary practice.

Abstract, Brazil’s June Days of 2013: Mass Protest, Class, and the Left

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Brazil’s June Days of 2013: Mass Protest, Class, and the Left

by Sean Purdy

On June 17, 2013, Brazilians took to the streets in militant rallies and marches against transit fare hikes, poor-quality education and health care services, and the immense public investment in “mega-events” such as the 2014 World Cup and the 2016 Olympics. These massive demonstrations capped off a two-week series of demonstrations initially provoked by a 20-cent increase in bus, train, and subway fares in São Paulo. In the face of brutal police repression, the harsh opposition of politicians and the major political parties, and the clear bias of the mass media, the largely young and working-class protesters soon forced municipal governments in over 100 cities to revoke proposed fare increases. Explanations for the June Days and the ensuing political crisis, which have been the subject of fierce debates in activist and scholarly circles in Brazil, ignore the role of particular forms of capitalism, the adoption of neoliberalism by Workers’ Party governments, and the changing forms and conditions of class struggle.