What's Really Going on in Brazil

 “The Politics of the Precariat – From Populism to Lulista Hegemony” by Ruy Braga, 2018

This is a sociological analysis of the precarious proletariat of Brazil.  It is written in a somewhat painful academic sociological style and could have been edited in half.  I read and skimmed it so you don’t have.  Braga rejects Guy Standing’s idea of the precariat as a ‘new class’ – instead showing it is part of the proletariat, identified that way by Marx long ago too.  Marx identified various strata in the unstable part of the working-class – floating, latent and ‘stagnant.’  Paupers - the extremely poor who couldn't or didn't work - and the lumpen-proletariat - the criminal element - had fallen outside the working class.  Braga initially uses the first 3 categories in his discussion of the precariat too, but because of their antiquity abandons their usage.  Many of the young, temp workers he's talking about came from rural northeast Brazil, from Bahia, and due to prejudice, were looked down on because of it.

Oddly, it is not clear why he calls many precarious workers ‘the precariat proletariat,’ as many of them seem to have full-time jobs, though with much turnover. After the military coup in 1964, companies regularly dismissed workers to save money by stopping raises.  Turnover could also be related to the vicious ‘business-police alliance,’ the coup-driven ‘corporate-military alliance’ and continuous factory despotism, so a reflection on the kinds of jobs they had.   

Because of the focus on Brazil, this kind of Marxist sociology could be applied to other so-called peripheral and semi-peripheral economies.  Brazil is now in the G20 and Lula’s recent 3^rd re-election brings immediacy to Braga’s discussion of “Lulista hegemony” and it social-democratic relation to capital. 

Braga thinks Brazil’s economy went from ‘primitive Taylorism’ to ‘peripheral Fordism’ to financialized sub-industrialism.  He spends much time refuting prior sociologists who think the precariat working in the factories around Sao Paulo were not radical because of their ‘unskilled’ status, their passivity and their rural roots.  He shows how they were actually more aggressive than many older and higher-standing workers in those same factories.  This is based on an analysis of workers during the massive local and general strikes of the 1950s and 1960s, a period terminated by capital in the 1964 military coup, a coup backed by the CIA.

Unsurprisingly, unlike Brazil I know of no sociological examinations of the U.S. proletariat and precarious proletariat in the recent past.  It seems an issue beneath bourgeois sociology.  Correct me if I’m wrong.

CONCLUSIONS

Of key concern is how the Brazilian CUT trade-union bureaucracy joined with the state apparatus to provide left-populist benefits to the poorer and working-class parts of society under Lula and the Workers Party (PT).  This is similar to social-democratic efforts in European countries and in other ‘pink tide’ countries in Latin America.  According to Braga this strategy was successful in diluting class consciousness and class struggle.  He thinks the success was not primarily because of Lula’s personality but because of these efforts.   He locates these benefits as first coming from ‘proletarian political praxis.’  After massive strikes in 1981 and 1995, the PT grew in influence and was able to first elect Lula in 2002. 

Of note, the U.S. does not even have the beginnings of a mass Workers’ Party of any kind.  The AFL-CIO/CTW labor bureaucracies and even some left formations like DSA and the CP still tail the Democratic Party, a bourgeois-led formation.  This is the real root of the weakness of the labor movement.

2013 June Days Rebellion in Brazil under PT-Rousseff

Lula has now been elected 3 times, while Dilma Rousseff of the WP was elected once.  Both were ‘legally’ deposed in two ‘palace coups.’  According to Braga, in 2002 the WP started to develop an alliance between the union bureaucracy, the state and through union pension funds, a sector of finance capital, while still helping poorer workers through the Family Fund. This brought Brazil into the orbit of world financialization.  He thinks that financialization and precarity work together and ‘economic growth’ alone – the capitalist solution - is unable to overcome under-development in Brazil.  Cheap labor is the enduring basis of Brazilian capitalism according to Braga. 

Braga looks at call center workers, students, domestic workers, the homeless and the massive fare rebellions and strikes of 2013 while Rousseff was in power, now called ‘the June Days.’  Many of these were led by, not the more established ‘European’ top level of the working-class, but the proletarian precariat – which he finally defines as young, underpaid, subject to high job turnover, with lower skills, working in difficult jobs or looking for their first job.  Job accidents, outsourcing and bad working conditions spurred this activity, but it did not lead to a break with the PT because most saw no real alternative.  This is a familiar situation, as we all know.  (This book pre-dates Bolsonaro.)  The PT had to increase social credit, hike the minimum wage and increase social spending as a response.  ‘Training programs’ also were offered, though few jobs were attained through them.  2013 showed a break between the PT’s approach and the masses of working-class Brazilians. 

What will surprise U.S. readers is that Braga reveals the descent of the PT and Lula from class-struggle unionism to the ‘regulation’ of society with capital, doing so through left populist measures. As he says:  “…the PT’s transformation strengthened these productive relations by ensuring that the extraction of surplus value would meet less resistance among the subalterns.”   But he concludes that Lulaism is a ‘precarious hegemony' as it relies on a base that can never be fully satisfied under a capitalist regime.  

We'll see if Braga updates his analysis regarding Bolsonaro, as it seems the alliance with capital carried out by the PT, which was seen as a betrayal by the precarious masses, might have led to the electoral victory of the military thug Bolsonaro.   This seems similar to the situation in the U.S. with Trump and the Democrats before him, where Democrats quite clearly abandoned the working class in favor of the professional strata and Trump took rhetorical advantage of that failure. 

Prior reviews of this subject, use blog search box, upper left, to investigate our 15 year archive, using these terms:  “The Dream of the Celt” (Llosa);  “Open Veins of Latin America” (Galeano); “Land Grabbing: Journeys in the New Colonialism,” “The Law of Worldwide Value” (Amin); “Tropic of Chaos” (Parenti); “Blood and Earth,” “The Long Revolution of the Global South” (Amin); “Value Chains,” “Building the Commune,” “Nazare,” “An Anthology of the Writings of Jose Carlos Mariategui.”   

And I got it at the cut-out/used section of May Day Books!

Red Frog

December 20, 2022 - Happy Solstice!