#ted fertik

What makes the Brazilian political crisis unique among the mass protests that have erupted in many corners of the globe over the past years is that its roots are to be found not in the current weakness, but in the historical success, of the country’s organized labor movement. In many parts of the world, the inflation of the 1970s heightened class conflict, producing both a newly energized working-class rank-and-file, and a quickened capitalist class resolved to quash labor militancy. In most places, the bosses won. But in Brazil, something very different happened: the trade unionists began a slow ascent to power.

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Since the 1930s, an aggressive policy of import-substitution industrialization had distorted Brazil’s balance of payments, even as it stimulated the rapid growth of a modern industrial proletariat. Late in the 1970s, with inflation rates topping 100%, workers in the industrial districts outside São Paulo challenged the military dictatorship’s policy of wage suppression and paternalist unionism by engaging in mass unauthorized strikes. The new, “authentic” unionists who led the strikes initially had what Americans might think of as Gompers-like “pure and simple” demands: direct negotiations with the bosses, the right to strike, better wages. Like the American trade unionists of the 1890s who struck against Carnegie or Pullman, Brazilian workers soon learned that the bosses (many of them foreign companies) could count on the state to crush industrial actions that exceeded narrowly-drawn bounds of acceptability. Unlike Gompers, whose experience of the unremitting hostility of the state to any form of working-class radicalism led him to forswear broader aims — in particular, any aspirations to independent working-class political organization — Brazil’s new unionists followed in the tradition of the European working classes and determined that the only path to democracy and social justice was through political power. Allying themselves with left-wing intellectuals and the progressive wing of the Brazilian Catholic Church, whose reach extended deep into Brazil’s poorest and least industrialized regions, Brazilian unionists founded the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). Becoming a mass party in less than a decade, the PT made Brazil, as Perry Anderson has put it, “the only country in the world to have produced a new working-class party of classical dimensions since the war.” In a country that had never known such a thing, the PT became not only the largest organized force working to dismantle the military dictatorship, but also a genuinely democratic mass political party.  

One of the PT’s founders was the “authentic” union leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, a metalworker whose story of migration from Brazil's miserably poor Northeast continues to resonate with tens of millions of Brazilians even as it has become world-famous. After three unsuccessful bids for the presidency as the PT’s standard-bearer, Lula convincingly won the prize in 2002, and was reelected even more decisively in 2006. His administration implemented important social programs meant to make a dent in the country’s vertiginous inequality, and he pursued a foreign policy that established Brazil as a presence on the world stage. Lula presided over the greatest economic boom in Brazil’s history, and he left office among the most popular figures in the world. 

But while Lula’s story is well-known, his very success has diverted attention from Brazil’s social movements. Whereas in the 1980s the PT was widely viewed as both a party and a mass movement, commentators now regularly affix to it the respectable epithet “center-left.” Despite the party’s history, the regimes of Lula and his successor Dilma Roussef look far friendlier to capital than do the governments of Evo Morales in Bolivia or Rafael Correa in Ecuador. Indeed, in the eyes of much of the Brazilian and international left, the PT of today has defaulted on its earlier radical promise thanks to an unholy combination of neoliberalism and opportunism: neoliberalism, insofar as the old, export-oriented model of growth based heavily in the primary sector has made a comeback; and opportunism because, after three failed attempts to win the presidency, Lula and the PT concluded that victory on the fourth pass could only be purchased at the price of moderation. In his 2002 campaign, Lula dropped earlier campaign demands for land reform and an audit of Brazil’s foreign debt. In their stead, he trumpeted the anodyne slogan “Peace and Love,” and made fulsome pledges of orthodoxy to the country's financial elite. Victory at the polls was secured, but the price was a limited mandate, the loss of cadres, and demobilization.  

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Both Lula and his successor Dilma Rousseff owe their political education to extraordinary moments of popular mobilization, but of two very different sorts. Lula’s came in the 1970s, directly out of the experience of shop floor struggles. Dilma, born to a successful Bulgarian immigrant entrepreneur, received hers in the late 60s, when she joined a relatively small group of mostly white, middle-class students who were attempting to organize a guerilla opposition to the military dictatorship during its most repressive “leaden years.” As the world knows, she was jailed and tortured for her activities, after which she received training as an economist and went on to a successful career as a high-level bureaucrat. Lacking Lula’s charisma, or a story that most Brazilians can relate to, she has not appeared to be the transformative figure that Lula was for so many. But in the present context, in which the political attitudes of mostly middle class Brazilians have taken center stage, perhaps Dilma’s experience, and her class position, are the more relevant of the two.

Few terms today are more ambiguous than “middle class,” but if news reports are to be believed, it is middle class youth who have been the dominant force in Brazil’s protests this year. There are reasons to doubt the veracity of these claims — not least because they match the self-congratulatory narrative of capitalist growth and democratic consolidation, which the likes of Samuel Huntington, Francis Fukuyama, and the editors of The Economist believe to have discovered, quite so seamlessly (free-market capitalism produces growth; growth produces a middle class; middle classes have always hated corruption and loved the rule of law; middle classes champion democracy and fairness against politicians focused only on special interests; everyone except the bad politicians and their special-interest-pleading supporters wins). Nevertheless, the emergence of middle-class protest in Brazil is worth investigating historically, because economic growth has been a reality in major “emerging economies” in the last decade, and this cannot fail to affect their politics.

The history of Brazil’s own middle classes is not especially encouraging from the point of view of a politics of emancipation and social equality. Until the middle of the 20th century, Brazil was an overwhelmingly rural country, dominated economically and politically by the descendants of the country’s slave-owning aristocracy. Patronage and extra-legal violence were the regulating features of political life, hierarchy and social exclusion its objects. To the extent that there was a middle class, it consisted of small numbers of mostly immigrant entrepreneurs, alongside native Brazilians who worked in the commercial precincts of the nation’s vast coffee export sector, and the clerks of the rather small government and urban public service bureaucracies. 

Politically, the middle classes were at times thought to resent planter dominance over political affairs, but fear of the often militant immigrant industrial workers on the one hand, and the largely destitute, illiterate, and black rural masses on the other, made alliances with their social inferiors unlikely. Ideological eccentricity and a sympathy for the military — an institution which more than any other in Brazilian society claimed to stand for the Republic’s founding principles of “Order and Progress,” and prided itself on professionalism and meritocracy — were the logical result. And so many members of Brazil’s middle classes supported the so-called Lieutenants Revolts of the 1920s, whose ideology was assertively nationalist but otherwise largely undefined, except for its opposition to rule by corrupt politicians. (The most famous of the tenente leaders, Luís Carlos Prestes, would go on to become the popular leader of the Brazilian Communist Party, and, paradigmatically, a firm supporter of a working-class alliance with the “national” bourgeoisie in the interest of national industrial development as a necessary precursor to socialist revolution). In São Paulo, the most economically advanced region of the country, much of the urban middle class also supported the 1932 revolt against the government of Getúlio Vargas, a movement which claimed democracy as its mantle, but which, as historian Barbara Weinstein has shown, had regional and racial superiority as its most salient quality and ambition. Vargas himself assumed the presidency in the “revolution” of 1930 thanks to the help of tenentes and tenente-inspired military officers, and established his corporatist “New State” dictatorship with the assent and cooperation of the top military command. 

Vargas was the first Brazilian president to adopt even a nominal commitment to breaking the power of the country’s planter elite, and in his own sentimental and authoritarian way, he won the allegiance of many of the nation’s less well-off, including urban workers and the rural poor. Though he had shown no lack of resolve in crushing a small insurrectionary left in the mid-1930s, by the early 1940s he was increasingly identifying his regime with the masses, as he oversaw their gradual incorporation into Brazilian social and political life. By 1945, he had drifted too far for the taste of the military, which saw to it that he was dispatched. Vargas left office peacefully, only to return as elected president in 1950, much to the chagrin of the military, which repeatedly let it be known that it felt no particular obligation to allow him to remain there. Vargas, now taking up the cause of the excluded more stridently, ultimately committed suicide in an act remarkable both for its bathos and for its success in cementing the legacy of “The Father of the Poor” as Brazil’s most important champion of the marginalized and excluded. 

Between 1945 and 1964, Brazil experienced a tight dialectic of popular mobilization and military intervention, all under the sign of a “populist” politics that emphasized industrialization and political inclusion, if within paternalistic and anti-radical boundaries. Nevertheless, under conditions of formal democracy, many Brazilians were politicized, and they repeatedly showed support for politicians who pressed for national self-assertion, economic growth, and a place for all Brazilians. Vargas, Juscelino Kubitschek, and João Goulart were moderate compared to many third-world nationalists of the era, but they responded to popular demands and to a certain extent allowed the masses to influence the political tenor of their administrations. After the success of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, these popular mobilizations began to assume an increasingly insurrectionary character, and the military feared that a populist politician might create the space for a communist breakthrough in South America. In 1964, with the assent of the US government, the Brazilian military deposed the elected president, inaugurating the first and longest-lived of the notorious “southern cone” dictatorships. The political right cheered, and middle class women took to the streets in celebration.

Brazil remained under military rule for 21 years. In the early years of the dictatorship, the middle class had been solidly behind the regime. But as time went on, the military came under increasing criticism from politicians and the media—especially after 1974, when the regime ended some of its most repressive policies and began a process of political “opening.” When the strikes of the late-1970s demonstrated that militant but unarmed opposition to the regime was possible, the idea of a popular movement to end the dictatorship became thinkable, even for middle class politicians who were angry over the regime’s growing incompetence, its economic mismanagement, and the international opprobrium that Brazil was beginning to suffer. Thus opposition to military rule became the ground on which a cross-class politics could be constructed, perhaps for the first time in Brazilian history. The high point of this new configuration was the 1983-1984 campaign to substitute a military-controlled electoral college system with direct presidential elections (“Diretas Jà”). Lula joined with prominent middle-class politicians, largely drawn from the successor party to the legal opposition (the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party, or PMDB), in speaking at mass demonstrations in cities around the country. While gaining impressive support, the movement ultimately failed to generate the necessary two-thirds majority in Congress to change the law, and Brazil’s transition to democracy continued along the conservative path the military preferred. When, in 1989, free elections were finally held, Lula scored the second-highest number of votes in a five-way race. But for the hysterical and calumnious campaign waged against him by the national media, he might well have won the run-off. The victor, Fernando Collor de Mello, who had campaigned on an anti-corruption platform, was ignominiously — but constitutionally — deposed two years into his term when vast and sordid acts of bribery and theft came to light. Responding in equal parts to the scandals and to Collor’s utterly failed attempts to rein in inflation, middle class youth took to the streets in powerful mobilizations that appear in retrospect to have vindicated Brazil's commitment to a democratic political culture, even as they highlighted the deficit of scruples among the country’s political class.  

The anti-corruption mobilizations of 1992 may be the closest precedent for the demonstrations this summer. In particular, both clearly demonstrate a desire on the part of much of the population for a democracy free of corruption and self-dealing. But, in two respects that are at least as important, the comparison is misleading. First, Brazil’s economy in 1992 was caught in an inflationary spiral, and living standards were declining; today, though growth has slowed significantly since the peak of the boom, Brazil is without a doubt more prosperous than it has ever been. Second, in 1992 there were genuine political alternatives available to people frustrated with the status quo, most notably the PT. Today, with the PT emphatically the party of government, and with no coherent alternative on offer, politics appears to have reached a stalemate. While opinion polls suggest that Dilma is very much in danger of failing to win re-election next year, this would hardly seem to register a national shift to the right in Brazil. What we see in Brazil is a challenge to the left from the left, which some of its members still hesitate to join, if only out of worry that it could provide an opening for the right in elections. Indeed, it is not inconceivable that the right could win an electoral victory solely because they find a way to promise better government and better public services, even as Brazil remains overwhelmingly in favor of the PT's social policies.

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History suggests that it is possible for the middle classes to be politically progressive when no radical threat to the established order appears on the horizon. This was the case during the military dictatorship, when the insurrectionist left was crushed; and so it is now when, thanks to Lula and Dilma, former guerillas and militant trade unionists have been incorporated into the existing social and political order. But this should indicate the limitations of relying on the middle class to be the vanguard of social progress: its condition is the absence of a real challenge from below. As Brazilian scholars have argued, that such a state of affairs presently prevails has less to do with economic success than it does with class decomposition on the one hand, and, perhaps ironically, the political success of the PT on the other. Most analysts think that growth is unlikely to return to the levels it reached in the 2000s; some have wondered whether this spells the end of the political formula that Lula applied so successfully, and with it the return of distributional struggles. If so, this will mark a real test of the theory of the middle class as the chief vehicle of political reform. 

The real question that remains is what actually are the political consequences of economic growth in historically poor countries. If the “middle class” of this summer’s protests is not a distinct occupational stratum — and certainly not a bourgeoisie — but rather a large and diverse swath of the country’s population that has experienced rising living standards due to a prolonged period of real economic growth, then it may be that we simply don’t have sufficient historical precedents to be able to make meaningful predictions. Many authoritarian governments helped inaugurate periods of economic growth, only to find that after decades of increasing prosperity and social peace, their populations tired of repression and arbitrary rule. We don’t yet know what happens to freely-elected left-leaning governments when their populations rebel against them not because they want less social justice, but because they want more. 

Events in Brazil now consistently register in the wider world. Politics there have taken unexpected turns before, and movements have shown considerable creativity. Though no obvious resolution to the present stalemate can be easily discerned, there is every reason to think that we are witnessing only the very beginnings of the workings-out of a new political dispensation. As to what will issue from it, it is far too soon to tell.