Abstract
Our article provides a class analysis of Brazilian society, examines the (changing) structures of political representation in the country, and explains the institutional conflicts during the federal administrations led by the PT. We argue that those conflicts express, in complex and mediated ways, disputes between classes and fractions within the dominant power bloc. Our analysis is carefully supported by examples drawn from the sugarcane-ethanol chain, Petrobras, the Brazilian Develoment Bank, the judiciary, the Federal Police, the mainstream media, and the recent corruption scandals.
This textured and historically grounded class analysis has been almost completely lost on our critic. His overlong and misleading summary of our argument is followed by the exposition of his own alternative: the PT was never aligned with the internal bourgeoisie; there is no internal bourgeoisie anyway; Lula was a “left Bonapartist” ruler; and the Brazilian state enjoyed considerable autonomy until it was overwhelmed by the financial bourgeoisie. Those ideas are not situated in the literature in general, let alone in his own work (only one eight-year-old piece is cited). His conjectures are not backed up by careful historical, political, economic, or sociological analysis, and he fails to provide an alternative account of the institutions of the state. He ignores the greater part of our argument, and his alternative is both inconsistent and unsupported.
He objects to our account of the class character of the PT as representative of the large internal bourgeoisie since, presumably, a party created by popular organizations could not “place the interests of the internal bourgeoisie at the heart of its policies.” This is a mistake. History offers plentiful examples of working-class parties’ migrating to the bourgeois camp; this is even the rule rather than the exception, although hope springs eternal. More generally, there is no fixed relationship between the social forces creating a political party and its subsequent trajectory, especially once it has been (dis)empowered.
Along the same lines, our critic asks why our definition of “internal bourgeoisie” diverges from the one introduced by Poulantzas, as if we should be reproached for drawing upon Poulantzas’s insights without following him in every respect. Paradoxically, given his claim that we are not sufficiently Poulantzasian, he also dubs us prisoners of Poulantzas’s “structural determinism.” This is the deployment of clichés instead of substantive criticism. To reiterate, our article provides a class analysis of the current political conflicts in Brazil that, we hope, is internally consistent and that helps to illuminate historical and contemporary realities.
Our critic eventually engages with the case of Brazil, but his own study is marred by a reluctance to confront empirical realities and by a limited grasp of economics. The latter is revealed by such expressions as “when governments become highly capitalized,” “a highly capitalized presidency,” “the full employment that resulted from Brazil’s favorable exchange with the international market,” and “exported commodity prices increased proportionally to industrial imports.” He also calls bank lending both “transfers” and “spending.” Finally, he claims that “annual foreign direct investment [in Brazil] reached US$45 billion in 2008 and US$62 billion in 2014 [while] foreign investment as a percentage of the gross national product . . . climbed from 19 percent in 2000 to 33.1 percent in 2013.” Please check your numbers. Brazil’s GNP in 2013 was a little over US$2 trillion. When measuring foreign direct investment against it one must distinguish between stocks and flows and between inward and outward flows and separate inflows from the reinvestment of profits retained by local subsidiaries. Abu-El-Haj even manages to get wrong the name of former Vice President José Alencar. Such deficiencies in his piece are too embarrassing and far too many to list.
Moving on, our critic declares that no bourgeois fraction was hegemonic during the PT administrations and consequently the large internal bourgeoisie could not possibly have driven Brazilian economic policy. He offers, instead, an alternative drawing upon a hypothetical “left Bonapartism” led by Lula. Unfortunately, our critic does not cite the work of André Singer and other scholars who have ploughed this field for a long time. Carrying on regardless, Abu-El-Haj claims that Bonapartism thrived because of the weakness of all fractions of the bourgeoisie, the features of the Brazilian political system, and Lula’s charisma and propensity to “bestow”’ favors on randomly selected friends: “What Boito and Saad-Filho consider an internal bourgeoisie . . . is nothing more than a set of business groups that have been favored . . . in periods of economic prosperity and fiscal health.” Thus, says he, the Brazilian state under the PT had “greater” or “more” autonomy—to favor business groups but never an internal bourgeoisie! He never explains what “greater” state autonomy means: greater than what, from whom or what, and how do you know whether it is more or less? He also does not explain or justify the significance of his concept of “charismatic political leadership” (with what content and for whom), which, incidentally, plays a prominent role in conservative political thought.
Crucially, Abu-El-Haj fails to support his claim that greater autonomy explains left Bonapartism. If he had wished to ground this intuition, he could, for example, have contrasted the PT’s economic policies with the demands of prominent bourgeois organizations. Unfortunately for him, the large internal bourgeoisie, represented by the Industrial Federation of the State of São Paulo, the Brazilian Association of Infrastructure and Basic Industries, the Brazilian Association of Machinery and Equipment Manufacturers, and the Shipbuilders’ Association, among other associations, strongly supported the PT’s neo-developmentalist policies, including its investment in infrastructure, its expansion of the Brazilian Development Bank, its local-content policy, and its anticyclical macroeconomic policies. These organizations rejected the neoliberal alternatives suggested by the PSDB, the mainstream media, and international capital, which are entirely neglected in Abu-El-Haj’s piece. This contrast is transparent in F. H. Cardoso’s The Misery of Politics (2015), in which the former president and leading light of the PSDB overtly supports transnational capital and bitterly attacks the economic policies supported by the internal bourgeoisie.
Abu-El-Haj concludes that Brazilian left Bonapartism (whose existence he has neither demonstrated nor explained) collapsed into the hegemony of the financial bourgeoisie, which he has not previously even identified. The attentive reader will have spotted the logical slip: if the Brazilian bourgeoisie as a whole was so weak that it could not exercise hegemony under the PT, leaving Lula free to pursue his Bonapartist proclivities, how could one of its fractions suddenly impose its own hegemony over the state as a whole? More specifically, how can Dilma Rousseff’s administration represent the hegemony of any social group if it has been paralyzed by its enemies and abandoned by its social base and retains little control over the state administration? Finally, how can our critic postulate the hegemony of finance while diagnosing a “defensive relative autonomy” in Rousseff’s policies? (If in doubt, one can always deploy a grandiose concept!)
Abu-El-Haj plays down the gravity of Brazil’s political crisis and suggests that it is merely the normal operation of the hegemony of finance. We beg to differ: the crisis of Dilma Rousseff’s administration is the crisis of the hegemony of the internal bourgeoisie. This political, social, and economic crisis is due to the adverse turn of the global economy and the unrelenting attack of large international capital and the internationalized fraction of the bourgeoisie, supported by the upper middle class, whose main goal is to regain hegemony within the power bloc by any viable means.
Our article offers a class analysis of the long-standing conflict between the PT and the PSDB and the ideological polarization between hybrid neo-developmentalism and orthodox neoliberalism during the PT administrations. These are more than squabbles among self-appointed elites or between random groups favored by Lula and Dilma and their detractors. We provide a detailed account of these forces and the role of key state institutions and locate the ongoing corruption scandals in the framework of the conflicts between classes, fractions, and ideologies. This approach also informs our analysis of the Lava Jato anticorruption operation that has imprisoned selected leaders of the large internal bourgeoisie. These prima facie surprising actions of the judiciary and the Federal Police can be explained by reference to ideology, the class composition of these institutions, and their positions within the state. In sum, our article offers a class analysis of the ongoing institutional conflicts in Brazil backed up by detailed empirical material. In contrast, our critic offers a collection of poorly articulated hunches backed up by shaky concepts and no evidence at all. It is, as always, for the reader to choose between them.