perry anderson
brazil
When Jair Bolsonaro stood to be the Speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress in 2017, he received just four votes. If he was known at all, it was for a capacity to outrage: the time he told another member of Congress she was too ugly to be raped, or when he said he would prefer a dead son over a gay son. Yet in October 2018, he was comfortably elected Brazil’s president. What sort of political meltdown could produce such a result? Perry Anderson, who first studied in Brazil in the 1960s, has collected a series of long essays from the London Review of Books into a book. Starting with the 1994 election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose seminar on Karl Marx he attended at the University of São Paulo, the pieces are often erudite and insightful. But as an explanation of the Bolsonaro phenomenon, they fall short. Instead, Anderson repeats many of the vices of the Brazilian left — the mixture of victim-playing and doctrinaire bashing of neoliberalism that renders the opposition unable to understand the rise of the far-right. The leftwing Workers’ party (PT) ruled Brazil from 2002, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office, until 2016, when his replacement Dilma Rousseff was impeached. Anderson sees in this period a rupture with the Washington consensus, with wealth funnelled to the poor via innovative social programmes. “For a dozen years,” he writes, “Brazil was the only major country in the world to defy the epoch, to refuse the neoliberal regime of capital”. Jealous at a loss of status, the middle-class fought a “one-sided class war”, ending in Bolsonaro. This critique minimises what went wrong under the PT and does little to explain what went right. Anderson dismisses the “neoliberal fixation” on the nation’s problems at the time of Rousseff’s impeachment. Yet when she left office, the economy was in a largely self-inflicted recession deeper even than the Great Depression. Other countries saw their economies slow when the commodities boom ended; Brazil’s fell off a cliff. The surprising thing about the PT was not its radicalism but how traditional it was, especially under Rousseff. In the name of “national development”, big business got big subsidies through cheap loans and tax breaks. To own the neoliberals, the PT threw public money at many of the largest private-sector companies. © Verso In essence, this was a repeat of the dirigiste approach of the military dictatorship. Lula da Silva once praised Ernesto Geisel, the general who ran Brazil from 1974 to 1979, as the “president who commanded the last great period of development in the country”. The results were also the same: ballooning deficits, declining productivity and a lost decade. Sweetheart deals with business also came with a catch — a system of kickbacks the US Department of Justice described as “the largest foreign bribery case in history”. When the state is picking so many winners, it pays to be friends with the king. Anderson is right to identify the “hostility of an enragé middle-class” as a central factor. This explanation captures elements of Bolsonaro’s more fanatical supporters, but pushed too far, it becomes patronising and self-serving for the left. There were plenty of other reasons for anger. If the economy craters while the president’s party, which claims to speak for the dispossessed, is actually in bed with big business, how else would you expect the middle class to react? More condescending is his attitude towards Cardoso. “The well-off knew their friend,” he says of the one-time communist who co-founded Brazil’s Social Democrats. Yet looking back, it is striking how much in common there was between the Cardoso years and the successful first part of Lula da Silva’s presidency, before the experiment in statism. Poverty fell substantially under Cardoso and even more rapidly under Lula da Silva, helped by big increases in the minimum wage. Scorned by the left, Lula da Silva rebranded and expanded the social programmes started under Cardoso. The precondition for this effective social policy was a rigid control of other spending, which requires the sorts of remedies Anderson dismisses as “neoliberal statecraft”. Returning to this formula is the key to regaining the trust of voters. But that involves admitting, as Anderson and much of the Brazilian left refuse to do, that Cardoso set the right path.
When Jair Bolsonaro stood to be the Speaker of Brazil’s lower house of Congress in 2017, he received just four votes. If he was known at all, it was for a capacity to outrage: the time he told another member of Congress she was too ugly to be raped, or when he said he would prefer a dead son over a gay son. Yet in October 2018, he was comfortably elected Brazil’s president. What sort of political meltdown could produce such a result? Perry Anderson, who first studied in Brazil in the 1960s, has collected a series of long essays from the London Review of Books into a book. Starting with the 1994 election of Fernando Henrique Cardoso, whose seminar on Karl Marx he attended at the University of São Paulo, the pieces are often erudite and insightful. But as an explanation of the Bolsonaro phenomenon, they fall short. Instead, Anderson repeats many of the vices of the Brazilian left — the mixture of victim-playing and doctrinaire bashing of neoliberalism that renders the opposition unable to understand the rise of the far-right. The leftwing Workers’ party (PT) ruled Brazil from 2002, when Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office, until 2016, when his replacement Dilma Rousseff was impeached. Anderson sees in this period a rupture with the Washington consensus, with wealth funnelled to the poor via innovative social programmes. “For a dozen years,” he writes, “Brazil was the only major country in the world to defy the epoch, to refuse the neoliberal regime of capital”. Jealous at a loss of status, the middle-class fought a “one-sided class war”, ending in Bolsonaro. This critique minimises what went wrong under the PT and does little to explain what went right. Anderson dismisses the “neoliberal fixation” on the nation’s problems at the time of Rousseff’s impeachment. Yet when she left office, the economy was in a largely self-inflicted recession deeper even than the Great Depression. Other countries saw their economies slow when the commodities boom ended; Brazil’s fell off a cliff. The surprising thing about the PT was not its radicalism but how traditional it was, especially under Rousseff. In the name of “national development”, big business got big subsidies through cheap loans and tax breaks. To own the neoliberals, the PT threw public money at many of the largest private-sector companies. © Verso In essence, this was a repeat of the dirigiste approach of the military dictatorship. Lula da Silva once praised Ernesto Geisel, the general who ran Brazil from 1974 to 1979, as the “president who commanded the last great period of development in the country”. The results were also the same: ballooning deficits, declining productivity and a lost decade. Sweetheart deals with business also came with a catch — a system of kickbacks the US Department of Justice described as “the largest foreign bribery case in history”. When the state is picking so many winners, it pays to be friends with the king. Anderson is right to identify the “hostility of an enragé middle-class” as a central factor. This explanation captures elements of Bolsonaro’s more fanatical supporters, but pushed too far, it becomes patronising and self-serving for the left. There were plenty of other reasons for anger. If the economy craters while the president’s party, which claims to speak for the dispossessed, is actually in bed with big business, how else would you expect the middle class to react? More condescending is his attitude towards Cardoso. “The well-off knew their friend,” he says of the one-time communist who co-founded Brazil’s Social Democrats. Yet looking back, it is striking how much in common there was between the Cardoso years and the successful first part of Lula da Silva’s presidency, before the experiment in statism. Poverty fell substantially under Cardoso and even more rapidly under Lula da Silva, helped by big increases in the minimum wage. Scorned by the left, Lula da Silva rebranded and expanded the social programmes started under Cardoso. The precondition for this effective social policy was a rigid control of other spending, which requires the sorts of remedies Anderson dismisses as “neoliberal statecraft”. Returning to this formula is the key to regaining the trust of voters. But that involves admitting, as Anderson and much of the Brazilian left refuse to do, that Cardoso set the right path.
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