The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century: Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism

This book aims to reconstruct the role played by left movements and organizations in Brazil from their process of renewal in the 1980s as they fought against the civil-military dictatorship, going through the Workers' Party's governments in the 2000s, until the Party’s dramatic defeat with a parliamentary coup in 2016. Henceforth, there have been attacks on social and political rights that severely affect the lower classes and reverted progressive policies on various issues. Through a historical reconstruction, this book analyzes how different left movements and organizations contributed to the democratization of Brazilian society, and how their contradictions contributed to the actual conservative turn. The essays also focus the development of Brazilian Left in the light of socialist politics and especially Marxism, both in terms of political organizations and theory. In this sense, the essays in this collection represent an effort to rethink some aspects of the history of the Brazilian left and how it can reorganize itself after the conservative turn.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Release date: Feb 4, 2019
• ISBN: 9783030032883

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© The Author(s) 2019

V. Puzone, L. F. Miguel (eds.)The Brazilian Left in the 21st CenturyMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03288-3_1

1. Introduction

Vladimir Puzone¹   and Luis Felipe Miguel²  

(1)

Sociology Department, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

(2)

Political Science Institute, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

Vladimir Puzone (Corresponding author)

Luis Felipe Miguel

Keywords

Brazilian leftMarxismBrazilian Communist PartyWorkers’ Party

The history of the Brazilian left is one of small victories and great defeats. Right now, it is a time of defeat. The Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT), which was in power for more than ten years, was overthrown by a broad coalition of forces in a parliamentary coup in 2016. When in charge of the country, the party carried out a very prudential political behavior, limiting itself to carefully negotiated reformist measures, which in no way projected a postcapitalist society. However, those who became in charge of the government after the coup are implementing an accelerated agenda of setbacks in social policies and individual and collective rights. Among those primarily affected are wage earners in general, women, Black people, Native peoples, and sexual minorities.

This list is not by chance. Left, as we understand it throughout this book, is a mosaic of movements, whose common trait is the combat against structural patterns of exploitation, domination, and oppression. Class conflict is always present, but gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality establish other collective subjects and other axes of social struggle. Marxism, as the primary theoretical basis of the workers’ movement, needs to have a dialogue with diverse perspectives, and to remain an attractive political ideal, socialism must incorporate multiple demands for equality and emancipation. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985, p. 2) wrote, it is no longer possible to sustain the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogenous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics. For the left, a central strategic concern is to articulate the workers’ class demands with other dominated and oppressed groups’ needs.

This book discusses different approaches of the contemporary Brazilian left and reviews its development between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this century. The importance of this debate is related to the long trajectory of struggles that are reconstructed in this volume. These struggles begin with the movements for the democratization of Brazilian society in the 1980s and the end of the political and social repression that characterized the more than two decades of civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). These movements, which included the founding of the PT itself and also the emergence of new social actors who fought for housing and public health, or respect of sexual diversity, contributed to the end of the civil-military dictatorship, as well as to the perspective of improving living conditions of the lower and working classes. However, the political struggle after the democratic transition was not easy, as the new regime emerged in a retraction phase of the global left (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the triumph of neoliberal ideology). At the same time, Brazilian elites searched for an association between formal democratic institutions and the permanence of the profound social inequalities that have always characterized the country. Indeed, Brazilian political history can be synthesized as the perennial conflict between impulses of democratization from below and the will of elites to keep social hierarchies untouched. Not by chance, Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.

The Beginnings of the Brazilian Left: Anarchists and Communists

A contemporary left appeared in Brazil in the first years of the 20th century. Slavery was abolished only in 1888. To replace the slave workforce and implement the population-whitening policy desired by the social elites, Brazil opened to impoverished European immigrants. They worked in the crops as well as in the first Brazilian factories. Industrialization was a priority for the republican government installed in 1889, and although not as effective as imagined, public loans provided a modest start for the secondary sector.

Some of the immigrants were Italian or Spanish anarchist militants, who initiated movements of worker agitation in their new country, demanding better salaries and work conditions. Anarchist publications in Portuguese or Spanish were founded beginning in 1900, and in 1906, the first Brazilian Workers’ Congress was held in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together more than 40 delegates from various labor organizations. Afterward, there were other congresses and the formation of a workers’ confederation. The strength of the movement led by the anarchists was revealed in 1917, when a general strike stopped tens of thousands of workers, especially in the capital city, Rio de Janeiro, and in São Paulo, the then Brazil’s emergent industrial center.

The year of 1917 was also, obviously, the year of the Russian Revolution. In Brazil, as in many other countries, October marked the decline of anarchism and the rise of Bolshevism in the workers’ movement. The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) was founded in 1922, mostly by former anarchists.¹ Named Communist Party—Brazilian Section of the Communist International, it obtained its affiliation to the International two years later. The party’s leader was a journalist, Astrojildo Pereira, but among its nine founders, who represented 73 militants in four cities, there was a majority of workers.

At this time, Brazil was governed by oligarchies that represented the interests of landowners. There was a simulacrum of electoral democracy, but it was a notoriously fraudulent system, in which the vote was not secret, and a special commission could overrule the election results. The answer to workers’ and poor people’s demands was repression; as President Washington Luís, who ruled from 1926 to 1930, said, a social issue is a case for the police. Placed in illegality three months after its founding, the Communist Party (CP) regained legal life in 1927, when it elected one congressman, and was banned once more, a few months later.

In its first years, the PCB was a small organization, facing police repression and also the shifts in its political positioning, determined by the International, but with a growing influence on the workers’ movement and among intellectuals and students. The fact that changed the future of the party, however, was the affiliation of a great political leader, Luís Carlos Prestes, a former army captain who had led a rebellion against the federal government in the name of liberal principles. For two and a half years, Prestes crossed the Brazilian hinterlands, with hundreds of soldiers (an epic journey known as the Coluna Prestes). In 1927, they exiled themselves in Bolivia, undefeated after a 25,000-kilometer march—and Prestes became a legend. He was called o cavaleiro da esperança (the knight of hope).

PCB emissaries gave him Marxist literature, and he adhered to communism, but his affiliation found internal resistances. Having moved to Moscow, he entered the party by decision of the International and remained its indisputable chief for several decades. Inside the PCB, he was the object of a small cult of personality, like other secretaries-general in CPs around the world. In this capacity, he led the main actions and political shifts of the PCB. The presence of Prestes attracted broader popular support and also a significant number of his former comrades, military officers that held many leading positions within the party. As one commentator explains, the gain with the entry of a character of his stature was accompanied by a loss with a kind of growing militarism inside the party (Oliveira 2018, p. 52). Prestes was secretary-general of the PCB until 1980. The two secretaries-general after him were also in the military, one as a corporal, the other as an officer in World War II.

Militarism marked the party’s strategy in the first half of the 20th century. In November 1935, a few months after the clandestine return of Prestes to Brazil, the PCB attempted to seize power, in a coup that started from the barracks, where the party had its most loyal bases (Pinheiro 1991). The coup failed and Prestes was imprisoned and barbarically tortured. Later, in 1945, he commanded the reconciliation with his tormentor, former dictator Getúlio Vargas, who had approached positions on the left during the Second World War. With Brazil entering a democratic period, Prestes was elected senator and led the CP caucus in the Constituent Assembly, in 1946. Besides Prestes in the Senate, the PCB elected 14 deputies, totaling 15 seats out of 328.

In the following year, when the party was again made illegal, Prestes led the turn for a far-left strategy. Some years later, he commanded another shift and the PCB engaged in a politics of class conciliation and supported reformist governments, even without legal existence. Despite these changes in political stance, the PCB interpretation of Brazilian reality was always basically the same. The country was characterized as semi-feudal, due to the labor relations in rural areas, and the main enemy was imperialism. Thus, the party engaged in a strategy of national revolution, whose primary objective was not socialism, but developed capitalism and national independence. Sometimes, the leadership of this revolution was ceded to the bourgeoisie; sometimes, it was assigned to the worker class, that is, to the PCB itself, but the framework remained.

Divisions Within and Outside the Communist Party

The PCB was the main trunk from where other Marxist organizations emerged in Brazil, beginning with small Trotskyite groups already in the 1930s. Trotskyism had some influence among intellectuals and students but, in general, little penetration among the workers’ movement. After Trotsky’s death in 1940, Brazilian Trotskyite organizations fragmented according to the Fourth International’s main lines of division. In the 1950s and 1960s, the larger part of these organizations was the Partido Operário Revolucionário (POR—Revolutionary Worker Party), aligned with the Argentinian theorist J. Posadas, an eccentric thinker who believed in extraterrestrial help with the socialist revolution (Demier 2015). This peculiarity was overcome in the 1970s, when Posadas’ influence declined and the most important Brazilian Trotskyite organizations aligned themselves with Nahuel Moreno, Pierre Lambert, or Ernest Mandel, the three main figures who were disputing Trotsky’s legacy. After re-democratization, all of those groups participated in the PT (Arcary 2014). Moreno’s followers were eventually expelled and formed their own party, with minimal electoral expression. The organization that aligned with Mandel dismissed its international ties and remains an important internal current of the PT.

Trotskyite dissidents were never numerically significant. However, in the wave of the 20th Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union (1956), in which Nikita Khrushchev pronounced his secret speech, the PCB split. Prestes remained loyal to the new USSR leadership, but many of his close advisors did not accept the betrayal of Stalinism. In 1960, the PCB changed its name—from Partido Comunista do Brasil (Brazil’s Communist Party) to Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party)—as an attempt to regain legal register and the right to compete for elections. Two years later, Stalinist dissidents founded a new Partido Comunista do Brasil, with the abbreviation PCdoB and a pro-Chinese (later, pro-Albanese) political stance. Regarding the general appreciation of the tasks for the Brazilian left, the PCdoB kept the PCB’s stageism unchanged.

Other important divisions occurred after the 1964 coup. In the context of the Cold War, the coup overthrew a reformist government and installed a highly repressive national security regime. While the PCB decided for political contestation and mass struggle against the authoritarian government, in a broad front with liberal bourgeois politicians, many of its militants opted for armed struggle. Many small organizations left the party to implement outbreaks of urban guerrilla warfare, inspired by the writings of Carlos Marighella, a former PCB leader, to whom the political situation in the country [must be] transformed into a military one (Marighella 1969). Cuba, which was, at the time, engaged with the Tricontinental project to export the revolution to Africa, Asia, and Latin American countries, was the main inspiration and support for these organizations. Most of them, however, were unable to implement the fight against the government.

Indeed, urban guerrilla warfare was caught in a vicious circle. Preparatory actions aimed at financing operations, such as the expropriation of banks (and, at least in one case, of a notoriously corrupt right-wing politician), led to police repression. The funds obtained were then used for the protection of the militants (safe houses, preparation of false documents, escapes to foreign countries). Even so, many of them fell into the hands of the political police. In order to save them from imprisonment, torture, and maybe death, organizations had to prioritize other actions. In 1969 and 1970, four ambassadors (from the United States, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland) were kidnapped and exchanged for political prisoners. Instead of preparing for the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, guerrilla groups were fighting for survival (Gorender 1987; Reis 1990).

A different experience was conducted by the PCdoB: a rural guerrilla in the margins of the Araguaia River, in the north of the country. While other armed groups were fighting in the cities, the PCdoB was sending militants to acclimate, gain members, and prepare for guerrilla war. Although better planned than the urban initiatives, the Araguaia guerrilla was discovered by the Brazilian Army and savagely crushed, after seven years of preparation and before they initiated the military actions planned by the party (Portela 1979).

Small leftist organizations that emerged in the early 1960s with no roots in the PCB also moved toward armed struggle. Formed by radicalized young Catholics, the Ação Popular (Popular Action) eventually merged with the PCdoB. Born out of the reformist and non-Marxist Partido Socialista Brasileiro (Brazilian Socialist Party), the Polop (Worker Politics) congregated young intellectuals and had an important role in formulating alternative interpretations about Brazil, defying the PCB’s semi-feudal approach and its consequent stageist strategy.²

Apart from Marxist thought, the Brazilian left had two other leading influences. One is the Catholic left. Even in the 1950s, a radical understanding of Catholic social teachings inspired anti-capitalistic thinking. After the Medellín Conference of Latin American Bishops, in 1968, these positions were encouraged by a theological approach that would be known as Liberation theology. The historical subject to whose behalf it acted on was not the working class but ‘the poor’. The Church is supposed to make a preferential option for the poor, engaging in the struggle for social justice. In Brazil, progressive Catholicism was the way for mobilization of many social groups, especially with the movement of basic ecclesial communities (CEB, in the Portuguese abbreviation) that was strong throughout the country in the 1970s and 1980s. The CEB’s influence is noticeable in the new unionism that eventually led to the founding of the PT and in the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra—MST), which is arguably the most important Brazilian social movement since the 1980s. In contrast to the Leninist democratic centralism or the vanguardist approach of most of the Marxist left, progressive Catholic rhetoric valued grassroots and community ties and gave less importance to leaders. The movement lost strength with the right-wing turn in the Vatican (with the ascension of Pope Wojtyla, in 1978) and with the growing competition of neo-pentecostal churches that disputed the same public but with a very different discourse.

The other non-Marxist source was the trabalhista (laborite) tradition, associated with former president Getúlio Vargas. The perfect political chameleon, in his long and tumultuous career, Vargas could be a liberal, an authoritarian, or a populist—and, sometimes, all at once. However, through the measures he took that established some guarantees for the workforce in labor relationships, he built an image as father of the poor (Levine 1998). His suicide in 1954, when in the presidency and under siege of conservative forces, made him a martyr of the people’s causes. Leftist interpretations of his legacy inspired political forces oriented by anti-imperialist nationalism and the desire to give expression to the needs of the disorganized masses of the country.

Caio Prado Jr. and Florestan Fernandes

The 1964 coup put an end to the expectations of the Brazilian left about the country’s process of modernization. With the established dictatorship, there was a significant crisis among the Brazilian left, which led to a series of heated debates among partisans and intellectuals. As indicated earlier, the center of the disputes was the mistakes made by the PCB over the course of its development. Considering state repression on every leftist organization, parties, and unions, as well as the systematic use of torture and murder on those who tried to resist, it took more than a decade for the Brazilian left to recover itself from the coup. An enormous effort of reconstruction was then necessary to rebuild Marxist and workers’ organizations. As part of this attempt, many intellectuals made a profound reflection about the mistakes that led to the establishment of a civil-military dictatorship. Among those who attempted to renew the interpretation and also the political practice of the left, two names are crucial: Caio Prado Jr. and Florestan Fernandes. Both undertook a lengthy reexamination not only about the history of the Brazilian left, especially the PCB’s Marxism, but also about the particularities of Brazilian society.

As we mentioned earlier, the party emphasized the survival of feudal features in the country’s social and economic structures, which reinforced the necessity of an alliance with a national and anti-imperialist bourgeoisie. Thus, before the working classes’ struggle to build a socialist society could emerge, it would be necessary to engage in a democratic revolution that would supersede the feudal traces left in Brazilian society and develop capitalism. For Prado Jr. and Fernandes, this description did not put forward an accurate knowledge about Brazilian reality, and the party’s theory and practice reflected this. Both authors reached the same conclusion: regarding the class structure and class relations in the country, a national and democratic bourgeoisie is something impossible in Brazil.

This evaluation is the starting point of Prado Jr.’s work, The Brazilian Revolution (2014), originally published in 1966. According to him, the so-called persistence of feudal structures in the economy, which led to a search for political alliance with the national bourgeoisie, was based on a complete misunderstanding of the reality. Since Brazil was born as a part of the capitalist colonial system, the argument that feudal social relations were transferred to the colony is inconsistent. Even where the agrarian activities were not entirely developed, it did not mean that they were precapitalist. A detailed exam of the matter gave evidence that capitalist social relations were dominant, mainly because rural workers were wage earners. But the problem with PCB’s interpretation concerns not only its inadequacy to reality, but it was also questionable considering it was imposed to the party according to the general guidelines of the Russian CP in the late 1920s. As the Comintern stated that all countries in the periphery of the system did not complete the transition to capitalism, they needed to fight against the persistence of precapitalist social relations. Then, an alliance with bourgeois classes interested in capitalist development was described as the previous phase for the construction of socialism. In this logic, it was necessary to first defeat landowners and American imperialism to engage the working classes in a broader and more radical struggle.

Prado Jr. also emphasized that the adoption of an imported general scheme corresponds to an erroneous interpretation of Brazilian political forces before the military coup. There were indeed social forces that could sustain a revolutionary movement in that period. But the distorted presentation made by the PCB about Brazilian reality resulted in wrong tactics and strategies. The central question concerned the inability of the Brazilian left to mobilize progressive groups in an effective and revolutionary way. While the communists guided the party politics through a national pact with bourgeois parties, this strategy served only to put working-class organizations under dominant interests.

Unlike Prado Jr., Fernandes was confident about the process of society’s modernization until 1964. Though the country was already a capitalist economy, it presented different historical times, which reflected in the maintenance of several portions of working classes in the most impoverished living conditions. This was evident in the segregation that Black people suffered and was explained as the persistence of racial relations from the slavery period. Then, it was necessary that Brazilian society gets rid of its past and completes the transition process to a competitive social order, in which all individuals have equal opportunities, including those who descend from African slaves. The key of this process resides in the achievement of complete industrialization, as the central countries of capitalism had already demonstrated. In this regard, the concept of industrialization is a synonym for bourgeois revolution. Despite the fact that Fernandes carefully re-evaluated his work after the 1964 coup, the equivalence between those concepts remained as key points for his explanation about the development of Brazilian capitalism. But in The Bourgeois Revolution in Brazil (1976), it would become evident for him that the military coup was not a break with the modernization process. On the contrary, it revealed that it was a necessary step for the Brazilian bourgeoisie to keep their domination. Due to what Fernandes calls the autocratic character of dominant classes, the idea of a possible alliance with the national bourgeoisie against imperialism represented a terrible mistake. For the first time in the country’s history, bourgeois domination exhibits itself as it has always done, with all its forces and procedures.

Contrary to his initial expectations, one of Fernandes’ central tasks in his book is the explanation about the peculiarities of Brazilian dominant classes and the bourgeois revolution. Its autocratic character should be explained by the reminiscences of the ancient status order that prevailed during the colonial period and slavery. The bourgeoisie never abandoned this attribute, even with the transition from colony to commercial capitalism. Since this class always felt that its social position was a privilege, nothing could disturb it. All must be done to prevent the social mobility of subaltern groups, including the use of systematic violence. The military coup was another chapter in this history, bearing in mind the political and social struggles in the early 1960s to change Brazilian social structure, which revolved around land reform and the improvement of the workers’ living conditions. The massive demonstrations during the João Goulart administration, with whom the PCB made political alliance, were gradually becoming unbearable to the bourgeoisie. At the same time, an economic crisis in that period transformed the military intervention into a practical and political solution.

Beyond Stagism and the Critique of Autonomous National Development

The failure of the PCB political program and the critiques put forward by Prado Jr. and Fernandes fostered a new generation of Marxists. Different explanations about the peculiarities of Brazilian capitalism were necessary, considering state violence as well as the changes in the economic structure. On the one hand, as indicated earlier, guerilla groups emerged from the crisis of the PCB, inspired in the success of the Cuban Revolution. This was important because it represented an alternative to the model of social change imposed by the CP of the USSR. The victory of the Cuban guerrilla over Bautista forces showed that a small group could take power in adverse conditions, as long as it received popular support. A socialist revolution in the periphery of capitalism was not intrinsically a next step in the development of the forces of production. Moreover, it was a demonstration of the limits of a political strategy that pursued an alliance with the so-called national bourgeoisie, because it indicated that a country in the periphery of capitalism could challenge American political hegemony over Latin America. With this example, the critics of the communist strategy pursued a theoretical and political path to defeat bourgeois groups.

On the other hand, capitalist accumulation was boosted by the authoritarian government with large public and foreign private investment. After the economic crisis in the early 1960s, growth and investment rates rose substantially. It opened a new accumulation cycle, which was subordinated and dependent on the interest of international capital. New Marxist readings on Brazil could confront what was apparently an enigma: how is it possible to boost capitalist accumulation without changing its social structure? There is also a shared feature behind the new Marxist approaches on Brazilian society. Besides the critical review of the problems faced by the CP during its development, it was necessary to evaluate the fundamental theoretical framework to which all left-wing politics gravitated in Brazil after the Second World War. This theory was the work of Celso Furtado. Alongside prominent Latin American intellectuals such as Raul Prebisch, Furtado formulated a creative interpretation about the economic structure in the periphery of capitalism. The cornerstone of his argument was the deterioration of the terms of trade: the prices of the products in the periphery were always less favorable compared to the products of the center because the former did not incorporate technical progress. In other words, the international economic system established a division based on the Ricardian idea that all countries should specialize their production in comparative advantages. According to this international division, central and peripheral economies could seek technical development. In contrast, Furtado, Prebisch, and CEPAL (Comissión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe—Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean) criticized this intellectual construction because it prevented Latin American countries to promote technical progress and, ultimately, supersede social inequality, since a substantial amount of economic resources were transferred from the periphery to the center of the system. Furthermore, the international division helped to split Brazilian society into a modern economic but restricted zone and a vast rural and underdeveloped area. This latter aspect of Brazilian society was an obstacle to complete economic modernization. The proposed solution consisted primarily in a massive process of industrialization based on public investment. Furtado hoped that this process would enhance technical progress and make the division between a modern and a backward country disappear.

Nevertheless, Brazilian history demonstrated that it could achieve higher levels of industrialization, developing its technical forces, without breaking with the subordinated pattern of international relations. In particular, the deepening of foreign industrial and financial capital came side by side with state violence and the dismantling of left and working-class organizations. At the same time, the industrial development during the civil-military dictatorship resulted in the deepening of income concentration, making the distance between dominant and dominated classes even larger.

Regarding the limits of Furtado’s analysis and the historical circumstances of the period, a group of intellectuals paid particular attention to the problem of underdevelopment. After 1964, Brazilian Marxism watched the emergence of a new interpretation about the development of local capitalism. Despite the fact that the Marxist dependency theory is the result of a discussion that aggregated intellectuals all over Latin America, we will focus our attention on its most prominent figure in Brazil, Ruy Mauro Marini. He summarizes his most important thesis in the book Dialéctica de la Dependencia (1973), written originally in Spanish, since the author was in exile. More than a biographical detail, his expatriation was a direct result of Marini’s political activities around Polop. Following the critiques of the communist political strategy in Brazil, Polop condemned the conception of a revolution through stages. On the contrary, it was necessary to organize working classes around the systematization of a socialist program and, at the same time, to struggle against the imperialist presence in Brazil. Marini’s work consisted of an analysis of the possibility of an independent working-class organization and, in particular, the structural features of Brazilian society that prevent a substantial transformation.

According to Santos (2000), dependency theory emerged as an investigation of the new characteristics of economic development in Latin America since the 1930s. There was, in particular, an industrialization process combined with the expansion of foreign capital. This combination paved the way to understand underdevelopment as a result of the global development of capitalism. In contrast, Furtado and CEPAL still believed in the possibility of a passage from underdevelopment to a developed economy in capitalist terms. In other words, dependency theory analyses how Latin American underdevelopment and the reproduction and expansion of capitalism are intimately associated. This aspect of peripheral societies is closely related to misery and social exclusion. Besides, the reason behind uneven relations between the center and periphery lies on labor super-exploitation.

Dialéctica de la Dependencia undertakes a Marxist analysis of the problem of dependency in peripheral countries with the capitalist center, focusing on the expansion of capitalism in global terms. One of its central ideas consists in a redefinition of general laws of accumulation, developing this investigation from Marxian categories and creating concepts to handle the particularities of Latin American countries. Following Prado Jr. and Fernandes’ statements, it is not possible to understand Brazilian reality only with the simple adoption of Marxist categories. In opposition to the PCB theory, Brazilian capitalism has its specificity, though the global system gives its direction. Likewise, dependency theory shows that the appropriation of the surplus by the countries at the center of the system cannot be explained only regarding technical development but the dynamics of capital accumulation as well. The concept of super-exploitation summarizes Marini’s positions, since it reveals the place Brazil occupies in the global process of capital accumulation and the country’s social structure.

The production of surplus value on a global scale explains the problem of the deterioration of trade terms; that is, the uneven development of peripheral capitalism and its dependency on central countries must be understood as a necessary result of the expansion of global capitalism. On the one hand, countries like England developed capitalism based on the import of primary goods that came from peripheral countries to reduce labor force value. The incorporation of Latin America into world capitalist economy allowed the transition from absolute surplus value to its relative form, concentrated on the increase of labor force productivity. While labor productivity increases, market prices are preserved, resulting in extraordinary profits. On the other hand, to compensate unequal exchange, Latin American dominant classes must set in motion higher levels of labor exploitation increasing its intensity or extending the working day. Since the economy in peripheral countries aims at the center of the system, Latin American production does not hinge on the consumption capacity of the internal market for its realization. Moreover, working-class consumption does not interfere with the realization of value products because it happens in foreign markets.

This process continued even with massive industrialization in the 20th century. In this period, the expansion of capital goods in central economies found profit-making opportunities in the system’s periphery, transferring obsolete technology and monopolizing advanced technology. This description fits the Brazilian industrialization process, especially from the 1950s onward, when there was a significant flow of foreign capital and the development of heavy industries such as the automobile branch. However, the products of industrialization did not influence the reproduction of labor power since Brazilian workers did not consume them. Therefore, there is no economic stimulus to develop national productive forces and, what is more, higher levels of exploitation follow the diffusion of technical progress. Unable to sustain the production of industrial commodities, Brazilian economy has to export them to the countries in the center of the system, which deepens their dependency upon them.

Although it represented an essential critique of Furtado’s theses and the communist strategy, the dependency theory was not the only Marxist evaluation of the period. Francisco de Oliveira also contributed to the renovation of Brazilian Marxism, taking the works of CEPAL as a point of departure. Oliveira’s primary goal in Critique of Dualist Reason (2003a [1972]) is to understand how Brazilian capitalism expands and replaces its conditions of accumulation, yet in a very specific way compared to central countries. He shares Marini’s primary concerns, that is, how the process of accumulation settles in labor super-exploitation, as well as the idea that underdevelopment is a structural factor. However, he was more interested in the inner contradictions of Brazilian capitalism and how they are more connected to class relations than to the articulation with the global system.

According to Oliveira, this was a missing element in Furtado’s hypothesis. The theory of underdevelopment represented an ideological form of capitalist expansion that obscures class conflict and overshadows the problem of whom this development interested in. Oliveira also argues that modern and backward divisions in Brazilian society do not constitute a dual structure. On the contrary, there is a dialectical relationship between them. Backwardness has an indispensable role in capitalist expansion (Oliveira 2003b, p. 5), and subsistence agriculture helped to lower the costs of reproduction of labor force in the cities. On the one hand, the latter reduced the prices of primary goods that constitute those costs of reproduction. In contrast, it provided an industrial reserve army to the urban centers. Overall, the agricultural sector facilitated the conditions of industrial capital. Although the former helped to finance the urban market, industrial activities favored high levels of labor exploitation in agriculture. It is no coincidence that the urbanization process in Brazil follows the expansion of informal activities. In this case, there is a reduction of the value of labor power, which reinforces income concentration and, at the same time, is adequate to capital accumulation.

As capital accumulation advanced after 1964, it became increasingly clear that Brazil was experiencing a new cycle of capital expansion. Furthermore, the political economy of the civil-military dictatorship was the perpetuation of an international subordination process and income concentration. The military coup was not an economic bourgeois revolution but a counterrevolution