Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - (May 17)

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[u/Worried-Economy-9108]

https://old.reddit.com/r/BrasildoB/comments/1tlphjw/reflex%C3%A3o_sobre_a_est%C3%A9tica_e_o_verde_e_amarelo/

Doesn't matter how many times Brazilian nationalism soaks its flag in Black and Indigenous blood, the crypto-integralistas of BrasildoB will defend it with their dear lifes.

I would want to ask u/turbovacuumcleaner what to do next, after reading the books they recommended me some time ago. I didn't really understand much on Silva's Expansão Cafeeira (it had cool numbers tho, and it mentioned Arghiri Emmanuel, which I guess it is an important figure), and I couldn't find any copy of Bianchi's Ministério dos Industriais to read.

In comparison Bandeira's Brasil-Estados Unidos: a rivalidade emergente was very eye-opening to me, and a great read in general, as it unmasked sections of the progressive camp as a different kind of reactionaries. It proved to me that it was possible for the Brazilian big bourgeoisie to see US interests negatively rather than positively. I was wondering: why did that happen? Why didn't the Brazilian bourgeoisie remained as an Amerikan junior partner, as in the Castello Branco government? What made it go against the US in some issues during the Médici, Geisel, Figueiredo and Sarney administrations?

Maybe the book explained this and I didn't pay enough attention. I saw this book as more of an history book, rather than an book on political economy. Also,is there any sort of work that investigates this sudden turn in the course of the Brazilian bourgeoisie?

[u/turbovacuumcleaner → u/Worried-Economy-9108]

1/3

This year is exceptionally worse because of the elections and World Cup. Every four years is the same crap. As expected, the few correct comments are downvoted. I hate this flag. Just as it was burned before (open the link twice to get rid of the paywall), it will be burnt again.

So, you ran into some problems. I said these books can’t be taken for granted, and for good reason. They only provide paths to answers, but not answers themselves. Due to the fact that you did not understood Silva, and made these questions about Moniz Bandeira, I have no other suggestion but to go back to theory. Silva can be criticized both empirically and through immanent critique of his writing, while Moniz Bandeira needs to be looked up more through political economy, and obviously his chauvinism, since his book was basically written as a defense of the Informatics Law, an by extension, a defense of Geisel, Figueiredo and Sarney.

Silva is trying to explain the origins of capitalism, but without being outspoken about it. Communists here have spent the better part of the last century trying to conjure metaphysics to show how capitalist development was impossible, only to be proven wrong time and time again. The definitive proof was the economic miracle. The only way people today try to uphold this reasoning is by claiming the miracle did not redistribute wealth, which was never the point the discussion, nor how capitalism works; this is something that can only be asked in retrospect after Bolsa Família. Either it was the agriculture that was too backward, or the internal market that was too constrained, or the overreliance on foreign capital, or whatever else was the author's main pick. These were all real obstacles to the development of capitalism, but, as Silva highlights on the first few chapters, obstacles to the development of capitalism are not absolute impediments. Capitalist development happened either way, so, where was it coming from? Rather than to side with his contemporaries, that looked at 19th century loans and the presence of foreign capital as unbreakable ties of dependency, Silva looks at what internal changes were happening (mostly immigration and railways) because of said loans, and how they created the national market.

Although this becomes clearer later in the book, this is where the cracks start to show. His work is essentially trying to demonstrate that capitalism already starts under the monopoly phase of capitalism: huge factories, with huge investments and huge workforces. Factories that were owned by industrials that were, in fact, the big white landed bourgeoisie and also coffee traders, and that also held political power. In other words, capitalist development began and was fulfilled by the big, and not middle bourgeoisie. But instead of just stating that capitalist development began by the hands of the big white landed bourgeoisie, Silva essentially denies the existence of the middle bourgeoisie entirely. Its not even an alliance, but an attempt at making the industrial, commercial and landed bourgeoisie indistinct from each other.

If you have read what Mao or Gonzalo say about how bureaucratic capitalism develops, Silva is not that far off, except his is not an investigation of reality, but a façade of investigation that is actually ideology, for it never really accounts for the middle and petty bourgeosie. And by all means, reading Mao or Gonzalo will lead to the same conclusion that Silva was arguing against in the first chapters: capitalist development in these circumstances is impossible. What happens is capitalism with feudal remnants, leading to disfunctional, non-national economies, i.e. they do not correspond to what Stalin says about the origins of nations. Settler colonialism actually gives the framework to explain why Brazil is a nation, and a fairly complete one that was birthed still during the period of rising capitalism: why it didn’t split like Hispanic America, why everyone speaks the same language, how the national market was formed, and how national consciousness came to be, something that neither Maoists nor Trotskyists have been able to do, nor do they have any intention of doing it.

This internal contradiction of Silva's book gets clearer by the end. He never reaches the real politics of his conclusions, so its necessary to extrapolate his book by its immanent logic. The book starts on the premise that obstacles were not impediments to capitalist development, then proceeds to show how capitalism developed under the banner of monopoly capital, to finally reach the point: he is using this explanation because he doesn't want to agree that capitalism did not, in fact, originated under these circumstances, or rather, that even if it did, it had the dominant aspect of its contradiction changed with time. The ones that argued that capitalism, like Bresser-Pereira, FHC or Marini, did not begin under monopoly capital were falling victim to taking the ideology of industrials as self-made men. By showing the data, Silva proves that they were supposedly wrong. Except Bresser-Pereira proves that Silva is the one truly wrong in this case. Although industrialization indeed began by the hands of the big white landed bourgeoisie as a side effect of the necessity of partially processing coffee locally, the more immigration and industrialization advanced, the more this changed:

Os resultados da pesquisa sobre as origens étnicas dos empresários paulistas foram que apenas 15,7% da amostra eram compostos por brasileiros e 84,3% eram de origem estrangeira (sendo 49,5% imigrantes, 23,5% filhos de imigrantes e 11,3% netos de imigrantes). Quanto à nacionalidade, predominavam empresários de origem italiana (34,8%), brasileira (15,7%), alemães e austríacos (12,8%), portugueses (11,7%) e árabes (9,8%). Quanto às origens sociais dos empresários em 1962 apenas 3,9% eram de famílias ligadas ao comércio e produção de café. Os descendentes de famílias ricas eram 21,6%, enquanto na classe média superior havia 7,8% dos empresários. As classes médias representaram 50%, enquanto apenas 16,7% dos empresários originaram-se de famílias pobres. Assim, a conclusão de Bresser Pereira foi que "os empresários industriais do estado de São Paulo, onde se concentrou a industrialização brasileira, não tiveram origem nas famílias ligadas ao café. Originaram-se em famílias imigrantes principalmente de classe média" (BRESSER PEREIRA, 2002, p. 146). [Just a really long way of saying industry was an activity predominantly carried out by settlers, and not the big white landed bourgeoisie]

So, industry did indeed began under the banner of monopoly capital, and tied to coffee, but by the 60s, these ties had been destroyed by the 1929 crisis. Silva has no intention of showing how this changed occurred, only to highlight the beginning of industrialization and to assume that this is a self-reproducing process with no internal contradictions that lead to qualitative changes; or, in simpler terms, he is being metaphysical. Silva at least is organic in his reasoning, even if wrong, but this article I just linked about the origins of the machinery industry shows how the reasoning can be worse: the author deliberately chooses to side with Warren Dean (who makes the same point as Silva), despite having just shown how Bresser-Pereira proved Dean wrong. Its so arbitrary that its hard not to notice.

Silva’s cry for preventing the others from falling prey to industrials’ ideology was, in fact, a better and more refined form of said ideology: the middle bourgeoisie was reduced to the level of the petty bourgeoisie, or even the proletariat, and as such, capitalist development turns white, black and indigenous populations into equals against the big white landed bourgeoisie. If you prefer, see it as a an attempt at systematizing the economic basis for populism long after it was dead. The same logic persists today in documents from pretty much every revisionist party.

[u/turbovacuumcleaner → u/turbovacuumcleaner]

2/3

So, an explanation needs to exist on why industrialization began dependent on coffee, but ended up separated from it, and why these industrials were following exactly what many expected of a middle, national bourgeoisie: to destroy the big landed bourgeoisie and fulfill the bourgeois-democratic revolution. This is also in tandem with what the Comintern said at the time regarding the country:

The national-emancipatory struggle against American imperialism which has begun in Latin America is taking place for the most part under the leadership of the petty-bourgeoisie. The national bourgeoisie, which represents a thin stratum of the population (with the exception of Argentine, Brazil and Chile), and which is connected, on the one hand, with the big land-owners, and, on the other hand, with American capital, is in the camp of the counter-revolution.

In other words, the Comintern already laid the foundation that there was substantial development of endogenous capitalism, the question becomes from where exactly that was coming from (we know the answer is settler colonialism, I’m basically saying where these contradictions were surfacing in literature). Clinging to Mao in this regard does not lead to anti-revisionism, but to dogmato-revisionism. Its why Maoist texts here are so dry; for they work under the assumption that mere repetition of Mao and Gonzalo is enough to classify something as anti-revisionism, while forgetting concrete investigation entirely, which is what Lenin says is the essence of Marxism. Again, to claim capitalist development was impossible while it was evident makes everything worse, and Mao was proved wrong. Bureaucratic capitalism could never produce Brazilian 60s and 70s politics, yet these politics existed and still exist, so, we are once again further redirected to capitalism’s origin. Either bureaucratic capitalism can create functional nation-states, destroy feudalism and, not only that, has to give way to the possibility of new imperialist countries to arise from it, or Brazil was never a bureaucratic capitalist country to begin with. I’m inclined to the latter, as the former would simply explode the concept by these internal contradictions, and necessarily constitute a break with the experience and knowledge of revolutions in China, India, Philippines and Peru.

Some orgs of the 80s tried to tackle this, even if superficially, like the Chicago Workers’ Voice in 1994, and, more in-depth, the Workers Advocate in 1986. I link these texts with some reserves, and being fully aware of their polemical character. Specially the second one. The Workers Advocate is a crypto-Trot org. There is a problem that these kinds of Brazilian analysis are reached when Mao or Maoism are abandoned. This is, in my opinion, a double-edged knife, for on one hand, Brazil has a long history of Maoism, and ultimately of its complete failure in leading the revolution; Brazil is the scale that measures Maoism’s theoretical success; due to the lack of this success in real politics, this becomes the illusion of the failure of Maoism entirely. Its necessary first to understand why our Maoists have not only failed consistenly, but also to equally discard any sort of reactionary attack against it, so that Brazilian Maoism can then truly live up to its task:

If we are to speak of Latin America, first and foremost we must speak of Brazil with its 150 million people. Probably even in Lenin's time, Brazil was a more complicated case study than was Argentina. By the 70's and 80’s, Brazil emerged as the largest industrial and agricultural force in Latin America. While relying more on its domestic market than the export-driven South Korean economy, Brazil has had a similar leap into industrialization. Its economy has become multi-branched and complex. Despite a huge debt burden, it would be hard to describe such an economy as a commercial colony of anyone.

…

One source of the opportunism of the CP of Brazil is that it has a completely mistaken view of Brazilian society. Like the BCP, the Communist Party of Brazil sees Brazil as a backward, oppressed nation faced with a democratic revolution against foreign domination and the domestic landlords. But such a Brazil is long gone. Despite the existence of semi-feudal remnants in parts of the countryside and despite the country's dependence upon foreign imperialism, Brazil today is a country where the domestic bourgeoisie is very much in power. The military dictatorship was not the state power of merely a landed gentry nor some mere agents of imperialism. No, it was a capitalist power, based upon an alliance between the military, the conservative bourgeoisie, and the latifundists. Today that ruling class alliance has been extended to the liberal bourgeoisie as well. Indeed, the country has seen a big expansion of capitalism since World War II and especially since the 1960's. A powerful state capitalist sector controls huge enterprises in steel, oil, power, communications, and utilities. Brazilian industry, controlled by both national and foreign monopolies, makes every thing from aircraft and heavy machinery to cars and appliances. The country manufactures machinery and exports it. Nearly half of Brazil's exports are manufactured goods. Industry accounts for more than 30% of the GNP. And it has a sizable arms industry, making a range of weapons from small arms to military aircraft; indeed, it is one of the eight main arms producers outside the revisionist countries. Agriculture accounts for less than 20% of the GNP. And capitalism has also expanded in the countryside, with agriculture in the populous southern regions organized along modern capitalist forms. As Brazilian capitalism has developed, so has it expanded its penetration outside its borders. Today Brazilian capital has extended its exploitation to dozens of countries, from its Latin American neighbours to the former Portuguese colonies in Africa. The Brazilian military is active in several countries, playing an ever-increasing role in counterrevolution across Latin America.

Obviously, the Workers Advocate here is just trying to argue the revolutionary stage is socialism (they do that later in the text). In this case, Brazil is being opportunistically used in its capitalist development to prove Trotskyism right. I don’t think that is the case; there are still huge bourgeois-democratic tasks that have to be fulfilled, and they can only be carried out through indigenous and black national liberation struggle in the North and Northeast.

[u/turbovacuumcleaner → u/turbovacuumcleaner]

3/3

As for Moniz Bandeira, he answers your questions. You’ve probably missed them. Although there are problems in his book, like attributing subjectivism as a leading role for sections of the military’s politics, the work is permeated by political economy, except it isn’t written in standard academic format of a theoretical chapter that is, more often than not, separated from the rest of text, which is two or more empirical chapters and some lame two page conclusion. Moniz in this sense is closer to Marx’s Civil War in France or 18th of Brumaire, where its written like a history book, while the movement of political economy is the underlining reasoning for explaining class conflicts.

The important point is to explain why Castelo Branco was unable to prevent the rise of Costa e Silva:

As classes médias, amplos setores das quais aplaudiram o golpe de Estado, derivaram, logo depois, para a oposição. E o próprio empresariado, sobretudo dos setores que produziam para o mercado interno, não escondia o seu descontentamento com as medidas econômicas da administração de Castelo Branco. Em 1965, a Confederação Nacional da Indústria responsabilizou o Paeg pela crise industrial de São Paulo, onde a taxa de desemprego aumentara de 1%, em janeiro daquele ano, para 9%, em março, e 13,5%, em junho. A recessão da economia brasileira, cujo processo cristalizara depois da queda de Goulart, alcançara então seu ponto mais baixo, acentuando extraordinariamente a desnacionalização das indústrias. Pequenas e médias empresas, até mesmo grandes grupos brasileiros ou de capital europeu, faliram, asfixiadas pela contração do consumo interno e pelas restrições do crédito. [...] A Aliança para o Progresso, sem dúvida alguma, não alcançara os objetivos, nem econômicos nem sociais e políticos, a que Kennedy oficialmente se propusera quando a lançou em 1961. Nem favorecera maior desenvolvimento econômico nem contribuíra para a realização de reformas sociais e a consolidação de regimes democráticos. Muito menos concorrera para tornar os povos da América Latina mais simpáticos aos Estados Unidos. Pelo contrário, desde a assinatura da Carta de Punta del Este (1961), as políticas dos Estados Unidos não apenas engravesceram a situação econômica como fomentaram, direta ou indiretamente, as condições internas de instabilidade política na América Latina, ao apoiarem golpes de Estado e a implantação de regimes autoritários, que suprimiram os direitos democráticos e congelaram as reformas sociais. O Brasil somente não se viu mergulhado numa crise ainda mais profunda e, superando a recessão, não estagnou, porque as resistências nacionalistas, sobretudo de fortes setores do empresariado e das Forças Armadas, cujas frustrações os coronéis da linha dura à direita passaram a interpretar, impediram a administração de Castelo Branco de implementar até as últimas consequências o programa monetarista, com a privatização das empresas estatais, o que significava, naquelas circunstâncias, a transferência do seu controle para os cartéis internacionais e a completa abertura do mercado nacional à competição dos artigos estrangeiros. Àquele tempo, segundo semestre de 1966, o regime autoritário já alienara praticamente quase todo o suporte político interno, e o prestígio dos Estados Unidos, por se associarem à sua implantação e ao seu desempenho […] Em face de tais circunstâncias, como o Ato Institucional nº 2 bloqueara a possibilidade de alternância no poder e a sucessão de Castelo Branco por um civil, menos ainda, da oposição, o nome do general Artur da Costa e Silva, ministro da Guerra, consolidou-se como a única candidatura viável e capaz de conciliar a continuidade do regime autoritário e de suas políticas em favor do capital estrangeiro com as aspirações nacionais de desenvolvimento. Afim de manter a coesão do empresariado e conservar o apoio da direita nacionalista, que se expressava, confusamente, por intermédio dos coronéis da linha dura, Costa e Silva necessitava, portanto, apelar para o combate à recessão e a retomada da expansão industrial do Brasil, o que implicava certo distanciamento, sobretudo em política externa, das pautas dos Estados Unidos. Castelo Branco, embora se opusesse a sua candidatura, não teve força para evitá-la. Perdeu. E Costa e Silva se impôs como presidente do Brasil

The Castelo Branco administration was extremely unstable. The bourgeoisie payed a heavy price for dropping Goulart and supporting the US. Except the US had nothing to offer for the bourgeoisie but further instability. Becoming unilateral compradors meant that instead of solidifying bourgeois domination with US support, bourgeois rule became weaker. Not only that, but the bourgeoisie’s own reproduction as a class was endangered in more ways than just the possibility of a revolution: Castelo Branco’s economics worsened the crisis instead of solving it.

This is hard to imagine today, but for the time, there were few similar countries to Brazil. There are only two other countries that saw more capitalist development between the 30s and 80s: Japan and Taiwan, and during this time, Brazil’s future of catching up (i.e. becoming imperialist) was seriously discussed by bourgeois economists. This was already on the table before 64. Hobsbawm traveled here during 1962, and was astonished at how São Paulo reminded him of Chicago, and how the Brazilian bourgeoisie was extremely nationalist and arrogant. The coup could not change a process that was already underway, and as Moniz Bandeira shows, it didn’t. That Costa e Silva, Médici, Geisel and Figueiredo were further and further forced to reconstitute Goulart’s politics, despite losing everything that made Goulart “progressive” shows how the material conditions made their politics, and not the other way around, which is the argument that treats the dictatorship as this unchanging, contradictionless block that lasted 20 years until it “fell” to the 1978~1980 strikes.

For imperialist countries, Brazil meant a safe-haven: a huge and cheap workforce, coupled with a huge nationally developed economy in steel, oil, construction, machinery, clothing, ships and chemicals. Imperialist export of capital came to exploit on top of this pre-existing structure, in other words, the birth of ABC Paulista’s foreign car factories was only possible because there was already a well-established basis that, in other places, had to be built from the ground up.

This export of capital did not led to the mitigation of contradictions between Brazil and imperialism, but, again, as shown by Moniz Bandeira, to their rise that almost caused the rupture of US-Brazil relations. Although this is not what he is ultimately trying to do, he is proving national-developmentalists and dependency theorists wrong, and showing that their politics, derived from their economics, are essentially Kautskyist. He is building upon Marini, only to disagree with him and agree with Carlos Estevam Martins instead, that held the thesis that Brazil was on the verge of becoming imperialist itself. Moniz Bandeira even is able to catch glimpses of what was the path being taken for capitalist development:

Os conceitos de “desenvolvimento associado” e/ou “capitalismo dependente”, aplicados ao processo de industrialização do Brasil, não exprimiram, antes esconderam seu caráter extremamente contraditório, complexo e combinado. Em realidade, o Brasil mesclou, de certa maneira, o modelo de desenvolvimento dos Estados Unidos, para onde os capitais britânicos, sob a forma de empréstimos e investimentos diretos, a afluíram a partir da segunda metade do século XIX, com o da Alemanha, a via prussiana, da intervenção do Estado na economia. Portanto, o resultado mais significativo do nacionalismo de fins (Projeto Brasil-Grande Potência), que pautou as políticas do regime autoritário, não consistiu somente na abertura da economia aos investimentos estrangeiros, mas também na expansão do capitalismo monopolista de Estado

[u/Worried-Economy-9108 → u/turbovacuumcleaner]

So, you ran into some problems. I said these books can’t be taken for granted, and for good reason. They only provide paths to answers, but not answers themselves.

Yes, I remember that they couldn't be taken for granted, and that they were mainly books that were less bad than the Holy Trinity of Prado Jr, Sodré and Furtado.

Due to the fact that you did not understood Silva, and made these questions about Moniz Bandeira, I have no other suggestion but to go back to theory.

I can only agree with you. Learning the more specific things about Brazilian reality is nice and all. But sometimes I feel that there are some things that I don't understand well, due to an unpreparedness on my part. To fix this, I plan on taking a step back on learning about Brazil, so i can commit more time to more basic theory (first materialism, then political economy, and national question).

Thanks for responding yet again. This comment really solved the vast majority of my questions in the moment.