LATIN AMERICAN MARXISM PANEL Politics - 2016

Authors:

Pedro Lima - PhD in Political Science from IESP-UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil;
Professor at the State University of Londrina (UEL), Paran, Brazil.
E-mail address: pedrollima@gmail.com

Josu Medeiros - PhD in Political Science from IESP-UERJ, Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.
E-mail address: josuedsrj@gmail.com

Title:
Struggling within populisms straightjacket: limits and repetitions of Marxist
readings on the Brazilian crises (from 1964 to 2016)
Abstract:
In the troubled political scene of the 1960s in Brazil, a prolific trend of Marxist authors
adopted populism as a main conceptual axis of their interpretations on the countrys
crisis. At that time, the Marxist refusal of national-developmentalism led to criticism on
the alleged theoretical and practical insufficiencies of the political actors identified with
the communist and labourist parties. According to that reading, common to many
relevant authors (Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Caio Prado Jr., Francisco Weffort,
amongst many others), the 1964 coup dtat and the military dictatorship have
epitomized populisms collapse and the exhaustion of a political structure based on
class interests compromise. Within that analytical framework, many of the social,
economic and political conquests obtained in the democratic period (1946-1964) would
come to mean nothing but false populist promises, ill-founded on populisms thin limits
and inevitable breakdown.
This paper identifies continuities between that discourse and certain Marxist analysis of
Brazilian contemporary crisis (by Paulo Arantes, Vladimir Safatle, Armando Boito,
amongst others). A priori depreciation of political practices through the concept of
populism; oversight of formal democracy and the potential bond between political form
and social conquests; critique of a class conciliation politics and search for a deeper
and truthful class struggle dimension; exhaustion of the conciliatory model as
historical necessity; immediate identification between State and emancipatory
movements oppression all of these features constitute an analysis that replicates in
2016 the meaning of those 1964 readings. It transfers to PT, Lula and Lulismo
similar sins as those attributed to communists of early 1960s and to Joo Goularts
labourism. Our purposes in this paper are to pinpoint those analytical and conceptual
ties and to open up the possibility of an alternative Marxist interpretation of the 2016
coup dtat in Brazil. Its potentialities would lie in a properly dialectical understanding
of the tensions and contradictions that emerged after a leftist party have risen to power
in a peripheral emerging country.