The degenerate West has seen its own shadow in the original "country of the future", a country that has always been regarded as destined to become a "country of the future", but this country has never achieved its goal, it is Brazil. The "Brazilianization" of the world is our future, and we refuse to accept such a future, and the frustration that arises as a result is pervading every corner of Western society.
【Text/ Alex Hou Chuli, translation/ Observer Network Horsepower】
The situation on the margins helps us predict the future.
—Mark Fisher mistakenly believes that this sentence comes from James Graham Ballard
"This cannot happen here", where it is assumed that pandemics and other health security threats will only occur in developing countries, and only from developing countries. However, in many developed Western countries, in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, the inability of governments to formulate and implement continuity policies, the inability to coordinate with government agencies, the inability to communicate effectively with the public, and the fact that they do not even have sufficient stockpiles to produce enough medical equipment and medicines (the shameful vaccine distribution in the EU is not described here), highlights the extent to which state dysfunction in the heart of global capitalism has developed. Weak state capacities, political chaos, cronyism, conspiracy theories, and trust deficits, we see the institutional legitimacy of rich and powerful countries collapsing, making them look like banana republics.
American Affairs published an article titled "The Brazilianization of the World" against the backdrop of slums in Brazil's modern metropolises
If we look up the rankings of the Resilience Index (such as the Global Health Security Index or the Pandemic Response Index) before the OUTBREAK, the United States and the United Kingdom are the two most responsive countries, and the European Union countries are also very highly ranked. These countries see little to learn from their previous experiences in Brazil, China, Liberia, Sierra Leone or the Democratic Republic of the Congo. While not many countries have been able to successfully cope with the pandemic, the failure of the state in the heart of Western capitalism has dealt a heavy blow to those who are smug that "history is over" or "one model is superior to another." Today, it seems that all people live in "less developed countries".
The reality we are faced with is that the 20th century has come to an end, that the state apparatus formed in the wars of the 20th century with great self-confidence and dedication to influencing social reality has been damaged, and that some of the other characteristics of those societies have disappeared: the orderly political antagonism between the left and the right (or between social democracy and Christian democracy), the cultural modernization resulting from the competition between universalists and secular forces, the national identity shaped in the minds of the toiling masses through formal and well-paid employment arrangements, And rapid and inclusive economic growth, these are no longer there.
Today, we find that the "end of history" has come to an end. Unlike in the 1990s or early 2000s, many people today are acutely aware that the situation is very bad. As the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher put it in his "The Slow Passing of the Future," we have all felt tremendous pressure that while the future is promising, that promising future has never arrived, and that the time for progress has degenerated.
The degenerate West has seen its own shadow in the original "state of the future", a country that has always been seen as destined to become the "country of the future", but this country has never achieved its goal, which is Brazil. The "Brazilianization" of the world is our future, and we refuse to accept such a future, and the frustration that arises as a result is pervading every corner of Western society. While it has always been common for only the left (i.e., Marxists) to worry about the "disappearance of the historical horizon," people who are now aware of the "anomaly" have spread throughout every line of the political spectrum.
Welcome to Brazil. In this country, the only people who are satisfied with their situation are the financial elite and corrupt politicians. Everyone was complaining, but there was nothing they could do but shrug their shoulders. The slowly degrading Brazilian society is not an out-of-control train, it is more like a nervous roller coaster, with occasional hopeful uphill rides that have never been derailed so far. We always go back to where we started, we were shocked, we were confused, and our hearts were full of anxiety.
Brazil is often thought to be synonymous with social inequality, and in Brazilian cities, the poor living in mountain slums look down on the tall buildings that the rich enter and leave. In his 1991 novel Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture, the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland called "Brazilianization" the phenomenon of "the widening gap between rich and poor and the consequent disappearance of middle-income groups."
In the 10 years that followed, the German sociologist Ulrich Beck used the word "Brazilianization" to describe the fluctuating state of life in which employment became flexible, arbitrary, uncertain, and decentralized; in other countries, "Brazilianization" meant that in their cities slums or shantytowns expanded dramatically, where the city centres were occupied by the middle class and the poor were squeezed out of the countryside; in other countries, "Brazilianized" means that in their cities slums or shantytowns expand dramatically, where the city centres are occupied by the middle class and the poor are squeezed out of the countryside." "Brazilianization" implies an emerging interracial contradiction, between the working class and the white elite, which encompasses all ethnicities.
As social inequality and life instability are increasingly torn apart in cities in Europe and North America, the above-mentioned understandings of the term "Brazilianization" do make sense on the surface. But why use "Brazilianization" to describe those phenomena? Brazil is a middle-income country, an economically developed, modern, industrialized country; at the same time, Brazil is also a country full of a large number of poor and backward phenomena, and the Brazilian ruling class seems to have made little progress since the time of their slave owners. In the eyes of the developed countries, Brazil is their own past, the early stages of their own development, and they think that they have left that stage far behind.
North and South, then and now
After the end of the Cold War between East and West, the new line in the era of globalization is said to be the line between North and South. In the final accounts of history, the new world will be divided, and the developing countries of the South will be seen as a land of poverty and conflict. Western powers tend to alternate between two postures in their relations with the South, one defensive (preventing terrorism, environmental degradation, new diseases, organized crime, and drugs from flowing from those southern countries) and paternalistic (Western countries should "help them develop").
The first gesture shown by the Western countries means that the developing countries of the South cannot benefit from it, so the second gesture truly reflects their purpose. The countries of the South will gradually become similar to the countries of the North, and the emerging middle class of the countries of the South will be eager to imitate the consumer culture of the countries of the North, and they will create more and more wealth.
In the new era of globalization, there is a repetition of the old theory of Cold War modernization. For the poorest countries, international development assistance projects such as well digging or microfinance and those promoted by non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have led people to mistakenly believe that those countries really have hope of "catching up". Such development assistance is often carried out by the international financial institutions that, through structural adjustment measures in the 1980s, fragmented poor countries.
For the better-off countries of the South (now known as "emerging markets"), the local neoliberal development model is of course a follower of Western theories of modernization. According to this theory, those countries are only "late" and sooner or later they will become "like us". Check out the big shopping malls on the streets of São Paulo, Bangkok or Cairo! All we need to do is wait for the wealth to spread to those countries, which will soon join the rich nations club. In the case of the Economist, for example, a magazine argues that countries like Brazil can achieve rapid growth by simply reforming their economies freely. After all, in the 1990s, a large number of countries, such as Mexico and South Korea, joined the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), and even Chile joined the organisation in 2010, and it was only a matter of time before Brazil joined.
However, this argument ignores the fact that the policy tools required for modernization theory (such as import substitution) are no longer effective, and that the international environment and technical relations of that year determined the effectiveness of this policy instrument and the feasibility of catch-up development, but that kind of international environment and technical relations no longer exist. The technologies and industries that emerged from the Second Industrial Revolution are no longer in the limelight, and the economies built on petroleum, rubber, and steel technologies (such as automobile manufacturing) are no longer so-called "high value-added" industries. Those things that are really critical are now protected by intellectual property and are not accessible to countries like Brazil. Thus, the countries of the South can no longer be regarded as being only in the early stages of the development of the countries of the North in time, and the countries of the South have been unable to achieve the goal of slowly catching up with the countries of the North, and the two are now in the same time and space.
In this case, Brazil is caught in a cycle of hope and frustration, unable to move. Many countries around the world are modernizing today, but not so much: people use whatsApp software on smartphones and live in slums; e-commerce models have emerged in cities, but gutters are still open.ed.
In fact, with the exception of China, which has achieved remarkable development, no matter how much one makes a long speech about the "new middle class", other countries have in fact been regressing over the past 40 years. Oh yes, now that groups of workers are dangerously stepping into the door of consumer society, they can afford a TV or a refrigerator, and some of them have even become the first in their family history to go to college, but they have not really gained a sense of security.
Degradation today is perhaps the most concerned issue in the countries of the North, and many of the characteristics exhibited in them have plagued the countries of the South for many years: not only social inequality and employment instability, but also growing elite corruption, lack of policy stability, and social rifts. Are the rich countries of the North regressing and entering a state of "modernization, but not to a high degree"?
Protesters hold placards marked "Shame" at a demonstration against the government's governance of the coronavirus pandemic in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil
There is no development of modernity
To understand what "Brazilianization" really means, and what it will bring us, we must understand Brazil's trajectory. Further, we must figure out what this trajectory can teach us about the present and the future. Brazil's awareness of its development potential and the frustration it has experienced have led Brazilians to think critically about modernization, and it is valuable for the world to do some research on these ideas developed by Brazilians.
In Brazil, perhaps the best illustration of a "modern but underdeveloped society" is the literary critic Roberto Schwarz, one of several scholars who joined a Marxist discussion group at the University of São Paulo in the late 1950s, along with the economist Paul Singer, the philosopher José Arthur Giannotti, the sociologist Michel Giannotti, and the sociologist Michel Schwarz. Michael Löwy and Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who later became president. These scholars are based on the writings of the economist Celso Furtado, the sociologist Florestan Fernandes, and the literary critic Antonio Candido, who stood in the footsteps of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto, and others, who were active in the 1930s. Gilberto Freyre and Caio Prado Júnior are on the shoulders of several historians. One of the common characteristics of these figures is that they are all concerned with how to describe and analyze Brazilian society, how to meet between the old and new generations in the field of dialectics, and how to reconcile the contradictions between their national identity and the international reality in the process of Integrating Global Capitalism in Brazil.
In 1973, Roberto Schwartz wrote the influential essay "Ideas Out of Place." Although the publisher uses the title "Misplaced Ideas" in the English version, the Portuguese version has the meaning of "forgotten but rather inappropriate, undesirable, incorrect views". It was through this "inadequacy" that Roberto Schwartz attracted the attention of the reader: in 19th-century Europe, liberal ideas on human rights and freedom, equality and fraternity were dominant, and that the ideological and legal superstructure of Europe was based on a production system based on free labor. However, the situation in Brazil is different. In the tropics, liberalism was only a Baroque decoration in Brazilian society, and unfree labor was still widespread.
Roberto Schwarz
The Brazilian elite spoke only liberal words, but in fact slavery was abolished in 1888, while other forms of unfree labor or coercion in labor persisted many years later. In Europe, liberalism may have played a role in masking the existence of evil black workshops, but liberalism at least reflects a very true reality that man as an individual is formally free. In Brazil, however, liberalism is considered to be absurd, so the reality of liberalism or the alignment of words and deeds on liberalism has never been achieved in Brazil.
Even in this day and age, there are many examples of ideas that do not match reality: "conservatives" agitate for the destruction of things that are worth protecting, such as the family; "liberals" who defend the freedom of supervisory institutions; "extreme individualists" judge a person more by his ethnic background than by the person himself; and "leftists" now come more from the well-educated and wealthy. There is a lot of "deaptation" around us, which is the philosopher Adrian Johnston from memetics, a new theory that explains the laws of cultural evolution from the perspective of Darwin's evolutionary theory, referring to the imitation of ideas between people in the cultural field and the spread of those ideas from generation to generation; genes are reproduced through inheritance, but memes are transmitted through imitation. It is a concept derived from the basic unit of culture, the Observer's Net Note, that the adaptation strategies that originally conformed to memeticism end up becoming useless or even completely opposite. If liberalism was originally born to adapt to the rise of the bourgeoisie and the consolidation of its position (all in the name of "freedom"), then today liberalism is in a process of "adaptation", which is used to guard the class order and its dominance.
Brazilian intellectuals have been wrestling with the issue of "adaptation" for decades, and they have made some important points for this, and by analyzing their views, we can have a better understanding of the status quo and clarify where the misalignment between ideas and reality comes from. Moreover, as luiz Philipe de Caux and Felipe Catalani, two scholars, put it: "Historically, ideas transplanted from elsewhere have been forced to be reintegrated into new cultural soils, and this new cultural soil has not adapted well to them as the soil that produced those ideas." We do not need to be aware of this maladaptive condition through the reflection of phenomena, because the daily experience of an ordinary person is enough to make us aware of this." Indeed, many ordinary Brazilians have become aware of the hypocrisy of those "anachronistic views." In the process of globalization (or Americanization) through the Internet, ideas are detached from the soil on which they are born, from the decisive material environment on which they are founded. This "anachronistic view" spreads across a wide range of fields. In Europe, where the economy is withering during the COVID-19 pandemic, young people have taken to the streets to oppose "white privilege", but in fact, in European countries, white people are the absolute majority, and those young people must have imagined themselves as Americans.
As for Brazil, it was once thought that by eliminating the "core-periphery" differences in Brazilian society (i.e., changing the situation in which wealthy islands are surrounded by a sea of poverty), the prospects of the "state of the future" would become a reality and catch up with the rich countries of the North. But the world is changing in the opposite direction. It seems that the rich countries of the North are instead "catching up" with the countries of the South, and they are replicating the social problems of the South. In this way, Brazil is indeed playing a kind of "pioneering" role.
The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes further developed the proposition of "Brazilianization" by publishing a paper in 2004 called The Brazilian Fracture of the World. Paul Alantis begins his paper by examining the views of several thinkers from the North who have expressed unease about the path of global capitalism. Back in 1995, the conservative strategist Edward Luttwak referred to "America's Third-Worldization of America." That same year, Michael Lind, predicting the future of American society, argued that American society would be divided, that there would be informal but intractable class divides: that the white elite would rule a society of all races, and that for a divided society within it, they would be willing to see oligarchs emerge. Michael Linde directly mentioned Brazil's name in the article.
A year later, Christopher Lasch, in The Revolt of the Elites, argued that the self-isolation of the ruling class and its detachment from the masses were already social realities. Meanwhile, John Gray, who championed the policies of former British Prime Minister Thatcher, believed that there would be a "Latin American rent-collecting class that profited from capital" in the West, with the white elite reaping substantial benefits in the new globalized world, the middle class losing its position, the working class being marginalized again, and the optimistic expectations of the future sparked by strong post-World War II economic growth shattered.
Manuel Castells, a Catalan sociologist in Spain, believes that many will be completely excluded from divided societies. A new reality has emerged, and only the bourgeoisie can continue to maintain its social status, and they will become a globalized, internationalized class.
The emergence of "Belíndia"
Brazil is a modern country from its first days of existence. Brazil was originally a colony, a place to exploit resources, and it was linked to the rising world market. Brazil may have been the last country in the Western Hemisphere to abolish slavery, but slavery in Brazil was a product of early modernity, and Brazil had never experienced a pre-modernization phase, nor had it ever experienced a feudal era. In this sense, "Brazilianization" is not a simple return to semi-feudal relations.
So how do you explain Brazil's illiberal labor, the system of large farmers, and the culture and politics attached to it that continued into the 20th century? In short, how do you explain all the "backward" things inside Brazil? In Brazil, modernization has fed the backward forces, and in turn strengthened and even multiplied the backward forces. In Brazil's rural areas, flexible labor and land supply created the conditions for the "primitive accumulation" of agriculture, which in turn inhibited the progress of agricultural technology. With the advancement of industrialization in the 1930s, a large number of poor peasants became cheap labor in the cities.
What makes Brazil's history unique is that from the populist period of the mid-1930s to the mid-1960s, the country's industrialization and modernization did not make any demands for the overthrow of the established institutions, unlike Europe, where bourgeois revolutions occurred a century ago. In Brazil, the rural propertied classes, in the course of capital expansion, instead continued to retain power and continue to benefit from this expansion. As the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira put it in his Critique of Dualist Reason published in 1972: "Brazilian capitalist expansion has been achieved by introducing new ones into old ones and replicating old ones in new ones." This trend was further reinforced politically by the corporatist labor laws introduced by President Getúlio Vargas, who in fact imitated Mussolini's policies aimed at fixing and establishing the rules for the proletarian identity of the workers of Brazilian cities. Crucially, by doing so, it severed the relationship between those workers and the countryside, and poverty and illiberalism in the Brazilian countryside continued.
For de Oliveira, the old class relations were preserved in the new world of Brazil. In the case of the new poor in the cities, for example, they can build their own houses so that the cost of this class from generation to generation becomes very low, and employers do not have to pay them high wages to pay rent. It can be said that the slums of Brazil are not a sign of the backwardness of the old era, but a product of the new era.
The cable car travels over the Alemão slum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, photo: Xinhua News Agency
We can now look at how the personal service industry in the lives of citizens works in this accumulation model. Brazil's upper-middle class has its own nannies and drivers, and this economic relationship can only be replaced after significant investment in public services and infrastructure sectors such as industrialized cleaning and public transport services. In this regard, the middle class in Brazil enjoys a higher standard of living than the same social class in the United States or Europe. Thus, this exploitation of cheap labor in the lives of Brazilian citizens effectively weakened the political motivation of the rulers to improve public services.
Has the world also become somewhat "Brazilian" in this regard? As various "private services" expand, are professionals and elites hiring personal yoga instructors, personal chefs and personal security guards? Upper-middle-class families in San Francisco are replicating the lifestyles of aristocrats and estate owners, and with it a service economy, but now everything can be outsourced, and digital platforms can bridge the gap between the new elite and private "subcontractors." Brazil's social structure has shown us the future of this world.
De Oliveira again analyzed the social situation in Brazil in 2003, comparing Brazil to a "platypus": Brazil is a deformed monster, the country is not underdeveloped (the "primitive accumulation" of the countryside has been replaced by a strong agricultural industry sector), but the country has not completely modernized, that is, Brazil has not yet really integrated the public into the country. It should be noted, however, that such a situation in Brazil is not inevitable. In the period leading up to the coup d'état in 1964, a growing force of workers could have brought a new situation to Brazilian society and put an end to this intense exploitation; brazil's agrarian reforms could have liberated the rural "reserve labor" that had poured into the cities in the 1970s and ultimately destroyed the forces that had long been entrenched in the countryside.
Such a process of modernization requires the cooperation of the bourgeoisie and the workers. The Brazilian bourgeoisie, however, supported the right-wing coup forces. Introducing De Oliveira's "platypus" view, Schwartz points out that there is a strong historical irony that President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, a neoliberalist who was a left-wing sociologist in the 1960s, discovered in the 90s that the Brazilian bourgeoisie did not want to see its country develop. President Cardoso pointed out that, unlike the dominant left-wing view at the time, the Brazilian bourgeoisie preferred Brazil to be a small partner of Western capitalist countries rather than see its dominance at home being challenged by other lower classes in the future. That said, not allowing Brazil to develop is the choice of the country's elites themselves.
De Oliveira pointed out that the reason why Brazil's "country of the future" has been repeatedly dashed is that "Brazil is one of the most unequal countries in the world ... The country has seen the strongest economic growth in the world for a long time... The decisive factors in this situation are the low status of the Brazilian working class and brazil's excessive dependence on the outside world". With its natural conditions, rapid economic growth and enviable culture, Brazil could have been a utopian country. The reality, however, is that, in the words of Decox and Catalani, brazil's essence lies in the fact that its national superiority cannot be translated into reality. It is not that it is backwardness that prevents Brazil from taking charge of its own destiny, but that Brazil's fate is endless frustration and frustration.
Moreover, brazilian society's disregard for the poor is not an accidental phenomenon, but an artificially created binary social phenomenon. In Brazil, this situation is called "Billy India," a term coined in 1974 by the economist Edmar Lisboa Bacha: Brazil is a country made up of cities as rich as Belgium and poor rural areas as India, both coexisting in the same country. The Brazilian "Belgians" ostensibly lived in a modern, well-functioning country, but they were dragged down by the "external" semi-feudal, backward "India." De Oliveira points out that for their own development, those who live "inside" rely heavily on the exploitation of the "outside." Not only that, but this duality of Brazilian society also affects the "Belgians" inside, shaping the Brazilian elite into a corrupt, selfish, generational group of social status who cares little about how the "Indians" on the outside are doing.
Unfortunately, the phenomenon of "Billy India", far from decreasing in recent decades, has become more and more common. We can look at what the two countries that make up the term look like today: Belgium may still be rich, but they have become increasingly bureaucratic, socially fragmented, and class-based, and India may still be poor, but they also have their own high-tech industries and conservative populism is hanging over the country. Similar phenomena exist in Italy, the United States, and the United Kingdom, where deep regional imbalances, rigid politics, and breathtaking populism are evident.
Rich and slums separated by only one wall (video screenshot)
How should we look at modernity
If we analyze the "Brazilianization" of Alantis, we will find that the cultural identity of Brazil's development also exists in today's new world in the post-growth era. The manner in which Brazilians behave in response to their modernity (social relations to adapt to flexible rather than fixed labor contracts, semi-legal workarounds, under-colored bourgeoisie) also appear around us.
Brazil, a former colony born into modern society, is not a society that emerged from feudal relations, nor a society that, through revolution, cut ties with the past and declared itself a new life. Rather, it is simply a place of production and distribution.
In the 1940s, the great Brazilian historian Caio Prado Jr. analyzed the social formation of the colonies in Brazil at that time, arguing that the efficiency of the colonial system lay in the combination of the organization of productive activities and the immaturity of the development of higher-order social relations, resulting in colonies with only economy and no culture. Thus, the contemporary fringes shaped by colonialism are internally "impersonally unrelated," the interpersonal order that allows individual human beings to connect with each other and unite into a society in which people living in it cannot form a cohesive and complete society. When you perceive certain signs of disintegration in contemporary neoliberal society, you should realize that this is no accident.
Historically, freedmen emerged in Brazilian society, made up of a landlord elite and slaves. Historically, Brazil's "quasi-society, which presents the image of the pioneers of mercantilism," was formed after being influenced by those liberals. In Brazil in the 18th and 19th centuries, there was a widespread act of almsgiving in society at that time, and Schwartz found this in the novels of Machado de Assis. In a world of slave owners and slaves, poor freedmen lived on the handouts and patronage of the propertied classes. Unlike the citizens who were entitled, the freedmen had to compete with each other for handouts from the propertied classes. We should already see the shadow of patronage and patronism in Brazilian society in some countries.
Our ideas and institutions are conformed to contemporary liberal ideology, so the reality is that this society is not organized according to reason, it operates according to the unbridled ideas of the rich. In such a society, the elite is of course the beneficiary, and so are the "freedmen", because they have access to the patronage and patronage of the elite, and they are not slaves. This relationship of patronage and patronage is overshadowed by liberal ideology, in which the hypocrisy is systematic: the high-sounding liberal ideology justifies both fickle and corrupt behavior. We can apply the above statement to the now "Brazilianized" United States, in our words today: "Information should be freely spread", but it should be restricted when it violates "social standards" or is not in the interests of oligarchs.
Similarly, Schwartz mentions the "dialectic of the malandro" (a tolerant and anti-heroic attitude toward a lazy, petty criminal life— observer's note) when referring to another central element of Brazilian subjectivity, a concept that Schwartz proposed while reading Tonio Candido's novel. In the works Schwartz reads, the "rogue dialectic" allows people to temporarily set aside real historical conflicts by playing tricks or some kind of practical knowledge—in effect, an escape. This involves a "very Brazilian attitude towards life, that is, 'corrosive tolerance', which emerged in the colonial era and continued into the 20th century, and which has become an important clue to the study of Brazilian culture." This is the Brazilian and slimy mentality that we see often being praised for, where black and white do not exist. This attitude to life may not be as dignified as the Puritan values of North Atlantic capitalist societies, who have a clear attitude towards things and which they can firmly condemn. However, in Schwartz's view, perhaps only this attitude to life can smoothly integrate Brazil into a more "open" world. Unfolding before Brazil is a "world free of sin".
This weakening of the conflict has permeated the entire history of Brazil. In Brazil's history, there are very few things that can finally be truly solved. Brazil has not experienced the Great Bourgeois Revolution, nor has it completely cut off its past. In Brazil, the price of the triumph of the new over the old is to allow the old to continue to gain a place in the new system. In the case of the re-democratization process that took place in the 1980s, the new Constitution promised to give more rights to groups that had been abandoned by society so that they could be more integrated into society; at the same time, it also assured the hereditary elite that they could continue to maintain their place in the new order and that the military had not been reorganized, the consequences of which were now evident. Uncertainty and indecision always dictate the path of the country. In Brazil, there is a saying that it all ends in pizza; legend has it that there was a serious dispute within the leadership of the Palmeras soccer team in São Paulo, Brazil, and a consensus needed to be reached within 14 hours. At their meeting, someone bought beer and 18 pizzas. So they decided to have a full meal first, but the tension was greatly relieved after the dinner, and they no longer seriously discussed, but casually compromised, which is the allusion that "everything ends in a pizza without results" - Observer's Net Note).
It is clear that our postmodern world is a "world free of sin", where people have no sense of morality, no one is condemned, and no one blames themselves. For the new global elite, fixed rules don't exist, and everything is negotiable. Morality has become a personal, subjective thing, and moral people sometimes feel embarrassed; the elites now prefer to preach empty corporate ethics rather than human morality. Moral standards are no longer the basis on which social authority is based. The postmodern elite does not feel any responsibility on their part. They have no law in their hearts, so they don't feel any guilt.
In the new economic era, adaptation and reconciliation are extremely critical. As a subcontractor (not an employee), you must always think about how to please your customers. In Alantis's view, today's society defines "professionalism" as nothing more than some of the qualities that must be possessed in order to survive in this unstable world. As for the scoundrels or liars in Brazil, they have no precepts to keep, just know how to "try their best". As for opportunism in general (such as the free people of 19th-century Brazil who sought almsgiving), it has now been transformed into a new way of working the world.
Postmodernity has long existed
Brazil's past is becoming a global reality today. In Ulrich Baker's view, "Brazilianization" means a bleak future, not only a problem of a large number of people being abandoned by society, nor a problem of barbaric capitalism, when the state will no longer be the monopoly of violence, and various powerful non-state actors such as criminal gangs will emerge. But Baker also found some positive qualities in Brazilians: they were flexible, tolerant, adaptable to new environments, and able to calmly accept the contradictions of life. "Why can we accept diversity in the form of the family but not diversity in the form of work?" Baker wrote. Perhaps for many Brazilians, they have not yet had the opportunity to meet the first modernity (full-time, tenured work, Ford, etc.), and they are ready to usher in the second modernity (flexible work, postmodernity).
If classical, high modernity is a concept associated with safety, certainty, and clear and unambiguous right and wrong judgments, then postmodernity is defined by risk, in which knowledge and adaptability are at the heart of everything. The "scoundrels" of Brazil are the real experts in such a postmodern world, a group of people who came before the times. Perhaps this explains why polish theorist Zygmunt Bauman's books on "Liquid Modernity" and "Liquid Love" are so popular in Brazil that you can even buy them in newspaper kiosks on the streets of São Paulo.
Brazil, a country that lacks the foundations of a bourgeois revolution (and therefore historically lacks the spirit of the rule of law, citizenship and even guilt), is colliding head-on with post-bourgeois 21st century capitalism. From this point of view, even countries that have experienced extreme bourgeois revolutions, such as the United States or France, are experiencing Brazilian-style hesitation and repeated failures. The United States has taken a senseless response to the global financial crisis, which has simply bailed out banks and turned a blind eye to structural problems, in effect doing nothing about the crisis; more typically in Europe, the eurozone has done nothing more than to keep procrastinating, an approach that Wolfgang Streeck calls "buying time."
For the current new capitalism, although hypocrisy and corruption are already strange and normal phenomena, Brazil still provides a very useful way to rationalize itself. Isn't this ambiguity of legality and illegality (and the problems of the poor in Brazil, as well as the rich, such as the clean operations in the global capitalist system while doing dirty things at home with the help of hereditary social status) a symbol of the grey legitimacy of the financialization of the economy? For example, vast amounts of wealth from the drug trade are circulating through the systems of some of the world's top banks. When people hear this kind of news, people just shrug their shoulders and nothing can change. Isn't this Brazilian-style "corrosive tolerance"?
There is no elite of the motherland
The Brazilianization of the world has led to uncertainty and indecisiveness. Neoliberal capitalism, which is on the decline, cannot find a way out of the crisis, and the people responding to it are too dispersed, too cynical, too unconvinced that change will really happen. This is Mark Fisher's capitalist realism: he insists that "there is no alternative", and he cannot imagine an alternative. The problem is not only that reality does not correspond to ideals, we do not even believe in the existence of ideals at all. The reason for this is that political ideals seem to have become integrated with our corrupt reality. Today, ideals are nowhere to be found. Similar to the situation in Brazil, the Western world as a whole is not only suffering from the frustration that "the foreseeable future has never arrived", frustration has even become part of the body of Western society.
In Brazil, the ruling classes that profited from colonialism, slavery, and the big farmer system also supported the 1964 coup d'état, which prevented workers from acquiring their place in society and thus eliminated the possibility of Brazil gaining national independence. Brazil's elite prefers Brazil to become dependent on international capital and the United States. As a result, they have deprived Brazil of its last chance to catch up. Since then, despite two late and limited attempts to integrate the masses into social development during the 2000 and 2010 administrations (which have created a larger, more prosperous domestic market, which is particularly beneficial to the elites), the elites have ousted the Party of Labor through an institutionalized coup. This collapse in the constitutional realm is actually made up of a series of events, and although Lula led the big polls in 2018, he was eventually arrested, charged, and hastily sentenced in unfair court. Given Brazil's superior natural endowments, widely loved culture, and decades-long economic growth, and the dualistic social reality of today (the country has become a monster platypus), we have to conclude that Brazil's elite is the worst in the world. Brazil's elite, who live in privately secured and proprietary apartment buildings, is nothing more than a more absurd version of the elite of the "advanced democracies of the West." They refuse to take responsibility for society, and Peter Thiel's "floating cities on the sea" plan is just one of the most famous examples.
Brazilian sugarcane harvesters staying at their accommodations have no drinking water, no beds, no electric lights, no kitchenware, no toilets, photo courtesy of Flickr user Ricardo Funari
When Brazil's ruling class chooses to give up national sovereignty in order to maintain its dominance at home, we have also found such phenomena within the European Union. The EU is a regional bloc that is actually an "economic community" that Europeans built to prevent politics from interfering with market norms. When Europe's elites decided to admit their countries to the European Union, they betrayed national sovereignty and corresponding political responsibility to society.
Italy's elite is desperate to keep Italy in the eurozone, with no regard for Italy's economic situation or its devastating impact on Italy's future. Just as the Brazilian elite wants to live permanently in Miami ( a city that has long been the capital of Latin American reactionaries ) , the global elites in Europe and North America want to escape from the masses and not be "held back" by them. The Italian elite wants to be German, as does the Remainers in Britain, and the liberal elite in the United States wants to be "European," or at least to see the vast interior of the United States disappear completely.
In this world, we find that no country (with the possible exception of China) is a dominant elite committed to achieving any form of "national planning" aimed at integrating the masses of society into the country's development process. As for the neoliberal elite, apart from short-term crisis management and building a government in the eyes of the media, what they do is often anti-national. As President Fernando Enrique Cardoso, who sold valuable state assets to investors at low prices in the 1990s, said: The national bourgeoisie is unreliable.
The Brazilianization of the world
In any country, modernization means eliminating the feudal remnants of the countryside, promoting the process of urbanization, and integrating the masses into industrialized society through formal employment. In the process, wealth spreads through society and civil rights are popularized. At least the proletariat will form in the cities, they will fight for their rights, they will get concessions from the elite, and therefore those elites will be restrained. Modernization does not completely eliminate the hereditary status of social status, nor can it break the patronage relationship. Politics operates more prescriptively within an ideological framework, and both the state and the bureaucracy can benefit from the modernization process – at least in the most developed countries.
The opposite of the modernization process (the disintegration of the formal employment system, the increase in unstable employment) laid the foundation for the emergence of the phenomenon of "Brazilianization". When "Brazilianization" emerged, social inequality grew, oligarchs began to rule government, wealth and social space privatized, and the middle class shrank. These phenomena are most pronounced in cities, where the city centre is increasingly occupied by the wealthy, while those abandoned by society move to the periphery.
In political parlance, "Brazilianization" means hereditaryism, patronage, and corruption. We should not regard these as anomalies, all of which are normal political phenomena when the fruits of economic growth cannot be shared by the masses, and the left-wing socialist forces cannot play any counteractive role in them. Only the political forces of industrial workers and socialists can keep liberals honest and prevent elites from using the state as a tool for personal gain.
The "revolt of the elite" has hollowed out many neoliberal states. Their bodies flee from society into heavily guarded private spaces, they enter the global financial sphere economically, making anti-democratic arrangements politically and outsourcing responsibilities to others. Elites close their doors to the populace and are indifferent to the pressure of the populace, but they are open to forces that have the resources and networks to exert direct influence on politics. The consequence of all this is not only corruption, but also the loss of the ability of the State to implement long-term development policies, and the inability of the State to even drive economic growth and eliminate regional economic disparities. The failure of the state in the covid-19 pandemic is just one of the most notable examples of what has been visible recently.
Brazil's past disgraceful history, known for its uncertainty and indecision, and its dualistic social structure led to the emergence of Brazilian-style cynicism. The West is moving closer to Brazil, and not only is the economy stagnating, but there is also a gap between the people and politics, and between citizens and the government. The mentality of the ruling class in looking at the masses of society is becoming more and more elevated. If anyone dares to rebel against the existing order, the elite labels them racist, sexist, or other unscathed. When their favorite candidate doesn't win enough votes, they create all sorts of weird conspiracy theories, the best known of which is Russia's "Russiagate" that manipulated the U.S. election. This phenomenon, known as the "neoliberal order collapse syndrome," has led to more serious cynicism in Western politics. This is another brazilian trait: conspiracy theories flourish when institutional trust in a country is low and there are actually a lot of conspiracies.
A society full of barriers
How will people respond to "Brazilianization"? Perhaps we will see the transition of nations to protectionist states, where national sovereignty becomes cherished and more inclined to shape a fatherly relationship between the state and its citizens. It's clear that the COVID-19 pandemic is pushing the country in that direction, providing citizens with support for the fight against the pandemic and providing them with direct financial subsidies, which President Biden did in his first month in office. At the same time, however, national transformation is taking place in other areas. The weakening of corporate profitability appears to have become an important factor in linking political and economic forces, so the resulting phenomenon is called "expropriation accumulation". Even Robert Brenner, an expert on the transition from feudalism to capitalism, suggests that we may be in the process of transitioning from capitalism to another.
The best part of the globalization process in the field of economic relations and ideology has come to an end, but the trend of social differentiation and stable employment opportunities is rapidly evolving. There is no doubt that the "rebellious elite" will conclude that the situation will get worse and will try to seek asylum in the social repercussions of a worse situation. Moreover, growing class divisions in the West have created barriers in society: between the winners of the new economy and others, and between the state and its citizens. The outward manifestations of this estrangement are fears of populism, complaints about bureaucratic incompetence, lack of government leadership, and lack of policy continuity, but these are the biggest headaches for the economic elite, and they are better remembered.
The debate about neo-feudalism, which should take place here, has four interrelated features and is very similar to "Brazilianization": the division of sovereignty, the new landlords and peasants, the hinterlandization, and the catastrophe. But the argument I make here is that the phenomena we see are not a return to history, but are in fact an outward manifestation of the essential characteristics of capitalist modernity. The globalization of the deterioration of social conditions and the dependence of capital on the state as a return to "feudalism" is not only a misunderstanding, but also a manifestation of Eurocentrism. If we are indeed sliding to the end of an employment society and modernization, then capital is bound to become more dependent on the state, not only because the state provides regulation, laws, and infrastructure, but also because capital can participate directly in the extraction of value and in the securing of its own profits.
Is this a stable practice? Brazil has been in endless chaos since 2013, and Brazilians are tired of "integrating into society through consumption." It is clear that this current state of wandering cannot continue indefinitely. As with consumption driven by personal debt over the past few decades, distributing money to the populace may buy the elite some time, but wage growth has long since stalled. The post-pandemic era will not be better, and the Brazilian-style state dysfunction of the world's richest and most powerful countries is there, and everyone can see it. At the end of the "end of history," protests, rebellions, and riots can become a global phenomenon, which may herald a riot at a higher level. It is not enough to simply condemn the elite. Broad action to choke our own destiny and take responsibility for our future is something that must be done in order to avoid a new wave of social unrest that "ends in a pizza without success."
Alex Hochuli, a freelance writer and research consultant from São Paulo, Brazil, published a new book in 2021, The End of the End of History. This article was first published in the summer 2021 issue of Volume V, Volume II, American Affairs, translator/ Observer.com.
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