Neoliberal Hegemony and Unionism in Brazil

Abstract

The neoliberal governments of Fernando Collor de Melo and Fernando Henrique Cardoso came to power in Brazil by popular vote. In these two elections the power of money and of the media were certainly very important, but it would be wrong to attribute the victories of the neoliberal candidates in 1989 and in 1994 just to the manipulation of the electoral process. They are in fact an indication that we are involved in a process-broader and more complex than that of the electoral process itself-of constructing a new bourgeois hegemony in Brazil, a hegemony of neoliberal ideas and political proposals. Hegemony is used here in the Gramscian to refer to the conversion of an ideology and a class's political platform into the cement of a new historical block. The apologia for the market and private enterprise as areas of efficiency and innovative and progressive initiative and the corresponding condemnation of the state and public enterprise as areas of waste, bureaucratism, and privilege became accepted as common sense, penetrating unequally, broadly, and sometimes contradictorily the whole of Brazilian society. Neoliberalism reactivates and makes new use-that is, in a new historic situation marked by monopoly capitalism and by the expansion of social rights-of fundamental concepts of the old bourgeois economic ideology (the virtues of private enterprise and of the market) produced by 19th-century capitalism, concepts that precluded any questioning of the legitimacy of the reforms of capitalism in the 20th century. In a word, we are dealing with an old ideology assuming a new political function that is to some degree paradoxical: that of exalting the market to benefit monopolies and at the expense of social rights.