Six Interpretations of the Brazilian Social Formation

Abstract

Intellectual output and the development of the Brazilian social formation are two inherently linked phenomena. Intellectuals try to analyze (and orient) the society, which at the same time conditions them. This conditioning reflects, on the one hand, the imperative of the changing reality and, on the other, class commitments and ideological options. The objective of this article is to analyze the main interpretations concerning the development of the Brazilian social formation. Therefore, instead of examining the liquidation of the agrarian-mercantile society, the populist period and its crisis, the authoritarian technobureaucraticcapitalist alliance and its collapse, and the perspectives that are opening up for the present Brazilian society, I will attempt to analyze the intellectual interpretations linked to these facts and their transformations. Any type of classification or theory concerning Brazilian society is necessarily arbitrary. While acknowledging this I nevertheless believe it possible to attempt a classification. Six or seven different interpretations appear in succession and enter into conflict in the intellectual scenario of the last fifty years. There is (1) the agrarian destiny interpretation that entered into conflict in the forties and fifties with the (2) nationalbourgeois interpretation. This conflict was overcome by a series of new facts that took place in the fifties and exhausted themselves with the Revolution of 1964. At this point there arose (3) the modernizingauthoritarian interpretation belonging to the new system of domination, while at the same time the intellectuals of the left were divided among three not always clearly distinguished interpretations: (4) the functionalcapitalist; (5) the imperialist superexploitation; and (6) that of the new dependency. Finally, starting in the mid-seventies when the 1964 regime began to enter into crisis, a new interpretation of the project for the hegemony of the industrial bourgeoisie began to take shape.