The Dispossessing 2016 Coup d’État in Brazil

Abstract

In 2016 Brazil’s Senate ousted the popularly re-elected President Dilma Rousseff, who had been accused of budget mismanagement under the pretense that she committed an impeachable crime that justified the parliamentary coup. This paper investigates the hypothesis that her government was removed once it could no longer sustain a neoliberal pro-finance agenda, which depends on the state, and that the forces that seized power promised to restore and strengthen. Pro-finance policies had been established in the 1990s by the Cardoso government and were maintained by the Lula da Silva government. The latter, nevertheless, was able to raise wages, as did Rousseff, but more slowly. Her government also loosened some neoliberal policies, such as the so-called fiscal austerity. Rousseff’s non-elected successor, Michel Temer, tried to limit budget spending by implementing a 20-year ceiling on the real growth of virtually all expenditures except public debt interest. He also began aggressive privatizations and, after curtailing labor protections, proposed a regressive social security reform to further cut state expenditures. Thus, the Temer government promoted dispossessing policies to redistribute economic surpluses—e.g., through future primary fiscal surpluses—and allow the expansion of capital accumulation. The latter is driven by the proletarianization that follows welfare cuts—i.e., cuts in the social wage—due to the budget cap and regressive social security and labor reforms that sought to increase the supply of cheaper labor-power. Capital could also expand because budgets can increase the commodification by private companies of hitherto state-provided pensions and healthcare.