antoine-roquentin:

Brazil was born modern. It came into existence as a colony, a site for resource extraction, already linked into an emerging world market. Brazil may have been the last country to abolish slavery in the West­ern Hemisphere, but its chattel slavery was a product of early moder­nity. Brazil was never premodern or feudal. By the same measure, Brazilianization does not mean a simple return to semifeudal rela­tions.

What then explains the persistence of unfree labor, the latifundia system, and its cultural and political effects, well into the twentieth century—in sum, all the “backward” elements of Brazil? Precisely that, in Brazil, the modern fed off the old and in turn reinforced and recreated it. In rural areas, an elastic supply of labor and land repro­duced “primitive accumulation” in agriculture, holding back improvements in agricultural techniques. With industrialization from the 1930s onwards, this pool of rural poor came to serve as a reserve army of cheap urban labor.

What made Brazil’s process distinct is that the country’s industrialization and modernization during the populist period, from the mid‑1930s to the mid-’60s, did not require a rupture of the system, as bourgeois revolutions in Europe had a century earlier.⁸ Instead, the rural propertied classes remained in power and continued to gain through capitalist expansion. As the sociologist Francisco de Oliveira put it in his 1972 Critique of Dualist Reason, the “expansion of capitalism in Brazil happens through the introduction of new rela­tions into archaic ones and the reproduction of archaic relations in the new.” This was reinforced politically through President Getúlio Vargas’s corporatist labor legislation, modeled on Mussolini’s as a means of formalizing and disciplining an urban proletariat. Crucially, it exempted labor relations in the countryside, preserving rural pov­erty and unfreedom.

For de Oliveira, the new world thus preserved earlier class rela­tions. Consider, for example, that the new urban poor would build their own homes, thus reducing the cost of reproduction of this class: employers would not have to pay wages high enough to pay for rent. Favelas, then, are not an index of backwardness but something produced by the new.

Or consider how personal services rendered in the domestic sphere reinforce this model of accumulation. Upper-middle-class households in Brazil have maids or drivers that service them—an economic relationship that could only be replaced by costly investment in public services and infrastructure (for example, industrial cleaning services or public transport). As a consequence, the Brazilian middle class has a higher standard of living in this respect than its equivalents in the United States or Europe. The exploitation of cheap labor in the domestic sphere also impedes any political drive for improvement in public services.

Are we not faced with precisely such a Brazilianization of the world today—with a growing array of “concierge services,” where­by the professional class and elite alike hire private yoga teachers, private chefs, and private security? An upper-middle-class household in San Francisco comes to replicate an aristocratic manor with a whole economy of services rendered in the domestic sphere, but now every­thing is outsourced: digital platforms intermediate between private “contractors” (formerly employees) and the new elite. Brazil’s social structure showed us our future.

Reflecting on Brazil’s social formation once again in 2003, de Oliveira classed Brazil as a duck-billed platypus: a misshapen mon­ster, neither any longer underdeveloped (“primitive accumulation” in the countryside having been displaced by a powerful agribusiness sector), nor yet having the conditions to complete its modernization—that is, to truly incorporate the masses into the nation.⁹ Crucially, this was not a foregone conclusion. Growing workers’ power in the lead-up to the 1964 coup could have led to a new settlement and an end to the high exploitation rate, while agrarian reform could have liquidated the source of the “reserve army of labor” that flooded into the cities in the 1970s, as well as finally destroying patrimonial power in the countryside.

Such a modernization project, however, would have required the participation of the national bourgeoisie in alliance with workers. The bourgeoisie backed the right-wing coup instead. In a great historical irony, noted by Roberto Schwarz in his introduction to de Oliveira’s platypus essay, it was Fernando Henrique Cardoso—the neoliberal president in the 1990s—who had observed, as a left-wing sociologist back in the 1960s, that the national bourgeoisie did not want development. Cardoso argued, in opposition to prevailing Left opinion of the time, that the bourgeoisie would prefer being a junior partner to Western capitalism than to risk seeing their domestic hegemony over the subaltern classes challenged in the future.¹⁰ Brazil’s elite chose not to develop.

According to de Oliveira, Brazil’s promised but endlessly frus­trated future is visible in the fact that it is “one of the most unequal societies in the world … despite having had one of the strongest rates of growth over a long period… . The most evident determinations of this condition reside in the combination of the low standing of the workforce and external dependency.”¹¹ Brazil thus could be a sort of utopia, given its natural blessings, fast growth, and enviable culture. The reality, in Caux and Catalani’s words, is that it is a country “whose essence consists in not being able to realize its essence.” It is not backwardness that prevents Brazil from claiming its destiny; its destiny is endless frustration.

Moreover, the social exclusion that seems so essential to Brazil’s social formation is not an accident, but a produced duality. In Brazil, this has been known as Belíndia, a term coined in 1974 by the economist Edmar Lisboa Bacha: Brazil is a rich, urban Belgium perched atop a poor, rural India, all in one country. Those in the Brazilian “Belgium” inhabit a country that is ostensibly modern and well-functioning, but is held back by those “outside,” in the backwards, semifeudal India. Yet as de Oliveira showed, the “inside” is dependent on the exploitation of the “outside” for its progress. Not only that, but the dualism shapes the inside of the “Belgium” itself; it creates a corrupt, patrimonial, and selfish elite, only too happy to wash its hands of the conditions found in its own “India.”

Unfortunately, rather than the Belíndia metaphor becoming less relevant in recent decades, it has only become more so. Consider what each component country represents in our times: Belgium may still be wealthy, but it is bureaucratized, fragmented, and immobile; India may still be poor, but it is now also high-tech and governed by reactionary populism. This could just as easily be a picture of Italy, the United States, or the United Kingdom, with their deep regional inequalities, sclerotic politics, and spectacular populism.