"}Brazil was born modern. It came into existence as a colony, a site \nfor resource extraction, already linked into an emerging world market. \nBrazil may have been the last country to abolish slavery in the West\u00adern\n Hemisphere, but its chattel slavery was a product of early moder\u00adnity. \nBrazil was never premodern or feudal. By the same measure, \nBrazilianization does not mean a simple return to semifeudal rela\u00adtions.
What then explains the persistence of unfree labor, the latifundia \nsystem, and its cultural and political effects, well into the twentieth century\u2014in\n sum, all the \u201cbackward\u201d elements of Brazil? Precisely that, in Brazil, \nthe modern fed off the old and in turn reinforced and recreated it. In \nrural areas, an elastic supply of labor and land repro\u00adduced \u201cprimitive \naccumulation\u201d in agriculture, holding back improvements in agricultural \ntechniques. With industrialization from the 1930s onwards, this pool of \nrural poor came to serve as a reserve army of cheap urban labor.
What made Brazil\u2019s process distinct is that the country\u2019s \nindustrialization and modernization during the populist period, from the\n mid\u20111930s to the mid-\u201960s, did not require a rupture of the system, as \nbourgeois 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,\n the \u201cexpansion of capitalism in Brazil happens through the introduction\n of new rela\u00adtions into archaic ones and the reproduction of archaic \nrelations in the new.\u201d This was reinforced politically through President\n Get\u00falio Vargas\u2019s corporatist labor legislation, modeled on Mussolini\u2019s \nas a means of formalizing and disciplining an urban proletariat. \nCrucially, it exempted labor relations in the countryside, preserving \nrural pov\u00aderty and unfreedom.
For de Oliveira, the new world thus preserved earlier class \nrela\u00adtions. Consider, for example, that the new urban poor would build \ntheir own homes, thus reducing the cost of reproduction of this class: \nemployers would not have to pay wages high enough to pay for rent. \nFavelas, then, are not an index of backwardness but something produced \nby the new.
Or consider how personal services rendered in the domestic sphere \nreinforce this model of accumulation. Upper-middle-class households in \nBrazil have maids or drivers that service them\u2014an\n economic relationship that could only be replaced by costly investment \nin public services and infrastructure (for example, industrial cleaning \nservices or public transport). As a consequence, the Brazilian middle \nclass has a higher standard of living in this respect than its \nequivalents in the United States or Europe. The exploitation of cheap \nlabor in the domestic sphere also impedes any political drive for \nimprovement in public services.
Are we not faced with precisely such a Brazilianization of the world today\u2014with\n a growing array of \u201cconcierge services,\u201d where\u00adby the professional \nclass and elite alike hire private yoga teachers, private chefs, and \nprivate security? An upper-middle-class household in San Francisco comes\n to replicate an aristocratic manor with a whole economy of services \nrendered in the domestic sphere, but now every\u00adthing is outsourced: \ndigital platforms intermediate between private \u201ccontractors\u201d (formerly \nemployees) and the new elite. Brazil\u2019s social structure showed us our \nfuture.
Reflecting on Brazil\u2019s social formation once again in 2003, de \nOliveira classed Brazil as a duck-billed platypus: a misshapen mon\u00adster,\n neither any longer underdeveloped (\u201cprimitive accumulation\u201d in the \ncountryside having been displaced by a powerful agribusiness sector), \nnor yet having the conditions to complete its modernization\u2014that is, to truly incorporate the masses into the nation.9\n Crucially, this was not a foregone conclusion. Growing workers\u2019 power \nin the lead-up to the 1964 coup could have led to a new settlement and \nan end to the high exploitation rate, while agrarian reform could have \nliquidated the source of the \u201creserve army of labor\u201d that flooded into \nthe cities in the 1970s, as well as finally destroying patrimonial power\n in the countryside.
Such a modernization project, however, would have required the \nparticipation of the national bourgeoisie in alliance with workers. The \nbourgeoisie backed the right-wing coup instead. In a great historical \nirony, noted by Roberto Schwarz in his introduction to de Oliveira\u2019s \nplatypus essay, it was Fernando Henrique Cardoso\u2014the neoliberal president in the 1990s\u2014who\n had observed, as a left-wing sociologist back in the 1960s, that the \nnational bourgeoisie did not want development. Cardoso argued, in \nopposition to prevailing Left opinion of the time, that the bourgeoisie \nwould prefer being a junior partner to Western capitalism than to risk \nseeing their domestic hegemony over the subaltern classes challenged in \nthe future.10 Brazil\u2019s elite chose not to develop.
According to de Oliveira, Brazil\u2019s promised but endlessly frus\u00adtrated\n future is visible in the fact that it is \u201cone of the most unequal \nsocieties in the world \u2026 despite having had one of the strongest \nrates of growth over a long period\u2026 . The most evident \ndeterminations of this condition reside in the combination of the low \nstanding of the workforce and external dependency.\u201d11\n Brazil thus could be a sort of utopia, given its natural blessings, \nfast growth, and enviable culture. The reality, in Caux and Catalani\u2019s \nwords, is that it is a country \u201cwhose essence consists in not being able\n to realize its essence.\u201d It is not backwardness that prevents Brazil \nfrom claiming its destiny; its destiny is endless frustration.
Moreover, the social exclusion that seems so essential to Brazil\u2019s social formation is not an accident, but a produced duality. In Brazil, this has been known as Bel\u00edndia,\n a term coined in 1974 by the economist Edmar Lisboa Bacha: Brazil is a \nrich, urban Belgium perched atop a poor, rural India, all in one \ncountry. Those in the Brazilian \u201cBelgium\u201d inhabit a country that is \nostensibly modern and well-functioning, but is held back by those \n\u201coutside,\u201d in the backwards, semifeudal India. Yet as de Oliveira \nshowed, the \u201cinside\u201d is dependent on the exploitation of the \u201coutside\u201d \nfor its progress. Not only that, but the dualism shapes the inside of \nthe \u201cBelgium\u201d itself; it creates a corrupt, patrimonial, and selfish \nelite, only too happy to wash its hands of the conditions found in its \nown \u201cIndia.\u201d
Unfortunately, rather than the Bel\u00edndia metaphor becoming \nless relevant in recent decades, it has only become more so. Consider \nwhat each component country represents in our times: Belgium may still \nbe wealthy, but it is bureaucratized, fragmented, and immobile; India \nmay still be poor, but it is now also high-tech and governed by \nreactionary populism. This could just as easily be a picture of Italy, \nthe United States, or the United Kingdom, with their deep regional \ninequalities, sclerotic politics, and spectacular populism.