Attempts to make generalizations from what happens in the United States and Europe to the rest of the planet do not, as a rule, meet with much surprise; these are, after all, generally assumed to be the most advanced edges of world history, where processes that will eventually spread to other regions first take hold. Most of the literature on the lethal danger surrounding democracies that has flourished in the last decade implicitly assumes these central countries as the normative standard from which others — and increasingly themselves — can be measured as deviations. Starting from a place like Brazil, on the other hand, does not enjoy the same air of self-evidence and seems to require some explaining. Countries on the periphery are supposed to be somehow quirky and unique, partaking in what is universal only through the ways in which they have caught up with their developed counterparts, and otherwise assumed to be locked in a particularity that prevents them from offering anything generalizable. The irony, in this case, is that a tradition within Brazilian social thought has for some time elaborated an argument not only as to why that is not true but that those may, in fact, be precisely the places from where to start.
After the defeat of historical fascism in World War II, the division of the world into two competing geopolitical blocs pushed both sides to work on their sales pitch to those countries that had hitherto lain in the margins of the global market. Whereas the Soviet bloc offered the international comradeship of the exploited and the imminence of world revolution, its capitalist rivals held up the promise that, if they stayed the free-market course, all nations could one day attain the same level of material well-being that the richest countries enjoyed. This prospect was at the center of the different approaches that became collectively known from the 1950s onward as “modernization theory.”
Almost immediately, a loose group of thinkers from Latin America and Africa began to build a of it. Development was not a race, they argued, in which each country had their own lane to run down and could reach the finishing line regardless of when they began, but rather more like chess, the position of each piece conditioning the moves available to all others. This gave the first countries to set out on the capitalist road a first-mover advantage: While their own early takeoff had been made possible by colonialism and slavery (and the access to cheap labor and nature that these afforded), the integration of former colonies into the global market had been based on unequal exchange from the start, subordinating whatever development they could have to the needs and interests of development taking place elsewhere. The fact that one could speak of a center and a periphery within capitalism was, therefore, no mere factual, transient contingency. Not only had the constitution of the subordinate pole been the exact same process through which the dominant one established itself, but the fact that the former could only grow within terms dictated by the growth of the latter meant that, even as the periphery progressed, the very relation of dependency reproduced itself. This entailed that the development of the periphery could only ever be “dependent,” “limited,” or “underdeveloped.”critique
That was not all. The assumption that modernization in all spheres of life — political institutions, labor relations, culture — would follow naturally from economic progress was simply not true. As Francisco de Oliveira’s from the early 1970s put it, in a place like Brazil, “capitalist expansion takes place . . . through the introduction of new relations in the archaic and the reproduction of the archaic in the new”: “a symbiosis and organicity, a unity of contraries, in which the ‘modern’ thrives and feeds off the ‘backward,’ if we still wish to retain those terms.” Thus, for example, in the country’s mushrooming urban centers, it was the spread of self-built informal settlements (“”) and the offer of cheap services like domestic work (itself a legacy of slavery) that, compensating for insufficient accumulation and infrastructure, enabled the high pace of industrialization observed from the 1930s to the 1960s.classic textfavelization
But this dialectical twist on the dialectics of the modern and the archaic had a further twist in store. By the late 1980s, it was modernization tout court, not only in the postcolonial world, that was coming to seem a mirage. In capitalism’s very core, rights and institutions that had been thought to be everlasting achievements were being rolled back; from that point on, it would be ever clearer that astonishing material advancement could exist side by side with levels of exploitation and inequality until recently deemed to be part of the past. Economic growth was no longer a guarantee of any of the things that were supposed to come with it — including, increasingly, democracy. What if what had been mistaken as the inevitable march of progress, the direction toward which the arc of history bent, had in fact only been a blip produced by three decades of uninterrupted expansion after the war — and what the future had in store was, in fact, as some had begun to predict, a progressive “” of the world?Brazilianization
If that were so, a group of Brazilian thinkers concluded, it was no longer just the case that the periphery was a space forever destined to be stuck between the future and the past. In its permanent, uneasy but organic, functionally dysfunctional amalgamation of the modern and the archaic, the developed and the under- or de-developed, it was, and had indeed always been, the future. “At the historical hour when the country of the future [Brazil] seems to no longer have any future,” Paulo Arantes , “we are singled out, for better or worse, as the future of the world.” Not, and this was crucial, in the simple sense that the once modern core was backsliding, but rather in that, having been a society overpoweringly determined from the outset by the dictates of economic reason (its constitution as a locus of production for the nascent world system), Brazil foreshadowed a world in which brute exploitation became the ever more dominant social logic. “We are once again in the vanguard, except now of disintegration.”wrote
This “Brazilianization” (or, in more general terms, peripheralization) thesis , in a nutshell, that “ is no longer informed by the center, but by the peripheries.” That is, both by the peripherical areas that proliferate in the metropolises of a “” and by the former colonies that have from birth “perfect laboratories for new forms of capitalist exploitation integrating authoritarian control of surplus populations, the management of unresolvable social conflicts and a new police state compatible with parliamentary democracy.” (Gaza being, of course, the most extreme form yet experienced of such laboratories.) What this suggests is that the likes of Brazil, Argentina, El Salvador, and so on may actually help us see more clearly the direction in which the contemporary far right points than can places like the United States and Western Europe, whose still relatively dominant position in the international division of labor allows for promises of national redemption that dull and disguise the features of what is likely to come: the privately managed breakdown of a world beset by climate collapse, the rampant growth of inequality and superfluous populations, and the proliferation of protected enclaves, sacrificial zones, and areas of contested sovereignty at both the supra- and the infranational levels.statesplanet of slumsbeenthe world’s horizon of expectation
This article originally appeared in , a democratic socialist magazine publishing long-form essays and analysis on politics, economics, and culture. JacobinSubscribe to the print edition for $20 a year.