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.
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Notes
For an alternative interpretation, see Vieira (2018), for whom Rousseff’s overthrow was not a coup d’état, but a strategic use of constitutional rules—i.e., there was no institutional rupture—to injure a political opponent.
Any data presented in this paper with no source reference is based on the author’s calculations from standard databases. Technical aspects or sources not made explicit will be communicated upon request.
The year 1999 was the year of the crisis that led the government to allow the exchange rate to float and to adopt inflation targeting as a substitute for exchange rate pegging to control inflation (see also note 6).
Since 2006 external debt has been outweighed by foreign exchange reserves, making Brazil a net creditor in foreign currency.
From mid-1994 to late 1998, inflation was controlled through exchange rate pegging, which kept the domestic currency close to parity with the US dollar, stabilizing prices of tradable goods in the domestic market. By early 1999, that policy was replaced by the inflation targeting regime, and the benchmark interest rate thus came to substitute the exchange rate as the nominal anchor of the domestic currency.
The Budgetary Directives Law (Lei de Diretrizes Orçamentárias in Portuguese) is a yearly law that sets the guidelines for the following year’s budget law.
The primary fiscal balance is equal to the difference between total non-financial revenues and total non-financial expenditures. A primary fiscal deficit indicates that there was no room in the budget to pay interest on the public debt. This is not to be confused with a default, because public debt and accrued interest can be rolled over.
Oil fields had been granted under a concessionary regime until 2010, when the government began to adopt a production sharing regime for the exploration of oil fields.
The government proposal suffered various modifications by a special commission formed by the Chamber of Deputies to analyze it before sending the measure to the floor for deliberation. I will not examine the various versions the proposal has reached; rather, I will remain focused on the original proposal, given that the essence of reducing primary state spending has been maintained. The reform proposed by Temer was ultimately not approved, but the next government proposed another reform package, which was approved in late 2019 and attained the main goal of raising the minimum retirement age.
It is clear that in these cases there would be a possibility for proletarianization, because those whose benefits are reduced can be pushed to sell their own labor-power. Nevertheless, the fact that they were already dependent on another person who sells his or her own labor-power reduces this probability, as in the case of minor children.
This is not to be confused with the Rousseff government’s institution in 2012 of a supplementary retirement regime for public servants to conclude the social security reform initiated by the Lula government in 2003.
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Acknowledgements
This paper is a revised version of one delivered at the 113th American Sociological Association Annual Meeting, Philadelphia, August 2018. The author is grateful for the insightful comments and suggestions of the editors and reviewers of the International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society. A prior draft has also benefitted from comments by Alessandro Miebach, Annina Kaltenbrunner, and Ricardo Summa, to whom I am grateful. All remaining errors of omission and commission and one-sidedness are my own.
Funding
This work was supported in part by CNPq (grant number 441749/2014-3), when social sciences were not under attack as they are today in Brazil.
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Bin, D. The Dispossessing 2016 Coup d’État in Brazil. Int J Polit Cult Soc 35, 433–461 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-021-09405-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10767-021-09405-8