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Brazil seems stuck in a permanent political crisis. After three years of agony, President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) was impeached last August. Now her traitorous vice president Michel Temer’s administration is disintegrating under a cloud of scandal, not to mention its mind-boggling incompetence. Four common illusions prevent us from clearly understanding why this political instability has only intensified under Temer: that Brazil has a unified right wing; that capital acts together; that the bourgeoisie controls the state and the political process; and that social conflicts revolve only around the fundamental disputes between capital and labor. Instead, rifts within the ruling class are threatening the Temer administration. A rogue judiciary, backed by powerful media outlets, has turned the upper middle classes against the government, stalling the nation’s return to neoliberalism. The Left can — and should — take advantage of this situation.

The Path to Crisis Not too long ago the world’s moderate left could hold Brazil up as a prime example of success. Global economic prosperity and President Lula’s exceptional talent allowed his administration to temper the neoliberal policy framework of the 1990s. He introduced more expansionary policies and unleashed a virtuous cycle of growth that increased profits, created jobs, distributed income to the margins, increased democratic participation, and built a stable political culture. When Lula stepped down in January 2011, his popularity rating approached 90 percent. Even then, however, his party was riven by contradictions. The PT’s remarkable ability to bring together bourgeois and working-class interests, delivering growth with redistribution, made it the best-funded political machine in Brazil. Access to money played an essential role in its success given the cost of winning elections in a large country with a fractured political system. But this cash infusion transformed the purported voice of the working class into the internal bourgeoisie’s political arm. Its most influential members became agents for powerful interests. Even though no one suggested personal gain as a motive, the PT found itself enmeshed in a cloud of financial impropriety. The party became forever vulnerable to accusations of hypocrisy, supported by damaging disclosures from disgruntled funders and hostile media outlets. Its method for gaining electoral traction exposed it to seemingly endless charges of corruption. As the PT moved to the center, it also lost its political coherence. The party defended both economic stability and structural reform, supported big capital while claiming to represent workers, and promoted a new, inclusive political culture while pursuing alliances with the most unsavory figures in Brazilian politics. Beyond its failure to choose a platform that it could actually defend, the PT neglected its most committed working-class supporters, refused to challenge the interests of the one percent, and shied away from reforming the media, even though mainstream news outlets systematically undermined the party’s administrations and repeatedly sought to destroy its leaders. A worsening economic slowdown, followed by political crisis, has engulfed Brazil since 2011. This economic degradation and the Rousseff administration’s repeated political mistakes encouraged a convergence of revolts that would eventually include the media, finance, industrial capital, the upper middle class, most of the government’s base in Congress, and virtually the entire judiciary. While these hostile forces gathered steam, the PT’s social base stayed largely inert: most workers remained passive in the face of a strong right-wing opposition, a shrill media, and the economic downturn. The PT, which years ago chose to follow the rules of conventional politics, found itself defenseless against an extraordinarily aggressive constellation of enemies. A diet of scandal and hatred for the PT, served by the mainstream media, has nurtured Brazil’s upper middle classes. Dizzy with indignation, this group has tended to ignore the economic, social, and political impacts of neoliberalism. Instead, they blame Lula and Rousseff for intangible but presumably vast damages to the state as a result of corruption and inefficiency. Implicitly, they hold the PT accountable for their own loss of income, privilege, and authority. A string of corruption scandals energized them. The Lava Jato (“carwash”) investigation, which the federal police launched in 2014, gained traction gradually, eventually becoming a juggernaut that overwhelmed the Rousseff administration. Accusations of corruption tainted the entire political system, and the PT appeared as a prime example. The media loudly and daily proclaimed that Lula’s party had set up a slick system to rob public assets and defraud the republic. The wheels of justice have turned surprisingly briskly. Law enforcement has developed a procedure for handling the investigation: arrest carefully chosen businessmen and prominent politicians and keep them in jail until they enter a plea bargain that incriminates others. Repeat as needed. Evidence has become entirely optional: hearsay is good enough. The investigation inevitably caught other parties in the net, but this didn’t matter: only claims against the PT really counted. No credible allegations were made against Rousseff, but the absence of guilt did not slow her political liquidation. The opposition concocted extraneous accusations, and an overwhelming majority in the chamber of deputies and the senate impeached her in August 2016.