FH

To answer this question I would need to introduce a dimension of 2013 that helps for understanding the particularity of the Brazilian case. I would start with a rhetorical question. Would there have been an Occupy Wall Street in the United States with a left-wing government in power? The question sets out the problem.

When the protests exploded, 80 percent of the population supported Dilma Rousseff’s government, which was widely considered to be left-wing. There were no corruption scandals, inflation was low, and the economy was still growing.

In terms of content, the protestors’ demands were entirely compatible with the agenda of the federal and municipal governments. I placed the issue of mobility at the heart of my campaign [Haddad was elected Mayor of São Paulo in October 2012].

In terms of form, however, there was a clear anti-state bias in the protests. The refusal of institutional dialog was crystallized, it could not be changed. The attempts to establish a dialog came directly from the municipal office, as the movements never solicited an audience. Even the political parties and the traditional social movements failed to establish a dialog with the movements. Even militants associated with political parties faced resistance from the movement.

The police violence occurred in that context. Police violence was sponsored by the state government, an intermediary sphere between the federal and municipal governments in the hands of the opposition. We will never know whether the governor [Geraldo Alckmin, a potential presidential candidate in 2018] ordered the repression. We know that the military police has a considerable degree of autonomy.

The repression in São Paulo triggered the national uprising. At that point, the Right hijacked the form of the protests, taking advantage of its anti-state and anti-politics bias. After a decade of marginalization, the conservative camp found in the format of the 2013 protests a channel through which it could make a comeback in the political arena.

It is fundamental to clarify that the conservative movements instrumentalized the form of the protests, but not the content, which they promptly discarded. Instead, they expressed the resentments of the middle class after a decade of progressive politics in Brazil.

Marx, in his late studies against the thesis of the pauperization of the working class, concluded that, in late capitalism, the dynamic of classes could be very volatile. As a result, he argued that the study of the relative position of classes would be extremely important for an understanding of domestic politics.

A study of Mark Morgan on Brazil recently confirmed Marx’s assumption. He argues, in essence, that the rich got richer, the poor got less poor, and the middle class lost its relative position in regard to the upper and poorer classes. That loss of the relative position is behind the revolt of the middle class against the Workers Party and state institutions.