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| The New Brazil |
Reviewed by Levi Gahman, ROAR Magazine
Raúl Zibechi, The New
Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy (translated by Ramor Ryan),
Oakland, CA: AK Press, 2014.
Brazil is bleeding, and
in his book, The New Brazil: Regional Imperialism and the New Democracy, author
Raúl Zibechi demonstrates how neoliberalism is responsible for inflicting the
wounds. The latest offering from the Uruguayan journalist, militant and
political theorist is a perceptive and incisive dressing-down of the capitalist
world system, the multinational corporate cartels that drive it, and the
ongoing colonial domination that is currently plaguing the masses of Brazil.
The book forcefully exhibits how the insatiable drive for capital accumulation
continues to dispossess, exploit, and repress the disempowered and voiceless.
Zibechi also demonstrates how the historical trajectories of imperialism
continue to operate within Brazil during contemporary times, thereby preserving
privilege and power for a select minority elite at the expense of both the
environment and the majority of Brazilian society.
To be more precise, this
work thoroughly deconstructs the social, economic and environmental problems
found within Brazil by linking its colonial past to the contemporary practices
it employs in expanding its economy, exercising power across local, regional
and global scales, as well as bolstering its ability to surveil and police its
own population. Zibechi states this situation has resulted in the plundering of
natural resources and has also resulted in severe escalations of actions that
marginalize the poor and landless. The book also notes that these imperial
strategies are not without resistance, but that such resistances do undergo
their own complications, stagnations and problems. Despite this, Zibechi notes
that the battle for space wages on and that struggles for justice continue
across local, regional and international levels. Such battles are not without
repercussion, however, as many have resulted in the disappearance, assault and
death of countless peasants, indigenous people, racialized minorities, and
women — all whilst benefiting state officials, private businesses and the armed
forces.
Zibechi continues his
narrative by flawlessly lacing together the elements of systemic violence,
government corruption, income disparity and forced land removal that have
coincided with the rise of neoliberal policies in Brazil. He describes how the
proliferation of expansionist propaganda has prospered among the highest
echelons of the state, thereby resulting in massive profit accumulation for the
well-connected, the suppression of the lower classes, and the widespread
degradation of the environment. The book emphasizes that in practice, the
neoliberal Brazilian state defends and protects the role of capital whilst
diverting as much responsibility away from civil society as possible. It
provides numerous examples of how neoliberal doctrine is applied to the
country’s economic and environmental policies in order to empower and enrich
the internationalized Brazilian bourgeoisie, while simultaneously ignoring and
neglecting indigenous people, the urban working class and rural peasants
through reductions in social spending and the evisceration of services that
provide for public health and safety.
Zibechi furthermore
spells out how Brazil’s rise to the status of a major player in the
contemporary world economy is nothing more than a recapitulation of the
imperial mindsets and abusively hierarchical tendencies that arrived during
conquest, and were carried out during the colonial era. The book underscores
how power, control and dominance are all threads that have been woven into
Brazil’s historical tapestry dating back to the violent arrival of the Spanish
and the Portuguese, followed by the coerced imposition of US hegemony under the
restructuring edicts of the Washington Consensus, up until the present-day
situation in which multinational extractivist corporations, speculative finance
brokers, and militarized sub-imperial economic policies rule the day. He aptly
illustrates such dynamics when he states:
Five decades after the
creation of the economic class that led Brazil from building its industrial
base in the 1950s to the military coup of 1964, a new economic elite has
emerged during the first decade of the century. These are state managers and
unionists from state enterprises who have embedded themselves in positions
where economic decisions are made. They have forged relationships of trust with
the old elites, the business class, and the military. I do not think we are
witnessing the creation of a new class in power but the gradual expansion of
the old elite, one that feels revitalized with a strong injection of fresh
capital and mega-projects that revive the old dream of the military caste to
turn Brazil into a global power.
Zibechi also strongly
argues that the harsh social realities that Brazil now faces are due to the
fact that a managerial elite backed by a military industrial complex is reaping
profits, prestige and power from a societal foundation built upon the pillars
of slavery, dispossession and enclosure. Pillars that have promoted genocide
against indigenous people, repressive acts of subordination against the urban
poor, working class and underprivileged, and that rely upon exploitative
practices of infrastructure development and agro-industrial export that destroy
and ravage ecosystems, the natural environment, as well as the traditionally
held lands of indigenous people. The book shows us that what is produced by
neoliberalism’s unholy trinity of privatization, deregulation and economic
liberalization is a matrix of oppression that aggressively slashes labor
rights, privatizes public assets, cuts public services, steals land,
commodifies the natural environment, incarcerates the impoverished, and rapidly
amplifies the amount of policing, surveillance and criminalization that
indiscriminately targets favelas and the rural poor.
Despite these oppressive
results, Zibechi also notes that the architects of this state-sanctioned
cruelty are being met with resistance — and that the resistance is being led by
a variety of groups yearning for the most basic of human rights including
affordable education, decent healthcare, protection of the environment, shelter
and housing, fair wages, access to transportation, and the return of land that
has been appropriated and stolen. However, even though the desires of those
being oppressed by neoliberalism are reasonable and socially just, the
bureaucratic capitalists who have engineered the repressive status quo remain
backed by influential corporate money and have the armed forces at their
disposal. Consequently, the administrators of Brazil’s neo-colonial
administration repeatedly choose to meet the disempowered who confront their
abuses with canisters of tear gas, the discharge of rubber bullets, and the
swinging of police truncheons.
And even though halting
the violent impacts that neoliberalism gives rise to is a seemingly
insurmountable challenge, Zibechi suggests that not all hope is lost. He points
out that progress in the way of justice and liberation can be made and that
possibilities remain alive and well within movements of collective,
anti-systemic resistance. Zibechi points out that it is critical for the social
mobilizations among Brazil’s exploited populations to seek autonomy, find
common cause, and remain steadfast against selling out to state tactics that
attempt to divide them. He also succinctly notes that the battle for justice
occurs across space, and that the potential for transformative change will be
made all the stronger when urban and rural sectors of Brazil’s population (as
well as international civil society) coalesce and unite against the managerial
bourgeoisie who continue to bask in the comforts, benefits and privileges they
have acquired at the expense of the poor.
In sum, The New Brazil is
diligently researched and lucidly articulated. Zibechi offers accessible and
clear understandings of the complex and multifaceted historico-spatial issues
at hand that have led to the militarization of Brazil’s bureaucratic state
apparatus. His writing offers readers pointed insight into the specific
intricacies enmeshed in the structural dynamics of Brazil’s political economy,
while at the same time seamlessly shedding light upon a host of injustices that
will penetrate their hearts. The book underscores, in meticulous detail, the
ways in which veiled and covert policies of border imperialism, corporate
financialization and transnational extractivism are operationalized and
contribute to abusive crackdowns on labor, violence against indigenous
communities, as well as rampant and widespread practices of ecological
destruction.
Zibechi’s book is an
acute tour de force of Brazil’s history, political economy and social
geography. It is a piece work that also exposes the ideology of neoliberalism
for what it is — a colonial, racist, and violent system of domination and
oppression ran by the hostile practices of imperial political elites. In his
examination of these realities, Zibechi takes the reader on a journey into
Brazil and explains the underlying structural injustices that function within
and around the country through substantive research, clear prose, and a
sophisticated comprehension of the complex intricacies surrounding the
country’s past and present. Readers who decide to take the time to venture into
The New Brazil will undoubtedly find themselves on an inspired path — a path to
education, a path to outrage, and hopefully, a path to collective resistance
that will stop the bleeding.
