The BVPS Blog is delighted to begin today the international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?, organized by Fabrício Maciel (UFF) and Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ and editor-in-chief of the BVPS blog), with editorial assistance from Miguel Cunha (PPGCS/UFRRJ).
The symposium invited Brazilian and international specialists, drawn from three major areas of the social sciences – social theory, the sociology of work, and Brazilian social and political thought – to address four questions concerning the complex relations between authoritarianism and capitalism in the contemporary world. Beyond the search for a consistent diagnosis, it also sought to discuss concrete solutions to the problem. The responses received will be published in blocks starting next week, always on Wednesdays, simultaneously in Portuguese and English. Today we publish the introduction signed by the organizers.
See below.
CAPITALISM AND AUTHORITARIANISM: WHAT IS TO BE DONE?
Edited by Fabrício Maciel (UFF) and Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ and BVPS)
Introduction
The theme of authoritarianism is one of the most urgent and distressing of our time. It has been ten years since Donald Trump won his first election as President of the United States, which constitutes an extremely important watershed for this discussion. After spending decades, in theory and in the public sphere, attributing to Brazil and Latin America the status of the realm par excellence of authoritarian governments and cultures, we are now witnessing, on a global scale and especially in the country that has always claimed for itself the role of guardian of democracy, the rise of authoritarian far-right leaders, willing to carry out a reactionary process of dismantling the institutions of liberal democracy. If, on the one hand, they have, at certain moments and in certain situations, run up against the institutional and political complexity of contemporary societies, on the other hand, they have succeeded in numerous of their projects of social dismantling, including war.
In this complex scenario, a large volume of research and publications has been produced both within and outside Brazil, which demands from us a sharp theoretical focus and redoubled attention to the most central and relevant questions in this debate. Currently, the public sphere has been dominated by low-level discussions, both on the right and on the left, which often boil down to insults or affective classifications of the sort that limit themselves to saying that Trump or Bolsonaro are insane individuals who must be restrained in their destructive impulse. Beyond aspects of the authoritarian personality of such leaders, which were never ignored by major names of the first generation of Frankfurt School thinkers such as Adorno or Erich Fromm, what critical and high-quality social science needs, in this context, are clear and objective analyses that reconstruct the macro and micro social processes, both objective and subjective, collectively experienced over recent decades, so that we may understand how we got here and, most importantly, how we will get out.
It was with this aim that we conceived this symposium, which we now bring to the public with great pleasure. So as not to flounder in the ideological or affective illusions that dominate many current debates, we sought to start from some objective ground, in order to produce a serious and collective discussion. To that end, we initially considered that the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism, in the contemporary global scenario, needs to be revisited quite calmly. Not by chance, Max Horkheimer’s famous phrase (1980), “Whoever is not willing to talk about capitalism should also keep quiet about fascism,” continues to be a great inspiration for countless investigations around the world.
Starting from this position, we cannot disregard the warning issued by Adorno (2019) and his collaborators in their classic study of the authoritarian personality. After interviewing, using the most refined psychoanalytic techniques of the time, a wide range of people from the most diverse social profiles, they identified that the germ of all fascism lies precisely within twentieth-century Western democratic societies. And more than that: the level of declared antisemitism in pre-Hitler Germany (which neatly synthesizes the general question of prejudice and intolerance) was lower than that identified by the authors in U.S. society in the period immediately following World War II (Adorno, 2019: 77).
In addition to them, Erich Fromm bequeaths us a profound analysis of the topic in his important book Escape from Freedom (1974). Faced with the astonishment that overwhelmed that entire generation of intellectuals, the author goes back to the roots of the material and psychological history of the West in order to understand that the central problem lies in the difficulty that we moderns face in dealing with the condition of freedom achieved over time. After breaking the shackles that in some way granted us security in pre-individualist societies, we now find ourselves as anguished and powerless individuals, which would be fertile ground for submission to authoritarian feelings and actions.
In the lineage of critical theory, Marcuse (2015) also warned us about the dangers of a “one-dimensional” society, that is, one in which the unfolding of the productive forces would not have occurred exactly as Marx had envisioned, but in the opposite direction, having pacified social forces and conflicts and largely neutralized the utopian potential to envision ways out toward a better future. Nothing could be more conducive to the emergence and consolidation of authoritarian forces. Marcuse’s concern, that a society without opposition would have as one of its central features the paralysis of critique, should alert us to the need not to give up on truly high-quality critical theory, so that our utopian energies are not depleted. We believe that this symposium can be a contribution of great relevance, in this sense, to the debate both within and outside Brazil.
In addressing the theme that interests us here, we could not forget other fundamental works, such as Hannah Arendt’s classic The Origins of Totalitarianism (2012), in which she masterfully reconstructs the social and political history of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, and which remains to this day one of the central references for many of us. From another angle, denouncing the intrinsic relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism in the dimension of colonialism, Frantz Fanon (2022) carries out a powerful analysis of how the arbitrary colonial relation politically expropriates and also dehumanizes, in the symbolic and moral dimension, the colonized other. Starting from an analysis of slavery, Angela Davis (2016) likewise points out how capitalist arbitrariness essentially does violence to the existential condition of women, races, and oppressed social classes.
In addition to these classic discussions, much has been produced recently. At the international level, concepts such as libertarian authoritarianism, ailing freedom, national populism, fascism, post- or neo-fascism, populism, authoritarian threat, right-wing rebellion, and social polarization, among others, have been productively mobilized in numerous debates. Some of them, however, such as fascism and populism, are already worn out and demand from us analytical recalibration.
One of the most influential strands in contemporary debate conceives authoritarianism not as a reaction to neoliberalism but as its creation. Wendy Brown, one of its main proponents, argues that the rise of the far right, white nationalism, and neofascism is less a response to economic vulnerability or a return of repressed hatreds than a political mutation caused by the long-term corrosion that neoliberalism inflicts on social capacities, public goods, democratic subjectivities, and informational ecologies. By internalizing market calculation as a way of life, the neoliberal subject progressively loses the subjective resources necessary for democratic resistance. In this sense, Brown tempers the Frankfurtian diagnosis with a Foucauldian mediation, insofar as authoritarianism is also produced by rationalities that inscribe themselves in individuals and redefine what it is possible to want and to do politically. This phenomenon is defined by her as “authoritarian liberalism,” a concept coined to refer to regimes that combine absolute belief in capitalism and a fierce anti-communism – a direct legacy of the neoliberal attack on popular sovereignty – with an authoritarian statism that classical liberalism would not have admitted.
In the contemporary Brazilian scene, concepts such as “cognitive dissonance” (Castro Rocha, 2023), “Brazilian authoritarianism” (Schwarcz, 2019), “right-wing poor” (Souza, 2024), “restricted and generalized fascism” (Safatle, 2026), “reactionary populism” (Lynch & Cassimiro, 2022), “language of destruction” (Starling, Lago & Bignotto, 2022), among others, have set with great quality the limits and possibilities of the debate carried out at the national level.[1]
In the repertoire of Brazilian social sciences, we cannot forget, as some responses in the symposium emphasize, the innovative theoretical accumulation on the theme produced by some of the Brazilian classics, among whom we would like to briefly highlight here Florestan Fernandes. If Frankfurtian critical theory asked itself why advanced capitalism produces authoritarian regressions, Florestan seems to invert the question and ask why capitalism on the periphery has never been able to constitute itself without authoritarianism. Here, this would not be an exception of dependent capitalism, but rather its normal historical mode of reproduction. This perspective requires thinking capitalism as a world system, in which center and periphery constitute distinct structural positions that nonetheless mutually shape each other. The State, in dependent capitalism, becomes an instrument for bourgeois domination, which needs its control in order to maintain its privileges and class interests. As Botelho & Brasil Jr. (2026) show in their review of A Revolução Burguesa no Brasil on the fiftieth anniversary of its publication, Florestan forges the concept of “autocracy” to interpret the phenomenon of the persistence of a radically antidemocratic ordering principle, more general in nature, of the State, society, and the market, even in formally or openly democratic moments. That is, to understand a society that, while realizing modern capitalism, maintains the monopolization of wealth, power, and social prestige in privileged and white minorities. Autocracy is thus like a shadow always present in the background, which emerges, with greater or lesser virulence, in moments of crisis of bourgeois power, responsible for the reiteration of forms of socialization averse to a democratic philosophy of life, to the legitimacy of conflict, and to the universal opening of the principle of competition. One of Florestan’s central arguments concerns the articulation between dependency and authoritarianism. The peripheral bourgeoisie proves powerless in the face of imperialism, which makes it even more aggressive internally. Since it cannot free itself from external domination, it then exercises maximum domination over labor and over the popular sectors. Authoritarianism constitutes, in this sense, a kind of compensation, in the realm of internal domination, for what the bourgeoisie is incapable of doing in the realm of national sovereignty.
The problematic field on which this symposium reflects is organized around a few central questions: is authoritarianism a product of capitalism, a reaction to it, an internal metamorphosis, or something relatively autonomous? How should it be named: is it a matter of fascism, of illiberal authoritarianism, of authoritarian populism, or of something new? Should analyses focus on socioeconomic structures or on the political culture, subjectivity, and affects mobilized by authoritarian movements? What emancipatory alternatives to capitalism can be imagined?
If the contributions gathered here suggest that no consensus is in sight, they nevertheless offer consistent elements for the construction of a shared diagnosis. The current articulation between capitalism and authoritarianism appears as a systemic effect of capital’s very mode of reproduction, and not as an anomaly or a transitory readjustment. Some authors point to this symbiosis from the very origin of capitalism, whose expansion depended on colonialism, slavery, and permanent violence in the peripheries. For others, authoritarianism appears as a recurrent but contingent possibility of the historical process. The disagreement about the degree of this necessity acquires practical weight, since it defines what can be done in the face of the situation.
Neoliberalism figures as a concrete link of this relation in most of the responses. The emphases vary – flexible accumulation, financialization, neoliberal governmentality, late neoliberalism, attention capitalism – but the effects of the identified dynamic largely converge: precarization of labor, dismantling of social rights, commodification of life in all spheres, competitive individualism elevated to public morality, weakening of the collective mediators historically capable of regulating conflict, especially the union and the mass party. From this would follow, according to some responses, the erosion of the material bases of liberal democracy and of the shared meanings that sustained it.
The subjective dimension also occupies a central place. Several authors refer to an affective economy produced by precarization, marked by anxiety, fear, resentment, and a sense of dishonor or social invisibility. These affects, when they find no political translation on the left, end up reabsorbed by an organized right that offers scapegoats and immediate symbolic solutions. A sociologically relevant correlative issue is the ethnicization of class conflict, insofar as distributive disputes are reconfigured as cultural disputes between natives and foreigners, or as moral panics about customs that hijack the public space and render invisible concrete redistributive agendas, such as working conditions, income, and dignity.
There is also an important discrepancy between the global North and South that several authors treat with care. In the North, the main affective traction is fear of losing the standard of living achieved in the postwar period. In the South, by contrast, it tends to correspond to frustration with democratic promises that have yielded little in terms of effective social mobility. The colonial-matrix reading helps to recall that authoritarianism never declined in the peripheries administered by the IMF, the World Bank, and dictatorships supported by the capitalist centers throughout the Cold War. Practices visible today in the center can be seen as a return of political technologies already applied in the periphery of capitalism for decades, which leads to a problematization of the very “novelty” of present-day authoritarianism.
Digitalization also appears in the responses as a new materiality of the capitalism/authoritarianism arrangement. Platforms, algorithms, artificial intelligence, digital management of behavior, uberization, and what some call attention capitalism configure a material base that reorganizes both the exploitation of labor and the formation of political consensus. Social networks operate as vectors of mass-scale disinformation and of the production of moral panics that overlay distributive agendas. The Chinese case is cited as a paradigmatic reference: an open combination of authoritarian regime, algorithmic control of behavior, and global productive capacity, which problematizes perspectives that take the sequence of capitalism, then democracy, as a historical tendency.
Even perspectives not quite convergent with the set retain heuristic interest for the debate. The thesis of democratic Bonapartism, for example, interprets the present moment as a delegation, on the part of the subaltern classes, of the representation of their interests to a radical right, in the absence of organized channels of class struggle. The category of libertarian authoritarianism seeks to account for a new format in which freedom is mobilized against the State and against public norms, as exemplified by the refusal of sanitary measures during the pandemic. There is also the view of the ideological hybridism of the new right, in which accelerationism, anarcho-capitalism, ethnonationalism, and scientistic racism (through the recycling of the idea of IQ) combine into openly antidemocratic formulations, breaking with the euphemistic tradition of the post-1945 right. One can also observe an underlying methodological critique that questions the very capacity of hegemonic critical theories – centered on European industrialization and on the nation-state – to capture peripheral, racial, and subaltern dimensions of the problem. In addition, some authors articulate climate denialism and attacks on redistributive policies as faces of the same ideological operation, proposing to think a conflict of socio-ecological transformation.
The analytical picture that takes shape from the set as a whole is that of a financialized capitalism in a prolonged crisis of legitimation, with no concrete systemic alternative since 1989, which produces subjectivities vulnerable to authoritarian solutions, while at the same time an institutional left appears to be progressively losing the capacity to place publicly on the agenda the degradation of labor, dignity, and social reproduction. Contemporary authoritarianism, in tight and schematic synthesis, would function within the reproduction of capitalism, especially when the social pact reaches the verge of unviability. There remains a fundamental difference between those who see this relation as symbiotic and structural, and those who see it as contingent and variable according to particular national trajectories. This analytical choice translates, in many cases, a political position about what can be done.
We invited to this symposium Brazilian and international specialists, drawn from three major areas of the social sciences – social theory, the sociology of work, and Brazilian social and political thought – seeking to meet criteria of diversity. We did so in the belief that, from distinct positions and perspectives, we would be able to offer the public a broad and diversified range of analyses that, taken together, could confront the complex dilemma of authoritarianism in our time. We would like to thank all those who accepted this challenge. Among the four questions that we put to the guests, beyond the search for a deep diagnosis – which is always the first step in the struggle for social change – we emphasized the need to find real ways out of the problem, on the basis of our theoretical and empirical studies. The responses received will be published in weekly posts, always on Wednesdays, in blocks, and simultaneously in Portuguese and English. In this arrangement we have sought to take into account the possible dialogue among the responses and the diversification of points of view. We invite you, reader, to see the result.
Note
[1]For a mapping of the different perspectives at play, see MACIEL, Fabrício. A ambivalência do autoritarismo: da Escola de Frankfurt ao Brasil contemporâneo. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula, 2026 (forthcoming).
References
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