The BVPS Blog publishes today the first post of the international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?, organized by Fabrício Maciel (UFF) and Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ and editor of the BVPS blog), with editorial assistance from Miguel Cunha (PPGCS/UFRRJ).
The symposium invited scholars from Brazil and abroad, representing three major fields within the social sciences—social theory, sociology of work, and Brazilian social and political thought—to respond to four questions concerning the intricate relationship between authoritarianism and capitalism in the contemporary world. The responses will be published in groups every Wednesday. By clicking here, you can read the introduction written by the organizers.
Today’s contributors are:
Raewyn Connell, Emeritus Professor at the University of Sydney. One of the leading international references in gender and masculinity studies. Author of numerous books, including Masculinities and Southern Theory: The Global Dynamics of Knowledge in Social Science.
Camila Rocha, researcher at the Brazilian Center of Analysis and Planning (Cebrap). Her work focuses on the study of the new right, digital networks, and contemporary politics in Brazil. Author, among other works, of Less Marx, More Mises: Liberalism and the New Right in Brazil.
José Maurício Domingues, professor at the Institute of Social and Political Studies of the State University of Rio de Janeiro (IESP-UERJ). His research focuses on social theory, modernity, and Latin American social thought. Author, among other works, of Critical Theory and the (Semi)Periphery and Political Modernity and Social Theory.
Jorge Chaloub, professor at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and researcher of Brazilian political and social thought. His work focuses on liberalism, right-wing movements, and intellectual history in Brazil. Author, among other works, of Contemporary Interpretations of Brazil and The Times and Discourses of the Latin American Right (ed.).
See below!
Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?
1. What is your diagnosis of the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism today?
Raewyn Connell: We should not make the mistake of picturing capitalism as a coherent, tightly-knit system, which generates political authoritarianism as a logical outcome. The actual world of ‘capitalism’ is wildly incoherent, illogical, and full of tensions. As a way of organizing productive life, capitalist economies were constructed by historic violence, and today are held together by coercion, manipulation and pervasive lying. The international economy is, as Milton Santos described it 25 years ago, a “perverse globalization”. Authoritarian regimes are a possible product, though not a necessary one.
In the case we should take most notice of today – China – the authoritarianism came first. The current massive growth of capitalist enterprises was the result of a policy turn by the dictatorship that had won the civil war thirty years before. After creating a state-owned industrial base, the regime in the late 1970s chose a new path to development: party-controlled capitalism, with ferocious repression of dissent.
In the rest of the world, a heterogeneous collection of military dictatorships, ethnic regimes, postcolonial developmental states, and oligarchies calling themselves democracies, became involved in the projects that we call ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘globalisation’. A huge growth in international trade, a global relocation of industry, a decline in welfare regimes, falling union density and labour movement power, and rising inequality and precarity, followed – producing the world we live in now.
These changed conditions have something to do with the rise of authoritarian regimes – but not following any single formula. The collapse of the Soviet Union produced economic and demographic disaster. Support in Russia for a new authoritarianism makes sense, but the Putin regime’s embrace of crony capitalism doesn’t follow the same logic. In the USA and the UK, it was right-wing parties that strongly pushed deregulation and privatisation, and they have become more authoritarian. In Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand, it was labour party governments that built the neoliberal regime, which has not produced an authoritarian state. Or not yet.
Camila Rocha: Today’s authoritarianism, in most of the countries where it is expressed, has a strongly nationalist, reactionary, and patriarchal character. This is due, on the one hand, to the crisis of legitimacy of international institutions and, on the other, to the crisis of discourses related to the human rights of minorities (women, LGBTQIA+ people, immigrants, non-white people, and non-humans). These crises are, in turn, related to the deepening of capitalist logics of exploitation and expropriation, which have as their consequences: rising income concentration, the loss of social and labor rights, the running-down and privatization of public services, the decline of union activity, and growing social inequality. Amid such a scenario, the populations of core countries fear losing the standard of living they attained over recent decades. There is a perception that a “competition” exists with foreigners, whether inside or outside their country, over jobs and standing in global production chains – hence the appeal of nativist nationalism. The populations of peripheral countries, for their part, are frustrated with the meager social gains offered by traditional politicians under democratic regimes, and they see authoritarian leaders as a possibility of breaking with the status quo and achieving radical transformation. In countries of the Global South, nationalist discourse sometimes lays claim to an anticolonial appeal while nonetheless reviving reactionary discourses tied to the preservation of a supposed ethnic-religious homogeneity of the nation. Ideas and public figures associated with the future and progress have also become increasingly aligned with authoritarian, reactionary, and patriarchal discourses rather than with democratic ones. In this sense, the discourses of magnates such as Peter Thiel and Elon Musk, and of politicians such as Nayib Bukele and Javier Milei, are exemplary. Finally, it is important to note the growth of libertarian ideologies in association with authoritarian thought: discourses against taxes and any kind of government regulation, coupled with the defense of nativism, the violent repression of criminals, and patriarchalism.
José Maurício Domingues: Capitalism has always had a contradictory relationship with democracy. In principle it decentralizes power, but it introduces social inequalities that favor an excessive influence of economic power – the social classes tied to it – over the equally differentiated political power. The more concentrated economic power is – that is, the more restricted and unequal the dominant social classes are in relation to the rest, to the actual majority of society –, the greater its potential influence over the political system if the latter is also closed and exclusionary toward most of the population (worse still if its neopatrimonial elements are dense). This is what we see today, with this twofold tendency toward restriction leading representative liberal democracy – which is democratic, but has an oligarchic core – to shift into an advanced type of liberal oligarchy. Everything seems democratic, but there are restrictions on the expression of opinion, on participation, and on any real influence of the plebeians – politically speaking – over the political system and professional politicians.
Jorge Chaloub: The discourses legitimizing the capitalist order have taken on a new guise in recent decades, especially when we compare them with the hegemonic pattern that prevailed after 1945. In the postwar period there was a growing effort, as part of the imaginary constructed throughout the Cold War, to naturalize the relations between capitalism and democracy, in a discourse that frequently took the democratic order as the most common consequence of the market and capitalism as an element inseparable from democracy.
Something, however, changed after 1989, when discourses gained traction that explicitly assume a tension between capitalism and democracy – not in order to envision a supersession of capitalism from the left, but to propose authoritarian utopias that break with the euphemistic tradition of the post-1945 right, diagnosed by authors such as Roger Griffin, and to openly defend non-democratic social orders.
In this sense, what stands out is both the return of old political languages, such as fascism, which once again occupy the center of the political stage with an openly non-democratic imaginary, and new repertoires, marked by the hybridism of various traditions and authors, combined to delineate non-democratic political-social orders. Among the possible examples of the second case, we may mention conjunctions between accelerationism and anarcho-capitalism, mobilized by authors such as Nick Land and Peter Thiel; or ethnonationalist, ultraliberal, or reactionary formulations marked by an explicit racism, often framed through arguments around the idea of IQ, as well exposed by the works of Quinn Slobodian, or through an idea of overlap between race and culture, as investigated in the recent efforts of Melinda Cooper.
The defense of avowedly authoritarian political-social orders changes the relations between capitalism and democracy, in the sense that one comes not only to contest concepts of democracy in electoral clashes and in the public sphere, but to take democracy itself as the object of dispute.
2. How do you think your field of knowledge could interact with other fields in constructing this diagnosis?
Raewyn Connell: The scholarship on new authoritarianism is of course multi-disciplinary. Sociology, economics, political science, history, cultural studies and international relations are all involved. Also part of the debate are interdisciplinary fields such as security studies and climate change. Those contributions are relatively familiar. I think we should also pay attention to two other fields, less discussed in debates about authoritarianism, which are important for understanding its contemporary reality.
The first is gender studies, particularly the research about masculinities. It is no secret that most contemporary authoritarian regimes are headed by men and effectively controlled by groups of men. The movements and governments they head are notable for gender conservatism. Their rhetoric for mobilizing their ‘base’ often includes a celebration of conventional masculinity and attacks on feminism, homosexuality, trans groups, and what the Catholic hierarchy calls ‘gender theory’. The leaders themselves may present an emphatic display of masculinity – Putin in particular is famous for this.
Certainly a few women have become prominent in far-right politics (Marine Le Pen, Giorgia Meloni), while the Modi regime has legislated in favour of trans rights. Generally, however, there is an interweaving of authoritarianism and reactionary gender politics. This may be important in understanding the popular appeal of authoritarian movements, in a period marked by both economic insecurity and long-term shifts in social embodiment.
The second field is postcolonial studies, understood broadly to include de-colonial research, Southern theory, etc. There is an argument that the broad neoliberal agenda came as much from the global South as from the global North. We should consider how authoritarianism might be brewed in postcolonial contexts, and the critiques that have also come from those contexts, from thinkers such as Ashis Nandy and Achille Mbembe.
There is one striking fact that points in this direction: every postcolonial society has deep experience of an authoritarian regime, since colonial power is itself a form of authoritarianism. In fact, colonial rule is the most common form of authoritarianism in recent world history. Post-independence regimes usually preserved the repressive machinery of the colonial state – armies, police, prisons, censorship – which often have become the tools of postcolonial dictatorships. Struggles against this machinery may be key sources for an anti-authoritarian politics today.
Camila Rocha: Political Science could interact with fields such as sociology, anthropology, political economy, geopolitics, law, history, and social psychology in order to understand in depth how macroeconomic and geopolitical changes have come to impact the worldviews, attitudes, and behaviors of different populations in recent decades, bearing in mind their specific national and regional contexts.
José Maurício Domingues: Sociology is a very close neighbor of political science, including the discipline of international relations; and social and sociological theory, of political theory. This must be emphasized and strengthened. On the other hand, economics – especially if we grant it, setting aside the highly restricted character of neoclassical economics, the character of political economy – can converge with these disciplines in diagnosing the development of capitalism and, in that process, the rise of inequalities. Anthropology, for its part, helps us to see how the different social classes live under this regime of capital accumulation and political domination.
Jorge Chaloub: It is first necessary to point out that the field of political theory has rather precarious boundaries, with a strong dialogue with other fields of knowledge owing to its interdisciplinary character. In relation to the proposed theme, part of the field constructs a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism and authoritarianism out of the conjunction between the worldviews and political languages of the actors – which are constitutive of political conflict itself – and the social conditions under which ideas are constructed, with particular attention to their historicity. In this effort, it directly mobilizes the knowledge produced by fields such as sociology, political economy, and history, in a move necessary to its reflections. Important authors in the debates on the subject, such as Nancy Fraser, Wendy Brown, Rahel Jaeggi, Melinda Cooper, and Quinn Slobodian, take political theory as a central instrument for constructing their main arguments.
The interaction can be especially fruitful if there is a concern to combine the reconstruction of political languages with processes of change in regimes of historicity, transformations in patterns of accumulation, or changes in forms of social action. The growing relevance of the languages described in the previous question should, in this sense, be considered in light of contributions from authors such as Wolfgang Streeck, who discusses new dynamics of capitalist accumulation, or Hartmut Rosa, who diagnoses, from a sociological standpoint, new forms of the social experience of time. Through this move, languages are not perceived as discourses dispersed across time and space, but as a way of conceiving and intervening in social and political conflicts.
3. In your opinion, what possibilities for effective action could be guided by this discussion, with a view to confronting the negative social effects produced by the deepening of authoritarianism today?
Raewyn Connell: To answer this question, we first have to specify what are the main ‘social consequences’ of deeper authoritarianism. I’ll be brief; I think these three are the most important crisis tendencies. 1) The growth of inequality and precarity in most regions of the world, over the past generation, which is hardened by authoritarian regimes. 2) The revival of sexism, racism, and belligerent nationalism, which are organizing themes for authoritarian movements and put into practice by authoritarian regimes. 3) Accelerated environmental destruction, especially from fossil fuel use, resulting from the corruption and unaccountability of authoritarian rule.
The international and national ‘rule of law’, assertions of ‘human rights’ and other devices of mainstream liberalism, have proved ineffective in response to populist authoritarian movements, and the self-interested policies of authoritarian regimes. There is currently no effective sanction against the violence of the regimes headed by Putin, Trump, Modi, Xi, Netanyahu. Billionaire culture prides itself on ‘disruption’, on smashing established social balances. As recent climate and media politics shows, there is little effective restraint on the self-interested controllers of the corporations running social media, biomedical research, or fossil-fuel industries.
It seems clear, then, that any effective responses must come from outside the framework of mainstream politics. They will require, fundamentally, organizing among the social groups – the majority of the world’s population – whose lives are being made unsustainable by the three crisis tendencies mentioned above. What role intellectuals can play in this process has yet to be seen. If any intellectual projects can support this process, social sciences would seem among the most relevant. But that requires the social sciences to focus on the problems that matter most.
Camila Rocha: From the standpoint of effective action, it would be necessary to build, on the basis of dialogues in the Global North and South, national and international measures aimed at achieving greater justice and equality through: i. mechanisms for the deconcentration and distribution of income (levies, taxes, measures against capital flight and tax havens, transparency and anti-corruption measures, among others); ii. investments in technology transfers to countries of the Global South with a view to developing new, sustainable production chains that afford them greater economic autonomy; iii. new forms of social, environmental, and labor protection suited to different contexts, taking into account the care work performed by women, the aging of populations, and respect for the ways of life of non-urban, indigenous, and non-human populations; iv. mechanisms to combat the oligopolization of communications and technology companies; v. changes in the representation of countries in international institutions, as well as new modes of action that restore the legitimacy of such bodies’ actions in mediating conflicts, crises, and wars; vi. urgent measures aimed at combating global warming, preserving forests, and reforesting degraded environments.
José Maurício Domingues: Struggles to renew and deepen democracy, restricting the autonomous power of the formal, state political system, giving publicity to all the processes internal to it; opening new channels of participation, introducing greater turnover in representative offices and in the executive, and combating neopatrimonialism and corruption without concessions.
Jorge Chaloub: There is a first effort that is conceptual: authoritarianism is a deeply polysemic term, which has been used in the sense of a type of political regime, of a personality, or even as a broad counter-concept of democracy. In order to grasp how to confront its negative social effects, it is therefore necessary first to define it more precisely, not only for intellectual and academic purposes, but for the organization of political action.
In this sense, the reconstruction of discourses that are critical of democracy and apologetic toward authoritarian utopias can not only better determine the arguments, actors, and social bases of these ideas, but also build typologies useful for distinguishing the various types of authoritarianism. One cannot deal with the authoritarian verve of neofascist or neo-Nazi political language in the same way as with the anti-democratic preachings of the anarcho-capitalist, since their political strategies, discourses, and audiences are quite distinct. It is necessary, nonetheless, to delineate both their divergences and their occasional consonances – often built around the idea of the enemy – since the two perspectives are central to understanding and resisting far-right political coalitions. The Brazilian scenario is a good example.
As a coalition, Bolsonarism is profoundly heterogeneous, finding unity through the construction of an enemy – broadly identified with the field of the left – and through the rejection of the democratic experiences of the post-1945 period. Any action to combat it, or to defeat new far-right coalitions, nonetheless requires a better understanding of its internal factions, which reveal at once the tensions within the coalition and what holds it together.
4. Which authors and/or works in your field of knowledge would be relevant to this debate? Mention three or four.
Raewyn Connell: José Rizal, Noli me tangere (1887). The classic novel of late imperialism in the Pacific, set in the Spanish colony of the Philippines. It dramatises the structure and dynamics of colonial society, as seen by a young intellectual of the colonized people. It’s a notable document of the corruptions and antagonisms that flourish under authoritarianism – and its violence. The author was judicially murdered by the imperial regime just as the Philippine struggle for independence got under way.
Milton Santos, Por uma outra globalização: do pensamento único à consciência universal (2000). A notable tour d’horizon, coming out of the 1990s social-science debates about ‘globalization’ as the new form of capitalism, and describing the world produced by imperialism and neoliberalism, just when the contemporary surge of authoritarianism was beginning. Clear about the totalitarian strand in the neoliberal re-organization of capitalism, Santos is also strongly aware of the turbulence of the global scene and its underlying irrationality and potentials for change.
Lynn Horton, Men of Money: Elite masculinities and the neoliberal project (2022). So here are the beneficiaries! Men like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos and Mark Zuckerberg, exemplary billionaires of the new deregulated tech-capitalist economy in the global North. Horton emphasises the fact of their gender. Their rise drew not just on men’s general privilege in the corporate world but on the construction of altered patterns of elite masculinity. (Elon Musk is part of the same story, showing the menacing irresponsibility of the new power of extreme wealth.)
Camila Rocha: Quinn Slobodian, Globalists (2018) and Crack-up Capitalism (2023);
Nancy Fraser, Cannibal Capitalism (2022);
Gary Gerstle, The Rise and Fall of the Neoliberal Order (2002);
Maristela Svampa, As fronteiras do neoextrativismo na América Latina (2018).
José Maurício Domingues: I wrote Political Modernity and Social Theory, published in 2024, with exactly that aim. The works of Thomas Piketty, especially Capital in the Twenty-First Century, are also essential in this regard, as is the book by Jens Bochert and Jürgen Zeiss (eds.), The Political Class in Advanced Democracies. In Brazil there is still a refusal to confront this head-on.
Jorge Chaloub: On the more contemporary debates, I think of the works of Quinn Slobodian and Melinda Cooper on neoliberalism, libertarianism, and anarcho-capitalism. These authors address themes such as the relations between a racial imaginary, typical of white supremacism, and the ultraliberal variants; the idea of a geopolitical order in the contemporary neoliberal imaginary; and the current formulations of the imaginary of austerity and of the critique of the idea of rights. Works worthy of attention include Hayek’s Bastards: Race, Gold, IQ, and the Capitalism of the Far Right (2025) and Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy (2023), by Slobodian; Counterrevolution: Extravagance and Austerity in Public Finance (2025) and Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism (2018), by Cooper.
Another contemporary author relevant to the debate, especially in connection with the theme of the normalization of far-right discourses and the rejection of democracy, is Aurelien Mondon – in particular his 2020 book, together with Aaron Winter, Reactionary Democracy: How Racism and the Populist Far Right Became Mainstream. His reflections on the relations between the traditional right and new right-wing actors are quite relevant, as are his analyses of the way authoritarian discourses circulate in the public sphere.
Finally, I think that Hartmut Rosa’s works on the transformation of modern social structures deserve attention, for they illuminate fundamental aspects of the transformations in the political world and of the changes in the patterns of discourse circulation. His research makes it possible to understand phenomena such as the enormous current relevance of social media in a way deeply connected to the transformations in patterns of accumulation and in the very experiences of contemporary capitalism.
