The BVPS Blog publishes today the second post of the international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?, which invited Brazilian and international specialists, drawing from three major areas of the social sciences — social theory, the sociology of work, and Brazilian social and political thought — to answer four questions around the intricate relationships between authoritarianism and capitalism in the contemporary world. The responses will be published in batches every Wednesday. By clicking here you can read the introduction signed by the organizers and the first round of responses.
Today’s contributors are:
Kehinde Andrews, Professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University, UK. The first Black Studies professor in the United Kingdom, he led the creation of the first Black Studies program in Europe. His research focuses on Black radicalism and resistance to racism. Author of, among others, Back to Black: Retelling Black Radicalism for the 21st Century and The New Age of Empire.
Graça Druck, Full Professor in the Department of Sociology at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Her research focuses on the social precariousness of labor, outsourcing, and productive restructuring. Author of, among others, A perda da razão social do trabalho: terceirização e precarização and Trabalho, Precarização e Resistências.
Frédéric Vandenberghe, Professor at Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). His work spans social theory, sociological theory, and the philosophy of the social sciences. Author of, among others, A Philosophical History of German Sociology and What’s Critical about Critical Realism?
Diogo Valença Azevedo da Costa, Full Professor at the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). He completed postdoctoral fellowships at the Graduate Program in Sociology at the Federal University of Pernambuco and at the Centre for African Studies at the University of Basel. He participated as an organizer and author of chapters in the book Florestan Fernandes’ Critical Sociology: A Social Theory of Brazil and Latin America.
The international symposium Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done? is organized by Fabrício Maciel (UFF) and Maurício Hoelz (UFRRJ and editor of the BVPS Blog), and has the editorial assistance of Miguel Cunha (PPGCS/UFRRJ).
See below!
Capitalism and Authoritarianism: What Is to Be Done?
1. What is your assessment of the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism today?
Kehinde Andrews: Capitalism has always depended on authoritarianism as its emergence was impossible without European empires. Genocide, slavery and colonialism were necessary to produce capitalism and therefore there is nothing new about the rising authoritarianism. In fact, the outlier was the short period after the second world war when the west was terrified of Communism and therefore gave some concessions to the working classes in Europe and built social democracies that authoritarians decreased. In the colonies the veneer of what Malcolm X called ‘benevolent imperialism’, allowed for so-called independence, whilst the economies were controlled by authoritarian institutions like the IMF and World Bank. The West also supported authoritarian dictators who would do their bidding, like Mobutu in the Congo. In truth authoritarianism never declined, there was just a brief moment in the West where it seemed as though there was more consent. This was short lived as Neo-liberalism emerged in the 1980s, and the model of financialization that had been perfected in the colonies boomeranged back into the former mother countries. Malcolm warned us that the liberal Northern Fox was more dangerous the vicious Southern Wolf, because at least with the authoritarian, brutal wolf we knew where we stood. The Wolf ‘bares their teeth in a snarl’, whereas the Fox ‘show their teeth but pretends that they are smiling’. Malcolm told us that either way we ‘end up in the doghouse’, we just go their willingly. The age of increasing authoritarianism is actually a blessing because it reveals the true nature of a society that has always been based on racial oppression. Now we may have a better chance of fighting it because we understand the stakes.
Graça Druck: In the era of flexible accumulation, the transformations of labor and production under neoliberal hegemony have created the material and subjective conditions for the far-right movements, governments, and leaders that embody the neofascism present today at the center or on the periphery of capitalism. This is because financialization, technological innovation, permanent productive restructuring, and neoliberal policies have redefined the way we produce and consume, reconfiguring labor and the social classes and imposing the social precarization of labor as a strategy of domination.
The neoliberalization of labor and society, sustained by these material transformations, is accompanied by an ideological hegemony centered on competition and individualism. It is a process of boundless commodification that seeks to impose the sovereignty of the market as the supreme value across every sphere of social life. Over the past 40 years, the results of these changes have led to a greater concentration of income and property, rising structural unemployment, the growth of absolute and relative poverty, social uprooting, and vast migratory movements throughout the world. It is the social precarization of labor at the heart of the dynamics of capitalism, instituting volatility, instability, uncertainty, and a lack of prospects for those who live from their labor. This has given rise to diffuse feelings of insecurity, anger, and hatred, to phobias of every kind, and to resentments directed at some “other” or “others.”
This is the kind of socio-economic and political environment in which the most varied forms and expressions of far-right ideologies, movements, governments, and leaderships flourish, drawing on this climate of crisis to present themselves as an alternative to the “system.” Even when they make use of liberal democracy, through elections, they show contempt for democratic institutions and the rule of law, for their social base lies in this mass of dispersed, competitive, disheartened individuals, driven by hatred of the “other” – conditions also seen at earlier moments in history, when fascism first emerged.
Frédéric Vandenberghe: Posed in this way, the question dictates the answer. “Political illiberalism” is a populist response to the “illiberal politics” of the elites. Populism and neoliberalism are two sides of the same process. If, however, we focus on authoritarianism without the automatic answers of a warmed-over Marxism, more complex responses may emerge to open up the great black box of capitalism. To grasp the combined effects of ideology and technology on the political psychology of the masses, a more cultural approach seems to me the right one. Polarization occurs when political entrepreneurs, on both the left and the right, exploit their voters’ feelings of loss and disorientation in order to raise the political temperature. When mediation runs through the extremes and no longer through the center, the center cannot hold.
Diogo Valença de Azevedo Costa: The current structural crisis of capital, in István Mészáros’s terms, leads to a resurgence of authoritarian practices that are, in fact, part of the autocratic essence of bourgeois domination on a world scale. This involves so-called civil society, the states, and the relations among countries. It is not a passing phenomenon but one inherent to capitalism itself. This system systematically reproduces barbarism, as we see in Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people, in the armed conflict in Ukraine, now stretching into its fourth year, and now in the acts of state terrorism, piracy, and abduction carried out by the Trump administration against Venezuela. The imperialist aggression of the United States targets not only that country but the whole of Latin America. There are other conflicts made less visible by the corporate media, such as the civil war in Yemen. The United States remains the world superpower, one that feels “threatened” (in quotation marks, because the rhetoric of the external threat serves only to justify the unjustifiable) by the Russian Federation, by Iran, and, on the economic plane, above all by China. The tensions between the imperialist superpower and this heterogeneous bloc, arising from the contradictions of the capitalist system, heighten the risk of the fascistization of the international structures of power. Countries will remain in conflict, for what is at stake are disputes over zones of political influence and over natural resources, chiefly oil and rare minerals. The current crisis of NATO, symbolized by Greenland, attests to this. At the root of all this lies a new pattern of capital accumulation, a more flexible one, that has been consolidating since the last quarter of the twentieth century with the scientific and technological revolution. This pattern permits a more violent exploitation of labor power, accompanied by the fascistization and autocratization of civil society and the state at the national, regional, and global levels.
2. How do you think your field of knowledge could engage with other disciplines in building this assessment?
Kehinde Andrews: One of the strengths of Black Studies is that is interdisciplinary, so my work draws across sociology, politics, law, history and a range of disciplines. This is essential because authoritarianism cut across all areas of life and we can’t understand it from just one perspective. This is especially the case when we think about what we do in the present moment. One of Black Studies central principles is the commitment to social change, what Robert Staples called the ‘science of liberation’. It is not just enough to understand the threat our scholarship must be committed to improving the world. As such that means directly engaging and being on the ground in battles against increasing authoritarianism. This is a lesson desperately needed across academia, which typically encourages us to be involved in the analysis but not the solution.
Graça Druck: Studies in the field of labor, which have investigated the transformations of the current process of financialization and of globalization under neoliberal hegemony, are an important contribution to understanding the present historical moment of capitalism. This is because they reveal the objective and subjective conditions of workers, bringing to light the disputes among the social classes. These are studies that are increasingly interdisciplinary in nature, spanning sociology, economics, law, political science, psychology, history, and other fields.
To analyze in depth the implications of the labor counter-reforms, for example, one must understand the role of the state and its forms of regulation, drawing on the contributions of Political Science and Law – the analyses of the transformations of the state and its institutions, as well as the debate on the regulation of the field of labor. Moreover, the discussion of the crisis of liberal democracy cannot be confined to the strictly political functioning of its institutions and to popular participation, because the fragility of democracies and their crisis must also be explained on the basis of the material foundations of present-day capitalism, whose economic and social inequality is reaching ever higher levels throughout the world, the result of neoliberal policies that, invariably, keep stripping away social and labor rights.
To explain authoritarianism or, as I prefer to call it, the rise of neofascism today, one must explain how the new “neoliberal economic model” has redefined inter-capitalist relations, the international insertion of peripheral countries such as Brazil, the state, and capital-labor relations – themes addressed with particular emphasis by political economy, for instance, which takes the historical process, past and present, as its reference.
Finally, and no less important, the centrality of “mass psychology” in this context, in the various approaches taken by scholars, helps us understand the dispersion, the heightened individualism, and the weakening of workers’ agency in their collective and class-based forms of action.
Frédéric Vandenberghe: In times of crisis, when the foundations of the Republic are cracking, all theories, tools, concepts and research have to be mobilised to make sense of a quickly shifting situation. The disciplinary background no longer matters. Any quality research on authoritarianism, the military, social movements, social media, the rule of law, etc. are welcome. Whether it is philosophy, sociology, political science, law or even investigative journalism doesn’t matter. We urgently need to reconstruct the social sciences to reconstruct societies.
Diogo Valença de Azevedo Costa: My training is predominantly in Sociology, but I think that critical Latin American social science has never been governed by the kind of rigid specialization seen, for example, in the United States and the countries of Western Europe. That rigid specialization begins in Brazil in the 1970s, with the graduate programs. If we take as a model the kind of Economics, Sociology, History, and so on practiced by social scientists in Latin America who were concerned with resolving the dilemmas of underdevelopment and dependency, from the mid-twentieth century onward, we will see that, although they had a predominant area of training, they did not disdain a fruitful interdisciplinary dialogue, theoretically and methodologically. Celso Furtado built an economic science of underdevelopment that was at once historical and strongly sociological in bent; Florestan Fernandes practiced, properly speaking, a sociology that was economic, historical, and political. A book such as Sociología de la explotación, by Pablo González Casanova, offers a solid theorization of the relations between capitalism and colonialism. The examples could be multiplied. We have this legacy in Latin America. I think that a first step toward my field of knowledge contributing to other fields – in constructing a diagnosis of contemporary capitalism – would be to recover the theoretical, methodological, and political legacy of the Latin American social sciences I have referred to. It would need to be questioned and brought up to date, but much inspiration is there, and through it we come to know our own history. When Florestan elaborated the category of dependent capitalism, he was thinking not only of Brazil but of the whole of Latin America, and he even ventured to conjecture that the features of dependent capitalism – bourgeois autocracy and its potential fascism – might become generalized on a world scale. An interdisciplinary effort is not limited to bringing together specialized knowledge but, above all, to establishing dialogues at the theoretical and methodological levels.
3. In your view, what forms of effective action could emerge from this discussion to address the social consequences of the current deepening of authoritarianism?
Kehinde Andrews: The main positive benefit of the deepening authoritarianism is that it opens up the radical imagination. By helping us to see the true nature of society we can then start to think about revolutionary alternatives. The biggest problem with the age of the Fox is that we thought we were making progress. This is why the rise of the Wolf is so surprising to many, we assumed we were beyond this kind of regressive politics. The Fox lulled us into a false sense of security, giving us faith that we could have freedom if only we could reform the system. But now we should be able to see that there are no reforms that could ever liberate those oppressed by the system and we should take another look at radical solutions. At this point this means stepping in to provide where the state refuses to. Self-help was the language used in the sixties and seventies in Britain, whilst Malcolm X spoke about the need for independence from the society that is set against you. Providing services in education, health, legal defence etc is not a long-term solution but akin to what the Black Panthers called ‘survival, pending revolution’. By building alternatives we begin to think through what a different society could look like. For the field of education this is especially important as authoritarian leaders look to control the knowledge that young people learn. It is vital that we are able to build a critical curriculum that is accessible outside of universities if we want to build a better future. As scholars this should be our first concern, how to counter the regressive schooling and media messaging that is being indoctrinated into society.
Graça Druck: On the one hand, neofascist movements and the election of far-right leaders around the world and in Brazil have made the collective struggle for political, economic, and social democracy more difficult. On the other, one observes a profound dissatisfaction among broad segments of society with the course taken under these leaders and with the lack of solutions to the present crisis, for “the old is dying and the new cannot be born.”
In Brazil, the 2022 elections represented an important victory in the country’s democratic reconstruction. Nonetheless, the neofascist forces represented by Bolsonarism remain, and they attempted, without success, a coup d’état. The main leaders of that attempt were tried, convicted, and imprisoned – the outcome of actions, online and in the streets, in defense of democracy, such as the great national mobilization that brought together hundreds of thousands of people across the country against the PEC da Blindagem (the “shielding” constitutional amendment) passed in the Chamber of Deputies, rendering its approval by the Federal Senate unviable.
In the field of labor, a movement is growing that challenges precarization through the struggle to reduce the working day. It is a mobilization that unites the most diverse segments of workers who want a “Life Beyond Work” (Vida além do Trabalho), the name given to this movement, now organized nationwide, which provided the backing to file a Constitutional Amendment Proposal in the National Congress that would replace the 6×1 schedule (six days worked to one day off) with four days of work and three of rest.
These are movements that make use of both social media and the streets and that are organized horizontally, bringing together trade unions, political parties, and social, cultural, and artistic movements, breaking with the hierarchy among the more traditional forms of political organization.
They are networks of counter-powers – based on popular and direct participation, and therefore reaching beyond the institutional struggle confined to the executive and legislative branches – that are necessary to confront neoliberal capitalism and neofascism, transforming the balance of forces and building an alternative to the present crisis.
Frédéric Vandenberghe: The task of the intellectual is to propose a sober analysis of the political situation so as to augment the quality of the public debate. It is important to defend the rule of law and avoid every form of cynicism. One should be careful not to demonise one’s opponents. As sociologists, we know how to listen to the other without immediately reacting to them. If authoritarianism is the problem, convivialism is the solution.
Diogo Valença de Azevedo Costa: The truth is that I am very skeptical about the role the social sciences can play, in concrete terms, in confronting the negative social effects of the present resurgence of authoritarianism. We live in a mass society and, at the same time, our universities – in the case of the social sciences in Brazil – have become bureaucratic structures removed from the reality of the people. It is one thing to produce within the University for the purposes of an academic career; it is quite another to produce knowledge within social struggles. However critical the knowledge produced in universities or research centers may be, it has no social channels for dissemination and practical use. I am not saying that this knowledge is unnecessary, mere intellectual idleness. I consider this knowledge necessary, but it does not reach those it ought to reach. I must also say that we have a very idealist and abstract bent; we reflect from our worldview as members of social classes and groups whose standard of living, in terms of purchasing power, is considerably higher than that of the majority of the Brazilian population. The low-income worker, often super-exploited, precaritized, and informal, is engaged in the daily struggle for survival, preoccupied with the physical existence of his family. How can we truly reach him if we speak in a language that does not touch the working classes and the great dispossessed masses? Thus, I think that the very construction of the diagnosis must begin from a dialogue, through politically committed research, with the working classes, the dispossessed masses, and the social movements. This would help to break the idealist language of the social scientist. The concrete knowledge produced in that political experience would come to make sense to the popular classes. Brilliant diagnoses are of no use unless we can count on democratic social channels of popular participation capable of curbing the authoritarianism of the elites and of the middle classes subordinated to them.
4. Which authors and/or works from your field of knowledge do you consider relevant to this debate? Please mention three or four.
Kehinde Andrews: I’ve already mentioned Malcolm X, but will reiterate how important his work is on this area. The Fox and Wolf analogy perfectly captures the movement. Also the concept of ‘benevolent imperialism’.
Keeanga Yahmatta Taylor’s Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership captures the shift from authoritarian (de jure segregation) to supposedly benevolent forms of racism that maintain inequality. This is a reminder that the system remains the same no matter if we are dealing with the Fox or the Wolf
Carole Anderson’s One Person, No Vote: How Voter Suppression Is Destroying Our Democracy illustrates the rise of authoritarianism in the US with brazen voter suppression, which is rolling back the civil rights that had been hard won.
Graça Druck: David Harvey (his work as a whole), especially: The Condition of Postmodernity: An Enquiry into the Origins of Cultural Change (1989); and A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005).
Ricardo Antunes (his work as a whole), especially: The Meanings of Work: Essays on the Affirmation and Negation of Work (1999, expanded edition 2025), and The Privilege of Servitude: The New Service Proletariat in the Digital Age (2018).
Luis Felipe Miguel (his work as a whole), especially: Marxism and Politics: Directions for Use (2024); Democracy on the Capitalist Periphery: Brazil’s Impasses (2022).
Christian Laval and Pierre Dardot, The New Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (2016).
A set of authors from the field of labor law who engage and interact with the sociology of labor, such as Jorge Souto Maior, Rodrigo Carelli, Renata Dutra, Lawrence Mello, Sayonara Grillo, among others.
Frédéric Vandenberghe: Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy ([1923] 1996).
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Psychological Technique of Martin Luther Thomas’ Radio Addresses” (1975), in Soziologische Schriften II (= Gesammelte Schriften 9.1), p. 7–141.
Steven Levitsky & Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die (2018).
Diogo Valença de Azevedo Costa: A fundamental author is Florestan Fernandes. The sociological analysis he made of the “New Republic,” in quotation marks, brings together many elements that help us understand the political phenomenon of Bolsonarism and the potential risks of fascism in Brazil. He did not speak of authoritarianism as such, but preferred the category of bourgeois autocracy, relating it to the notion of the “composite hegemony” of sectors of the dominant class, in order to argue that, under dependent capitalism, threats to a democracy of broadened participation are not the exception but the rule. In interviews toward the end of his life, Florestan suggested that the most drastic features of dependent capitalism were becoming universal. Beyond him, I would like to mention the importance of Marxist Dependency Theory. Another author I consider fundamental is István Mészáros, with his classic Beyond Capital. This book moves us to reflect on the relevance of the socialist project today, on the basis of a critique of the socialist experiences of the twentieth century. Mészáros shows how the sociometabolic relation of capital and its alienating consequences can persist in post-capitalist systems. This prevents the construction of a radical and popular democracy. As a few further suggestions, I would like to speak not of specific authors or works but of critical traditions of thought. We need to recover the classics of the Marxist theory of imperialism down to the present day: Lenin (who, incidentally, drew on the work of a liberal, John Hobson, to develop his theses on imperialism), Hilferding, Rosa Luxemburg, Bukharin, Maurice Dobb, David Harvey, among others. The category of imperialism is not outdated. These works help us understand fascism as a structural phenomenon of capitalism. There is also an important Marxist tradition that studies the fascist phenomenon specifically, which needs to be recovered. The essential thing, however, I think, is not to repeat formulas but to carry out concrete analyses of these new autocratic reconfigurations in contemporary capitalism.
