The BVPS Blog publishes today the third 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 other publications from the symposium.
Today’s contributors are:
Heloisa Starling is a historian and full professor at the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG). Her work focuses on the political history of Brazil, republicanism, democracy, and authoritarianism. She is the author of, among other works, Os senhores das Gerais, Lembranças do Brasil, and Ser republicano no Brasil Colônia, as well as co-author of Brasil: uma biografia, with Lilia Schwarcz.
Elísio Estanque is a professor and researcher at the Centre for Social Studies at the University of Coimbra, in Portugal. His research covers labor, social inequalities, social movements, trade unionism, and labor precarity. He is the author of, among other works, Classes médias e lutas sociais and Precariado, juventude e trabalho.
Josué Pereira da Silva is a professor at the State University of Campinas (Unicamp). He works on social theory, inequalities, citizenship, recognition, and contemporary social thought. He is the author of, among other works, Trabalho, cidadania e reconhecimento and numerous studies on the reception of critical theory and theories of recognition in Brazil.
Ricardo Festi is a professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Brasília (UnB). His work is dedicated to the sociology of labor, the history of the social sciences, and social theory, with particular attention to the intellectual relations between Brazil and France. He is the author of, among other works, As origens da sociologia do trabalho: percursos cruzados entre Brasil e França.
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?
Heloisa Starling: How can we escape the Democratic State? This question serves as a conduit through which self-styled “libertarians” articulate, within a common rhetoric, a strategy for creating territories — called “special zones” — governed by authoritarian political arrangements and the complete suppression of democratic principles. “Destructive capitalism,” to use the definition of historian Quinn Slobodian when describing the current phase of neoliberalism, is under construction. It makes use of a new type of capitalist mechanism that enables the establishment of an authoritarian form of government, aimed at guaranteeing order, with the market at its center. Democracy is its great obstacle — above all by virtue of the catalogue of rights.
In this case, we are not dealing with the conquest of political power as we have known it. What is at stake now is the experimentation of a new strategy: installing miniature private governments in planned micro-cities that function as gated communities — with controlled access, private policing, closed streets with barriers, and entirely separated from the public world. The so-called “special zones” — modeled on Dubai and its artificial archipelagos of World and Palm Jumeirah, or on the example of Prospera Zede, on the island of Roatán in Honduras — are enclaves that test the limits of the nation in an authoritarian key. They are exempt from common forms of regulation, have low or no taxes, and allow investors to dictate their own rules without democratic oversight.
This new type of capitalist mechanism has been advancing in recent times. We do not yet know how to fully extract all the political consequences of its functioning for society, but it grows stronger with the destruction of democracy, and its ideological argument is clear: capitalism does not need to walk alongside democracy. On the contrary. It is more important, and dispenses with the democratic order.
Elísio Estanque: The relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism is ambiguous. As we know, modern capitalism has the market as its most important catalyst. It is important, however, to stress that capitalism, in addition to not being a uniform system, always combines with other modes of production and national (or local) contexts with their own specificities. For example, corporatist political regimes that prevailed in the last century in southern Europe and Latin America centered economic activity within their territories and restricted international trade, thereby conditioning the expansion of capitalism. In various such regimes, large economic monopolies benefited from state protection and contributed to rapid economic growth, at least in the short term. This happened in the former USSR in the early phase of Stalinism with the “five-year plans,” as well as in the Nazi regime with the implementation of infrastructure and the armaments industry. Even under the Estado Novo, the economy and finance experienced a period of growth and balanced public accounts from the 1930s through the end of the Second World War; and Getúlio Vargas in Brazil also implemented a series of industrialization and urbanization policies that brought economic growth in that period. However, these cases reveal two fundamental problems: first, growth was generally limited — despite rapid expansion in the initial phase, these regimes ultimately created barriers to sustainability, mainly due to restrictions on free competition; second, the social stability afforded by tight state control can quickly become exhausted, and repression either reaches a totalitarian and extremely violent level, or gives rise to contestation and social conflict — and therefore to the kind of unpredictability that major investors dislike.
But if we focus on the present, in a period of accelerated economic globalization, the topic requires a different perspective. We must first situate the problem of the world of work, where authoritarian power has always been most acutely felt. The era of national markets and industrial productive activity based on intensive labor or the primary sector (heavy industry, mining, agriculture, textiles, metalworking, regulated markets, etc.) has lost momentum, and new growth sectors obey different dynamics of competitiveness (fragmentation of production, deregulation of public policies, service economy, outsourcing, digitization, technological innovation, automation and platformization of labor, relocation and acceleration of flows, etc.). In short, with the end of Fordism and the advent of neoliberal globalization, a turning point coincided with the technological and digital revolution; the rapid expansion of global capitalism broke through international borders, led to the deregulation of labor rights, caused social policies to retreat, and fostered the emergence of new vulnerable and unprotected layers of the working classes, making precarity and instability a characteristic affecting all sectors of the workforce, from the most to the least qualified.
Therefore, the tension between capitalism and authoritarianism can be seen, in a certain sense, as a mirror image of the tension between capitalism and democracy. Ellen Meiksins Wood, in her classic book Democracy Against Capitalism, highlights that modern capitalism, by privileging market and capital accumulation, inevitably leads to an increasing concentration of capital in the hands of the richest elite and, consequently, to growing social inequalities — eroding democratic logic. We can also invoke, along the same lines, French sociologist Thomas Piketty’s critique of neoliberalism, which stimulates an accumulative logic that privileges financial capitalism and speculative investments, worsening economic inequalities and hollowing out political democracy.
Therefore, even acknowledging the difficulty of finding an economic model alternative to capitalism, it is important to emphasize that if global capitalism continues to grow without restriction, deepening inequalities will create ever-greater pockets of exclusion and subordination, sharpening cleavages that reduce the space for democracy and open the way to its definitive erosion in many countries. Finally, it is worth recalling the Chinese example, where capitalism appears to combine perfectly with authoritarianism. China’s so-called “popular capitalism,” whose economic success is unquestionable and which seems to be gaining ever more admirers in the Western world, operates according to a centralist and authoritarian criterion managed by state power seated in the Communist Party. Its success comes at the cost of suppressing individual freedoms, arbitrary imprisonment, and tight control in which digital applications and algorithmic power dictate the rules governing citizens’ behavior. Democracy seems a term outside the imagination of that vast country.
Josué Pereira da Silva: Before anything else, I should note that I write as a non-specialist on this topic and will not be bound by definitions of capitalism or authoritarianism. I will go directly to the diagnosis of the relationship between the two in the present day, pointing to the broad lines of what I consider essential to answer the question.
I believe that the situation of recent decades bears strong resemblance to that of the early twentieth century — the period preceding the Second World War, marked by the rise of various right-wing authoritarian and totalitarian regimes, mainly in Europe, such as Salazarism in Portugal, Francoism in post-civil war Spain, Fascism in Italy, and Nazism in Germany, not to mention the left-wing versions exemplified by Stalinism in Soviet Russia. By this I mean that the relationship between capitalism and authoritarianism is not new. However, the current situation has specificities that make it different from that earlier period. And the main difference is directly related to the historical context.
Hence the importance of approaching the problem from a critical diagnosis of the present — one that does not ignore three major problems afflicting us today: the technological revolution, the environmental crisis, and social inequality. These serve as the necessary backdrop for understanding the new configuration of capitalism — increasingly digital. The appropriation of this new reality by right-wing forces seems evident, as does the convergence of interests between neoliberal defenders of the minimal state and the far right. Denying the environmental crisis and attacking policies protecting the most vulnerable is convenient for both ideological currents. The current explosion of social inequality is to a large extent a direct result of all this. Furthermore, the authoritarian right has been adept at exploiting the frustrations and resentment of populations excluded from the benefits of digital capitalism, fueling xenophobia and contempt for the most vulnerable sectors. Thus, capitalism’s adaptive capacity combined with the opportunism of right-wing tendencies — both fisiological and authoritarian — join forces in undermining the institutions that sustain democratic politics, resulting in the hollowing out of democracy, the decline of politics, and the crisis of the democratic rule of law.
Ricardo Festi: Capitalism as a social and political formation is structured in authoritarianism. The essence of its configuration lies in class division, racism, the exploitation of labor power, and the expropriation of subaltern strata. Over the past few centuries, only in a few Western countries were there periods in which capitalism was managed through liberal democracy and a welfare state was established. Known as the Fordist compromise, this gave capitalism a more democratic appearance, even though the intensification of exploitation advanced exponentially. Currently, the unprecedented crisis of capital has eroded social bonds and increased political conflicts. Neoliberalism — the radicalization of reification and the destruction of any solidarity-based project — helped consolidate in broad sectors of society the perception that the democratic regime is ineffective and fails to meet the expectations of the majority. To make matters worse, governments led by both right-wing and left-wing parties maintained or deepened neoliberal conceptions, creating the perception that all are the same. In periods of crisis, capital seeks to recover through new technological cycles (today, automation and Artificial Intelligence) and through the reorganization of labor and society with a view to increasing profits. One consequence is the emergence of despotic and totalitarian political forms, as we see in the projects of the far right.
Unlike the twentieth century, today we have no political and social regime rivaling capitalism. Even if post-capitalist countries (USSR, China, Cuba, among others) were far from the emancipated society envisioned by past revolutionaries, they provided a reference point of an alternative to capitalism for the oppressed classes, who maintained political engagement around utopias. The absence of such worldviews today is the greatest expression of the political crisis we are living through. The very word revolution has disappeared from most left-wing movements, and those who dare defend it are seen as anachronistic. Paradoxically, the defense of “revolution” appears in the discourse of the far right, in a manner similar to what we saw in the fascist movements of the past. These groups present an anti-system discourse, even though their political function is to preserve and perfect capital. The bourgeoisie outsources power from time to time to save itself, even if it must renounce democratic institutions.
Finally, we face an escalation of capitalist authoritarianism across all spheres of society — manifesting not only through the State and its institutions or through factory-floor exploitation. The forms of capital’s domination have grown more complex, particularly with the advancement of information technologies, robotics, automation, platformization, and digitization. The digital management apparatus of e-commerce companies, for example, can control the entire supply chain through digital means and artificial intelligence, anticipating trends and influencing consumers’ tastes and perceptions via virtual social networks. Capitalism has changed substantially in recent decades, but its hegemony still begins in production.
2. How do you think your field of knowledge could engage with other disciplines in building this assessment?
Elísio Estanque: Sociology, like any other social science, cannot do without dialogue and intersection with related disciplines — particularly economics, anthropology, and political science, among others. Although sociology is currently losing prominence in its influence on democratic institutions, the theories and studies developed around digital platforms and their impact on the world of labor engage in dialogue with economics, social psychology, and legal sciences, challenging authorities to defend the rights of the working class as a condition for preserving the minimum social balances indispensable for safeguarding democracy. Knowledge of society, of subjectivities, and of how social perceptions are constructed can be decisive for influencing policymakers. The problems of inequality and the growth of social resentments that today fuel far-right populisms are matters in which the social sciences are well versed, and their diagnoses regarding the limitations of democracy or the attack on fundamental human rights help to demonstrate the distortions and inequities generated by an “undignified capitalism” (a topic of study by Fabrício Maciel), which has been suppressing elementary progressive achievements.
Josué Pereira da Silva: The very nature of the topics suggested above indicates that collaboration between the various disciplines is not only welcome but necessary — and here I am not referring only to the humanities. Sociology can, together with other disciplines, contribute to a richer multidisciplinary critical diagnosis than any single discipline could achieve on its own.
The theme of authoritarianism has always been a field of inquiry proper to political theory and political science, although studying authoritarianism is not their exclusive domain. In the same way, capitalism as an economic system has been the object of political economy, but since capitalism is not reducible to purely economic relations, it automatically becomes an object of other disciplines.
As for sociology specifically, I am drawn to the proposition of Jürgen Habermas in his book The Theory of Communicative Action, according to which it falls to sociology, in modernity, to perform the role once attributed to philosophy — that of interpreting society as a whole from the standpoint of reason — but now in collaboration with the other scientific disciplines. Although this may seem presumptuous to non-sociologists, it carries the interesting metaphorical sense of regarding sociology as a non-specialized discipline.
Ricardo Festi: The sociology of work has been focusing on two central questions for a diagnosis of reality. On the one hand, it carries out research on the transformations of production and labor models and their relationship with new technologies, such as automation, platformization, digitization, artificial intelligence, among others. At the same time, scholars in this field grapple with the thorny question of the agency of labor subjects. Connecting these two research strands is fundamental for understanding the current world. And studying the world of work requires articulation with other disciplines, since sociology alone cannot account for the complexity of this object. For this reason, in recent decades we have witnessed an interesting movement of articulation, dialogue, and even blending with psychoanalysis, history, economics, law, medicine, engineering, data science, and many others.
For example, the platformization of work brought a new challenge to understanding the relationship between technologies and forms of domination over labor subjects. From the 1970s onward, with the works of Braverman and Burawoy, an important debate began regarding forms of subordination of workers in their workplaces. Some perspectives emphasize the coercion of capital and labor organization; others highlight the role of consent in producing hegemony of the labor regime. Today, with so-called algorithmic management, this problematic takes on new parameters. Apparently, there is no boss directly involved in imposing discipline — it appears as the subject’s own action, a characteristic of neoliberal subjectivity.
One of the new aspects of the early twenty-first century is the emergence of a subjectivity among laboring classes that is averse to the historical banners of the trade union movement. In some places, these classes have been captured by the far-right project, expressing themselves against progressive agendas. Here it is necessary to understand the contradictions and ambiguities of the thinking and actions of these subjects in order to understand by what paths they can be contested by democratic and emancipatory projects. Thus, I believe the first step is to move away from over-specialization in the sciences, since this prevents a reading of the social totality. Each discipline has its theoretical tradition, its references, and its methodologies — we should not discard these, since specialization was important in this respect. But drawing on these instruments, we must construct a critical social theory and present solutions to society.
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?
Heloisa Starling: A termite is advancing through the world today and threatening democracy, warned political scientist Miguel Lago. “Termite Democracy,” as he named it, does not resort to coups d’état. It arrives without fanfare, gnawing at democratic structures from within until it empties them completely. But it preserves the façade and maintains a kind of democratic shell surrounding everything that has been eaten away — institutions, legislation, forms of social solidarity, government agencies, the catalogue of rights, standards of justice. The termite’s action establishes the point of convergence between government programs that need not be exactly the same, such as Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil and Donald Trump in the United States.
Fragile but renewable, democracy “depends on our willingness to re-enchant it,” insists Miguel Lago. This means breaking the isolation of individuals in society in order to recover a public space broader and more permanent than the ballot box, with greater opportunities for citizens’ voices to be heard beyond election days. The art of association, Hannah Arendt said, expands citizens’ field of action beyond the periodic vote and the delegation of representation, and confers upon the Republic its most authentic democratic meaning. Association takes on many forms: councils, assemblies, solidarity or community networks, platforms for digital deliberation. Citizens quickly realize that participating in public affairs is worthwhile when the defense of the common good becomes the responsibility of each one.
The act of declaring rights gives democracy its pulse. Sustained by an assertion of self-evidence, the declaration has a galvanizing effect. Rights are convincing because they resonate within each person. They incite the excluded to speak for themselves and to demand equal recognition. It is impossible to define them once and for all: their horizon of expectations is wide and in continuous motion, because advances in the understanding of who has rights and what those rights are change constantly. Like democracy itself, the act of declaring rights is not a finished construction but an ongoing endeavor.
Elísio Estanque: In 2023 I published a book (referenced below) that addresses “public sociology” as a project assuming the need for this discipline to step beyond its academic borders and address a broad public with potential influence on political action. Science in general — but the social sciences and sociology in particular — although following the premises of modern rational thought, are not immune to normative visions and choices of an ethical nature. Various strands of critical thought (including those under the influence of Marxism and the Frankfurt School) have stimulated successive debates and movements of political intervention aimed at critiquing capitalism and its excesses, and defending humanist principles and transformative projects. It is also in this vein that the works of authors such as Florestan Fernandes and Francisco Oliveira in Brazil, Michael Burawoy and Erik Olin Wright in the USA, Alain Touraine and Pierre Bourdieu in France, and Klaus Dörre and Hartmut Rosa in Germany are situated. Social movements, which in many circumstances have been decisive in producing ruptures and transformations in capitalism in a direction that broadened the field of political action and deepened democracy, are currently going through a period of stagnation and have in many cases been “swallowed up” by xenophobic, nationalist, and proto-fascist narratives. I believe, however, that we are living through a transitional phase and that new rebellions of an emancipatory character — combating inequalities (of class, gender, race, economic, religious, sexual orientation and LGBTQ+, etc.) and defending peace and environmental balance — will resurface to contain the risks of new authoritarianisms that are today on the march.
Josué Pereira da Silva: Beyond the three major themes mentioned in my response to the first question, there are other specific developments of this diagnosis that cannot be ignored.
There are problems worth investigating here. For example: the relationship between the growth of social inequality and the proliferation of organized crime, especially in areas semi-abandoned by the State, which leaves the most socially vulnerable population at the mercy of criminal organizations. There is no doubt that this kind of situation largely stems from the dismantling of social protections by neoliberal policies and the absence of the State. A portion of the unprotected population, which sees the State more as a repressive organ than as a provider or guarantor of citizenship, may become an easier target for criminals, charlatans, and self-styled saviors of the homeland. One cannot ignore that this has consequences for democracy and the democratic rule of law, as we have seen not only in Brazil. The same reasoning applies to the environmental question and also to the technological one, especially in a country like ours experiencing a very rapid leap from illiteracy to the digital age, almost without mediation.
What is to be done? Certainly, a change of course. Although this is not easy, persisting in error and betting on old policies that have only worked for those who always benefit will only increase the size of the social abyss.
Ricardo Festi: Recently, Axel Honneth published a remarkable book entitled The working sovereign: labor and democratic citizenship (2024). He demonstrates that there is a reciprocal dependence between democratic participation and a certain quality of working conditions in a society. He points out that one of the great deficiencies of theories of democracy is the failure to recognize that the majority of the members who are supposed to exercise democratic governance are also labor subjects. Therefore, neglecting this sphere of society is a mistake, since it, like education, is one of the few spaces in which the rule of law can act upon the very conditions of existence. In other words, the State can determine whether work will be organized under cooperative normative conditions or under egotistical and self-centered schemes.
The reflection of the German author runs counter to the movement of ultra-specialization of knowledge that has occurred in recent decades. If this process has brought greater knowledge in various fields, it has also led to a loss of perspective on the totality. In this sense, Honneth keeps alive the good tradition of critical theory. At one point in the book, he affirms that a theory of democracy without the concrete vision of the sociology of work is empty, just as a sociology of work without the concepts of democratic theory would be blind.
Honneth is not invoking the ontological condition of labor, as György Lukács did, but rather its structural position in democratic societies. The limitation of the book lies in its failure to question liberal democracy in depth. As other authors have demonstrated, in recent decades democracy has been constrained by late capitalism itself (or neoliberalism). Thus, it is impossible to imagine emancipated labor without a substantial transformation of the system, and vice versa.
In any case, the key question of Honneth’s book is correct. It is an unavoidable starting point for answering the question put to me. It is impossible to understand the erosion of Western democracies without looking at the corrosion of labor regimes, above all with the precarization that has permeated all dimensions of life, as Bourdieu pointed out in his writings of the 1990s. For him, precarity profoundly affects all those touched by it by leaving the future uncertain. The loss of hope that collective action against the ills of the present can shape a better future is linked to the certainty that individuals are disposable and that their actions will make little difference. Therefore, the rise of authoritarianism in contemporary societies has a direct relationship with individuals’ perceptions of the effectiveness and legitimacy of the democratic regime — perceptions deeply anchored in everyday experience and life experiences. The loss of rights, the precarization of labor and of life, and above all the absence of emancipatory utopias results in a raw and pragmatic presentism. Faced with this context, broad sections of the population can be easily seduced by the discourses and projects of the far right. This has been the subject of reflections in books from the most diverse theoretical traditions, such as Guy Standing (the dangerous class), Didier Eribon (on the French working class), and Jessé Souza (on those daily humiliated). Our research on workers in digital platform companies also points to this question, though our perspective is not fatalistic: despite the presence of neoliberal ideology among the most exploited and precarious sectors of society, there exists among them a questioning and dissatisfaction about their lives that leads them to struggle, even if there is no emancipatory horizon in these struggles.
4. Which authors and/or works from your field of knowledge do you consider relevant to this debate? Please mention three or four.
Heloisa Starling: Quinn Slobodian, Crack-Up Capitalism: Market Radicals and the Dream of a World Without Democracy. Metropolitan Books, 2023.
Miguel Lago, “Termite Seminar: The Most Dangerous Threat to Democracy Is the One That Imitates Its Form,” O Mantiqueira, Sept. 2025, CARDE. Belo Horizonte, Editora Autêntica.
Hannah Arendt, Thinking Without a Banister: Essays in Understanding 1953–1975. Schocken Books, 2018.
Elísio Estanque: Elísio Estanque, Ressonância e Sociologia Pública [Resonance and Public Sociology]. Porto, Editora VidaEconómica, 2023.
Michael Mann, Fascists. Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die. Crown, 2018.
Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism. Profile Books, 2019.
Josué Pereira da Silva: I will not allow myself to suggest specific authors or works, because there are many people researching and writing on each of the themes I consider relevant. But I believe that any positive way out of this situation needs to rethink the relationship between economy and society, as well as between economy and the environment, and also to defend the democratic rule of law and deepen democracy, which sustains it.
Without this, we may relive — as farce, certainly — the experience of the early decades of the twentieth century. And, to make matters worse, without the hope of a socialist utopia on the horizon, as there was in that era.
Ricardo Festi: In addition to the authors mentioned in my previous responses, I would add the work of Ricardo Antunes. It has theoretical vigor, and his reflections contribute to thinking the totality from the concreteness of the world of work. Also worth revisiting is the classic book by Florestan Fernandes, The Bourgeois Revolution in Brazil, particularly his characterization of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and the State as an autocracy. In this regard, all authors from the Black theoretical tradition are fundamental, since it is impossible to understand Brazilian society without addressing the racial question. Thus, we could add to what Honneth formulated that any theory of democracy in Brazil that does not take into account the questions of labor and race will be empty.
From a broader perspective, I would recommend the works of Mark Fisher and Enzo Traverso. These two authors can be read in a complementary manner. The reflection contained in the Italian author’s Left-Wing Melancholia is extremely pertinent — especially the problem of the disappearance of utopia (the projection in our cultural imagination of a better future) and the imposition of presentism in political conceptions (a concept borrowed from the French thinker Daniel Bensaïd).
