Brazil

[Secco <livrosecco@xxxxxxxxx>]

Radical changes in Brazil ?

PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores, Labour Party) appeared in the scene
politics at the same time that Solidarity in the Poland.  Luis Inácio
da Silva (Lula) was pointed as a new leadership in 1980 and was
received by the Pope together with Lech Walesa.  As well as
Solidarity, the PT is also a party of many catholics.  However, in
contrast of Solidarity, the PT is socialist and its catholics follow
a theology of left.  In any way, the victory of Lula is the first one
of a laborer since whom Lech Walesa arrived at the power in the
Poland.
The eventuality of this victory places interesting problems.  If it
is truth that the new government (assuming that it comes to govern of
fact) has a new economic model, which is it?  And in which conditions
it can will be implemented?  The second part of the question is more
easy to answering and, in practical, is more difficult to carry out. 
Lula, in first place, will have that to face two distinct orders of
problems:  the inheritance of the Old Regimen and the new
international situation.  They influence themselves.  The Old Regimen
is, on the other hand, the bomb clock mounted for Fernando Henrique
Cardoso who, nonetheless its personal and intellectual qualities,
commanded a government doubtful and that he increased the
vulnerability of the Brazilian economy to such point that becomes
difficult to think about one retaken of the growth.  On the other
hand, this weighed inheritance is colonial and neocolonial.  One is
about the external dependence as factor of long duration (longue
duré) in the history of Brazil.  Been born as by-product of the
commercial company overseas of Europe, our country always had its
essential centers of decision in the exterior.  The international
situation actually aggravates this with the globalization (deepening
of a known situation already, that the historians already pointed out
in XVI century).  The response to the first question it only can be
suggested.  The new economic model answers to the imperatives that
are perhaps illusions.  Lula has declared that it is impracticable to
keep a economy where the tax of interests is desirable of the one
than the tax of industrial profit.  But as the government of the PT
it does not want (or it cannot) to nationalize the financial system,
the offers of indispensable credit for the retaken one of the growth
will continue being a decision of the national bankers and
international and the definition of the tax of interests will
continue also depending on them.  
A democratic social government can direct the private investments and
until controlling the accumulation tax with politics of tributation,
even without being owner of means of production, as Keynes praised. 
But also it needs to count on the support (it saw agreements) of the
entrepreneurs.  Lula used a symbolic speech.  He reaffirmed old
beliefs concerning the enterprising paper of the entrepreneurs one. 
The historian Pierre Vilar remembered that the Spaniard of century
XVI, even so lived of incomes, hated the Italians because they gained
?chento per chento? (100%)  intermediating the monetary circulation
between Europe and America.  We also know of the preconception
against usury in the Middle Age.  It has, today, diffuse in the
enterprise ways, this compound of anger and envies directed to the
financial system.  How much this mentality can contribute for a
government that is product of the syndicats but it wants the support
of the industrial sector, it is an incognito.  At last, it is little
probable that government (any that is it), exactly with majority in
the congress, obtains to brutally raise our taxes of growth and to
promote the active and independent insertion of Brazil in the
international scene.  Still thus, it has a small breach that
countries with the dimensions of ours can be risked to try. This
possibility exists because Brazil is not Curaçao, Honduras, Lituania
or Bangladesh. As it says the program of government of the
Workers?party, Brazil produces airplanes, automobiles, bicycles,
telephone exchanges, agricultural machines, steel, footwear,
remedies, oil, cement, glass and paper.  Or either, the Brazilian
industry produces since in the traditional sectors until the tip
sectors.
It is as the hole of the needle.  In the New Testament a rich one is
almost impossible to pass for it.  In the capitalism, a poor person
is almost impossible to pass for it.  But the Brazilian electorate
seems to have determined that it is good for trying.  

Lincoln Secco, Historian, Universidade de São Paulo (USP)
e-mail: livrosecco@xxxxxxxxx


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Secco

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