[Marxism] Cardoso as a Marxist

["Jurriaan Bendien" <adsl675281@xxxxxxxxxx>]

How Brazil's Cardoso Left Marxism, But Not Marx's Way of Seeing History
Written by Richard F. Kane
Thursday, 07 July 2005

To the many critics in both the ivory tower and the political realm who fail
to understand how it is possible that the same President who privatized
Brazilian companies like Companhia Vale do Rio Doce and instituted a host of
other market-based reforms in Brazil during the decade of the 90's, is also
one of the leading Marxist scholars of the 20th century, I offer the
following explanation.

As soon as Fernando Henrique Cardoso applied the basic conclusion of his
anthropological research on slavery - that the Brazilian slave was both a
hidden and excluded social actor - to the Marxist debate over class struggle
in Brazil, it became apparent to him that the Marxist theory of revolution
popular during the late 1950s and early 1960s was clearly untenable.

Cardoso's research raised the question of how to politicize Marxist class
relations in a slave society that is not of classes, but of castes (1).
Moreover, the caste society that developed in Brazil is historically unique.
A fact, which for Cardoso, required an interpretative approach unique to its
Latin American context be employed for accurate sociological analysis. The
Brazilian Negro, although alienated, remained trapped in an underground
social caste even after Brazil transformed into a class-based society.

Complete text: http://www.brazzil.com/content/view/9325/76/


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