Polanyi meets Bolsonaro: Reactionary politics and the double movement in twenty-first-century Brazil

Abstract

Twenty-first-century Brazil’s political evolution is a window on the dynamics of contemporary political transitions. The inability of Brazil’s Workers’ Party to sustain its social democratic project and the subsequent rise of the reactionary regime of Jair Bolsonaro are, in turn, part of a global pattern of political change. Karl Polanyi’s vision of the ‘double movement,’ in which the dominance of the market vies with the countervailing movement for social protection, offers an analytical springboard for reflecting on these political transitions. Trying to understand the movement for social protection leads to examining ebbs and flows in the momentum of mobilization. Trying to understand how market dominance leads to reaction brings us back to Polanyi’s advocacy of ‘crass materialism’ as a lens for looking at reaction, and from there to consideration of how the structural power of capital undercuts efforts at social protection and opens the door to reaction.