Social structure and political crisis in Brazil

Abstract

Focusing on works that combine Marxist and Weberian traditions in the analysis of social structure, this article addresses the present-day Brazilian crisis as a distributive conflict, involving four social classes or strata (the poor, outsiders, the well-to-do, and millionaires) defined from five determinant vectors of social inequality: wealth, position in hierarchical contexts, knowledge, selective association and existential rights. The guiding hypothesis is that the PT-led alliance between 2003 and 2013 was able to increase the overall level of wealth, knowledge and existential rights, but the established lost positions given their diminished capacity to exclude outsiders and the poor. Starting in 2014, the economic crisis caused all groups to lose wealth, albeit in different proportions. At the same time, investigations of corruption threw the selective associations between millionaires, politicians and the state in disarray. In view of this situation, the distributive arrangement among capital, wage labor and the state established by the PT in 2003 lost its support in the public sphere and at the parliamentary level, culminating in the removal of Dilma Rousseff. The adjustments introduced by Temer have so far had the clear sense of reforming the distributive arrangement in favor of the upper strata.