A POLÍTICA DE REMUNERACIONES DE LA SOCIEDAD PARA EL AÑO EN CURSO

However, this Brazilian process of building a nation in which people feel attached to their co- citizens has other characteristics that reduces the spirit of national unification. If, as presented above, all Brazilians feel part of the same nation, as explored below, their feeling of attachment with unknown co-citizens is very low. The first reason for this is related to the Brazilian process of colonisation that was quite different from what happened in the US. Thus it produced peculiar types of miscegenation and racism. Holanda presents important characteristics of the origins of this difference:

If the first settlers of English America had been moved by desire of building, overcoming the wilderness, a Blessing community, free from the religious and civil oppression that they endured in their homeland, and where they could finally realise the pure evangelical ideal, the Latin Americans were attracted by the hope of finding in his achievements a paradise made of mundane wealth and heavenly beatitude, offered to them without demanding higher labour, but as a free gift.” (Holanda, 1992[1959], p. xvii, Apud. Fonseca, 2016, p.146-7)

As a consequence of this, overall the Portuguese mingled much more with the indigenous and African peoples than British colonisers, who essentially decimated North-American indigenous people (Cardoso, 2013, p.113). Two main factors were decisive for this difference. Firstly, instead of British colonisers, who travelled to the US with their families, the Portuguese normally migrated alone to Brazil (Ribeiro, 2015[1995], p.173). Thus, some kind of miscegenation based on sexual needs simply happened. Moreover, the Portuguese, because of geographical and historical reasons, already considered themselves a mixed race, and consequentially were more open to integration, unlike the British, who had the tendency to keep themselves more “pure” (Ribeiro, 2015[1995], p.54). In Brazil, this “milder” process was the beginning of the “coexistence of the contraries”, something that Freyre (1933) identifies even more in the relation among slaves and their owners.

Slaves came to be brought from Africa to Brazil in the sixteenth century and slavery was abolished only in 1888, with Brazil being the last Latin American (and Western) country to stop this horrendous practice (Villa, 2011, p.21). However, it is possible to say that, in Brazil, slavery was less perverse than in other countries, mainly in the US51. As mentioned before,

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Freyre (1933) calls attention to the fact that the Portuguese felt less racial superiority over African slaves, since they were also quite mixed with Moors (Cardoso, 2013, p.111-2). This allowed a kind of coexistence based on “harmony or balance of contraries” (Cardoso, 2013, p.109-11). It is this “peaceful” coexistence, something not necessarily good, that promotes closer proximity amongst different races in Brazil, something that allows Freyre to propose something that is known as the “Brazilian myth of identity based on miscegenation” (Cardoso, 2013, p.293).

From this interpretation, social problems in Brazil are seen by some as basically related to the huge gap between rich and poor people. Magnoli, for example, cites the Brazilianists Pierson and Wagley, who wrote about Brazil in the middle of the twentieth century. They, though recognising the presence of racial discrimination in Brazil, counterposed “the American panorama, characterized by remarkable mobility classes” and “impenetrable barriers in the race system”, with Brazil, marked by “obvious distances between the social classes, but with diffuse racial boundaries” (2009, p.158).

Cardoso, however, sees the question of racial discrimination from a different point of view. Though he agrees with Freyre, Magnoli, and others that “miscegenation, hybridism, and even (mystification apart) cultural plasticity of coexistence of the contraries are not only a characteristic, but an advantage of Brazil” and “an input letter of Brazil in a globalised world” (2013, p.90), he also sees lots of problems related to this. Following Bastide and Fernandes (1955), Cardoso argues that, after abolition, “colour and racial discrimination completed themselves in order to preserve the slavery times establishment”, and that “colour and racial differences are remade in their cultural meanings to maintain an unequal interethnic situation, potentially violent, highly exploitative, but which are accommodated, based on those cultural redefinitions, avoiding the explosion of that order” (2013, p.197). In this sense, “colour has a role, evidently, but a role of a symbol, that is, a well identifiable criterion, which situates the individual in a certain rung of the social ladder” (Bastide & Fernandes, 1955, p.161). In other words, in Brazil there is class prejudice, and, since most of poor people are black, then, at the end, the class segregation promotes race segregation. Some data analysing this gap between white and black people, as well as between poor and rich, men and women, hetero and homosexuals, are presented in 6.4.

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Thus, because of its peculiar process of miscegenation, Brazil developed a huge social gap in which black people are normally in the position of submission, but, at the same time, there are not strong social or racial conflicts in the country. In Bastide‟s view, this fact is related to people‟s capacity to “accommodate” conflicts (Bastide & Fernandes, 1955, p.11).

Cardoso distinguishes between racial prejudices “of origin”, based on ancestry and common in the US, and “of mark”, occult and dissimulated, based on appearance and common in Brazil. According to Cardoso, because of this:

Black Americans acquired awareness of the oppression that they were subjected, what made them to react and vindicate their rights; in Brazil, on the contrary, racism was consolidated in the hearth of social relations and was incorporated passively by the black people. (2013, p.159)

Pointing to the same direction, and calling this Brazilian tradition as “assimilationist racism”, Ribeiro also identifies the passivity which maintains the status quo in such a society, differently from the US:

The most perverse aspect of assimilationist racism is that it passes an image of greater sociability, when in fact it disarms lack people to fight against the poverty that is imposed on them, and masks the conditions of terrible violence to which they are subjected. (2015 [1995], p.170)

Related to this perverse assimilationism, another historical and anthropological characteristic of Brazilian people is their “cordiality” that diminishes their social/public virtues and produces a “patrimonialist” society. In his classic definition of “cordial man”, Holanda contrasts cordiality, a personal/private virtue, with civility, a social/public virtue:

[T]he Brazilian contribution to civilization will be of cordiality – we will give to the world the “cordial man”. The gentleness, the hospitality, the generosity, virtues so boasted by foreigners who visit us, represent, in effect, a definite trait of the Brazilian character, in the measure, at least, in which the ancestral influence of the patterns of human relations, coming from the rural and patriarchal world. It would be a mistake to suppose that these virtues could mean “good manners,” civility. They are, above all, legitimate expressions of an extremely rich and

124 overflowing emotive background. An idea of coercion is associated with the concept of civility – civility can be expressed in commandments and in sentences. (1995 [1955], p.146-7)

Holanda, then, says that Brazilian people, in general, do not have social/public virtues sufficiently developed. They actually tend to behave only based on personal/private virtues, even in the social/public sphere:

It was not easy for the holders of the public positions of responsibility [in Brazil], formed by such an environment, to understand the fundamental distinction between the domains of the private and the public. Thus, they are characterised precisely by what distinguishes the “patrimonial” official from the pure bureaucrat according to Max Weber‟s definition. For the “patrimonial” official, political management itself appears as a matter of its particular interest; The functions, the jobs and the benefits which they derive are related to the personal rights of the official and not to objective interests, as in the real bureaucratic State, where specialisation of functions prevails and the effort to ensure legal guarantees for citizens prevails. (1995[1955], p.145-6)

Similarly to Holanda, this thesis understands such “cordial” characteristics as virtues in the personal/private sphere, but, vices when practiced at the social/public sphere. The Kohlberg versus Gilligan debate, introduced in 5.3 and developed in 8.5, investigates this difference between the personal/private and the social/public spheres, but, in order to explore this specific characteristic of Brazilian people, the following example is elucidative. It seems quite obvious that the Western people consider it a virtue to care more about relatives and friends in the personal/private sphere, though it is considered a vice to do so in the social/public realm – for example, should a civil servant use his/her position to favour a friend or family member. In Brazil, however, such examples are quite common, as shown in 6.4. More than this, this attitude seems not to be seen as something wrong, since there is a widespread idea that duties towards family/friends are always prior than towards strangers (Holanda, 1995[1955], p.145-6).

Related to this, Fonseca sees an evident split between how the two different strands of Christianity influenced North and South America:

On the one hand, the Catholic Counter-Reformation, with a strong Jesuitical, missionary and inquisitorial accent; the attachment to medieval scholastic coupled with resistance to the

125 winds, methods and ideals of Enlightenment; the centralised and bureaucratic absolutist Crown; and the parasite mercantilism of a rentier elite. And, on the other, the Protestant Reformation, with strong Puritan and Calvinist waves (“among the things of this life, the work is what most resembles the man to God”); vigorous adherence to the Enlightenment project of science and technology at service to rescuing the human condition through dominating nature and rational action; the institutional monarchy; and the primacy of competitive market and free enterprise as instruments of economic efficiency and capital accumulation. (2016, p.148)

Following this, unlike Freyre, Holanda is much less optimistic about the role of family ties in Brazilian development:

[Holanda] criticised what was valued at his time and still today: the cordial character – emotional, personal – of Brazilians, our cultural specificities. He showed the unfortunate political consequences of the Iberian heritage baked in the sun of the Tropics: personalism, strong leadership, lack of rules and hierarchies that mean much more of an arbitrariness of the masters than comradeship among equals. [Freyre] rarely speaks of equality, and with respect to the notion of “balance between opposites” – essential in its interpretations – passes the impression of accepting inequality, although he reacts against the idea of racial inequality. [Holanda] shows that, without the abstract, formal equality of the law, and without the practical exercise anchored in political culture, there is no democracy. (Cardoso, 2013, p.132)

Here, the main difference between Freyre‟s and Holanda‟s analyses is that the latter puts much more weight on the need to promote justice based on the notion of civility and abstract rules, whilst the former sees Brazilian historical stability as something much more important.

Thus, if “accommodation of contraries” keeps power relations based on hierarchical structures that have origins in slavery period, Brazil also keeps power relations based on “patrimonial” structures that are perpetuated throughout history. According to Faoro (1958; 1975), from the colonial times until, at least, the Vargas Era (which finished in 1954) more or less the same “caste” of people founded the state and ruled the country, taking advantages for themselves, instead of sharing the goods and giving voice for the worst-off. Faoro considers that this caste is basically located in the public sector:

126 [T]he State projected itself, independent and autonomous, over the social classes and the proper nation. State and Nation, government and people are distinct realities, which don‟t know each other and, frequently, are antagonists. (1958, p.45)

Souza (2017), however, presents strong criticisms against such an interpretation. In his view, this narrative only blames corrupt bureaucrats for the inequalities in Brazil and through this, hides the real responsible for this: rich people from the private sector that inherit unfair advantages since the times of slavery. Souza completely disagrees with Faoro‟s historical analysis: “Brazil does not inherit from Portugal its social structure; this heritage comes from slavery, which did not exist in Portugal” (2017, p.200). Actually, “the colonisation of the country was left in the hands of private individuals. [...] The Portuguese State, only very dimly, could impose its will” (2017, p.205)

However, a balanced interpretation of this debate seems more accurate. According to Cardoso, “the plot between the State and bureaucracy, on the one hand, and civil society, classes and market, on the other, is more complex” (2013, p.231). Nevertheless, Cardoso endorses Faoro‟s idea that the lack of feudal tradition in Portuguese history made Portugal centralise power before the other absolutist states, and this fact contributed to the transmission of the feudal tradition to Brazil (2013, p.230-4). The US, where civil society was prior to the state, was founded on a pact that gave strong power to the different federations. In Brazil, where the state was prior to civil society, political power is very centralised and the laws of the federations hold no weight (Faoro, 2007, p.13-4).

Moreover, Cardoso agrees that, until now, this element is very present in Brazilian political structure – though the bureaucratic establishment has shifted from the aristocracy to the military and, later, to certain sectors of civil society. In this way, he considers that the private sector is also part of the Brazilian current structure of power. Through a direct criticism of some policies of the Workers Party, which succeeded him in the national government52, Cardoso says:

The confusion between governing parties and public machine has control instruments to co- opt both the business sector (via credit and various advantages of concessions), and workers

127 and dispossessed masses (via union benefits and direct income transfers). (Cardoso, 2013, p.261)

This claim is very controversial for several reasons. First, defenders of the Workers Party policies accuse Cardoso‟s government of having done the same kind of co-opting, and of being extremely neoliberal in its policies, something that made urgent this direct income transfer (Bolsa Família) to help such dispossessed people. More importantly, when Cardoso says that the public sector co-opts the private, he seems to put the centrality and protagonism of this process in the former. Souza‟s (2017) reverse analysis, however, seems to be more accurate. It seems right to say that rich people who belong to the private sector are those who, throughout history, have unfairly concentrated wealth and only have used the public sector to create laws and policies that keep this unfair structure.

However, though the private sector seems to lead this process, it also seems that private and public sectors depend on each other. Lazzarini (2011), appealing to several data showing the historical and current entrenched relation between private companies and the Brazilian state, demonstrates this. He calls the spurious relation of exchange of advantages between the public and private the “capitalism of ties” (2011, p.38). Such a relation is currently the basis of huge scandals of corruption, one of the main problems of Brazilian society, presented in the introduction and also approached in the conclusion of this thesis.