"The Brazilianization of the World."

A loooong essay, but extremely worthwhile. 

The essential argument is the world's future is that of Brazil: a superficially-modern society, but one which rests on pylons of political, social and economic inequality, patronage, functional castes and the social immobility which comes with all of those formidable problems.

For the better-off societies in the South, now called “emerging markets,” neoliberal development aped the tacit assumptions of mod­ernization theory in assuming these countries were just “late,” but that they would get there eventually—they would become “like us.” Just look at the shopping malls springing up in São Paulo or Bangkok or Cairo! We just need to wait for that wealth to spread and soon these countries will join the rich-world club. In the pages of the Economist, for example, it was said that countries like Brazil just needed some liberal reforms before growth would once again take off. After all, Mexico, South Korea, and a handful of countries in Eastern Europe joined the OECD in the 1990s, with Chile following in 2010. It was only a matter of time.

What this story ignores is that the policy tools wielded by modernization theory (such as import-substitution industrialization) were now gone, as was the international scenario and technological relations that had made catch-up development possible. The technologies and associated industries of the Second Industrial Revolution were no longer in the vanguard. An economy based around the technologies of petroleum, rubber, and steel—say, the manufacture of automobiles—was no longer the stuff of “high value-add.” The important stuff—the really valuable ideas—were now protected by intellectual property rights, inaccessible to a country such as Brazil. Global South and North are therefore no longer avatars of past and present, with the former slowly catching up to the latter, but now seem to exist in the same temporality.

Brazil consequently finds itself stuck—caught in the perennial fluctuation between hope and frustration. And the fate of being modern but not modern enough now seems to be shared by large parts of the world: WhatsApp and favelas, e-commerce and open sewers. In fact, leaving aside the exception of China’s remarkable ascent, the global story of the past forty years is one of retrogression, whatever bluster there may be about the “new middle class”—or, really, a working class that has entered consumer society precariously, now able to buy a fridge and a TV, and maybe even go to university for the first time in family history, but which has not achieved real security.

Indeed, this story of regression is now perhaps most conspicuous in the Global North, which today is demonstrating many of the features that have plagued the Global South: not just inequality and informalization of work, but increasingly venal elites, political vola­tility, and social ungluing. Is the rich world not also becoming “modern but not modern enough,” but in reverse?

 And later:

All around we’re confronted with deaptation, an idea the philosopher Adrian Johnston has taken from memetic theory to describe the way that an initially adaptive memetic strategy later becomes useless or even counterproductive.⁵ If liberalism was a set of ideas appropriate to the bourgeoisie’s rise and then consolidation—all in the name of freedom—it is today in a state of deaptation, wielded in defense of hierarchy and domination.

Brazilian intellectuals have been tangling with deaptation for decades, and thus offer an important perspective from which to understand our moment and the misalignment between ideas and contemporary reality. Moreover, as scholars Luiz Philipe de Caux and Felipe Catalani remark, “in historical situations in which trans­planted ideas are forced to readjust themselves to material conditions that do not sustain them in the same way as their conditions of origin, this maladjustment does not need to be discovered through reflection, as it is always already a daily feeling of the common man.”⁶ 

The average Brazilian has always sensed the hypocrisy of out-of-place ideas. Globalization—or Americanization, via the internet—means that ideas become unmoored from their conditions of origin and the determinate material realities to which they bear witness. Ideas are out of place everywhere, as seen in Europe when young people, in the midst of a pandemic with looming economic devastation, took to the streets to attack “white privilege” in overwhelmingly white-majority countries, thereby imagining themselves American.

As for Brazil, people once thought that its promised future would materialize when it erased the core-periphery division within itself—curing the problem of islands of wealth surrounded by oceans of poverty. Instead, it seems like it is the Global North catching up with the Global South in replicating this pattern. Brazil is once more in the global vanguard.

The Brazilian philosopher Paulo Arantes advanced the Brazilianization thesis in a remarkable 2004 essay, “The Brazilian Fracture of the World.”⁷ Arantes began by surveying various thinkers in the Global North who had registered disquiet about the course of devel­opment of global capitalism. As early as 1995, the conservative strategist Edward Luttwak wrote about the “Third-Worldization of America.” In the same year, Michael Lind referred directly to Brazil in his prognosis of an American society divided through a rigid, though informal, caste system. White elites governed a racially mixed society but the masses, internally divided, would allow for the strengthening of oligarchy.

A year later, Christopher Lasch would attest to the ruling class’s self-enclosure and separation from the rest of society in The Revolt of the Elites. Meanwhile, the former Thatcherite John Gray would write of an emerging “Latin American–style rentier regime” in which elites made a killing in the new globalized world, while the middle class lost its status and workers were proletarianized anew, putting an end to the great expectations provoked by postwar growth.

Catalan sociologist Manuel Castells saw that many would be excluded entirely even from this divided society. A new reality was emerging in which only the bourgeoisie would remain as a social class, albeit a transnational, cosmopolitan one.

It will take a while, but read the whole thing. The diagnosis seems to be dead on.