rubin roots of brazil's economy

Don't Ignore the Roots of Brazil's Economy

By Jeffrey W. Rubin.

Jeffrey W. Rubin is a fellow at the Center for the Critical Analysis of Contemporary Culture at Rutgers University and author of "Decentering the Regime."

In Brazil, as in Asia, governments and policy makers can't seem to get the economic equation right in time for the new millennium. They're repeating the mistakes they've made for the past 50 years.

The global market system of the 1990s intensifies the agonizing mix of prosperity, modernity and poverty that has come to characterize Latin American societies through decades of "development."

Brazil's stock market is reeling as panicky investors take their money elsewhere. The IMF, bolstered by Tuesday's congressional approval of $18 billion to help countries in crisis, is poised to step in. Officials in Brazil and the United States are now considering whether the bailout will be enough and worrying about the costs of a devaluation.

They equate national elections with democracy and wonder whether President Fernando Henrique Cardoso, just re-elected, will be able to impose the harsh measures deemed necessary to stem the economic decline.

But even as the merits of tax hikes and budget cuts are being debated, most observers ignore the fundamental innovation in daily life and local politics that is occurring on the ground in Brazil. The real fights over democracy and social justice are not happening in the capital, Brasilia, and they do not even show up on the radar screens of the Clinton administration or American media.

Brazilians are experimenting with new ways of balancing politics and economics to create alternatives to the neoliberal dead-end. In the southern city of Porto Alegre, for example, people in poor neighborhoods meet to decide how the city's budget for municipal services will be spent, in the process developing new forms of representation and citizenship.

In the rural towns of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, women from modest backgrounds have withdrawn from male-run organizations and formed their own Rural Women Workers Movement in order to discuss women's health, women's work and gender relations within families - often in church meeting halls.

Meanwhile, the Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) has literally traveled across Brazil in a decade, occupying idle land, constructing new forms of collective agriculture and capturing national headlines with dramatic protest marches. Public opinion, influenced by a recent TV soap opera portraying fictional members of the movement, overwhelmingly supports land reform, according to polls. At the same time landowner-sponsored violence against activists is increasing.

In Rio's most violent and drug-ridden shantytown, Vigario Geral, leaders of the Afro-Reggae Cultural Group secure government funds to open a music school and teach young children and teenagers to play the drums.

Speaking a language of music and culture, they explicitly take on issues of racism and violence, in the process gaining national and international recognition. On a typical Saturday afternoon, their drumming reverberates from a ramshackle stage into the streets.

New forms of politics are being shaped as this music enters family courtyards, churches, soccer fields and workplaces. Afro-Reggae activists use cultural projects to bring about meetings with the mayor and the governor and reshape the texture of urban life. In Porto Alegre, vibrant local participation gets streets paved and drainage installed because the leftist Workers Party forged new forms of consensus building and democratic procedure, first within the party in the early 1980s and then in the neighborhoods a decade later.

Porto Alegre continues to be one of the strongest magnets for foreign investment in Brazil, and the World Bank enters into partnerships with the leftist municipal government, which wins elections repeatedly. That same government cleaned up city finances and instituted a steeply progressive property tax, collecting revenue with the explicit purpose of redistributing it though a citizen-run budget council.

This is innovation. As Brazilian scholars and activists have observed, a new political culture is being created, as people begin to claim a "right to have rights" and local governments across the political spectrum respond in new ways. These new movements are not without problems. While democratic procedures foster economic change in Porto Alegre, the largest organized challenge to the economic policies of the Cardoso administration comes from the MST, which is run from the top down.

Afro-Reggae activists favor economic opportunities for boys over girls, and the citizens' budget councils in Porto Alegre rarely address race-based discrimination.

Nonetheless, these new ways of doing politics make real the promise of democracy. Elections are crucial to the process, and a functioning economy is a prerequisite to well-being. But neoliberalism is not the answer.

In the face of the current economic crisis, with country after country falling victim to global financial turmoil, most people see that a humane economy, where markets are shaped around people's needs, is the only viable path.

Americans have rarely asked what the present might have looked like if the people being "developed" had had more real power to negotiate the direction of their path. That is what many Brazilians are now trying to do.

And it is through new forms of speech and organization and new ideas about what democracy might mean in real places that we may envision creative lives without misery in a new century.

March 2, 2004