Betrayal of the left? The agency and structural constraints of the state’s embedded autonomy

In order to implement Bolsa Familia, the PT had to strike deals with multiple social actors, especially with those who hold economic and political power domestically and internationally. The party had to walk an extremely fine line between complying with specific group and class interests, and exercising its power to twist the arm of those who stood in its way - e.g. state governors. However, the PT’s willingness to negotiate with opposition conservative parties and business elites caused a tremendous backlash. If during its inception the PT could be characterized as being part and parcel of the broader social movements that swept through Brazil in the second half of the 20th century, its rise to power signified an abrupt break with these same grassroots political groups. Not only did the PT come under heavy criticism from its former allies, but also from an increasingly hostile intellectual left that saw in the PT the disappointing story of a hero fallen from grace. So the question remains: Did the PT betray the left?

The main indictment about PT’s betrayal is a comparison between pre-presidency promises and post-presidency action. On the side of promises, the left argued that Lula’s and the PT’s strengths laid in their focus on radical agrarian reform, suspension of payment on Brazil’s enormous foreign debt, and redistribution of income and wealth (Foster 2007, 16). To a large degree, many on the left expected the PT to completely break with international capital, dominate domestic elites in the agricultural, industrial and financial sectors, and enact revolutionary economic and social policies that would ultimately lead to a post-capitalist society. Unfortunately, when this did not come to pass, hope turned into a sour disillusionment. In March 2006, a group composed of the leading grassroots movements in Brazil²² delivered a document to the Food and Agricultural Organization of the United Nations denouncing measures implemented by the Lula government that impeded campesino agriculture and the larger fight against business interests.²³

Many academic scholars have also been highly critical of the PT. James Petras, a professor Emeritus in Sociology from Binghamton University, analyzed in an article on the Journal of Peasant Studies the phenomenon of the 'centre-left' regime that has emerged recently in Latin America. He concluded that the government of Lula in Brazil, when measured against a set of criteria designating espousal of “leftist politics,” fails the test (Petras 2006). He argued, for example, that the composition and agenda of the Social Economic Development Council, which was tasked with creating a social pact between labour, business and the government, revealed Lula’s pro-business, anti-working class bias.

Of the 82 members of the Council, 41 are businessmen and 13 are trade unionists, a better than three to one proportion favouring the bosses. The purpose is to discuss tax reform —reduce business taxes, in other words— and social security reform, decrease payments to workers, pensioners and other state beneficiaries. When Lula was confronted with the preponderance of the business elite among his inner circle, he roundly defended his proindustrial/agribusiness bias, embellishing his choices with an apolitical, meritocratic varnish and accusing his critics of nepotism. Lula conveniently forgets that his businessmen’s ’disinterested talent for thinking for the country’ has resulted in the greatest social inequalities in the world. Like his ’Third Way’ counterparts elsewhere in the world, Lula deliberately overlooks the class interests of the business elite precisely because they are his strategic allies in the pursuit of a neoliberal project (Petras and Veltmeyer 2003, 13).

John Bellamy Foster, a professor of sociology at the University of Oregon and editor of Monthly Review, echoed these criticisms. Foster argued the following:

In 2002 . . . the PT . . . indicated a greater willingness to accept the conditions imposed by neoliberalism, including full repayment of Brazil’s debt. Taking care of economic “fundamentals” was to be prioritized even at the expense of the PT’s broader social program . . . Lula’s first term consequently was characterized by . . . very stringent economic programs aimed at debt repayment and “fiscal responsibility.” This was coupled with a much less ambitious program than originally conceived on behalf of the poor . . . the PT has also promoted neoliberal structural reforms that directly undermine the overall position of workers. This has then constituted a kind of Latin American social-democratic “third way” strategy in which neoliberal ends are hegemonic (Foster 2007, 16).

While it is certainly accurate that the PT changed its policy agenda in route to winning elections in 2002, the argument that this constitutes a betrayal of the left is a simplistic—yet understandable—reaction that stems from an incomplete theory of the state. The belief that the state apparatus can unilaterally make economic and policy decisions; that its autonomy and agency, while certainly substantial, is such that if only the right people were in power anything could happen, is nothing more than a ludicrous assumption.

In his Embedded Autonomy: States and Industrial Transformation, Peter Evans argued that successful state policies require bureaucratic autonomy from the dominant societal forces, as well as embeddedness with those same forces. While the autonomy argument stresses the value of government agency, the embeddedness argument reflects the fact that government agencies cannot effectively involve themselves in policy matters without obtaining detailed information from nongovernmental actors and generating trust with those actors by more or less representing their interests (Evans 1995). What is lacking in this picture, however, is an analysis of limits and constraints. To what extent can governments assert their autonomy over societal constraints? Can the state lose its agency by being co-opted by special interests?

This theoretical void is filled by David Held. In recounting Napoleon Bonaparte’s France, he said:

The state is portrayed as an immense set of institutions, with the capacity to shape civil society and even to curtail the bourgeoisie’s capacity to control the state . . . There were ultimate constraints on the initiatives Bonaparte could take, however, without throwing society into a major crisis, as there are on any legislative or executive branch of the state. For the state in a capitalist society . . . cannot escape its dependence upon that society and, above all, upon those who own and control the productive process. Its dependence is revealed whenever the economy is beset by crises; for economic organizations of all kinds create the material resources on which the state apparatus survives. The state’s overall policies have to be compatible in the long run with the objectives of manufacturers and traders, otherwise civil society and the stability of the state itself are jeopardized (Held 1989, 35).

In other words, while class interests can definitely take over the state’s autonomous agency, this does not preclude the possibility that the state can retain a scaling degree of autonomy. However, the degree to which the state can be an autonomous decision maker has very concrete material limits. In the case of Brazil, the fact that Lula chose to pursue a conditional cash transfer program, instead of the promised radical agrarian reform, was because of this exact limitation. In Brazil, agricultural products are used as inputs into other manufacturing and industrial sectors, such as the biofuel industry.²⁴ Agriculture also plays the crucial role of earning foreign exchange through exports. In the case of Brazil, 34 percent of total exports come from the agribusiness sector²⁵ (World Bank 2011, 1024), which amounts to approximately US $52 billion (World Bank 2011, 1031). Without this influx of foreign currency, the Brazilian state would not be able to import essential inputs to sustain industrial activity. As a matter of fact, 75 percent of Brazil’s imports are manufactures,²⁶ (World Bank 2011, 1001) for a total of approximately US $101 billion (World Bank 2011, 1004). Because agriculture is such an essential element within the economic model, it creates a partnership of mutual dependency between the state and corporate agribusinesses, whereas the survival of the former is a function of the profits and economic viability of the latter (Stedile 2007, 50). If Lula was to disrupt the agricultural elites, the state apparatus and society at large would have collapsed under the storm of a crisis.

Does this mutual dependency mean that the structural conditions nullify the state’s agency? I would argue that they only constrain it. Popular pressure is important too for legitimation purposes. While Lula would have never been able, under the specific historical and economic conditions, to enact the kind of agrarian reform that the left was clamoring for, the state had enough leverage to create the largest welfare program in the world (as discussed earlier, social movements were largely responsible for creating such a political space). A more conservative administration would have not implemented a welfare program as ambitious as Bolsa Familia, even if it had the capacity to do so. The fact that the PT was in power —and the kind of agency and political commitments it had—mattered a lot.

In short, contrary to what the left was arguing, there was never a betrayal from the PT, because the tool in question—i.e. state apparatus—never had the ability to carry out the demands for agrarian reform in the context of 21st century Brazil. The PT only created a misconception due to its own political inexperience and lack of theoretical insight. When it realized the mistake of the promises they made, it was too late to reverse the hopes and expectations of millions of people.

²² The Movimento dos Pequenos Agricultores (MPA), the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST), the Movimento dos Atingidos por Barragens (MAB), the Movimento das Mulheres Camponesas (MMC), the Comissão Pastoral da Terra (CPT), and the Associação Brasileira de Reforma Agrária (ABRA).

²³ Among other points, they argued: “. . . the government has wholeheartedly embraced neoliberal policies and supported international organizations such as the WTO and the World Bank. At the Montreal round of the WTO, the Brazilian government helped to block the initiative to make it mandatory worldwide for transgenic products to be labeled, thus defending the interests of multinational agribusiness companies. Specific policies biased toward the big farm sector include: the continuation of the tax-exempt status for supplies used for export-oriented agribusiness (a hidden subsidy to the foreign commodity trade); legalization, through a presidential decree, of the use and trade of transgenic soy; ignoring any and all environmental research and the actual infringement of law through the smuggling of banned cotton and corn transgenic seeds; ignoring campesino and environmentalists” demands in the drafting process of the biohazards law; lack of enforcement of the law ordering the food industry to carry warning labels on all products containing more than 1 percent of transgenics; continuation of financial support through public banks for large agribusiness concerns, for a total sum that went from 20 to 42 billion reals per year . . . ; granting of credits through a federal development bank, the Banco Nacional de Desenvolvimento Social (BNDES), for paper mills and eucalyptus foresting; and taking the initiative to pass a law opening national parks to logging interests. The government has also . . . failed to fulfill its promises to settle the landless families occupying large estates; implement an encompassing agrarian reform program . . . ; pass a law to expropriate estates that use slave labor; stop . . . the final conclusions that define land occupations as a major felony; push for judicial punishment of rural massacres such as those in Corumbiara (1995), Carajás (1996), and Felisburgo (2004); stop the rise in violence in rural areas; remove older laws and statutes that block agrarian reform; demarcate native land belonging to several ethnic groups, especially the Xavantes, Guaranis, and Pataxós; control the advance of cultivation of soy and cotton in the Amazon and bush areasa process which could have dire environmental consequences in the future; and create a wide network of cooperative agri-industries among campesinos (Stedile 2007, 54).

²⁴ Brazil is a biofuel industry leader. For favorable assessments, see World Bank (2010); Silveira et al. (2009). For a critical assessment of the social and environmental impacts of biofuel production in Brazil, see McMichael (2010); White and Dasgupta (2010).

²⁵ Agribusiness exports comprise the commodities in SITC (Standard International Trade Classification) sections 0 (food and live animals), 1 (beverages and tobacco), and 4 (animal and vegetable oils and fats) and SITC division 22 (oil seeds, oil nuts, and oil kernels). For a detailed structure and explanatory notes of SITC, see http://unstats.un.org/unsd/cr/registry/regcst.asp?Cl=28.

²⁶ Manufactures comprise the commodities in SITC sections 5 (chemicals), 6 (basic manufactures), 7 (machinery and transport equipment), and 8 (miscellaneous manufactured goods), excluding division 68 (nonferrous metals).