by Jawdat Abu-El-Haj
Boito and Saad-Filho interpret the rise and fall of the power bloc that has sustained Brazil’s PT governments in the tradition of Poulantzas’s work on classes, class struggle, and the state. They consider the Brazilian state to be the main arena in which classes manifest their interests and power to influence economic outcomes. As did Poulantzas, they fall into the trap of structural determinism, in which collective choices and actions are derived mechanistically from fixed social spaces. I disagree with their thesis that the PT administrations represented an internal-bourgeoisie power bloc in an alliance with the middle classes and the popular masses and instead describe those administrations, especially under Lula, as left Bonapartist. The federal government under them exhibited greater autonomy from the bourgeoisie because of positive economic indicators such as a large trade surplus through commodities exports, the expansion of incoming foreign direct investment, and the capitalization of state-controlled pension funds. The increasing fiscal efficiency of the state led the government to amass unprecedented financial power.
