FROM THE COLONIAL SYSTEM TO THE NATIONAL STATE

Florestan’s (1974) historical analysis of the development of capitalism in Brazil starts from the assumption that the “seeds” of capitalistic behavior were planted in the country with the colonization process. According to him, these “seeds” were the basics notions of commercialization and profit that shaped the colonial structure of the plantations. These notions, for their part, were the foundation for the implementation of the slavery system; for the system of land appropriation adopted, which was based on the concentration of large properties in the hands of a rural oligarchy subordinated to the Portuguese Crown; and for the decisions about which products to export. However, the nature of the colonial system prevented these seeds from growing. The economic, political, and juridical foundations of the colony were constructed to guarantee the exploitation of resources by the metropolis. These structures also prevented the construction of an organized flow of income within Brazil. In addition, Portugal concentrated most part of the profit generated by agricultural production in the Brazilian territory. Therefore, the plantation owners, who were the oligarchic and dominant colonial class, did not have enough capital to diversify their activities and stimulate the internal economy. The lack of capital was complemented by the lack of an autonomous mind on the part of the landowners, who saw themselves as financial agents of the Portuguese Crown and were moved by the spirit of conquest instead of the spirit of capitalism (Fernandes 1974: 23). Therefore, although the seed of capitalism already existed in the country, the colony did not operate within capitalistic logic. For Florestan, the internal colonial social structures were not organized around capitalistic dynamics power, but by a logic of domination based on patrimonialism in which the rural aristocracy was the dominant group (Rosso 2015).

This system of exploitation resulted in the exclusion of the colony from the global system of capitalism. As Portugal commercialized the products of the plantations, Brazil was only tangentially connected with the global market. The consequence of this exclusion was the impossibility of the development of an internal market in the colony. The Brazilian economy was forced to specialize in the production of agricultural goods that could be exported to generate profit for the metropolis. Moreover, it was forced to constantly increase this production to meet the global market's demands. Within this system, the colony was doomed to economic exclusion and stagnation. This forced specialization strengthened the traditionalist spirit of the rural oligarchs, who repelled any possibility of economic transformation that could result in the loss of their social privileges.

The seeds of capitalism were only able to develop in the country after the process of independence and the formation of a national State. Florestan (1974) claims that this transition represented the process of formation of a national society in which the State could explore all the capitalistic potentialities of the agriculture system established in the territory and consolidate capitalism as the main economic system of the Brazilian society. This process generated the end of the homogeneity of the agricultural oligarchy and the formation of new economic agents related to the diversification of the internal market. However, this dynamism of the internal economy was not strong enough to reshape the colonial economic structures. Similarly, the political transition to a national State did not transform the colonial system of stratification that privileged the rural oligarchy. In this argumentative context, Florestan proposes the concept of competitive social order. According to him, every capitalistic society is shaped by a competitive social order that organizes the patterns of dynamic equilibrium of the relations of production and exchange in the system. By affirming that the consolidation of capitalism in the Brazilian national State did not disrupt the social patterns of colonial society, Florestan is saying that this process of consolidation occurred before the establishment of the social competitive order in the country. In consequence, the economic, social, and political structures of colonial society shaped the composition of capitalism in Brazil. Therefore, after the political independence, the Brazilian economy continued to be based on agricultural production for the exportation of goods, on the system of slavery, and the concentration of land in the hands of the rural oligarchy.

THE BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION IN BRAZIL

Within his efforts to analyze the development of Brazilian capitalism, Florestan Fernandes aimed at answering a specific question: did Brazil experience a bourgeois revolution? Although short, this question is complex and involves a set of sociological and historical examinations. For Florestan, there was in Brazil a bourgeois revolution; nevertheless, this process was not similar to the revolutionary events of the European countries. The author argues that the revolution of the bourgeoisie is not a fact of history, but a structural event. As such, it can be reproduced in distinct ways according to the social conditions of a specific place. The only essential pre-requisite is reaching the social point in which revolutionary action becomes a historical necessity. In Brazil, the rise of the bourgeoisie happened after the consolidation of the national State and capitalism as a system. When the national society was formed and the country experienced a dynamization of the internal market, sectors of the agricultural and oligarchical elite adopted a bourgeois pattern of civilization and abandoned the traditionalism that characterized the colonial land owners (Cassin 2020; Florestan 1974). These sectors formed what can be defined as the Brazilian bourgeoisie in the period. However, Florestan claims that this bourgeoisie was more a “social congère” than the proper class as it is classically described by Marx and Engels. This “social congère” was held together by the sharing of liberal values such as the opposition against slavery and the defense of universal free labor. These values were understood as essential to the formation of a true capitalistic internal market (Rosso 2015). Nevertheless, the lack of unity created a fragile bourgeoisie that was incapable of being the agent of modernization of the country.

Because of its fragility, the Brazilian bourgeoisie converged to the State in order to rise to power. According to Florestan, instead of promoting revolutionary actions that would create social institutions based on the bourgeois patterns of civilizations, the fragile bourgeoisie in the country acted to appropriate political power within the state by unifying itself within the political institutions formed after the establishment of the Republic. In the Brazilian bourgeois revolution, hence, there was no transformation of the economic and social structures. The rise of the bourgeoisie did not represent the collapse of the old oligarchical order that existed during colonial times. In fact, Florestan (1974) argues that this process of transition happened under the hegemony of the rural oligarchy. For him, what guaranteed this process was the conciliation between the interests of these two classes. In consequence, the rural aristocracy did not lose its foundation of power in society. Moreover, this class was able to modernize itself and adapt to the bourgeois patterns of civilization, a fact that guaranteed its perpetuation. On the other hand, the Brazilian bourgeoisie constituted itself as a non-revolutionary class that absorbed the conservative patterns of the rural oligarchy and maintained the economic structures that kept the country within a marginalized position in global capitalism. These conservative patterns resulted in what Florestan defines as bourgeois autocracy, a state of class domination that combines the modernization inherent to the global bourgeoisie with the reactionary structures of the colonial oligarchy. In economic terms, the absence of revolutionary changes kept the country in the marginalized position that the colony occupied. For the Brazilian bourgeoisie, it was interesting to keep the exportation of agricultural goods. The consequence was the consolidation of the country in the context of dependent capitalism.

FLORESTAN AND MARX AND ENGELS: HISTORICAL MATERIALISM

Florestan’s sociological perspectives were based on what Cohn (2005) defines as “well-tempered eclecticism”. This eclecticism represents the balanced use of concepts and theories proposed by Marx, Weber, and Durkheim. For Florestan, all three members of the canon presented valid methodological views. Hence, in the practice of social science, one may decide what approach to use according to the objects of study. After the military coup of 1964, Florestan adopted a revolutionary Marxist frame of reference to produce politically engaged sociology that could be integrated into the movements of resistance against the dictatorship (Barão 2012). This adoption was based on the assumption that Marx and Engles’ historical materialism is more suitable for the study of social change. As stated by Barão (2012), Florestan believed that Marx and Engles’ methodological perspectives were the main contributions of these authors to the modern social sciences. He saw in historical materialism the possibility of generating new developments within the sociological historical perspective. His goal was to mobilize Marxist theoretical tools in order to understand the social and historical roots that led the country to a military dictatorship. Despite this, it is essential to mention that there are some important traces of the well-tempered eclecticism within his considerations about the development of Brazilian capitalism. For instance, in addition to the objective conditions of the colony, the author presents considerations about the subjective state of the economic agents of colonial times, especially the rural oligarch. In his discussions about the “subjective modes of being, thinking, and acting socially” (Florestan 1974: 38), Florestan makes clear references to Weber’s spirit of capitalism and its opposition to the traditionalism that shapes the mentality of the colonial land owner.

FLORESTAN AND MARX AND ENGELS: BOURGEOIS REVOLUTION

Overall, the most important expression of Florestan’s methodological attachment to historical materialism within his analysis of Brazilian capitalism is the “concrete examination of the concrete historical situation” conducted by the author (Bezerra 2017). Motivated by this attachment to empirical reality, the author strongly critiqued every Marxist view that demonstrated any form of theoretical dogmatism based on the propositions of Marx and Engles. Florestan's reflections about the development of capitalism in Brazil present a clear concern with the investigation of the materiality of the economic structures that shaped the colonial system and the economic structures after independence. This concern is especially expressed in the author’s movement of abandoning theoretical generalizations about the formation of capitalism to analyze the construction of this system within a colonial context. This movement is evident in his considerations about the bourgeois revolution in Brazil and the bourgeoisie as a class in the country. In general, the Brazilian author counterpoints the idea of the bourgeois revolution described by Marx and Engles. In consonance with Gramsci and Lenin’s views about the rise of the bourgeoisie in Italy and Prussia, Florestan is peremptory in affirming that Brazil experienced a bourgeois revolution, but not in the classical formed described by the German authors (Rosso 2015). In this sense, he questioned the dominant view of Brazilian Marxism at the time, which defended that the country was still in a “feudal state” (Rosso 2015). For him, what characterized Brazil’s history was not a feudal state, but the colonial historical moment. By doing this movement, Florestan is capable of examining the historical reality of Brazil through Marxist lenses without committing the mistake of universalizing European history. In this sense, the Brazilian author provides a critical perspective that questions the positionality of Marx and Engles. The statement that Brazil experienced a different form of Bourgeois revolution and that capitalism was consolidated in the country by a national State based on rural oligarchies carries as an assumption the constatation that the historical stages described by the German authors are specific to a certain social context.

Florestan’s critique regarding the historical positionality of Marx and Engels is also present in his conceptions about the bourgeoisie as a class and its domination. For the German authors, the historical rise of the bourgeoisie was characterized by a dialectic movement between its economic development as a class and the appropriation of political power. According to them, “each step of the development of the bourgeoisie was accompanied by a corresponding political advance of that class (Marx and Engels 1972: 475). Although these two forms of domination reinforced each other, the appropriation of political power was understood by the authors as a consequence of the economic domination obtained by the bourgeoisie. In this sense, the structures of class domination imposed by this group were initially based on economic domination. Only after obtaining political power, the dominant class uses the structures of the State to guarantee its power over the dominated. For Marx and Engels, the bourgeoisie loses its revolutionary character as soon as it surpasses the complete destruction of feudalism. In contrast, Florestan argues that this dialectical relation between economic and political domination was not present in the Brazilian bourgeois revolution. The author describes the rise of the bourgeoisie in the country as an essentially political movement (Carvalho 2021; Florestan 1974). This political nature of the bourgeois rise generated in Brazil a system of class domination that is mainly based on reactionary authoritarianism and autocracy (Carvalho 2021). Differently from the bourgeois class described by Marx and Engels, the Brazilian bourgeoisie was always reactionary and conservative. The State is used by the dominant class to reinforce an autocracy that was always dominant in national society. In consequence, the Brazilian bourgeoisie never had the need to revolutionize the instruments of production and the relations of production to reinforce the bourgeoise social institutions. The dominant class in the country had to act only politically to guarantee its domination. In this argumentative context, Florestan proposes his thesis that the implementation of a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964 represented a counter-revolutionary action of the bourgeoisie (Carvalho 2021; Florestan 1974).

CONCLUSION

The work of Florestan is paramount within Brazilian sociology. His efforts to understand the development of capitalism in Brazil and the bourgeois revolution in the country provided essential theoretical keys to the examination of the Brazilian social reality. In addition, his propositions about the effects of colonialism in the formation of national capitalism produced sociological insights regarding the position of colonial countries within the system of the global market. In this sense, his work is one of the central foundations of dependence theory and he was the main sociological influence for many Brazilian authors of dependence. However, the main contributions of his theoretical perspectives are within his efforts to question the universality of the Marxist descriptions of revolution by the use of historical materialism. By doing this, Florestan was capable of conducting a dialectic movement between theory and reality that resulted in the construction of a singular view of the development of the dynamics of capitalism. Based on these efforts, Bezerra (2017) defines the author as a decolonial Marxist. Moreover, Florestan was capable of promoting an important movement towards the creation of Brazilian sociology: a sociology that could be produced in Brazil and for Brazil. By questioning the validity of the Marxist theory of the historical development of capitalism, Florestan demonstrated that interpretations of Brazilian society should be based on the empirical reality of the country and not on supposedly universal theories.

In addition, it is essential to mention Florestan’s relevance within Brazilian Marxism. The author’s notions about the bourgeoise revolution in the country and the autocratic nature of the bourgeoise dominant were central to the elaboration of new revolutionary perspectives within the national communist movements (Rosso 2015). The statement that Brazil had already experienced a bourgeois revolution that did not transform completely the colonial social structures resulted in new elaborations about how to conduct a proletariat revolution in the country. Against this backdrop, Florestan defended that Brazil’s context demanded not a direct revolutionary action towards communism or a truly revolutionary bourgeoise revolution in order to complete all the stages of development proposed by Marx and Engles. Instead, the author's perspective was that Brazil needed a democratic revolution conducted by the proletariat (Bezzera, 2017). This revolution would not fight only against the bourgeoise domination; it would also combat the oligarchical structures that remained from colonialism and the imperialism that limited the country to a position of dependence within the global market.

However, despite his efforts to question the universality of the Marxist descriptions of historical movements, the work of Florestan presents a conception of modernization that is based on a Eurocentric point of view. The way he articulates notions of the bourgeois way of thinking and the idea of civilization and modern society demonstrates an attachment to the visions that understand modernity as a civilizational peak. In this context, it is essential to note how his criticism of colonization focuses on the economic, political, and social aspects of this system of domination. Florestan does not present discussions about the colonial imposition of Eurocentric perspectives about the world and the epistemological “killing” of indigenous cosmologies and ways of understanding empirical reality. Against this backdrop, I disagree with Bezerra’s view that Florestan was a decolonial theorist. Nevertheless, it is undeniable that his perspectives were part of the theoretical contributions that opened up the path for a decolonial critique of social science and modernity.

Finally, reading the work of Florestan will provide a theoretical perspective that can elucidate how the dynamics of colonialism shaped the current global capitalism. In this sense, the author's theory gives a strong foundation to the comprehension of approaches such as dependence theory, world-system theory, and the dynamics of exclusion of the global south. Moreover, it will provide an empirically engaged interpretation of Marxist theory about the historical development of capitalist societies as well as an illustration of how to produce theoretically based sociological research that can advance the stage of scientific knowledge by providing new theoretical perspectives.

REFERENCES

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