The geography of the current anti-globalization protests signals a new world-political landscape for the Left. In a sense, this is a reversal of that historic shift of which Isaac Deutscher spoke—the relocation of the anti-capitalist movement from its nineteenth-century origins in Western Europe to Russia, then China. Behind this millennial transformation, of course, lies the earthquake that brought down the Soviet bloc; set China on course for a pragmatic integration with the capitalist market; provoked an identity crisis—and then a political one—in social democracy and the old mass Communist Parties; and led to the selective immiseration of the Third World. An entire topography of the Left was obliterated in that upheaval. From its ruins—in Chiapas or Porto Alegre, Seattle, Genoa, Barcelona and elsewhere—have grown the groups and networks that are now questioning neoliberal globalization. They point towards an entirely new ideological, political and geographical design.

Chiapas: an impoverished region of southern Mexico. Seattle: symbol of the microchip and American postmodernity. Porto Alegre: a ‘European’ city in Brazil’s deep south, run by a party that claims to represent its workers. What kind of movement can arise from such social and geographic diversity? In a country not known for its leftist traditions, Porto Alegre has suddenly emerged as the emblem of the new groupings, the point at which a host of hopes and fears, illusions and questions converge.

The development of the Brazilian Left was delayed relative to that of other countries in the region. Although its Communist and Socialist parties were founded at roughly the same time, the late 1910s or early 1920s, Brazil’s socio-economic formation—its coffee economy and low level of industrialization—made it impossible for these forces to acquire the critical mass of those in Argentina, Chile or Uruguay. A comparison between the national-populist programmes of Vargas in Brazil and Perón in Argentina points up the distinction. In response to the devastating consequences of the Wall Street crash, Vargas took power in 1930—overthrowing a conservative, primary-exporting government—in an essentially agrarian country. The state had little difficulty in harnessing, both politically and institutionally, the syndicalist structures through which he promoted the rights of a limited urban working class. In Argentina, by contrast, it was a progressive, Radical government, which had played a leading role in university reform in Córdoba in the late 1910s, that fell victim to the 1929 disaster. A military regime that would renegotiate Argentina’s dependency on regressive terms was in place throughout the thirties and early forties. When Perón seized power in 1943 it was at the head of a socially constituted working class, with a clear political and ideological trajectory and a distinct set of traditions—Perón had to defeat socialist and communist influence in order to project himself as the people’s leader. Vargas had far less difficulty in imposing his rule (as dictator, from 1930–45; as elected president, 1950–54), due to the weakness and political backwardness of the Brazilian working class.

One of the consequences of this fragility was that the nationalist labour-communist coalition that had backed Vargas virtually disappeared after the military coup in 1964. The trabalhistas, who owed their strength entirely to the state apparatus, the Labour Ministry in particular, ceased to exist once this had been taken over by the junta, whose first measures decreed the military supervision of all trade unions, a wage freeze, and police persecution of working-class leaders. The Communists’ strategy of subordinate alliance with the ‘national bourgeoisie’ collapsed in ruins, and the Party effectively disappeared.

Thanks to its important geostrategic position, the sixties’ coup in Brazil occurred relatively early compared to others in Latin America—1964, the same year as Bolivia’s; 1966 saw a failed putsch attempt in Argentina, successfully pushed through ten years later; the military seized power in Chile and Uruguay in 1973. Although the Left was weaker in Brazil than elsewhere, ferment in the countryside on a hitherto unseen scale and the politicization of lower-ranking army officers was considered a risk to national security both by Washington and by the upper echelons of the armed forces, concentrated in the Escola Superior de Guerra.

Coming at this stage, the Brazilian coup allowed the military dictatorship a honeymoon period during the final years of the long postwar boom. An influx of surplus dollars funded economic expansion, albeit based on exports and the luxury-goods sector.footnote¹ Growth rates exceeded 10 per cent per year, right up to the international capitalist crisis of 1973. Even then, while practically every other economy was entering recession, Brazil’s rates merely decreased to between 5 and 7 per cent. The expansionist momentum was maintained up to the end of the seventies by loans and dubious public-works projects—football stadiums, the still unfinished Transamazonian highway, large hydroelectric plants and other grandiose affairs. At this point the boomerang of borrowing and state spending came back, bringing to a close five decades of continuous growth that had transformed the country in almost every respect, while leaving it choked with debt, inflation and public deficits. This crisis resulted not just in a ‘lost decade’, but an era of virtual stagnation, with indices of economic expansion barely exceeding demographic growth.

Left resistance to the military coup mostly took the desperate route of armed struggle between 1967 and 1971, all other methods being ruled out by the repression. Despite a few spectacular actions, this strategy proved unable to accumulate forces on a mass level. Following the Left’s defeat there was a broad liberal hegemony over the opposition to the dictatorship, ideologically oriented by the ‘authoritarianism’ theses of Fernando Henrique Cardoso—then gaining prestige as an intellectual trying to start a political career. This force crystallized in a broad party—the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB)—grouping together all elements of the legal opposition. Alongside it, a grass-roots trade unionism began to develop from the devastation of the earlier syndicalist tradition.