Top Menu

Brazil

João Pedro Stedile, leader of the MST, and federal deputy Maria do Rosário (PT/RS) at the Democracy Camp, in the Pôr do Sol amphitheater, in Porto Alegre, on the banks of the Guaíba River, and near the Regional Federal Court of the 4th Region (TRF4), where former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was tried on January 24, 2018

Land, Cooperation, and Socialism

This article will be released in full online July 28, 2025.

João Pedro Stedile, founder and spokesperson of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), reflects on the movement’s efforts to build a socialist alternative through land occupations, cooperative production, and political education. He highlights the importance of collective struggle and the MST’s deepening ties with Venezuela’s communal movement as part of a broader project to construct a just and solidarious society. | more…

Image 1. Curutú Household, Late 18th Century

Popular Power in Brazil: What Can We Learn from Indigenous, African, and Peasant Histories of Collective Resistance?

This article will be released in full online August 4, 2025.

“To tell the history of resistance,” Roberta Traspadini writes, “we need to investigate the territories where people live their daily lives.” Using both historical analysis and contemporary data, Roberta Traspadini reveals the importance of Brazilian Quilombola communities as local sites of struggle against colonialism, capitalism, and imperialism. These quilombagem, she argues, reveal the revolutionary legacy that persists among the most marginalized in Brazilian society. | more…

Prestes Maia Avenue in São Paulo, Brazil

Labor Informality and Unemployment in Brazil: Insights from the Perspective of the Relative Surplus Population

Using data from Brazil’s Integrated System of Household Surveys, Renata Falavina and Gabriel Ulbricht employ Marxist categories in order to illuminate the concept of the reserve army of labor in the context of underemployment and informal labor in modern-day Brazil. This view, the authors write, shows that the dichotomy of full employment and unemployment fails to capture the complexity of unstable labor dynamics in a world of informal and precarious work. | more…

Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System

An Ecological Civilization Will Have to Be Socialist

In this interview with Claudia Antunes of Brazilian magazine Sumaúma, Ian Angus takes stock of our current planetary crisis, from its origins in Marx’s ecological thought and the present debate over its designation to the future of human civilization as we know it. “The key question is,” he concludes, “Are we going to see large number of people moving for change?” | more…

A New Global Geometry?: Socialist Register 2024

A New Global Geometry? Socialist Register 2024

In its 60th volume!

Scrutinizes possibilities for an equalised global order, in light of recent conflicts between the world’s major powers

The “post-Cold War era is definitively over,” asserted US President Joe Biden as he launched the new National Security Strategy, warning in late 2022 that “a competition is underway between the major powers to shape what comes next.” American leadership, the document declared, would be more necessary than ever to define “the future of the international order,” insisting that the US must marshal its unparalleled economic, military, and diplomatic resources to confront its rivals.

Socialist Register 2024: A New Global Geometry? takes stock of momentous changes

Jair Bolsonaro

The Brazilian Crisis and the New Authoritarianism

Three decades after liberal democracy replaced the military dictatorship of 1964–85, the far right in Brazil has made a comeback, most starkly with the electoral victory of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. Bolsonaro, however, is not an isolated individual; rather, his government is characterized by an authoritarian style of neoliberalism built on a series of alliances, a prominent one of which is with the judiciary. This coalition boasts connections with the military and police forces, the evangelical religious right, and agribusiness. | more…

A swastika painted on a wall in Sao Paulo, Brazil

The Preemptive Counterrevolution and the Rise of the Far Right in Brazil

During the 2018 Brazilian presidential elections, almost thirty years after the first democratic elections since the military dictatorship, Jair Bolsonaro took on the role of supposed underdog and, in the face of the collapse of the other center and right-wing bourgeois candidates, became the only one capable of countering the risk of the victory of the Workers’ Party. Bolsonaro, or the captain, as he is frequently called by his acolytes, is a sort of Donald Trump of the periphery—a second-rate Trump. Though he appears to be the most radical critic of the system, he is, in fact, the very image of the status quo, in all its brutality and rawness. | more…

Protest against Michel Temer, São Paulo, Brazil (August 2016)

Contemporary Challenges for the Working Class and Peasantry in Brazil

In Brazil, there have been two recent parliamentary coups against the Workers’ Party and in favor of banks and corporations. Dilma Rousseff was impeached in 2016 and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was prevented from running for president, sequestered, and imprisoned. The electoral coups have resulted in a government without a social base in most of Brazilian society. It does not have a project for the majority or for the nation. It is just a project for international capital, dominated by banks and global corporations. This has led to a government made up of many nuclei of power that, despite internal contradictions, remain in agreement as a unit with regard to the project of capital. | more…

Monthly Review | Tel: 212-691-2555
134 W 29th St Rm 706, New York, NY 10001