Persistent Inequalities, Mutable Classes? Social Structure and Political Crisis in Brazil

The paper first draws on contemporary contributions that combine Marxist and Weberian traditions of social structure analysis (especially R. Kreckel and G. Therborn) for constructing a conceptual framework able to study recent transformations observed in class positions in Brazil. Starting from this framework, the paper discusses contemporary Brazilian crisis as a distributive conflict involving four classes or strata (the poor, newcomers, established, millionaires), defined using five vectors of inequality: wealth, position, knowledge, selective association and existential rights. The class alliance led by the Workers’ Party PT brought between 2003 and 2013 an improvement in terms of wealth, knowledge and existential rights for all four strata or classes. However, the established lost social position as their power to exclude newcomers diminished. Starting in 2014, the picture has changed: Due to the economic crisis, all strata have lost wealth. Additionally, the millionaires lost part of their selective associations as the investigations into corruption advanced. In this context, the existing arrangement between capital, state and wage labor lost support leading to Rousseff’s impeachment. Her successor, Temer, has systematically readjusted the distributive arrangement in favor of capital