Notes on the Paths of the Brazilian Revolution

• Author: Fernando Garcia de Faria
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X221111777
• Published date: 01 September 2022
• Date: 01 September 2022
• Subject Matter: Book Reviews

Silva and Johnson/BOOK REVIEW 243

In Atilio Boron, a Marxist academic with Machiavellian-Gramscian overtones,

a teacher, a researcher, a prolific writer slowly matures but is very particularly

a creator of dialogue spaces with emancipatory projection among and across

generations. Faithful to the Florentine, he recommends revisiting the actions of

the great armed prophets who projected a vision of the Patria Grande —the

Greater Homeland— Bolívar, San Martín, Artigas—considering the extensive

experience of the revolutionary processes in the dialectic of history, which

takes the shape of a spiral, with advances, impasses, setbacks, and new offen-

sives but never a return to the starting point.

REFERENCE

Löwy, Michael (ed.)

2016 O marxismo na América Latina: Uma antologia de 1909 aos dias atuais. São Paulo: Perseu

Abramo.

Notes on the Paths of the Brazilian Revolution

by

Fernando Garcia de Faria

Translated by

Patricia Fierro

Luiz Bernardo Pericás Caminhos da Revolução Brasileira. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2019.

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X221111777

Amid the serious and irreparable consequences of the structural crisis of

capitalism in 2008, it is necessary to rethink our tactics and strategies for the

defeat of the society imposed by capital over the past two centuries. This

rethinking cannot start from scratch; it needs to revisit what took place, above

all, in the postrevolution after October 1917, and few initiatives in this regard

have been as accurate as Luiz Bernardo Pericás’s Caminhos da Revolução

Brasileira. It features 19 excerpts from representative works on theories of the

Brazilian revolution covering the period from 1926 to 1985 and, in addition to

being sufficient in itself, will serve as an aperitif—a kind of study guide, com-

pass, atlas, or menu—for the reading on the subject that is necessary. The intro-

duction presents the ideas for understanding the book and recalls Nelson

Werneck Sodré’s “What to Read to Learn about Brazil,” describing the authors

of its chapter, tackling several dozen others,1 and considering the context and

the internal dynamics of the production of such a monumental bibliography.

Pericás begins with a synthesis of the main aspects of theories of the Brazilian

revolution (9):

On the one hand, confirmation of the gradual march (with occasional bursts)

of capitalism domestically (and a glimpse of the qualitative leaps within this

Fernando Garcia de Faria is a historian and a researcher on Brazilian social and political thought.

Patricia Fierro is an American Translators Association–certified translator living in Quito, Ecuador.