The Failure of Dilma Rousseff’s Developmentalist Experiment: A Class Analysis

• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19877187
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19877187

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 230, Vol. 47 No. 1, January 2020, 152–168

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19877187

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

152

The Failure of Dilma Rousseff’s

Developmentalist Experiment

A Class Analysis

by

André Singer

Translated by

Sean Purdy

There are various reasons for the dissolution of the productivist coalition and the for-

mation of an antidevelopmentalist bourgeois united front during Dilma Rousseff’s first

term. With the intention of accelerating the pace of Lulism, Rousseff actively opposed

neoliberalism, but state intervention alienated the industrialists even though, paradoxi-

cally, it aimed to favor them. On a small scale, Rousseff’s developmentalist experiment

may have followed in the footsteps that led to the 1964 military coup.

Diferentes razões apontam para a dissolução da coalizão produtivista e a formação de

uma frente única burguesa antidesenvolvimentista durante o primeiro mandato de Dilma

Rousseff. Com a intenção de acelerar o passo do lulismo, Dilma se contrapôs ativamente

ao neoliberalismo, mas a intervenção estatal alienou os industriais, apesar de, paradoxal-

mente, tentar favorecê-los. Em ponto pequeno, o ensaio desenvolvimentista de Dilma pode

ter seguido as pegadas que resultou no golpe de 1964.

Keywords: Developmentalism, Class coalition, Lulism, Dilma Rousseff, Brazil

Why did Dilma Rousseff’s attempt to ensure sustainable growth with rein-

dustrialization fail? My hypothesis is that the president bet on a coalition

between industrialists and workers to sustain a developmentalist turn that

would accelerate the pace of Lulism, but in the midst of the effort the coalition

disbanded as the industrialists changed their position, sinking the policy archi-

tecture that could have dealt with the shock waves generated in 2011 by the

recurrence of the world crisis. In place of a coalition between industrial capital

and labor, a renewed bourgeois united front emerged around a neoliberal plat-

form focused particularly on cuts in public expenditures and labor and

social security reforms. What I want to investigate in this article is the political

André Singer is a full professor of political science at the Universidade de São Paulo and coordina-

tor of the university’s Centro de Estudos dos Direitos da Cidadania. This article is modified from

articles published in 2015 and 2016 and his 2018 book O lulismo en crise. An abridged version

appeared in 2017 as “The Failure of the Developmentalist Experiment in Three Acts” (Critical

Policy Studies 11: 358–364). Sean Purdy is a professor of the history of the Americas at the

Universidade de São Paulo.

877187LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19877187Singer / ROUSSEFF’S DEVELOPMENTALIST EXPERIMENTLATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES

research-article2019

Singer / ROUSSEFF’S DEVELOPMENTALIST EXPERIMENT 153

components of the failure of this developmentalist experiment, linked to the

problem of class coalitions that support this or that economic orientation.

For a minimal definition of developmentalism, the economist Ricardo

Bielschowsky (1995: 7) lists the following items:

By “developmentalism” we understand . . . the ideology of the transformation

of Brazilian society defined by an economic project that is composed of the

following fundamental points: (a) full industrialization is the way to overcome

poverty and underdevelopment in Brazil; (b) there is no way to achieve effi-

cient and rational industrialization in Brazil through the spontaneous forces of

the market; therefore, it is necessary for the state to plan it; (c) planning should

identify the desired expansion of the economic sectors and the instruments to

promote this expansion; and (d) the state must also direct the expansion, cap-

ture, and orientation of financial resources, promoting direct investments in

those sectors where private initiative is insufficient.

Examining the practical proposals of the “new economic matrix” of Dilma

Rousseff in terms of Bielschowsky’s criteria, one perceives their developmen-

talist bias. The clearing of paths for industrial recovery, the efforts at full indus-

trialization, the belief in the indispensability of state planning, the distrust of

spontaneous market forces, the decision by the state of which sectors to expand,

and the public role in its financing—all these factors were present during

Rousseff’s first term.

AdvAnce, PeAk, And RetReAt

After a semester that was to a certain point typical of the beginning of a

presidential term, with its budgetary constraints,1 ministerial adjustments, and

so on, in the Brazilian winter of 2011 the second phase of the global financial

crisis interrupted Dilma Rousseff’s routine. On August 4 and 5, markets around

the globe revived the turbulence of 2008. Following the example of what had

been done in 2008, the president sought to sustain the pace of local growth

despite the generalized downturn. Calculations showed that to continue the

reforms of Lulism it was necessary for the gross domestic product (GDP) to

grow by about 5 percent a year (Singer, 2012: 160). This was where the oppor-

tunity opened up for the new economic matrix that had been in preparation

since the replacement of Henrique Meirelles by Alexandre Tombini as head of

the Central Bank in November 2010.2 In the anticyclical program adopted by

Rousseff, interest rate reduction, intensive use of the Brazilian Development

Bank, reindustrialization, deregulation, infrastructure projects, reform of the

electrical energy sector, devaluation of the real, capital controls, and protection

of national products were highlighted.3

Lulism was the strategy employed by Lula from 2003 on of maintaining

economic orthodoxy (especially in his first term of office, between 2003 and

2006) and promoting the internal market for the less fortunate, which, added

to the maintenance of stability, was nothing less than a complete class (or class-

fraction) program (Singer, 2012: 76). This fraction was not the organized work-

ing class, whose movement had started in the late 1970s as a “break with the

current economic model” (PT Diretório Nacional, 2002: 15), but what Paul