The Governments of the Workers’ Party: Capitalist Development Pattern and Macroeconomic Policy Regimes

• Author: Luiz Filgueiras
• Published date: 01 January 2020
• DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19882010
• Date: 01 January 2020
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X19882010

LATIN AMERICAN PERSPECTIVES, Issue 230, Vol. 47 No. 1, January 2020, 28–44

DOI: 10.1177/0094582X19882010

© 2019 Latin American Perspectives

28

The Governments of the Workers’ Party

Capitalist Development Pattern and Macroeconomic

Policy Regimes

by

Luiz Filgueiras

Translated by

Patrícia Fierro

From the point of view of their capitalist development pattern, the governments of

Fernando Collor de Mello, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, and Michel Temer, on the one

hand, and Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff, on the other, were similar: the former were

actively promoting that pattern and the latter accepting it as irreversible, the limit of the

possible, and adapting to it. They differed, however, in the macroeconomic policy regimes

they adopted. The development pattern of the Workers’ Party governments may be

described as the peripheral-liberal pattern, the form assumed by neoliberalism in Brazil.

Do ponto de vista de seu padrão de desenvolvimento capitalista, os governos de

Fernando Collor de Mello, Fernando Henrique Cardoso e Michel Temer, por um lado,

e Lula da Silva e Dilma Rousseff, por outro, se assemelhavam em. Os primeiros pro-

movendo-o ativamente e os segundos aceitando esse padrão como irreversível. Eles

diferiram, no entanto, nos regimes de política macroeconômica que adotaram. O padrão

de desenvolvimento dos governos do Partido dos Trabalhadores é aqui descrito como o

padrão liberal periférico, a forma assumida pelo neoliberalismo no Brasil.

Keywords: Neoliberalism, Capitalist development pattern, Macroeconomic policy

regimes, Workers’ Party, Peripheral-liberal pattern

The debate about the nature of the governments of the Partido dos

Trabalhadores (Workers’ Party—PT) tends to contrast two diametrically oppo-

site views: that they constituted a total rupture with the neoliberalism of the

previous period (the governments of Fernando Collor de Mello/Itamar Franco

and Fernando Henrique Cardoso) and that they simply continued the political-

economic model of the past, creating, at best, a sort of social liberalism. These

different views are accompanied by positions that emphasize the ambiguous

or hybrid nature of the PT governments and therefore are situated between the

two poles. With the unfolding of the debate, the various responses have been

reduced to the opposition between neoliberalism and developmentalism (the

Luiz Filgueiras is a full professor of economics at the Federal University of Bahia and the author

of História do Plano Real (2000) and, with Reinaldo Gonçalves, A economia política do Governo Lula

(2007). Patrícia Fierro is an American Translators Association–certified translator living in Quito,

Ecuador.

882010LAPXXX10.1177/0094582X19882010Latin American PerspectivesFilgueiras / DEVELOPMENT PATTERN AND MACROECONOMIC POLICY

research-article2019

Filgueiras / DEVELOPMENT PATTERN AND MACROECONOMIC POLICY 29

latter with nuances). Normally, the arguments presented to defend the different

points of view compare the performance (macroeconomic and social) of the

Brazilian economy during the PT governments vis-à-vis the previous govern-

ments (Collor de Mello/Itamar Franco and Fernando Henrique Cardoso), and

identify a set of economic and social reforms and policies whose content,

together with a greater or lesser economic activism of the state, would charac-

terize a government as neoliberal or developmentalist (neo-, new, or social).

The problem is that, despite the importance of the aspects considered, this

approach does not unequivocally distinguish the structural dimension, which

determines the deeper characteristics of the Brazilian capitalist development

pattern established at the beginning of the 1990s, from the macroeconomic

policy regimes that have conditioned and limited the actions of Brazil’s govern-

ments for the past three decades. In addition, the opposing views (neoliberal

and developmentalist) are generally either fundamentally economic or essen-

tially political in character, and even when advocates consider both of these

dimensions of the Brazilian capitalist development pattern they cannot ade-

quately articulate them. By fragmenting these dimensions or weakly articulat-

ing them they lose sight of the whole and make it difficult to understand how

the material, social, and political interests of classes and class fractions intersect

and determine each other, producing a long-term trend around which fluctua-

tions and inflections (economic and political) occur, or how that pattern might

be altered.

Employing the (transdisciplinary) concept of the capitalist development pat-

tern (Filgueiras, 2013) and identifying the particular form it has assumed in

Brazil since the 1990s, this article seeks to overcome the lack of hierarchization

between structure and context and the separation (or weak articulation)

between economics and politics. The proposal defended here is that, from the

point of view of the capitalist development pattern, the governments of Collor

de Mello, Cardoso, and Temer, on the one hand, and Lula da Silva and Dilma

Rousseff, on the other, were similar: the former were actively promoting that

pattern and the latter accepting it as irreversible, the limit of the possible, and

adapting to it. They differed, however, in the macroeconomic policy regimes

they adopted.

The understanding of neoliberalism adopted here is as a political-ideological

doctrine systematized shortly after World War II by Hayek and Friedman,

among others, out of a critique of the welfare state and socialism—a regressive

update of liberalism (Anderson, 1995). In addition, accepting the conception of

Dardot and Laval (2016), neoliberalism, rather than an ideology, is a global

political rationale drawn from commercial competition whose logic tends to

spread to all social spheres and all political subjects. Its political-practical mar-

riage with big financial capital after the crisis of capitalism in the 1970s was

expressed in a general political-economic program that can be summarized as

privatization, deregulation, and liberalization. However, this program and its

policies were implemented according to the specificities of the various socio-

economic formations—distinguished, above all, by their condition of center or

periphery but not only by this, because neither the center nor the periphery is

homogeneous. Therefore, there is more than one capitalist development pattern

associated with neoliberalism. What is referred to here as the peripheral-liberal