God, homeland and family

Conjunctural similarities and conservative rhetoric during the Factory Acts, the Vargas era and the rise of Bolsonarism in Brazil

Abstract

Interpretations of the rise of conservative groups that led Jair M. Bolsonaro to the Presidency of the Federative Republic of Brazil have been the subject of controversy in the specialized press and among intellectuals. In this article, we support the thesis that historical materialism, with its concept of class struggles as the engine of the historical process, still offers the best economic and social theoretical system to understand the political crisis in Brazil. To support our argument that the typology of current conflicts is not something endemic to the Brazilian reality, nor is it essentially “new”, we analyze events of class conflicts in two different historical cuts: the Factory Acts, in the 19th century England; and the Vargas era, between 1930 and 1954 in Brazil. In both cases, we highlight events in which bourgeois practices were very similar — sometimes identical — to those experienced in Brazil before and after Dilma Rousseff's impeachment, including anti-democratic practices and the appeal to slogans such as "God, homeland and family".