Brazilian revolution

Structural changes to complete nation-building

Abstract

This article addresses the relationship between structural changes and the paths of the Brazilian Revolution. Its objective is to analyze the contradictions that currently hinder the course of this revolution, taking into account both the contradictions inherited from the past and those more recently incorporated into the process. To this end, it investigates how these contradictions were confronted in earlier periods in order to draw lessons for the present. The article also argues that the very conditions for overcoming these contradictions emerge from within them, through a set of structural changes capable of breaking with the economic, social, political, cultural, and environmental features that characterize the country's current structure. It demonstrates that, under a comparable international context — the structural crisis of the world capitalist system between 1914 and 1945 —, the Brazil of the 1930 Revolution managed to successfully confront several of these contradictions and obstacles. As a result, the country industrialized under predominantly national control, established an advanced labor legislation, and built its development based on the domestic market. The article then examines a set of new characteristics of both Brazil and the global order — such as the deep intensification of capitalism’s internationalization, the emergence of multipolarity driven by the rise of China and the relative decline of the United States, financialization, the advance of the Scientific and Technological.