The Reestablishment of Bourgeois Hegemony

During the week immediately following the elections of November 15, 1994, I was traveling in an almost empty bus listening to the conversation between the driver and the ticket collector behind him. Both from the Northeast, the men were commenting on the electoral results-who won, who lost. At one point, the driver said emphatically, people are wrong about us. Come time to vote, the one who lives in a shack is the same as Antonio Ermirio. By no means do I want to generalize from this one observation, but in the context of innumerable other observations, based both on systematic surveys and on election results, I consider the remark of this anonymous worker representative of the prevailing view of the electoral process. The acceptance by the millions of inhabitants of shacks of the immense inequality represented by the very few millionaires such as Antonio Ermirio is legitimated by the equality between the two extremes in the mythic moment of depositing a vote in the ballot box. With the electoral results of 1994, democracy in Brazil was consolidated as a political form of bourgeois domination. The salaried workers and the poor in general constituted the bulk of the population that had protested in the streets for the end of the military dictatorship and for direct elections. The democratic political form therefore corresponds to an aspiration of the subordinated classes, including the middle class. These classes perceive that democratic liberties allow them the opportunity to pursue concrete changes in their daily lives. Yielding to this aspiration, the dominant bourgeois class was able to establish the broad social consensus necessary for its own domination. The masses do not see that there might be something better for them than democracy. They want democracy, and at the same time they can only want a bourgeois democracy. In the current scheme of things, there is

Ballot · Bourgeoisie · Context (archaeology) · Democracy · Dictatorship · Hegemony · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Population · Sociology · Voting · Demography · History · Law · Political theory and Gramsci · Social and Economic Solidarity · Social and Political Issues

• External Liberalization, Stabilization, and the Labor Market in Brazil

  Open Access•Matias Vernengo•Latin American Perspectives•2004

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