Leading English-language account of the fall of Lula's Workers' Party and rise of Bolsonaro and the New Right What does Brazil's lurch to the hard right under Jair Bolsonaro portend for Latin America's most populous society, and how has it come about? Perry Anderson, foremost observer of the Brazilian scene in the English-speaking world, offers a matchless account of the country's recent political upheavals: after the dashed hopes of the Cardoso years, the soaring popularity of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva; the parliamentary coup d'état against his successor, Dilma; and the sweeping election victory of Bolsonaro, backed by the Armed Forces and a youthful new right. Always something of a world unto itself, under the Workers' Party, Brazil had bucked the global trend towards a tighter neoliberalism. With its lodestar, Lula, now behind bars, a weighing up of the PT's legacy, and of the contrasting Bolsonaro regime, is urgently needed.
Author
Perry Anderson is an English Marxist intellectual and historian. He is Professor of History and Sociology at UCLA and an editor of the New Left Review. He is the brother of historian Benedict Anderson. He was an influence on the New Left. He bore the brunt of the disapproval of E.P. Thompson in the latter's The Poverty of Theory, in a controversy during the late 1970s over the scientific Marxism of Louis Althusser, and the use of history and theory in the politics of the Left. In the mid-1960s, Thompson wrote an essay for the annual Socialist Register that rejected Anderson's view of aristocratic dominance of Britain's historical trajectory, as well as Anderson's seeming preference for continental European theorists over radical British traditions and empiricism. Anderson delivered two responses to Thompson's polemics, first in an essay in New Left Review (January-February 1966) called "Socialism and Pseudo-Empiricism" and then in a more conciliatory yet ambitious overview, Arguments within English Marxism (1980). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry\_An...
