I think Brazil is currently an anchor pulling BRICS down. While most BRICS countries seek sovereignty by getting as far from US dependency as possible, even though not necessarily harboring anti-imperialist takes, Brazil is selling even more of its industry to other global powers, even defunding is military industry (Avibras and Embraer) and depending more on US and Israeli tech.

It's not even effectively taxing the rich. The government simply set a goal of 0 budget deficit.

In Brazil the government spends budget is divided into primary spends and nominal spends. Primary spends are the amount the government spends on health care, education, social benefits, infrastructure, research, military etc. Nominal spends are financial expenses (treasure bonds interest rates, securities etc). So the workers' party government goal of 0 deficit is basically about reducing primary spending to a value below the tax revenue.

Whose interests this policy and budget goal favors? The financial sector. The government put a lock on primary spending, in a way those spendings can't grow in the same pace the population grows or gets old. It can't run a deficit to increase the amount it spends on infrastructure and services. Even if the government increase its tax revenue, it can't increase spending, since there's a lock limiting government spending.

So how the financial and banking sector profits from this? Many of the government state owned companies will start having budget issues, meaning they can't provide services properly to the population. Meaning, to increase investment, they need private money, meaning opening a door for privatization. Secondly, any tax revenue growth that surpasses primary spending will only be used to pay financial expenses, meaning more interests and bonds issued paid by the government to the financial sector, who will probably use this new money to buy off state assets.

So the government is basically pushing a right wing agenda with leftist rhetoric. And using a good, but meagre policy to make the left militancy to support the right wing policies that will come in the same bill.

The "tax the rich" thingy is actually a neoliberal policy to increase government tax revenue by taxing some financial operations related to exchange rate. Most of the people affected will be middle class, not the rich. The government has already stepped back from taxing investment operations in foreign countries (which would target mostly rich people, and specially - financial institutions).

The other policy, the increase of the ceiling of the first revenue tax bracket is a good policy, though. The problem is that the government will still tax middle class people in other ways.

The reason the government wants to do this, however, is to throw some crumbs to the people in order to get re-elected in the 2026 elections. This increase in tax revenue won't be translated into public investment, since the workers' party pushed a fiscal policy early in 2023 to limit government spending increase.

The Brazilian workers' party strategy is to distract the left militancy so they still rally around the party for the next elections (so they don't leave the workers' party for another party), while at the same time they maintain their neoliberal agenda that supports the interest of the big financial sector and banks.

Lula is revealing himself as a sneaky bastard, and a shackle to an actually radical leftist agenda.

It's interesting how the totalitarian argument falls apart when you look at the actual reality. The people isn't composed of mindless drones that follow the state discourse. They are confusingly different from each other, many even reactionary.

@[email protected] and @[email protected] already provided good answers to this question, so I will just add my 2 cents.

I dislike the term state capitalism, because capitalism per se is a state system. The nation-state is the way the bourgeoisie thought it would be best to organize a country ever since the end of the monarchies in Europe in the 19th century. Nation states have laws (which secure private property, and how agents that hold private property should engage each other), have clearly defined borders, an official language (in feudalism many villages within a territory would speak many different dialects), concentrate all the power of violence and bureaucracy under the nation-state (a move that started to happen since the advent of absolutist monarchies), will issue a currency and will define the laws on how foreign actors will engage in the domestic economy.

So the capitalist market is a superstructure created by the nation-state to uphold the interests of the capitalists. The state creates the conditions for the market to exist. It creates the entire legal framework that is used by the market, and even runs state services (transportation, energy generation, police, roads, railways, airports, military, diplomacy, urban zoning etc) that will support capitalist enterprises. There is a dialectical relationship between the market and the state, both a positive relationship, as the market depends on the state to exist and a contradiction in the sense as the market battles the state bureaucracy to have more power over it (as in neoliberalism) and/or the state fights the market in order to establish the dominance of state-based economic development (as it happened in the Keynesian phase of post WW2).

Note that socialism and capitalism are not different from each other because of economic planning. Both Japanese and South Korean economies heavily depended on central planning, with South Korea having a dictatorship and central planning that was even more centralized than we ever had in the post communist revolution China. The SK state was draconic with capitalists regarding their returns and how they should invest their capital and they would be disposed if they didn't achieve state development goals.

This reasoning about planning was what motivated Deng Xiaoping's market reforms in China:

Why do some people always insist that the market is capitalist and only planning is socialist? Actually they are both means of developing the productive forces. So long as they serve that purpose, we should make use of them. If they serve socialism they are socialist; if they serve capitalism they are capitalist. It is not correct to say that planning is only socialist, because there is a planning department in Japan and there is also planning in the United States. At one time we copied the Soviet model of economic development and had a planned economy. Later we said that in a socialist economy planning was primary. We should not say that any longer.

So the idea that state-capitalism is an initial form of socialism is wrong. The real question is, who holds power over who? The communist party, controlled by fractions of the proletariat is the controller of the state in the case of socialist economies. In capitalist economies, even in case of countries with good welfare programs, the state is still controlled by the bourgeoisie. Let's never forget the politics in political economy. This is essential to understand how both capitalism and socialism work. Let's not fall in the same trap the traditional neoclassical economists do in order to label economic systems.

Most of our fellow citizens already associate the state with "corruption" due to that agenda, unfortunately. There is a cultural barrier to be won here. Tech has always branded itself as "revolutionary" and utopianistic, we could and should use that for good.

The problem of the corruption rhetoric is that people think the government is not doing what it should, when in fact the government is actually doing EXACTLY what it was supposed to do, which is upholding the interests of the dominant class. The government under capitalism is corrupt by nature, and democracy is just a lie we are told every day.

I have saved this, but I am also commenting on it so I don't lose this gem.

I started to hate the tech industry, especially with the AI bubble/hype and the whole tech powered Gaza genocide going on. I feel I am contributing to make this shitty world even shittier.

I worked on the public sector in my home country (Brazil) and even though I worked on very important initiatives (such as the information systems behind the COVID relief package for all Brazilians during the pandemic), I do feel the public sector is too contaminated by the tech industry mentality.

The hustle culture is very present, as well as the cost cutting mentality, and a cock sucking attitude towards US tech monopolies. I have stomach butterflies just for thinking on how many discussions I had with different people, especially in the top hierarchy, for their obsession in using bloated Oracle, IBM, Microsoft or any other Gartner magic quadrant listed tech, instead of just using a simple low cost Spring or name your OSS framework with a PostgreSQL instance so we wouldn't be vendor locked in. And the same mentality of working late hours and weekends just to appease potential clients and business to increase revenue is there. I think I had a much more exploitative relationship working in one of the big Brazilian public sector tech companies than I am doing right now in a private company.

The directors of the public state-owned companies are actually indicated from outside (politicians, top level bureaucrats and executives from the private sector) based on a neoliberal agenda that seek to provide services to provide data and public information for private companies. For example, there's an initiative called "empréstimo consignado", which is a kind of loan discounted directly from all government granted benefits. So whenever someone retires and receive a pension, banks and financial institutions are notified and start to offer pensionists (often in a difficult financial situation) loan packages with astronomical interest rates which often put those people in a even worse condition. Today, Dataprev earns more revenue on the "Empréstimo Consignado" than by processing social benefits for the population.

So, I think in the end, for our own survival and for the good of our society we need to fight back. While it is good to live outside of the tech industry but in the end we have no option but fighting it. So even if we need to take a break to work on more meaningful stuff in the name of our own sanity, we cannot avoid the fight which can only be done as workers, by taking possession of the means of production, doing strikes to halt the system down and breaking this profit making machine that only cares about increasing shareholder value.

Of course, Jacobin. Let's keep doing the same thing Western Europeans did after WWII, and then socialism will be on the rise. Err... Wait? Where is socialism in Western European states? What do you mean capitalism is in crisis (again), Western democracies are in crisis (again) and Fascism is on the rise (again)?

As Marx once quoted:

Hegel remarks somewhere[*] that all great world-historic facts and personages appear, so to speak, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce.

Ah, Bernie, why are you such a disappointment...

Use the correct category, Bernie, compare fascists with fascists. Otherwise we all will be right to call you a fascist and a Zionist apologist as well.

They will be very successful at blowing up their own people, that's what they will achieve.

I love when mainstream false news are easily debunked with a minimum amount of facts, logic and critical thinking.

While I find it good news that he is talking about Marxism and Marxist philosophy/ideology, I don't like much the idea of following someone based on appearances. Is Lukashenko promoting Marxism in universities? Is he applying dialectical materialism to understand his country and that is being translated into actual policy? I find this important, because otherwise it would be much more a PR move rather than an actual change. Regardless, it's better to have a leader promoting Marxism than one who condemns it.