Karl Marx in Brazil: the reading capital of Capital (1958–2014)

ABSTRACT

The national appropriations of Marx’s work have received two kinds of approaches. On the one hand, Marxists have dealt with the topic based on their internal disputes, elaborating “genealogies of ideas” in the service of demanding “ideological coherence” from each other or highlighting faithful interpretations and supposed betrayals. On the other hand, the field of historical sociology has neglected to address the transnational circulation of the work of Marx and Marxist authors. This area has accepted the current theoretical hierarchy, in which Marxism has no credibility – therefore, studies about its presence in the scientific field are unnecessary. Contrary to these two trends, the following article does not judge the value of Marx’s work. It focuses on the disputes surrounding its legitimate readings and uses, by addressing the main initiative that lifted this author out of a marginal position and turned him into an unavoidable figure in Brazil: the first university reading circle of Capital in the country started in 1958 at the University of São Paulo (USP). This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the determining factors behind Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s membership in that initiative and his stance on capitalism, slavery, and Marxism. Then, it defines the “reading capital” (in a Bourdieusian sense) of Capital and addresses its fate in current times.

RESUMO

As apropriações nacionais da obra de Marx têm sido objeto de dois tipos de abordagens. Por um lado, os marxistas têm-se debruçado sobre o tema a partir das suas disputas internas, elaborando “genealogias de ideias,” exigindo uns dos outros “coerência ideológica,” acusando-se mutuamente “fidelidade” e de “traição” à obra de Marx. Por outro lado, no campo da sociologia histórica tem negligenciado a circulação transnacional da obra de Marx. Esta área aceita a hierarquia teórica vigente, na qual o marxismo não tem credibilidade – portanto, estudos sobre a sua presença no campo científico são desnecessários. Na contramão dessas duas tendências, o artigo a seguir não faz juízo de valor sobre a obra de Marx. Centra-se nas disputas em torno da legitimidade de suas leituras e usos, abordando a principal iniciativa que tirou esse autor de uma posição marginal e o transformou em figura incontornável no Brasil: o primeiro círculo de leitura universitária d’O Capital, iniciado em 1958, na Universidade de São Paulo (USP). Em seguida, analisa em profundidade os fatores determinantes da posição de Fernando Henrique Cardoso, membro desta iniciativa, em relação ao capitalismo, à escravidão e ao marxismo. Finalmente, define o “capital de leitura” (no sentido bourdieusiano) do Capital e aborda seu destino nos tempos atuais.

RESUMEN

Las apropiaciones nacionales de la obra de Marx se han abordado de dos maneras. Por un lado, los marxistas han abordado la cuestión desde el punto de vista de sus disputas internas, elaborando “genealogías de ideas” al servicio de la exigencia de “coherencia ideológica” entre ellas o destacando las interpretaciones fieles y las supuestas traiciones. Por otra parte, el campo de la sociología histórica ha descuidado la circulación transnacional de la obra de Marx y de los autores marxistas. Esta área ha aceptado la jerarquía teórica actual, en la que el marxismo no tiene credibilidad – por lo tanto, los estudios sobre su presencia en el campo científico son innecesarios. Contrariamente a estas dos tendencias, el siguiente artículo no juzga la obra de Marx. Se centra en las disputas en torno a la legitimidad de sus lecturas y usos, abordando la principal iniciativa que sacó a este autor de una posición marginal y lo transformó en una figura ineludible en Brasil: el primer círculo universitario de lectura filosófica del país comenzó en 1958 en la Universidad de São Paulo (USP). A continuación, se analizan en profundidad los factores determinantes de la posición de Fernando Henrique Cardoso ante el capitalismo, la esclavitud y el marxismo. A continuación, se define el “capital de lectura” (en el sentido bourdieusiano) de El Capital y se discute su destino en los tiempos actuales.

KEYWORDS:

• Marxism
• Brazilian thought
• classics
• university
• international circulation of ideas

PALAVRAS-CHAVE:

• Marxismo
• pensamento Brasileiro
• clássicos
• universidades
• circulação internacional das ideias

PALABRAS CLAVE:

• Marxismo
• pensamiento Brasileño
• clásicos
• universidades
• circulación internacional de ideas

1. Introduction

The national appropriations of Marx’s work have received two kinds of approaches. On the one hand, Marxists have dealt with the topic based on their internal disputes, elaborating “genealogies of ideas” demanding “ideological coherence” from each other or highlighting faithful interpretations and supposed betrayals. Moreover, they take for granted that Marx is a classic author through his intrinsic value and the accuracy of his ideas.¹ On the other hand, the field of historical sociology has neglected to address the transnational circulation of the work of Marx and Marxist authors. This area has accepted the current theoretical hierarchy, in which Marxism has no credibility – therefore, studies about its presence in the scientific field are unnecessary. Thus, in contrast to the studies on the global circulation of works by Durkheim, Weber, Foucault, and Hannah Arendt almost nothing is known about the circulation of Marx’s ideas (even if some of these authors were imported into different spaces precisely because the criticisms they directed at the Marxist tradition) (Rodrigues 2020). Therefore, a relational and conflictive analysis cannot ignore the national peculiarities of the transnational circulation of Marx’s oeuvre.

Contrary to these two trends, the following article does not judge the value of Marx’s work nor does it evaluate the corrections or errors of its readings. Based on the conflictual perspective of Peter Baehr (2002) and Morris (2017), it proposes an analysis according to which texts and authors are not born but become “classics” because of cultural and political disputes among their readers. It focuses on the disputes surrounding the legitimate readings and uses of Marx in Brazil. The following sections begin by situating the main initiative that lifted Marx out of a marginal position and turned him into an unavoidable author in the Brazilian context: the first university philosophical reading circle in the country, started in 1958, at the University of São Paulo (USP). It will emphasize the innovation of this initiative in the cultural scenario, the sociological profile of its members, and the professional interests that motivated them. This is followed by an in-depth analysis of the determining factors behind Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s stance on capitalism, slavery, and Marxism in the discipline of sociology. The article then characterizes the effects that the “philosophical reading” of Marx produced among academics and communists. Finally, it addresses the fate of Capital’s reading, following the double defeat of these approaches in both the political and scientific fields.

2. The first Brazilian academic reading circle of Capital (1958–1964)

In Brazil, study groups on the book Capital, comprised of young university readers, carried out a specific import of Marx’s work, responsible for his transformation into a “classic” author. The first study group, known as the “Marx seminar,” began at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences, and Letters of the University of São Paulo (FFCL-USP), created in 1934.

In 1958, a philosophy student who was also precariously employed at FFCL-USP, José Arthur Giannotti (1930–2021), gathered together his friends with the purpose of reading Marx’s Capital, “the greatest text” (Giannotti 1985, XVI).² The motivations for this were inseparable from the unstable professional status of the members of this circle and the internship that Giannotti had completed in France in the previous years.

Initially, the predominant clientele of FFCL-USP were fractions of the local oligarchy in economic decline, endowed with a literate culture acquired in the family cradle and accustomed to the dilettante style of intellectual fruition. Gradually, the incongruity between their lifestyle and the intellectual discipline required by the French missions, hired by the University to launch the activities of the new institution and select the natives who would lead it after them, became evident. Concomitantly, it became apparent how easy it was to subject other social strata to the ascesis required by scientific and educational training. The socioeconomic aspirations of modest social strata, for whom access to diplomas consisted of the chance to acquire a profession and improve themselves, made them more malleable to such work discipline (Bourdieu 1984, 189). Gradually, FFCL-USP shed its oligarchic character and its predominant clientele became plebeian (Miceli 2001).

The “Marx seminar” reproduced this sociological profile on a reduced scale and Giannotti incarnated the forces of social ascension through educational merit in a typical ideal way. His school performance caught the attention of Gilles-Gaston Granger, professor of logic at the French mission in the Philosophy section, as well as João Cruz Costa, the Brazilian responsible for the area at FFCL-USP. He obtained a scholarship from the Brazilian government to study in Rennes and Paris. From there, Giannotti confessed to Cruz Costa, in private correspondence: “I adopted a motto: to study modern Germans in the French way. Let’s see what will happen. After all, our bearded man was German (Jewish) and we are still going to read him in the original” (Giannotti 1957). By “bearded,” he was referring to Marx, and “in the French way,” to the method of “structural reading of the text.” This reading technique had been developed by Martial Guéroult (1891–1976) and introduced at FFCL-USP by Jean Maugué.

Giannotti was influenced by his French internship when he wrote that letter. In addition to his fascination with material conditions (such as libraries and their collections) and the pace of work of the French, he was exposed to intellectual routines alien to the Brazilian environment. Giannotti aimed to modify it, importing from France new reading practices: (a) “reading the authors in the original” (and not in translations); (b) using the “method of structural reading of texts”; and (c) translating them from the original and commenting on them as a propaedeutic exercise in preparing a doctoral thesis (Giannotti 1957). On his return, among other initiatives in this direction, he assembled his two close friends to read Marx: the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso (1931–) and the historian Fernando Antônio Novais (1933–).

Giannotti established the reading rules followed by his circle and published them twice (Giannotti 1960; 1962). He prescribed a “structural analysis … in order to extract from the work itself the methodological processes that led to its realization,” and, for that, he established three steps: 1) “to subordinate the book to the same technique of interpretation of philosophical texts”; 2) to go “patiently in search of the intentions that led the philosopher to structure the text in a given way”; and 3) to “carefully demarcate the variations in the meaning of the terms used, trying to relate them to the new contexts in which they were inserted” (Giannotti 1960, 63).

However, two methodological rules were problematic for the “seminarians.”³ On the one hand, reading in the author’s mother tongue was impossible as many did not have command of the German language. On the other hand, the reading method was prescribed exclusively for “good authors” and “classics.” According to Maugüé: “Reading should be a rule of life for the student. They should naturally read only good authors. It is safer to read those that time has already consecrated. Philosophy begins with a knowledge of the classics.” (Maugüé 1935, 12)

As for the linguistic deficiency, the solution consisted of inviting people who were fluent in German. Hence the entry of Roberto Schwarz (1938-) and Paul Singer (1932–2018) into the small circle. These were two USP students with outstanding academic performance from Austrian families who had recently migrated to Brazil and who had “impeccable” German acquired at home (Rodrigues 2018). This is how the circle was reconfigured, according to the narrow limits of the skills needed for collective reading. Nonreaders or those not fluent in German read Capital in Spanish, French, and English. Subsequently, they were clarified by comparisons with the original, made by those fluent in Marx’s mother tongue. One has an idea of the seriousness of the issue when one finds in Giannotti’s missive to Cruz Costa: “I’m feeling dumb as hell, because studying a language is the stupidest job in the world” (Giannotti 1958). Capital, translated directly and completely from German into Portuguese, was only first published in 1968.

The group disobeyed the rule according to which the “structural method” should be applied to authors that “time has already consecrated.” Marx was not consecrated: his work was unfinished and did not correspond to the conception of a “closed philosophical system,” such as that of Descartes, for example, analyzed by the mentor of the method, Guéroult (Arantes 1994). Yet Giannotti took a stand in favor of it: Marx’s Capital demands “the same conversion to text that every philosophical work of importance claims” (Giannotti 1960, 63).

The group strictly followed these reading rules between 1958 and 1964. Meetings took place fortnightly, alternating among members who focused on determined excerpts from Capital. Disobedience to the hierarchy of authors and method presupposed obedience to the methodical discipline of reading over a prolonged time period. This was a typical oxymoron of symbolic innovations and one of the cornerstones of the work of legitimizing Marx as a “classic.”

3. Among academics: a work of legitimation

For Marx’s work to be established as a “philosophical work of importance,” it would not be enough for the small circle to read it nor for Giannotti to publish his arguments about it. It was necessary to demonstrate the correctness of this position and to consolidate it socially. Not by chance, testimonies from the seminarians converge in stating that “doing [doctoral] theses that, in addition to being Marxist, were better than the others” was a huge “trial by fire” (Schwarz 2009). Why?

At the same time as the group’s meetings, all the seminarians were preparing doctoral theses. This title was the institutional prerequisite through which they could secure a stable teaching position at FFCL-USP. Therefore, the success of legitimizing Marx’s work depended on their own professional destinies. A single investment – that is, the structural reading of Marx’s text – weighed a double and simultaneous constraint: proving Marx’s value and building their careers. This double pressure made the transfer of the circle’s acquisitions of methods and concepts understandable to the academic disciplines from which they would extract their doctoral degrees.

Marx was read by seminarians within a constellation of authors and not in isolation. The group also read History and Class Consciousness by Georg Lukács – in addition to other less-mentioned authors. The repertoire and practice of reading allowed seminarians to inculcate in each other principles of appreciation and depreciation of common intellectual work, in addition to a certain “pattern of intention” (Baxandall 2006). Therefore, in all the theses that were defended, the same effort was registered: sustaining “Marxism as a method” and defining a “concrete totality” as an explanatory anchor of its objects. The perspective according to which the methods were of interest, and not the mechanical application of concepts or the classification framework, was also based on the idea that they did not originate from the Brazilian experience nor did they initially address its explanation (Schwarz 2009).

The conflictive and ritualistic dimension of the public defenses of doctoral theses was also crucial in the social sedimentation of the group’s positions. The “reading of Marx” became an intellectual resource exclusive to “seminarians.” Therefore, defending the theses implied submitting oneself to the judgment of peers, sometimes consecrated, who did not have the mastery of the repertoire mobilized by seminarians, and who, nevertheless, had the power of life and death over them. Their examination committees could either fail the thesis or prevent them from defending their thesis. Therefore, the thesis defense opposed the spiritual power of the postulants to the temporal power of established professors (Bourdieu 1984, 138) Thus, defending the respective thesis and Marx’s approach to achieve the doctorate, consisted of a symbolic anointing without which seminarians would not become doctors and could not rise to stable positions as professors of FFCL-USP. Moreover, Marx would not be raised to the same level that “all philosophical work of importance claims.” The incongruity between the “elevation” of the method and the “lowering” of Marx gradually disappeared with each successful doctoral thesis.

4. Anatomy of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s thesis: capitalism, slavery, and reading Capital

Sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso was the first seminarian to defend his doctoral thesis. To analyze it, it is necessary to briefly reconstruct the history of Brazilian sociology. At the beginning of the 1950s, Roger Bastide, a member of the French mission that founded FFCL-USP, chose Florestan Fernandes to work on the “Unesco Project,” and later to replace him in the chair of Sociology. This project consisted of a set of studies commissioned by Unesco on race relations, carried out in the northeast and southeast regions of the country. Unesco assumed that the eradication of anti-Semitism would benefit from the study of experiences of “racial democracy,” as it believed Brazil to be. Fernandes disproved this idea, demonstrating that racial prejudice remained in the country and assessing that it was necessary to investigate other regions of Brazil (Maio 1997).

In 1954, he assumed the chair and invited former students who had worked on the “Unesco Project” to continue the research. Among them was Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who was assigned the task of replicating the research on race relations in the south of the country, where there had been strong European immigration (German, Italian, and Polish), little use of slave labor, and yet a region where racial prejudice still prevailed (Cardoso and Ianni 1960).

This should have been the subject of his thesis. However, between its conception (1954) and its defense (1961), it gradually changed. The sociologist started with contemporary race relations but finally focused on the (historical) relations between modern slavery and the formation of industrial capitalism. This ambivalence is evident in the switch of the title of the thesis, “Formation and disintegration of the caste society: the black man in the slave order of Rio Grande do Sul,” which was published in book form as Capitalism and slavery in Southern Brazil. To clear this confusion up, as he was harshly questioned by the thesis committee, he added the following to the book jacket:

the leitmotif is the analysis of the relationship between the capitalist system and the servile organization of labour. The author shows that slavery was, at the same time, the possible resource for the southern economy to integrate into the capitalist export market and the fundamental obstacle to the development of modern forms of capitalism in the Rio Grande do Sul economy of the past. (Cardoso 1962)

The twist was due to the reading done with his friends at the “Marx Seminar” during the preparation of his thesis. The problem of the correlations between modern slavery and industrial capitalism was constructed collectively and all the seminarians engaged with it. Understanding that industrial capitalism presupposed a free labor market, labor should be remunerated for the circulation and realization of value. However, slave labor was unpaid, and the slave (not his labor) was a commodity. How to explain the resurgence of slavery, an anti-capitalist labor regime, between the 15th and 18th centuries, precisely during the feudal-capitalist transition?

The seminarians proposed an articulated conception of the “colonial system” – that is, the relations between the dynamic center of the world economy (the European metropoles, not just Portugal/Spain, but their relationship among them and with the other European countries) and the occupied, populated, and exploited territories (not just the Americas, but also Africa and Asia). In particular, they proposed investigating how the “colonial system” regulated the production and unequal appropriation of economic surplus of one region over another.

The references underpinning this perspective were historiographical and theoretical. Inspired by Lukacs’ idea of “concrete totality,” they rejected the idea of only analyzing colonization country by country, colony by colony (something that, at the time, led to the view that there was no causal link between capitalism and slavery, since the former was consolidated in the eighteenth century in England, and the latter in the American colonies in the sixteenth century). In addition, they questioned the debate on the feudal-capitalist transition, which mobilized English and Caribbean historiography: the group maintained that there were only two “modes of production” conceptualized in Karl Marx’s work: “feudalism” and “capitalism.” However, they felt that Marx lacked a perspective on the history of modern slavery in the colonies and the role it played in the primitive accumulation of capital that made the English industrial revolution possible (Novais 1974).⁴

This was the research problem shared by the seminarians. Within it, Cardoso reconstructed the formation and disintegration of the “slave society” in the south of the country and argued that slavery integrated this region into the (mercantile) capitalism of the modern era. He then tried to explain its outcome, putting forward the idea that once a certain stage of capitalist development had passed, slavery began to block the development of capitalism in the region.

Cardoso inaugurated a practice that became one of the principles of appreciation of intellectual work among Brazilian academic Marxists: the “theoretical-methodological introduction” to the thesis, the content of which is presented below. He stated:

The totalizing perspective has, therefore, in the dialectical interpretation, a heuristic intention. Certainly, also in other forms of sociological explanation, the notion of totality is resorted to, and, in some of them, this is done with explanatory and not merely descriptive purposes. However, the problem does not lie in knowing whether the dialectic, such as the functionalist interpretation or the “structuralist” approach, etc., uses the notion of whole, but rather in determining how, that is, according to what methodological requirements and with what cognitive intentions they construct – and the totalities in the different forms of interpretation. As the objective of the present discussion is restricted to the characterization of the totalizing procedure in dialectical interpretation, the analysis will be limited to the comparison of this procedure with another different interpretation technique, to highlight the peculiarity of this way of conceiving and theoretically explaining social reality. (Cardoso 1962, 11)

It was about defining one’s theoretical-methodological position, no longer about vaguely alluding to an author as the study group’s academic predecessors had done.⁵

However, this comparison lent itself to decrying the impotence of other sociological currents – structuralism and functionalism, notably – to do the same. In this introduction, Fernando Henrique Cardoso did not discuss the dialectical method. The young sociologist defended its superiority in sociological analysis to the detriment of structuralist and functionalist currents, as well as its exclusivity and “purity”: according to him, one was either a functionalist, a structuralist, or a dialectical materialist. The last choice was better and superior because it explained what the others ignored (Cardoso 1962, 19).

Cardoso wrote this “introduction” because of a theoretical dispute with Fernandes. A decade earlier, the latter had already dealt with the most appropriate sociological themes and domains for the use of Marx, Durkheim, and Weber, postulating that the theoretical choice would depend on the subjects and processes analyzed. In this sense, the idea of the “superiority” of one author over another, as formulated by Cardoso, made no sense. Indeed, Cardoso’s introduction stated that Fernandes was eclectic, and, despite not being politically conservative, he was not a Marxist (Cardoso 1962, 13).

The topography of the theoretical space of Cardoso’s introduction symbolically inverts the objective hierarchy to which he was subjected. Cardoso constructed a downgraded position for Fernandes (who was institutionally superior) and an upper position for the seminar (which was institutionally inferior). Faced with such a “theoretical introduction,” Fernandes, as supervisor, refused Cardoso’s thesis. The latter, in turn, threatened to defend it with a competitor of the sociologist, forcing him to back down.

To make Cardoso’s motivations intelligible, we must recover the state of the intellectual field at the time. Born in 1931, in Rio de Janeiro, into a military family with intense political involvement, from an early age he conceived of himself in positions of command and prominence. He stood out among Fernandes’ modest team for having a car, speaking French fluently, and having the best intellectual performance of all. In this team, he took on the role of institutional relations liaison (raising funds from philanthropic businessmen and negotiating positions with the rectory), which presupposed the skills he had gained from his domestic socialization among the ruling elites. However, a division of tasks with opposing and excluding attributes crystallized: while Fernandes was recognized for his monopoly of scientific capital, Cardoso was deprived of it, and gradually came to be seen as someone with institutional capital, contacts, and a support network (Bourdieu 1984, 138–140). The incompatibility between the ambitions instilled by his social origin and his intellectually subordinate position was a force at the root of the drive against Fernandes’ monopoly of theoretical capital. Considering that, at that time, there was no standardization of the discursive procedures of a “thesis,” his “introduction” was an opportunity, created by himself, to prove that he possessed exactly the specific capital that he socially seemed to lack.

5. We can only explain by comparing: “Group 2” and the “Brasilia group” (1963–1969)

The collective and philosophical reading of “Group 1”⁶ increasingly defined the legitimate reading of Marx, and those individuals without it suffered a disadvantage in the intellectual field. “Group 1” involuntarily produced a “reading capital of Capital”: a differential resource, coveted by many, with which some were gifted and others were not (Bourdieu 1984).⁷ An unequivocal indication of this was the subsequent multiplication of Capital reading circles with purposes, organization, and reading methods identical to those of the “seminar” after the first doctoral thesis defenses.

In 1963, two other reading circles of Capital were formed: one at the same FFCL/USP as “Group 1,” and the other at the University of Brasilia (UNB), which was created in 1962 with the transfer of the country’s political capital from Rio de Janeiro to this city.

At FFCL/USP, Schwarz and Ruy Fausto, in a similar way to “Group 1,” brought together immigrants and the rising middle classes for a weekly philosophical reading of around 50 pages of Capital (Sader 1998). However, unlike “Group 1,” it was open to women and party activists. In addition, the members of “Group 2” were on average 10 years younger than those of the first group.

Exploring these differences between the groups allows us to highlight some explanatory factors. Since the seminarians were socially older, they were under the institutional constraints of marriage (they were married and had children) and profession (defending a thesis was an obligation). The second circle brought together individuals in a state of social indeterminacy, i.e. unmarried, childless, and without clear professional commitments. This explains the caution of the seminarians, who ended their meetings at the advent of the military coup in 1964, as well as the “radicalization” of “Group 2,” who, after 1964, became involved in the armed struggle and started publishing the journal Teoria e Prática (TP) (interrupted by police repression in 1968). By 1969, almost all of them were underground or in exile (Rodrigues 2018) – which also differentiated the two groups, since the seminarians secured their positions, whether in FFCL/USP itself or in the research centers funded by the Ford Foundation.

Meanwhile, in Brasilia, Theotônio dos Santos, Vânia Bambirra, Ruy Mauro Marini, and André Gunder Frank organized a seminar on reading Capital. The first three established links at the preparatory meetings for the founding of the Revolutionary Marxist-Political Workers’ Organization (ORM-POLOP), which took place in 1961 in Rio de Janeiro. POLOP brought together small dissident groups from the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), critical of the thesis that Brazil had to go through the “phase of the bourgeois revolution” before achieving the communist revolution. POLOP denied: (a) the stages theory of the “bourgeois phase,” and (b) its corollary, the “strategic” alliance with the “national bourgeoisie” (Seabra 2016).

Economist Paul Singer, the only political activist in “Group 1” and a member of “Group 2,” was a member of POLOP, where he met Santos, Bambirra, and Marini. He suggested the philosophical reading model of Capital to the three of them and they reproduced it at UNB with Andre Gunder Frank, a newly hired German professor, at the invitation of Darcy Ribeiro. This was the origin of the “Brasilia group,” whose meetings did not last even a year, because in 1964 they went underground due to their militancy in POLOP. The four met again around 1966 in Santiago de Chile. In that city, they published the works that became known as the “Marxist theory of dependency” (TMD).

It is also worth highlighting another comparative point with “Group 1.” Marginality in relation to state policy marked the São Paulo university experience because for its staff studies were the only alternative. Thus, in São Paulo, competition within the university was crucial in determining the positions taken by the “seminarians” regarding Marxism. The opposite occurred at the universities in the country’s political capitals – Brasília and Rio de Janeiro (Bomeny 2016; Miceli 2001; Sá Motta 2014). Thus, at UNB, Marx’s readers were urged on by party competition (i.e. against the theses and strategies of the PCB) and not by the university. This factor had an impact on intellectual production. If we consider that the bibliography that analyzes it is correct in insisting that the substance of the TMD was already found in the programmatic documents of POLOP against the PCB (Seabra 2016; Kay 2021), we can infer that their reading did not have implications equivalent to those observed in the experience of the “seminarians.”⁸

6. Among communists

The “structural reading of the text” did not only establish competition between academics. It was also about opposing political party activists, notably those of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), founded in 1922 as a section of the Communist International (IC). Until the beginning of the 1950s, its leaders, its bases, and its supporters monopolized, according to the logic of their respective political tasks, the selective importation of texts by Marx and their reading, editing, and uses.

The first mentions of Marx and Engels in Brazil date back to the end of the nineteenth century in newspapers, and until the foundation of the PCB, it was common for moral attributes associated with the figure of Karl Marx to have more relevance than his ideas. Later, several editors who sympathized with the PCB published manuals and collections with excerpts from texts by political leaders, both from international communists and from the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR). The closer the editors were to the PCB, the more inclined they were to edit under the influence of the USSR – both through the selection of texts and the acquisition of their translations from Spanish, a sister language that was considered easier to translate into the Portuguese language. Mostly, the texts were translated into Portuguese not directly from German and Russian, but mainly from French and Spanish (Hobsbawm 1983b). These editing and translation modalities corresponded to the crucial dynamo of the action of the political sphere: to increase the number of communist activists and their sympathizers. To that end, it seemed reasonable to circulate texts such as The Communist Manifesto and The Eighteenth Brumaire. They corresponded to the political peaks of the militancy of these agents, and also of Marx’s own activity (Hobsbawn 1983).

The intellectual uses of Marx’s work by PCB leaders varied, depending on the Brazilian political situation: when it was not illegal and they could run for elections, it was about establishing the stage of the communist revolution they were in and negotiating strategic alliances with hitherto “class enemies.” Furthermore, it was also necessary to corroborate, at least until the 20th Congress of 1956, the official interpretation of the USSR, which considered third-world countries still unprepared for the communist revolution. In this way, the divergences between party intellectuals, regarding the nature and phase of capitalist development, were linked to the strategies they defended to achieve the “socialist revolution.” And, for that, it was necessary to articulate the “global” analysis (for which the USSR offered a framework) with the “local” one (not always corresponding to it).

The contrast between what is henceforth called partisan Marxism and university Marxism was evident. While the agents of partisan Marxism were driven by the logic of openness and expansion of numbers, those of the university were driven by social closure. The former aimed at increasing their compagnons de route, while the latter established tolls for entry and permanence in their circuit – such as the acceptance of reading rules, work discipline, and possession of language skills. If for the former the texts were resources for political dissemination, the latter were only interested in reading them. If partisan Marxism privileged the political fraction of Marx’s work, which could be placed at the service of propaganda, academics considered it inferior to Capital, the reading of which was its exclusive asset. In short, academic Marxism verticalized hierarchically what partisan Marxism socialized horizontally.

From the point of view of appropriating Marx for analyses, the contrast was also evident. The communists were guided by their duty to diagnose the present and outline the correct strategy for the revolution, a task that required them to establish what was the “mode of production” in force during the Portuguese colonization of Brazil and to which stage of capitalist development the historical present corresponded. Academics were interested in the method of “historical materialism.”

The competition between academic and partisan Marxism followed a different logic from that established between academic peers. The seminarians depended on the latter to win titles and to legitimize Marx but dispensed with any kind of recognition of their communist rivals. On the contrary, the distance in relation to them reinforced their legitimacy among academics. The “structural reading of the text” presupposed the “conversion of the author,” and, simultaneously, the rejection of the political-partisan activity carried out in his name.

Once more, in the dynamics of importing Marx’s work, broader aspects of social space were at stake. The conduct of the “Marx seminar” embodied the dynamic opposition between the cultural systems of the two cities. In São Paulo, the centrality of FFCL-USP and the regulation of intra-peer activities; in Rio de Janeiro, the political capital of the country, the structure of opportunities within the state, the institutions that grouped applicants to the bureaucracy and advisory services, enticing and co-opting intellectuals situated in a vast spectrum of ideological positions – ranging from liberalism to communism (Miceli 2001).

In this way, the inverted signs of the urban and institutional scenario animated the principles of opposition between, on the one hand, university Marxism and, on the other, partisan Marxism. This is how an academic reader from São Paulo formulated them:

[Marxism] had existed as an article of faith of the Communist Party … it was a doctrinaire presence … drunk in manuals … the Stalinist yardstick [and] the revolutionary and popular option itself … had contributed to confining him to a precarious intellectual universe, far removed from the normality of studies … our school … ambitious and rustic … [had] the scientific standard as its flag, as opposed to ideology. In addition, it is possible that the “pure” Marxist bet, focused on the autonomous dynamics of the class struggle, had more verisimilitude in the context of São Paulo capitalism. Whereas in Rio, with the loopholes and funds offered to the left by the promiscuity of national-populism, there was no way to say no to the state … (Schwarz 1999, emphases added)

This is how a communist from Rio de Janeiro formulated it:

[Schwarz makes] an apology for the university corpus as a superior instance capable of providing the scientific foundations of a revolutionary theory … . Nothing less Marxist … Only with so-called Western Marxism … did university lucubrations become important … what would those aspiring exegetes of Marx have assimilated from the theory of capital? … The seminar intended, as it were, to isolate theoretical elaboration in a practicalist microbe-proof bell … the poor militants … did not have the necessary intellectual level, and so it was up to university cultural circles to replace them in the task of producing theory … fat and monotonous São Paulo nonsense. (Werncek de Castro 1996, emphases added)

On the one hand, Schwarz and the defense of reading and nonpartisan institutional rules and, on the other, Moacir Werneck de Castro (1915-2010), a journalist, affiliated with the PCB between 1947 and 1956, for whom the universe of São Paulo seemed dwarfed by the challenges that effective political practice imposed. While Schwarz disqualifies the communists for their “doctrinaire faith,” Werneck de Castro questions the “purity” of university students: “nothing less Marxist.” The legitimacy of the Marxism of one group consisted in distorting it according to the parameters of the other. Here was the genesis of a structural opposition in the modalities of importing Karl Marx to Brazil. On the one hand, the pole with a university inclination, for which the legitimate guarantee of “being a Marxist” resided in the knowledge of the text and, on the other, the partisan, which defined it by political commitment.

7. Two defeats and the reconfiguration of the social space of Marx’s readers (1969–2014)

In 1964, a military coup established a dictatorial regime in the country that lasted for two decades and the two poles in the importation of Marx’s work were defeated in the dynamics of competitions specific to their spaces. This section characterizes the consequent reconfiguration of their positions, based on the eventual fading of the split described above.

The PCB and left-wing organizations fragmented into numerous groups, segmented according to different strategies and programs of resistance and confrontation with authoritarianism. Some acted in the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), a party authorized by the authoritarian regime to oppose it while others joined the clandestine armed struggle. If there were exiles within these two strands, most of those who opted for the latter were persecuted, tortured, and killed. The survivors returned to the public scene in the early 1980s, with the “slow, gradual and sure” redemocratization.

The regime censored the content of artistic and intellectual production. However, it also favored the expansion of higher education, science, and the cultural market. This contradiction conditioned the possibilities of maintaining the academic readings of Marx and, subsequently, the shelter of communists in universities. To understand this, the social sciences in the period are characterized below.

Some representatives of university Marxism were compulsorily retired and prevented from teaching – especially those in the “Brasilia group.” However, as a whole, the social sciences benefited institutionally from the educational policies of the authoritarian regime, and, economically, from US philanthropy. At that time, master’s and doctoral degrees were issued by postgraduate programs isolated from each other without a state body that regulated them. The authoritarian regime centralized them, imposing common rules of operation, evaluation, and financing – carried out by two federal bodies: the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) and the Coordination for the Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (Capes).

This new institutional order received economic inputs from the Ford Foundation (FF). It acted according to the general strategy of the cultural Cold War, in the phase of Cuba’s alignment with the USSR. For this reason, in line with the US State Department, it shifted its resources from Eastern Europe to Latin America. In this continent, it competed with European theories (Marxism, among them) that put American-style empirical research in the background (notably, in the “Behavioral Sciences”) (Calandra 2011). Thus, it aimed to produce a non-Marxist “new left,” and, therefore, financed the doctoral studies of students, notably in political science and economics, with radical political positions (Rodrigues 2020).

The FF established a Brazilian office in 1962 and started granting two types of aid: (a) scholarships for carrying out doctorates in the USA and (b) foundational funding for the creation of autonomous research centers in the country, establishing in the contract that their scholarship fellows should work with them when they returned to Brazil. The institutions most benefited from this patronage were the Graduate Program, linked to the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Minas Gerais; the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), and the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (CEBRAP) in São Paulo.

The combination of the institutional reorganization of the authoritarian regime and the funding of the FF structured the higher education and research system, segmented into two diametrically opposed profiles. On the one hand, the universities, dependent on the public budget, cultivated teaching and research, motivated by individual ambitions, on the great theories of European origin. On the other hand, the new autonomous research centers maintained by the FF focused on American-style quantitative and empirical investigation techniques that were managed by research teams (Miceli 1990, 22). The model of excellence of the most competitive agents consisted of being an FF scholarship holder, completing a doctorate in the USA, becoming a researcher and leading one of the aforementioned autonomous centers.

At the turn of the 1980s, the “Ford mafia,” that is, its former fellows, entered the evaluation committees of the FF itself, as well as those of the Brazilian government through Capes and CNPq.⁹ As mentioned before, these bodies regulated, evaluated, and financed higher education and research on behalf of the Brazilian state. Therefore, by becoming members of its committees, they began to direct the system and managed to impose the model of excellence of their generational fraction on their younger peers (Rodrigues, Hey 2017).

Slowly, the achievements linked to the “reading of Capital” became obsolete and Marx’s readers were being relegated to the university pole of the system, materially precarious and symbolically dominated. The first academic readers of Marx were able to consecrate themselves through the exclusive attribute of “philosophical reading.” However, the same would not be possible in the 1980s. The value of that reading was limited to the dialogue between Marxists.

The dismantling of the PCB and leftist organizations by the authoritarian regime and the victory of the “new elite” of the social sciences were equivalent defeats. The homology of positions between university and party Marxism derived from this development: the first group was defeated by the “Ford mafia” and the second by the annihilation perpetuated by the authoritarian regime. Defeated and dominated in their own respective spaces, it is not surprising that the rivalry between them faded and alliances that were once unthinkable were established.

The university pole, characterized above, became porous to the presence of several followers of Marx, especially those partially converted to the principles of university studies when they returned from exile and tried to break with their communist past. One can have an idea of the relevance of this by noting that three of the most relevant Marxist authors in the country today present exactly this trajectory of structural reading and then career reconversion: Carlos Nelson Coutinho, José Paulo Netto, and Leandro Konder.

Neither they nor Marx’s readers with a strict university origin corresponded to the intellectual model of the “Ford mafia” in the genesis of the regulation still in force within the national system of higher education and research in the country. In the current scenario, “Marxists” are numerous and active in universities, but they do not dispute or occupy management positions in regulatory, evaluation, and financing bodies. The fading of the rivalry between the two types of Marx’s readers and the establishment of a complex interdependence between both are valid for maintaining the homology of their dominated and less prestigious positions.¹⁰

8. Conclusions

The characterization of the first university reading circle of Capital in Brazil allowed three main interpretations. First, the main field effect promoted by the novelty of this reading practice: the social production of a specific capital (in a Bourdieusian sense), the reading capital of Capital, concomitant with the transformation of Marx into a “classic” author.

Second, the seminarians’ actions and reading were strictly oriented towards and for the intellectual field. In this way, they strove to write theses, to challenge the research agenda of their disciplines, from which their scientific rivalries and alliances were nourished. The case of the rivalry between Cardoso and Fernandes, in the field of sociology, is exemplary of both the effects of socio-economic origin on competitive strategies and the correlation between the stage of professional careers and the theoretical formulations of the agents. If this is commonplace in studies on scholarly generations, it remains unusual for the approach to Marxist intellectuals, who present themselves as if they are beyond the sociological analysis of their own trajectories of social decline and ascent.

Third, although the seminarians’ reading and actions were not oriented toward the party-political field, the latter did not pass unscathed. There were alternating bouts of rivalry and complicity between those inclined toward the political and academic fields. The historical turnaround and their respective defeats in 1964 promoted reconfigurations in the social space of Marx’s readers, transforming former adversaries into allies.

This article thus corroborates the critical perspective on the “idealism of a history of ideas and the mythology of fantasy affiliations” (Ymonet 1984, 3), which results in judgments about “fidelity” or “betrayal” of the purity of Marxism (Tarcus 2007). After all, it is based on a consistent sociological perspective according to which ideas and theoretical positions “are explained above all by the position of each intellectual within their professional space” – and not the other way around (Sapiro and Matonti 2009, 5).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This research project was funded by Fapesp, Capes, and CNPq, Brazilian research funding agencies, and the Federal University of São Carlos (UFSCar) to which I am grateful.

Notes on contributors

Lidiane Soares Rodrigues

Lidiane Soares Rodrigues, Associate professor at the Federal University of ABC (UFABC). PhD in History from the University of São Paulo.

Notes

1 Studies on the Brazilian reception of Marx are no exception to this. One of the most widespread books on this topic states that “dialectics and Marx's thought were only partially understood in Brazil” and because of this the communists were defeated politically (Konder 2009, 15). This article follows the criticisms addressing this “Marxist idealistic” approach offered by Gouarné (2013); Tarcus (2007); Ymonet (1984); Colliot-Thélène (1984); Hobsbawn (1983); Bourdieu (1982).

2 Obviously, value judgments of this type will be highlighted in this article as native classifying categories. The above term, “greatest text” is used in the opening biographical outline of Marx in a collection of texts organized by José Arthur Giannotti on the occasion of the centenary of Karl Marx (Giannotti 1985, XVI).

3 The sociology of religion and culture, as formulated by Bourdieu (1971), inspires this analysis. So, “seminarians” is adopted to emphasize the practice of ascetic reading (instead of “Marxist,” an unstable category whose definition depends on the outcome of symbolic disputes under my own analysis).

4 For this reason, none of the seminarians based their historical interpretations on the "classification" of the “mode of production” in the Iberian colonies from the 15th to the 18th centuries.

5 The rare Brazilian academic readers of Marx who preceded them cited Marx sporadically, alluding to one idea or another, yet these were secondary to the theoretical frameworks established by the disciplinary tradition. An illustrative example of this can be found in the way in which Candido (Schwarz's thesis advisor) alluded to Marx in his thesis, defended in 1954: “I owe to Marx’s work the awareness of the importance of livelihoods as a dynamic factor” (Candido 1975, 11).

6 These are native categories: “Group 1” and “Group 2” or “theoretical-practical” (found in Sola 1993) and “Brasilia group” or “Group of 4” (found in Kay 2021).

7 There was also a “schooling” (Elias 1982) of Marx's work: discussion protocols were established prior to reading and appropriating it, engendering the demand for propaedeutic texts by Marx and Marxist sociology, Lukacs and comments on translation choices, among other editorial apparatuses once unimaginable. Unfortunately, it is impossible to demonstrate here in detail these effects on the publishing world.

8 The group from Brasilia was helped by Fernando Henrique Cardoso to establish themselves professionally in Chile – where the sociologist stayed between 1964 and 1967. They stand out as dependentistas and the Brazilian segment was transported to Chile. Cardoso, who came from the autonomous pole, was based at ILPES (Latin American Institute for Economic and Social Planning) and was the most famous representative of “reformist” dependentismo. The Brasilia group, coming from the less autonomous pole, was based at CESO (Center for Socio-Economic Studies, Universidad de Chile/UC) and was the most famous representative of “revolutionary” dependentismo (Rodrigues, 2023). However, analyzing this scenario would take away from the focus of this article.

9 The term “Ford mafia” was used by an interviewee in July 2021 whose anonymity is maintained.

10 The statements in this paragraph are based on a survey carried out with 988 self-designated Marxist individuals working in Brazilian universities. For preliminary numbers, see Rodrigues (2018; 2019).