| Using a lens of historical materialism with a Gramscian understanding of hegemony, historic bloc and the state, I argue that President Fernando Henrique Cardoso implemented a model of development under the Washington Consensus that reproduced and accelerated Brazil's situation of dependency. I ask why Cardoso pursued a course of development in the 1990s that he had characterized as imperialist twenty years before, and why members of Brazil's capitalist class abandoned Cardoso's governing party in the presidential election of 2002 to ally themselves with Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and Brazil's subaltern classes. Specifically, I examine the shift in control of the most dynamic sectors of Brazil's industrial structure to the hands of transnational corporations. With their power to influence Brazil's industrial strategy badly eroded, domestic capitalists disenfranchised by Cardoso's development model, abandoned it and the Washington Consensus, fracturing the unity of Brazil's capitalist classes, creating a crisis of hegemony. |
