III Dialogues

The golden age of Soviet psychology in the mirror of contemporary Marxist psychology in Brazil

A quote from a classic Brazilian psychologist synthesizes the pathos of Marxism in our country. As in the Soviet Union, there has been a history of striving for liberty and progress facing the hardships of extreme inequality:

What does social progress ultimately consist of? In the development of intelligence. by continually striving to make the best use of the resources of nature from which we derive livelihood, and in the sharpening of altruistic sentiments, which make life ever smoother, allowing greater cordiality among men, a perfect solidarity, a greater interest in common happiness, a growing horror of injustice and iniquity.

Bomfim (1903/2008, p. 25)

This chapter presents a brief - and therefore necessarily personal - history of psychology' and Marxism in Brazil. Our text relies on books, thesis and other historiographical materials, as well as an original research in the CNPQ’s national directory of research groups. Our priority is the legacy of Lev Semionovich Vygotsky and his co-workers as the most popular authors in national Marxist psychology. In order to contextualize it, we resort to historiographical research on the political history of the country, pointing to the creation of the first popular Communist organizations and their developments in the Brazilian intellectual life, which, despite their wealth, were late in exerting an impact on psychology as a whole science and profession. The first initiatives to constitute a Marxist psychology arose only in the 1970s, bearing the hallmarks of the civil-military dictatorship and the subsequent process of redemocratization. As a way to follow the legacy of Vygotsky and his co-workers back to the 1970s—1980s to a sketch of their development to our days, we mention the researchers who first approached their psychology, as well as their main topics, their research groups and their institutions. Keeping in mind tlie diversity of the leftist spectrum in which this early approximation occurred, we also mention the first publishing of the most influential books by Vygotsky and his co-workers in Brazil.

Brazil and Marxism

Portugal has made Brazil an agro-exporting colony whose independence was not because of popular struggles, but an agreement established within the Portuguese Crown itself. Dom Pedro I, the ruling prince of the House of Braganza, declared independence for the Colony in 1822 (in a cunning blow to popular interests that transferred the metropolis’ debts to the new independent country) and abdicated the throne in favor of his son, D. Pedro II in 1831, subsequently returning to Portugal. The abolition of slavery occurred only in 1888, and the Proclamation of the Republic in 1889 (Fausto & Fausto 2014).

Through a new coup d’etat, this time by military and conservative means, the First Republic began, whose economic hegemony shifted from the state of Rio de Janeiro to that of Sao Paulo and Minas Gerais. The first, a major cotfee producer; the second, a milk and dairy producer. Hence, the curious nickname attributed to the First Phase of the Republican era: “Coffee-with-Milk Republic”. Though inspired by positivism, this Republic did very little for the modernization of the country, ending in 1930 with astronomical indices of illiteracy in the general population. The ruling elite kept the structure of the social classes virtually intact, dealing with European liberalism in the same way as the imperial government had. The equality and freedom of all before the law, supposed pillars of the republic, they were of no use in the face of the culture of favor, familism and authoritarianism that pervaded the relations between state, capital and labor (Martins, 2011). This basic conservatism took shape with the existence of eugenic policies, which took shape in the attempts to “whiten” the population through European immigration. While the masses of the mestizo population were destined for oblivion or state violence until the beginning of the twenty-first century, whites were reserved for wage labor in southern Brazil, in Sao Paulo’s coffee farms and in the nascent industries of the same state.

It is important to remember that the extreme levels of social inequality in the country have generated many popular struggles and revolts since the seventeenth century, especially the formation of numerous quilombos, subsequently destroyed by the forces of order. The massacre of the village of Canudos (1896—1897) by the Republican Army became a milestone of these struggles. However, the camp was based on the messianism and autonomous religiosity of the rural population, without being influenced by the proletarian European struggles, essentially composed of urban workforce. Similarly, Brazil had creative interpreters, who were original forms of thinking in tune with the needs of the majority of the population. Manoel Bomfim, whom we recognize at the beginning of the text, besides being a doctor, educator, politician and social scientist, was also one of the pioneers of scientific psychology, founding the first laboratory in the history of Brazilian psychology in 1906, with the assistance of George Dumas and equipment imported from Paris and Leipzig (Antunes, 2016). However, its legacy goes virtually unnoticed in the field of psycholog}'.

It was up to the Italian and Spanish immigrants, who became wage earners in the industries of Sao Paulo City, to form the first anarchist circles in Brazilian history, organizing the working class in the First Republic. Moraes Filho (2003) indicates that the name of Marx, father of “German materialism”, had been mentioned in the Brazilian press since the year of the Paris Commune (1871), but not infrequently he is confused with Comte, Spencer and positivism. The first socialist circle dates from 1889, and the first publications are from the 1890s. A significant wave of strike manifestations took place between 1917 and 1919, with the founding of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) in 1922, in parallel with the creation of several other Communist parties in Latin America. Indeed, this was the foundational decade of Marxism in the subcontinent. However, Moraes Filho states, “it was only after 1930 that Marx’s work really began to spread in Brazil, both in foreign languages and in translations, which multiplied” (p. 51, our transl.).

Like so many other national leaderships of the Communist parties, the PCB enthusiastically Stalinizes over the 1930s, a wave that ebbs from the Soviet thaw. However, Moraes Filho (2003) notes that the text “On the principles of Leninism” (1924) remained in use until at least the late 1960s, with Stalin hailed as an example of firmness even by the 1968 movements. Marxism-Leninism survived at least until 1975, when Venezuelan Ludovico Silva wrote an Anti-Manual para uso de Marxistas, Marxologos y Marxianos (Netto, 2012). According to the same author, some leaders were scorched by the alignment with the Marxism of the III International, in a national context in which Trotskyism was politically insignificant in organizational terms, despite making noise at the ideological level.

Nevertheless, the revolution most celebrated by the Latin American left soon became the Cuban Revolution (1959), with its own trajectory of defiance of US imperialism (Barao, 2003). Cuba brought hope against US predatory action, which had replaced the British Empire by fomenting dependent capitalism, with monocultures of exploitation, cultural subservience and atrocious dictatorships in the subcontinent, unconditionally backed by local elites. The criticism of imperialism and the native ruling classes became the tonic of Marxism in Latin America, which gained increasing diversity throughout the twentieth century. According to Netto (2012), from the 1930s onwards, “autochthonous publishing activities centered on Marxist literature and featuring national productions" (p. 6) multiplied more vigorously after 1956. Between the 1930s and 1960s, the Brazilian author Caio Prado Jr. (1907—1990) published seminal books on the historical specificity ofBrazil’s insertion in the world economy, whose counterpoint fell to Gramscian Nelson Wer-neck Sodre (1911—1999). According to Netto, social movements, universities and research institutes intervened in Marxist elaboration.

Netto (2012) goes on to describe how, in the early 1960s, the Frankfurtians, G. Lukács, Henri Lefebvre, Erich Fromm, Koger Garaudy, Jean-Paul Sartre, Louis Althusser, Bertold Brecht and Mikhail Bakhtin references in the Latin American debate. However, the most significant post-Stalinist contribution to Marxist thought and praxis would come with Liberation Theology, one of the main sources of Paulo Freire’s pedagogy' of emancipation (1921—1997), which in turn has repercussions in several subcontinent countries — inspiring the Liberation Psychology (psicología de la liberación) of Martín-Baró (1943-1989). This pedagogy managed the Popular Circles of Culture and the publication of the book Pedagogy of the Oppressed in 1970 by Paulo Freire, among many others, inspiring some timid initiatives related to Marxist social psychology' in Brazil in the same decade, despite being marked by' the spontaneity of ideas and practices. Following the military' coup of 1964, Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) of December 1968 heightened state violence, marking the 1970s as a decade of defeats to the left wing, from the Stalinists to the autonomists.

Torture and death had been trivialized in the basements of dictatorship. But from the middle of the decade, several facts contribute to the crisis of the military regime, which proposes a “slow, gradual and safe” opening in which the military themselves took control of the democratic transition (Chaui & Nogueira, 2007). Thus, establishing structural vices in the political system that is in serious trouble at its core to the present day', with the coup of 2016 and the recent election of Jair Bolsonaro — the captain of the dictatorship — in 2018. We now have to deal with how Marxist ideas developed in psychology'.