The Ex-Worker

In Brazil, a three-way contest is unfolding between the far right in the streets, the institutional electoral left in the halls of power, and autonomous radical movements caught between them. When authoritarian president Jair Bolsonaro was narrowly defeated at the polls in October, a popular right-wing movement emerged to contest the election results, culminating in a protest in which Bolsonaro supporters stormed government buildings in the capital of Brasilia. In this episode, we share two articles in which Brazilian anarchists analyze these developments: the first, published in October shortly after the election, assesses the limits of electoral strategies as pathways to social transformation or checks to fascist power; the second, published just after the right-wing attack on government buildings in January, analyzes the similarities and differences between the events in the US and in Brazil, and argues for the urgent necessity of autonomous direct action to counter both the limits of the left and the thre