Brazil's Middle Class Growing

According to this report, issued yesterday in O Globo, Brazil's middle class is on the rise. According to the study cited in the article Brazil's "Classe B" (Brazil census and data measurements divide socio-economic standards into five classes; "Classe B" is the second 20% of income levels in Brazil), which is marked by a monthly income of 3,040 reais/month (US$1900/month) has swollen to almost 20 million people, or roughly 11% of society; home ownership among this group has grown nearly 80% in the last 5 years. The study cites the growth of personal as well as national incomes in Brazil under Lula's administration as the main reason for this growth. If the report is accurate, there are some truly encouraging things to be drawn from this, including people improving their class status, and consumer goods becoming more available to the populace (something I saw myself while in Brazil).

I actually was planning on writing about this beforehand, but Randy's comments in this thread merit some remarks, too. While I don't fully disagree, I don't fully agree, either, for a number of reasons. First, I never saw Lula as being the savior that many intellectuals and people from the left felt he would be when he was first elected in 2002 (and to be clear, I'm not accusing anybody I know in the US of having been like this). Too many people in Brazil turned on Lula when he didn't immediately launch a major revolution that solved Brazil's poverty issues immediately, which I found not only totally unfair, but completely unrealistic. While I wouldn't go quite so far as to say that poverty in Brazil is "intractible" (I feel that A) poverty probably can never be fully eliminated anywhere, just due to simple human nature to create inequalities; and B) (and rather paradoxically) I feel "intractible" suggests the current conditions can never be overcome, and I'm not willing to say that, either), it certainly faces such severe obstacles within society, that no president, Lula or anybody more radical (or counter-radical) could ever solve the problem of poverty in Brazil so quickly. It's ok to hope for important changes, and to even expect them, from Lula or other leftist leaders, but to expect that the extreme poverty in Brazil and, more importantly, social stigmas against the poor among the middle- and upper-classes could be eliminated under one president, strikes me as impractical. This is why I found the leftists and intellectuals' disillusion with Lula so frustrating when I was in Brazil; while he was and is certainly not perfect, the demands they were placing on him were so unrealistic as to be unachievable by anybody short of Jesus Christ himself, and even then, he'd have his hands full.

Secondly, I think this poll points again to how much the standard of living for people has improved during Lula's administration. Yes, it's just data on the 2nd-highest 20% of incomes in Brazil. Still, the fact that Classe B has grown so dramatically, and that access to consumption based not just on home ownership but on household goods has also increased, is promising, and does point to how much has been done in Brazil. Since Lula became Brazil's first "leftist" president since 1964, Brazil has seen unprecedented growth.

That said, I don't fully disagree with Randy, either. The report doesn't mention anything about Brazil's poorest, both in urban and rural settings, but it doesn't have to. Those people are still mired in poverty in a country with one of the greatest levels of economic inequality in the world. There are still plenty of landless, and plenty in the favelas, and any gains they may have made in the past few years are minor in the face of their situations.

However, I'm not quite willing to lump this on Lula, either, and not out of any particular partisanship. As I've said before, the problem runs far deeper within the social fabric, where poverty is treated as a criminal activity, and the poor little help or sympathy from the middle classes. In this atmosphere, the police can and do act not just with impunity, but with the tacit (and sometimes explicit) approval of wealthier elements of society and the media, garnering outrage and protest only when they torture and repress members of the middle class. Simply put, there is neither tolerance for nor acceptance of the poor and economically marginalized in Brazil. The fact that so many people have tried (and succeeded) to improve their class status alone hints at the social stigmas tied to being part of the lower classes. Like I said, while I wouldn't go so far as to say "intractible," the poverty issue in Brazil is indeed grim.

But again, I think this is where it is important to separate presidential politics and power from broader political and sociological processes. As Brazilian intellectuals failed to recognize, Lula, working within a presidential parliamentary system where white-collar politicians and much of the middle class (including many of my in-laws) irrationally hates him for having simply been a metal-worker, could only get so much done. Poverty is undeniably severe in Brazil, and police treatment of the poor, urban or rural, is abominable and unforgiveable, yet illicitly and explicitly approved of in Brazil.

When the time comes to evaluate Lula's administration, I suspect (though I may be wrong) there will be many areas where he will be legitimately deemed as a disappointment, if not a failure, particularly on environmental issues. However, I think that, at the end of the day, his administration has been nothing short of a major success on economic matters. That the poor are treated so brutally is not so much a symptom of Lula's failures as a symptom of the severe classism and racism that still pervade much of Brazilian society, issues which any president will be hard-pressed to solve by himself.