projects, including highway funding, school funding, and public transportation, as well as programs that care for the elderly, children, poor people, the disabled, the unemployed, and other people who need assistance. Overall, the basic idea is that, protecting its citizens and acting on behalf of the public good constitute core values of social democracy and strong social welfare states require participatory democracy.
In contrast, neoliberal state policies take a different view of the role of the state in promoting public well-being. As a philosophy, neoliberalism is grounded in the belief that markets, in and of themselves, are better able than governments to produce economic outcomes that are fair, sensible, and good for all. The state practices associated with neoliberalism differ dramatically from those of social welfare states. First, neoliberalism fosters the increased privatization of government programs and institutions like public schools, prisons, healthcare, transportation, and the military. Under the logic of neoliberal ideology, private firms that are accountable to market forces rather than democratic oversight of citizens can potentially provide less costly and more efficient services than government workers. Second, the logic of neoliberalism argues for the scaling back, and in some cases elimination of, the social welfare state. The safety net of government assistance to the poor, the unemployed, the disabled, the elderly, and the young is recast as wasteful spending characteristic of irresponsible government. Third, neoliberal logic claims that fewer economic regulations and more trade that is free of government constraints protect jobs. This freedom from environmental regulation and entities such as unions should produce greater profitability for some companies, which should lead to more jobs. Finally, neoliberalism posits a form of individualism that rejects the notion of the public good. By neoliberal logic, people have only themselves to blame for their problems: solving social problems comes down to the self-reliance of individuals (Cohen 2010; Harvey 2005).
The relationship between neoliberalism and social democracy has been contentious. Neoliberal philosophies have been used to launch sustained attacks on the public programs of social democracies that were put in place to address social inequality. The effects have been shrinking funding for public institutions of all sorts, including public schools, healthcare, housing, and transportation. The philosophy of neoliberalism predicted that such cuts would not foster social inequality, but that they might reduce it. Yet, since the 1980s, as the exponential growth within nations of both income and the wealth gap shows, the results of neoliberal policies are quite the opposite. Democratic states that pursued neoliberal policies identify big government not as a solution to social inequality, but as one of its causes. Following the trickle-down economics principle that claims that tax cuts for businesses and the wealthy in society stimulate business investment in the short term and benefit society at large in the long term, such policies want less government intrusion in the marketplace, on the assumption that neoliberal policies will reduce social inequality by growing the market and providing more opportunities for everyone. Global social inequality has grown in tandem with the weakening of the social democratic state.
Increasingly, many social democratic nation-states that try to remedy social inequality by adopting neoliberal economic policies face serious challenges, among them, the rise of far-right populism. On the one hand, refusing to implement policies that are informed by neoliberalism can make a state less competitive in the global marketplace. Making industries more competitive in the global marketplace via computer automation and artificial intelligence, deskilling, and job export increases the profitability of companies. Industry 4.0 is a name given to the current trend of automation and data exchange in manufacturing technologies. It includes cyber-physical systems, the Internet of Things, cloud computing, and cognitive computing. This will have an increasing impact on global economic competition between states and between cities. Yet, such policies can aggravate existing economic inequality, fanning the flames of right-wing populism by those who consider they are the ones left behind.
On the other hand, as we discuss in Chapter 5, implementing neoliberal public policies as the solution to inequality can foster social unrest. Economic development of the nation-state does not necessarily reduce economic inequality. Those same strategies eliminate jobs and suppress wages, leaving closed factories, unemployed workers, and the serious potential for social unrest in their wake. Brazil’s experiences in the wake of hosting the 2014 FIFA World Cup capture the tensions that distinguish a nation-state that aimed for a balance between social welfare policies and neoliberal aspirations. The money spent in preparation may have raised Brazil’s profile in the global arena, yet it simultaneously sparked massive social protest about cost overruns and corruption. Ironically, it also led to the emergence of a national far-right populist leader in the 2018 elections.
Intersectional analysis illuminates the differential effects of public policies on producing economic inequality of people of color, women, young people, rural residents, undocumented people, and differently abled people. Yet intersectionality’s focus on people’s lives provides space for alternative analyses of these same phenomena that do not stem from the worldviews of academic elites or government officials. Black people, women, poor people, LGBTQ people, ethnic and religious minorities, indigenous peoples, and people assigned to inferior castes and groups have never enjoyed the benefits of full citizenship and, as a result, they have less to lose and more to gain. People who bear the brunt of shrinking benefits from social welfare states or neoliberal marketplace policies may be more hopeful than their public officials about the possibilities of social democracy. Drawing inspiration from Pope Francis, they may also view growing economic inequality, as well as the social forces that cause it, as “the root of social evil,” yet refuse to sit passively watching it destroy their lives. Without hope of change, neither social protest nor social movements are possible.
The black women’s movement in Brazil
More than 1,000 black women and their allies attended the seventh annual meeting of Latinidades, the Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women’s festival in Brasilia. As the largest festival for black women in Latin America, the 2014 event was scheduled to coincide with the annual International Day of Black Latin American and Caribbean Women. Latinidades was no ordinary festival. Several decades of black women’s activism in Brazil had created the political, social, and artistic space for this annual festival that was devoted to the issues and needs of black women in Brazil specifically, as well as Afro-Latin and Afro-Caribbean women more generally.
In 1975 at the beginning of the United Nations (UN) Decade of Women, black women presented the Manifesto of Black Women at the Congress of Brazilian Women. The Manifesto called attention to how black women’s life experiences in jobs, families, and the economy were shaped by gender, race, and sexuality. During this Decade of Women, white feminists remained unwilling or unable to address black women’s concerns. Léila Gonzalez, Sueli Carneiro, and many other black feminist activists continued to push for black women’s issues. Their advocacy is all the more remarkable given that it occurred during the term of Brazil’s military government (1964–85) and that it preceded contemporary understandings of intersectionality.
Brazil’s national policy concerning race and democracy militated against such activism. Brazil officially claimed not to have “races,” a position that rests on the Brazilian government’s approach to racial statistics. Without racial categories, Brazil officially had neither “races” nor black people as a socially recognized “racial” group. Ironically, the myth of Brazilian national identity erased race in order to construct a philosophy of racial democracy, one where being Brazilian superseded other identities such as those of race. In essence, by erasing the political category of race, Brazil’s national discourse of racial democracy effectively eliminated language that might describe the racial inequalities that affected black Brazilian people’s lives. This erasure of “blackness” as a political category allowed discriminatory practices to occur in areas of education and employment against people of visible African descent because there were neither officially recognized terms for describing racial discrimination nor official remedies for it (Twine 1998). Brazil’s cultivated image of national identity posited that racism did not exist and also that color lacks meaning, apart
