Ruy Braga

On the night of February 3, 2025, Michael Burawoy was fatally struck by a vehicle near his home in Oakland, California. The driver fled but was later arrested. Michael’s death marked the loss of the most important contemporary Marxist sociologist, whose career had repositioned Marxism within the university after the collapse of bureaucratic state socialism, while maintaining an organic link between theory and struggles for human emancipation. Michael...

In general, analyses of Brazil’s current political and economic crisis emphasize the economic policy “errors” of the government, inherited by President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) from her predecessor, Luíz Inácio Lula da Silva. While it is true that certain federal policy decisions have interfered with the dynamics of the Brazilian distributive conflict, this focus on political regulation is far too narrow...

June 2013 will go down in the history of social uprisings in Brazil. Beginning on June 6 with a march in São Paulo, which attracted about 2,000 people in protest against hikes in public transport fares, the youth of Movimento Passe Livre [Free Fare Movement] (MPL) could never have imagined that they were shaking the country in an explosion only similar to the campaign for direct elections in 1984, while still under the military dictatorship. Indeed...

Despite the unexpected competition in the runoff, Dilma Rousseff's (PT - Workers Party) victory, with around a 12 million vote margin, over Jose Serra (PSDB – Brazilian Social Democracy Party) in the Oct. 31st Brazilian Presidential elections demonstrated the current administration's political hegemony. Supported by a wide margin of votes in the Northeast of Brazil - one of the poorest regions of the country and the main beneficiary...