Ruy Braga

How do governing elites in the global South attempt to remake hegemony in a conjuncture of durable crisis? This is the question at the core of Southern interregnum, a comparative conjunctural analysis of hegemonic projects in Brazil, India, China, and South Africa. Working with a Gramscian notion of crisis, centred on the interregnum as an enduring period of instability and uncertainty, in which hegemonic authority erodes and competing projects for crisis resolution emerge, the book proposes a novel critical reading of the convulsions that are currently reshaping the political economy of the global South and the world-system.Mapping the variegated trajectories of elite projects to reconcile accumulation and legitimation – and probing the limits of these projects – the book breaks new ground in the study of the contemporary global South.

Making use of the theoretical tools of Marxist critical sociology, Ruy Braga proposes an innovative reading of the social history of Brazil—from Fordist populism to the Lulista hegemony—using the "politics of the precariat" as an analytical vector. Braga's analysis seeks to explain both economic and structural processes (peripheral Fordism, its crisis, the transition to financialised post-Fordism) and the subjective dimension of the proletariat suffering from precarity (the anxiety of the subordinate, the preoccupation of the worker, the plebeian or classist drive of the exploited). At the moment when the plebeian drive is once again stimulating strike activity in the country, underlined by the protests that have recently shaken Brazil, this book impels us to reflect on the limits of the current model of Brazilian development. First published in Portuguese as A política do precariado: do populismo à hegemonia lulista by Boitempo Editorial in 2012.