The Counterinsurgency State and Authoritarianism in Bolsonarist Brazil: An Analysis in the Light of Ruy Mauro Marini

Abstract

is paper analyzes Brazilian political dynamics since the 2016 parliamentary-legal-media coup and its continuation in the Bolsonaro government (2019-2022), in light of Ruy Mauro Marini's category “Counterinsurgency State”. The objective is to understand how this form of authoritarian reorganization of the bourgeois order, already present in the 1964 coup, is updated in the recent context. The research, bibliographical and with a qualitative approach, uses historical-dialectical materialism to interpret this phenomenon as a temporary suspension of liberal democracy, aimed at eliminating transformative forces and subsequently restoring the institutional order. It is argued that the Bolsonaro government did not represent a total rupture, but an authoritarian modulation sustained by the appearance of legality, articulating the militarization of politics, the externalization of the revolutionary threat, and liberal restoration. Bolsonarism, driven by social resentments and an ultraliberal project, mobilized “conservative counterpublics” that corrode democratic institutions from within. The radicalization of the Counterinsurgency State is expressed in the combination of military authoritarianism and neoliberal dismantling, with the use of denialism, anti-establishment rhetoric and symbolic terrorism against the opposition. We conclude that Marini's category is fundamental to understanding the new authoritarianisms on the periphery of capitalism and to thinking about political alternatives to this configuration of power.