Florestan Fernandes and Roberto Campos' ideas on the 1988 Constitution and the imperative of a new constituent

Abstract

Abstract: Since the 1990s, Brazil has experienced a routine and illegitimate alteration of the normative rights established in the 1988 Constitution. There have been more than 130 amendments since the beginning of the so-called “Citizen Constitution”. These amendments sought to remove guarantees from the Constitution that supported the aspirations of the popular and subordinate classes, annulling and mitigating many social rights, as well as other legal precepts that aimed to boost national economic and technological development through state control of certain economic activities. This is a political process characterized by a true usurpation of popular constituent power. In this sense, the essay aims to identify certain ideas that marked the brazilian constituent process of the years 1987 and 1988. For this, it seeks to identify estimates around the constituent and the Constitution of 1988, developed by two important parliamentarians of the time, the marxist Florestan Fernandes and liberal Roberto Campos. From the description of a dialectical game of visions about the Constitution and the brazilian society, theoretical considerations are made about the imperatives of a new constituent, taking as the focus of analysis the long and intense process of neoliberal deformation of the constitutional charter. The theoretical approach is guided by the instruments of marxist reflection. In its concluding remarks, it draws upon some recent Latin American political experiences as exemplary cases for addressing the challenges inherent in a constituent process.