Class relations in Brazil's new neoliberal phase

While maintaining the neoliberal capitalist model, the Lula administration has ushered it into a new phase. With respect to the bloc in power, national and international financial capital today shares its hegemony with the important domestic industrial and agrarian bourgeoisie. However, with respect to the working class, there have been two changes. First, the new unionist elite that has been moving toward a micro-corporativism since the mid-1990s has established an alliance with the domestic bourgeoisie against financial capital. Second, the poor and unorganized laborers, who have been serving as a support class for neoliberal politics since the Collor and Cardoso administrations, today are more linked to the government and are a passive base for the rise of "Lulismo," a political phenomenon separate from the Partido dos Trabalhadores.