Council Democracy and Autogestão in Brazil: Re-Interpreting the Roots of Democratic Innovations

This paper proposes a novel interpretation of the historical-philosophical foundations of the democratic innovations designed during Brazil’s re-democratization. It explores their connections to the council tradition, highlighting the influence of council democracy and autogestão in the PT’s early participatory agenda and experiences in local government, as well as in the writings of Brazil’s critical social theorists. The paper introduces a reconstruction of the intellectual history and reception of these concepts in Brazil’s scholarly-militant milieus from the 1970s onwards. It points out the prominence of anarcho-Marxian themes in the design of tools, procedures and norms for democratizing decision-making and state-society relations, in the context of Brazil’s re-democratization, re-federalization, and constitution-making processes. This reinterpretative account allows to outline a revisitation of the ideas and practices that informed the forging phase of democratic innovations between 1980s and the early 2000s. With this, the paper shows how Brazil anticipated today’s growing scholarly interest towards council democracy, engaging with the incipient literature thereof. It also intends to revert the Western scholarships’ tendency of approaching Brazilian democratic innovations with the intent of extracting only what is deemed desirable, often overlooking the ideas and scope that originally defined the said innovations. By expanding the knowledge of the ideational referential at the basis of Brazilian re-democratization, the paper calls for a better assessment of the role of self-management socialist ideas in the processes of re-democratization and constitutional rewriting of other South American states.