Editorial.
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The journal of UERJ's Faculdade de Servico Social, Em Pauta: teoria social e realidade contemporanea, dedicates its 33rd issue to the theme: 50 years since dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). It aims to register the memory of this recent stage in Brazilian history and the democratic resistance to arbitrary power and terror, refusing to accept and forget them. The goal is to remember the past and shed light on the collective routes engendered in the present which attempt to consolidate democratic values and institutes in the social praxis.
The "dictatorship of big capital", as defined by Ianni (1981) (1), develops as a counterrevolution. It was a response to the political ascension of the working class and the peasantry, coming from the financial and monopolist bourgeoisie, associated with sections of the middle class, the Church, the military, the police, landowners, bureaucrats, technocrats and other groups and class fractions. This counterrevolution is manifested in two senses. First, it was a coup d'etat against the transformation of workers and peasants into a political class, an organized, conscious and active group. And also, as an autocratic, bourgeois counterrevolution against democracy, as Florestan Fernandes pointed out, putting an end to the prerogatives of civil rights, however limited they were, acquired between the promulgation of the 1946 Constitution of Brazil and the Military Coup of 1964.
The military and bourgeois dictatorship worked under the motto of Seguranca e Desenvolvimento (Security and Development), a modification of Ordem e Progresso (Order and Progress), Brazil's national motto. "Security" was used in the sense of "internal security", focusing on control and repression of any and all political organization, especially of the working classes, and giving free rein to accumulation by the monopolist capital. And "Development" was taken as the flourishing of market forces, predominantly of the free enterprise. Thus the strategy encompassed both political repression and overexploitation of the work force, based on the coalition of the technocracy and the military in power. The secret of the "Brazilian Miracle" showed itself in the daily lives of the working class as excessive labor, low wages, long workdays and prolonging of fatigue, depletion of energy, absolute and relative impoverishment. All these factors contributed to the (re) politicization of the working classes (IANNI, 1981).
This concentrated and reorganized power of the state allowed the right conditions for economic policies serving the interests of the monopolist capital to be formulated and executed. These factors show a deep connection between the banking and industry capital, according to imperialist interests.
The marks of both the dictatorship, expressed in the disrespect to political and human rights, and the democratic resistance spread through various dimensions of social life: in political organizations, in cinema, in theater, in music, in the press, and in the activism of students, women, factory and rural workers, and other social actors rising in the public scene.
In an attempt to enlighten the collective memory, the present issue of this journal intends to capture this tension between repression and democratic resistance in the years of dictatorship. Also, it tries to establish a counterpoint in other national experiences. This effort also focuses on giving visibility to particular expressions of this tension in the academic and professional world of Brazilian Social Work and its Latin American counterparts.
It is essential to note that all pictures in this issue of the journal, including the cover photo, were provided by Memorias Reveladas and are part of the collection of the Arquivo Nacional and the defunct newspaper Correio da Manha. We would like to say thanks to Inez Stampa and Vicente Rodrigues who in solidarity pre-selected, to be part of this issue, several images that depict the complexity of the struggles and the horror of that period.
The opening article of this issue's thematic dossier rescues the memory of the military dictatorship, presenting an initiative created in 2009 by the Brazilian government, the Centro de Referencia das Lutas Politicas no Brasil (1964-1985)--Memorias Reveladas (Reference Center of Political Struggle in Brazil 1964-1985--Revealed Memories), which aims to bring together and promote the documentary heritage of the period. The authors of the text are Ines Stampa and Vicente Rodrigues. To open the files of the dictatorship and gather the collections of documents of the period under custody of the Arquivo Nacional (National Archives) implies the treatment of the political and social memory as a public good. These measures are of historic relevance, promoting transitional justice in Brazil as a theoretical and practical field to face repressive legacies in the particular forms they assume in this country, and also inspiring initiatives such as the Comissao Nacional da Verdade (National Commission of Truth), and the Lei de Acesso as Informacoes (Law on Access to Information).
During the bourgeois autocracy, social and working rights were taken through repression and cooptation. The resistance to...
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