Marx, Kalecki and the desenvolvimentistas dream in Brazil – Developing Economics

I met Professor Jorge Miglioli in 2000, the year I started my undergraduate studies in Economics at UNESP, Araraquara – Brazil, fully convinced it was the right path if you wanted to change the world. I did briefly consider Sociology too, but my mum (like any another mum who dreams of their children doing better than they did) put her foot down: I didn’t work this hard to give you a good education just so you could become a schoolteacher! That settled it.

Just a little over a month into the course, I found myself in the middle of one of the longest national university strikes in Brazil. For context: Brazilian universities are publicly funded by both national and state governments, and higher education is tuition-free. That strike, so early in my academic journey, made me question whether I had chosen the right course. Most of my peers simply returned to their hometowns instead of staying and engaging with what was happening. It wouldn’t be fair to say they were against the strike; they just didn’t care. Many of them came from the Brazilian middle class or up, which reflects the schizophrenia of our tuition-free higher education system. They were on a clear path to join the elite, working in banks, big corporations, and so on, and the strike had simply disrupted that trajectory. They just wanted to get back to their normal lives. Things were even worse in my department, the Department of Economics, where only two, maybe three professors supported the strike. The majority made it clear they were against it and disappeared for the entire duration, which lasted nearly four months

On the bright side, that moment introduced me to fellow Economics students who stayed, supported the strike, and opened the door to an economics that actually mattered – they would also become dear friends. It was through them that I first encountered Karl Marx. I also met Renata Belzunces, the student leading the strike in my campus, admired by many, including Professor Jorge Miglioli, and who went to become one of the most inspiring role models I’ve ever had.[1] And it was in this moment that I met Professor Jorge Miglioli too.

Miglioli, who eventually became “Miglis” to me, a nickname he never fully liked but accepted nonetheless (I’m not sure I ever gave him much choice!), was different. There were no ‘buts’ with Miglioli when it came to the strike. I remember him saying something like How else do you expect capitalists and the government to hear us? But it wasn’t just what he said, it was how he said it. There was no attempt to convince, no rhetorical flourish. It was more like: why are we even debating this? His tone carried a kind of quiet certainty, and beneath it, a deep frustration and disillusionment with the fact that this even needed to be explained.

Later on, I found out that, back in 1962, almost 40 years before these conversations were taking place, Miglioli had written a short book titled Como são feitas as greves no Brasil? (How Strikes Are Carried Out in Brazil?). He was in his late twenties at the time, and the book was part of the Cadernos do Povo Brasileiro (Notebooks of the Brazilian People) collection. The collection’s mission said it all: 

The major problems facing our country are studied in this series clearly and without any sectarianism; its main objective is to inform. Only when well-informed can the people emancipate themselves. (my translation[2])

That book was probably the first time I saw economics so clearly and eloquently interwoven with politics, social classes, terms like capitalism, and concepts like imperialism. I remember saying “yes!” out loud right at the beginning, when Miglioli wrote that strikes are meant to paralyse production so if they don’t hurt capitalists, they serve no purpose; they’re not effective. And then I remember being puzzled, trying to process what came next: Yet, a strike is not carried out with the intention of hurting capitalists, but to benefit workers (Miglioli, 1962, p.11; my translation)

I later also came to know that Miglioli’s distinguished academic trajectory was deeply intertwined with his commitment to the communist struggle. A long-standing member of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), he contributed to the Revista Estudos Sociais, a Party publication aimed at shaping discourse around Brazil’s most pressing issues. Within the PCB, Miglioli is recognised for advancing the Party’s understanding of class struggle, the dynamics of the capitalist economy, and the possibilities for building socialism in Brazil.

Miglioli had a profound knowledge of Karl Marx and Michał Kalecki, and was unapologetically anti-capitalist — though, not all Marxists in Brazil agreed with the latter (and the fact that he drove a Toyota Corolla didn’t play well with the left!). For Miglioli, Marxists had spent too much time studying the working class and not enough time studying the bourgeoisie. Yet, social classes, labour, and workers’ struggles were always central to his work, his worldview, and his concerns. The fact that economists and economics as a discipline were increasingly moving away from these issues wasn’t just frustrating to him, it was defeating. And that defeat often turned into a deep sadness, a kind of quiet nostalgia that I only began to understand better as we became friends.

He had similar frustrations with sociologists. For Miglioli, the post–Berlin Wall era and the collapse of the Soviet Union ushered in a kind of triumphant haze: the idea that capitalism had won, definitively and heroically. This vibe didn’t just make the theme of “the end of capitalism” seem outdated, it also gave rise to an overwhelming body of literature celebrating the supposed merits of this socioeconomic system now liberalised and globalised, and apparently here to stay until the end of time (Miglioli, 2007, p.97; my translation). Miglioli had little patience for this literature on “post-industrial societies,” “post-capitalist societies,” and “the end of labour”. For him:

…almost all of this literature does not actually deal with the end of capitalism as a socioeconomic system (or as a ‘mode of production,’ in Marxist language), but only with changes, some more or less profound, that occurred within this system, and not infrequently, several of them are more imaginary than real (such as the ‘end of labour’). (Miglioli, 2007, p.98; my translation)

In fact, much of this literature, he argued, simply repackaged contemporary capitalism under new names, presenting it as somehow better than the “old capitalism” studied by Marx. And “better” could mean anything: more efficient, more equitable, more emancipatory, whatever the author needed it to be (Miglioli, 2002, p. 98; my translation[3]).

When the strike ended, I realised I’d be seeing Miglioli every week for an entire semester, as he taught Introduction to Social Sciences to economics students (yes, I did a BA in Economics where one of the courses was Introduction to Social Sciences!). My entire first year was actually quite amazing: I had Institutions of Law, History of Economic Thought, History of Political Thought, and even Accounting! But Miglioli’s course was, without question, the highlight. If anything, he’d walk into the classroom, sit down at the desk, open his notebook (its yellowed pages suggesting it had been with him for decades) light a cigarette, and start speaking. He never stood up. And he smoked, well, at least ten cigarettes per lecture, I reckon.

My memory of those classes is a rich mix of anecdotes from Miglioli’s life, which was basically a living history of Brazilian political and economic thought. His lectures wove together the history of sociology as a bourgeois, anti-Marxist science, and a constant, sharp, and often poignant critique of the discipline of economics. It wasn’t just teaching, it was storytelling, political analysis, and a kind of intellectual resistance, all rolled into one.

It was in one of those classes that Miglioli asked us: Do you know what statistics is for economists? The usual student-awkward silence followed. Miglioli waited and then said: It’s a way to beat up the numbers until they say what you want. That was Miglioli’s style: transmitting knowledge through sharp, witty anecdotes and jokes, always punctuated with porra — a swear word unacceptable to most Brazilians, except, of course, to cariocas. His lectures were never conventional, but they were memorable. He taught with a kind of irreverent brilliance that made you laugh, think, and question everything you thought you knew about economics.

After class, I’d often chase after Miglioli with the excuse of asking a question about the lecture when really, I just wanted to keep listening to him talk about economics. Soon, I learned from friends that Jorge Miglioli was the economist in Brazil. He had been member of the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB), an institute founded in 1955 in Rio de Janeiro to engage critically with developmentalism, aiming at a shaping a national development strategy and construct an ideological framework that could steer the bourgeoisie to lead Brazil’s economic, social, and cultural transformation.[4] He had done his PhD with Michał Kalecki in Poland. He was also the one who introduced Kalecki and the concept of effective demand to Brazilian audience. He had been exiled. He had worked with Nelson Werneck Sodré and Álvaro Vieira Pinto.

However, I never sensed any of that ‘grandiosity’ from him, quite the opposite. He always made time for students, for me. Coming from a non-academic family or the kind of well-educated, wealthy background that often dominates university spaces in Brazil, I found the academic environment unapproachable. But with Miglioli, I never had to worry about any of that. Talking with him was always fun, always encouraging, and I always walked away having learned something new.

It didn’t take long before I started wondering why Miglioli wasn’t teaching us macroeconomics. I never really found out why. When I asked him, he couldn’t care less, simply saying he wanted nothing to do with economics. Miglioli had done a bachelor in Social Sciences, a master in Planning, and a PhD in Economics. And yes, he was indeed supervised by Michał Kalecki in Poland. Under Kalecki’s supervision at the Warsaw School of Statistics and Planning, he immersed himself in the study of socialist economic planning, a body of work that later became the book Introdução ao planejamento econômico (Introduction to economic planning), published in 1982. This contribution positioned him as a key figure in shaping the debate on economic planning in Brazil, bridging theory and practice in the pursuit of a more just economic order. His post-doc work, Acumulação de Capital e Demanda Efetiva (Capital Accumulation and Effective Demand), was published as a book in 1981, and is considered a benchmark for the introduction of macroeconomics in Brazil.

Interestingly, Miglioli doesn’t really engage with Keynes in the book. Sure, there are references, but no real discussion. I never asked him why, and in our conversations, Keynes was never present. The big umbrella was always political economy, Marx, and Kalecki. And honestly, with what the book offers, it’s hard to feel like Keynes is missing. Part I deals with Say’s Law (the foundation of classical and neoclassical economics) and critiques from Malthus and Sismondi. Then there’s an entire section dedicated to Marx, deep dives into Russian Marxists like Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski, and a whole part on Rosa Luxemburg. It’s a rich, layered work that reflects Miglioli’s intellectual commitments, and his refusal to dilute them.

If Joan Robinson argued that it’s possible to see an incipient theory of effective demand in Marx (Robinson, 1966; Alves, 2022), Miglioli went further. Using of one his great strengths, didactic clarity, he exposed and explained Marx’s and Marxists’ theory of effective demand, known in a Marxist language as the theory of realisation. In his own original way, he demonstrated how supply in capitalist economies always tends to exceed demand, pushing forward what Marx identified as one of the core contradictions of capitalism: production outpacing the monetary demand needed to absorb the output, leading to crises of overproduction – or, more broadly, disproportionality. In other words, the realisation problem.

His engagement with the authors mentioned above was always guided by this problem, whether through the Russian Marxists and their debates on underconsumption, international trade, and unproductive labour, or through Rosa Luxemburg’s underconsumptionist approach. Miglioli took no prisoners when defending Luxemburg and Marx. He argued they were spot on in identifying underconsumption in the short run, rooted in the contradiction between growing productive capacity and the narrow limits of consumption (Miglioli, 1981). For him, this was the reason behind crises of disproportionality, and the fundamental problem of effective demand.

That was my introduction to macroeconomics, via Marx, Luxemburg, Kalecki and economic planning! All thanks to Miglioli. Fast forward almost to 2018, I said I was a macroeconomist at the Department of Economics at the University of Cambridge, England, but was met with scepticism because I couldn’t not name the model I used. I felt intimidated, didn’t know how to respond and thought I better start saying I am a political economist.  But today, writing this piece, I wish I had said to myself back then: Porra, Carolina, para de tentar conversar com economistas!

Looking back, I now think that Miglioli’s decision to leave Keynes out was deliberate. He wanted to introduce effective demand through Marx. My understanding of macroeconomics has never been shaped by IS-LM-MP neoclassical synthesis, DSGE models or equilibrium frameworks. It’s been shaped by development economists, dependency theorists and Miglioli. His insistence on discussing capitalism, surplus value, what determines profits and wages, capital accumulation, all while considering social classes, imperialism, and economic development, and drawing on thinkers like Rosa Luxemburg. That’s what macroeconomics means to me, even if everything around me says otherwise.

From that first meeting as a first-year undergrad, we went on to become friends. Miglioli also became my supervisor for my undergraduate dissertation. I told him I wanted to study financial capital, and he replied: Before getting into the world of finance, you need to learn that capital is, first and foremost, a social relation. I struggled to read and write but he basically babysat me. We spent hours discussing every author he told me to read, and he would force me to sit at his desk and write. I wouldn’t exist as a scholar if it weren’t for him. I wasn’t the brightest student in the room. I didn’t look like most of the academics in Brazil. I didn’t speak another language, wasn’t good at maths, hadn’t travelled abroad, and couldn’t quote Machado de Assis from memory. But Miglioli saw potential in my perspective. He encouraged me constantly. He made me feel clever.

Our friendship didn’t end when I finished my undergrad. Miglioli supported my decision to pursue an MPhil in Sociology. While teaching in Araraquara, a city 181 km from his home in Campinas, he shared a house with me and three other friends. He did this to help us when we wanted to take a small step up the ladder, to live somewhere less ‘student-like’, more suited to preparing for the master’s entry exams. He also let me ride with him to Campinas and open his house to me when I was auditing postgraduate modules at the University of Campinas to prepare for my MPhil. I could never have afforded those trips on my own.

He was by my side throughout the two years of my MPhil, even if he never stopped criticising my theoretical choices: Georg Lukács and the Ontology of Social Being (Labour). He was one of my MPhil examiners, and during my viva in 2007, he couldn’t help himself: Porra, Carolina, I told you all this ‘Hegel’ stuff wouldn’t help! That said, two years before he had given me my first book about Hegel. He also strongly supported my decision to travel abroad to learn English in 2007. And when I wanted to return to Brazil in 2010, he said firmly: No. Things in Brazil are taking a very bad turn. It’s not the moment to come back. Pursue your PhD there. He was adamant, and so certain that Brazil was heading into economic and political decline. Today, I wonder: how did he know?

He was humble. Simple. Coming from São Carlos, a university town, my image of professors was shaped by those living in posh houses in rich neighbourhoods — arrogant, distant, superior. But that was never the case with Miglioli or his family, whom I came to know well and loved. His house felt like a cross between a laid-back beach house and a 1960s bungalow. No luxury, no etiquette. Just cozy. His home office/library, the first ‘private’ library I ever stepped into, wasn’t intimidating at all, despite having what felt like zillions of books. It was simple, messy in its own organised way. Inviting. Cozy. The kind of space that made you want to sit down, read, and stay for hours. It’s the office/library I dream of having in my own house one day.

He was never full of himself because of his past. He never brought up Kalecki unless someone asked. And even then, he’d always begin with Kalecki was a gentleman. At some point, he’d inevitably add, I wasn’t the only one there. I wasn’t special. I believe that for Miglioli, it felt important to remind us that Kalecki had welcomed many Brazilians fleeing the dictatorship. Names like Leandro Konder would come up casually, almost offhandedly, as he reminisced about pre-coup Rio de Janeiro; a time that, in his telling, was not only politically vibrant but also full of long, sunny days at the beach with friends such as, Leandro! It was the same with Nelson (Nelson Werneck Sodré). Miglioli would mostly mention him when complaining, half-jokingly, about how he wanted to sleep in the office after long nights out, but couldn’t because he shared the office with Nelson who was always there, religiously, typing away at his perfectly organised desk. Clickety-clack, all day long.

Whenever Miglioli spoke about his role in founding what is now one of Brazil’s — and arguably the world’s — most important heterodox economics hubs, the Institute of Economics at UNICAMP (originally the Department of Economics and Economic Planning, DEPE), his words were often tinged with disappointment. You could hear in his voice both the hope he once had and the deep, poignant disillusionment with what the Institute, and economics more broadly, was becoming. Yet, he would brighten when we visited the Institute. Old friends, administrative and academic, would hug him, and soon stories, family updates, and laughter would flow. Especially with Wilson Cano (those two could talk for hours. Truly, no exaggeration!)

It was the same when he talked about Brazil in the pre-1964 coup years. The way he described the energy, the certainty of change, the belief in emancipation, in ending dependency and inequality. It was as if he were passing on both a sense of life and a sense of loss at the same time. Recently, while revisiting Celso Furtado’s work and reading Celso Furtado, Correspondência intelectual: 1949-2004 (Celso Furtado, correspondência intelectual: 1949–2004) by Rosa Freire D’Aguiar, I noticed in Furtado for the first time the same poignant, defeated feeling that was always present in Miglioli. I can only imagine what it must have felt like: to stand at the edge of real change, to believe that Brazil could become a developed and independent nation, and then to face a coup d’état, go into exile, and return years later only to realise that you couldn’t pick up where you left off. Worse still, to witness the corruption of friends and comrades. Miglioli would speak about this often, especially when reflecting on José Serra.  Yet, when his friend Tamás Szmrecsányi died in 2009, that same defeated, poignant voice softened. For Miglioli, Tamás’s academic and political integrity stood in stark contrast to the disillusionment he felt elsewhere.

He loved tango, samba, and Italian films. And he educated me on all three (he put me through what I think was every film ever made by Vittorio De Sica). But more than that, he indirectly and unintentionally helped me rebuild my relationship with my mum due two reasons: his deep love and admiration for his own mother, and the challenges he faced as a parent; challenges that mirrored my mum’s. With him, I could finally see the other side. Every now and then, Miglioli would recount the story of his mother, gripped by fear as rumours of the coup spread, burning all his books in a desperate attempt to protect him. She left only one untouched Capital by Karl Marx, mistaking ‘capital’ for a reference to a government centre, and assuming the book posed no threat!

Whenever I visited Brazil and managed to see Miglioli, I’d leave with a heavy pain in my chest, thinking it might be the last time. And when his son told me he no longer remembered me, that same pain came rushing back. But today, it feels different. It’s not just the ache of goodbye, it’s the feeling that a light I didn’t even realise was on has been quietly turned off. His absence leaves a silence that is both personal and collective.

Rest in power, Miglioli.