His victory tells a broader story. A story about a war: the class war that the few are waging against the many across the Western world. It’s a war acknowledged by its victors, including Warren Buffet who once quipped: “There’s class warfare, all right, but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” Mr Buffett was not exaggerating. For almost four decades, Western governments and central banks have pulled every policy lever in the same direction: to make the assets of the few burgeon at the expense of the incomes of the many.

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Consider the numbers. Between 1952 and 1988, economic growth was behind nearly all the gains of the West’s stock market. From 1989 onwards, though, growth explains only about a quarter. The largest share, around 40%, came from income diverted from workers to shareholders. Another third came from cheaper money and lower perceived risk. This is not wealth creation. It is wealth extraction: a transfer from those who work to those who own, exacerbated by states making cheap money available to those who already have loads, and trumpeted on the evening news as “a strong economy”.

And the wealthy rarely pay taxes: they don’t actually earn an income, but, rather, own assets, which are taxed only when sold. So they avoid selling, borrow against their soaring assets at 1 or 2% and live on the loan. Then they die without ever paying tax on their capital gains and pass on the loot to their kids at ridiculously low inheritance taxes. Meanwhile, the worker borrows on a credit card at 20% to pay bills and put food on the table, her debts the mirror image of their fortunes.

This arrangement relies on one crucial thing: asset prices must be protected from collapse. And when they are threatened, the state comes to the rescue: 2001, 2008, 2020, the British gilt crisis of 2022, Silicon Valley Bank in 2023. Together this string of bail outs reveals the rule: when financial wealth is threatened, governments discover that money can be found. Today, in the United States, the top 10% own almost 90% of all shares. It’s a similar picture in the UK and the EU. The US federal government and the Fed, the UK governments and the Bank of England, Brussels and the European Central Bank have repeatedly intervened to insure the wealth of the wealthy, doing “whatever it takes” to prop up their asset prices. The rest of the population pays the premium, in the form of the austerity that follows every bailout.

Yet austerity does more than redistribute the costs of a crisis. It also changes the balance of power between those who own and those who work. To understand why it keeps returning, even though it undermines economic growth, consider the story Marx told about Thomas Peel, who in 1829 sailed to Western Australia’s Swan River with £50,000 of provisions and three hundred working-class men, women and children. On arrival, his workers walked off into the bush and worked for themselves. Peel had brought money, tools and labour, but he could not bring capitalism along, because his workers had alternatives.

Capital, Marx concluded, is not a thing, a mere asset, but a social relation: the power of those who own to get those who don’t own to do things they’d rather not do. Austerity is not an economic policy. It is a disciplinary device, keeping the many sufficiently insecure and indebted to accept “an offer they can’t refuse”. The ruling class’s deepest fear is not inflation or debt. It is to end up like Peel: asset rich, but without the power to compel.

Here is the part of the story that keeps me awake at night. When center-left politicians, from Bill Clinton, Barack Obama and Tony Blair to Gerhard Schröder, François Hollande and Andy Burnham, abandoned the language of class, a void opened up in the working-class heartlands of the West. Into that void stepped a venomous storyteller with a century of experience in filling such voids: the resurgent far-right, including its rebranded fascists. It offers left-behind workers a story of dignity, then redirects their fury away from the owner who shipped their factory abroad, or the minister who sold their council house to some fund, and towards the migrant next door. It does not end the class war. It merely divides one side — the workers — to rule over them. It camouflages the war.

From the red suburbs of Paris to south Piraeus, from England’s red wall to Italy’s rust belt in Taranto, from the American rust belt to eastern Germany, the pattern is relentless. And so a fatalism has set in: the class war waged from above, we are told, must inevitably end in a neofascist, racist, misogynist revival.

Brazil has just refuted this fatalism.

Brazil knows the monster intimately. It lived through four years of Jair Bolsonaro, with his nostalgia for the military dictatorship. On 8 January 2023, his followers stormed the Congress, the Supreme Court and the presidential palace. Brazil’s far Right is not a fringe. Unlike Trump’s ragtag stormtroopers, they had years of running a dictatorship.  They won the first round of this election. They had the White House fully behind them, while the US Democrats, once again demonstrating their irrelevance, stayed mute. And yet, yesterday, they were defeated.

How? Not by hand-wringing about “populism”, nor by a centrist promise to manage the status quo more efficiently. Lula won because he did what the Western center-left has forgotten how to do: he spoke the language of class, and backed it with policies that shifted power, however modestly, from the few to the many. His government exempted those earning up to 5,000 reals a month from income tax and paid for it with a minimum tax on the very richest. During Brazil’s G20 presidency, he proposed a global minimum tax on billionaires. When Lula tells Brazilian workers that the elites have rigged the game, he points his finger upwards, at the rentier and the speculator, not sideways, at the migrant or the poor. But the most innovative weapon in Brazil’s arsenal is one that few outside Latin America have heard of. It is called Pix.

Every time you tap a card to pay for a coffee, a toll is levied. Visa, Mastercard and the banks take a cut, often 2% or 3%, from every transaction. Multiply this by billions of purchases a day and you begin to recognize one of the most lucrative rent-extraction machines ever devised. These are not profits made in competitive markets but a toll extracted by those who own the digital rails on which our economic lives now run. It is a key weapon of technofeudalism.

Unlike Britain, Europe or, of course, America, Brazil’s central bank moved to limit this rabid exploitation. It launched an alternative: a public, instant payment system, free for individuals and with capped fees for merchants. A Brazilian pays a street vendor in Salvador or sends money to her mother in Recife, instantly, using Pix from her phone, with no card company or bank taking its slice. Brazilians adopted it with astonishing enthusiasm. Last year, Pix processed almost 80 billion transactions and overtook credit cards as the most popular way to pay online.

Pix is the Swan River of the digital age. It gave tens of millions of Brazilians, including the poorest, who had never had a bank card, an alternative to the toll booths of Big Finance. And, like Peel, the collectors did not take it lying down. This summer, Washington imposed 25% tariffs on most Brazilian exports, and its trade representative explicitly named Pix as a grievance, complaining that it “unfairly disadvantaged” American payment companies! The most powerful government on Earth deployed its trade arsenal against a Brazilian free public service for being too successful at denying rents to Visa and Mastercard.

Lula did not blink. He defended Pix as a Brazilian public good, and Brazilians rewarded him for it. Here, at last, is a concrete example of limiting the power of Big Business, Big Finance and Big Tech: not with slogans, but by building public digital infrastructure that removes the opportunity to extract rent in the first place.

Let me, however, refrain from romanticizing Lula. Lula is no revolutionary. His margin was admittedly narrow. Brazil’s Congress remains in the grip of agribusiness and evangelical blocs. Its central bank still keeps interest rates punishingly high, a weapon of the class war if ever there was one. Lula himself has compromised much too much with those vested interests, and lost support as a result.

But Brazil has shown us three things: first, that the class war waged against the many does not have to end in fascism. Fascism flourishes only when the Left vacates the battlefield of class. Second, a progressive government can win by pointing upwards, at those who extract rent, rather than downwards, at those who suffer. And third, Big Business can be defeated, at least forced to lose some battles, by building public alternatives to its rent-extracting machines.

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So, here is the challenge to Britain, to Europe, to the people of the United States. Build your own Pix: public payment rails that end the tolls of Visa and Mastercard. Tax capital gains, not just income. Make every rescue conditional, with the public receiving real, permanent equity in return. Create a public investment bank as an alternative to the bond markets. Restore the bargaining power of the workforce. And give working people what Peel’s workers found at Swan River: an alternative, and thus the freedom to say no.

Buffett was right. There is a class war, and his class has been winning hands down. But yesterday, in Brazil, it lost a battle; though not the war. It lost because a working-class president dared to name the war and fight it using weapons fashioned to defend the many.

The two candidates left in the run off have sadly offered up the most vacuous contest in living memory. Though keen to defend sovereignty, the Left-wing octogenarian Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva talks mostly about his past achievements. The 45-year-old Flavio Bolsonaro principally wants to get his dad, disgraced former president Jair Bolsonaro, out of jail.

It is Flavio who looks the most likely to prevail, to the delight of US interests, from Donald Trump to Big Tech. However, the emergence of a new force in Brazilian politics — the upstart Missão party, led by the former student activist turned political entrepreneur Renan Santos — offers the possibility that this settlement may not hold forever.

Even if he was knocked out in the first round of the presidential election with 2% of the vote, Renan (politicians are known by their first names in Brazil) had led the field among under-24s with 36% in polling earlier this year. Commentators noted that he possesses a rare commodity in today’s digitalized political landscape: the ability to “break out of the bubble” and reach voters on the other side of the political spectrum. Indeed, the limitations of digital age politics is a core theme: “We have never been so polarized and yet there is so little debate”, he told me in a recent interview. Political alignment has become “automatic” so there is never any need to fight over politics. What he hopes to bring is fresh ideas, and transcend the “asphyxiating” effect of social media — which has done so much to shape the dire character of modern Brazilian politics.

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South America is now dominated by conservative governments — all of whom, despite their differences, adopt MAGA-like themes and are friendly to the US president. A slew of new Right-wing politicians are born-online culture-warrior provocateurs: foremost among them is the Bolsonaro-aligned Nikolas Ferreira, who has 23 million social media followers. Renan is scathing of these figures. “The electoral process has become the end in itself, and the mandate is only an instrument for gaining more fame and attention on social media.”

Younger generations in Brazil have grown up under Workers Party governments — 17 of the past 24 years have been under the party of the center-left — and now increasingly identify as Right-wing. Missão stands apart from its own camp for demonstrating a willingness to rethink Brazil’s role in a post-globalization world and presenting this in a forcefully ideological and programmatic package.

Renan is a constant critic of the Bolsonaro clan, their submissiveness to the US, their links to organized crime, and their self-serving culture wars. “Voters care more about a hypothetical trans person entering their bathroom than public security or corruption,” he says in one video. He repeatedly calls out Bolsonaro junior as a “miliciano“, or paramilitary gangster, for the senator’s alleged associations with Rio de Janeiro extortion rackets. Indeed, since Renan was knocked out of the election, the Left has been happy to amplify many of his critiques of Bolsonaro.

Missão are often called far-Right or even fascist by opponents, mainly due to their stance on crime. Under the party’s Direito Penal do Inimigo — “enemy criminal law” — members of organized crime gangs would be treated as enemy combatants and lose their status as persons under the law, much as has happened in El Salvador. The party has even pushed the slogan Prendeu, Matou (“arrest ‘em, kill ‘em”), implying a willingness to use extrajudicial killings appealing to a growing punitive strain in Latin America (and, indeed, the US).

Still, without wishing to explain away these provocations, Missão bucks convention today and in many respects resembles bourgeois modernizers, promising a politics of substance. In a recent post, Renan talked up the late Left-wing British philosopher Mark Fisher; and his defense of democracy and sovereignty stand out amid all the Right wing politicians who have tolerated or encouraged Bolsonaro’s coup-mongering as well as the clan’s lobbying the US against Brazilian national interests.

It is these themes that lead Renan to believe Missão can potentially appeal to Left-wing voters. Victor Marques, a philosophy professor and popularizer of Mark Fisher who has run for office for Lula’s Workers Party, tells me that Missão are at least “thinking through the global dynamics of the crisis of hegemony” — though he adds that he “disagrees with their entire programme.” The prominent progressive intellectual, Miguel Lago, has also praised their ambition: “Missão’s merit is to have outlined a vision for the country — which others have failed to do,” he argues, welcoming a “Right that thinks”. Still, Lago, who has written extensively about reconstructing Brazil, is at pains to emphasize that not only does he disagree with the content of Missão’s propositions in principle, he also finds many of them impracticable.

Where Renan is novel, at least on the Right, is in his understanding of the end of US hegemony: now the US demands explicit alignment, whereas previously it was presumed to be the only game in town. This imposes choices on Latin American countries. It is in this new world disorder that Missão is now seeking to advance Brazil’s interests.

This much is clear in The Yellow Book, a 500-page manifesto. Instead of focusing on Bolsonarist bugbears, it considers how to maximize the country’s rare earth deposits, clean-energy networks, and its status as the breadbasket of the world, so as to overcome regional inequality and unleash Brazil’s potential.

That starts with redefining what it means to be “Right-wing”. Orlando Lima, the editor of Valete, Missão’s in-house magazine, believes the Brazilian Right is stuck in “an intellectual and creative hole”, too obsessed by ideas of American libertarianism and British conservatism that don’t map on to the unique problems faced by Brazil, while the global Right in general is too fixated on being “anti-Left” on issues such as gender identity or migration.

Yet, Missão’s roots lie in the Free Brazil Movement (MBL), libertarians who were often criticized as Right-wing yuppies. For all their anti-establishment rhetoric, they were a young, business-friendly grouping from upper-middle-class backgrounds — and Missão supporters are still mainly drawn from this milieu. The anti-corruption movement they played a large part in advancing served to delegitimize politics, though Renan disagreed when challenged on this point, defending their record.

Still, today the party is expressly political. On founding Missão in 2023, Renan diluted his economic liberalism — he realized that there were too many problems in Brazil for “less state” to be the solution — and instead focused on remedying deindustrialization, low productivity growth, a dependence on imports, and a decadent elite.

Missão also marks a distinct contrast to the racism that pervades the radical Right globally in its embrace of Brazilian society as it is. Lima puts it grandly: he hopes to overcome the nation’s issues with a big civilizational project that would prove that a miscegenated tropical country can succeed in the new global order — finally making good on the long-promised (and much-derided) idea of itself being the “country of the future”. The Yellow Book argues that the decline of the US has left a power vacuum in the Global South that Brazil is uniquely positioned to exploit. De-dollarization would be pursued through the creation of a basket of South American currencies led by the real, while the BRICS+ would be engaged on a pragmatic basis so the country can extract concrete benefits and retain autonomy.

It would also use Brazil’s three “trump cards”: its possession of 23% of the world’s rare earth deposits, the largest behind China; its extraordinarily clean energy matrix; and the major diplomatic strengths of non-aggression and democratic stability. The vision rests largely on two strategic inputs — food and computing. Brazil is already the breadbasket of the world, but producing its own fertilizer would increase its independence. Meanwhile, reversing the brain drain and building data centers would see it become an AI powerhouse.

Rather more controversial is the plan to rid Brazil of its favelas, or informal settlements, in which 8% of Brazilians live (the figure is as high as 25% in Rio de Janeiro and over 50% in the Amazonian capitals). The favela “is more than an urbanistic problem, it is a civilizational plague”, argues the Yellow Book, seeing the remedy as not just a physical but a “spiritual” transformation. There are concerns that the combination of awarding land titles to residents, public service-provision, and housebuilding would cost a lot more than the projected 1.5% of GDP. Moreover, given Brazil’s authoritarian management of its lower classes, it’s not hard to imagine these plans playing out as violent mass expulsions.

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Moreover, the much vaunted “War on Crime” has still more alarming implications in a country where the police already kill 18 people per day, over 6,000 per year, according to official figures. Many of Brazil’s Military Police are already implicated in the criminal gangs known as “milicias“, who vie for territory with the drug traffickers. Missão’s plan — ostensibly in pursuit of territorial sovereignty, nation-building, and political control — could just as well end up in the violent chaos of a multisided armed conflict. Meanwhile the horrific implications of the Prendeu, Matou slogan hardly need spelling out. “The fact that Renan always explains it away confirms it is opportunistic and demagogic,” Lago tells me.

How much of a break with the neoliberal Right all this is remains an open question. Its development plans are still weak sauce, even by the standards of Brazil’s own past, while fiscal austerity is item one in their manifesto. “Inequality” hardly features in the Yellow Book, despite Brazil being one of the most unequal societies in the world. Renan meanwhile opposes Lula’s recent (incredibly popular) move to legally guarantee two days off a week as opposed to one — which even Senator Flavio Bolsonaro supported, suggesting the libertarian faith remains strong. In this sense, Missão’s departure from their 2010s neoliberal antecedents is only partial.

Still, whether or not Brazilians agree with the content of Missão’s programme — and many do not — there can be some small hope that their political seriousness, ambition and vision speaks to the possibilities of the emerging post-hegemonic world. For all the passivity-inducing brainrot of social media today, the current moment is also about the breakup of world order, which should force hard thinking, where previously complacency reigned. In place of imported ideas, there is an emphasis on taking the Brazilian experience seriously as a starting point.

Should Flavio win on Sunday, the defense of Brazilian sovereignty and democracy will be paramount from day one. Renan sees this as more propitious for his camp: the Lulista project will fall apart and there will be a mass of people who are still politically conscious looking for something new. But even if Lula pulls off another miracle, the prospects for progressives look grim. Missão should serve as a reminder to the Left that idealism and political commitment used to be their domain.