"What is the class nature of the Lula governments? How has Brazilian academia analysed the PT's economic, social and foreign policies? These are the two big questions in Octávio Del Passo's work, which is the result of his master's thesis in the Political Science Programme at Unicamp, defended in 2018. (...) The text is very rich and original. There is a thread that leads the reader through the pages and through a debate that is not merely political, but is informed by a theoretical framework. The aim was to understand the concepts and theoretical bases of each of the theses presented. The initial point made by Del Passo, based on Nicos Poulantzas, is that empirical analysis must start systematically and consciously from a given theory, since for historical materialism theoretical work is connected to real processes, and in this sense reflects a given reality and interprets it using existing conceptual tools." Tatiana Berringer.