By TARSUS GENUS*
The public subjectivity that infests Eastern Europe, the United States and Germany, which to a greater or lesser extent affects Latin America, is not the cause of the rebirth of Nazism and Fascism.
"I went back to Walter Benjamin’s book and read at random in a chapter entitled Theory of Progress the following line: “Knowledge always comes in a flash. The text is the long sequence of thunderclaps that follow it.”
(Tomas Eloy Martinez, The tango singer).
1.
The return of wars, the search for new sources of energy and the imposition of the climate issue, as the main factors of crisis and also of capital accumulation – in the different global geopolitical spaces – have revealed the need for a new political-organizational pact, at the “top” of the world-system. This new pact should seek to establish, both within States – in the most developed capitalist countries – and in the forms of political organization of their internal groups, classes and estates, the formation of governing groups with new forms of organization and political command.
This process is replicated in all regions of the Western world, partially or totally, as is also replicated – throughout the world – the absence, “at the base” of the world system, of new organic ties capable of resisting the strategic onslaught of the new type of government that the very rich are designing in the world.
This will happen outside and above the traditional parties, since the instruments for disseminating ideas and controlling them will have to rely on the militant support of both traditional conservative media and the “big techs” that control opinion formation, in addition to seeking support from the channels of global criminality, organized in the “alternative” basements of the networks. It is from these new forms of organization that new leadership groups are being formed, once again, that will dispute political hegemony and control of the state apparatus from within and outside the new governments that will come.
With the transmission of signals and data, cultural values and material goods, real-time information in a world that operates through financial flows by bytes and political information in a network with its instantaneous transactions, it becomes possible, even with inappropriate lenses – which distort the process – to visualize that what is essential in some place on the planet can occur simultaneously everywhere. In “every place in the world”, whether through flat, concave or convex mirrors, it is also possible to be in “another place”, whether as mimesis, in the temple of subjective derivatives and styles, or as tragic or pathetic similarities, in the territories of fear.
Mercantile-financial globalization, which followed the globalization of traditional forms of exchange, was the unifying path of minds with the mercantile and neoliberal way of life in the main social spaces of the globe. The irony of current history, however, is that humanity does not breathe through the same pores everywhere. The local and the global in different places are always one and the other, both in the way of life of fascism, when it manages to present itself as a seductive novelty, and in the ways of life of liberal democracy, since both renew not only the appearance of the old extreme conflicts in political democracy. It is there that freedom and submission in specific forms ceaselessly convert into each other. [I]
2.
The public subjectivity that infests Eastern Europe, the United States and Germany, which to a greater or lesser extent affects Latin America, is not the cause of the rebirth of Nazism and fascism. It is an effect, determined by new and old bases – economic and cultural – that produced the impulses and rules of modern totalitarian regimes. Social inequality, regional inequalities, incited social hatreds, the military industry employing millions of people at all levels of production and the policies of conscious disorganization of the State, promoted by the policies of the rich and very rich, engaged in the “liberal” right, increase “the persistence of the assumptions that produce the (new) types of fascism (specific) to each era”.[ii]
Donald Trump’s government is therefore trying to create a new dogma in the geopolitics of subjectivities, both to expand the private appetites of the current liberal-rentier system and to deny the concept of the State and sovereign territory. His ultra-liberalism combines, with his great-power protectionism, so many moments aimed at his internal political bases, which give him the strength to govern in cahoots with “big techs”, and – if his strategy works – to organize himself worldwide to impose a “total” government of the rich.
The crisis is the lungs of the system, and the reconstruction of cities destroyed by successive wars means that the oxygenation of the means of production, which are quickly rebuilt, transforms disasters into business. The differences between the two modern eras, however, are also marked by the fact that their phenomena are linked in a network and their movements – with their information and communication flows – create the norms. In the new ways of life of the market and also in the aggressive conditions of environmental crisis, which are also driving forces of business, norms are created in life itself to become both new laws and complacent jurisprudence.
After the defeat of Nazism, “every praiseworthy mention of a major firm in the destruction of cities (during the war) contributed to its renown, thanks to which they obtained the best orders during reconstruction.”[iii] Today, the crisis is once again the lung of the system, maximized by the sum of times of war, combined with the totality of natural disasters. Let us point out some symbolic speeches, in different geopolitical spaces, that show the mirroring of the new material and immaterial flows, which reproduce – incessantly – the political conditions for the global government of the rich.
3.
In the fragmentation of the class structure left behind by the Second Industrial Revolution, with the economic plans for post-war recovery, and with their international relations secured by the Yalta Pact, groups and classes are both coming together and differing, gradually restructuring themselves into new formal and informal bodies. At the top, today, the conglomerates of the large “big techs” and their associated companies organize their direct and reflexive ideological power in a unified way. In this scenario, new discourses and new types of politicians (or “experts”) are preparing to face the new challenges of the new capitalism that is emerging from the ashes of social democracy.
The recent speech by the American vice president in Munich demonstrates that the ideological and cultural truth of fascism, whether in its national-socialist form or simply as a form of hyper-authoritarian power (policies that dehumanize a vast sector of global society) – that truth – remains intact in the new forms that fascism assumes. Regarding DJ Vance’s speech, the mainstream press reports: “(..) eighty years after American soldiers liberated Dachau, high-ranking German officials accused DJ Vance this weekend – and by extension, the president Donald Trump – to promote a political party that many Germans consider to be descended from Nazism.[iv] The milestones are of a new economic, aesthetic and communicational era that, although fragmentary, are unified as a new power structure in the post-modern world.
The new messages on the network have subjugated modern reason, thirsty for laws, but blocked by the desert of formal (legal) institutions for controlling related crimes, political and environmental, serial, on the Internet. In the affected countries it is almost impossible to restore truths against the plan of the new “global government of the rich”, which was also established with the conditions of submission of the “few rich”, hegemonized to subject themselves to the empire of a single world government.[v] To face the new unity at the “top”, the scarce organizations of the “base”, as well as left-wing politicians in general, were unable to seek new unitary meanings for the reformist or revolutionary discourse.
A corporate government of the rich over the entire planet is therefore advancing in four areas of dispute, mainly in Europe and the American continent, territories that are fundamental both for the revocation of the culture of democratic enlightenment and for erasing the memory of political freedoms.
The first terrain is that of the geopolitical “occupation” of subjectivities in territories with high population density; the second terrain is that in which the corporate government of the rich proposes to dominate new technologies, for the psychic control of all who can be submissive; the third terrain, which the rich already fully dominate, is that of the control of large private finances and the budgets of militarized states, to finance wars; and the fourth terrain, still in the process of definition, is that of the appropriation of spaces of sovereignty, so that temples of security against organized crime can be built there, at all levels, in a model that mainly favors the interests of rich countries.
4.
January 8, 2024 the newspaper The State of S. Paul printed on its first page, without losing its naturalness, that the “Facebook owner surrenders to Trump and takes the brakes off fake news”, a headline that draws attention to one of the key facts that hint at the beginning of a new era. It should not be a new institutional framework for the State, as it was known in mature modernity, but an institutional “non-framework” of private regulation, which designs not predominantly norms, but normative behaviors, in a war of all against all, observed from above by the global cartel of the government of the rich.
It is in this that the new material and formal systems of political hegemony of the new world-system are formed, which is undergoing a “becoming” that can be configured without the need for coups d’état, but through a series of serial moments of a certain type of exception. The project is of a non-State, but of an apparatus without any relevant public function, occupied by the very rich and thus composing a new private government, exclusively of the rich and their associates in a global cartel.
In this new political world surrounded by the acceleration of the new hegemonic capacities of the very rich – who already directly occupy the United States Government – it can already be seen that the global funnel of the great capitalist economies drains its strength to feed the alliances of the proto-fascist extreme right with the traditional right, and also stimulates hundreds of thousands of irregular bodies of criminal action, both in the basements of the networks and in the more traditional conservative jungles of the religions of money.
5.
In the most remote places on the globe, groups of leaders of this new power are apparently spontaneously generated, where small, medium and large local businessmen (and also from the most traditional sectors of the economy) imitate the fascist and neo-fascist politicians of the most advanced countries. In this now classic mimetic process, they express not only their admiration or their understanding of “the wars” that are devastating local capitalisms – concentrating power and spreading hatred against the weakest – but also undermining the minimum level of social belonging that would help class society itself to remain stable. These are the total signs of war.
The imitation of everything that occurs in the most developed capitalist countries, however, is expressed everywhere, not in an identical way, but in a disguised and conditioned manner. A prestigious regional business newspaper (to give an example of leaders who could guide the public sector) even mentions the names of four major businessmen from Rio Grande do Sul as exemplary teachers to teach the state's politicians. They are not named because our objective with this text is not a dispute with companies or businessmen in particular, but with a compact and homogeneous political enterprise, which is already present in the state in an attenuated way and in the state capital, in a transparent way.
In this, with its specific alliances, a system of total power is being set up in the city: radical gentrification of urban space, complete absence of any citizen participation in major public decisions, climate and health denialism, as well as – at the very least – a lenient stance by communication companies towards allegations and investigations into corruption. In these, the mantra at the end of articles, when the situation approached the center of power, through parental relationships and direct administrative subordination, became: “the Mayor is not being investigated”.
The newspaper's discourse, not surprisingly, is all about idealizing the private sector and the government of the rich, when it says in an almost religious manner: "Every public manager or businessman should stop for a few moments to listen to what (they) think. The four business leaders, references in their segments, are some of the most lucid minds in the state (..)".[vi] It is some of these lucid minds that, in different degrees and forms, are present in the legacies of the climate and health denialism of Bolsonarism, sometimes moderate, sometimes radical, but always pathetic, which dominates the state's political culture.
In Porto Alegre, during the most critical period of assistance to the population, in the “climate tragedy”, while the Civil Police, the Fire Department, the Military Brigade, the Municipal Guard and the institutional apparatus of the State, at various levels, including contingents of the Armed Forces, created a formidable support network for those affected, a “phalanx” of liberal businessmen from RGS disdained the state’s action and distributed a few goods (given the scale of the catastrophe) repeating a well-known denialist formula: “only the people help the people”.[vii]
6.
Since the election of Donald Trump, the achievements of social democracy, which were in force as traces of democratic enlightenment in a certain historical period on all continents, continue to be designated as originating from “cultural Marxism”, whose messages are being replaced – in our regional space and in the world – by the proposal of another type of state.
This “State”, whose universal model should be the shelter (or cave) that coherently houses a “total” government of the rich, comes with a proposal of primordial trust in the bureaucratic power of the rich and very rich, which thus distorts its politicization with the naturalization of fascism “within” liberal democracy. It is a soft form, even, that allows combining, in all its messages, “the magical realism of inflationary targets, which instills fiscal terrorism (…) with the “imposition of an impractical Selic rate”,[viii] which blocks the Social State at all its pores and makes it necessary for all political forces to include financial capital in any system of alliances.
The philosophical foundations of this global movement are expressed in the colloquial language of neoliberal talents, who mix an abstractly anti-communist common sense with attacks on those who do not govern, especially local companies, and dare to formulate programs to protect the poor and excluded. “Human beings have a tendency to seek the easiest control (…) – says the columnist – (and then come) high interest rates, political distrust and populist maneuvers to feed the ego of rulers” (…) “so let us visualize the path forward more clearly.
The fallacy of the nanny state, which will take care of everyone, is becoming more and more visible, because the bill is coming. And it is high.”[ix]. Here we are also talking about the ego of future (eventual) rulers, if their project, which calls for the total privatization of the State and the way of life, is implemented at some point. This possibility also exists there. And it is also high. In Argentina it has already arrived, through a psychopath who talks to dead dogs.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (arts & crafts). [https://amzn.to/3DfPdhF]
Notes
[I] (…) The leaders, unable to devise “an alternative economic policy line (they failed to do so) were also unable to conceive of an alternative policy, so that neither the federative tensions, nor the public security crisis, nor the enormous infrastructure shortages, nor the low investment rate, nor the disorganization of urban life, nor the imminent ecological disasters, nor acute problems such as air transportation, nor the low growth rates, nor the scandals and the consequent demoralization of institutions seem to be sufficient to sustain an opposition policy worthy of the name. (…) TORRES, João Carlos Brum. BRAZILIAN SITUATION AND THE SÃO PAULO EVIL. UFG Magazine, 2025.Available here.
[ii] ADORNO, Theodor W. Aspects of the new Right-Wing Radicalism. Translated by Felipe Catalani. London: Oxford University Press, 2020, p. 31.
[iii] Ibid.
[iv] But after the American vice president spoke in Munich the next day, German leaders questioned whether he had truly understood what he had just seen. TANKERSLEY, Jim , In The New York Times-Munich. Trump Administration Officials Attack German Consensus on Nazism, Hate Speech. The Globe, Rio de Janeiro, 2025.
Available in stock here.
[v] (…) The proposal put forward by woke capitalists, however, is different. (Cf. C. Rhodes, Woke Capitalism, Turin, 2023). His consideration is that, since democratic politics is no longer able to meet the expectations of citizens' well-being and since Third Sector entities do not have the strength, although they have the will, to meet the need, the rich and super-rich must replace the State in fulfilling its tasks in the area of well-being, as long as they are not burdened by a tax on income above 15%.(…). ZAMAGNI, Stefano. The super-rich in place of the State: a threat to democracy. Instituto Humanitas Unisinos, 2025, Available here.
[vi] (...) RS Resume, they summarized initiatives capable of generating a virtuous circle: their companies did not achieve success and then implement ESG. They reached such a level of excellence also because of these practices. LOPES, Rodrigo. RS has a historic opportunity to change its relationship with the environment. GZH, Porto Alegre, 2025. Available here.
[vii] Professor Marcelo Kunrath says after an enlightening study on this moment: “I think it is the bet of the ideological dispute. It is not just a question of economic or political interest, because they already have that. They also have a lot of power over the City Council, through campaign donations. These guys, in fact, have almost total control. There is no bill that interests them that was not approved during Melo’s administration. Changes to the Master Plan, changes to urban legislation to allow construction in areas where it is not allowed, self-licensing [of works]. It is curious because big businessmen generally do not want to show off when they have influence in politics. Now, the younger generation of families is taking the lead, they are more politically engaged – not necessarily in electoral party politics, but in the political dispute in society. It is a generation that was involved in the impeachment process of [former president] Dilma Rousseff, that helped to fund the MBL [Free Brazil Movement], Brasil Paralelo.” KUNRATH, Marcelo. Floods in Rio Grande do Sul consolidate conservatives in Porto Alegre, says sociologist. Publishes Investigative Journalism Agency, 2025. Available here.
[viii] One of the country's major problems is the gaps in the information market. A thriving country is being designed in academic research, in some cutting-edge sectors, in the design of a rare earths policy, focused on the energy transition, in the New Brazilian Industry (NIB) programs.(…).
NASSIF, Luis. An anodyne government under a terrorist media. GGN- The Newspaper of all Brazils, 2025. Available at:https://jornalggn.com.br/coluna-economica/um-governo-anodino-sob-uma-midia-terrorista-por-luis-nassif/
[ix] MAGNANI, Paola Coser. Easy thinking is no longer convincing. GZHMore, 25.02.25. Available here.
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