By MARCELO JOSÉ MOREIRA*
The shock of the new coronavirus exposes a sanitary-economic-civilizing crisis, making clear the failure of the fallacy of the globalizing process as an ideology and as a civilizing process
The capitalist world-economy (undergoing restructuring, as Wallerstein (2000) pointed out) is immersed in a generalized inertia. A movement of slow accumulation, low investment, limited growth rates, but with a high level of profit, and which takes place through intense pressure on the levels of existing inequalities, combining world restructuring of wealth and income generation with a pattern of reproduction of the labor force to the level of its limited maintenance. Inertia that is verified, above all, from the financial-productive crisis of the first decade of the 2000s, especially from 2008. Brazil is not oblivious to this inertia and its consequences.
The Brazilian economic dynamics, of income and wealth concentrating development, was covered: 1. by a trajectory of industrial activities, without configuring an industrialization process per se (as stated, for Latin America, Marini (2000)) , which are deindustrialized (early (RICUPERO, 2007), harmfully (CANO, 2014) or prematurely (BRESSER-PEREIRA, NASSIF and FEIJÓ, 2016)) insistently since the 1980s; 2. by a continuous advance of agroeconomic activities (metamorphosing the capital generated there and making the very notion of agricultural activities complex), in a process of primarization of the export basket that expands and affirms itself in a kind of perpetual way; and, 3. for a labor market structured to the precariousness of working conditions and relations and the reproduction of inequalities.
Such elements, constituted (in) and constitutive (of) a structural external dependency process, functional for the development of internal productive forces with the intensification of their dependency relationship with the world economy, takes place in a frank interdependence relationship, as What happens is "(...) an intensely complex and contradictory network of reciprocal dependencies on a global scale, with multiplier and intensifying problems and demands in each particular area, which are currently far beyond the control of any single 'centre', no matter how powerful and advanced. .” (MÉSZÁROS, 2009, p. 87).
This structural covering expresses: 1. the intentionality of external dependence for the dynamics of internal accumulation, integrating it and making economic activities interdependent, in such a way that any significant change in the productive chain becomes extremely limited, since it is based on a dependence historically constituted and intentionally maintained, in terms of an intensely integrated and spatially specialized systemic economy that, under the shock of the new coronavirus, feels the contradictions of this specialized spatialization; and, 2. the immersion of the Brazilian economy in a type of internal response mechanism that outlines a trajectory of political-institutional advances (or retreats), as if in a pendulum movement, not significantly altering the process of material reproduction concentrating and generator of social inequalities. This response-mechanism defines the situation of Brazilian dependency in the process of systemic reproduction and is presented in the form of a modus operandi of the national economy: it is a historical process that is not simply linked to periods of growth, depression or recession. It is based on primacy for accommodating the complex movement of the capitalist world-system, along the lines of productive-financial globalization that shapes the accommodation of the systemic cumulative structure.
Inserted in this context, the shock of the new coronavirus, in general, exposes a sanitary-economic-civilizing crisis, making clear the failure of the fallacy of the globalizing process as an ideology and as a civilizing process, established in the structures of volatile production and consumption and the globalized financialization of capital (CHESNAIS, 2005) under the designs of parasitic speculative capital dominating over substantive capital (CARCANHOLO and NAKATANI , 2015): a system of gears based on the ephemerality of accumulation itself and which is structured in a process of reproduction of material life of the same condition. In the specific, aggravates the characteristics of the dependentista overlay of Brazilian development, described above; It is, express, in particular, an intentional inability (materialized in attitudes favoring institutional instability) of the Bolsonaro government to deal with adverse situations that require short-term measures to minimize the effects of this crisis in the longer term. The president of the republic stands as a real threat to the fraying of the social fabric and national institutional disintegration, added to the systemic chaos ordered in/by elements yet to be identified in substance, movement and reaction, covered by the shock of the new coronavirus .
In the critical and threatening moment that the working class, the economy and Brazilian democracy are going through, it is urgent to focus on what I refer to as the central problem to be faced by its collectivity (and its institutions): building a pattern of reproduction of intellectual and material life (in a clear process of resurgence in its cultural, social and political dimensions), which encourages the non-tearing of the social fabric on which its process of dependent accumulation is established (tensioned by the chaotic systemic movement), and which enhances its accommodation within the frameworks of a humanly viable, socially habitable and ecologically possible society.
* Marcelo Jose Moreira is professor of economic history at the State University of Goiás (UEG).
References
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