By TARSUS GENUS*
The announcement by the future American president that he will impose a 100% tax on imports of products from BRICS countries is not simply a bluff.
Legend has it and part of my state's history tells that one of our great governors, on his deathbed — suffocated by pulmonary emphysema — responded to an advisor with a historic phrase. The advisor: “Courage, Governor!”, to which he responds: “I have courage, you son of a bitch, what I lack is air!”
Ralf Dahrendorf in his essay “The Changing Nature of Democracy” (magazine “Politics”, 1997, Paidós) examining Marshall's arguments on modern citizenship, the following question arises: is it not more appropriate to think of modern citizenship using a pattern of “concentric circles”?: “there is a hard core of fundamental rights that are indispensable to personal integrity, (such as) due process, freedom of expression and other rights. Therein lies a set of basic human rights, without which the rule of law is reduced to an empty shell”.
The announcement by future President Donald Trump that he will impose a 100% tax on imports of products from BRICS countries — if they adopt an alternative currency to the dollar — is not simply a bluff. It is not a decision already made to be implemented, nor a mere warning, but the first exploration of the new geopolitical terrain of dispute that has been forming since his return to the White House. It is a move that complements the coup d'état attempted at the end of his first term, a crime from which he emerged, remains and will remain unharmed.
Two essential data from the American economy help to explain not only Donald Trump's victory, but also the crisis of the country's liberal-democratic system, which has always worked well for its colonial-imperial interests: the US debt-to-GDP ratio is 120% (currently in Brazil it is around 80%) and the income per capita The wealth of its richest 20% is nine times greater than that of its poorest 20%. The richest 1% in America owns more wealth than the poorest 50% combined.
These figures, left behind by the Joe Biden administration in a country that continually gives lessons to barbaric peoples on how to control their public spending and how to clean up their structural finances, have now elected a xenophobic, protectionist, misogynist and self-confessed criminal to lead the nation for the next four years. The crisis of representative democracy is not new, as the legal and political mediations through which it is carried out appeared shortly after the end of the “Cold War”, although they have only reached their peak today, in the world’s largest capitalist power.
This same analysis, transferred to the Brazilian and South American situation, can be understood in its specificity, based on the general-global situation of the capitalist system, controlled by public (from rich countries) and private (global) financial agents, in another circular condition. It was exposed by Danilo Zolo, in the same work (cit. pg. 127), in this way: “given that in a free market society only a minority has sufficient political, economic and organizational resources to benefit from the purchasing power of the last class of rights (economic-social), citizenship produces inequalities and freedom, in the same way that the market generates inequality and wealth”.
This contradiction between the standardized fundamental rights and the unequal distribution of income (and access to private and public social goods) is the pillar, or the organic “center” of the socio-metabolic reproduction of the capital system. It can be summarized in the following pragmatic and “popular” question: how much material advantage can political (liberal) democracy achieve for citizens – without destroying the socio-metabolism that structures the market system – in order to distribute something to those at the bottom and increase the wealth of those at the top?
The perplexity (including that of this writer) with which the PT and the left deal with this issue, whose synthesis – as a public policy – is called “Haddad’s framework”, should have started much earlier. It would have helped us define bolder directions in the conduct of a centrist and democratic government that has not devoted itself to making a political reform that would facilitate a policy of Fronts, which would value national parties and not the regional oligarchies of each state, for the production of electoral alliances.
I am referring to the time when Lula complained about the constant bad moods of the “Farias Limers” (and their ilk on Paulista Avenue) towards his governments. “Even though they have never earned as much as they did under my government,” the President said. When Lula pointed out this contradiction between the gains of capital and the level of dissatisfaction of the allied classes, some of those who were closest to the President at that time realized that he believed in the “good faith” of human beings in the abstract, dominant in the market, and less in the power of the concrete market to dominate the minds of these same beings.
The lack of “gratitude” from the ruling classes, in their way of doing politics, was placing a highly complex problem within their system of alliances, which could only be resolved by a new political Front, which would locate – in a situation very far from any social revolution and very close to the advance of the extreme right on a global scale – where the ideal point would be, not of an impossible rupture in those historical conditions, but of a widening of the corridors for the transit of a more just and possible society.
What is present in the “Haddad framework”, within the limits of the alliances that are given by the Consulate of Lira and Bolsonarism in the third Lula government, are not Haddad's personal political positions, but are exactly the conditions inherited to govern without ruptures, to manage, within the limits of this order and the system of alliances through which it was carried out, the reconciliation of the people with the political democracy that the people themselves stopped valuing.
In fact, what remains for Brazil, from all that we are seeing around the world, is a resistance in the local and South American political arena. Resistance to stop the fascism that is now coming to Milei’s Argentina, from within the “libertarian” and elitist anarchism that has already set its bloody paws on several regions of the world. Let us remember that stopping Fernando Haddad’s “framework” could result in the same infamous process that “impeached” Dilma Rousseff and opened the floodgates for Bolsonarism, at once suicidal and murderous, which still haunts us.
*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).
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