By CRISTIANO ADDARIO DE ABREU*
Poor right-wingers identify with the ostentation funk of mediocre figures like Pablo Marçal, dreaming of conspicuous consumption that excludes them
Progressive context
At the turn of the 1900th century to the 1861th century, the United States was experiencing profound economic growth (in 1865, it surpassed the British as the world's largest industrial producer), with a steady and secure industrial development that had been solidly developing since the Civil War (XNUMX-XNUMX). This economic growth occurred under the leadership of the industrial sector, which grew under the shield of the largest protectionist tariffs in the world at the time, practiced by the United States since the Civil War, with the Morrill Tariff, the Tariff ActOf 1862.[I]
This chronic US tariff protectionism has promoted its catch up industrial, together with the consolidation of the large productive monopolies of Gilded Age (American term for the same period as, and equivalent to, the Belle Epoque European), of these “golden years” of elitism and the consolidation of North American monopoly capitalism (Baran-Sweezy).
But this situation brought serious social and political problems, due to growing inequality, with profound social injustice, which generated a growing public questioning of the validity of these monopolistic economic structures by various social groups, the three main ones being: (i) small agricultural producers, grouped together in the populist movement;[ii] (ii) urban industrial workers, united in the growing trade union movement with a predominantly socialist profile (this was the most combative, but this was not the only movement that was growing at the time); (iii) the regulatory/anti-monopoly middle-class sectors, influential in the legal world, in the academic world and in the US press at the time.
This framework of social crisis, with general questions about the economic model, found in one work in particular an overwhelming academic, economic, social and political critique, in the 1899 work by Thorstein Veblen: The leisure class theory (The theory of the leisure class). In this work, the author studies the wealthiest classes in the United States from the perspective of an anthropologist studying indigenous peoples from America or isolated islands in the Pacific, analytically describing the behavior of the US elite in a raw manner, and without moral judgments, but seeking to portray this class scientifically, which resulted in an embarrassing final image for this elite.
Thorstein Veblen is the American economist and social scientist most representative of Institutionalism, and his work had a long-lasting impact on the self-image of the American elite of that time. Gilded Age, romanticized by economic ultraliberalism (which was not practiced in the USA!), but strongly disapproved of by the critical thinking that his work leveraged, generating a strong and lasting criticism of that wasteful and ostentatious elite of conspicuous consumption, provided by a concentration of income and productive capacity promoted by the State, to the detriment of the collective, of commonwealth. Even consistent liberals criticized the situation at the time.
This work was a very strong critical framework of this elite, which reverberated in several artistic works, such as Chaplin's films, painfully poetic about the impoverished "vagabonds" (the tramp) of that very rich and unequal society. Criticism of this situation and this elite proliferated in North American culture, with the character of Uncle Scrooge being an iconic example of pop culture criticism of the situation of the unregulated monopoly capitalism of the time (at least unregulated in the duties of capital: because in the protections of capital there was indeed regulation, with a lot of protection).
All this social unrest resulted in a wave of social criticism, which would culminate in a first wave of greater state regulation of monopolies in the USA under the Woodrow Wilson government (1912-1920), and then culminate in the New Deal Roosevelt, who created a so-called “civilized”, “modern” capitalism… because it was regulated. But whose regulatory bases would be destroyed in the deregulations of neoliberalism, starting in the 1980s, with Ronald Reagan: which has regressed central capitalism to that savage state of Gilded Age, studied by Thorstein Veblen.
Big Tech Culture War
This description of the impact of Veblen's academic work on the social struggle of the American people against the oppressions of their monopoly capitalism serves here to demonstrate the power of studies and research for the improvement and social, economic and political evolution of societies. Because the difficulties and traps (legal, conceptual, economic...) against the working classes are increasingly sophisticated in this digital world, which demands greater study and understanding of the social forces that are victims (the People) in this process. Unfortunately, in Brazil today the opposite is happening.
For such academic works to have, over time, such a receptive reverberation in society, there needs to be reading and study by a growing segment of society. The most popular dissemination, done through filters by disseminators who have read the works, is an honest path to academic dissemination. In the 20th century in the USA, local radio stations and a lot of popular and union press, spread throughout the country, in addition to theater groups, played this heroic role. Today, this occurs on independent websites on the internet, but above all on dissemination platforms that are global monopolists (American), such as YouTube (owned by Google), where independent disseminators post their works, many of which are of excellent quality.
But this shows the widespread and growing submission of society to digital communication monopolies, which today hinders the popularization of intellectual and academic production, as was the case in the described social critique of the unjust abuses of American capitalism in the period already mentioned here. Today, the situation in Brazil is desperate, given the absurdity of the regressions that have been implemented, both social (in the regression of labor and social security rights, while productivity only increases), and in terms of productive rights: with privatizations, which are the handover of public productive assets built by generations, of fixed capital, handed over to the altar of private monopolies that are structurally irresponsible for any social/ecological/or technological duty, of the productive sectors that take over these criminal privatizations.
Regressive context
Today in Brazil we are experiencing a historical process that is the opposite of what reversed the Gilded Age of the wealthy of monopoly capitalism in the USA towards the New Deal. There, popular social forces managed to popularize ideas and criticisms of monopoly capitalism, and forced a reform of capitalism. Today in Brazil, the internet is used by the working classes in a TikTok-like way: videos of no more than five minutes (if that), only images, and everything seen on monopolistic Big Tech platforms... The medium creates the message, and the message is always regressive in its form: simplistic due to its structural brevity, and manipulated/directed by Big Tech algorithms that are always in action...
The fact that the Internet is an infinite library of texts and images, films and books, only occurs in the minds of people who were educated to know how to use a library. Those who were never educated to use a library use the Internet as they learned to watch TV: always going to the same links (facebook, WhatsApp, etc.) G1, R7, etc…). Therefore, he uses the internet not in an active and interactive way, but in a passive/reactive way, just as he always did when watching TV: TV was the school of miseducation in the popular use of the internet.
In other words: the vast majority of Brazilians are using the internet in the most idiotic way, even more so than they used TV. The reading capacity of generations born with a cell phone in their hands is as good as that of a TikTok: they can't read three pages.
Thus, problems increase, reality becomes more complicated, and young people's ability to study and understand reality regresses towards chronic illiteracy, pathological illiteracy, incapable of intellectual abstractions that are only achievable through the lever of reading.
Such people, immersed in and raised in the chronic digitality of fast-paced videos, are not only chronically illiterate in books and texts: they are increasingly incapable and unwilling to watch an entire film. There is already a growing film illiteracy emerging in these new generations! Such people not only do not read any books, they can't even watch films anymore!!! Thus, the situation of chronic illiteracy is more serious than it seems! Because the narrative itself, the story told, is increasingly unbearable for those who are uneducated with their cell phones in their hands, and always use them for visual purposes, with a time limit of five minutes (if that!).
This brings us to the chronic agony of our days. If chronic illiteracy is a topic that is increasingly problematized today by authors such as Michel Desmurget,[iii] Film illiteracy is a concept that I dare to launch here, while the concept of nowness is taken from João Cezar de Castro Rocha, and is also the regressive result, which already came from the use of television, made today by the ultra-visualized, fast, non-continuous use of videos on digital platforms.
The past and the future do not exist in this way of using digital platforms! The construction of temporal linearity, as well as of cumulative intellectual construction, is increasingly denied and erased in this way of using digitality: the eternal present is a dictatorship of compulsory forgetting in a world without history. The end of history is a neoliberal obsession… Obviously there is a reason for this: the only way out of the neoliberal, neofascist trap, of this dystopian digitality, is through the systematic study of history.
The increasing difficulty in concentrating and abstracting, in training to understand a narrative construction (not to mention a dissertative construction!), has created intolerant people who are incapable of listening, impatient and irritable, incapable of having the resilience to study, read, or to any pleasurable return in the long term of dedication (such as studying, reading, and increasingly even watching a film!).
Nowhood is the result of this general picture of induced impatience, totalitarian intellectual laziness, inability to concentrate, resulting in chronic illiteracy: literary illiteracy, digital illiteracy, film illiteracy.
This growing chronic lack of education, unpreparing people for studying, reading, intellectual accumulation, and temporal and causal associations, has generated a growing collective imbecility, in an increasingly infantilized, regressive society, but which is increasingly confronted with more complex and distressing problems.[iv] But in dealing with such problems of increasing complexity, average intellectual capacity has rapidly regressed in our Brave New World digital networks controlled by Big Tech algorithms. In the Age of AI machinery progresses, plagiarizing our intellectual work, and humans regress into a digital binary mechanization.
The triumphant mediocrity of the idiot Pablo Marçal
The result of this? It is the victory of the outcry against politics, of the hysterical channeling of frustrated forces against any constructive dialogue. Because the objective of these forces is not collective improvement, or the solution of anything, but the imposition of whatever is best, blindly, for the valorization of monopoly capital: passing the herd is always the objective of this “new right”, without measuring any collective, social or ecological cost.
They can burn the whole of Brazil, they can stimulate deaths in pandemics, they can destroy water security (privatization of Sabesp), they can destroy minimum food security structures (like the end of regulatory stocks with Temer), or the security against floods can be destroyed (like those that were scrapped in Porto Alegre by neoliberalism: structures built since the 1940s with Getúlio Vargas, and that did not work due to the planned scrapping of neoliberalism...): all social and environmental costs are worth nothing to a monopoly capital that is blind to the whole, there is no Commonwealth Furthermore, there is no Republic, to the scoundrels who defend this regressive neoliberalism.
Brazil is experiencing a capitalist project that is the opposite of that of New Deal: we are under an “elite” (as FHC taught: Brazil has no elite. He is right!) that continues under the neoliberal delirium destroying any constructive civilizing pact. That is why we hate industrialization: only agriculture is popular… (agriculture financed technologically and scientifically by the state-owned Embrapa). But the campaign by the mainstream media and Big Tech algorithms to legitimize such destructive projects is the road to collective madness, celebrated self-sabotage, and infantilizing imbecility, which finds in the scoundrel Pablo Marçal its finished representative at the moment of the moment (this moment will pass, but it does not matter: the project of a crazy opportunist on duty will continue to be revamped).
Hatred of politics, the criminalization of politics, is a project of monopoly capital against civilizing forces, which already came from the old traditional media, but which is amplified in the algorithms of Big Tech: the repetitive circle of binary imbecilization to “solve” all problems (which are always increasingly complex) is spread across WhatsApp groups and far-right channels, leveraged by the hidden algorithms of Big Tech.
Such simplistic and dishonest “answers” seduce with their crude and deceitful simplicity, with the illusion of power they exude and “propose”: putting the route on the street, civic-military school, “I’m going to break your face”, “I’ll arm myself”, a 1 km building… Most of the “solutions” are individual, selling an illusion of personalized empowerment, to people who have always suffered such violence, and are very far from any power…
The most humiliated and suffering, infantilized and revolted adults, are the ones who fall most for this absurdly false talk, Wizard of Oz swindlers: the most extreme example of which at the moment is the convicted conman Pablo Marçal. A gentleman who lies by displaying the greatest symbol of Vargas' laborism, the work card, as if he were defending it, when he only politically allies himself with the greatest enemies of the entire labor tradition in Brazil.
This gentleman was convicted in 2010 for participating in a gang specialized in digital scams, sending pornography with viruses to steal data, accused of creating fake websites for public banks to divert money from account holders (especially the elderly): according to the lawsuit, the group sent charges for defaulting on payments to victims, manipulating lies and scams to steal from people, mostly the elderly.[v] The group stole the data, but the financial institutions refunded the account holders and covered the losses (therefore: Pablo Marçal stole from the public treasury). He was convicted in 2010 for these crimes, but the sentence expired and he did not serve his sentence. Pablo Marçal on this occasion reported his accomplices in crime to the federal police.[vi]
Pablo Marçal escaped from this prison due to the statute of limitations, but the sentence was never reviewed or withdrawn, it remains more confirmed than ever, and the electoral court still does not overturn the legality of this criminal candidacy.[vii]
Bandit, almost, I confess[viii], and mocking, his strategy in this election is to raise to the thousandth power the messiness of politics, already anticipated by the candidate priest of the June festival in the 2022 election: the destruction of politics, of serious and constructive speech is the objective of the worm Pablo Marçal. With this he gains views, and monetization on the internet (his business...), and the election becomes a monetized lever for his internet horror show, in which he profits by feeding all that is worst on the planet.
But if all this nonsense in itself is not enough for the Electoral Court to revoke this candidacy, there would be no reason to have an Electoral Court: the serious parties need to create a CPI (Parliamentary Inquiry Committee) on the Electoral Court's inaction in this case. Because this gentleman's crimes seem to have no end: the slander he perpetrated against Guilherme Boulos, openly in bad faith, with him using a namesake of Boulos to spread lies against the PSOL candidate, is one of the proofs that everything about the worm Pablo Marçal's candidacy is a fifth-rate scoundrel.
Again: Brazilian society (and the Justice system) accepting the circus of horrors, lies, and crimes of this lousy candidacy will be opening the Pandora's Box of political collapse, it will be the militiaization of politics in Brazil. This person needs to have his candidacy revoked, as well as his political rights. Revocation that, by the way, needs to happen to all those who participated in the sewage of January 08, 2023: Brazil needs to crush those who sully politics and try to kill public debate.
But what about the success of such scoundrel Pablo Marçal, precisely, with so many of the most humble? As Simone de Beauvoir said: oppression only succeeds because of the support it finds in the oppressed… The current problem in Brazil is that such support has reached astonishing levels: I believe that Mrs. Beauvoir would be shocked by the absurd situation in Brazil today.
It's like the slave described by Machado de Assis in Posthumous Memoirs, Prudêncio, who served as a “horse” for Brás Cubas, being whipped at the beginning of the book, and who at the end of the book, already freed, acquired a slave himself, and inflicted much worse tortures on him than he himself suffered at the beginning[ix]: This is the project of seduction for the Brazilian poor sold by the digitalized extreme right, as personified by Pablo Marçal.
The success of these disqualified cadres in politics is the case of this project of stimulating hatred, self-hatred, and the imbecility propagated by Big Tech deregulated: again, just one New deal internet regulatory[X] can save democracies. This happens all over the world: not just in Brazil.
Unfortunately, such poor right-wingers identify with the ostentation funk of mediocre figures like Pablo Marçal, dreaming of conspicuous consumption that excludes them. Today's Brazil needs a Thorstein Veblen to write the book The Theory of Imaginary Classes, to try to describe and understand the ridiculous absurdity that has been the political result of so many people, more connected with their projected illusions and masturbation, than with their concrete realities.
*Cristiano Addario de Abreu He has a PhD in economic history from USP.
Notes
[I] CHANG, Ha-Joon. Kicking Up the Ladder: Development Strategy in Historical Perspective. Unesp, 2004., p. 56
[ii] POSTEL, Charles. The populist visionOxford University Press, 2007.
[iii] DESMURGET, Michel. Make them read!: To avoid creating digital idiots. Vestigio Publisher, 2023.
[iv] MORIN, Edgar. Introduction to Complex Thinking. trans. Eliane Lisboa, v. 4, 2015.
[v] https://oglobo.globo.com/politica/eleicoes-2024/noticia/2024/08/09/pablo-marcal-ja-foi-condenado-por-furto-entenda-o-que-pesa-sobre-o-candidato-a-prefeito-de-sp.ghtml
[vi] https://www.em.com.br/politica/2024/08/6928230-marcal-e-x-9-policia-federal-aponta-que-ele-delatou-comparsas-em-esquema.html
[vii] https://www.brasildefato.com.br/2024/08/26/relembre-acusacoes-contra-marcal-candidato-a-prefeitura-em-sp-e-associado-ao-crime-por-adversarios
[viii] https://noticias.uol.com.br/eleicoes/2024/08/26/sakamoto-condenado-por-furto-pablo-marcal-denunciou-seus-comparsas.htm
[ix] BROWN, John. The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas. Editorial Studio, 1998.
[X] https://www.brasil247.com/blog/a-inteligencia-artificial-e-a-estrada-da-servidao-voluntaria
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