By TARSUS GENUS*
Considerations on the January 08 coup attempt
On April 21, on the anniversary of the founding of Rome, Giovane Gentile, a sort of Ives Gandra of Benito Mussolini – a philosopher known to the European elite – published in Il Poppolo d'Italia a “Manifesto of Fascist Intellectuals”, who defended a fascist faith, a fascist religion, a fascist hatred of the decay of the West. This Manifesto would correspond here, in the era of Tik-Toks, of Wathsaps, to Jair Bolsonaro's declaration of vote in the impeachment of Dilma, with its infamous messages, against the greatness of a woman who was deposed and faced her executioners head on . In a single gesture, Jair Bolsonaro inaugurated an era of “nothing”: the emptiness of perspectives in the history of democracy would be a substitute for the crisis of liberal democracy.
Theodor Adorno recalls, in his studies on right-wing radicalism, that it is in modern, more narcissistic periods, that the dissolution of utopias becomes “eras of diminishing expectations”. In them emerges, in a “fringe of lunatics”, the social hopelessness that, in given social conditions, tends to expand. In later studies, such as those presented in a 1967 lecture, the philosopher finds that these groups are not only composed of “lunatics”, but also of anticipators of a “generalized state of mind”, which takes shape in a “collective desire for the apocalypse”. .
I take these findings from Theodor Adorno's book Aspects of the new right-wing radicalism (Unesp), in which radicalism – always mutating – carries not only the germs of an essential renewal of fascism, but also a specific project of the capital system. And also new forms of struggle and new policies of brutality, material and moral, which are accepted or advised by significant parts of the traditional press, then by organized political crime networks and, equally, by the military with political pretensions, allied with religions. of the money.
Enzo Traverso, in The new faces of the right (Siglo Veinteuno) goes in the same direction, observing other experiences after the end of “post-Fordism” (in 1980), when he finds that, in these contexts, “the social landmarks of memory” have already disintegrated: the dissolution of political force of the classical proletariat, as the subject of a historical birth based on socialism and communism, was emptied. In this void of organizing or referential subjects of class society, figures that summarize the “tiredness of liberal democracy” emerge. They originate from their tortuous forms of domination and the effectiveness of the miseducation programmed by the political system, always averse to the most direct forms of political participation.
Criminal campaigns on networks are not just new forms of communication, they are above all scientific forms of mental subsumption by a large part of the population to accept – in the new times of hopelessness – the destruction of social ties in everyday life. But beware: exchanging them, not for the hope of a better future to be built in society through political action, but rather for the attempt to revive the ties of a past that only exists in the imagination romanticized by alienation.
Jair Bolsonaro came – for example – into this irreversible decay of the industrial way of life, blocking the memory that would be transmitted to current generations. It forms, with its verve of hatred, an ocean of “nothingness” (Ernst Bloch) that, in the absence of formal resistance workers, highlights the partial narratives of each oppressed social group – cultural, ethnic, gender, sexual – that prays rises with dignity on the political stage.
The strength of the message of these groups comes from the fact that, since the traditional left did not know – at any point in its political strategies – to anticipate changing times, when liberal-democratic fatigue became clear. In these new times, there were classes in confrontation followed by class agreements devoid of commitment, in which the majority of capital managed to impose itself on the “nothing” of hope (“at the end of ideologies”) and the left enacted income transfer policies, not as a social-democratic transition, but as a compensatory strategic purpose. The ideology of utopian entrepreneurship, which combined fascism with neoliberalism, in this scenario becomes the new utopia of the poor and unemployed.
The sincerity of hopelessness in any democratic solution is what gave legitimacy to Jair Bolsonaro to say that he defended torture, that we would go back to the time when the maid would have breakfast with us again, that the poor should be punished by squads of bandits in the service of the cause he defended, that blacks should be weighed by “arrobas” and that it is much better to work sixteen hours a day, being the immediate owner of “my nose, than an employee where you know the boss.
Thus, the little captain, without any powerful resistance from the “big media operators”, with the support of the rich middle classes and a large part of the lower strata, grew up in a society already tired of paying, proportionally, the highest taxes in the world, compared to taxes paid by the rich in the global and local financial casino. The slow and planned death of democracy (Bolsonaro intended) would succeed the new type of fascism, which would unify the people around the myths of the market and the workers around employment for the few and scarce services for the many.
Politics and crime have become definitively integrated into the nation's scenario, since the leader's central message, which now goes to waste, has left serially customized puppies, who are still going to seek power, with a social base no less than 1 \4 of the population, for whom human life is worth nothing, the earth is flat, Foucault can be Minister Dino's secretary, Lula is a dangerous communist and God can help in coups by the State. The hydra has not been annulled and is going to prepare a new outbreak of violence: in the name of God, the Fatherland and the Family, which for them is just a slogan devoid of reality and humanity.
*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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