By JOSÉ RAIMUNDO TRINDADE*

The country is at the most crucial moment of Brazilian capitalist modernity

“Time is a knot,\ Center knot,\ Sailor's knot,\ Backward knot,\ No destination knot,\ Time is our knot of history”

We are a few days away from one of the most critical moments in Brazilian history over the last hundred years. Here I want to highlight some points of what this means and why I consider this moment to be more crucial than other moments of Brazilian capitalist modernity.

To be didactic, I will list in six points what I understand and I will close with a final significant point, I hope that the text will contribute to bringing new ideas and that we can make what I call the force of history pulsar, because only a heart that is alive and pregnant with the future can keep pulsating and face fascist movements like the current one we face.

(1) Brazilian history has gone through seven very expressive social and economic cycles in the last hundred years. Still in the second decade of the 1922th century, Brazil entered the capitalist contemporaneity, including the organization of industries and the formation of the Brazilian working class. In XNUMX the first Communist Party is created and the “Week of Modern Art” takes place, at that moment the world is in a trance, after the Russian Revolution and the First World War.

The second critical moment takes place ten years later, in 1932, with the Constitutionalist Revolution and with the breaking of the São Paulo-Mineiro pact and the establishment of Getúlio Vargas.

The third moment takes place in the transition between the end of the first Getúlio Vargas government and the government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra. We have the experience of a government of complete national surrender and loss of the sovereign possibility that had been established, even if fragilely, in the previous period.

The fourth moment is observed with the return of Getúlio Vargas and the constitution of a nationalist government, which establishes the first historical possibility of sovereign organization of the Brazilian Nation, something that is betrayed by the Brazilian bourgeoisie and leads Getúlio Vargas to suicide in 1954.

The fifth cycle takes place with Juscelino and the historical reorganization of the Brazilian economy, with several problems, including the growing penetration of international capital, but it allows for a leap in capital accumulation and advancement in the organization of the working class and the peasantry.

That cycle lasted until the 1964 coup d'état, a period characterized by Florestan Fernandes as a “counterrevolution”, establishing a sixth cycle, whose authoritarian nature and complete association with international capital led to the loss of Brazilian sovereignty.

The seventh cycle takes place in the post-dictatorial period and lasts until 2016, when again there is a coup d'état and an authoritarian escalation and loss of rights, with the neo-fascist government of Jair Bolsonaro representing the apex of this period.

(2) The electoral process we find ourselves in marks an inflexible knot, we face either the deepening of a long-term authoritarian cycle, or its partial rupture and the construction of new ways out of the profound civilizing crisis in which we find ourselves.

(3) It is worth observing more slowly the two main possibilities raised, in order to establish constraints and possible strategies for social struggle in the coming years. The first possibility, which constitutes the center of our actions today, refers to the election of former President Luiz Inácio. The government that will result will be a crisis government, with great dispute in society and within the already fragmented institutions of Brazilian bourgeois democracy.

The only way to maintain governance and establish a minimal agenda will be through social organization. Even considering Lula's conciliatory capacity, however, the contradictions present today only intensified in the next period, whether due to the subaltern position of the Brazilian bourgeoisie in the international crisis scenario, or due to the great strength with which the physiological and neo-fascist sectors acquired in the current election.

(4) A possible Lula government will have a fourfold conditionality: (i) It will be a government of not only Brazilian resistance, but global resistance. The constitution of forces of accumulation of forces becomes interactions of a different order from the last twenty years, because the so-called social networks are only instantaneous forms of intelligence, which remove historical capacity and, thus, create memories that are only present, reinforcing alienation and the fetishistic power of capitalism.

(ii) Social pressure will set in both ideologically and economically. Let us observe that in capitalism we have two equalizing forces: the price that is established as an average and general logic, being seen by society in general as something natural, since nobody questions prices. In the same way, ideology as a force is also an equalizing condition, everyone considers natural the defense of individualistic interests and the perception of the alleged equalization between all, so a businessman with billions of dollars appears in the social mentality as equal to the worker who earns a minimum wage, ideology nullifies the grotesque asymmetries. The Lula government will have to mobilize the forces to oppose these two social and economic “farces”, how to do it we will have to deal with in the future.

(iii) It will have to be a mobility government. Only in action will there be a democratic and popular government.

(iv) The Lula government will have to break with three business-tax institutes: it will have to break with the fiscal standard imposed by authoritarian neoliberalism, second, it will have to impose tax changes, taxing the bourgeoisie and large fortunes, in addition to the agro-mineral sector; third, it will have to establish a new Brazilian industrial standard.

(5) Finally, it is worth systematizing the possibility of a new Bolsonaro government, which at this moment does not constitute a failure of discourse, but possible logic. In this case, we have to deal with two observations: first, the elimination of the national project, something that will come true and, second, the elimination of any limit of social rights, a movement that will represent the condition that we have already dealt with in another moment of the establishment of “ Latin Nigeria”.

(6) Our time is short.

*Jose Raimundo Trinidad He is a professor at the Institute of Applied Social Sciences at UFPA. Author, among other books, of Six decades of state intervention in the Amazon (Paka-armadillo).

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