The large scale of the political dispute

Image: Magali Magalhães
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By EUGENIO TRIVINHO*

Without rescheduling political antagonisms to the dimension of the “cultural war”, the chances of overcoming neo-fascist necropolitics are slim

For Angela Pintor dos Reis and Francisco Rüdiger

 

Strategic alliance under unified horizon

In the summer of 2019 to 2020, I wrote a long article – published in the earth is round – on the urgency of permanent re-articulation of all progressive forces against neo-fascism as a social movement and State ideology in Brazil. In the wake of this far-right delirium, the pandemic, at the time, crossed national borders, to soon become one of the greatest humanitarian dramas in the country's history - the greatest, certainly, of the period of redemocratization: a pro-pandemic horror that reaped thousands of lives due to the complete institutional irresponsibility of the federal government. The fact is doubly part – due to its occurrence and impunity – to the cynical and indifferent role of Brazilian carnage.

"The Long Tail of the Great Plague” – a text fundamentally of intellectual combat, as they say of those with non-academic characteristics, intended for the clash of ideas in the public sphere – aimed to contribute to the strengthening, renewal and expansion of leftist, republican forces e progressives [note the italics] against this political and social disaster. The architecture of the argument obviously served to defend democracy, human rights and civil liberties in the country.

With complementary angles to several authors in the same direction, the study emphasized the need for a more organized, decentralized and intense strategic alliance between all anti-fascist forces (party and union, journalistic and artistic, educational and scientific, NGOs and militants, etc.) – on digital networks, on the streets, in parliaments, in fields, on stages, in all spaces -, with a wide national opposition diameter, internally diverse and cohesive in the goal, aiming at the long confrontation of the resilient sinister: the neo-fascist necropolitics - the populist governance of the State and society through indifferent imposition (direct or not) , declared or silent) of widespread suffering and death, inspired by military regimes and Nazi and supremacist trends.

By situating the confrontation in the broader field of culture (viewed in an anthropological sense) and by bringing communicational, warlike and ethical aspects to the discussion table, the defense of the aforementioned strategic alliance envisions a unified horizon: the consolidation of a collective dynamic of continuous attention against the various faces and disguises of the prevailing anti-democratic state of corrosion – until it is satisfactorily overcome.

Interspersed with lyrical epigraphs, “Atail Long of the Great Plague” includes a tribute: the closing passages, of absolute repudiation of torture, rightly evoke the pain and clamor of the combatant poets – arms raised to freedom.

 

Unfinished power of electoral alliances

After two years and on the eve of the 2022 elections, the general political-articulatory conditions to which the text alludes have changed positively and significantly. The center-left field prospered in very important alliances, from political parties to social and popular movements, from trade unions and class associations to Universities, from culture and arts to sport, from ecology to education, from law to entrepreneurship, and so on. against. The need for expansion and duration of the articulations, however, remains the same: the political alliances sewn together, with loose support in surveys of intention to return and with majority potential, are not enough to guarantee the consistent overcoming of the claim. Ingredients of greater demand and electorally oriented, obviously fulfill a crucial trigger trigger sine qua non.

The authoritarian and insidious nature of the ongoing “cultural war” – as exasperated in denialist strands of the extreme right – cannot be reduced to (even successful) dispute arrangements around the State apparatus. Democratic claims make up a tolerated rite en passant by neofascism. It does not constitute its exclusive space of manifestation.

While Bolsonarism deepened, capillarizing itself in various levels of the State and society, old divisions in some segments of the center-left remained immovable: programmatic divergences (not to mention personal) eventually resentful enliven the mutuality of intense criticism, to the legitimate shadow of the democracy of ideals and proposals, as if the social-historical and political context were any, far from the urgency of confronting the common enemy, with visible faces (not always hostile) and myriad of occluded actions. (The matter is resumed in the final topic).

Faced with the unfinished power of electoral arrangements – something constructively chronic (from chronos, in the inflection of the etymon, referring to duration) –, the essence of “The long tail of the great plague” remains to be realized, in favor of the continuous strengthening of democracy, human rights and civil liberties in Brazil. From another angle, the political and ethical prevalence of this injunction justifies thematic developments, by way of post scriptum; and the reasons for this evocation appear (re)contextualized below.

 

The long tail of neo-fascist necropolitics

Mistakes, hesitations and credulities should be removed: current trends make clear how much Bolsonarist neo-fascism (in all its segments: civil-business, military, police and militia) has a long tail in Brazil. Even rough in their paranoid-anticommunist ultra-conservatism and attractive to social groups vulnerable to authoritarian nods in favor of a populist leader, a supporter of order by tacape, these segments encompass strategic movements of the right and the military extreme right in addition to the eventual electoral dehydration of Bolsonarism itself .

The primary focus of the dispute must therefore be this neo-fascist nationalism and its typical necropolitics. It represents the most obscure antipode fringe of the ostensive and reductionist polarization that cuts, from colonial origins, the sociopolitical formation of Brazil: European invader and tropical native, indifferent elite and pockets of misery, implacable repression and irruptive freedom, structural racism and organized struggle, xenophobia and resistance, and so on.

From the social-historical point of view, the Bolsonarist wave configures a neoliberal landscape of the time and, as such, markedly rowdy in the institutional field and of human, social and civil rights. It may disappear after some time, as a “biodegradable bubble”. What is essential are the swampy tectonic plates that remain – these bubbling magmas forgotten by Brazilian culture, from the first decades of colonization and, in particular, from the period of slavery. Not by chance, this neo-fascism must be apprehended as a well-characterized moment in the necropolitical flow of Brazilian history. (Complying with strict definition, the argument of “The long tail of the great plague” thus portrayed this extreme right.) The pedigree The history of this naturalized state of exception is hypostatized today in media evidence of hatred, recurrent insensitivity to thousands of deaths and the fetishization of firearms. They are, among others, trivial military procedures of Bolsonarism.

The fundamentalist resilience of around 50% of electoral support for the current authoritarian streak is certainly due to anti-communist delusions, but, above all, to a peculiar identity: in the nostalgic wake of post-colonial signs of power and regimes of strength and repression, they applaud the torture and murder of opponents. This percentage band dilates and its content intensifies according to the institutional, political and moral flaccidity of the times. were such underworld magmas – don’t forget – that made possible and sustained the long-lasting post-64 debacle.

On an international scale, especially with regard to Latin America, Bolsonarism represents, as a warning sign, the stimulating reorganization, in and from Brazil, of the most repulsive, mocking and despicable lead forces (and no one is happy to see that ), towards the remilitarization of the State (widely harming the constitutional image of the Armed Forces) and the “militiaization” of civil society.

 

Reconfiguration of the conceptual legacy of political modernity

Proto-fascism, neo-fascism and the like, in the wake of authoritarian nationalisms of the second half of the XNUMXth century, integrate, in fact, with pale terminology at times, the political banality of recent decades. These terms, however, never correspond to old-fashioned clichés, even less to mere fetishes of politicized criticism. The empiricism they cover – always more abysmal than concepts can apprehend, and this goes beyond the accumulated knowledge – is palpable in several countries in Europe and Latin America. Germany, Austria, Belgium, Denmark, Slovakia, United States, Philippines, Finland, France, Hungary, Italy, Poland and Turkey remain as threatened – and not only from a party-political point of view – by these ultraconservative forces as Argentina, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay and Uruguay. Streets and squares of Brazilian metropolises, with intense repercussions and multiplication in social networks, have given emblematic and international testimony to this.

Evidently, it is convenient, from time to time, to reconfigure signifiers and meanings. In detail, what was indicated above prevails: strictly speaking, it is not just about fascism as defined strands, but about something much bigger, organized as neo-fascist necropolitics, inside and outside the State. The semantic metabolism of this conceptual expression, in the perspective of the argumentation of “The long tail of the great plague”, re-characterizes, in return, both neo-fascism and necropolitics (in nature, state of the art, modus operandi, scale of reach and immediate consequences). The matter, then settled in the text, will not need to be reflected here.

The mentioned task of terminological reconfiguration has extensive validity, projecting itself to most of the conceptual elements bequeathed by modernity, from the end of the XNUMXth century onwards.

That the left – those in the political segment, in particular – need to renew themselves and constantly advance in understanding themselves and their genuine peers, the sources of “friendly fire” and their enemies and adversaries; and that need to comprehensively approach the social-historical stage and local and global political-economic trends, is a well-known requirement of the very qualification of the clash, whether in the front line or in the rear: it comes from before 1933 (the final blow of Hitler) and 1947 (mark of the emergence of the “enlightenment” dissuasion of the cultural industry), so as not to go back in time.

The issue, having a wide national and international track, carries its own complexity to the place where, without filigree eyes, one can equally and unintentionally leave gaps in reflection. In particular, the political regression in Brazil from 2016 was so huge that it reversed the character old fashioned and smeared with classic terms from both pragmatic politics and political philosophy and science – such as “right”, “left”, “liberal”, “reactionary” and the like –, restoring them, not without surprising legitimacy, to the agenda. Even the most sensitive and attentive portion of common sense did not fail to notice, via screens and at the table, how much the virulence of the extreme right made the world take countless institutional, political and social steps backwards. Instead of the civilizing process helping the democratic rule of law in the direction of everyday life, the historical setback, hijacking the universal realization of the democratic ideal, ended up requiring the urgent and absolute defense of formal democracy, namely, in the strict modality of organization enough from the state.

This is the historic moment of countries threatened by neo-fascism. Since history is not linear, it cannot be assumed, however, that the ultra-conservative deed, object of multilateral counter-pressures, has not dammed it up: no matter how many centuries it lasts, the inclusive and egalitarian promise of the democratic ideal will always be to fully realize it in the everyday life – donate to whoever hurts.

In the scope considered above – that of the forces of opposition to authoritarian State and/or government regimes (by assumption, in multi-capitalist conditions of production of social life) –, it is important to know which dimensions of the left one is talking about. The diversity of the political spectrum in this area ranges from the most airy theoretical heterodoxy to the most praxiologically engaged orthodoxy. This internal tensional tuning fork makes the strata and groupings differ in relation to the background discourse and the context narrative (both based on peculiar historical balances and expert analysis of trends), the economic, political and cultural project of interaction with society (henceforth algorithmized and guarded by network robotics), alliance architecture, process goals, strategic actions, and so on. The successful equation of these factors, whether on a single political front, or in triangulated and synchronized compositions, depends on macrostructural characteristics and the temperature of the historical moment, in general unfortunately linked only to ritual cycles of party dispute around the State.

Covering these concerns – focused, it should be noted, on the thought and practice of the spectrum of opposition in an exclusively conventional field (the political party) –, it is worth apprehending, differently, the lefts as they express themselves in unfolded fields: the left in culture and in arts in general, the left in science and religion, the left in education and law, universities and journalism, and so on, alongside and/or in conjunction with the left in parliaments and class associations, in parties and unions etc.

The filigrees of this mosaic of propensities to qualified tension make it obviously complex. (The last topic brings additional observations.) Above all, it is essentially – as has been said – a radical democratic counterpoint to all types of political authoritarianism, as well as to all forms of violence engendered by the model of status quo valid.

Bearing in mind the variety of predispositions and orientations (conscious or unconscious, voluntary or tacit, unconditional or not) of these left forces, the lexical and semantic re-sculpturing of the argumentation must necessarily evoke the old – and still solid – biopolitical proposition, of From Foucault to Deleuze and Guattari, from the 1970s onwards: they do not exclusively concern battles for control of state instances. Bureaucratized powers (executives, parliamentarians and jurisprudents) do not totalize or exhaust their tendencies of questioning and/or contesting the macrostructural form of social life, as well as the political conjunctures of the current historical condition.

The leftist forces, in addition to pragmatic politics, are available as a macrostructural, multiple and decentered thread that runs through, without strings attached, all fields and sectors of human expression and action. At a small angle, these forces spread out like a multilateral micropolitical belt that cuts, in a daily explicit or assumed protest, the ateliers and the newsrooms, the classrooms and the congresses, the laboratories and stages, the courts and pulpits, the conversation circles and consumption, the purchase and sale counters, even the barracks and, with luck, the financial workbench, among other redoubts. The exuberance of these forces, to the extent of their contextual tensions (total or partial, direct or not), positions them, in one way or another, to the left of the establishment, understood as the prevailing model of organization of social life and compatible modes of subjectivity, that is, corresponding (even if ambiguously and/or resistantly) to the social-historical reproduction of this societal model. Such opposition is projected on the present and on the future of the country, in embrace of rights to be protected and/or conquered.

 

Politicization of the civilizing dispute in the dimension of culture

The kaleidoscope of the contradictory needs, at this moment, a difficult (and until now improbable) procedure, challenged by the passage of time: to articulate itself in a stable way, with decentralized organization and persistent vigor, in an anti-fascist front as a historical-programmatic goal, under the initiative of the most prepared civil society, coinciding with the intellectual, scientific-educational and journalistic, party and union, artistic and religious lefts. In the name of preserving what still remains of democracy as a formal regime, constitutional freedoms and social, civil, labor and social security rights, this strategic union around the cardinal political principle at stake – in addition to anti-fascism, anti-neoliberalism – became in the most relevant national agenda that the left, democratic and progressive forces can deliver to the country, in favor of the gradual restoration of the republican health of the institutions inherited from the late 1980s.

This priority must be combined with an emergency and mediated political-economic program, aimed at the recovery of the working, precarious and/or unemployed masses of the population, who suffer the most, day by day, from the abysmally deepened inequalities under Bolsonarism as an insanity of the State. .

The urgent response to hunger, misery and segregation throughout the cities, with a definitive and dignified overcoming of illiteracy, is and will always be a historical, institutional and moral duty – the raison d'être – of leftist, democratic and progressive forces.

Both tasks must, in turn, be subordinated to a national political-economic and cultural macroproject – widely discussed, with concrete prospects, computed decades –, for example, mutatis mutandis, of the social-historical and juridical-organizational function performed until today by the Federal Constitution of 1988, despite all the risks, bumps and vacillations.

This civil darning protagonism aims to strengthen the opposition forces for the slow process of dispute of consciences and affections in the terrain of the “cultural war” and, in particular, of electoral rituals – symbolic terrain in which neo-fascist seduction plays, with substantive results. This horizon must foresee, in the first place, the permanent dehydration of the voting potential of neo-fascism, especially the hegemonic, Bolsonarism; and, secondly, its isolation as a political movement, to the point of making it a simple exception in the dynamics of social powers: with minimized reach and structure, its ability to produce adherence, multiplication and expansion will certainly be remote.

As mentioned before, the dispute board, however, is never exhausted in successful elections. On the contrary, if careful care is not taken, the victorious suffrage can operate proudly in favor of fragile sensations of the world – such as that the hardest path has been taken, the State is under control and the rest will follow. Crucial vertices of the satisfactory supplantation of the sinister, electoral victories cannot dissuade more complex political-transgenerational urgencies, unfolded in a long time.

The anthropological tuning fork of culture shows, with unmistakable clarity, how the party dispute is a stream – fundamental, but only one – of facing the ongoing social drama: the visceral antagonism around the axiological matrices (relating to priority values) of the process civilization in the current digital and interactive growth of capitalism – and, obviously, beyond it. This civilizing dispute falls on socio-educational development and on worldviews and sensibilities, on the formation of habits and customs, on the uses of language and language, on behavior and the relationship with the other, with the city and with the environment. self – to stay only on these factors. Such competition is now internationalized; and Brazil can contribute a lot to understanding the global nazi-fascist revival, based on the national and cross-border reverberations of the corrosive trajectory of Bolsonarism as a state ideology.

The prism of culture, raised against the light of authoritarian trends that allegedly run to shape tomorrow, reveals how much the anti-fascist opposition must rethink itself in the light of long durations. The political and ethical need to translate results and produce immediate social indicators needs to be linked to this principle.

In an alternative understanding, the social-historical challenge of the republican and democratic forces, in the country and abroad, resides in combining, in a longitudinal treadmill, strategic alliance and stability of goal, focus and action, without prejudice to political diversity.

After 1964-1985 and the return of the repressed, in the cynically virulent form of Bolsonarism – this symptomatic red flag, in every sense –, a nation project for, say, five decades must encompass efforts (including Ministries and State Secretariats ) for progressive dehydration of neo-fascist necropolitics in the core of society (from everyday life to professional and/or formal spheres), preserving a watchful eye to extremist winds abroad.

Strictly speaking, social institutions – starting with these – should respond to the enormous challenge in a peculiarly corresponding way: with anti-fascist clarification work aimed at emerging and later generations, covering the largest possible number of sectors of society. Education (formal and informal), science (especially in the field of humanities) and the arts (in all segments) play – and will always play – a fundamental role in this process. The horizon of contributory influence of these areas requires substantial public investments under state (not government) legislation, preventing sporadic sabotage by misaligned administrations. Equally, the scope of this praxis includes the tireless and articulated work of progressive instances and means of communication, to combat structural disinformation and the spiral of fake news; and legal-political monitoring of anti-republican and anti-democratic practices, among other important focuses.

Due to the historical gravity of the situation, it deserves the exhaustive merit of the explanation: the left, democratic and progressive forces, despite already in the front symbolic and multilateral for decades, have not entered, with the due strategic integration and organization, the war platform in which the necropolitics of Bolsonarism has invested government, corporate, military and militia tokens, namely: the field of culture (on the scale of mentioned meaning).

As a related caveat and alert to historical patience, here is the record: the democratic alliance of political forces of the left, center and right that governed Brazil from 2002 to 2016, under the leadership of the articulatory-majority nucleus of the Workers' Party and with economic guarantee -conservative financial, did not allow shaping institutions and the economic mode of production in the original perspective of a society without deep material inequalities. Brazil is excessively diverse and, therefore, difficult to govern (even more so in a short time) without an extensive alliance, the same one that, in perverse return, ends up putting any progressive government on a knife's edge and, through this trap, submits it to fatal sabotages.

 

Necessary dissolution of resentful differences

The fact that criticism of Bolsonarist necropolitics was rescaled to the broader arc of culture shapes, from the beginning, the set of recipients of reflection. In “The Long Tail of the Great Plague”, this design included the prediction of suggested strategies and practices.

Such an injunction is linked to inspiring and presupposed theoretical sources. Because they involve goal effectiveness, the nature and urgency of the clash with the extreme right evoke and/or reframe conceptions that have long been known in Western Universities. The argument, here as in the other text, was freely inspired (that is, without systematic citation commitment) in the background conjunction between Marcuse's contesting prism on the existent and the micropolitical vision of Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari. Virilio's phenomenological sociodromology was present from start to finish.

This theoretical conjugation could be expressed in reverse, in due diplomacy, preserving the original coherence of each remembered strand: sociodromological criticism can embrace Hegelian-phenomenological and Marxist foundations of a part of the Frankfurt School in the direction of micropolitical action in the streets and networks . The equation does not dispense with the company of sociopsychoanalysis (in this case, from Freud to Lacan) and the theory of the imaginary (from Castoriadis) applied to biopolitics. In this context, Mbembe's demystifying vision of necropolitics remained on the horizon.

For no other reason, this network of inspirations excluded from the theoretical battle the voluntarist advocacy of denunciation, whether in the letter or between the lines.

The recipients of the reflection are profiled in that thread of tension that permeates the social as a multilateral belt of active dissatisfaction in relation to the dynamic structure of current models of life, especially based on – or linked to – procedures of capitalist accumulation divorced from commitments consistent with the sustainable human development.

Without prejudice to the positive volatilization of this recipient diameter (to include sympathizers of and/or interested in the democratic and anti-fascist cause), these notations do not fail to show that both texts – that one and this one – are mostly addressed to a select and exclusive universe of historical agents from the field of progressive boldness, discarding, by assumption, all kinds of politicians and opportunist trends, whose usual vacillation easily betrays character fragility.

The circle encompasses four main segments of political power in Brazil, in terms of resistance and transformation. Above all, the reflection is aimed at the ruling left (parliamentary and executive), the intellectual left (inside and outside Universities), the cultural left (media or not) and the socially enlightened left (with or without affiliation to parties and/ or membership in militancy) – all spread across the country. They are admirable segments, marked by a poignant history – of life, desire and struggle – and fatally shredded by resentment in the extensive journey of interactions and conflicts with the status quo.

In conventional politics, resentment is a blocking stone to advances towards rights: it needs to be granulated and dissolved or, at least, neglected in defined historical circumstances, which require a strategic union of purposes, around common priority goals. This is the case in Brazil – and this will continue indefinitely. Resentful differences have prevented the programmatic formation of the broadest anti-fascist opposition network, as necessary as it is urgent, more clarified in the perception of context, more organized in relation to the common north, more prepared in the long term, more openly firm to unpredictable consequences.

Equally and for obvious reasons, the reflection was dedicated to all democratic and progressive forces (and, with them, their sympathizers) with a stable history of political honesty and coherence. The specific objective, in this case, was to minimally contextualize these forces regarding the altered nature and cultural dimension of the mission involved. Democratic values, which need radical and inveterate defense, must be placed in the lap of neo-fascists, in an indefatigable series of republican clashes, inside and outside parliaments, before, during and beyond electoral rituals. The historical course of this contradiction needs to preserve and expand the list of humanitarian achievements in the civilized world.

These trampled paints only indicate, in another way, the anthropological level of the current crucial conflict. As neo-fascist necropolitics goes beyond the scope of party politics – the latter, on the contrary, is an ingredient of a broader range –, the experience of overcoming at stake involves joint efforts of instances, agents and expertise progressives in the aforementioned fields – from law to journalism, from science to the arts, from education to religion, from entrepreneurship to volunteering, and so on.

Of all the segments addressed by the reflection, the left and democratic forces are the most prepared to carry out the foundations of the proposal made, bringing with them the other identity and/or similar forces, for the cohesive expansion of the anti-fascist network.

The dogmatic, orthodox, extremist and similar strata or groups, indispensable in and for militancy in specific contexts of collective action, but eventually impervious to free thinking, did not prevail on the radar of the conception and development of the argumentation. Certainly, these strata and groups will continue along the path together. If they do not understand, however, the priority need for the anti-regressive defense of republican and democratic values ​​on the macroscale of culture, they will be out of line with the dramatic demands of combating neo-fascism as necropolitics.

 

Fragmentation of the left and political and social consequences

The conservative and reactionary mentality, the unconscious tail of voluntary adherence or tacit submission to the tradition of colonial tutelage, has always had strong representation among the Brazilian masses – since before the country's capitalist-industrial formation. The fragmentation of left-wing, democratic and progressive forces, wearing out entry into the framework of popular dissatisfaction and indignation and contestatory sensibility, plays a relevant role in the expanded continuity of this post-colonial representation.

The fragmentation of party oppositions, especially after successful results in majoritarian elections, contributes to generating and nurturing the so-called “Centrão”, an informal parliamentary instance that submits, with exchange of symbolic terror (“take it, give it here”), all and any government under a presidential regime dependent (or not) on a volatile heterogeneous coalition. Composing a majority with veto power, this pragmatic-conservative grouping, scalded by relatively stable electoral bases, blackmails and humiliates the Executive Branch, if not the Judiciary Branch and the Legislative Branch itself, with nepotist and physiologist pragmatism without any embarrassment or remorse.

Even in the two terms of former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, from 2002 to 2010, the fragmentation of the left and progressive liberal segments forced governability to be based on a set of party forces so diverse that, bequeathed to the subsequent mandate, from Dilma Rousseff, played the cards to the point of isolating the then president and unleashing her impeachment, in a totally unfair and case-by-case process supported by the Federal Supreme Court (STF).

This debacle – it is not too much to remember – extracts power directly from the void given by political forces that should, rather, occupy, urgently, the central scenario in an integrated and lasting way; and, when they do not, the decision-making effect is similar to that of a collective (even involuntary) waiver of the aforementioned urgency. The accentuated Brazilian personalist primacy in relation to joint actions of multilateral and permanent leadership is intimately related to this gap: it prospers in total disfavor of the necessary results of these same actions.

The factual culmination of this process, although collectively unintentional, carries with it the severity of its own historical shadow: the persistence of fragmented and non-aggregating circumstances in the progressive field benefits, largely and without complicity, the conditions for the advancement of neo-fascism, the same as the opposition forces wish to overcome. Obviously, mainly resentful fragmentations are of interest only to the political and institutional perpetuation of ultra-right mentalities and practices in the interstices of society, indifferent to the collateral ills of extreme inequality that they produce.

Due to the most recent quadrennium of bitterness (2018-2022), the democratic segments of the political, cultural, educational and journalistic left need to induce and lead the gradual and concatenated work of reconquering the hearts of the masses, based – as indicated – on a program short-, medium-, and long-term affirmative action multidisciplinary approach (both for a quadrennium and for 50 years). (The subordination of the action plan to immediate empiricism makes the policy of alliances, for example, equivalent to a belt of drunken agents: without mastering the course of the fundamental conflict, they only cover what appears along the way).

Winning the presidential elections in 2022 is, in this sense, the political restart sine qua non of the golden opportunity for the reconstruction of the country under the north of a national project that contemplates the anthropological and educational dimension of culture in an anti-fascist perspective. The tragic experience of the 2018-2022 quadrennium, with the revival of the plague, leaves no room for hesitation.

Only this sociopolitical work – as aggregating as it is stable, as continuous as it is expansive –, with nods to non-corrupt liberal-democratic strands, is capable of interrupting the cycle of reactionary reproduction reinaugurated after the 2016 coup, removing the debris of hell that weigh over the heads of all men and women, and put the country back on the tracks of an unavoidable restructuring. There they are, gigantic, misery and illiteracy, exclusion and segregation, from rural to urban areas; the deliberate encouragement of all kinds of prejudice, with the murder of indigenous people, black people and members of the LGBTQIA+ community; the criminal speed of deforestation in the Amazon; the mining and prospecting destruction of biodiversity; the invasion and depredation of ancestral territories; threats to the republican and democratic institutional dynamics, based on the distortion of constitutional provisions; aggression against the doctrine of human rights and social, labor and social security rights; the militarization of the State and education; civilian armament and militia expansion; the promotion of torture and the decoration of its defenders; authoritarianism against the press; the spread of fake news; corruption covered up by secret budgeting and secrecy clause (100 years old); disinvestment in education and science, research and innovation, and the stigmatization of Universities, among other serious trends, in the wake of institutional and genocidal indifference during the Covid-19 pandemic and the international depreciation of the country's image.

The simultaneity between the validity of this extensive list and the insistent fractures in the democratic and progressive universe constitutes, for now, the worst historical warning about the Brazilian political and cultural scene.

* Eugene Trivinho Professor of the Graduate Program in Communication and Semiotics at PUC-SP.

 

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