By ALYSSON LEANDRO MASCARO*
Under capitalism, Brazil is already what it should be. Development will be socialist
The relative positions of countries in world capitalist development are not due to incapacities or omissions or absence of wills and sufficient agreements for progress. They are, fundamentally, materially sufficient positions of exploitation, domination and accumulation. For this reason, the image of a world geopolitical top to which some countries rose by effort and merit is not appropriate, leaving it to others to reach it as well.
Class division and differences between countries and social formations on the external and internal levels are exactly the model of capitalist social reproduction. Brazil, even though it is peripheral on the world stage, is large enough not to be able to resolve itself autonomously without impacting the interests of international capital, which interpenetrates indissolubly with Brazilian capital. In this dialectic of power and limits, there was no lack of economic means, frameworks or ideas that would give rise to a full Brazilian capitalist development: there is a lack of sociability structures.
Brazil's contradiction is exactly the same as capitalism's contradiction on the world stage. It will not be by better astuteness, agreement, smoothness, concord, good reason, republicanism, legality and compliance with constitutional principles, or by exhaustion of the same attempts, that stable and inclusive development will then arrive in Brazil: the error is in the form of the struggle, not in the art of enterprise. During the XNUMXth century, social formations of great weight in the world, such as the Brazilian weight, only changed successfully through socialist revolutions.
The Russian and Chinese cases demonstrate the refoundations of sociability and its institutions, which proved to be sufficient for a vigorous rewriting of their own histories. Much of this is due to the social aggregation of the working classes – as a rule forged through wars – and, in particular, to the autonomist and progressive seizure of power that structurally alters institutions such as the armed forces (in the Russian and Chinese case, reformulated from a new point of view). standard, popular armies) or even the executive, legislative and judicial institutional functions (also rewritten in such countries through the centralism of communist parties).
Cases of progressive exchange within the capitalist system only occurred under the subordination of the United States and through its strict geopolitical interest – Europe under the Marshall plan, South Korea and Japan as wedges in the Soviet-Chinese East. But Brazil represents US interests exactly what it already is. Everything that tends to be different changes positions and is immediately blocked. And, with regard to internal social relations, the capitalist classes and dominant groups in Brazil do not expect any other type of strength, nor are they guided by the equality and progress of the poor and workers, just like any other capitalist and dominant class in any other country. world capitalist.
The logic of capital is the sufficient and optimal maintenance of the already given patterns of accumulation, or the modulation only for their expansion. Therefore, a progressive social transformation can only take place through the working classes. Under capitalist conditions, capital and its institutions destroy inclusive struggles as soon as such a process begins to materialize. Only the rupture of forms, with new cohesion and forging of power, action and interests, leading to the end of the dynamics of capital accumulation, is capable of restructuring Brazilian society, as well as any other society.
All other attempts, operating within the forms of capital, are swallowed up and blocked by the very forms and institutions already given. For the structural contradictions of the struggles under capitalism, there is only a narrow gap in history, the revolution that changes the mode of production. Socialist changes are difficult as they were and have been for nearly two centuries in many parts of the world, but peculiarly they are still easier than changing a society from exploitation to inclusion while maintaining the general framework of the forms and institutions that only operate accumulation and which block the progressive exchange rate. The story is open. Utopia is concrete. Development is possible. If it exists victoriously and perennially, it will be socialist.
*Alysson Leandro Mascaro He is a professor at the Faculty of Law at USP. Author, among other books, of State and political form (Boitempo).
“Theses on development and capitalism”, originally published in the book Utopias to Rebuild Brazil, organized by Gilberto Bercovici, João Sicsú and Renan Aguiar. Rio de Janeiro, Editora Quartier Latin do Brasil, 2020.
