By ELIZIÁRIO ANDRADE*

Critical, judicious thinking seems to fade, submerge, go out of fashion to give way to a subject that only replicates and follows false information from a society that accelerates and expands its own autophagy.

In the post-socialist experience period of the 20th century, tenacious and continuous opposition developed from the international bourgeoisie and imperialism, led by the USA, to defeat these regimes that, even with their internal political contradictions, represented a strong fear and terror for the interests of the dominant classes, as Marx would say, the ghost of communism that haunts [Europe] the capitalist world.

On the other hand, the political and economic contradictions within the socialist model established mainly in the Soviet Union and China, which were supposed to be post-capitalist, caused these experiences to collapse, representing a profound challenge for Marxism to demonstrate the possibilities of socialism in a world in which the crisis of capital and imperialist hegemony threaten not only the working class, but all of humanity.

From that moment on, the bourgeoisie, capital and imperialism launched an offensive in the face of the decline in working class struggles and the deterioration of the socialist civilizing project on a global scale. In parallel with this reality, notably from the 1970s-80s-90s to the present day, capitalism has been carrying out structural changes that have allowed the vertiginous strengthening of bourgeois power and its social order on a global scale. And, as the historical, institutional and political forms of capital's control over labor within the production process are destroyed, there is a dramatic weakening of the working class's capacity to resist or act offensively against the bourgeoisie and its reactionary and conservative reforms.

Thus, a reality emerges in which the bourgeoisie and capital have forged a qualitative leap in the productive structure and in their own logic of reproduction. This phenomenon can be observed as we observe the integration that has been taking place in the productive structure and in the system of machines of the means of production and their operability.

This has been happening with the introduction of sensors, information flows and coding, in real time, through computers, software, algorithms and artificial intelligence that allow commands for machines, enhancing the automation and robotization of the central production processes of the capitalist system which, consequently, allows for an increase in productivity, by completely freeing the production system from the institutional constraints and labor relations in which capital was immersed.

Now, it finds itself facing its own negativity, that is, at the same time that it strengthens itself to deepen the automation of its historical conditions of reproduction, it engenders, on the other hand, the relative destruction of the social force of labor, which is the essence of the source that generates the social value of commodities and which guarantees the reproduction of the system and of bourgeois power.

This is a contradiction that points to the historical limits of capital itself because, despite the fact that labor and the working class are structurally irreplaceable within the social relations that generate the production of value, both in the manufacturing sector and in the service sector (the latter as an auxiliary part of the construction of value) it ends up suffering – a relative decrease, socially unprotected and removed from its locus fixed and regular work.

Previously, it was used by workers as a place for articulation, militancy recruitment, political and union training, and with the dispersion of production units and work, various forms of employment relationships emerged: outsourcing and precariousness in general, with profound social and cultural impacts on the basis of the social and material development of workers as a class. From then on, there was a dispersion and subjective weakening in the sense of collective belonging, obstructing the development of class consciousness and of solidarity-based, community-based subjectivities, necessary for an offensive action against capital.

The growing backdrop to this dynamic is the massive replacement of living labor by dead labor, a relative and growing shift away from the real subsumption of labor in traditional industries and the rise of an industry dominated by new technologies and information. Without signifying, as some think, the end of work and the working class, what we are actually observing is a new level of intensification of work as a deepening dynamic of productivity and a specific form of expropriation of the social labor force.

All of this represents a high socioeconomic impact that transforms the crises of capitalism and bourgeois society into an increasingly permanent and daily phenomenon, according to the very form of production of total value (direct and indirect) incorporated into material and immaterial goods; after all, what matters is knowing whether or not certain goods and services are produced for profit and accumulation purposes. This is the quintessential form of how capital exists and reproduces itself socially.

The bourgeois class and imperialism, faced with these structural and material transformations, will react in different ways – politically, socially, culturally and ideologically, at a national and global level – resorting to everything to maintain the order of capital; the State and its legal and coercive apparatus as means of intensifying and maintaining its power and hegemony at any human, social and natural devastation cost.

In effect, they abandon the pretensions of civilizing positivity that have taken place since the bourgeois revolutions of the 18th and 19th centuries, expanding and deepening, in all spheres of society, their counterrevolutionary and destructive character. Objectively, what is sought in this context is the need to rehabilitate the rate of profit and accumulation, where capitalism reveals itself without restraints and in all the crudeness of its logic and class tendencies.

As a result, the deregulation of the economy, privatization of all public assets and the breaking of environmental protection legislation, as well as the increase in fiscal, monetary, industrial and financial austerity in economic policies, far from expressing or signifying irrational decisions of neoliberal policies, are part of the constitutive elements of the imperatives of capital as a counteroffensive to discipline and control labor, protect capitalism and its relations of production in permanent mutations.

The objective set by such macroeconomic policies, since the 1970s, has been to reorder the productive forces in the class struggle, through forms of mediated bourgeois domination, directly and indirectly, whether through ideological, political or subjective power, based on the real and technological subsumption of labor or, when necessary, with the use of the brute and merciless force of repression or physical elimination, properly speaking.

The order of capital over workers is imposed selectively, coldly and objectively, so that the vast majority of them are subjected to despair, discouragement, unemployment, underemployment and cuts in social protection in terms of health, education, housing and food. And here lies the great paradox of this reality of capitalist society: at the same time that it propagates its triumph, it also expresses its failure and the limits of its form of social reproduction, becoming an increasingly unviable, unjust and profoundly unequal society. It is configured as a society in which unbridled super-exploitation becomes normality, a natural and acceptable procedure. In this way, capital produces a society where its logic ends up devouring the social beings who live from work and exist in it.

In this context of destructive dynamics, it is also important to note that the devastation of nature becomes impossible to overcome or contain within the framework of the capitalist mode of production and the bourgeois state, subject to the inescapable imperatives of capital. Contrary, therefore, to the ideas of “degrowth” of certain segments of the left, as well as liberal and even Keynesian aspirations of “green capitalism” and “sustainable development”, these fail to consider – for political and ideological reasons – that capitalism is essentially productivist and exists through the incessant production and reproduction of goods, responsible for the generation of values ​​that express the totality of abstract labor, profit and accumulation.

The social-democratic left and even some currents that claim to be revolutionary seem to seek paths that can circumvent a direct clash with capitalism, avoiding confrontation with their own logic and the State that safeguards the social, political and economic order. Ultimately, their understanding of the relationship between capital and nature fails to consider that today all sectors of the economy and the various bourgeois factions are subsumed by financial capital, forming a hierarchical structure of power and domination over all forms of goods, material or otherwise, produced by man.

This relationship of subordination of the industrial, agricultural, technological and communications bourgeoisie fractions has to pay taxes, that is, large amounts destined as interest to speculative and financial capital. For this reason, companies that compete in the markets seek to respond to this contradiction defensively, by reducing labor costs and increasing the disposability of goods, that is, by programming their obsolescence in an accelerated manner to allow for greater organic rotation in the realization of capital, in order to reduce their losses and increase their profitable advantages more quickly, with the increase in consumption.

The logical and catastrophic consequences that this objective imperative of capital, moving on an uncontrollable dynamic of economic development, has on the resources of the environment and all species of nature are more or less clear. With the increase in the destructive process of demand for raw materials, energy, and fierce disputes over the exchange of goods on a global scale, nothing escapes the need to convert any good, including the social and human being itself, with its multiple characteristics, into disposable goods. In this way, under such historical conditions, capital and the bourgeoisie push not only the working class, but also all of humanity into a self-destructive process, in the face of the suppression of certain natural prerequisites for its existence.

The most intriguing and dramatic thing is that, faced with such a reality and horizon for human existence, the bourgeoisie – even though it is part of humanity – finds itself in a tight spot, and can do nothing but continue with its role as a political and structural agent of the class to meet this self-destructive logic. First, as a class, the bourgeoisie and its fractions subordinated to financial capital are compelled to meet the needs of production and reproduction of capital in its phase of structural crisis, with repercussions in multiple dimensions on human society and its historical dependence on nature.

The second contradiction, already pointed out in some way earlier in this text, also originates in the intrinsic and irreversible need that capital has had in the history of capitalism, to dominate and have absolute control over work, ensuring greater power over its time and pace of completion, with the purpose of reducing costs, through the introduction of new technologies during the incessant process of revolutionizing the productive forces; always with the purpose of converting work into a disposable and manipulable object.

But, contradictorily, this same bourgeoisie continues – within the framework of capitalist society – to need work, of course, in its most precarious form possible and with legislation that meets the new dictates of the reproduction and profit of capital. For the bourgeoisie depends on the worker, because he is still the social source of the creation of values, whether in its living form (variable capital) or in its dead form (instruments of production: machines, tools, technologies and knowledge). And, above all, because the worker is a founding element of the social relations of production of capital, therefore, his elimination would be the negation and overcoming of this very mode of production.

However, without a solution to this contradictory impasse in the logic of social relations of capitalist production, combined with its tendency towards low average profits worldwide, the response found by the bourgeoisie has been to circumvent the explosive object of the contradiction, to take shortcuts, like a patient who permanently needs oxygen balloons to breathe and continue with half a life until the end.

This is why financial capital, rentiers and large business corporations clearly and directly pressure governments and political parties of the “liberal right”, extreme right or social democratic “left” to destroy the legal framework protecting the working class and block, or even extinguish, institutions and bodies that monitor labor protection standards, with the aim of freely expanding the super-exploitation of the social labor force.

For the bourgeoisie and its factions, alleviating the suffering or even overcoming the greater dramas of the working class and all those dispossessed of the means of production is no longer on their economic and political agendas. On the contrary, the political positions of the ruling classes have been to brutally create political, legal and violent means to transfer public-state funds to their projects on a larger scale, as well as portions of the national wealth to the hegemonic imperialist countries. In this strategy, public debts systematically contribute to favoring financial capital and sometimes transferring more than half of the GDP to the pockets of rentiers and financial corporations.

In fact, it is clear that the bourgeoisie no longer thinks about producing objective mechanisms for the integration or protection of those who live from work, for the dispossessed, the discouraged, the oppressed and those without any prospect of work and survival. We now live in brutal times, in which the actions of the State are defended coldly and cynically by the main factions of the bourgeoisie; capital imposes its own face without make-up or half-measures, the main motto becomes economic horror for the great majority and repressive terror for those who dare to resist, naturalizing and universalizing, as a standard of control and domination, the historical quadrature of the structural crisis of capital and its civilizing project in crisis.

It is in this context that the bourgeoisie more easily adheres to authoritarian and far-right proto-fascist political forces or, when not, to political positions that defend a pseudo-liberal democracy, as a guarantee to stabilize or partially restore the quantitative declines in the margins of relatively declining capital values. This is the bourgeoisie's search for a lifeline to face and respond to all possible forms of difficulties that come from within the system itself, with regressive and accentuated practice of violence as a method and pedagogy of social control and political domination.

In this way, political coercion and the social rise of far-right forces express the increasing difficulties of the ruling classes in building – as in the past – greater consensus and unity around their hegemonic social, political, cultural and moral universality. This reveals a disruption in the standards and concepts of truth, science and in the rational and universal references of dominant political practice in bourgeois society, giving way to irrational references paired with the uncontrolled irrationality of the current destructive forms of social and material reproduction of bourgeois society.

Within the political spectrum of the struggle between classes, it is observed that the actions of the working class and its forms of resistance are on the defensive, disorganized and ideologically defeated in the face of the offensive of the dominant classes and capital against their means of survival and social protection. The explosions of revolt and resistance that emerge in some isolated cases, and in others in an offensive form, do not prove capable of placing the working class and social movements as political protagonists with the strength to effectively dispute the current political space.

The organizations of social, union and political movements lean towards a conservative, conciliatory political and practical vision, tied to small-scale, immediate, corporate politics and ideological dilemmas that, in many cases, represent a clear capitulation of a class that acts with moderation to obtain miserable crumbs from the bosses or the State.

A situation is created in which the class fractions and political and social organizations identified with the working class are unable to present to society and the working class as a whole their project for transforming society, their ideology and their way of interpreting the world, life and our existence; they opt to follow a line, as Mészaros points out, of “least resistance” or simple capitulation. The opposite, therefore, of the objective of rallying social and political forces for the radical transformation of society through a revolutionary praxis that is organized, persistent, determined and capable of establishing a relationship of systematic and permanent interaction with the various fractions of the working class and social movements.

This empty space left by the left, class fractions and social movements identified with the project of transforming society was occupied by the right and extreme right, with their opportunistic radical populist discourse, spreading a denialism that seeks to remake the notion of truth that is referenced in science and rational and objective knowledge.

At the same time, by presenting itself as “anti-system,” it seeks to reconstruct the facts and reinterpret history and reality, elevating its political practice to a cultural and ideological clash with the left and any socialist perspective. They operate as watchdogs of capital, which, despite the bad smell they exude, the bourgeoisie – as it has always done at other times in history when faced with profound threats to its interests – turns its nose up at and, to a certain extent, makes room for and welcomes these political forces; especially because they are organizing an offensive against workers, in the face of the structural changes mentioned above and which need to maintain the reins and control in the hierarchical relationship of capital, as well as over the working class and the majority of the population.

In conclusion, we understand that the current dynamics of capital require the in-depth restructuring of its productive base and social labor relations; therefore, recurrent pressure is imposed through the State and political action to block any attempt to articulate and organize counter-hegemonic struggles and perspectives that have a revolutionary horizon beyond capital.

Thus, the right-wing and far-right forces are welcomed by the bourgeoisie and the system, which can no longer expand and exponentially increase its profit rates on a global scale without causing uncontrollable, catastrophic and social consequences for labor and nature. For this very reason, the productive dynamics of capital, with its interface expressed in the creation of values ​​through capitalist social labor, can only continue with pure negativity towards human society and nature.

And as it is unable to resolve its contradictions, which are increasingly broadened, intense and profound, the capital reproduction system, as the structural and material basis of its civilizing configuration, generates realities that express unequivocal processes of exhaustion and chaos.

This is the structural and material basis of the current political game to feed the power system of capital in the liberal pseudo-democracy and through the virtual world of networks, whose rule, before anything else, is to confuse and sow chaos with the proliferation of suspicions, false information and replicating ideas and facts without real basis, as a method to increase the alienation and manipulation of the masses.

The foundation of truth and the pseudo-concreteness that shapes the appearance of the real world and the logic of its relations and contradictions in the capitalist world reach, in this social and historical situation, a maximum point of realization, reaching an institutionalized level of the way of thinking. Critical, discerning thinking seems to fade, submerge, go out of fashion to give way to a subject that only replicates and follows false information from a society that accelerates and expands its own autophagy.

They act as the very gears that make capitalism work, under a means and logic of production of social values, the substrate of the social force of labor that is hidden in its social relations and in its world of appearances, covering up its essence and political class purposes. To confront them, to unveil their appearances, lies and misinformation, we need to contribute to the formation of subjects and political programs that are capable of opening paths for a confrontation with the undead world of capital in its entirety, in its foundations of class and power, in its artifices of manipulation and alienation.

* Eliziário Andrade is a full professor of history at UNEB. Co-author, with Jorge Almeida de Turbulence and challenges: Brazil and the world in the crisis of capitalism (Dialectic) [https://amzn.to/3T5qlPo]

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