By CRISTIANO ADDARIO DE ABREU*
The end of the New Republic and how a democratic renegotiation could be in Brazil
What will Brazil be like after Jair Bolsonaro? This is the question we ask in this entry of 2022 (bicentennial of the Independence of Brazil). Everyone asks us historians such a question. I begin by focusing on the symbolism of the year, which forces us to note that any independence, if not cared for and valued by those interested, can be reversed, as Bolsonaro's years in Planalto show us.
The more than seven years of regression that Brazil has been experiencing since 2013/14 needs to be reversed, so that we can define a new development path. It is evident that the so-called New Republic, begun in Diretas Já, which led to the indirect election of Tancredo Neves (1985), ended when President Dilma’s re-election was not recognized by Tancredo’s grandson. Mr. Aécio Neves went down in history as the gravedigger of the Democracy that his grandfather worked to generate. His hate campaign against Dilma and the PT ended up destroying his own party: the PSDB seems to have the fate of the British Liberal Party (Whig), which was crushed between Labor and Conservatives. Meanwhile, the PT remains, increasingly, the strongest party in Brazil.
To think about what a democratic renegotiation will be like in Brazil, we will look at the experience of the New Republic. Many have spoken of the Moncloa Pact[I], as a possible model for a post-Bolsonaro republican renegotiation. Surely the Brazilian way out will be a Moncloa way out: awake and moderate, without witch hunting. However, looking at the history of the New Republic, one sees that the total lack of judgment and punishment of the anti-democratic forces was the origin of many evils. Brazilian society in 2014 was very different, much more complex than it was in 1964, and yet such coup forces came out of the closet.
Throughout this period Brazil, and its Democracy, proved to be stronger than many imagined. ANVISA, MEC, technical bodies of Ministries: Brazil has civil servants who have passed public exams, of extremely high quality who, thanks to the stability of the civil service, have saved us from major catastrophes in these days of an anti-national, Malthusian, anti-People and anti-scientific government.
To talk about post-Bolsonaro Brazil, we will talk about what the New Republic survived the coup, and democracy has saved us. Public servants and stable civil servants, regulatory agencies, and state-owned companies, those that still exist, are increasingly necessary for a strong Democracy. Efficient and resistant republican institutions need to be valued. And, among them, the biggest political institution in Brazil to cross this coup wave was a political party with two letters: the PT.
Valuing our history and our political institutions
Since 2013, there has been a war against politics, with campaigns for its delegitimization, with a hysterical anti-corruption lacerdism screamed by the media. And the focus of this delegitimization of the Policy was the PT.
The PT is the largest party in Brazil, it has been in all presidential second rounds of the New Republic since 1989, and won half of them. In practice, this campaign of hatred of the PT, disguised as journalism, was an anti-political campaign, with still immeasurable consequences in the history of Brazil. To defeat the PT, the old right (globo, PSDB, traditional right) opened the doors of coup d'état. So that, soaked with so much campaign against corruption (as they did with Vargas: the sea of mud... of lacerdism), they managed to get people who claim to hate corrupt politicians who do nothing to elect in 2018 a former captain of pornochanchada, from the lower clergy centrão parliamentarian, responsible for cracks[ii] and gas theft[iii], folkloric pathetic, who approved only 2 bills in 28 years as a federal deputy…
Those who say they hate a corrupt/leaning parliamentarian elect this deputy for the presidency. Words really lost connection with things, opening up an abyss of non-dialogue, of this death of Politics, which is Bolsonarist Brazil, which uses anti-PTism as a dishonest scarecrow for the resentful. Just as Nazism used anti-Semitism in Germany: the Jews were to blame for everything in Germany, just as today, for the coup supporters/Bolsonaro supporters, the PT is to blame for everything in Brazil.
The Judiciary was fundamental in Nazi Germany too: giving absurd convictions to those who were on the left, and acquitting, of equivalent actions, when the architects were on the right. The toxic and sound speech of anti-corruption of the corporate media, reached levels of media warfare at Lavajato. We were in the Dilma government, a politician with a technical profile, who was certainly one of the most honest people to set foot in Brasília. But, in an Orwellian way, she was removed from the presidency without having committed any crime of responsibility, by a Congress presided over by the bandit Eduardo Cunha[iv].
Dilma was not even accused of a crime of responsibility (the only reason provided by the Constitution to open an impeachment process), but was overthrown, in a criminal/opportunistic jurisprudential innovation, by… tax pedaling…, something practiced by all presidents before and after her. Not only did we tear up the Constitution in that abject session of Dilma's impeachment, but that was a lesson in the criminalization of Politics. They criminalized the policy that dares to step outside the scholastic playbook of what I call gerontoliberalism[v] (neoliberalism).
The institutions that need to be refounded: the media, the judiciary and the Armed Forces
Interestingly, the media demanded a lot of self-criticism from the PT. But for a democratic renegotiation, the three institutions that would need to be refounded are those mentioned in the subtitle.
The Armed Forces are the most difficult to deal with. But his departure from the Bolsonarist boat would also have to have an economic axis, which I call the Geiselzist pact.[vi]. With defense of some base, and diversification, internal industrial. Hence, some economic nationalism. To have some margin for job creation: thus some progress, even to make any minimum order possible in society. But, strangely, the Armed Forces seem to be ideologically hijacked by fundamentalist economic liberalism, and an Atlantism/Otantism (NATO), averse to any debate on a national project.
The Judiciary, on the other hand, began its withdrawal from the coup, annulling the vicious and criminal sentences of Lavajato, decreeing Moro, a judge who combined sentence with the Prosecution, what we all always knew he was: incapable of being a judge, due to his commitment to the prosecution. The STF left the coup boat, hence the Bolsonarists' hatred against them.
The media is still in a narrative crisis: saying that it is politically opposed to Bolsonaro, but in economics it remains very faithful to the Paulo Guedes agenda. And here is Ariadne's interpretative thread for the Labyrinth of Brazil coup: the economic issue in Brazil's corporate media is at the heart of the 2016 Coup.
The historic exit for Bolsonarism will be when the forces that supported the impeachment without Dilma’s crime[vii], and the illegal arrest of Lula[viii], generating this selective “anti-corruption” novelization, accept to make a self-criticism themselves. The Judiciary has already disembarked from the coup. But the institution that remains hidden in this debacle of Bolsonarism is the corporate media: all TVs and major radio stations and newspapers in the capitals refuse any self-criticism. The dynamic center of Brazilian society remains manipulated to the right, with Globo focusing on being liberal in customs, pro agenda race and gender, while the anti-labor massacre, of destroying jobs and destroying labor legislation, with skyrocketing inflation, by Paulo Guedes, remains sacred in Globo's newsrooms and the entire press.
At this point lies the heart of the 2016/2018 coup: is the economy stupid. Defending female parity in parliaments (after campaigning to overthrow the first woman to reach the presidency of the Republic without legal causes!) is a perfect outfit for this media coup, as in the rewriting of history in the book 1984: they will say today, in general, the opposite of what they said yesterday. The modern outfit, from liberal to behavioral causes, in the pro agenda race and gender, is the ideal cover for the media institution to follow the coup, focusing only on maintaining the economic agenda, which is, and has always been, the heart of the coup. no self-criticism seems likely to occur in the media monopoly, it will need to be forced. because that would attack the cosmogony that dragged us to Paulo Guedes: the economic heart of anti-PTism. If anti-PTism is a political phenomenon, its fuel, and end, is economic.
Liberal Betrayal in the New Republic
What is happening now, with the Brazilian corporate media dressing up in some liberal disguise, at the end of the coup ball, with some poetic license, we can say that it already happened at the origin of the New Republic. That time it happened as a tragedy, today it happens as a farce. In the 1980s, the disguise was neoliberalism. Academic fad of the 1980s, whose real essays were under Pinochet's boots in Chile (1973) and Videla's in Argentina (1976), which de-industrialized these countries as much as they could. But in the Orwellian para-reality of corporate media, they dressed up for the liberal crusade in economics, marrying totalitarian neoliberalism with democracy in post-dictatorship Brazil.
The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR was the background of dreams for this narrative creation by the media, of marrying economic ultraliberalism with the redemocratization of Brazil in people's minds. And this became a long-lasting Cultural War in Brazil, which generated the 2016 coup: Brazil can have free elections, as long as the government does not deviate, even in the slightest, from the totalitarian dogma of the absolute free market. The champion of this agenda of unique discourse in economics in Brazil was, and is, a company with a monopolistic profile: Rede Globo. The communications group, with its Rio de Janeiro newspaper, already existed, with its historic struggle against Vargas and Labor, but in 1965, the year following the Coup, the TV channel was created, almost like a state-owned company of the regime: its contracts and licenses have a full monopoly profile. Its foundation occurs in an association with the North American group TIME-LIFE, whose foreign participation was illegal then[ix].
At the end of the military regime, led by the Globo Group, all corporate media in Brazil turned economic neoliberalism into a single dogma in their newsrooms. But that's not the worst: it's been like this since the beginning of the New Republic until today! There are no minimum standards of democracy if there is no porosity and discussion of ideas. When the economic debate is restricted between more liberals and ultra liberals… No democracy survives.
And what is more Orwellian: in a New Republic (1985-2018) that voted half the time for president in the PT, any word that supports the economic lines of this party is censored in the public debate of this media. As one of the fathers of heterodox thought in Brazil, Amaro Cavalcanti, would say, "... something needs to be changed, either in the definition, or in the defined"[X].
What will the democratic renegotiation look like? It will only happen if we start to have a minimally democratic media: one that does not censor heterodox economic ideas, supported by most of the Brazilian people.
Media dictatorship and the novelization of reality
But the problem is that, in Brazil, the internal media groups are all owned by submissive groups and umbilically linked to the financial system: Folha de S. Paul (PagSeguro)[xi], Globe (linked to Órama, in addition to having a fortune, as a monopoly company with no public capital, its financialized fortune is largely outside Brazil, the country that generated such a fortune)[xii] , SBT[xiii], Girl Scouts[xiv]… newspaper The State of S. Paul (from the Unibanco/Itaú Group)[xv]. Such total financialization, monopoly of the press, had to be illegal. We have a press that cannot express any other opinion than that which benefits the monopoly financial system: every opinion in defense of industry and production is demonized by this press of half a dozen families of finance capital.
This is not freedom of the press. This generated a liberal narrative monopoly in economics (since it is not even liberal), which deforms the average Brazilian's view of reality on a daily basis. Here is the origin of the coup: in the absence of a minimal argumentative democracy in media economy. Which generated a petrified and dead unique economic discourse: a totalitarian scholasticism of neoliberalism. That since the 1980s monopolistically repeats such a unique discourse, deifying such neoliberalism, which could have been renamed economic gerontoliberalism a long time ago.
Society is increasingly ignoring free-to-air TV and radio (open TV is increasingly for very poor old people). This is due to the advancement of the internet, but also to the coup of 2016: not by chance, since then the symbolic, anti-national, even Dark poisoning of the narratives of such channels about Brazil has made them increasingly unbearable. And the agenda applied by Mr. Paulo Guedes is the victory of the gerontoliberal agenda, deified by the media since 1980, defended by all channels. Also defended by Moro and Bolsonaro, the “New” Party (the anarcho-liberals’ obsession with novelty…): they all agree with Guedes’ economy. And the unfeasibility of any sustainability in maintaining such a Malthusian agenda for more years is so glaring, that it even reflects on popular tolerance in enduring watching newspapers that bark the same lie in economics for 40 years…
Moro tried to destroy the Brazilian Justice, Bolsonaro the Politics, but Paulo Guedes destroyed the illusion, of the economic illiterates, in believing in the unique discourse on economics of this old media: it is intolerable, for 90% of the People, the regime of unregulated private monopolies, stealing across the country, that such ultraliberalism imposes on us.
After the delirium, manipulated by the algorithms of social networks, of screaming for totalitarian simplistic and binary solutions, which we have experienced since 2013, it is increasingly understood that the return to the appreciation of Politics is the key to getting out of this catastrophe. The middle way, the regular and constant political mediation, will be the road to get out of the Labyrinth in which we were thrown. And here we ask: how to renegotiate the Republic, allowing this liberal betrayal to remain untouched in the corporate media? A media democratization of Brazil is the only way out for our Republican Renegotiation after the deluge. With the economic discourse in the media being what most needs to be democratized.
Exit of the coup: republican renegotiation and appreciation of institutions
There is a narrative crisis, from the once traditional right, voiced by the media, which embarked on anti-PTism. Revaluing politics and public debates will set in motion the social forces of Brazilian redemocratization. Soon, it will replace the PT at the center of politics. Embarking on anti-PTism was a dive into a denialist novelization of reality. Antipetism is the denialist irrationalism of Brazil's political reality. Because he doesn't want the biggest and most organized party in Brazil to exist. Say you see one compromise, as long as PT doesn't exist... it's just a delusion. This is splitting Brazil, denying its history, and will only throw Brazil into a permanent Civil War.[xvi].
Because even imagining this dystopia of a Brazil without the PT, the labor, social and human guidelines that the PT defends will continue in society. This reminds Argentina of the years of Perón's exile, when laws were even proposed to prohibit the pronouncing of the name Perón, in a lunatic denial of Argentina's political history: fighting for an Argentina without Peronism is like fighting for an Argentina without tango. But such hysterical, anti-labor denialism was pursued there. In Brazil today, the same occurs with the bizarre phenomenon of this anti-politics, which is anti-PTism. Wanting to end the PT is an anti-institutional delusion, against Brazil's political history, and its labor traditions. The PT is the largest party institution in Brazil, linked to the third largest trade union center in the world (CUT). Point.
The 1964 Coup fought the Varguista heritage and Labor. But they fought in politics, being shrewd in economics: they maintained JK's economic tripod (State-owned companies, domestic capital and multinationals). Even in its most liberal economic moment (Castelo Branco), the military did not destroy state-owned companies. The Campos/Bulhões reform modernized state-owned companies, and during the Geisel government, with the II PND, there was a large increase in them. The 2016 Coup, on the other hand, was radically liberal in terms of economics: from Temer destroying regulatory stocks, and removing the mandatory union tax, to the dystopian apotheosis of the Paulo Guedes Ministry. The economic regression is so disgraceful that he managed to bring inflation back. And the most obvious: no one in Povo supports it. In any election, whoever arrives defending an economic agenda by Paulo Guediana will have a maximum of 3% in the presidential election. Despite the people's chronic cowardly silence, popular disagreement is total.
We need to talk again: state
There is a wide and articulated Brazilian intellectual production on our Economic History[xvii]. Brazil, together with Japan and the USSR, was the country that grew the most in the world, between 1930 and 1980. It is not by chance that the period in which we structured Five-Year Plans, planning, and structured… State-owned. This word was banned in corporate media newsrooms, but it is the basis for the allocation of optimized resources, in the long term, for real production, in a way that private capital, extractive and short term, is never able to do. Today, agribusiness is the star of our trade surplus, but they pretend to forget that what made this possible was a state-owned company: EMBRAPA. Which, among other things, domesticated soybeans, from a temperate climate, to the cerrado. It is curious how the US does not privatize NASA, an American state-owned company at the technological forefront of all higher value-added production in that country.
Brazilian heterodox economic thinking needs to break through the media dictatorship in Brazil, and demand to be heard: renegotiating the Republic is democratizing the media, which will need to stop censoring the word State.
Developmentalist agenda and PT political hegemony
The world is experiencing a crisis of hegemony between the US and China. that is far from over[xviii]. It is the perfect time for a middle-income country, even more so the giant size of Brazil, to complete its development, taking greater advantages from the parties in dispute. As Vargas did in the last major intracapitalist dispute between Germany and the USA: it was not by chance that CSN (1943) and a series of industrial chains in Brazil emerged at that time. With the current ecological crisis, Brazil's strategic position has become even more comfortable for us to develop: whatever the energy base (wind, tidal, hydraulic, biomass, oil...) Brazil is rich: all you have to do is harness industrial chains to energy extraction. As Canada and Norway do.
The PT, when consolidated in the federal executive by popular vote, copied the Norwegian and Canadian model, and showed its industrial development strategy with the presidential decrees for the exploration of the Pre-Salt, with: (1) national content of 1/3 of all industrial material used in the exploration; (2) sharing regime with Petrobrás, (something not radically nationalist… well moderated even), and; (3) Sovereign Fund[xx] for health and education.
Because the 2016 coup came to prevent this project from consolidating[xx], with which Brazil would become a high-income country, without extreme poverty, importing workers to handle the creation of industrial jobs that we would have. But it is clear: the PT would stay for another 60 years in the presidency of Brazil, politically leading our developmental leap. What would have been great: every country that developed did so with a hegemonic political group in power. Like Lincoln's republican party, which from the Civil War to World War I, monopolized the White House in the USA, social democracy in Sweden (more than 50 years in power), or de Gaulle in post-war France. Without political hegemony, there is no complete and sustainable economic development: there are only chicken flights. Economics is concentrated politics.
Curious, how the induced hatred of the PT blinded the middle portions of Brazilian society to this fact: that a PT hegemony would favor them economically. The old middle class, which rose socially with the PT in the presidency, and from 2016 onwards, experiences an accelerated economic regression, has a political obsession, and an economic blindness in relation to the PT. What makes this middle class, in an Orwellian way, so against its own interests is the monopoly media manipulating its hatred of the rise of the most humble, which the PT also did. But again the media, and the evangelical sects, made this middle class elitist discourse slip into the mouths of the poor (and even then anti-PTism reached).
Always with the unique discourse of the monopoly media repeating some Pavlovian vectors stuck in the population, in a totalitarian way by this media. Namely: (1) the self-meritocratic discourse that my economic victory is mine alone, (there is no such thing as society[xxx]). Here there is a marriage between gerontoliberalism and the ideology of predestination, so shouted at by evangelical sects, but which penetrates all of society, especially through soap operas: I am predestined, I will be rich, I will win… And the pronoun we is deliberately hidden: because all wealth is, to a large extent, a collective construction that requires sharing, and invites the sharing of responsibilities and returns. In any society it is like that. Including the capitalist. As the US, a profoundly contractualist society, shows us: rights and duties oppose each other, contracts and unions need to be respected for capitalism to function. But in the egotistical novelization, which TVs and evangelical sects created in the Brazilian people, the predestination for wealth became a ghostly ideology, detached from the collective, which is where work, in fact, exists.
Example: the Olympic canoeing champion, who came out of the poor interior of Bahia (thanks to the public policies created in the PT years), is shown in the newspaper as a champion only thanks to his individual efforts: all collective construction, and public, behind, it is erased from the novelized narrative of the newspapers, to force this predestinating vision of reality. If they could, the newspapers would erase the BNDES (national public bank) stamped on the shirts of all athletes in Brazil. The message is totalitarian: victories are private achievements, while defeats are public problems. Corruption is only public in this media, never corporate and private. And so on.
(2) Hatred of poverty. On this point there is continuity with the first, because the predestination that I will be rich, that all my economic victories have nothing collective, culminates in this second point: the hatred of poverty. Even if the subject is himself, as in 99% of cases, poor too. In this there is self-hatred, hatred of Brazil, exhaled from people under this novelization of reality. Militant impatriotism, and the stimulus to an anti-Brazilian self-racism is something that comes out of that too, and is central to the manipulation that threw us into the 2016 regressive coup. Brazil was strategically placed to be a secondary rising force in the US/China dispute . The Coup, overthrowing an elected president who governed in a Brazil almost at full employment, was the work of financial forces (national/international) to impede the development of Brazil. The 40 years of fighting industry in Brazil, since the 1980s, is the work of the monopoly (financialized) media: those opposed to protectionism in the 2016th century. XIX criticized artificial industries, as their liberal descendants carried out such an irrational campaign that, with the XNUMX Coup, they managed to generate the liberal dystopia of an artificial deindustrialization in Brazil.
A self-criticism that the PT needs to do: how to politicize the majority benefited by its policies?
Economics is concentrated politics, and politics is only done on a cultural basis. Evangelicals and TV audiences, the novelized ones, believe in selective predestination: the bad in their lives is public, the good is privatized. Every economic victory is privatized, with all the public policies that supported the victorious economic groups in certain generations (Era Vargas, JK years, economic miracle, Lula/Dilma years) being forgotten the economic policies that allowed such personal enrichment. Collectivity is ignored in this ideology of novelized predestination, whether evangelical or not. Those who ascended to Universities thanks to FIES, PROUNE, and expansion of the federal ones, many coming from humble origins, forget such public policies that opened the doors of cultural and economic opportunities to them, and many privatize their victories in their minds
Interestingly, such university youth from humble origins, for the most part, is very moralistic, with regressive attitudes towards sexuality, sometimes even practicing sexual abstinence, and politically conservative as well. In the private and in the public, a large part is averse to the collective, updating the great São Paulo historian Sergio Buarque de Holanda, it is the “cordial men”, who bring everything to a familiar, personalistic sphere: what is Public, collective, does not interest them, only what is privatized, in terms of privileges, interests them. They are also often culturally conservative, not taking advantage of the cultural opportunities of their Universities and big cities: trained by TV, they do not have a welcoming structure for the cultural goods and opportunities with which they come into contact, preferring to restrict themselves mentally, they choose to have TV as a cultural center, or the internet with a popular television profile.
In May 1968 in France, the perception of the strength of a generation of workers' children arriving for the first time at the University was very clear, with this social fact at the root of the student uprisings that brought Marx and Freud together in the streets of France. Les Trente ans Glorieuses, as the post-war Keynesian years in France are known, saw the universalization of university access generate a liberating cultural uprising.
In Lulaist Brazil, the extraordinary educational accession of the popular classes, carried out by the PT, had as a cultural consequence an uprising of the most moralist popular reaction: children of humble families, without union formation in their families, have their cultural references trapped in soap operas and churches. Unionized workers strengthen the political education of the masses, hence the need to defend unionization, as was the case in France in the 1960s/70s, and therefore we need to defend unions in Brazil.
That's why the hatred of the PT in coup-era Brazil: unionizing educates the people politically. But the children of humble families, who rose through the PT's public policies, reproduce the discourse of novelized predestination: their victories are only personal, and they hate the poor (from which they emerged). Thus, they strengthen a regressive, moralistic, averse to politics, and privatist cultural world. The moralistoid discourse of lavajatismo enchants them, and even the evangelical Talibanization of behavior is often seen with sympathy, when not supported.
In short: in a cultural phenomenon opposite to that of 1968 in France, this apolitical youtha/reactionary favored the fascist uprising of 2016. As much as this uprising is contrary to their interests, and those of their families, this youth of humble origin did not organize against the Coup, at any time. Or, in many cases, it diffusely supported the coup against the PT's Rooseveltian essay, which took them off the road and included them in the budget. The Brazilian left needs to have the political courage to look at this unpleasant problem: this army of reactionary youths. Track, and understand, as such frankenstein history was possible is the beginning of the solution. Without seriously thinking about a courageous cultural and political plan for this segment of Brazilian youth, there will be no progressive way out for Brazil after Bolsonaro.
Culture and production, with the return of state-owned
I am an economic historian, specializing in the origin of heterodox economic thought in Brazil and the US. My time of study is the XNUMXth century, the Romantic century. And it is very curious to read the authors of that century, because it was a century that still had slavery, and the miseries were many. Reading Victor Hugo, Dickens, or Marx, the impression we have is that Europe was one big slum in the XNUMXth century. Despite the difficulties, the authors of this century are full of hope and confidence in human progress. I suspect that even with all our problems, in order to build solutions today, we need more hope and joy. For we have reasons, since there are solutions, and our historical experience is full of lessons.
Brazil at the beginning of the Republic[xxiii] it was a very fragile country, coming out of slavery, without relevant productive diversity, while the center of capitalism entered the second industrial revolution. Our relative delay was frightening, greater than it is today, in relation to the centers. But from 1930 to 1980 we had an extraordinary growth. Our entry into the second industrial revolution took place in the 1940s, via state-owned companies. Because that is exactly what we must return to as a basis for long-term productive projects for Brazil.
The relative gap that opened up in these third and fourth industrial revolutions, that of digitality, will need to be attacked as a strategic issue. Brazil today is being recolonized by Big Techs (Amazon, Apple, Facebook/Whatsapp, Google, Microsoft): if a digital attack occurs, people are unable to communicate or work anymore. This is a question of communicational security, which is, yes, a matter of national security, which at the public university we are trying to highlight, and treat as a strategic issue. A public mail is strategic, and an e-mail and whatsapp from the post are communication requirements of the XNUMXst century, which we will need to face, as a matter of national security. Make an email from public mail[xxiii], mandatory for obtaining a passport, and accessing any State function, will be something that will need to be done soon. And that it be linked to income tax: taxing the richest, and free to those exempt from income tax.
Conclusion
The framework of a Republican Renegotiation needs to democratize the media, with the democratization of the historical narrative, forcing media corporations to accept heterodox economists as a constant mandatory presence in newsrooms. A national public TV, but with resources, would be an excellent break from the narrative monopoly of the media. In Brazil, it is the State that breaks the monopoly when democratized.
A renationalist agenda needs to emanate from the popular forces: this agenda needs to weigh again on the parliamentary agenda for next year, especially on the PT base. The heart of the 2016 Golpe was the Pre-Salt and its national content sharing plan. An article by Guido Mantega was published[xxv] giving economic guidelines in a probable return of the PT to the Plateau. With all due respect, but in the face of this chronic pandemic and structural stagnationism, we will need something more audacious, whose axis, I propose, is to break private monopolies by creating state-owned Brazilian companies, to destroy the stagnationist chains that have been trapped in us since the 1990s.
In the Brazilian Civil War: the lost cause remains the developmentalist agenda. The bad internet in Brazil needs a national option, a NETCOMBRAS(sic), to expand services with quality and regular prices. Like e-mail and the Mail's communication network, freeing us from the Big Techs monopoly. It would even be appropriate for ODEBRECHT to be recreated as a state-owned company, with that same name. As a symbolism of the fight for industrialization in Brazil, not allowing the destruction of production and employment, under the excuse of combating corruption. In the event of corruption, judge and condemn the directors, but never destroy the company.
No adult believes that the PT's problem (for the coup leaders) was corruption (the PT created the two best institutional instruments to combat corruption: the Access to Information Law[xxiv], and the Transparency Portal[xxv]), what they fought against was the prospect of a strong growth of industrial chains in Brazil, linked to pre-salt exploration. To leave the coup is to force a counter narrative, anchored in our success story of the fight for industrialization, which leads to productive results, via restructuring and creation of state-owned companies. In order to have a growing unionization of the People, to give them a living political school, and to reverse the structural coup d'état, whose plan is to make us a deindustrialized extractive colony. To accept this, in the middle of the centenary of independence, is to forget and deny a fantastic story of overcoming challenges.
*Cristiano Addario de Abreu is a doctoral student in the Economic History Program at USP.
Notes
[I] https://acervo.oglobo.globo.com/em-destaque/pacto-de-moncloa-que-inspira-presidentes-do-brasil-marca-espanha-nos-anos-70-17019322
[ii] https://www.poder360.com.br/justica/quebras-de-sigilo-revelam-indicios-de-rachadinhas-de-jair-bolsonaro-e-carlos/
[iii] https://valorinveste.globo.com/mercados/brasil-e-politica/noticia/2020/04/30/acusacao-de-que-bolsonaro-teria-fraudado-cota-parlamentar-e-encaminhada-a-pgr.ghtml
[iv] https://g1.globo.com/pr/parana/noticia/2020/09/09/eduardo-cunha-e-condenado-a-15-anos-de-prisao-por-corrupcao-passiva-e-lavagem-de-dinheiro-na-lava-jato-no-parana.ghtml
[v] https://gmarx.fflch.usp.br/boletim-ano2-09 FOR AN OEDIPIAN KEYNESIAN REFORMATION AGAINST MINOTAURIC GERONTOLIBERALISM
[vi] https://revistaforum.com.br/debates/guerra-civil-brasileira-ii-rale-empoderada-por-cristiano-abreu/
[vii] https://www.justificando.com/2017/08/31/dilma-rousseff-foi-afastada-do-cargo-sem-ter-cometido-crime-de-responsabilidade/
[viii] https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/brasil-56327483
[ix] https://memoriaglobo.globo.com/acusacoes-falsas/caso-time-life/
[X] CAVALCANTI, Amaro. The National Circulating Medium (1808-1835). Ed. University of Brasilia. Brasília, 1983. Pg. 3.
[xi] https://pagseguro.uol.com.br/sobre/#rmcl
[xii] https://valor.globo.com/financas/noticia/2017/06/21/globo-compra-fatia-minoritaria-na-orama-1.ghtml
[xiii] https://investidorsardinha.r7.com/opiniao/como-silvio-santos-quebrou-banco/ https://www.poder360.com.br/midia/sbt-completa-40-anos-como-plataforma-para-negocios-de-silvio-santos/
[xiv] https://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/2019/11/band-fecha-acordo-com-tv-estatal-chinesa.shtml https://braziljournal.com/na-band-a-maioria-dos-acionistas-quer-mudar-de-canal
[xv] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_P_v3a0kE4Q&t=1891s
[xvi] https://revistaforum.com.br/debates/guerra-civil-brasileira-i-o-inquestionavel-dogma-do-mercado-por-cristiano-abreu/
[xvii] https://congressohistoriaeconomica.fflch.usp.br/
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCyG-X28drZfxWVLGES3XS7Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PRgYzHFb0w&t=5140s
[xviii] https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2021/11/08/rivalry-between-america-and-china-will-shape-the-post-covid-world?utm_medium=social-media.content.np&utm_source=facebook&utm_campaign=editorial-social&utm_content=discovery.content&fbclid=IwAR2FNqk3OWOg83y6kiyHoTZqhWsQ7pUNYQ8if-COvXDgB7rGPM_jUGj6Hao
[xx] https://www.gov.br/tesouronacional/en/fundo-soberano-do-brasil-fsb
[xx] https://agenciabrasil.ebc.com.br/economia/noticia/2020-12/presidente-da-petrobras-defende-fim-do-regime-de-partilha
[xxx] https://newlearningonline.com/new-learning/chapter-4/margaret-thatcher-theres-no-such-thing-as-society
[xxiii] https://teses.usp.br/teses/disponiveis/8/8137/tde-31032015-113729/pt-br.php
[xxiii] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XhVOL9eb-Q0&t=3876s “Science in Brazil and the concept of national sovereignty in current world geopolitics”
[xxv] https://pt.org.br/bolsonarismo-levou-brasil-a-crise-e-retomada-vira-com-o-seu-fim/
[xxiv] https://pt.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lei_de_acesso_%C3%A0_informa%C3%A7%C3%A3o
[xxv] https://www.portaltransparencia.gov.br/sobre/o-que-e-e-como-funciona