By TARSUS GENUS*
In fascism, the passivity of the oppressed is shared with the consented perversion, the bad conscience of the “well-off classes”
The determinations of fascism as a genre, in the crisis of capitalism, both in its economic and social contents, are those that found its emergence and its contours, in a certain territorial and cultural space. When fascism, however, becomes a political movement with prospects of power – to understand and combat it – it is necessary to locate its most reserved mental hiding places in the dominant subjectivity and in the conduct of political subjects its darkest manifestations (and violence) in everyday life.
The dramatic situation in the country, where democracy fades away in every fascist jargon emitted by presidential grunts – in a country affected by the death toll of the pandemic and endemic hunger – requires a sophisticated political strategy on the part of the democratic opposition forces to refute it. The dominant “Bolsonarism” managed to separate a significant and polyclassist part of society from reflection and political dialogue – necessary for liberal-representative democracy to function.
This was thrown into a space where debate does not penetrate, arguments are worthless and minds only work by reflecting the authorized word of “myth”. The fragmentation of society's class structure favors this isolation, in which these “separate” groups create their own, illusory world, in which the earth can be accepted as “flat”. In it, communism also haunts “good” families and the veneration of “cocks” hidden in baby bottles – as a political weapon – can be reproduced endlessly. Approximately 1/3 of the population is dominated by these pockets of manipulated ignorance.
Throughout its history, fascism has always capitalized on the lies that became the foundations on which its political power was based. The difference in which this capitalization takes place today, in relation to the times of the last century, is that it flows much more quickly and can be isolated in bubbles of inaccessibility, in which contestations to the myth are blocked from their “entrance”. And repelled.
The blocking of contestations to the lies is done with direct and simple arguments, erected to satisfy not only the simplest minds harassed by the social crisis and insecurity, but also to rest in the perverted consciences of a large part of the highest strata of the population. On the level of public subjectivity, fascism is the revelation of the mental laziness of the oppressed, combined with the consented perversion, present in the bad conscience of the “upper classes”.
What is the “sophistication” I am referring to as necessary for the opposition to be effective? The unity of the fragmented parts of the fascist proposal is made by the “myth”, which moves from one closed “bubble” to another, from one fragment to another, with simple protocols of rejection of enlightened modernity. This “rejection” is particularly opposed to the human possibilities of liberating subjects from the influences of religious prejudices and their overcoming – through the truth – of the political anathema produced by the mainstream media, in relation to the left.
The opponents of the values of fascism are attacked from the apparent morality of the “medieval” castes, a morality constituted for the mental blocking of everything that is outside the standards of the patriarchal family, often expanded as an idea of nation. For this, fascism bets on blindness due to hatred, which these individual or group freedoms can provoke in common sense, always presented as “contrary” to orderly life, which is destabilized by these “deviations”.
Fascist ideology thus transforms perversion and intolerance by virtue of order and into a nation project: it is the ideology of the frustrated, of the resentful people excluded from the good life of the rulers who then turn against everyone who tolerates disorder and generates instability in families. The truth of what the myth is does not interest the fascist, because what seduces him is his own untruth, which has become a symbol for the redemption of mediocrity steeped in collective unhappiness.
The overcoming of this subjectivity will not occur without the defeat of the myth and the defeat of the myth will not occur without us being able to break the unity of that part of the ruling classes with it, produced for their specific purposes of domination. This domination, in the first place, uses the “myth” to promote reforms and accentuate the privatization of the State, both by increasing the power of the militias and by privatizing public assets.
The future political front that should govern the country must be composed of four movements of a political symphony, which point to a resumption of the republican order of 1988: in the first, defeat “Bolsonarismo” and expel it from power, uniting what has of democratic in the nation against him; in the second movement, preparing a common transition program for a productivist, non-rentier and inclusive economy in employment and activity; a third movement, organizing the left to be the pivot of a political front of an electoral nature – that goes beyond the left to govern –; and a fourth movement, with the strength of institutional power, to reform the political system to open new perspectives for social and institutional reforms that reinforce national sovereignty and cohere Latin America around democracy and continental solidarity.
*Tarsus in law he was Governor of the State of Rio Grande do Sul, Mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil.
