Álvaro Vieira Pinto and national sovereign education -

Álvaro Vieira Pinto and national sovereign education

04/01/2025

Brazil 200 • Culture • Education • Books

By LUIS EUSTÁQUIO SOARES*

Foreword to the recently released book by Vinícius Aguiar Caloti

The advent of the trans-historical cycle of the Brazilian petite bourgeoisie.

Brazil has been characterized by its economic cycles, overdetermined by Western metropolises; and its coups d'état. Beginning with the sugarcane cycle in the Northeast, economic cycles are not a Brazilian phenomenon. They are colonial, capitalist and imperialist forms of primitive capital accumulation, omnipresent in Latin America, Africa and Asia; and they are also and above all objective forms of depriving labor, economic, social and cultural memories, making the country of cycles without a past, without a present and without its future. Soulless.

As far as Latin America is concerned, the book The open veins of Latin America (1971), by Eduardo Galeano, is a must-read work, because it describes with perplexity what comes after each economic cycle: environmental destruction, prostitution in decline (the peak is the peak of the cycle), misery, abandonment, impersonal tragedies because they are collective, of any kind.

In the case of Brazil, in addition to economic cycles, there have been and continue to be cycles of (i) institutional-cultural transplantation and (ii) coup d'état cycles. All of them serve the function of interrupting the continuum historical-mnemonic, such as the Portuguese colonial, the British liberal and the North American neoliberal, for the first point; and the coups d'état of 1889, 1930, 1937,1964, 2016, XNUMX, as examples of the second point, not to mention the oligarchic electoral frauds and the underground interruptions carried out by the incessant interference of imperialist powers, in alliance with petty-bourgeois, landowner and business sectors.

At the end of each economic-cultural cycle, the country was under the illusion that it could start from scratch. From the sugarcane cycle to the gold cycle in Minas Gerais, an important temporal change occurred, which deserves a separate reflection because it concerns the first shift in the cycle, both economic and cultural, with the submission of Portugal to England at the beginning of the 18th century. In this context, the British became, in practice, the new colonial center of Brazil.

Revolts such as the War of the Emboabas (1707-1709), the War of the Mascates (1710-1711), the Revolt of Vila Rica (1720), the Inconfidência Mineira (1789) and the Conjuração Baiana (1789), to name just a few, had, as we know, Lisbon as a reference to be denied and fought, although it was London that effectively manipulated the cards; and appropriated the largest possible quantity of gold and diamonds.

Em Summary of the history of Brazilian culture (1978), Nelson Werneck Sodré addressed this anachronism by presenting its subjected subject, namely: the petite bourgeoisie (imaginary category; not a social class) which, according to the historian from Rio de Janeiro, had emerged in Brazil before the dominance of capitalist relations of production, describing it as floating and tendentially referenced in the metropolis that represents the new productive forces.

This phenomenon became a historical law of the Brazilian dependency structure, which is outlined as follows: a petite bourgeoisie inspired by London liberalism was followed by another referenced in the lifestyles of the period of American hegemony, without disregarding the French cultural vogue of the late 19th century, running through the first half of the 20th century, mixed with a noble prosody and posture, outside of the national ground.

Internal economic-cultural accumulation

The behavior of the petite bourgeoisie, however, is not the exception, but the rule. Economic cycles were and are designed by the metropolises, in the colonial period; and by unequal exchanges, under the domination of the monopoly capital of the European-North American imperialist system. The result has always been the same: absence of an internal market and, as a tragic effect, cultural, identity-based, political-institutional self-blindness; insensitivity to the question of national sovereignty and cynical distance in relation to the fate of the excluded majority, the super-exploited working class, abandoned to an unseemly hell.

Internally agitated by the demands of the metropolises, the country does not exist for itself; its academic petite bourgeoisie, internationalized and historically desirous of stylized behavioral, theoretical, aesthetic-cultural and ideological fashions, as in a masked theater, has had as its raison d'être the burlesque imitation, because of out-of-place ideas and styles, of the petite bourgeoisies of the metropolises of the Western-American imperialist system.

How not?The girls' secrets (1656), a baroque painting by the Spanish painter Diego Velásquez (1559-1660), everything is reduplicate: the painting to be painted, representing the burlesque symbolic nucleus of the Spanish court, king and queen in the background, ladies-in-waiting, court jesters, the painter himself in the act of painting, working, what is actually painted, and is reflected and reflecting itself, is the decadence of the Spanish colonial empire, already surpassed by Holland, which is why, like a mirror of a mirror, it needs to be replicated symbolically and metaphysically, since it has already lost the thread of history.
It is this quixotic speculative regression of outdated productive forces that the Brazilian petite bourgeoisie reflects in itself the more it tries to be the inverted reflection of the new productive forces, embodying them in a country that refuses to see itself.

The issue, however, is not moral or the metaphysical essence of the petite bourgeoisie; it is historical and economic. Without an internal market, the mirror to be reflected looks through the specular face of the ideological and biopolitical system of the metropolis of the time, an argument that can be verified by considering as a counterpoint the following periods: from 1822 to 1889 and from 1914 to 1964.

In the first case, José Bonifácio (1763-1838), Luis Gama (1830-1882), Quintino Bocaiúva (1836-1912), André Rebouças (1838-1998), Machado de Assis (1839-1908), Castro Alves (1847-1871) Joaquim Nabuco (1849-1910), José do Patrocínio, (1953-1905), Cruz e Souza (1831-1898) and Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909) are examples of intellectuals and public men who emerged within the Imperial State and represented a project for the country that had in the axiom of Joaquim Nabuco, abolitionism (1988), the dialectical synthesis of national emancipation: “Without independence there will be no de facto abolition and without de facto abolition there will be no independence”.

It is not a question of being in favor of the Empire with the slave production relations that were at its base. The issue at hand is continuum historical, cultural and economic. Although the educated class in the 19th century, which had the indispensable awareness of social injustice, was the one that fought for the end of slavery and for the republic, the advent of the latter was, in general terms, a coup d'état against social thought, praxis political-institutional that has accumulated over time for more than eighty years.

At the end of Brazil's economic history (2003), Caio Prado Junior looked into this issue, pointing out that, after the change of regime in 1889, the careerists and speculators, eager for easy wealth, presented themselves at the forefront as mediators for their counterparts in the metropolises, especially England and the USA, in order to negotiate, read as deliver, the spoils not exactly of the Empire, but of national wealth and raw materials through unequal exchanges ratified by new loans, by the financialization of Brazilian society, represented, for example, by the encilhamento, the name given to the speculative expansionist financial policy adopted between 1889 and 1891, generating uncontrolled inflation and increasing the State's debt.

The romance Esau and Jacob (1994), by Machado de Assis, uniquely portrayed the two sides in perspective, with the old Counselor Aires typifying the sensible and thoughtful diplomat of the State structure of the Second Reign; and Santos, the enriched profile of the new times surrendered to the monopolistic capital of the Metropolises, in the era of the emergence of the imperialist phase of capitalism.

The second period of internal cultural-political-institutional accumulation lasted, with interruptions, from 1914 to 1964, during which the country began to develop an internal market, with all possible and imaginable contradictions, especially considering the dynamics of industrialization carried out in the import substitution process that occurred during the First and Second World Wars.

And the reason is none other than this: the European monopoly metropolises destroyed each other in inter-imperialist wars, easing tutelage, control, blackmail and loosening the alliance of the agrarian-exporting and commercial oligarchy with the maneuvers of imposing unequal exchanges carried out through the different mechanisms of capital export carried out by the center of the imperialist system.

The 1917 General Strike in São Paulo, the founding of the Brazilian Communist Party in 1922, and the Revolt of the 18 do Forte in 1922 placed the country in a world of turmoil, with its epicenter in the Soviet Revolution of 1917. This convergence is internally a result of the presence of capitalist relations of production and, with these, of the first sketches of the organization of the working class. From an aesthetic-cultural point of view, the 1922 Modern Art Week, financed by the São Paulo bourgeoisie, represented for the first time the outline of a bourgeoisie that, far from being revolutionary, was interested in promoting a more aggressive version of itself, in tune with the modern era of the Western capitalist world system.

Composed of a petite bourgeoisie layer such as the painters Anitta Malfatti and Vicente do Rego Monteiro, the poets and writers Mário de Andrade, Oswald de Andrade, Menotti Del Picchia, Manoel Bandeira, the sculptor Victor Brecheret, the musicians Villa-Lobos and Guiomar Novaes, and the ceramist from Minas Gerais, Zina Aita. All these cultural agitators had in common: (a) they were in tune with the new European fashions, especially considering the artistic avant-garde, with its epicenter in France; (b) they were committed to dialoguing with Brazilian cultural diversity.

There was, of course, a lot of naivety in the group, generally expressed through an anarchist and iconoclastic spirit, and it is no coincidence that the poet, writer and essayist, Oswald de Andrade, son of the São Paulo bourgeoisie and representing the front line of the Zeitgeist vanguard of the European cultural petite bourgeoisie, made, in the preface to Seraphim Ponte Grande (2010), a 1933 novel, his retrospective self-criticism in the following terms: “I was a clown of the bourgeoisie”. This generation lacked historical-cultural materialism. The break with the coffee-with-milk oligarchy, with the Coup of 30, represented a major blow to the agrarian-exporting oligarchic system that centralized power, in alliance with the mainly Anglo-Saxon imperialist architecture. Capitalist relations of production surpassed those of the rural sector.

In the dialectic of the transformation of quantity into quality, a window opens for the literary settlement of accounts with Brazil's colonial past, starting with the fictional embodiment of Brazil's colonial past of sugar cane mills, taking as reference the Northeast of the noble and patriarchal oligarchy and the emergence of writers such as José Américo de Almeida, José Lins do Rego, Graciliano Ramos, Jorge Amado, Rachel de Queiroz.

With the most expressive aesthetic-realist incisiveness of Graciliano Ramos, in general terms these writers held the realistic advantage of distancing themselves, from the following perspectives: (i) being a generation after the first Modernism, markedly petty-bourgeois and referenced in European avant-garde fashions; (ii) because they were situated within the scope of capitalist relations of production, a position that subsumes and allows for a more plastic and critical look at the outdated social relations of production of the world of large estates and patriarchal sugar mills.

Both the first and second points explained above also referenced the emergence of the resumption of Brazilian social thought, abandoned in the second half of the 1933th century. In XNUMX, Caio Prado Júnio emerged with Political Evolution of Brazil (1980), a work that sought to tie together the threads that were broken between the past and the present; and Casa Grande and Senzala (2018), by Gilberto Freyre. Later on, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda enters the scene, with Brazil roots (1995), work from 1936; and Nelson Werneck Sodré with History of Brazilian Literature in its economic foundations (1940)

The country is once again thinking about itself, the formation of its people, its culture, history, and perspectives. From 1930 to 1936, the country was in turmoil like never before, driven by internal cultural and institutional accumulation, with the advancement of the organization of the working class increasingly bringing the generally ambiguous and hesitant petty bourgeoisie to its front lines of struggle.

The Vargas dictatorship of 1937-1945, as an intrinsic part of the inertia of the discontinuous cycles mnemonics, emerged with the same faces of the Old Colonial Regime, disguised as elegant gestures of noblemen of the latifundium, as well as, among the smart ones in search of wealth, with the re-actualization of the post-1889 arrivistes, in the style of Santos, of Machado de Assis, with the objective of stopping the internal historical-cultural-economic accumulation, led by the masses, by the working class, with their feet on the ground of Brazilian social reality.

It was a time of nationwide arrests of anyone affiliated with the PCB, of intellectuals and writers worthy of the name, of class-conscious workers and peasants, as well as of the purges of the most nationalist cadres of the Armed Forces. The country suffered yet another setback in its continuum historical-social and cultural.

After 1945, the end of the Second World War, the saga of cultural, economic, social, in a word, civilizational accumulation, was resumed, in a distinctly adverse context. If the XNUMXth century marked the end of Portuguese cultural-institutional transplantation, with the progressive installation of British cultural-institutional transplantation in the country, American hegemony on a Western-planetary scale initiated the third process of cultural-institutional and economic transplantation in the country, in a context in which, in dialogue with Nelson Werneck Sodré de The truth about ISEB, the: “[…] short interval between the end of the Second World War, in which Nazism, fascism and Japanese militarism were defeated, and the world seemed to have entered a phase of peaceful development – and the beginning of the so-called Cold War, when the world was divided again and the ideological struggle assumed threatening proportions (SODRÉ, 1986, p. 36)”.

Between 1945 and 1964, the country attempted to reconnect with the threads that had been broken during the previous Vargas dictatorship. This re-actualization of historical, cultural and economic materialism that was specifically Brazilian occurred in view of the following geopolitical crossroads: (a) the process of British-European cultural transplantation, which intensified after the 1889 coup d'état; (b) the beginning of a third wave of cultural transplantation, now led by North American imperialism, with its cultural industry and its cold war against the socialist axis centered on the USSR and China.

In the first case, there was an internal dialectical synthesis with the transformation of quantity into quality of cultural, political, economic and social accumulation due to the dynamics of import substitution that occurred between 1914 and 1945, the dominance of capitalist relations of production, workers' struggles, the aesthetic-critical density of Brazilian culture and social thought.

In the second, the Sisyphean syndrome of “starting over” gradually (with the support of the repression of the Military Dictatorship of 1964) took over the country, with the romantic-reactionary endocolonization of American way of life, and with the establishment, on the ground, of the consumer industries of the imperialist triad of the USA, Europe and Japan, financed with loans taken out from the metropolises, especially Washington, thus worsening the debt and dependence, ironically called the “Brazilian economic miracle”.

The 1964 coup is not an isolated case, but rather a trans-historical one, being yet another chapter in the military forces that have become the armed wing of metropolitan cultural transplantation and its architecture of income extraction and overexploitation of labor. One of the most positive effects of the materialist process of internal cultural accumulation, based on the challenge of national emancipation, is the formation of nationalist cadres who begin to act internally in institutions, including within the Armed Forces.

Getúlio Vargas, elected by popular vote and sworn in in January 1951, is the one who will house a group of intellectuals, including advisors, who will deal with research into various aspects of Brazilian reality, in order to propose projects referenced in the challenge of expressing the country's potential, in a multidisciplinary, interrelated manner. Then comes the IBESP, Brazilian Institute of Economics and Politics, with Hélio Jaguaribe as its secretary-general and the magazine Notebooks of Our Time as a reference for publication and dissemination. One of its creators, Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, was the one who invited Nelson Werneck Sodré, the most important Marxist intellectual in the Armed Forces, to join the group.

With the suicide of Getúlio Vargas and the siege of the pro-Yankee wing of members of the Armed Forces, the IBESP was dismissed. In its place, President Café Filho created by decree the ISEB, Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies, linked to the Ministry of Education and Culture, with its own budget, freedom of expression and professorship. During the Juscelino Kubitschek period, it dedicated itself to providing research support for national sovereign development.

Its members included Hélio Jaguaribe, Alberto Guerreiro Ramos, Antonio Candido, Nelson Werneck Sodré, Cândido Mendes, Ignácio Rangel, Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Abdias do Nascimento, among others, in addition to the author who is the object of study of this book, Álvaro Vieira Pinto and sovereign national education, the result of careful research work by Vinícius de Aguiar Caloti.

Investigating fundamental works by Álvaro Vieira Pinto, such as National conscience and reality (1960) Ideology and national development (1956) and Seven Lessons on Adult Education (1993), Vinícius Caloti managed, in this book, to articulate the first two to the third, resuming, from a philosophical perspective, the importance of updating the emancipatory education project, of a national-developmentalist nature, starting from popular mobilization/consciousness, a basic proposition of the philosopher from Rio de Janeiro, accepted by the author of this book.

The fundamental problem, however, with this philosophy of praxis of a national-developmentalist education, based on popular mobilization, lies in the setback suffered by the precarious and contradictory process of internal cultural accumulation with the emergence of American hegemony and, with this, with the full victory of the cultural transplantation carried out, via the cultural industry, by Uncle Sam.

The country is skating on the absurd and still refers to itself today entirely in American way of life and because of this, also, because the Yankee model is absolutely counterrevolutionary and antinational, all real historical materialism, at the same time national and developmentalist, even if precarious, carried out from 1822 to 1889 and from 1914 to 1945, with a peak between 1951 and 1964, has been despised and vilified, not to say absolutely unknown.

One thing is certain, in any case, without resuming the internal process of cultural accumulation, the irrefutable core of an existential-social-civilizational-independenceist pedagogy, the Brazilian soul, Brazil will always be vulnerable to a new cycle of coups. This book by Vinícius de Aguiar Caloti goes against the grain of contemporary petty-bourgeois research, which is predominantly apologetic for the trends coming from Washington.

It is a bold book because it dialogues with the worldview of an era and an author who dedicated themselves to thinking about and praxis of national independence, in an anti-imperialist way, Brazil for Brazilians; for the popular classes; full sovereignty.

*Luis Eustáquio Soares is a full professor in the Department of Letters at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES). Author of, among other books, The society of integrated control (Edufes).

Reference

Vinicius Aguiar Caloti. Álvaro Vieira Pinto and national sovereign education. São Paulo, Editora Terried, 2024, 86 pages. [https://shre.ink/bFok]

REFERENCES

ANDRADE, Oswald de. Seraphim Ponte Grande🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2010.

ASSIS, Machado de. Esau and Jacob. New York: New York University Press, 1994.

FREYRE, Gilberto. Casa Grande & Senzala. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2018.

GALEANO, Edward. The open veins of Latin America. Porto Alegre: L&PM, 1971.

NETHERLANDS, Sérgio Buarque de. Brazil roots🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1995.

NABUCO, Joaquim. abolitionism. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Nova Fronteira, 1988.

PINTO, Alvaro Vieira. National conscience and reality. Rio de Janeiro: Brazilian Civilization, 1972.

___. Ideology and national development. São Paulo: Cortez, 1980.

___. Seven Lessons on Adult Education. Petrópolis: Voices, 1975.

PRADO JUNIOR, Caio. Brazil's political evolution. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1980.

___. Brazil's economic history. 15nd ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2003.