Lessons from Gramsci and Weber

Carlos Zilio, ESTUDO, 1970, felt-tip pen on paper, 47x32,5 (1)
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By TARSUS GENUS*

The crisis advances and Bolsonaro wins: with Globo, with FHC and with everything

I dedicate this article to Lula, Ciro, Boulos, Haddad, Carlos Siqueira, Marina, Freixo, Flávio Dino and Requião. So that, with their differences, they can lead us in reversing the tragedy.

In one of his texts of reflection on political hegemony, Gramsci refers to the leaders of Italian democratic liberalism (Croce and Fortunato), to address the concept of “Party”. And he does so by designating the Party “as a general ideology”, superior to the various more immediate groupings, a sparse order of fractions and national and regional groups, fractions of liberalism”. Gramsci says that Croce – whom he admired for his greatness and intellectual authenticity – “was the theorist of everything that these groups and cliques, cliques and gangs, had in common” (…) and that he (Croce) spoke as “a national leader of cultural movements, which were born to renew the old political forms”. Obviously, Gramsci's criticism had in mind the defense of an organic, proletarian, national-popular party, for the construction of a new social order in the sick conjuncture of Italy in a trance.

Updating Gramsci's observations for this phase of the crisis of liberal democracy – harassed by fascist scum stimulated by rentier ultraliberalism – we can verify on the national scene at least three relatively defined “parties”, composed of “non-organic parts”, but politically combined, which present a general identity of their own, in their different perspectives to face the crisis. All three “Parties” – in that sense referred to by Gramsci – are formed, with different internal weights, by informal groups of traditional parties, fractions of “classist” leaders, intellectual leaders from diverse corporate origins, political leaders of regional and national scope, supported by virtual communication networks, national or regional traditional communication companies.

A first “Party”, coordinated by the media oligopoly that makes up the dominant public voice of rentier liberalism, intends a formal democratic way out of the crisis, “taming” Bolsonaro and accepting his continuity in the Government, as long as he continues with the reforms ultraliberals: party willing to forgive him of all his militia and genocidal relationships in exchange for reformist results. A second “Party” – a democratic opposition with a reformist-democratic bias – that seeks a way out of the crisis by defeating fascism and purging Bolsonaro from the Government, a bloc formally prepared to halt the ultraliberal project and open democracy to new experiences of popular governments. Its most visible leaders are opposed - both to fascism and neoliberalism - but the bloc has little internal unity on the forms of struggle, economic proposals and adequate opportunities for the toughest confrontations with Bolsonarism, such as the "impeachment" proposal. .

The third “Party” is that of Bolsonarism in power. Extremist, fundamentalist and religious, supported by the frameworks of the State, the religions of money and organized crime, which opens and closes to the groups that intend to tame it, according to the viability of its permanence in power. This "Party" takes advantage of the media's support for reforms, becoming more - or less - conniving with corruption and physiologism, according to the needs of its power architecture and the internal movements of its central staff installed in the State, with a reduced number of cadres with leadership capacity, mainly originating from a part of the military reserve. I do not include in this indication of “parties-parties” the “Juntos” Movement, in fact it is a democratic articulation of civil society, in which it is possible to point out cadres that integrate both the first and the second alternative of the “Parties”, referred to here.

The Organic Party – a formal and regulated structure for purposes of power and application of programs – progressively ascends with liberal-representative democracy and with it declines. And it tends to become disposable, if it does not adapt to the era of networks and new cultural forms that affect the minds of the people, processed through the oligopolies of communication and clandestine groups for the dissemination of “fakes” and ideas, which invade the world. daily lives of the "masses". Anyone who opposes the fascist forms of construction of new hegemonies – driven by algorithmic calculations that aim to adapt individualities to the taste of the market – can only produce something new by knowing how this game, which we are getting to know now, operates.

In order to organize in a superior way in discipline and camaraderie, with superior purposes and on the basis of programmatic commitments around emancipation, it is necessary to conceive that the “organization” of “their” party is easier and more predictable: their organizational logic it is predominantly the logic of money. Our forms of organization are more difficult and unpredictable, as our organizational “ballast” is only consciousness. We are already feeling in the flesh that the new forms of production in info-digital rentier capitalism have disfigured the emancipatory struggles around a class structured predominantly in the modern factory. This historical fact has been emptying both classical social democracy and the traditional proposals of socialism, which resulted in real socialism.

Workers of all orders and types – intellectuals, workers, service providers in culture and IT – dependent self-employed workers, low-level public sector employees, young people excluded as superfluous, women and anti-racist fighters of all classes, for rights own and others – today form the socially dispersed groups that, due to their objective life of oppression and their repressed demands, can compose a “new type” libertarian political constellation: in it, traditional class identities and socialism – as regulatory ideas – are only (and it is a lot) the starting point of moral and political unity, in defense of Democracy and the Republic, for a new civilizing level. If we do not leave the rest “open”, we will remain in the present, which will be a long-term present – ​​Bolsonarist and ultraliberal – that could dominate for a long and dark cycle.

Weber, speaking of the great "Parties" of the aristocracy in the eighteenth century, treating them as the labels of ruling political groups, which were no more than "retinues of powerful aristocratic families", says that each time "a Lord, for whatever reason, changed of Party, everything that depended on it, passed, at the same time, to the opposing party.” Weber's analysis makes us understand how important it was for the Brazilian ruling classes, parasites of global finance, the attempt to destroy the parties of order - traditional or not - to put in their place "mobile" devices of domination, whose institutional plastic is it easily forms the necessary alliances, quickly, to direct and implement the destructive reforms of the Welfare State.

The first “Party”, whose ideological auditor and political programmer is the media oligopoly, articulated with the power system of financial capitalism and with the cadres of the various reactionary or conservative parties (with public expression inside and outside the Government) – this first party, of Maia, Fernando Henrique, Globo, Fiesp and the reserve military, different but united – is winning. Its last movements, preparing for the end of the critical year, which will see the destruction of our productive fabric, mass unemployment, exclusion of unpredictable dimensions, environmental crisis and lack of minimum resources to finance the functioning of the State, are in progress, simulated or real form.

What are these moves? The organization of a parallel “centre” of Government, with Vice-President Mourão at the head, leaving Bolsonaro free to his traditional fascist antics, begins to operate some essential policies to give a certain rationality to the liberal-rentier project, acting in different directions . The Army's intervention in the Amazon, consolidating and legalizing the areas already occupied, at the expense of Bozo's proclamations at the beginning of his Government, should block the advance of the most evident land grabbing and recover dialogue, internal and external, on environmental issues and their consequences economical.

The merit of maintaining the programs for distributing resources to the poorest and to the sectors of industry and commerce, which were fiercely disputed by the opposition, is being capitalized – in its positive results – by Bolsonaro personally, not by his more sociopathic group, as to the benefited sectors – due to political interest or simple ignorance – it does not matter who “conquered” them, but who “paid”. This occurs regardless of technical failures in achieving these values, which are extremely necessary so that the economic catastrophe does not deepen even further.

At the same time that the continuity of ultraliberal reforms advances and Maia blocks the possibility of “impeachment”, the pandemic becomes natural, with the absence of actions by the Public Ministry against the propagators of denialism, who are co-responsible for the deaths of thousands of Brazilians. In this context, the Government presents an exponential letter to make State financing viable “after the windstorm”, at the end of the year: a kind of CPMF 21st Century, combined, certainly in a demagogical way, with the boosting of Bolsa-família, recycled with a Bolsonarist label.

In Education, to the delight of the majority of political commentators from the “party” of the oligopolistic media, the stupid, purely destructive olavists leave and a pedantic evangelical enters, who recommends the use of violence against children, but already disguised as a secular republican. In summary, Bolsonaro moves forward to respond to the “end of the year” and establish himself, within the disaster that is his Government, as the guarantor of liberal reformism, where everyone can have the entrepreneurial illusion and few will be able to have decent jobs to survive the crisis. crisis.

For these and other reasons, I have argued that if we reach the end of the year without presenting the country with a program of “one party” to govern, but a program to save democracy and the republic, to be implemented by a reformist coalition , democratic and popular – we may succumb. Universal minimum income and income supplementation for the poorest “self-employed” workers, consolidation and expansion of Bolsa Família and new protections for the new world of work, real and feasible, will be on the order of the day, for after the storm. Hopefully this analysis is wrong, but if it isn't, everyone – after the storms ahead – will be subject to some winters of misfortune, with little chance of disputing the immediate future.

*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.

 

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