By TARSUS GENUS*
The new capitalist society is one of dispersion, both in terms of its class structure and its conflicts.
“What is usually seen is the struggle of small ambitions (…) against great ambition (which is inseparable from the collective good). (...) Demagoguery means many things: in the pejorative sense, it means making use of the popular masses, of their passions wisely excited and nourished, for one's own private ends…” (Gramsci, Prison Notebooks).
The Labor Day demonstrations on Sunday were weak and redundant, but not significant in changing the electoral landscape of the presidential elections. These take place in an international and South American context of great unpredictability within a “new global order” already in flames, due to the War in Ukraine. Or would it be better to say “war” between two countries reformed by the fall of real socialism. This war has, on the one hand, NATO boosting the Nazi battalions of Ukraine (“Azov”) against Russia, and on the other hand, Russia as a political-military power with an authoritarian government, attacking to maintain its geopolitical spaces of domination, respected even during the “Cold War”.
This is an endless war. It just doesn't threaten world peace through an atomic war, because there has never been world peace seriously signed and because it will probably never be atomic, because its contenders know that a nuclear war could provide the reciprocal destruction of the countries in conflict. The economic and financial effects of this war, however, will be enormous, since it will have a direct impact on the financing costs of indebted States, not only because of the surprises that we will have in the exchange of goods in the global system, but also because of the traditional manipulations of interest rates. on debtor states' debts.
Even beyond the Labor Day “crisis” of last Sunday – to think of the November elections – our attention must turn to the “labor crisis” itself, which has been petrifying tributes to the heroines and heroes who they were martyrs of workers' struggles all over the world. It is this crisis that has been causing a profound retraction in the struggles of these traditional sectors of the world of work and weakening their union representation structures, such as their predisposition for democratic political struggle, whether within the scope of socialist struggles, or within the scope of social democratic struggles within the order.
The struggle of the various political foci of fascist groups against order, inside and outside the State, are always very powerful, since fascism is above all an intense expression of the class struggle that capital has always shamelessly used against workers and democrats in general, in all serious crises of its system of power. And they operate both when hegemony takes place through democratic disputes, and in moments of exception, sometimes turning against institutions that resist them, such as the STF today, as well as against democratic leaders, workers or not, who become relevant to resist in democracy .
These concrete problems of left-wing socialist and social-democratic movements, which have the very same origin at the beginning of the last century, generate difficulties that have not yet been considered by parties originating from the world of traditional work. These parties have not yet managed to make their transition – material and formal – from their status as bodies rooted in the political culture of formal workers’ struggles, from “portfolio” (linked to the business structure of classic industrial capitalism) to a new condition of parties of emancipation of all the oppressed, exploited and “denied” in their individual and group personalities by the class society updated by the ongoing technological revolutions.
The new capitalist society is one of dispersion, both in terms of its class structure and its conflicts, in the twilight of Enlightenment modernity, whose impasses call – not only for new forms of struggle and organization against objective and economic exploitation – but for the new effects of barbarism.
The society formed in this crisis repudiates any kind of subjectivity that denies consumerist individualism, that turns against those who honor the victory of the strongest over the weakest, that does not accept the humiliation of white against black, the supremacy of supposed normals against the “strangers” of all stripes and against the different who are proud of their humanity in difference. It is for this new society, more cruel, more unequal and more violent, that we – from the left and from democracy – have to revolutionize our parties and our ways of fighting: to face a barbarism that insists on hitting the State and suffocating hopes. that remain in a people already tired of waiting.
*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. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).