By LUIZ MARQUES*
There is life beyond “presidentialism” and “parliamentarism”: “citizen participation” to manage public revenues with ethics in politics
In the Second World War, democracy was presented as the guardian of freedoms in the face of the authoritarian offensive of Nazi-fascism, which made it a consumer dream for peace, as well as an alibi manipulated by the “elites” for convenience. In Latin America, civil-military dictatorships in the leaden years tortured in their basements and promised a return to normality, as they did not dare repudiate democratic predicates. For now, the legal-media-political collusion archives the militarily. The new scams study the function of each cutlery on the table, to protect appearances.
The Ipanema cell
In the famous essay Democracy as a universal value (1979), Carlos Nelson Coutinho (1943-2012) intervenes in the PCB to deny the orthodoxy of the Central Committee and also the personalism of Luís Carlos Prestes who, in the Letter to the Communists, accused the party line of being reformist as if it were not reformist. Knight of Hope. The author combines Antonio Gramsci with the insurgency of São Paulo's ABC to counter the instrumentalization of democracy, opposing the democratic issue to transformism. Theoretically, it highlights the organic connection between democracy and the socialist society project.
Em Carlos Nelson Coutinho and the renewal of Marxism in Brazil, Marcelo Braz pays tribute to the essayist: “Postulates an association between the socialist transition and democracy, as a starting point and an ending point”, although he was in tow with the MDB. Only after ten winters, already in the throes of the old Party, did the renowned UFRJ intellectual abandon the bus party strategy once and for all. On the date that unites the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Washington Consensus, finally, the Ipanema cell joins the PT in defense of alliances with the hegemony of the popular classes. The stage political agenda dismantles and buries the “bourgeois-democratic phase”. Patience has limits.
In the 1990s, the modernization of the Fernandos (Collor and Cardoso) was based on the Thatcherite motto: “the people do not exist, what exists are individuals and families”, which frees the State from formulating public policies. Volunteering transforms the condition of the poor, from creditors, into those in need of generosity. The march of deindustrialization begins, unemployment creates a reserve army and the private sector plunders state assets. With the path open, neoliberalism celebrates the “end of history – the victory of the market economy and liberal democracy”; the supposed ceilings of the possible.
Carlos Nelson Coutinho admits that the libel title was a bad choice. It would be more appropriate to title it “Democratization as a universal value”. I would avoid being labeled as an illusionist for ignoring the concrete analysis of concrete reality. If democracy transcends class horizons, the thesis of spontaneous capitalist exhaustion exaggerates the dose of optimism. Erect barriers against anti-systemic mobilizations and mass insurrectionary events, so as not to provoke a putsch civil and/or military, is to believe in Santa Claus. Desiring profound changes in society, with the assumption that they will not be noticed or provoke a counteroffensive, is unforgivable naivety. O habitus Tolerance is not the rule in the trajectory of patriarchy and colonialism in the West.
Balance of forces
In ancient times, if the right trampled on human rights, for the left democracy had a tactical character. The strategic dimension matures through contact with Gramscian notebooks. The controversial essay helps the oppressed and exploited to assimilate the vector of emancipation. Leandro Konder subscribes to the reflection of the comrade of utopias and creamy draft beer in the bohemian neighborhood of Rio: “Democracy is not a path to socialism; it is the path to socialism”, he summarizes.
But the challenges increase in the 21st century. The current arc of democratic-polyclassist alliances is a response in the midst of adversity. Economic and extra-economic contradictions arise without unions, parties and movements moving forward in converting the slogan “life, work and dignity” into a unity of action, to implement redistributive policies, raise awareness and rally vulnerable groups. This is the complicating factor in combating the extreme right and the corporate media, which flirts with the devil in the yellow pages of complicity and hatred.
Nevertheless, the civilizing field imposes a democratization on social, political, economic, cultural and institutional relations. Just quote the declaration about “the defense of democracy, through the construction of public policies in the interest of the people and the sovereign reinsertion of the country in the world, among other advances”. See the Resolution of the PT National Directory (December 2023). As President Lula 3.0 praised in his inauguration speech: “Brazil wants democracy forever”.
The undertaking re-updates the ideas of an icon of Austro-Marxism about the combination of direct and representative forms of democracy, in the “Red Vienna” of the 1920s. “The advantage of workers' councils over Parliament is evident: the links between voters and elected officials are narrower due to the fusion of the legislative power and the executive power”, highlights Max Adler, in the anthology collected by Ernest Mandel, Worker control, worker advice, self-management. The articulation of “political democracy”, based on private interests, with “social democracy” based on collective interest reflects the balance of forces – while it lasts. It's not an end, per se, but a moment of class struggle.
The Jacobean spirit
The peculiarity of the Porto Alegre Participatory Budget is that it took place in a non-revolutionary situation to accumulate forces, against the grain of neoliberalism. A situation that is repeated in the institutionalization of National Conferences made official by the federal government today. The mechanism puts into snooker the clientelism and physiologism characteristic of the Brazilian Congress. The Participatory Budget celebrates the form of government that slumbered (without snoring) in the 1988 Constitution. The international awards of the PT administrations reveal competence, creativity, commitment, vision of the future and solidarity in the decision of the organized community – the best technician is the people.
There is life beyond “presidentialism” and “parliamentarism”: “citizen participation” to manage public revenues with ethics in politics. According to Montesquieu, the best regime is the Republic; It's difficult to find Republicans to support him. The change in the traditional model of governance has apologists for res publica on the periphery, willing to comply with the general interests of workers. The level of education is not an obstacle, but rather the retraction of popular sovereignty by technocracy.
Transparency in the Treasury empowers subjects who do not have the opportunity to exercise deliberative functions in the theater of modern politics. The Participatory Budget condenses the ruler/governed dialectic to: (a) meet the equal desire for access to urban facilities – schools, health centers, sanitation, transport, lighting and; (b) democratize planning to reduce the chaos and inequities that accompany the march of the free market. The people are not a simple prop of the government, but its soul. The spirit jacobin it emanates from rebellion against all ancient injustices.
The participation serves as a guiding compass for overcoming the grammar of domination and subordination and, at the same time, the constitution of socialist humanism. In neoconservatism, neoliberalism and neofascism, charting one's own destiny is a breath in favor of equality and freedom. With Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Brazil learned that democratizing is a gerund verb. The democratization process underway in the country is the chance to build a true nation. The feat focuses on animus from the resilience of the global South to declining imperialism, to building a multipolar order. After all, the “right to have rights” has an internationalist dynamic.
* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.
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