By NATALIA T. RODRIGUES*

Commentary on the book by Pedro Rocha de Oliveira

1.

Reasons to hate modern ideology. This is perhaps the central theme that mobilizes Pedro Rocha de Oliveira's writing, already presented in the first pages of his new book: Philosophical discourse on primitive accumulation: a study on the origins of modern thought.

Following in the footsteps of some authors at the dawn of English modernity,[I] little by little the author de-represses the historical-social sense of a certain “we” carefully manufactured by this class – also known as intelligentsia – and which had been organically involved in the primitive accumulation of capital. With acid language and disconcerting humor, it seeks to stimulate the imagination of readers to free itself from any traces of sympathy for the ideology of progress that insists on permeating contemporary times.

The concerns that occupy the author's thoughts, although they are in continuity with his previous studies,[ii] seem to take on a new form, demanded by the very subject matter to which they are based. By presenting some of the main arguments that guide the essays in this book, I will try to bring to light Brazilian historical experiences that seem to materialize the meaning that the subject matter suggests.

The book consists of an introduction, three essays and an afterword. In it, the author proposes to understand the birth of modernity that is confused with capitalism, under a key of two-faced intelligibility. That is, Pedro Rocha is interested in the formulations of enlightened ideas, interpreted together with the process of primitive accumulation of capital, because in this way philosophical tradition and history enter into a relationship of mutual illumination (p. 55).

The thinkers with whom the author deals are three of the greatest theorists of the period in question, and who formed a school in the historiography of this period.[iii] coming to us: Francis Bacon's theory of knowledge, Thomas More's humanism, and Thomas Smith's political economy. The tools for the fabrication of his writing are, Dialectic of Enlightenment, by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer and The many-headed hydra, by Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, in addition to the texts and interpreters of those theorists.

More useful than showing the falsity of those theories, Pedro Rocha is interested in analyzing them, tracking the “intestinal content of modern ideology” (p.55), after all, it is this content that explains the functionality of those theories in the process of capitalist accumulation. Furthermore, although there is no explicit reference to Resentment of the Dialectic (1996), by Paulo Arantes, is also with whom Pedro Rocha dialogues in several senses.

Like Paulo Arantes, Pedro Rocha focuses on the paradoxes in which intelligentsia is involved in the process of national formation. As is known, Paulo Arantes incorporates the two-faced perspective, center vs. periphery, developed by Roberto Schwarz to think about the dialectic of capitalist modernization from a peripheral point of view, 19th century Germany. To this end, he weaves a long path of investigation, starting with the circulation of ideas in the French Enlightenment, especially notable in the torn consciousness of Rameau's nephew (2019), until its unfolding on the other side of the Rhine, expressed in intelligentsia of German romanticism and idealism.

Instead of taking this path from the structural method of text interpretation, he opts for an alternative path, in which these philosophies are analyzed from a broader social basis in the process of global modernization. That is, at first, Arantes shows how the ideas fostered by intelligentsia French, ended up contributing to the completion of the national formation process, even while remaining outside its management or administration.

However, the bourgeois liberal ideas that then mobilized the literate sectors in France, when incorporated into intelligentsia German, were spinning their wheels. This is because the social connections required for that formation, as they were in France (and England), did not exist in the German material reality. At that historical moment, an intellectuality was formed that was resentful because it was deprived of significance in this formative framework. The result, according to Paulo Arantes, would be the reasoning that characterized the philosophy of German romanticism and idealism. With this procedure of analysis traced from a two-faced point of view, Paulo Arantes extracted the socio-historical meaning of intelligentsia German then negatively implicated in the process of capitalist modernization, of which it is an effective part.

In this area, what interests Pedro Rocha are the historical links between the ideas developed by intelligentsia and the process of formation of the English national state. That is, the author shifts Arantes' interpretative scheme to the dawn of English modernity, where the bridge theorists were: Francis Bacon, Thomas More and Thomas Smith. In this case, however, the thinkers were effectively hands-on; after all, they were all, to a greater or lesser extent, involved as entrepreneurs, bureaucrats, and advisors to the Crown in the process of colonization, deportation, encouragement of misogyny, among other barbarities that were rampant at the time in the colonized countries.

We might ask ourselves how these thinkers became canons in the progressive camp if their discourses are so committed to such horrors. Which brings us to the central point of the text, namely, that the philosophical discourse that emerged at the dawn of modernity was based on a series of repressions, among which were oral culture, the continuous rebellions of the peasant masses against the enclosures of the fields, and even the effective disinterest of ordinary people in modern values.

What Francis Bacon's theory of knowledge, Thomas More's humanism and Thomas Smith's political economy do, in different ways, is to place antagonistic sectors within a universal shell of “common people”, but which is particular, and which appears in different ways in each author, from “commons” – common; “commonwealth” – republic/society until “civil society" – civil society, this is perhaps the crux of the matter. With this procedure, we observe a “common” analogous to the sense established years later with the Third Estate, during the French Revolution, where “anyone who is neither noble nor cleric is common” (p. 19).

This gesture by theorists of including so many people in a single conceptual basket ended up also encompassing the urban oligarchies, the lesser educated nobility, the non-noble landowners, among other property-owning men interested in the rise of capitalism, from which Pedro Rocha, when analyzing the various documents and books left by these people, extracts a more precise meaning. We are in fact faced with some “common elites” (p.20), who have nothing to do with what we could today call “popular sectors”, or, those who “get left behind” – in the expression used by Paulo Arantes in the debate for the book launch.[iv]

2.

From Francis Bacon, the first bridge theorist analyzed, we come across the Moral Essays (1625), in which several prosaic and mundane issues such as marriage, business, friendship, youth or even travel are mobilized. As Pedro Rocha shows, these themes, however, were not raised by chance in the Essay;after all, Bacon had in mind precise recipients, that is, those “elite commoners”.

Among the elements that stand out in these Essay Moral, are the relationships with the proclaimed values, useful or not, depending on the situation. The value of truth is illustrative, “regarding the truth, although grand, it has limited usefulness, the lie on the contrary, although vile, has a certain usefulness, as in the process of re-coining gold carried out by the monarch” (p.62).

The relativization of values ​​is well known to Brazilian readers. Whether in the provincial, but no less modern, Brazil of Machado de Assis, or in London in the 1625s, selfishness, effort, and self-improvement end up in failure. They simply do not work, because they are not always useful![v] While Machadian sensitivity implodes these values ​​in his story, Medallion Theory (1881), Francis Bacon in his distinguished position as shareholder in the Virginia Company[vi] and social theorist, teaches his peers a way to empower them, but how?

Presenting “a detailed lesson on the use of the gab”, after all, “a wise man pays attention to his path; a fool goes astray by means of schemes”[vii]. Here, Pedro Rocha names this particular wisdom as an authentic “Baconian shamelessness” (p. 62), which is far from being foolish; after all, the theorist does not forget to dedicate his Essay to Lord Buckingham, revealing, in this historical period, the links that intertwine the dependence of intelligentsia in relation to the nobility.

The man's class impudence follows in droves in the Essays, until we get to the author's analysis of the New Organon (1620). In it, Bacon proposes a new intellectual exercise, based on the triad “observe-experiment-interfere” (p. 108) – with a view to the constant and secure progress of science, a gesture that says more than a mere “epistemological insight” (p.174). This passage reveals a conceptual development committed to the needs of capitalist accumulation and that, therefore, seeks to sweep under the carpet the remains of theology, speculative teaching and mysticism present in London universities at the time, hence his special attention to the “mechanical arts”, an artifice analogous to what we understand as technology (p.111).

Related to such filth, there is also the prohibition of spoken language in everyday life, the castration of lived spontaneity. But lived by whom? Who haunted, obstructed all this sanitization that was to be done? The people themselves, brutalized, coarse, vulgar, brutish, rude, rude, filthy, madmen, scoundrels, donkeys, asses, idiots, greasy, dirty – all the truly ordinary people produced by the violence of capital accumulation, and whose name only changes depending on the region.

3.

All these people are also repressed characters in the inventor of the word that gives the book its name. Utopia (non-place), by Thomas More, but which had been revered by none other than Pope Pius XI, Karl Kautsky and Karl Marx (p.163). What these notable men had not told us until then is that this pious and charitable man, who was sympathetic to the people, was also a fierce enemy of the Anabaptist socialists, an opponent of the Reformation and Lutheranism and, to top it all off, the owner of a magnificent pillory in his residence (p.265).

Biographical elements, historically situated and which at first glance could be interpreted, in a more structural reading, as exogenous to the text. Reading Utopia otherwise, what Pedro Rocha does is carefully show the way in which that entire context – which involves several political choices by Thomas More – is not only within the text, but configures the core of the author's “otherworldist” (p.174) proposal.

In theory, the entire work Utopia, is based on an idea of ​​a highly rationalized society that would guarantee everyone the right to food, clothing, housing, including, without much fuss, leisure in moderate doses. It turns out that this access to a “radical egalitarianism”,[viii] at first glance sympathetic, was pregnant with a perverse reality and on several levels. For example, the English translators, by appealing to a gender-neutral language, “to translate some passages in which Thomas More had in mind only the male sex”,[ix] they began to construct, little by little, “simple frauds” that would extend to issues of race, class, etc.

All these subtleties, however, constitute in Pedro Rocha's argument “the specifically modern, rational, advanced core” (p. 173), repressed in the modernizing mentality that insists on a discourse of autonomy of ideas. Autonomy imploded when he recalls that Thomas More formulated them on a diplomatic mission in Flanders, while negotiating the interests of English wool producers, that is, the same ones responsible for enclosures (p.168). Just as Francis Bacon's biographers divide his life into two – that of the public man and that of the private man –, a similar procedure works with Thomas More.

In both cases, ideas humanize and, at the same time, are mobilized to defend the propertied classes and the Tudor State. How can we account for this equation? asks Pedro Rocha. Simple, “since ideas are better than the world, we can recognize in them a project to improve the world.” To the point, even, that a rich landowner could enjoy reading Utopia, while giving “orders to employees promoting the primitive accumulation of capital” (p. 172).[X] From engagement to engagement, the lights would descend to earth, leaving behind the dark world of the Middle Ages. It turns out that in this non-place, where hunger would not be a problem, there is a latent material content: colonization.

In a few lines Thomas More narrates how Utopia It was once the land of the Abraxians[xi] – island residents - but who were defeated “in the first assault” (p. 207), thanks to General Utopos, thus forming the brigadier heaven that Hythlodaeus[xii] inculcates us to desire. The referent, however, is not a fantasy, it has a specific address and date, it took place in Ireland between the 16th and 17th centuries, under the yoke of English colonization.

Since a little misfortune is nonsense, the humanist Thomas More fills his work with an obsessive misogyny disguised as arguments about care. It would be up to the siphogrants – old, intellectual and property-owning men – and the “matrons” to mediate sexual relations between couples so that everything would go according to plan. By placing the suitors “naked in front of each other”, Thomas More believed that marriages would work out, after all, in his mind, the reasons why they were unhappy or failed were due to the fact that the parties did not know, in advance, what was under their partners’ clothes (p.215-216).[xiii]

Adultery would be punished with slavery (p.225). Women, when pregnant and during collective meals, would stand close to the exit door so that, if they became ill, they could leave without disturbing anyone. The pleasure of eating, the spontaneity of sexual relations or any other “subjective feeling of preserving life” (p.256) would be dirty habits from the past, to be eradicated by the “soft life of gerontocrats (…) immersed in intellectual pleasure” (p.290) Utopia.

But not only that, this class of old landowners also produced a laugh – common in the works of Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio – disguised as sophisticated irony (p.189). In this context, unlike the high nobility, lazy and not very fond of reading, the lower nobility with its natural blindness due to ascension, fit into a rational ideal of nobility, closer to the utopian ideal, and which went against the activity by Thomas More.

After all, the humanist rose socially to the point of integrating himself into the literate class at a time in history when the majority of the population was illiterate. By making these class distinctions, Pedro Rocha shows us that the laughter produced in much of this literature had to do with laughter about others, that is, the riffraff already mentioned: the buffoonish priests who, in this context, were closer to the poor than to the bishops, the abbots, the ignorant courtiers, the women, the kings greedy with their bodies and lifestyles.

The learned, as well as the bishops (owners of extensive lands), were left out of the jokes made between peers.[xiv] Going through these and other blind spots in the work of the humanist esteemed by progressive historiography, Pedro Rocha shows us how, beneath the brilliant idea of ​​creating a beautiful, bucolic and pleasant forest called Utopia, we see a perverse and blatantly patriarchal reality, anchored in the violent processes of colonization – contemporary to Thomas More –, whose metric has always been that of a “permanent state of exception” (p.265).

4.

Finally, we have the analysis of the last bridge theorist, Thomas Smith, one of the individuals who held the most important positions in England and who was the first to coin the term “civil society” so dear to political economy. The first object analyzed is the document From Republica Anglorum, written in mid-1565, published in 1583, in which Smith argues, in different ways, how important a certain ideal of stability and efficiency is to Republic.

Here too, we are dealing with a model of society, designed in an exclusivist way, after all, it includes male property owners, sons of the economic elite, “interested in rising socially using the family’s pecuniary endowments” (p.296). In this document, the populace is identified as intrinsically tyrannical, but not only that, Thomas Smith resorts to the Old testment to suggest “a kind of mythical origin of tyranny.” In this scheme, “Adam, Noah, Abraham, Jacob, and Esau” are interpreted as “patriarchs who exercised absolute rule (absolute rule) over their own children or servants (trammen) (…) or in the rude world, among rude and ignorant people.”

What does Thomas Smith propose in this scenario? “We do not know whether or not we should obey a tyrant, but we do know that changing the government and the laws is a foolhardy thing to do” (p. 304). In other words, this theorist who has won the sympathy of much of the historiography on original accumulation, writes clearly that it matters little whether a government is legitimate or not. Its role is to serve the interests of those who are part of the government’s civil pact; the rest, that is, all non-owners, become, in this ideal of a Republic, the target audience for constant wars.

The second and third document analyzed by the author is the Discourse on the Republic of the Kingdom of England [1581-1590] and a letter entitled TB of anonymous origin, but that Thomas Smith and his son are listed as being in charge of a project to colonize Ireland (p.382). From this material, Pedro Rocha points out how the common procedure of pillaging and looting in the colonies is translated by Smith into business terms.

That is, Thomas Smith pioneered the idea of ​​a kind of outsourcing of the colonial enterprise, which would be financed by a shareholders' fund, and which ended up giving a helping hand to the English Crown, which at this point was too busy with other issues (p.384-387). Of the three theorists analyzed, this is perhaps the one who most explicitly demonstrates the “brutal political realism” (p.405), on which both the modern idea of ​​Democracy and that of the Republic, so dear to contemporary times, are based.[xv]

Finally, we have the afterword in which the author establishes a common thread between these ideals and the current Brazilian context.[xvi] Instead of presenting it here, I would like to follow the same thread by revisiting our 19th and 20th centuries, because I believe that, in a certain way, they have something to tell us about the times we live in. I will start here from two intertwined points that were raised by Paulo Arantes when the book was launched. I am particularly interested in the double meaning that “falling behind” takes on in this debate on the primitive accumulation of capital, which was mentioned at one point by Paulo Arantes.

The first, and most obvious, concerns the thousands of ordinary people who were never interested in any class pacts for the formation of any state and who were “falling behind.” The second relates to a certain form of writing that, at some point, was part of the Brazilian cultural experience, but which seemed to have evaporated over time. Here, perhaps Paulo Arantes was referring to the essayistic criticism written with disconcerting humor, directed largely at intellectuals and artists, written by Mário de Andrade. What is happening here? What is this connection made by Paulo Arantes that unites a modernist from São Paulo with a Rio native from the north zone, in such a distant time?

As a path to understanding, I propose a detour from the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis, to look at the people of the Northeast. After all, who were these people? Someone once said that they were Portuguese who mixed with the Indians, the enslaved blacks, the Moors who appeared in Ceará, but also with the Dutch in Pernambuco and that, in the process of national formation, they fell by the wayside, they stayed, stayed... “falling behind”.

The examples that will be valid for me here are in the aforementioned time frame, but they may vary according to the reader's imagination. As is known, there is a huge amount of material produced that shows how much the Brazilian cultural experience has gained from the interpretive efforts of the critic, self-taught and enthusiast of USP education Mário de Andrade.

In the beautiful diary The Apprentice Tourist, the modernist takes us to know a Brazil of the common people at a time when the population was mostly peasants. He takes us, as an interpreter once said, to his “reason” (GILDA DE MELLO, 2005). Writing down the songs, following the processions, the reisados, the congadas, Mário de Andrade is dazzled by these people. He, who had been a “student of the bull” (ANDRADE, 2023, p. 163), says, at a certain point in his diary, “Northeasterners, in general, not only speak while singing, but also give concerts” and later adds: “in fact, the picturesque, the well-spoken nature of the conversation of the general Northeasterner is extraordinary. Effortlessly, they speak almost like the Indians of José de Alencar.

With more realism, of course. They like to touch the subject in everyday images of an unexpected scare, it is admirable” (ANDRADE, 2023, p. 133-34). To some extent, we have here a typical encounter of the intellectual with the people who, not being used to him, are amazed by his most vivid way – free from petty-bourgeois mannerisms – of expressing himself.

Along these lines, we could return to the French illustration in which the philosopher was also impressed by the verve of the Rameau's nephew; we could still remember a certain passage recalled in or place, by Annie Ernaux, in which she describes how “there are those who appreciate the 'picturesque' aspect of patois and popular French” and how Marcel Proust drew attention “in ecstasy, to the inaccuracies in Françoise's speech and to her use of old words in the language”, the novelist, however, “was only concerned with aesthetic issues, after all, Françoise is his maid and not his mother” (ERNAUX, 2021, P.37-38), an interesting path, but one that is not relevant. It seems to me, at this point, more useful to dwell more on what Gilda de Mello thought of as a motive, pointing out the inevitable limits of Mário de Andrade.

His view of how those people from the Northeast lived is of the utmost importance. Despite the fact that the “pink mango” is for him “the most beautiful fruit in this world”, the “baked butter cheese” (ANDRADE, 2023, p. 144), among so many other delicacies that pleased him so much – none of this leads to an idyllic view of the life of the backlands people, in this first period of the XNUMXth century. Thus, he says in a certain passage: “I guarantee that the sertões It is a false book. The climatic disaster of the Northeast cannot be described. It is necessary to see what it is. It is hideous. Euclides da Cunha’s book is a general beauty, but a hideous falsification. But it seems that we Brazilians prefer to be proud of beautiful literature rather than give up literature altogether to begin our work as men. Euclides da Cunha transformed into the brilliance of sonorous phrases and chic images what is the unbearable blindness of this sun; he transformed into heroism what is pure misery, into an epic… It is not about heroism, no. It is about misery, petty, unbearable, hideous misery. God forbid that I deny resistance to this resistant Northeasterner. But to call this heroism is to ignore a simple phenomenon of adaptation. The strongest leave.”

“Let’s go south!…”

“The strongest leave. The oldest population remains, weakened by the sun, dulled by the drought, parched, still, living because man lives, finds a way to live until now! But he stays because… my God! because he doesn’t know how to leave!…” (ANDRADE, 2023, p. 185-86).

5.

The reader may have, or know someone who has, a relative who came or left for the South. Something is known about those who left, very little about those who stayed behind. The effort to erase these people who are nothing – coined by one of our intelligent[xvii]as “unemployable” and “going to dance” – mobilizes Pedro Rocha’s commitment to studying the process of primitive accumulation at the dawn of English modernity. Looking at the process of Brazilian national formation, we see that these people also existed and resisted.

I am thinking here of the turbulent years of 1872-77 when the population of Alagoas, Paraíba, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte and Piauí took to the streets to protest the adoption of the decimal metric system, which introduced the meter, the liter and the kilo in the country to replace the old colonial units of measurement, such as the rod, the canadas and the ounces. Dissatisfaction with the increase in taxes and the outcry over a new law on military enlistment converged into the same spirit of revolt. Notary offices and tax offices were invaded and all their paperwork was burned. Jails were broken into and prisoners were released. Fairs and markets became targets of vandalism. The new measuring instruments, considered by the most exalted as Satan's paraphernalia, were destroyed by the furious mob. Hence the name [Revolt] of Quebra-Quilos. Amidst the chaos, people shouted: Long live God and death to the Freemasons! (NETO, 2019, p. 81).

Revolt against the metro? But what parameters did these people use to live? The parameters that were at hand and that were mixed with a secular popular Catholicism.[xviii] The way they lived, desired and dreamed had nothing to do with the modernizing collapse that would unfold later.[xx] If Pedro Rocha's text is based on the insubordinate people of Many-headed hydra in England, we can also mobilize our imagination by resorting to woodcuts Seven-Headed Beast, from Pernambuco J. Borges.

In both cases, the violence of the process of national formation had not yet been completed, so that the thousands of people who were “left behind” rebelled and rose up against the so-called improvements of modern life. Associated with the Quebra-quilos Revolt were the riots of the mothers from the backlands who tried, in different ways – often by setting fire to the registry offices – to prevent the reading of new laws, such as, for example, the “law of captivity” that ordered the census, military enlistment and the registration of births and deaths.

All of these measures, in addition to indicating a fracture between the world of the learned and the oral culture of the backlands, delegated to the State – increasingly centralized – the power to decide who would live and who would die, sending a series of young people to wars that did not concern them, or even establishing who would be free and who would not. Looking at the historiography of the period, we see several documents of “masters registering the children of their slaves born after the 1871 law as slaves, falsifying the date of birth” (SECRETO, 2011, p. 22). These and other revolts announced, at the dawn of our modernity, the “incomparable defeat” that marked the distrust of Tutu Caramujo, in the image provided by the poet.[xx]

Finally, I would like to point out an aspect of Pedro Rocha's writing that, although Paulo Arantes is aware of, having known it for a long time, has not been raised. If it is true that the critical spirit of the writer from Rio de Janeiro and the writer from São Paulo meet, since they resort to spoken language and a certain acid humor that disconcerts the reader with intellectualizing pretensions, it is also true, if I am not mistaken, that there is an irreconcilable abyss between the two that shifts the terms of comparison mobilized to another axis, still open.

I am referring here to the aristocratization of culture, in which the entire middle class of São Paulo, contemporary with Mário de Andrade, had been involved and which, unless I am mistaken, finds no trace of sympathy in Pedro Rocha’s essays. One example will suffice. I am thinking here of a certain laughter present in great writers of the 1986th century, fundamental in the formation of that middle class of the 41th century, understood here as what was most radical, in the terms already consecrated by Antonio Candido. This generation – identified with the proletariat, but aristocratized by culture – had learned that the laughter of someone like Marcel Proust “does not suppress the world, but knocks it to the ground, running the risk of breaking it into pieces, before which he is the first to cry” (BENJAMIN, XNUMX, p. XNUMX).

If laughter is still a weapon, with some power to destroy, the tears that would follow seem, finally, to no longer find correspondence in the writing of contemporary writers, among which, the essays of Pedro Rocha de Oliveira.

*Natalia T. Rodrigues it's dPhilosophy graduate student at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ).

Reference

Peter Rocha of Oliveira. Philosophical discourse on primitive accumulation: a study on the origins of modern thought. New York, Oxford, 2024, 504 pages.https://amzn.to/4dYZsFj]

REFERENCES

ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo. resentment of the dialectic: dialectics and intellectual experience in general (old studies on the ABC of German misery). Peace and land. 1996.

BENJAMIN, Walter. The image of Proust. Magic and technique, art and politics, Brasiliense, 1986, p. 36-49.

BRITO, Felipe; until the last man: Rio de Janeiro’s visions of the armed administration of social life. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.

CARIRY, Rosemberg. O Holy Cross Desert Cauldron. Cariri: Cariri Films, 1986.

ANDRADE, Mario. the apprentice tourist. Itatiaia Publishing House, 2023.

DE MELLO, Gilda, The master of Apipucos and the apprentice tourist. The idea and the figurative, Editora 34, 2005.

DIDEROT, Denis. Rameau's nephew. UNESP Publishing, 2019.

ERNAUX, Annie. or place. Phosphorus, 2021.

MIGUEL, Wisnik Jose. machination of the world. Drummond and mining. São Paulo, 2018.

NETO, Lira. Father Cicero: power, faith and war in the backlands. Company of Letters, 2009.

OLIVEIRA, Peter Rocha. Money, commodities and the State in the origins of modern society. Loyola, 2018.

SECRET, Maria Veronica. unmeasured: The revolt of the quebra-quilos (1874-1876). MAUAD, 2011.

Notes

[I] The current term in English historiography that the author analyzes is “early modernity”, to oppose the idea of ​​the “beginning” of modernity, or the beginning of capitalism, the author chose to translate – dawn of modernity.

[ii] Cf: Pedro Rocha and Felipe Brito (orgs). To the last man: Rio de Janeiro's visions of the armed administration of social life, Boitempo, 2013; and Pedro Rocha, Money, commodities and the State in the origins of modern society: Study on primitive accumulation of capital, Loyola, 2018.

[iii] Robert Brenner, Andy Wood, Christopher Hill, Neal Wood but also Karl Marx and Karl Kautsky.

[iv] Check in“Philosophical Discourse on Primitive Accumulation” – Launch debate with Paulo Arantes>

[v] This does not mean that in the Baconian system there is a defense of utilitarianism as a value to be sought, it is a “relative autonomy or indifference of utility in the face of morality” (p. 62)

[vi] This Company held a monopoly on colonial exploration in Ireland.

[vii] Pedro Rocha quoting Francis Bacon, (p. 63)

[viii] Pedro Rocha quoting Foundations of political economy, by Andy Wood. (p. 167)

[ix] The author refers here to an edition of Utopia published in 1895, Oxford: Clarendon Press, Ed. Joseph Lupton.

[X] The author refers here to Guillaume Budé (1467-1540). It is worth reading where Pedro Rocha cites a “reflection” by Budé himself in the body of the text (p.169). The author’s comment on this passage could also lead us to the anecdote recalled by Antonio Candido, in which “Jorge Amado’s books did not keep Roberto Simonsen awake at night”. The speech is found in the last minutes of a statement by Candido about Mario de Andrade. Available atTestimony of Antonio Candido about Mário de Andrade [Audio] (youtube.com) >

[xi] Thomas More’s hatred of the poor is also expressed in the meaning of Abraxa itself: “it is a name of little-known origin and meaning, associated with the Gnostic Basilides, who claimed to be a disciple of Saint Matthew and was therefore, like some of the Anabaptists whom our author so detested, a figure linked to early Christianity. Could it be that Utopos unleashed against the Abraxians a fury similar to that with which the mythical heroes destroyed the “monsters of Africa,” whom More evokes when speaking of the German heretics of his time – that is, the population that fought against primitive accumulation?” (p. 206).

[xii] The translation of this name is “seller of nonsense” – another “learned joke”. (p. 175)

[xiii] This ideology, describes Pedro Rocha, only makes sense for a “pompous and rigid social class, buried in petticoats and moralism” (p. 215-216).

[xiv]       Pedro Rocha develops an important argument in which scholars like More appropriated popular anticlericalism to repress the same people who were victims of the process of expropriation of the fields. (p.187-191)

[xv]        Furthermore, it seems to me that the study on Thomas More carried out by Pedro Rocha may provide a new reading key for investigating the logic of contemporary neoliberal rationality.

[xvi]       Perhaps Pedro Rocha’s greatest discovery was to show how the 64 Coup was not exactly against the communists, but against the “social experience of a factional rupture, of a split society”, which in practice guaranteed that the peasant and popular sectors would take what was rightfully theirs, in direct confrontation. This concern is analogous to the humanist problem of factions that the author reviews, from the Italian Renaissance (in which there are authors such as Machiavelli, fundamental to the English Enlightenment), to “our Renaissance” (p. 419). Obviously, the author acclimates this entire issue, taking into account our historical specificities. That is why he highlights how not only is the effort to enlighten the local “haters of darkness” useless, but in a certain way it is also cynical, because it forges an “us” that never existed, except for themselves and for a short period of “truce” (here we are talking about our “glorious thirty”). Truce that comes to an end with the rise of the local (and global) far right. After all, violence explodes against sectors that were part of the pact, that is, against themselves: the intelligent, progressive, haters of darkness...

[xvii]     Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

[xviii]               The Theater Collective Alfenim of João Pessoa produced a play about this historical event in 2009, touring all over Brazil. A report about the play can be seen at: Kilo-breaker (youtube.com)

[xx]       We can also remember the socialist culture put into practice in the village of Caldeirão and which was led by the blessed José Lourenço, famously remembered in the documentary by Rosemberg Cariry, available at The Cauldron of the Holy Cross of the Desert – Rosemberg Cariry #MostraAfroolhar #LusoCine (youtube.com) >.

[xx]        I am referring here to the poem Itabira, present in some poetry (1930) by Carlos Drummond de Andrade, played by José Miguel Wisnik as our “angel of history” in the book Machinery of the World: Drummond and Mining. Company of Letters. 2018.

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