By MAURO LUIS IASI*
Bolsonaro is isolated and on the defensive and was forced to give in to still serve the capital
"Every man is born original and dies plagiarism"
“Never have so many owed so much to such pigs”
(Millôr Fernandes)
It is undeniable that the militia president always had institutional rupture as an intention, a kind of nostalgia for the 1964 coup and the dictatorship that followed. We have stated with some insistence in our columns that the buffoon in the presidency had certain resources to, at least, give a basis to his outbursts, mainly in the supposed support of segments of the armed forces, his social base supported by the militias and the so-called religious organizations , in addition to the electoral base that earned him more than 57 million votes.
However, we must remember that such resources would be of no use if there was not a certain condescension of the big monopoly capital towards the visible messes of the militiaman, since his only function in office was to follow up on the reforms and measures demanded by capital and the god Marketplace. Once such measures found their way, the would-be president was balancing in office despite everything. In this direction, a pact was made between the military, STF and parliament to avoid the instability of a possible impeachment of the president, whether for any reason among the countless ones to choose from (electoral irregularities on the Jair/Mourão ticket, attacking institutions with anti-democratic acts that the said president called for and participated, meddling in the Federal Police to protect his family and criminal friends, etc.).
At the time of the pact, the main factor of instability was the clear intention of a sick executive to stir up tempers to justify a rupture. However, the development of the pandemic has changed this scenario. The denialist in the highest position in the Republic, even though he retreated in the name of the pact with Parliament and the Supreme, blessed and protected by the military in the government, proved to be a factory of instability to respond to his social and electoral base or for any other reason. reason. Relativizing the severity of the disease, defending illusory and irrational preventive treatment methods, refusing an orderly plan of social isolation and protection measures defended by science, disdaining the importance of the vaccine and adequate logistical measures for immunization; it ended up throwing the country into the chaos of the pandemic and its dramatic social and economic consequences.
The change of Health Ministers and, mainly, the reasons for such changes, added to the attitude of the highest representative of the Republic, unmask the grotesque face of denialism, irrationalism and total contempt for human life. But capital and its imaginary friend, the market, don't care about that. Rodrigo Maia, faithful guardian of the pact, saw no reason for impediment. The Supreme Court and its unattainable reasons and legal foundations were satisfied with the deep drawer where it sent the ongoing processes that served as ammunition for the supposed pact that should keep the insane president in the playpen.
What happened is that the development of the pandemic, expected and predicted by experts, changed this scenario. Big capital begins to outline less idyllic scenarios for economic recovery and the mountain of daily deaths reaches that mark that starts to generate “concerns” for the owners of the wealth and destiny of the nation. It wasn't about seven or ten thousand, which the despicable owner of the fast-food chain was willing to accept as an acceptable cost, or even the hundred thousand that coexisted with acceptable profits and prospects of recovery that the frightened economist hailed in each edition of the newscast to deny it in the next edition. It is interesting what capital can regard as acceptable, what is different between the one hundred thousand and the three hundred thousand dead, besides the macabre accounting of people buried every day?
Capital and its different sectors, I mean monopoly capital and not the bunch of supposed disposable entrepreneurs who ideologically believe themselves to be more than they actually are for the production chain, profited a lot in this dark time. I am not referring here to the deceptive appearance of the most visible sectors, such as telesales, delivery services, online courses (everyone discovered that they could play the piano and it was easy, as well as practice woodworking, watercolor painting and applying in the market finance), but if such sectors of distribution and services grew, it is because goods continued to be produced, banks continued to finance and collect debts. The impact on small traders and other sectors is undeniable, which certainly suffered from restrictions on their small and medium-sized businesses, but there was a significant growth in profits and an increase in wealth and concentration. At this stage, concern for distancing and preventive measures are selective. Stay at home, wash your hands, wear masks, of course, if you are not a worker, an app delivery person, a cleaning lady, a health or public safety professional, because if that is the case, you have to get out of your home, get on a crowded bus and make things work.
So, in this mortality range, somewhere between one hundred and three hundred thousand dead, everything was going well. Such a feeling that capital shared with the denialist with the presidential sash was that one day the pandemic would pass and everything would return to normal, who died, died, who profited profited. As always, as in all the so-called normal years in which capital's fury kills thousands of workers. In 2019, the number of accidents at work grew by 5,45%, from 341.700 to 360.320 thousand. Between 2012 and 2019 every 49 seconds a worker suffered an accident at work and every one hour and three minutes a worker died as a result of an accident.
This being the case, why the change in attitude of big capital and its servants who have been entrusted with or invested with parliamentary mandates? I believe that the fact of presidential denialism starts to produce instability on two fronts. The total disorganization in the logistics of vaccines accentuates the seriousness of the pandemic and, above all, affects the perspective of exiting the health crisis. The temporal dimension here is of great importance. Both the population and economic agents can withstand catastrophes, as long as there is a prospect of recovery later on. The serious flaw in the production, purchase and logistics of vaccination makes the temporal dimension cloudy and materializes the predictions of collapse. This undermines the desired return to economic normality and creates dangerous risks of political and social instability.
Let's see if it's clear. Burning forests, killing Indians, assassinating opponents, handing over huge urban areas to the control of militias, dismantling universities and research centers, imposing budget cuts that stifle public and social policies to death, dismantling national culture, mass unemployment, deaths due to lack of oxygen or crowded ICUs, scrapping the country's productive capacity and public infrastructure, throwing thousands of families back into hunger and absolute misery, may be acceptable, but jeopardizing the stability that allows capital accumulation to continue is worrisome.
For this reason an adjustment in the covenant was necessary. Now it must be included in the norms agreed upon (which we do not know what they are because the pact is secret) that it is not enough not to attack the institutions aiming at an institutional rupture, but one must also suffer in the adequate confrontation of the pandemic and a vaccination policy efficient.
The operator of this line of action in parliament is the so-called centrão. The executive has placated the president of the Senate and the Chamber, but these gentlemen are operators of the pact and not of the president. They demanded and managed to change the minister of health and now the chancellor, imposed a ministerial change and charged the bill on the budget disfigured by parliamentary amendments and the silence of the military sector to the detriment of the necessary investments and resources for health, science and technology, education and other nuisance areas for the bloodsuckers who rule us.
As for the military, it is too early to say. It is necessary to separate the scene from the departure of the Minister of Defense and the heads of the armed forces in solidarity with the Minister. The Bolsonaro (dis)government does not find homogeneous support in the armed forces and has always presented contradictions, now this one is added. But the military presence remains strong and expressive in the government, which means that I do not believe, as some imagined this week, in a break between the military and the government. They remain and continue to validate the pact of which they are one of the main protagonists. What seems clear is that they are already looking for alternatives for the future and want to get rid of responsibility with a government that seems to be destined for the (toxic) garbage can of history.
The president, excuse the euphemism, is isolated and on the defensive and has had to give in. He is not in a pact out of conviction, but because of the threat to remove him from office and we know that there are means and reasons for that (only Rodrigo Maia did not see them). He gave in in the flesh, since the departure of Weintraub until now with the ouster of Araújo in foreign relations. It seems to us that Bolsonaro's points of resistance are the points that are essential for him, the positions that can protect his children from the processes that close the siege and that can lead them to prison and the promise not to remove him from power via impeachment.
Under these conditions, what about the militia's intention to break? This is not an easy question to answer. We are at a disjunctive that can be answered in this way. The more the president finds himself cornered and loses the effective management of his government, the greater the temptation for a coup and the less the conditions to carry it out. This means that the possibility of a coup is far from being ruled out, but, if it occurs, it will take the form of an adventure without a material base of support or consolidation in the bourgeois order. In other words, the resources previously available to the presumed president of the republic in office have deteriorated (be it in military support and police bodies, be it in the militias and S/As churches, be it in the electoral base), mainly, its functionality for the interests of the monopoly bourgeoisie, but what is left is enough for a desperate reaction. This gives him enough clout to try to secure himself in office and delay the offensive against his criminal family, but his dreams of being a farcical copy of Louis Bonaparte, What was Napoleon's farce?, seem distant.
His hopes migrate to 2022 and the hope that the erosion of his image and the abandonment of his usefulness to the capital will not be able to erode his electoral potential to once again be the alternative left to the right without alternatives.
* Mauro Luis Iasi He is a professor at the Department of Social Policy and Applied Social Service at UFRJ. Author, among other books, of The metamorphoses of class consciousness (Popular Expression).
Originally published on Boitempo's blog.