By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
Media owners do not pay any attention to those who do not submit to their navels and continue to dominate the word through the force of their economese
History reveals many edicts and edicts, which have served many ends. There were inquisitorial edicts that presented themselves as “edicts of grace”, a sign of deep irony. There were also useful Roman edicts to avoid lyres and Centrons of the time, whenever possible. However, editorials, even considering licenses in their etymological history, could mean something more than the thought of the economic group that dominates a media organization, such as a newspaper or magazine; in that sense, they could become the revealing totality of the thought that mediates the information, debate and communication of the press organ and the like.
Perhaps, however, this is impossible in a society formed by slavery, empire and which is continually undemocratic, which is our case. It should be noted that one of its greatest delays consists in being guided by economic knowledge, raised to the condition of a system. The newspapers think that the core of their being in the world is economic and that this bias dominates the totality of what individuals, groups and societies think and are. Consequently, the economic phenomenon, which is a social knowledge among others, becomes the central element of anything or everything. Thus, it is user and time to find such determinations for the whole of society, for the future of life in the terrestrial biosphere, for the Brazilian electoral campaign of 2022, etc. An economic panacea. Also a historic mistake.
Sorry for the editorialists, but such a reading seems to reveal a lack of intelligence, as the economy can only be understood as a reference after surveying the human and social needs, rights and values, which require the organization of society to respond properly, guaranteeing life. The economic phenomenon, the result of human sweat and not mere profit (mark of privilege and social selection) will be dispensed with and divided according to those needs and their values. Apart from that, economics becomes a myth and that is not part of science, whether in 1800 or now. It is, therefore, mythical the act of placing the economic taboo at the center of society and presenting it as a vicarious dispenser of values for this and that, for this and that, in bulk.
In the beginning there was the verb and not the word. The principle makes and the budget results for distribution according to principles. That's why all our governments are wrong, ill-mannered by the falsity of doing economics. More wrong, then, are the editorialists who jump headlong into the economic tsunami, especially those located in dependent and peripheral societies.
It so happens that in an electoral campaign, as we will soon have it, there are policies and programs never commonly promised (nobody better than Greta knows how to pronounce blah-blah-blah), since they are organized by public principles, objective dispositions, strategies and evaluation processes and ombudsman. Such government/governance provisions must be announced in the heat of the campaign by the candidates themselves and not by the notables who put things on paper and keep it. Within the strategies are economic, statistical, sociological operations and other fields of knowledge that participate in the knowledge applied to governments and governance.
Hopefully housing, culture, transport, sanitation, education, ecology/extreme disasters, agrarian reform, etc. be properly enunciated and announced in the political-electoral campaign of 2022, leaving the economy its modest, but fair, place of reference and function. And that this be done by representatives of the left, center and right so that the people are not deceived once again.
Think, therefore, of editorials and their false social roles.
Today it is worth analyzing one of them. From Estadão, focusing on the economic thinking of IEPE/ Casa das Garças, Christmas Eve this year. In favor of the act of arguing, the thought of Michael Löwy is used as a control data.[I] express on the website the earth is round three days before the important date of the Christian calendar. Löwy names his text Ecosocialism. The author's book is not alluded to here. To avoid the abomination of Socialism and other similar oddities, it is clear that the ecological theme was of great interest to the columnist in comparison with the editorial, centered on State reforms. Moreover, it is convenient to remember the tasty image of Agnes Heller, reiterated, that Marx was not a Marxist, just as Jesus was not a Christian. It is about working with thoughts, postures and arguments realized in practice and then characterized and formalized, as was also common in the history of arts and literature. Just to argue, it is worth thinking that in the socialist and capitalist fields, thoughts are guided by dynamic praxis, which require good analysis and a sense of reality, which, in turn, enable agents to construct plans and policies.
Decisive, in fact, are the results, those “good fruits from the good trees” that the Gospel speaks of, since there is little point in counting many fruits and carrying them to a select and privileged few; on the contrary, this mode of distribution consists in the perversity and vileness of society as a whole. Portrait of our country, which does not know, nor has known (except for a few bumps) any experience other than the capitalist one and its selective and unfair plans for modernization and development without social progress widely embodied in the majority of the people.
So, while the editorial of the prestigious São Paulo newspaper emphasizes the various modernizing reforms in contemporary Brazil, which today lead millions to gnaw on bones at the doors of butcher shops and dumps, as well as to embitter the brutality of “flexible” work, in Löwy it is called attention to something beyond reforms based on political exchanges that maintain the usual regime, that is, a new way of living and participation of populations in the destiny of their societies and, consequently, of the populations of the biosphere is projected. Strange that the editorial calls it structuring that reformist measure with significant economic strength. Nothing that has happened with cultural or educational preponderance was structuring, as the text of the unfortunate editorial does not offer room for this type of thinking, that of parallelism and asynchrony of social phenomena, already with a rich critical mass. Now, under the Estado Novo and its shadows, Mário de Andrade runs a cultural-educational public service in the ex-pauliceia that Gilda and Antonio Candido considered to be a model for democracy and the construction of a democratic state. This practice of the common good took place with the full support of Mayor Fábio da Silva Prado between 1935 and 1938 and fell apart amid the intrigues of Getulismo and its troops.
The cited editorial paints economic reformism as substantially modernizing. And modernization is seen in the text as something intrinsically good. In this logic, the structuring modernizations known since the previous century would have been very positive. However, the country included populations in the retail of socio-educational projects and excluded wholesale from the continuously mitigated economic rights, which is revealed in the comparative documents often drawn up by prestigious institutions by Capital, from the OECD to international banks and academic institutes of excellence. Credibility is gained by the fact that the faces and hands of the many Brazilian modernizations were incapable of working on ecology and the environment, the quality of public services at the forefront of politics, the prediction of risks and harm to the vulnerable and any safe path towards citizenship of an entire people. Well, what the hell were these modernizations for? Or are the legal delays, political setbacks and populist misfortunes not at the service of the same regime ardently defended by the editorialist of the Estadão? Have you ever seen a populist government create effective direct representation of the population in decisions or stop governing for privileged groups?
As always, the editorial is also a small text in its size. So small and still wastes time and space to assert nonsense, in the case of “voicing” that Dilma Rousseff's government did not implement any modernization. Well, if they were to be tailored to the others, since the dawn of the Republic, it would be better to leave them to the structuring of the modernizations. However, many educational advances, carried out in quantity and quality, to cite just one policy, which continued the previous government of President Lula and only went into decline (due to mistakes, concessions and excesses by certain agents) in the last year of government by Mrs. Rousseff, they are also out of the scope of the editorial of the State of São Paulo, because education is not structuring, except under the breath of the economy. Which is often fetid, as seen in the ever-important (due to the basis built) Mec-Usaid agreements and, at the same time, in the invasion of private capital into educational businesses in Brazil without the slightest analysis of needs, time, space and social diversity.
Poor creators of Casa das Garças. It was them and they were misused by the editorial, who just wanted to stop by to give a nudge to some PT government (the abominable fetish of the lulopetismo, which haunts newspapers and business systems!) and the unnameable on duty in the Planalto, which is not invisible because everyone has already evaluated its mismanagement). In fact, the figure is unnamable because adjectives from the political field of the Portuguese language are starting to run out due to intense use. It only deserves the space due to the historical garbage.
The editorial instituted an edict to the population against PT governments and was realized as a broken-foot edict about how modernization should be. Unfortunately for the big newspaper (which is always limited with the same or similar texts) nothing edited materializes and everything falls apart. On the one hand, because it attacks a government as interventionist and does not discuss any intervention, that is, it makes enunciation without enunciation in that textual period. On the other hand, because he visits an institution endowed with some knowledge, regardless of ideology, and pecks there, as a predator, a datum that will serve as a pretext for his obsession, PT governments and populism. The first are far from being bad governments and the second was never an explanatory reference for all Brazilian problems. Indeed, turbo-capitalist neoliberalism is not a chimera; it has many faces and all of them have been studied and understood as the root of the country's problems, even inducing the vote for the unnameable and populist practices. So what to do with editorials whose authors, despite their professional brilliance, are content with the intellectual scraps of life? Those that deal with structuring reforms without mentioning ecology, environment and quality of life for the entire population. Absurd.
Unlike the editorial, the text by a Brazilian researcher based in France touches on what structures contemporaneity: the risk to life in Brazil and the biosphere and the urgency that each policy creates healthy, non-polluting or toxic forms, highly representative of ways of life beyond consumerism (exaggerated value of the field of profit) and capable of both avoiding the destruction of land of men (of sapiens) how to direct the creation and maintenance of a society whose acts of property are pregnant with the ethical and socially just and whose political experience abandons the domain and forms of development that led to authoritarianism and the predation of life and its many natural actors. Since it is impossible to implement a green or clean capitalism, the battles of ecosocialism, which already has good critical fortune, will constitute, despite obstacles of various kinds, fronts against polluting and criminal emissions, new experiences in rural life and of the city, senses of the future in the conquests of each day, confronting technoscience at the service of big techs, aggregation of many specific struggles of sectors of society, deep respect for Mother Nature and expansion of solidarity throughout the world. In the light of this thought, the supposed reforms listed in the Estadão editorial are things worthy of oblivion.
It matters little that media owners do not pay any attention to those who do not submit to their navels and continue to dominate the word by force of their economese. After all, this is their “nature”. Equal to them, or worse, are the church owners, generally far, far from what they call the Gospel and very close to what is understood by merchandise and consumerism. By yes, by no, they exchange meanings.
* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.
Note
[I] Researcher at the French National Center for Scientific Research.