By PEDRO DE ALCANTARA FIGUEIRA*
The scorched earth policy is what drives everyone in these elections and is explained by this general historical context of the decline of capitalism
From the moment that the political and economic dominance of the bourgeoisie in much of the world – starting with the revolutions of the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries in Europe – introduced the conception according to which under the bourgeois regime man had finally achieved his true human nature, the dispute for political power took on new forms.
Without referring to past times in which the conquest of power took the form of war, civil war, assassinations, revolutions and other no less violent forms, in times not so remote we had the deified power that fell to those chosen, sanctioned and sacred by the Church Catholic. This is a form of power that was established in Europe for ten centuries with small regional variations.
The new form, the one that came to us from the XNUMXth century onwards, is election. Those elected, as a general rule, were those previously chosen for being faithful representatives of the bourgeoisie, the ruling class.
This system of political domination gained an indestructible mark when it became a representation of a form of social organization, democracy. It became the undisputed representation of the dominance of capital as an economic force committed to progress.
Even the seizure of power by the Nazi-fascists in Germany and Italy with the consequent collapse of democracy did not mean a substantial change in the progressive perspective of capital considered as an irreplaceable productive force. It is true that these products of the 1914 war, as well as the countries that boasted their sacred democracy, were faced with a new force that contradicted them by demonstrating that progress did not have a single form.
The history that belongs to us left all this to a past that we can now classify as remote. The electoral regime has completely lost those characteristics that coincided with its birth.
If we go to the bottom of what we have evident and not evident in this world that until recently we calmly classified as capitalist, we will see that the ongoing transformations have not made it easier to consider whatever it is as eternal. Like everything else, the electoral process is trying to balance itself on the tightrope called capitalism.
In this sense, so as not to dwell on considerations about what is happening in other countries, let us focus on the upcoming electoral disputes in Argentina and the United States.
Let's go to our starting point. If we start from the immense differences between the greatest world power and a country still considered underdeveloped, it is inevitable to treat the crisis that is plaguing them as different in nature. This is not, however, the path we will take.
What leads us to leave the differences between these countries in the background is that both are mired in the same crisis that we can now classify as decadence. Although the candidates contesting the elections in the United States show themselves to be totally different from a certain pickaxe supported by a youth tormented by exactly this decadence, their purposes only differ in terms of the gigantism of the American objectives outlined by the industrial-military Complex whose destructive rage is accompanied of constant threats to all humanity.
Although the Argentinean fraudster has proclaimed mediocre threats, what is important, I repeat, is to show that they come from a single purpose, namely, to prevent the highly technologically and scientifically developed productive forces from becoming a general conquest of all humanity. overcoming obstacles that became conscious political activity.
What we have had here among us of the systematic destruction of wealth fits perfectly into the general case, although it was carried out institutionally, without heroic fanfare, by a supreme economist, whose destructive task does not distinguish him from his professional colleagues when it comes to creating all type of impediment to social development.
What differentiates the Argentine pickaxe from the others is his mouthiness, which seems to result from a deep despair generated by the awareness that our era is marked by an irresistible tendency to take new directions. For this reason, what unites them all is anti-communism, because, as we tried to demonstrate, differences are erased when “a time of social revolution comes”, in Marx's words.
The advent of this era allows us to understand that we are citizens of a single world experiencing the convulsions generated by a process of decadence that brings at its core a transformative power sometimes greater than that represented by the Industrial Revolution in another historical moment. If this revolution established in all its plenitude the undisputed dominance of the capitalist class and turned class antagonisms into a productive force incomparable to any previous era, the economic and social power that resulted converted those antagonisms into chains to be broken. And they are being broken.
The scorched earth policy, which is, in short, what moves everyone, is explained by this general historical context of the decline of capitalism. One original thing can be credited to the pickaxe: having revealed that the Savior broke his commitments to the eternity of capitalism.
* Pedro de Alcantara Figueira he holds a doctorate in history from Unesp. Author, among other books, of History essays (UFMS).
the earth is round exists thanks to our readers and supporters.
Help us keep this idea going.
CONTRIBUTE