By LUIZ MARQUES*
The deregulation of inspection bodies and the uberization of labor evoke an obvious civilizational regression and an accelerated reverse march in the evolution of Homo sapiens.
Utopia bases its possibility on reality. The world does not take a turn towards a new beginning from scratch, as the French Revolution supposed when it established a new calendar (1793) to announce the death of the Ancien Régime and the decline of the Catholic Church. Year I ceases to be the birth of Christ, to mark the advent of the Republic. Christian holidays are abolished. Napoleon Bonaparte returns to the Gregorian calendar (January 1806). History cannot deny for long what it accumulates in and through culture. The challenge lies in rediscovering what replenishes our lost illusions.
In republican Brazil, the vectors for a new country are: (a) the Getúlio Vargas achievements in favor of workers with the approval of the national minimum wage and Social Security after 1930; (b) the Legality Campaign led by the audacity of Brizola in 1961; and (c) the citizen Constitution of 1988, with the SUS (Unified Health System) as a symbol of an inclusive, democratic and egalitarian nation. Dreams are catapulted by episodes that shape a collective identity.
From the last commemorative date until today, with the exception of the coup period between 2016-2022, Brazilians lived thirty years under a liberal democracy, in the Tourainean sense of “respect for procedural norms”. Now it is discovered that such decades caused difficulties for the enemies of the democratic rule of law; now caught, still without nominal accountability of the business fractions involved in the sinister plot – finance, agribusiness, large retail trade. Ditto, in the Legislative and Judiciary branches.
Consider Lava Jato, whose main mission was to fragment Petrobras, the pre-salt layer, engineering companies and the very idea of social welfare. It wiped out 4,4 million jobs. It recovered R$6 billion and caused a loss of R$153 billion in the judicial operation.
Neoliberalism is generally thought of as “biopolitics” (Michel Foucault), “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe), “surveillance capitalism” (Soshana Zuboff), “cannibal capitalism” (Nancy Fraser), “new worldview” (Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval). In this range of approaches, state institutional solidarity is the first victim of neoliberal policies. Its grinding machine attacks remnants of humanitarianism to reaffirm the fratricidal war of all against all.
Archaeological discoveries of skeletons over ten thousand years old reveal burial practices and care for individuals – with broken bones – who would not survive without help. The feeling of solidarity accompanies the formation of remote primitive communities. This means that the deregulation of regulatory bodies and the uberization of labor do not only evoke an obvious civilizational regression, but also an accelerated reverse march in the evolution of Homo sapiens.
In the midst of the Digital Revolution, we are witnessing the return of lawless and immoral hordes. Colossal fortunes sound the trumpet of the end of the world, with the crazy gaze of a colonizer in outer space. When Thomas Hobbes describes the hardships of the “state of nature,” in Leviathan (1651), does not target Neanderthals; it targets the bourgeois habits of his time to justify the creation of the “social state”.
Movies, like Star Wars, directed by George Lucas in 1977, and literary works such as The thing, published by Stephen King in 1986, denounce contemporary dystopias given the fear of otherness embodied, allegorically, by the presence of immigrants. Sometimes with the simulacrum of an intergalactic war, sometimes with appeals to the supernatural – what underlies the print and screen is the dive into a barbaric ancestry disguised by technical effects. It is no coincidence that the era of digitalization coincides with chaos, generating hecatombs and successful series in streams.
The question of who is pulling the brakes on the ongoing apocalypse leads to the question of the “subject”. The proletariat had the development of productive forces in its favor. The environmental and social crisis, combined with the dynamics of rentier capitalism, empowers new subjects, based on what exists, is fair and is possible. Hopes of the globe, unite. He who fights is not dead.
Radical deficiencies
According to Agnes Heller, in To change life (1982) “The theory says that social strata that express radical needs can become subjects of revolutionary transformation”. The neologism distinguishes objective needs from subjective needs (“needs”). It encompasses social classes, anti-racist, feminist, and pride groups. gay, water resources, cycle paths, etc.
“Radical deprivations” convert strata and movements – such as the MST, MTST, CUT, UNE and MMM (World March of Women) into ideological and political vanguards to overcome systemic contradictions and reveal other horizons of emancipation. Everyone in revolt against economic-private rationality is a bearer of a consciousness that aims at the “regulated society”. The assimilation of democratic values through the “right to have rights” serves as a guide for the “good fight”. It should not be confused with any social transgression; it has principles.
The initiative by the former favela president (28/11) addresses the needs with the “Periferia Vive” Program, focusing on: (i) urban infrastructure; (ii) social facilities; (iii) social and community strengthening; and (iv) innovation, technology, and opportunities. It does not address needs with a quantitative logic that turns people into instruments of other people. It inserts “marginalized” people into the social structure. Not all needs refer to material products or to the material production of society. The corporate media remained silent. It covered up the Central Bank’s deindustrializing interest rates.
Collectivities have the political conditions to advance in the realization of “happiness, freedom and democracy”. To all according to their needs; to each according to their capacity. The State is essential to invent institutional forms of human and environmental coexistence where solidarity replaces predatory competition, which hides almost half of the world’s GDP (US$ 100 trillion) in tax havens. The path to transformation is far from the Bets, and close to heaven.
Peripheral battles drive the disalienation of ethics centered on performance and profit. Convictions are born from arguments based on evidence, not from hatred and resentment to perpetuate domination and subordination. déjà vu of injustices is immense; the unusual is observed in the plural actions that multiply, without stopping. Where to get the energy to change reality is secondary. What matters is the methods and goals for the new sociability and governability. As the song says, “faith does not usually beech” and makes an original contribution to the building of socialism.
When asked about the century she would like to live in, Agnes Heller answers: “The 17th century, when atheists, agnostics and believers could gather in a tavern to drink wine together.” Fascists, neoliberals, conservatives – words that convey pleonasms – rebuild the walls of intolerance to block criticism; the sword of aporophobia against the poor; and the arrogance of cognitive denialism. “Theses / syntheses / antitheses / watch where you step”; the messiah is made of clay.
We need to revisit the philosophical difference between “freedom” and “free will.” Freedom is always freedom for something and, being a relationship, it continually needs to be expanded. Its conceptualization contains duty and recognition. No one can be free if there are others around them who are not. Freedom understood negatively, de something, lies in the minefield of indomitable free will.
In times of cholera, the federal government takes advantage of gaps in Congress to implement inclusive, democratic and egalitarian policies: based on what exists, what is fair and what is possible in an adverse correlation of forces. Lula's projection in the international articulation “to combat hunger and defend democracy” is a symptom of the metastasis of the capitalist system. Imperialism in crisis, and with the BRICS on its heels, aborted the putsch who brandished the free market and privatizations. Who saw you…
* 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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