Francisco Weffort – sad trajectory

Image: Lachlan Ross
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By HECTOR BENOIT*

A short summary of the trajectory of Weffort and his “companions”

Francisco Weffort had a sad trajectory! Now dead they mystify him.

He was a traitor to the Brazilian working class from the start. In 1980 they surrounded Lula, he and his partner José Álvaro Moisés. Along with the late Marco Aurélio Garcia.

With this beautiful advice, what could happen to PT? Weffort was what he was, a traitor to the Brazilian working class. Instead of building a liberating party for the working class, he took what had been predictable since the 1980s. He turned the country over to the extreme right.

But Weffort's trajectory was fantastic! Particularly fantastic! After being the main founder of CEDEC, he participated in CEBRAP, and like the others, recently deceased, Giannotti. Leôncio, and others, only followed one path, that of the betrayal of the Brazilian working class. These elements, headed by FHC, who were supported in his first election to the Senate by Lula himself.

In the case of Weffort, however, the issue is scandalous! After being the PT's General Secretary for some time, when FHC was elected president, he passed by. Become an open ally of the FHC! Becomes FHC's Minister of Culture. At the time, he even wrote an article saying that the Brazilian Revolution could be bourgeois, sociological, we could “modernize” the Brazilian State, a dream that FHC always kept, that dream impossible without a revolution.

Always accompanied by his “faithful follower”, José Álvaro Moisés, they acted in the media propagating this impossible dream that diverted a large part of the Brazilian youth. Bourgeois democracy was his specialty, which democracy? The merciless domination of the bourgeoisie has been largely realized!

Who traveled the most to Fernando de Noronha on FAB planes, for missions that were barbecues? Francis Weffort. Of course this is a detail, but it expresses the trajectory of a life. At the Ministry of Culture, some colleagues who came to work with him said something like this: “it's sad, everyone here wants a poor person to earn money”. He always has democracy in his mouth. But they are the most elitist of intellectuals.

A sad life for Weffort, we thought. The worst thing is that a good part of the left and the majority of Trotskyists, fell into this deception that was that PT of 80, guided, initially, by Weffot and its sociologists, philosophers, economists, who worked in CEDEC and CEBRAP.

Do you know what he taught at USP at that time? It was about Alexis Tocqueville. Someone who was terrified of the “Permanent Revolution!. He traveled to the USA, looking for a model of democracy that was far from the Jacobin model, inspired by the Jacobin and Greco-Roman model. They thought, Tocquevillle, Comte and Weffort: are we going to stop the Jacobins? How to stop Jacobinism? Like Comte, they dreamed of stopping the French revolution, which always continued. Comte even gave astronomy classes to the workers to try to divert them from the revolution. Read the memoirs of both Comte and Tocqueville. Terrified, they wanted to stop the advance of the working class (Cf. BENOIT, Lelita Oliveira, Comtean sociology: genesis and becoming, Editorial Discourse).

Democracy led to a sad day today, today, 55% of the Brazilian population lives in a situation of misery, they don't know what they are going to eat tomorrow!

The worst, much better than Bolsonarism, will return, probably PTism, but, but much worse than that of 1980. Without a working-class base, without nuclei, the PT of today is equal to the PSDB, the PMDB, PTB, to Solidarity and even almost to the PP. He identifies with obscure figures such as Glauco Arbix (by the way, my college friend, as he was very militant, asked me to write his undergraduate works. He never studied anything more seriously, but today he is a full professor at USP). Of course, he rose in life with his studies on negotiation chambers between workers and capitalists, guided by Leôncio, he came to preside over IPEA, in the victorious return of the PT.

I remember one day, I think it was in the late 1980s, when the PT was doing poorly. He sat in a modest canteen where I had lunch and told me: “since you, a professor and doctor, eat in such rubbish, you need to go to a restaurant. I myself – he said – just want to earn money now”. And he even added: “you'll be like Florestan, old man, thinking the same thing”.

Well, this is a small summary of the trajectory of Weffort and his “companions”.

In short, Brazil has no future, it is a vicious circle, something that characterizes Weffot well. After blocking the construction of a workers' party, he openly opened the game. His game, as a good sociologist and “positive social scientist” has always been to preserve bourgeois domination and repeat and repeat the failures of the bourgeoisie and the working class

In that sense, there is nothing to regret or honor with his death: he handed over Brazil to the extreme right and to a vicious circle, the eternal return of misery and the erasure of any dream, so many dreams that ended there in the 1960s, when we still had valuable intellectuals.

*Hector Benoit He is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of Plato's Odyssey: The Adventures and Misadventures of Dialectics (Annablume).

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