By TARSUS GENUS*
The web of financial capital, the arms industry and rentier accumulation begins to dominate the meaning of democratic liberalism and thus definitively guide people towards carefree individualism.
The interview in the newspaper Zero hour on this September 21st, with professor Paulo Artaxo, from USP, a respected authority in global terms — member of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change IPCC — heard by the President in the meeting with the Three Powers shows: first, that the Instituto Novos Paradigmas and all the 600 signatories of the Letter to the President, requesting a Federal Agency to harmonize our future with the new standards of global sustainability, were correct.
Second: this is so true that the Lula government is organizing a National Institution on the subject, which shows that the blockade carried out by a significant part of the local business community made the aforementioned proposal prejudiced, harmful to Rio Grande do Sul and delayed solutions to the region's structural problems: climate transition deniers cannot see beyond the immediate situation of their businesses in crisis and confuse immediate reconstruction, to restore the State to normal and ordinary operating conditions, with the strategic reconfiguration of its future.
Although the state governor did not understand our movement, pressured by his short-term vision of politics, he was right to demand from the Federal Government — for this immediate reconstruction — a direct “fund-to-fund” relationship, to expedite the conditional transfer of the large resources that the federal government allocated to Rio Grande do Sul.
For this analysis of strategic sustainability for Rio Grande do Sul, I work here with the concept of “historical bloc”, in the sense of the formation of a new industrial base for services and production of goods, driven by clean energy and new information technologies with a high capacity for adding value. So that these new conditions of production and productivity can be reflected in lasting alliances to face the climate crisis and for new connections — within the new global economy — from which new protocols for external-internal relations emerge, in formally sovereign countries.
Wars, particularly the war in Ukraine (“global or hegemonic” as Fiori says); the control of territory for the formation of public and private subjectivities, by “outside” interests, as Elon Musk has been testing here in Brazil; the Israeli government’s foreign policy of war crimes in succession, which also turns against its own people, already naturalized by the global “big media”; climate catastrophes and the nation state’s unpreparedness to monitor them and block their harshest effects on common life and production, mark the end of the era we are living in. This was and is the meaning of our 1988 Charter.
In addition to these issues, the failure of state reform policies through savage privatizations and the dilapidation of the state's public functions is also a central issue to be considered for any national or regional project of a democratic nature that restores the political strength of democratic republicanism. Besieged by Nazi, fascist and far-right groups all over the world, democratic life on the world stage is a real war—not declared—but already underway by new means and for old ends.
The web of financial capital, the arms industry and rentier accumulation begins to dominate the meaning of democratic liberalism and thus definitively guide people towards carefree individualism: one for all, all for none! In this context, the “constituent people” of representative liberal democracy no longer exists in overlapping layers of classes (or fragments of classes), but is constituted by the overlapping of limited blocks of declining socialities.
In these new conditions of social reproduction on the planet, habits, values and ideas about the world of life are no longer formed by the force of sharing productive work, but by the same traditional social relations of dependence on capital, on another level, formed — above all — by individual access to selective consumption in the market, where the dominant moral values are constantly recreated. Electronic war games aimed at children prepare the new generations for this environment, which has brought us to the brink of the abyss.
How can we bombard this stronghold with humanism? I think that in addition to the strategic issues that many are discussing at the moment, the issue that concerns the behavior of individuals in the face of everyday political forms should be proposed by the left and by authentic democratic forces: everyday life and history merge at every moment, which implies that tactics and strategy are inseparable today.
It is in everyday life, not in grand narratives, that the new totalitarianism thrives and where the struggle for power takes place, between the directionless invisible and the directions of the invisible power, which comes from the information flows of platforms with no visible location. This totalitarianism has built the perfect power — as an ideology of war that it is — to classify “any social or political movement that is a denial of (its) sacred values (of accumulation) or of the way of life of the current order, (…) as totalitarian, authoritarian, terrorist or antidemocratic.” This is the world we live in and it is also where the region we live in is reflected (Hortmann, 2022, Ed. Ruptura).
In addition to understanding, showing solidarity with and helping new identity movements, cultural movements or groups in the new worlds of work, political organizations in society that do not want to give up on emancipation through equality and freedom – in the daily lives of any type of activism – must develop a policy of care (Brugére, Ed. Contracorrente). Care for others is the real networks of everyday life that can be transferred to virtual networks where the catacombs of hatred proliferate.
Within their militancy, this means lending an immediate useful meaning to common life, to restore relations of solidarity between equals — as the oppressed — and also with the socially unequal, interested in the idea of the nation as a community of destiny.
On the edge of the abyss, both libertinism without a regulatory state and the market of assassinated reputations are merged, as well as monetized fascism — in legal or clandestine networks — with the owners of information manipulated by big techs without a homeland. At the bottom of the abyss lies the continuation of wars without territory that encompass all territories. Responses to the climate crisis could bridge the abyss. Is this a possible utopia?
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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