By TARSUS GENUS*
In Europe, in the current global situation, the most important thing is to block the advance of the extreme right
In the book one way street Walter Benjamim (1892-1940) searches in the “shards of History”, objects, places, readings of novels, allegories, new narrative languages for new “experiences” of understanding the world. The meaning of his search, however, is not present in each concrete object – separately – but in its connections with the society that consumes and stylizes them, in a society that he wants to understand and change, outside the traditional canons of academic philosophy. .
I wrote on March 10, 2021 in the newspaper Le Monde Diplomatique Brazil, that the unitary campaign of the (global) media and the rapid internalization in our Latin American countries of the global crisis: “favored the formation of a broad coalition of forces to unite the worst in national politics, the defenders of anti-communism ghost, with groups endowed with a medieval reactionaryism in their customs, which gave rise to a slave-owning hatred against the supposed excess of workers’ rights”. Today, I add: that it fed the coup spirit present on January 8th.
The newspaper Extra class September 2023 edition, shows in the report “The world with an eye on Bolivian lithium”, the political and economic decline of Argentina and the political and economic recovery in Brazil. Combined with the current disorder in global geopolitics, they open up several channels of communication between Brazil and the political and military instability in the world. This is stimulated by NATO's belligerence, sheltered in the tripod of the decadent USA (which threatens to have Trump as President again), the United Kingdom in crisis (which bets on social-liberal labor as the successor to conservative incompetence), and is supported by Germany, where it flourishes Nazism again and in confused France, without leadership to unify it.
The BRICS, as Flávio Aguiar shows in his article The G7, the Brics – war and peace (July 2024) is on the other hand the counterpoint of multilateralism. “Vector of balance, peace, security and cooperation between nations in the exercise of their sovereignty”, says the author, in the context of a world ruled by wars of conquest, the arms industry, the conquest of vital spaces, as Adolf Hitler repeated to his time.
These macro, intertwined historical facts weave a concept about the current world and insist on showing that the left's strategies for recovering utopias involve the relentless struggle for peace. This is because war policies unify the center, right and extreme right; They also involve strengthening participatory mechanisms in liberal democracy, because this is almost an empty shell of effective rights. They also include policies to combat unemployment, hunger and social desertion, as unavoidable steps towards recovering the prestige of the left, as misery and abandonment feed, within the working class itself and workers in general, the virus of violence and fascism.
Each object sought or obfuscated by the spirit is not just an abstract being for verification, but is a fact in that sense that is in the detective novel about the political transition in Spain, Murder in the Central Committee, by Vázquez Montalban. It’s a complex interrelationship about which one researcher says: “Aranda, don’t be irrational. I'm tempted to think the same thing as you. But facts are facts. Facts are more stubborn than ideas.”
A lone hammer in an abandoned building is a discarded object, this is a fact without historicity, but a hammer in the hands of a psychopath can be a preparatory fact for a murder. Just as the votes exercised, or not exercised, in an election in different situations can be facts with different consequences in the lives of millions. Or even, like an interview that says something to many, just like a poem that is read and reaches its destination.
Somewhere in the remote year of 1972, a critical text on the history of Culture was republished, by the Argentine writer Leopoldo Lugones (1874-1938), who had written about the Martin Fierro, the famous poem by José Hernández. Lugones said of that poem: “like every epic poem (it) expressed the heroic life of the race, its struggle for freedom against adversity and injustice.” (March Notebooks, October 72)
Let us keep this small fragment of literary criticism and move on to another record of history, this time through the criticism of politics, now in more present times (March Notebooks, March, 88) when Raul Sendic, now released from prison, gave an interview to Jorge Barreiro, whose first question was: “How do the Tupamaros live their political past in 1988? The question is very close to the dramatic situation of the transition in Uruguay and the answer could only be (and was) an epic answer: “we have to keep the torch burning (….) because today we are a movement eager to join a large broad popular current, and within it we seek to be an ideological pole, so that the (Broad) Front does not become diluted and has increasingly bold proposals”.
Lugones and Sendic, at different times, respond to the sphinx fed by the facts of History – the first related to the enlightened elite of the latifundium, the second related to the revolutionaries released from prison – both knowing that real life is always new and always different, in each fragment of the present with which they relate. The “big-headed” facts!
These fragmented historical facts, however, cannot be confused with the supposed reality engendered on the networks, as this, as Juan Luiz Monedero says (newspaper Public, July 2024), is a space of narcissism and ego, where there are only gaps for identities and not for political discussion. In both Lugones and Sendic's speech, the facts are historical and challenge us to think. Flows pass through the networks that do not form reasoning, but expand sensations that do not last, nor are they established as concepts, but expand as affections, hatreds and indifferences, programmed for the herd spirit and dear across the planet to the movements of the sick extreme right. .
A recent review read by Serge Halimi (Radio NL 144, Condition of France, July 2024) present in its text Delayed Victory, transforms the epic victory of the left against the French extreme right into a second-line fragment disconnected from its object. The victory, says the author, “may have defied predictions of a victory for the extreme right (…) but it did not triumph”. For him, the defeat imposed by the New Popular Front was achieved in large cities where the population is disproportionately bourgeois and highly educated.
The basis of the assessment is that in the former communist and leftist strongholds of the old Popular Front, the New Front did very badly, which did not happen in Paris, which is “the most expensive (bourgeois) city in France”. The real struggle that was taking place in France, liberal democracy in the social state in crisis versus the fascist and proto-fascist extreme right, lost, in Halimi's analysis, all its political meaning and its historical significance.
This is a formally correct, but problematic, analysis, as its central argument is based on the following fact: the left lost its revolutionary political subject – the proletarians – and did not recover it in the electoral process. And since they won the elections in the “most expensive” stronghold in France, their victory is undeserved.
Without considering that this very thing – famine – may have been the immediate and basic economic reason for the defeat of fascism in the country, two questions arise: is defeating fascism electorally with the votes of the rich not positive for the left to rise again? Can the votes of the old proletariat of the second industrial revolution, in the process of moving to the extreme right for more than 30 years, still be recovered?
A text by Ken Loach, “Labor won, but it is not a left-wing Party”, Posted in the earth is round) goes along the same lines as Halimi. The article seems to assume that “left” and “right” are ontological conditions of political formations, not relative positions in the face of concrete conditions in the struggle of classes around their immediate or historical interests. Ken Loach starts from the conviction that even with a Labor victory “the rich will remain rich, there will be no public ownership, no radical policies”.
What seems to be most important, however, in the current global situation remains aside: whether the labor victory helps to block the advance of the extreme right in Europe and whether the new Government's social policies will reduce inequalities a little - at least. These are new conditions that would make it difficult, in a historical period largely unfavorable to any revolutionary idea, for fascism to advance. And more: whether the victory, even sweetened by centrist laborism, restores appreciation for political democracy and can help to move England away from War policies.
Excuse me Ken Loach, one of the great contemporary filmmakers: this is as important for us, in South America, in particular, as the victory of the Broad Front in Uruguay is, in universal terms, for all our struggles in defense of democracy and for an alternative project to galloping neoliberalism.
*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).[https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]
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