Peripheral places, modern ideas

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By MARCELO RIDENTI*

Considerations on the recently released book by Fabio Mascaro Querido

From the 1990s to the mid-2010s, the Brazilian Social Democracy Party (PSDB) and the Workers' Party (PT) were the main protagonists and adversaries in the national political scene, as is well known. Both came from the opposition to the dictatorship and were critical of the policies prior to the 1964 coup, which were considered populist. Less well known is the intellectual basis of this dispute, the history of which is the subject of Peripheral places, modern ideas.

The work proposes that it originated in academic debates in São Paulo from the end of the 1950s, particularly in the “seminar d'The capital”, led by sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso and philosopher José Arthur Giannotti, which included their colleagues from the University of São Paulo (USP), historian Fernando Novais, sociologist Octavio Ianni, anthropologist Ruth Cardoso, economist Paul Singer and young social science students Roberto Schwarz, Michael Löwy and Francisco Weffort.

All of them are key figures in the “São Paulo critical tradition”, which gained national prominence in the context of the fight against the dictatorship and subsequent redemocratization that led them to different intellectual and political paths, but based on a common basis that became predominant in the interpretation of Brazilian society.

“Academic Marxism” was formed, claiming to be scientifically rigorous and politically radical. The aim was to overcome the national-developmentalist intellectual currents that had been hegemonic until 1964, anchored in institutions such as the Higher Institute of Brazilian Studies (ISEB), the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC), and the Brazilian Communist Party, which had a strong influence on intellectual and artistic circles.

“From the height of their provincialism,” the academics from São Paulo considered themselves “artisans of a more universally colored modernity, in opposition to the national or nationalist modernity sought by intellectuals linked to the national-developmentalist ideology,” who were active mainly in Rio de Janeiro. The São Paulo scholars pointed out the errors of dualistic analyses that contrasted modernity with backwardness, development with underdevelopment, internal with external, showing – each author in his own way and in dialogue with his peers – that the poles of this duality were inseparable in the Brazilian social formation, peripheral and therefore with the best angle from which to critically observe capitalism as a world system.

Little by little, and with clarity, the author Fabio Querido introduces characters who have been active in São Paulo over the years: Florestan Fernandes, Antonio Candido, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco, Francisco de Oliveira, Marilena Chaui, Paulo Arantes and many others whose main works have been commented on in summary, in debate with each other. The book does not set out to interpret the whole of Brazilian intellectual life, but by mapping out the academic tradition of São Paulo in an unprecedented and very well-executed way, it helps to illuminate the broader scenario, since intellectuals from various states and with different theoretical orientations appear as interlocutors.

The book also analyzes the second seminar ofO capital, already in the context of the dictatorship. Some had participated in the first seminar, which was joined by academics such as Ruy Fausto, Emília Viotti, Emir Sader, João Quartim and Sergio Ferro. There were cases of imprisonment and torture. Roberto Schwarz was forced into exile, and his trajectory serves as a “red thread” that guides the analysis proposed in the book, with attention to his work as a whole, read in the light of Theodor Adorno and other authors dear to Roberto Schwarz, and also of thinkers not very close to him, notably Antonio Gramsci, in one of the most creative passages of the text, when he points out unexpected affinities in the approach to the national question.

In 1969, the Brazilian Center for Analysis and Planning (Cebrap) was created after the expulsion of professors considered subversive from the university. Once again led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso and José Arthur Giannotti, with funding from the Ford Foundation, the new center brought together former members of the seminary ofThe capital, such as Paul Singer and later Otávio Ianni, as well as new members, such as Francisco de Oliveira from Pernambuco.

Cebrap would play a fundamental role in the redemocratization process, by joining forces with Ulisses Guimarães' MDB before the surprisingly successful elections to Congress in 1974. This was the first step towards Cardoso's entry into institutional politics, which would lead him to become an alternate senator in the 1978 elections, in a career that culminated in the presidency of the republic years later. He was supported by friends from his old days at the seminary and at Cebrap.

This institution also included social scientists who would later join the PT, such as Francisco Weffort, who left Cebrap in 1976 and helped create the Center for Contemporary Culture Studies (Cedec), which was aligned with the so-called new social movements and thought about politics from the grassroots of society, not the State. Francisco Weffort would play an important role in the leadership of the PT, a party he would leave to join FH Cardoso's ministry.

One contribution of the work is to think of the 1980s as “the decade that was not lost”, highlighting the flourishing of the intellectual debate underlying the process that would give rise to the parties born in São Paulo that would dominate the political scene from the following decade onwards, PSDB and PT, dividing the intellectuals who had worked together in opposition to the dictatorship. On one side were those who saw the need for a multi-class composition to consolidate democracy, on the other were those opposed to the “transition from above”, valuing social struggles for rights, with a fringe of autonomists such as Marilena Chauí, Eder Sader and Marco Aurélio Garcia.

They questioned the Leninist vanguards, the established trade unionism and the delineation of social life by the State, betting on the self-organization of workers outside of institutions, with the entry onto the scene of new figures from the popular classes. This current lost ground, as institutionality would soon predominate in politics.

The 1990s would be dominated by the “neoliberal specter” after the end of socialism in Europe, and São Paulo intellectuals would be divided between “adapted and resistant.” The former were led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who formed “a liberal-conservative coalition that would prepare the country for an advantageous insertion in the globalized world.” The resistants, on the other hand, were with the PT, some of them grouped together in the Center for Studies on Citizenship Rights (Cenedic) at USP, such as Francisco de Oliveira, who would become one of the most harsh critics of his former party when the PT began to moderate its positions until electing Lula president. In turn, reviewing the past of the São Paulo intellectuals in his group, Roberto Schwarz found that some of them, aiming to save the country, ended up saving Brazilian-style neoliberal capitalism.

The book's proposal to establish the seminary seems pertinent.The capital as the origin of academic Marxism, despite the mythology surrounding it, contested by those who did not participate in it, as the work does not ignore. After all, it was a pioneering group of distinguished university students proposing to use historical materialism in an original way to interpret Brazilian society, which would have a strong impact on the country's academic and political life.

But it would not be out of place to go back in time a little and see the connections, for example, with intellectuals from the democratic left that emerged at the end of the Estado Novo, which would later form the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB). The same anti-Vargas bias and criticism of the Communist Party and the nationalists was present, for example, in Mario Pedrosa, Antonio Candido and Sergio Buarque, linked to the old PSB, who, not by chance, would become early supporters of the creation of the PT in 1980.

From the perspective of the new generation, Fabio Querido helps to collect and glue together the pieces of the intellectual tradition of which he is one of the heirs, an indispensable step towards understanding the dark and bottomless pit into which Brazilian society has ended up in the current context of rapid advance of barbarism on a planetary scale.

*Marcelo Ridenti is a full professor of sociology at Unicamp. Author, among other books, of The Secret of the American Ladies: Intellectuals, Internationalization, and Financing in the Cultural Cold War (unesp). [https://amzn.to/4hFh7CE]

Reference


Fabio Mascaro Querido. Peripheral places, modern ideas – potatoes for São Paulo intellectuals. São Paulo, Boitempo, 2024, 288 pages. [https://amzn.to/3CtWtX9]

Originally published in the newspaper Folha de S. Paul.


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