By MAURICIO FALAVIGNA*
While people around the world are beginning to discuss a certain value for work and the welfare state, here, more than the absolute primacy of the market, we are still seeking to dismantle the state.
“Freedom leads to disorder, disorder to repression, and repression back to freedom.”
(Balzac)
As on all occasions when there are proposals and discussions that are dear to the government and its support base, the subjects in the media deviate into polemics around the figure of the president and calculated aggressions. While privatizations, administrative reform and maintenance of the spending cap are the obsessions of the moment, nonsense appears that occupy the space of the news. This time the media itself made itself available to create the factoids, since there was little difference between the editorial of the Sheet and the threat of assaulting a journalist.
But the human comedy also includes real life, and so, going back to the government's intentions...
While the liberal world was at first outraged by the amount of evidence and arguments raised by picketty that prove that, if there is an incontestable normality, it is that the free market does not distribute wealth, but generates growing inequality and creates oligarchies whose final objective is to encompass the State and undermine any democratic aspiration, today these ideas have already been assimilated by important political actors in the civilized world.
Left and center-left parties validated this argument in the political debate, and even part of the liberal discourse assimilated the coup. The form of capitalism began to be questioned, as well as the social role of the State, the ideas of progressive taxation, taxes on the rich and a necessary reduction of inequalities.
However, around here, the savagery of the 80's is popular with the elite. Guedes must have his office decorated with posters of Thatcher and Reagan in bright colors. If we consider the historical scene as the political clash between Capital and Labor (which there is not in Piketty), it was a period in which workers' interests were massacred by anti-union policies, unemployment and salary flattening. First there was the loss of government, then the demobilization and the salary and employment crisis, finally a political loss that brought even the opposition parties closer to the liberal agenda.
In Piketty, when he states that the return on capital always exceeds the growth of income, a capitalist contradiction is posed. For Marx it would be a rule or law: it is the imbalance of power between Capital and Labor that leads to this constant. And history shows us that this will even lead to the flattening of consumption to levels where the product of capital is not absorbed. And, when there is a need for an increase in demand, a certain value is given back to work and the welfare state. And the ways to do so are being discussed on the international scene.
But here we walk in the opposite direction, we travel the first road, today globally questioned. And, more than the absolute primacy of the market, we still seek the dismantling of the State. Both inaction in social areas, administrative reform and the desired privatizations lack logical sense, but liquidate any state control over the economic game and considerably reduce investment possibilities. Not to mention social areas, which would be at the mercy of philanthropy and private initiative – two sources of investment that never reduced inequality, which maintain the status quo. The freedom of the market leads to despair and cries, these will give rise to repression and the game should continue until the resumption of power for values that favor the vision of the workers. But what state will be left after this devastation?
The most impressive thing, in the Brazilian case, is the unique voice that echoes in the public debates constructed by the media. As much as there are characters who scream against the economic policy of this government, we will not find a single statement in the news that points to the irrationality of the spending ceiling, the criminalization of the civil service, the privatization of strategic sectors, the collapse of companies like Petrobras , Correios, Caixa and Banco do Brasil. The interests of capital are masquerading as natural forces, as the only road to follow.
Piketty envisions political solutions to the capitalist horror, while Marx dissects the horror of life under these principles. As avid readers of Balzac, with more or less hatred, both use the same human being as an example to paint the selfishness and greed that spread through human relationships. But, whether in Piketty's pastel tones, or in German's expressionist palette, both know that, in the savagery of this reconstruction of Brazilian reality carried out by the primacy of the market, as the novelist would say, the “privilege of feeling at home in any place belongs only to kings, prostitutes and thieves”. There will be no country left.
*Mauricio Falavigna is a historian. Book author Digital inclusion – Brazilian experiences.
Originally published on the website recount there
