By VALERIO ARCARY*
The neo-fascist current has internal heterogeneities, different programmatic emphases, country by country, but has a common ideological core
“He who does not know who he is fighting cannot win”
(Chinese folk wisdom).
“If you’re at a poker table and you don’t know who the sucker is, it’s because you’re the sucker.”
(Brazilian popular wisdom).
The demonstration led by Jair Bolsonaro on Paulista Avenue on September 7 was yet another show of strength. It was not a fiasco. Nor was it a stumble. Some fifty thousand people confirmed their presence over the course of three hours, under a scorching sun, applauding loudly the demand for amnesty for the coup plotters and the impeachment of Alexandre de Moraes. They also applauded Pablo Marçal, who was carried by the crowd.
Marxism is revolutionary realism. To diminish the impact of the radicalization of the far right, the most constant and fatal error of the majority of the Brazilian left, both among the most moderate and the most radical, since 2016, would be obtuse. The argument that one should neither underestimate nor overestimate is an “elegant” but escapist formula. “Escapism” is a negationist solution. The state of denial is a defensive attitude to avoid facing an immense danger head on.
It only serves to waste time, fueling the self-deception that one is “gaining” time. One example: the only truly decisive capital where the left can win the municipal elections in a little less than a month is São Paulo. And among the three candidates who are technically tied, according to all the polls, two are variants of Bolsonarism.
There is a mass audience for the “against everything that is out there” movement. Anti-system radicalization is far-right. But this extremism is not neutral, it is reactionary. The attraction to the anti-system hysteria of the far right cannot be disputed by the left in Brazil. There is no symmetrical space available for an anti-system leftist discourse. An anti-system discourse would be to go to the opposition to the Lula government.
The “proof of the pudding” is that the organizations that radicalized their agitation against Lula are invisible. This space does not exist, because the social balance of forces has been inverted. We are in an ultra-defensive situation in which workers’ confidence in their organizations, and in their own capacity to fight, is very low. Expectations have collapsed. In the most conscious and combative sectors of the working class, apprehension prevails. We are in an unfavorable balance of forces.
The moderate left went into crisis between 2013 and 2022: Labour, the French Socialist Party, the Socialist Party of Sovereignty, Pasok and even Syrisa, the Workers' Party and Peronism, but it was a partial and transitory process of experience, and it recovered. The masses protect themselves with the tools they have at their disposal. The left of the left can occupy a place. But it does not need to retreat to propaganda. It can demonstrate that it is a useful instrument of struggle within the spaces of the United Front, if it accompanies, with revolutionary patience, the real movement of resistance to neo-fascism.
We are not facing a social and political polarization. A polarization only exists when the two main camps – capital and labor – have more or less similar strengths. Brazil is fragmented, but the illusion that Lula's electoral victory, by two million votes out of 120 million valid votes, would be a portrait of an equivalence of social positions of strength is a fantasy of desire. We are on the defensive and, therefore, leftist unity in the struggles, including in the elections, is indispensable.
Left-wing unity should not be used to silence fair criticism of unnecessary vacillations, bad agreements, wrong decisions, or inexcusable capitulations, but the central enemy is neofascism. A left-wing opposition strategy to the Lula government is dangerously wrong and fruitless. Some lesson should have been learned from the “Out with everyone” line, at the same time that the far right was agitating for “Out with Dilma”. Especially since the situation has worsened since 2016.
Lula's victory was huge, precisely because the reality is much worse than what could be concluded from the results of the polls. An outcome that, by the way, was only possible because a bourgeois dissident supported him. There are many factors that explain why the situation is reactionary. Among them, the historic defeat of the capitalist restoration between 1989-91 defines the stage because there is no longer a reference for a utopian alternative like socialism was for three generations.
The restructuring of production gradually imposed an accumulation of defeats and divisions in the working class. The governments led by the PT between 2003 and 2016 were not innocent, due to a strategy of class collaboration that limited changes to such minimalist reforms that mass mobilization was not possible to defend Dilma Rousseff when the time came for impeachment. Accumulated defeats count.
Our enemies are on the offensive. It is not sensible to argue that without Lula, Jair Bolsonaro's electoral defeat would not have been possible. Let us remember that the ticket was Lula "peace and love" against the cabinet of hate and embraced by Geraldo Alckmin. It was only possible to win with an ultra-moderate tactic. This evidence does not authorize the conclusion that Lula was right in choosing Geraldo Alckmin as his vice president. But it should guide us when realistically assessing the political balance of power.
The centrão will probably be the political group that will emerge stronger from the elections. Even in Porto Alegre, even after the tragedy of the city government’s failure to respond to the most catastrophic flooding in half a century, Sebastião Melo, the current pro-Bolsonaro mayor who uses the MDB party as a proxy, is the favorite. The PT’s candidacies in Aracaju, Natal, Fortaleza and even Teresina should not, unfortunately, surprise us. The situation in Belém is one of a heroic struggle to ensure that at least Edmílson from PSol advances to the second round. What could save us in the 2024 elections is a victory for Guilherme Boulos. The political balance of power after October depends essentially on the outcome in São Paulo, where we can win, but it is difficult.
A neo-fascist movement has been built through relentless denunciations, but not just any denunciation. They denounce that there are too many rights for workers. Jair Bolsonaro coined the threat: jobs or rights? What is threatened by the far right are all the small but valuable social achievements since the end of the dictatorship. The achievements of all social movements: popular movements for housing or women, black or cultural, student or union, peasant or LGBT, environmentalist or indigenous.
Bolsonarism is not a reaction to the danger of a revolution, as was the case with Nazi-fascism in Europe in the 1920s, after the victory of the October Revolution. There is no danger of a revolution. The neo-fascists have gained a mass base because a bourgeois faction has radicalized and is leading an offensive against workers supported by a majority of the middle class, dragging popular sectors along and arguing that a shock of “savage” capitalism is necessary.
The far right is growing as a reaction to the crisis that began in 2008/09, which condemned Western capitalism, including in Brazil, to a decade of stagnation, while China grew. Its program is neoliberalism with a “43 degree fever”.
Between 2013 and 2023 we had the first regressive decade after the end of the Second World War: (a) during the thirty “golden years” Europe and Japan rebuilt their infrastructures and carried out reforms that guaranteed full employment and concessions to the working class; (b) in the eighties came the mini boom with Reagan; (c) in the nineties the mini boom with Clinton; (d) in the first decade of the XNUMXst century a mini boom with Bush Jr. Brexit and Donald Trump, Jair Bolsonaro and Javier Milei are the electoral expression of a strategy to save US leadership in the world.
A fraction of the bourgeoisie, on a global scale, dissatisfied with neoliberal gradualism, has turned to a hyperliberal shock strategy of destruction of rights: it advocates Latin Americanization in the central countries and Asianization in Latin America to level production costs downwards with China. It wants to impose a historic defeat that guarantees stable regimes for the space of a generation.
But the far right does not simply embrace an economic strategy of maintaining leadership in the world market. It is not merely a political alignment with the United States in the international system of states. The neo-fascist current has internal heterogeneities, different programmatic emphases, country by country, but it has a common ideological core. They embrace a worldview: exalted nationalism, sexist misogyny, white supremacist racism, pathological homophobia, climate denialism, the militarization of security, anti-intellectualism, contempt for culture and art, and distrust of science.
This clash is not possible without restricting democratic freedoms and even destroying political freedoms. The far right has an appetite for power and aims to subvert the liberal democratic regime. It is not pursuing a “copy” of the Nazi-fascist totalitarianism of the 1930s. But it does aim for authoritarian regimes. It admires Erdogan in Turkey, Bukele in El Salvador and Duterte in the Philippines. They can only be stopped with a lot of struggle.
* Valerio Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc]
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