New face of the old Empire

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By RONALD ROCHA*

Trump insistently tried, without success, to replace the bourgeois-democratic political regime with a fascist-type dictatorship, in the form of personal autocracy.

Finally, the painful and antediluvian count generally defined the result in the USA. The conclusion of the Trump Government and the victory of the Biden candidacy are announced, with a double majority: in personal suffrage and in the Electoral College, still pending a formal decision next month, the 14th. However, the political and legal harassment of the extreme right began to challenge the numbers, weaken the opposition party, disturb the succession procedure and convert the future situationist camp into an enemy mortal.

Its purpose is to keep the other White House family under the artillery barrage of organized militias in arms, a parliament at internecine warfare and a now hostile Supreme Court, with the Nation even more divided and polarized. An institutional crisis could emerge, however much “politicologists” and light commentators insist on the mythological balance of the “biggest and best democracy” in the world, always seeing it as an abstract universality that hovers in the stratosphere, far above reality.

In the classification in vogue, the clash took place between the two parties with exclusive voice in political society. The Republican, now symbolized by the color red, comes from the old bourgeois-industrial abolitionist current headed by Lincoln – recipient of a letter drawn up by Marx after the civil war – and has become a hyperconservative association. It fulfills, in the historical era of mature and concentrated capital, the fate of every class that, without the initial progressive impulse, accommodated itself to the dominant condition.

In turn, the Democrat, identified today by the blue, headed the confederate counterrevolution – contemporary with Nietzsche's slavery sympathies – and regenerated, with a remarkable sense of opportunity, on the rubble of its original oligarchic base. Thus, it became the typical expression of a capitalism supposedly civilized, ready to redeem each and every one of the preceding sins, within the “system” that it integrates and whose “imperfection” it has been vowing to correct in the name of empirically labeled victims.

However, the current and greater meaning of the ongoing dispute, which is still far from over, goes far beyond the nomenclature and a past that was camouflaged in the mists of history. In fact, the election opposed two blocks of ancestral characteristics and fundamentals, but whose contours have recently crystallized, as a harmful result of the current long economic cycle, in its adverse phase. In recent decades, a polarization between the “top” fractions and their propositions has emerged within capital.

On the one hand, the reactionary conformation of the now terminal Federal Government. After consolidating his posts and internal positions in the republican machine, establishing his hegemony, Trump insistently tried – without succeeding – to replace the bourgeois-democratic political regime, regulated by the Constitution approved in the Philadelphia Convention, 1787, by a dictatorship of the species fascist, in the form of personal autocracy, expression of regressism long harbored in the depths of American society.

On the other hand, the candidacy of the so-called liberal opposition by local jargon, that is to say, by the American notion that refers to a type of conservatism that defends some social, civil and democratic rights, among which the limited policies of identity promotion. Its arc ranges from right-wing compassion, which has a broad and solid hegemony, to social democracy faithful to the establishment and by various sectors linked to the support of civil liberties, even some diffuse semi-anarchist movements and such.

The prevalence of this binomial was guaranteed by the century-old criteria and norms of the indirect elective procedure, in which selective and marginalizing state districts prevail. The ingenious ruse is responsible for isolating and dismissing minority opinions, as it blocks – coercively and legally – the postulation of candidacies located somewhere to the left of the political spectrum, even more so of revolutionary parties, especially when linked to Marxist conceptions and the movement communist.

The scenario that emerged in the dispute does not allow or authorize any illusions, such as those manifested by some figures and sectors that define themselves as the left. Obviously, it would be very wrong to say that they all come from the same bag and that no changes have taken place. Both competitors are, however, aligned with internal monopoly-financial groups – which since the beginning of the twentieth century have controlled the State and its apparatuses kept intact – and with imperialist geopolitics in the world sphere.

Even adopting, depending on the occasion and real conditions, different policies, methods and discourses, none of the sides in the internal dispute gives up areas considered strategic for their own and common Power, especially when the decisions concern dependent peoples and nations. On the contrary, they practice sabotage, intervention, intrigue and war. Remember that the democrats Lyndon Johnson and Barack Obama, with the well-known conduct, governed during the deposition of João Goulart and Dilma Rousseff.

Certainly, the masses and citizens have dramatic reasons to fight Trumpism, the hordes that support it, the interests it represents and the despotism that, in addition to promising, it permanently seeks. Moreover, the American proletariat and people, even affected by the serious crisis of capitalism in the form of pauperization and unemployment, as well as showing enormous dissatisfaction, still lack an autonomous path and feed unfounded hopes, sometimes in one, sometimes in the other rightist pole.

In Brazil too, it would be in vain to look for decisive consequences, provoked by external determination, as if the change of tenants in Washington had the magic power of changing the climate of Brasília. However, the presidential succession there will have repercussions in some way on the bourgeoisie here, above all through the proverbial “mutt complex” – to use Nelson Rodrigues’s expression – belonging to the Brazilian business community, which historically has been constituted in a situation of subalternity.

Thus, it will interfere with its businesses and interfere in its political movements, including among the State's bureaucratic summits at various levels, with emphasis on Itamaraty and the barracks, which live the diplomatic and military relations in a special way. Finally, it will exacerbate the domestic and international problems of the Bolsonaro Government, which is now losing its godfather and its global crutch. Such frictions have public repercussions and, in the fold of the conjuncture, they could acquire some tactical relevance.

Evidently, the curve that marks the planetary isolation of the group encamped on the Plateau rose one more point, generating new and multilateral difficulties. At the same time, shortly after the opening day, the Plateau will deal with a certain Sofia's Choice. One option is to move some pieces of foreign policy and make ministerial adaptations driven by time that flies – without the same Virgilian beauty Time flies, cited in the land of white supremacists by the masterpiece of the great black pianist Bud Powell.

Another is to collide rhetorically with its main ally in the North – “gunpowder” –, generating uncertainty and fissures in the field itself. Certainly, the current Brazilian rulers will never abandon their licentious, surrendering and self-coupling purposes, which have already been made explicit and demonstrated. In view of the situation created, it is up to the popular ranks, even if they need to adopt occasional tactical adjustments in their movements, to maintain a firm course resistant to the Bolsonarian reaction, in the different spaces and dimensions.

It is about promoting solidarity initiatives with Latin American nations, peoples and workers, in defense of sovereignty and against the imperialist yoke. Reinforce and maintain alliances of a democratic and progressive nature in Brazil, to stop the regression and defend the regime described in the fundamental clauses of the Constitution. Strengthen, in the final stretch of the municipal elections, as well as in the second and decisive round, the broadest unit to isolate, bar and defeat the extreme right, in each location and with the necessary coalitions.

Finally, the effort to promote the accumulation of partial conquests in the various fields in which the class struggle takes place is of the utmost importance, with a view to – to the benefit of the proletarian and popular opposition – changing the terms that prevail in the correlation of forces, militating tirelessly to put an end to the Bolsonaro government and its reactionary policies. This is the appropriate and consistent way, at the present juncture, to combat the most extreme, repressive and ferocious representatives of capitalism.

*Ronald Rocha is a sociologist, essayist and author of Anatomy of a creed (financial capital and production progressivism).

 

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