By MARCIO POCHMANN & LUÍS FERNANDO VITAGLIANO

Excerpts, selected by the authors, from the introduction of the recently released book

At the end of the first quarter of the 1980st century, a certain sense of despair began to spread again in Brazil. This would not be surprising, as it seems clear to us that after the prevalence of various experiences of popular mobilization – as most recently recorded in the 1983s (Direct Elections Now campaign, 1984-1990), 1992s (Movimento dos Caras-Pintadas, 2010) and 2013s (June Protests, XNUMX), there has been a wave of political accommodation and a decline in social, political and economic expectations for the future.

This hopelessness may have begun with the loss of perspective of a national development project, without a precise event or date to locate it, but a medium and long-term process that involves progressive reformism that is always postponed. From the macro suppression of alternatives to establishment neoliberal to the micro level of discouragement generated by multitudes of leftovers and disintegrated people without a destination that puts the Industrial Age in the spotlight.

Employment driven by factory working conditions, the working class and production are losing ground in the face of the primary-export prevalence in the international division of labor re-edited by the digital age. In the inadequate form of adherence to globalization, the tertiary sector of the economy was left with the proliferation of survival activities typical of the popular economy, increasingly disputed by the social management of poverty triggered by the government's emergency policy, which was decorated with the action of the new urban thug system of religious fanaticism and social banditry.

Just as occurred with the rural exodus processes in the transition from agrarianism to industry, the surplus mass of marginalized workers should be, but is not always, a concern of the State. This is because it inevitably affects not only the material conditions of a national territory, but also destabilizes the forms of socialization and social ties that give solidity to the nation.

In the current context, we have identified that the proposals in progress are geared towards a suspension of the future. In other words, the absence of proposals for a new insertion of internal sociability and external participation of Brazil. The option for the definition of backwardness has a serious problem regarding the lack of perspective for the future, if it ignores the fact that the future is inexorable. However, the order in which a society is modernized is decisive because time defines the place of each nation in the international division of labor. By delaying the future, Brazil sentences its position to marginalization in the international economic order.

Concomitant with this despair, however, came the rise of the far right; as a conservative reaction to the leading role of popular rebellion. In Brazil (and around the world), the far right has repeatedly sought to occupy spaces for redefining futures, whenever they opened up throughout the Republican Period. In the 1930s, for example, the rise of the integralist movement (1933-1937) and the Nazi organization (1928-1938), as well as in the 1960s with the prevalence of movements in defense of tradition, family, God and property (1960-1968). In the current situation, the dispute for the Future is about suspending the future as a project.

While the conservative right challenged some aspects of society through proposals for the working classes in the first half of the 20th century, the right in the second half of the same century focused on customs. The neoliberalism of the 20th century was both social and economic and participated in the international neoliberal alliance. However, both in the past and in the present, the extreme right (with the aim of eliminating the enemy) represented only a smaller part of the right – which grew with the times and the crises.

In the 2010s, however, another moment in which the rise of the far right was possible was fueled by the sinister prospect of a kind of cancellation of the nation's future. Or, at least, of the future that was dawning for Brazil from the founders of Brazilian social thought for the formation of the nation, projected by figures such as Joaquim Nabuco, Manuel Bonfim, Sílvio Romero, or even the most debated such as Caio Prado Jr., Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, Gilberto Freyre, Mário Pedrosa, Florestan Fernandes, to name just a few. Which transforms the current change of era into a profusion of immediate responses.

The delay of the future and the “cordial man” aims to cover this new historical period in Brazil. From the abandonment of a national project that opens with the formation of a Brazilian national thought represented by a robust intellectual production to the absence of perspectives for the future and the immediate and short-term concern of an entire literature that does not risk proposing alternatives to capitalism itself.

Modern Brazil is not an isolated image. Just as colonial Brazil looked to Europe as a mirror that projected the future. The colonial past told us nothing. The project for the Future was an assault on the tradition we did not have – Western and modernist – like the 1922 manifesto. Although late, the project for Western modernity continues to be identified by the ruling classes as the civilizing horizon that will reach the most distant corners of the national territory. Thus, presentist visions as a residue of the colonial past seem to profess the spontaneous imprisonment of the hegemony of modern-centrist thought.

It turns out that, nowadays, the progressive dream of the modernists for Brazil seems to be tormented by disputes between the collective anomie of the left and the individualistic heteronomy defended by the extreme right. In the historical perspective of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, the roots of the national malaise would be in cordiality. Unlike instrumental rationality, affability would correspond both to the usurpation of private domain over the public sphere and the incarnation of the political personalism of favors typical of the patrimonialist State.

Due to the ever-present contamination of formative traits from the colonial slave past, the inflection in the trajectory followed by Brazil since the last quarter of the 20th century seems not to have been fully perceived. Artists, generally more sensitive to the course of events, boldly and courageously anticipated what the ruling classes relegated to secondary importance, especially due to the irrelevance of politics under the hegemony of economic and financial interests capturing the State.

Special foresights regarding the signs of ruin of Brazilian industrial society can be found, for example, in Ignácio de Loyola Brandão (You won't see any country, 1981), Chico Buarque de Holanda (hindrance, 1991) and Paulo Lins (City of God, 1997), just to name a few. In the context of critical thinking, the conceptual framework of interpreters of national formation began to be confronted by the emergence of the conceptual framework of deformation.

The delay of the future and the “cordial man” seeks to narrate the trajectory resulting from the change of era that Brazil finds itself in during the first quarter of the 21st century. The main symptom of this process is precisely the effect it has on one of the most deeply rooted processes in Brazilian society: the practice of cordiality. To present the narrative thread of the ongoing process, the four structuring foundations that challenge the contextualization of the delay of the national future and help to explain the social perplexity that has trapped us in presentism are highlighted.

Initially, the transition from urban and industrial societies was led by the Western modernity project of the last 500 years to the new Digital Age. As a result, Eurocentrism, which was based on the dominance of modern warfare and the cultural industry typical of the Industrial Age, loses its meaning in the face of the advance of the information revolution in other societies subject to the imposing reality of the international division of labor.

On the one hand, the bloc of countries that produce and export digital goods and services and, on the other, the consumer-importing nations of the same goods and technologically dependent on them, underpin neo-underdevelopment. Ultimately, neocolonialism lurking in the rentier dominance of the financialization of wealth and natural and mineral resources, dismantling the old centrality of the capital-labor relationship and reviving the emerging debt-credit relationship of the multitudes of surpluses with no future destiny;

Next, the Anthropocene phenomenon, still little formulated as a theory, demonstrates that we have entered a new geological era in which human action is decisive for the transformations of nature. Under the Anthropocene paradigm, a significant part of the debate on climate change and global warming recognizes that a change in perspective regarding the use of natural resources is necessary, but the economic impact and the distribution of resources are a battle that results in intellectual paralysis.

In this sense, the perspective brought by Pope Francis (Saving Francisco and Clara, Laudato Si) on the economic system that kills in the global scenario of inequality, poverty and predatory consumption of natural resources converges with the Latin American and Caribbean reaction to the Western modernity project. Thus, the concept of good living and the affirmation of the rights of nature (Pachamama) demonstrate the search for development as freedom and harmony in the relationship between human beings and planet Earth.

Likewise, the course of the shift of the dynamic global center from the West to the East. In the first quarter of the 2st century, more than 3/XNUMX of economic expansion is concentrated in the East, with the Global South, no longer the Global North, as the dynamism of the world economy.

Most of the world's trade no longer crosses the Atlantic Ocean to Europe. The Mediterranean's past centrality is behind us, and it is no longer the world's main shipping route. The Pacific Ocean is increasingly taking on a central role as the dynamic axis of global flows of goods and services, based on the leading role of the East, especially China, which is approaching a certain "historical normality" of what prevailed before the 16th century.

Last but not least, the emergence of a new demographic regime that has negated the trajectory that began in the 18th century of continuous acceleration in population growth, pressured by falling fertility and even a possible decline in the world population. Fewer young people and more concentrated in specific categories are population characteristics that are changing the geography of the world. University for the elderly, longevity with more advanced medical methods and studies, and falling birth rates in the West with negative population growth represent new demographic challenges; not to mention the fact that there are only two countries where the move away from Westernism can be found.

These four conceptual elements structure the debate, they are part of the foundation we use to define the change of era and, therefore, they are present at all moments of this narrative: from the redefinition of Brazil's place in the international division of labor to the political crisis about the future embodied by the presentism that contaminates contemporary politics.

Given the narrowing of the possibilities of material progress, neoconservatism was not an isolated phenomenon. With the loss of energy in the Western modernity project, avant-garde progressivism seemed to have expired, increasingly lacking in creativity. No longer able to validate the horizon of superior expectations of unlimited achievements for the collective, the political impulse towards individuality of hedonistic and narcissistic valuation catapulted by innovations in communication and information technologies prevailed. This brings us to a third element in the downfall of the Western project: the culture industry and the aesthetic domination of the West based on the exaltation of the individual.

In this way, aesthetics dominated, whether through the search for extreme beauty, consumerist vanity or ostentation on social networks. Competitive individualism around micropowers in personal relationships led immediate personal pleasure to dominate the perspective of the collective, disregarding its consequences.

To a large extent, economic imperatives and changes in the forms of state intervention have meant that the agenda of progressivism has been shifted from the struggles for socioeconomic modernization of the classes to aesthetic modernity. Thus, the emptying of the politics of class belonging to excite the future of transforming realities has facilitated the shift towards redefining reparatory identities of the past in the face of the social consequences dictated by the demands of economic adjustments to the limits of the modernity project.

This book will address this ambivalence between the deformation and abandonment of a development project, not only economic, but also social, political, environmental, cultural, national and civilizing. The survival of the “cordial man” from the catacombs of Brazilian agrarianism as a proposal to accommodate the backwardness in the face of the national development project represented by the Brazilian Industrial Era in fact meant its deformation and accommodation to the interests of traditional and conservative elites. On the other hand, the change in the entire international orbit, not only recent, but since the neoliberalism of the 1980s of the last century, has forced Brazil to seek its place in the world.

Due to the uncertainties of a superior future, compatible with the risks of regression and relationship to the past, the desire for certainties increasingly focused on the existential plane has gained ground. To this end, the active and growing role of both the resumption of naturalist traditions and religious renewal converges in supporting the rise of neoconservatives.

A new and unprecedented perspective for Brazil to face the traumas inherited from the past on new bases, profoundly altering the power structure formed from the concept of “cordial man”. If this path is confirmed, the opportunity to break with the predominant neoconservatism becomes effective, as long as the leading role of the progressive is recovered and sustained in the singularity of the digital transformation underway in Brazilian society.

To this end, the recovery of critical social thought assumes a necessary leading role. Without attacking the existing, it seeks to discern and expand knowledge in search of new conceptual horizons for the contemporary interpretation of Brazil in the face of the historical march that is currently imposed, driven by a profound change of era.

Currently, in order for a few to win and many to lose, a national project is underway to deliberately reject the perspective of the future that is becoming a one-way street. Delaying the debate and preventing hope from becoming a verb and mobilizing progressive social forces is the project we oppose. Therefore, we present this work from the opposite perspective: we want to open the discussion and present a modest contribution to the national debate about Brazil and its possible directions.

Driven by this impulse, we present this book. Enjoy reading.

*Marcio Pochmann, full professor of economics at Unicamp, is the current president of IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics). Author, among other books, of Does the union have a future? (Popular Expression). [https://amzn.to/416ZDtN]

*Luis Fernando Vitagliano holds a PhD in “Social change and political participation” from EACH-USP.

Reference

Marcio Pochmann & Luis Fernando Vitagliano. The delay of the future and the “cordial man”. New York, New York, 2024, 176 pages.https://amzn.to/3CRWcNw]

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