Market egalitarianism

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By LUIZ MARQUES*

The erosion of workers' living conditions and the structural inequities of humiliation spread frustration with the values ​​of democracy

Social networks were active in the rise of the extreme right, in the Northern and Southern hemispheres. Cyber ​​theater is a powerful digital influencer, according to the DataFolha survey on the sales of Saudi jewelry received by the ineligible party, in the late mandate. For 68% of those interviewed, Jair Bolsonaro knew about the sales, and 52% believe that he committed a crime. But 38% believe that the ineligible person did not commit a crime, and 17% believe that he had no knowledge. The percentage of those who, with the shield of fanaticism and ignorance, reject evidence to the contrary is significant.

The spirit of the already convicted terrorist who roared in a video: “Supreme is the people. Guys shit so much in Brazil. I think I'm going to shit in the Senate. There's a reflecting pool there, I'm going to swim there. That’s mine.” We are still a nation marked by colonialism and patriarchy, which for centuries naturalized racism and misogyny. The political underrepresentation of black people and women is not surprising. Among us, the republic is a mirage separated from reality by a wall of protection for privileges that date back to hereditary captaincies. The distinction between public and private is a mere suggestion in Brazil land. The culture of patrimonialism clouds the lenses.

Evidently the fact that something is located in the common space does not confer its ownership on anyone. However, more than a third of people reason in the same way as those with resentment who, well, spend time behind bars. They assume that, if the gifts were from the Union, they could yield dividends for the agent. The mass of hidden interests maneuvers ignore the intellectual mentors and financiers of the chaos on January 8, to justify a military intervention with a view to annulling the elections. They do not even classify violent attacks against the Constitution and popular sovereignty as a “coup”.

By avoiding the arrests of pseudo-patriots in front of the barracks, during the early hours of the day after, the commander of the 11th Military Region of the Army bought time in the expectation that the unusual show of force, metabolized by the general will, would mobilize the Collectors, Shooters and Hunters (CACs), in addition to the traditional zombies to overthrow the elected government. However, the streets fell silent in favor of the democratic rule of law. The President of the Republic, the Federal Supreme Court (STF), the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate closed ranks with legality. The High Command of the Armed Forces got the message, added it to the disauthorization of the imperial power in repeated messages from Joe Biden – and, with a broken heart, pulled the handbrake.

The strategy predicted a bloodbath, like the planned attack at Brasília airport. It wouldn't be the first time that Armed forces would violate their constitutional commitment. Nor that of the businessmen who conspired to install the State of exception, along the lines of the civil-military dictatorship of 1964. The reckoning, which did not occur during redemocratization after 1985, revealed the error of the political center (MDB), at the time. , by accepting the transition “from above” without judging the usurpers of power. For Joaquim Nabuco, carrying out Abolition was easy; It is difficult to remove the propensity for slavery from the souls of the “elites”. The generation of the Military School of Agulhas Negras, under the undemocratic regime of yesteryear, makes up the current generalship – whose stars equate the country to a convenience store.

The expulsion of the other

Social networks recover what Byung-Chul Han calls the “terror of the same”, in The expulsion of the other: society, perception and communication today. Expanding the scope of the essay, it is possible to state that the positivity of the same has become the enemy of the negativity of the other. “The proliferation of the same constitutes the pathological transformations of the social body”. Thus, “overcommunication” and “overconsumption” generated contemporary “depression” and “permissiveness”. Communication stopped being communicative to be cumulative and consumption predatory. Consumers now binge on films and series, without time limitations. The algorithms guarantee what corresponds to the tastes of the customers, perceived as cattle for fattening with what is always the same, when it is realized that the structuring of the narratives follows a pattern that repeats itself over and over again, day and night.

We are living in the era of “biopolitics” announced by Michel Foucault in the course birth of biopolitics, from France secondary school (1978-1979), where the French thinker analyzes the expansionism of the neoliberal ideology that - more than an economic model – it universalized the “self-entrepreneur” subject, with business criteria: profitability, productivity. The appeal to “authenticity” reinforces the compulsion to individuate. We are terminally ill with neoliberalism, “in a State under the surveillance of the market, instead of a market under the surveillance of the State” (class of 07/02/1979).

Byung-Chul Han highlights reified subjectivities, which evoke the commodification of everything and everyone. To pay off the small debt with watch and punish, Foucault is cited on page 83. Similar to birds that sing far from their nest so as not to give away their location, many good people suffer from citation amnesia about the work of the predecessor to whom they owe the most, in academia. E la nave va.

The expulsion of what is different leads to a process of destruction of otherness. On the internet, the dialectical tension of the other is missing; what remains is the insipid unity of uniformity. The terror of the same encompasses multiple spheres of existence. Neofascism also feeds on the dynamics that orbit ideas themselves, in the tangle of the self. The digital connection between equals replaces the face-to-face meeting with others, which leads to a narrowing of our horizon of existential experiences.

The essence of the relationship with others is pain due to the displacement of each person's center of gravity. “Pain now gives way to 'like' that propagates the same”, to get around the pain of being and being. The calculation reproduces what is known. In architecture, market egalitarianism is visible in theshopping centers without windows to the outside, creating a closed system to exclude undesirables and, ditto, anti-systemic critics.

The society of fear and the society of hate condition each other, teaches political philosophy. Facade nationalism hands over the country's strategic assets to the private sector. In the misgovernment, surrender affected Eletrobras, Petrobras, the pre-salt and the Alcântara Base for commercial use as a rocket and satellite launch center. The agreement with the United States was signed by the hypocrite who loved the slogan “Brazil above all”, ma non troppo (but not much). And he preached “God above all”, I gave less time to the seller (except for the temple sellers).

Without proposals that stimulate the institutional solidarity of the State and the sense of the common, for a vital-political overcoming of the Washington Consensus, uninformed segments are co-opted by the demagoguery of the extreme right to channel dissatisfaction with the status quo.

A brief review

The erosion of workers' living conditions and the structural inequities of humiliation spread frustration with the values ​​of democracy. The autonomy of the economy in the face of politics undermines the social organization based on parties. The false independence of the Central Bank confirms the control of the capital market, in this case, over national monetary policy. According to the Global Wealth Report 2023, 58,7% of the Brazilian population suffers from food insecurity (mild, moderate or severe), while half of the wealth (48,4%) is in possession of 1% of Chupacabras. It is necessary to eradicate such shame from the map of Brazil. Taxing the rich is a moral issue, one of solidarity with efforts to deconcentrate income and implement tax justice.

The balance of the “government of hope” is positive. In the local scenario, the correlation of political forces is more equalized, and the effects are reflected in the social, environmental, cultural and economic dimensions. On the world stage, President Lula da Silva's travels move fundamental pieces in the chessboard of class struggle, on an international scale.

The global agenda incorporates consensus to solve the urgent climate problems, attack inequalities, guarantee peace, strengthen democracy and reform the institutions responsible for global governance, summarizes the Brazilian statesman (Opening Speech at the UN General Assembly, 19/09) . The ideological pillars of neoliberalism are already shaking. Market egalitarianism has lost its expiration date.

* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was the state secretary of culture in Rio Grande do Sul during the Olívio Dutra government..


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