In the vacuum of the dissolution of political solidarity, democratic options fade away, creating the culture broth where fascism proliferates, the death of the rule of law by the will of organized insanity in power.
By Tarso Genro*
The “great fear of an uncertain future” gripped industrial and rural Italy in the 1920s. Agricultural disputes in the Po Valley and clashes in modern factories in Milan and Turin brought down the government of Prime Minister Francesco Nitti, of the Radical Party.
Anti-fascist, surrounded by endemic hunger in the countryside, destabilized by the occupation camps of Milan factories – harassed by fascist violence – in July 1920 the Nitti government dissolved. It is again the turn of the liberal Giovanni Giolitti, to stabilize, impose respect and revalue democracy. Our current crisis is not the same and here, who could be the Giolitti of the moment, adopted the exemption between the “two extremes” and cherished fascism.
The man “of the art of mediating the possible”, Giolitti – five times Prime Minister of Italy – was the most famous and competent state politician since the beginning of the XNUMXth century. It was up to him to restore – between the aborted proletarian revolution and the state institutions in tatters – the dream of ideal democracy. The one that, if it did not give in to the socialist revolution, would also not give in to Mussolini's fascism, leader due to the rage without a project, based on the frustration of the disinherited, generated both by the War and by the retreating Revolution.
This new and brief Giolitti government lasts one year. By refusing to repress the workers by arms, the government is also unable to repress fascism, which is expanding its rise among the workers themselves, especially among the unemployed. The powerful industrial society, which rises dominant – from the great factories of Pirelli, Benedetti, Agnelli (Fiat), Alfa Romeo, experiences the class struggle as a social laceration, before carrying in its belly the political utopia of democracy or the historical breakdown of equality.
In the factories, strikes and lockouts follow one another, in a raging sea of endless dialogues and confrontations. In a meeting with industrialists – in which the immediate use of armed violence to end the occupations is debated – Giovanni Agnelli, as spokesman for the “violent line” of industrialists, requests an armed action from the new prime minister. Giolitti replied ironically: “Very well, senator, I have an artillery battalion stationed in Turin. I will place you at the gates of Fiat and order you to open fire on your factory.” Opening fire on the Agnelli factory today means opening the doors of isolation and devastating all efforts to block the pandemic.
The “great fear of the uncertain future”, at the time, was the socialist revolution and expropriations. And the enemies were defined by their position, in each particular confrontation: the occupants of the factories defended their management by the workers, the unemployed wanted them open to generate new jobs, the bankers wanted to receive their credits, the demobilized soldiers asked for respect and work, the middle classes, safety in schools and normalized consumption.
Exhausted peasants asked for better paid land and hours, humane treatment from large landowners, technical support for their cooperatives and subsidized financing. It seems that the more anomie prevailed, the more distant the new order became, even though it was already shattering the current order, with its meteors of fear and uncertainty.
Democracy – in context – is not very attractive, without bread, salary, production, where the great fear of the uncertain future meets the easy certainties of fascism: redemption through war, romanticization of the past, violence as a catharsis of the humiliation that everyone carries in the remote places of society. soul and whose overcoming requires weapons, massacres and sacrifices.
Our fear of the uncertain future is not revolution, factory occupations, peasant anger or endemic hunger, which generate political mobilizations, nor the dismantling of state institutions to be engendered for a new order. The fear that plagues us is called a pandemic, this noble concept of the postmodern plague, whose threats dismantle the cultured and superficial solidarity of modern political categories.
In the vacuum of its dissolution, the democratic options for politics and the minimum conditions for revolutions vanish, which, if yesterday they were no longer – according to each person’s perspective – neither desirable nor convincing, today they create the culture broth where it proliferates fascism. It is necrophilia lying on entire contingents of disposables, the death of the Rule of Law by the will of organized insanity in power, the surrender of the State's destiny – not to the force of virtue – but to the will stripped of reason and public morality.
I would venture to point out two significant cultural pillars of the current situation of the political order: the first is the revelation made by President Bolsonaro’s “thinker”, the so-called philosopher Olavo de Carvalho, when he revealed in a tweet on June 19th the following: “ From the beginning of his term I advised the president to disarm his enemies before trying to solve any 'national problem' (and) he did the opposite. He listened to 'exemptist' generals, giving his enemies time to grow stronger… ”.
Now, armed in Brazil are the military and the militias, which makes us conclude that the “exempt” generals – referred to by the “philosopher” – are those who defend political solutions within the rule of law from within their corporations, vision that reveals – by itself – what came and what the Bolsonaro Government is.
The second ideological pillar is expressed in the manifestations of different origins about the relationship between “life” and “production”, “commerce” and “isolation”, through which Olavist irrationality begins to take on mass proportions. In this dimension, it generates that “natural” state, where the death of someone (always the “others”) is a detail, and what “worths” is the preservation of the final objective, which today finds resistance in groups that should be “disarmed”. and who, for Olavo de Carvalho, are not: the “exempt” military who, regardless of their ideological preferences, are not fascists, have not given up on a nation project and do not condone the dementia in power.
Treated as a “Chinese conspiracy” or “press hysteria”, the scientific position of the WHO, in defense of isolation, has been gradually made irrelevant by Bolsonarist networks, criminally associated with bureaucrats and businessmen, who take their class selfishness to the its highest moment: that of terrifying simplification, which could cost us thousands of deaths and an economic crisis even more brutal than the one that already awaits us. The President's self-centered voluntarism is the great political engine of the Olavist ideology, which transforms the instrumentalization of life into a short-term episode for the market.
The late modernity split by the religions of fanaticism and money generated a Jim Jones, in an isolated world that functioned analogously. Everything indicates that bankruptcy – or at least the suspension of the utopias of real equality and unrestricted human solidarity (in the age of networks and commutative global relations), is generating far more cruel monsters.
Jim Jones at least asked for death and suicide to meet God, but today's monsters consider the same paths only to save their businesses and their current markets, even if that means – in the medium term – their final ruin. They forget that barbarism has a virus that crosses borders of all classes, it is not ideological or necessarily selective.
*Tarsus-in-law he was governor of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, minister of Justice, Education and Institutional Relations in Brazil.
