By TARSUS GENUS*

The end of the public functions of the State to transform it into a pure private accumulation machine

The “naturalness” of our alliances is an important achievement. Processed in a moment of extreme drama, in which the coup conspiracy ran wild, these alliances were balanced on a “razor's edge”. Razor difficult to be felt in its width and having, on each side, an enormous precipice where the demons of fascism and conservatism, under the baton of ultraliberalism with gold teeth, courted (and still court) the throat of the nation.

What is he? In a nutshell: the end of the public functions of the State to transform it into a pure machine of private accumulation, alignment with the emerging fascism in the most developed countries and reduction of the excluded, the poor, salaried workers of all kinds, into zombies of precariousness, informality or simple absolute misery.

This naturalness of alliances to “survive” cannot be subject to the laws of nature, that is, be only what is allowed by the material and moral reality of society – as if it were second nature – because democratic politics is not nature, but elaborate subjectivity, a ruse of human intelligence to build appropriate sociabilities for coexistence among citizens who do not give up on being equal.

Let's say that, regarding the system of alliances, we have two forces in confrontation: on the one hand, the "Lira party" and its allies, most of them originating from budgetary Bolsonarism and, on the other, a set of democratic forces - more or less conservatives – who want a minimum program of affirmation of the democracy of the 1988 Charter.

If the political leadership of the government, inside or outside the Planalto, does not put a brake on the “Lira party”, with a strategy delimited in time and does not have the capacity to explain to society which direction is being sought, we will be subordinated to a “ state of nature”, that is, we will not create a “frequency”, to be heard and thus expand alliances to the base of society, with the dignity that politics deserves.

From a Twiter post: “with its unique song” emitted in a double frequency, the whale found in 1992 is still watched today by poet biologists and sound scientists. And she wanders in the endless saga of the ocean calling for company, without answers and without welcome: none of the species settles in her animal affection of the frequency of 52 hertz. Her voice is unique and the owner of an ignored cry: she has no natural family and has never been mated, “but she keeps calling” – rejected both in the basements of the waters and in the vast liquid sky of the luminous foam of the ocean.

Hannah Arendt poet – I didn't know either! – In her short lines “Park by the Hudson River”, she wrote: “Fishermen fishing in silence in the rivers of the whole world, conductors leading blindly along paths around the whole world”. I confess that I saw, in the Twitter post and in Hannah's poem, the definitions of poetry created by the senses of inexhaustible solitude. In the tragedy that again crosses the world, harassed by an already endless war – inside and outside each individual – at this time in an innovative and special way, the collective crisis of solitude in a network already suffocates utopias.

When a man wants to break with a loneliness that he considers special and thinks, vainly, of being the only one, he can become the metaphor of a city in its geography of classes. And then split in two. One day, perhaps, you will have to choose your destiny, as Freddie Drummond did in Jack London's short story. South of the Rift, in that older part of San Francisco California.

Jack London tells in his memorable report that “to the north of the Rift were the theaters, the hotels, the department stores, the banks and the solid houses of business. To the south, there were factories, alleys, laundries, workshops, heating boilers and workers' huts”. Freddie Drummond, who “lived in both worlds” and on both sides of the Rift “got along very well in both worlds.”

The ambiguous life of Jack London's character, days of study and intellectual writings on economics and production, south of the Rift, as a sociologist and researcher of the bursts of progress in the American dream and later, north of the Rift, living and celebrating life with the fighting and heroic proletariat, in a supposedly ongoing revolution. All this can represent the moral and political dilemma of parties committed to democracy that have not given up on socialism.

Why? The vacuity of our immediate conquests can still become a promise to forge a new Humanity, or this has already reached its almost absolute limit, with the total commodification of life, since humans – transformed into market objects – no longer choose the commodity , but are they chosen by them, captured in their most elemental emotions? Their frustrations become depression, subsumption in the logic of capital, which transforms bodies into solitary animals infrequently, or into fishermen and drivers, repeating the same movements, with no option and no pleasure in life.

I approach the conjuncture or the historical period in which I live, through the theme of solitude, because I think we are living in a time in which a type of individual is supposedly full of alternatives, supposedly free, supposedly pacified in his exposed individuality and, at the same time, , suffered in its sordid clandestinity – in which nothing is safe – and thus sees that everything dissolves and is discarded, both people and goods: a society of “zero sums” that do not communicate, but that only increase their number of “alones” ”.

And I'm going to remember a little about Mario Benedetti, because I already remember his Scaffolding, with a summary: – “that is where the risk seems to me – he says – there is life insurance, fire insurance, insurance against theft. But in politics, let alone revolution, there is no insurance against defeat. Nevertheless, there is a dignity that the victor cannot achieve”. And then he adds: “We learned very little from the right, but the right – in turn – did learn something from the left”. For example – “that the popular masses exist, they simply erased them from the ideological map. They were only valid as an object of exploitation. Now, on the contrary, they are also worth as an object of consumption. And as consumers, which is no small feat”. The current epoch will disappear, due to war, the end of time or the overcoming of humans over the merchandise that controls them today.

In a conversation recorded with Pepe Mujica, which will soon be released in a documentary that makes us reflect on the end of the era we are living in – which is always another beginning again – he says three very simple truths, spoken by a man who spent more than 12 years in a dungeon , as a hostage of a military dictatorship, which today acquire a very special value: (i) the right is unified by material and concrete interests and the left is divided by its political projects of generosity; (ii) our gas station pacts must be for a maximum of five years and must be renewed, so that they can work and be instruments of permanent political democracy; and (iii) the political democracy that exists there is not the last democratic form of modern humanity, just one more of them.

*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).

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