Who makes up the “party”, the organic “part” that processes the set of interests of the rentier-bourgeois elites in the country?
By Tarso Genro*
“I introduce in poetry\ The word diarrhea\ Not because of the cold word\But because of what it sows\\ (...) In the dictionary it is a mere abstract word.\ More than a word, diarrhea\ is a weapon that wounds and kills\ That kills more than knife, \ More than a bullet from a rifle\ man, woman and child in the interior of Brazil\\(…) And above all, it is necessary\ to work safely\ inside each man\ to exchange the weapon of hunger\ for the weapon of hope.”
This poem by Ferreira Gullar, “The dirty bomb”, buzzed in my memory like a cutting lightning in the nights of plague and death, which spread in the insane country. Gullar's poem touches the strings of the generous soul and makes us think that this power, in poetry, is the same that radiates choices to decide who dies and who lives, as if society had a door always open to a field of execution of " leftovers” in capitalism in crisis.
On Friday, April 17, a public conversation via the Internet with Benedito Tadeu, Miguel Nicolelis and Fernando Moraes explained to me, with the intelligence of these world companions, why Gullar's poem hummed. It is necessary to introduce into the debate – even if it seems like a strange obsession – the word “party” not as a cold word, but because of what it sows. I think that without it the times of cholera will be worse after the times of the plague, because we will be too weak to exchange the weapon of death for the weapon of hope.
Introducing the word “party”, comes the question. What is the “party” that dominates us and manages to contract and expand – break up internally and rebuild itself – without losing its basic organicity, given the conjunctural issues it must face? What is the “party” that achieves iron unity on key issues, such as maintaining the power of finance capital over national politics and carrying out ultraliberal reforms?
It is certainly no longer the “type party”, which was explicitly constituted in democratic legality, linked to a formal program, to captivate groups and social sectors that make them the majority in electoral competitions, with their alliances and conveniences.
The “dominant” party of the ruling classes, today, is that complex of networked interests – communication and virtual – which conceived to return to the origin of the word party. The Party as a “part” of society that relates to political “truths” and visible material interests, which today makes institutional-legal parties irrelevant. They become mere channels of access to the set of institutions, classes and class sectors, which can be hegemonized, mobilized or abandoned, according to their power conveniences.
The greater or lesser success of the formal parties – conservative, right-wing or merely opportunistic – depends on the reception of this “party” – organically articulated within the current legality- which has a superior leadership capacity as an ideological governing body, over the institutional parties themselves, whose leaderships become pure formality, based on the internal clientelism of the already old political organizations of the XNUMXth century.
Who makes up this “party”, an organic “part” that processes the set of interests of the rentier-bourgeois elites in the country? And how does he organize his Central Committee – which opposes democratic, left-wing or center-left parties – which maintains its old ways of operating politics within a minimal republican tradition? I think that its composition is atypical within the political tradition of modernity and its command and execution relations are integrated by “nodes” of horizontal relationship, whose common idea to make a new cycle of accumulation possible is the destruction of the Social State.
Its most powerful members are the following: the barony of the media oligopoly, fractions of the traditional parties, strong leaders of local and global businessmen – articulated with intellectuals from the conservative elite – endowed with enormous economic and communicational power; parliamentarians linked to neoliberalism, think tanks” national and international and fundamentalist religious groups, branching out into various civil society organizations and parties. They form the network of power that the “new type party” of global domination, which in the era of finance capital overrides states and manages their crises.
The political agenda of this “bloc” is processed within the oligopoly of communications that dispute influences over political power among themselves – as they are currently doing – maintaining and inducing the irrevocable agenda of “reforms”. The stability of this agenda, whose maintenance is the “bronze law” for exiting the crisis after the storm, is what still keeps Bolsonaro in power today. His mandate is hostage to this “organic party of ultraliberal domination”, which was forced to create him, with its necrophiliac policy by contracting a commitment to the reforms that he previously deplored.
The modern, organic and plural “party” of domination – which expands and contracts according to current economic issues – has its Central Committee. This ties the nodes of contradictory political and cultural networks, regarding the agendas that must be played with priority and at the same time blocks the possibilities of republican sharing of power. This should only be open to those who identify with ultraliberal reformism and do not dare to test new ways out for Brazil, outside the primary schemes of Hayek and Friedmann.
His occasional Keinesianism aims to give solidity to a liberal-rentier solution that does not hesitate (after the storm and after getting rid of the fascist group that helped to prosper) – does not hesitate – to destroy the Social State. Left and center left, labor, social democratic and communist parties, even democratic centrist sectors – in the name of universal humanism – must form a broad front for the defense of health and democracy in the country. But they must also be aware that their programmatic proposals need to be updated and that their ways of social relationships – their discourses in search of new utopias and their vision of society's class structure – no longer have the strength they used to have.
The world of work is still the basis of human emancipation and of any modern democratic project, but the forms of organization of production, technological and cultural transformations and the modes of interference in the formation of social consciousness are different from what we experienced in the past. It is not for nothing that the current political power managed to carry out a heavy labor reform with a brutal extortion of rights, without putting anything “protective” in its place, with the total complacency of the sleeping working classes in their Unions.
To the organic party of liberal-rentism, horizontal and decentralized, soon re-centralized (depending on the ongoing dispute) the parties of the left – of socialism, of social democracy, of democratic republicanism – must oppose not only concrete anti-coronavirus points, but also , for after the crisis, a minimum program of unity against fascism and an economic program to save the economy, in defense of employment, sovereignty and democracy.
For this, we must take the organizational example of the enemies of the Social State and democratic freedoms: start the creation of a network macro-party, in which each political organization does not lose its characteristics, but which starts to operate - in each critical scenario of the dispute – in a combined and harmonious way. It is time to use the convening power of our main leaders to form a new political majority in defense of Brazil. I introduce, therefore, the word “party”, so that we can think of hope with new forms of organization and humanistic complicity, in the face of the social disaster that devastates us and the physical and political death that awaits us.
*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
