By TARSUS GENUS*
Entrepreneurs complain about the absence of “a project for the country” when their business interests are not being well treated by the power system they themselves have set up
Some say that the struggle between classes becomes superfluous to understand history, at a time when there is the possibility of manipulating the genetic heritage of humanity, converting it into raw material for the development of capitalism. Others – the most tired ones – say that the end of history is already situated in this “conversion” of biological heritage into capitalist heritage, and that our limit is given by the very possibility of converting liberal democracy into “dialogical” democracy, with whom it will control that biological capital. As I am an incorrigible historicist, I bet that politics can either help one or another alternative, as well as direct them towards humanist and libertarian directions not yet engendered.
The end of history – in Fukuyama – would be proved by the end of the “real” socialist idea, in the USSR, from which liberal democracy would thrive in hearts and minds, freed from the idea of equality, replaced by the idea of competition. This was projected as the beginning of human dignity, in which the norm of “equal opportunities” would promote the rich in all corners of the world. But capitalism, freed from the war between “competing systems” (as thesis), seized the opportunity to get rid of the modest “spree” of social democracy spending and opened wide in the elimination of poverty: it dealt with the physical elimination of the poor, not for the thesis, but for the concreteness of the “increasing misery”, which kills by hunger and disease.
The application of a fascist project, in Italy and Germany, was only possible through a vast political alliance induced, predominantly (in Germany), from the unity of the big bourgeoisie of modern industry, in a country humiliated in the Second World War; and (in Italy), from a broader alliance – agrarian-industrial – which encompassed vast sectors of the middle peasants, demanded by the despair of the rural poor, who harassed them for more dignified wages.
In both countries, the general insecurity of civil society – across all classes – allowed the faction that showed the most strength to establish a new order to prevail in the course of crises of expectations about the future. The containment of disorder, which undermined expectations for tomorrow, played a decisive role in setting up the new permissive political subjectivity. The same one that supported the marginal cliques that came to power through direct violence, which devastated the streets of large Italian and German cities.
It is advisable to pay special political attention to a triple movement of the Bolsonarian system of power in force, in which its political irrationality has three successful pillars: the disunity of the republican and democratic opposition, which generates suspicions about our ability to govern firmly; the formation of a “common sense”, which sees evil as a virtue, capable of purging the insecurity of its daily life; the sterilization of criticism by the corporate mass media, which separate two sides of the Bolsonar project: one that says he is incompetent and authoritarian, the other that he is “erring” because he is not “reformist” enough, in neoliberal terms.
“He always lies and never lies. Its falsity is its authenticity. It sounds complicated, but it's quite simple. He believes in everything and believes in nothing. He is an actor. But you still haven't had enough" of him, says Klaus Mann's character, in Mephisto: Romance of a Career. In the anti-fascist classic by the son of Thomas Mann – in whose decisive passages the panels of democracy in decay are painted – the traits of what would become the profile of the extreme right in the coming century are already clear.
"We can't make a joke with a client like China", said the Goiás businessman Marcello Brito, President of the Brazilian Agribusiness Association, in his axial interview with the newspaper The State of S. Paul (07.11), through which he makes an acidic criticism of the country's international relations, in the Bolsonaro government. The businessman presents himself as a defender of a “third way”, since he concluded (not exactly original) that “we need a project for the Country”, a dogma that entrepreneurs always remember when they want to say that their business interests are not they are being treated well, by the system of power that they themselves have set up.
The interview is no exception to the usual rule of the main interviews of national business leaders, in which the “nation project” is always subsumed in the project designed for their businesses. In this “project”, his ideal government ideas are always linked to the assistance of business corporations and the production sectors, where their businesses prosper. This, of course, is nothing new, but it acquires greater importance when the interview is contrasted with the vote on the “default” PEC, in our “exemplary” Chamber of Deputies: the numbers of that vote say a lot about what could be the great problematic of governability, in the government that will follow that of Bolsonaro.
Two-thirds of a Federal Chamber, which certainly won't be much different from the next one, approved a Constitutional Amendment that, simply by applying a default on the Union's creditors (which involves the entire class pyramid of society), responds only to the immediate interests clientelists from the political sphere, although their damage cuts across all classes: from Union creditor workers to middle and lower sector entrepreneurs; from federated units to large business contractors, with firm credits in the Union.
It is possible to observe that in 9 out of 10 interviews of these business leaders, issues of the country's sovereignty, social inequality, unemployment and hunger are not considered; much less the genocidal and denialist tendency of the Government that they promoted; nor is it mentioned the immense suffering of millions of people, who were not only affected by death and disease – in the face of both the Bolsonaro Government’s health neglect – but also by violence, promoted to the forefront of politics, in all our political instances and territorial.
The fact that the businessman said the truth about our foreign policy and about the need to treat our foreign business customers well, however, does not remove him from the criminal political field, which most of the country's large business community signed up. In the current period, the field that rejects another economic solution – for the country – outside the framework of the current ultraliberalism of Guedes and Bolsonaro, is unable to implement any path. Denying Bolsonaro, without denying ultraliberalism and the systemic corruption that follows it, will only be a modest redesign of “Bolsonarism without Bolsonaro”
This redesign could have its electoral path facilitated by the disunity of the left and the absence of a broad democratic opposition. Only this would be able to agree on a way out of the crisis, outside fascist authoritarianism, which has already cost us the weight of global ridicule, the return of hunger and radical exclusion and the more than 600 deaths of its medieval denialism. Looking with a magnifying glass at the vote on the “default” PEC and the ruralist president’s speech, dissatisfied with the treatment given to “Chinese comrades”, we can conclude that time is increasingly short and the danger of ultraliberal fascism is increasingly real . The solutions do not come from the market, but from democracy, they do not come from the idea of merit, but from real equality, they do not come from default, but from the social responsibility that can be assumed by a legitimate government, resulting from free and fair elections, in which fascism and the fascists have a crushing defeat.
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.