By EVERALDO FERNANDEZ*
Commentary on Jessé Souza's recently released book.
“Twist, turn, but here is the law of life: first, bread, then, morality” (Bertolt Brecht, Threepenny Opera)
The right-wing poor are undoubtedly a global phenomenon, just think of Donald Trump's second term in office. What's more, it's not just Argentina, governed by Javier Milei, or Brazil, which elected Jair Bolsonaro.
The concept or notion of the right-wing poor arises from the assumption or premise that the conservative and individualistic ideology (of the right) does not correspond to the material interests of the poor or impoverished classes. Put this way, this hypothesis certainly does not explain the rise of a new proto-fascist or ultra-liberal right in recent times.
In the United States, studies have long investigated why people would vote against their material interests. One widely held hypothesis is that modernization has made the values of the elites and upper classes more cosmopolitan and universalist, which in turn has alienated working-class voters and engendered a counterrevolution of values.
One variant focuses on the moral or cultural conflict between different sectors of the elite. This conflict between the elites would induce an electoral and partisan polarization that then spreads and affects the voting behavior of the poor. Part of this explanatory effort also considers the fact that in Europe the convergence between the main political parties, especially in Germany, produces disenchantment among various layers of society and the rise of an openly racist and xenophobic right wing.
In Brazil, among the analytical efforts, the work produced by Jessé Souza has recently come to light. He is already well-known in national debates with his various works on the rabble, the elites, and the Brazilian middle class. Revealing a solid intellectual background, the book has the first merit of daring to analyze a phenomenon while it is still happening, and while its essence is not yet fully established or clearly perceptible.
In the work, the figures of the poor white man and the evangelical black man are configured and chosen for reflection, as they have an emblematic role. Historically, he situates the role of these “characters” in the process that brought Jair Bolsonaro to power in 2018 and the process that followed.
The analysis of this so-called paradox of the right-wing poor is then carried out based on two central interpretative keys: the rejection of economism and the “culturalization” of racism.
The rejection of economism. Contrary to liberalism, and also to certain Marxisms, the premise adopted is that economic rationality is not the criterion or central motive of behavior in society. Economic gain, he states, is not the determining element in modern society. He rightly rejects utilitarianism, where the only thing that matters is the linear calculation between losing and winning, having a greater or lesser advantage, as if the notion of quality, content, and gain did not exist. And this is because the economy itself is not a peaceful territory either.
There is no such thing as the supposed neutrality of the economy, nor can it be considered the universal rule of social behavior. This is where the text gives us its first central premise: “the core of any economic production and distribution is, […], a moral question and choice.” Every economic model therefore has an embedded conception of justice and a criterion for the distribution of wealth. In other words, behind the economy are moral values and choices.
The production and distribution of wealth, he continues, is based on a moral choice. This leads to one of several observations that do not conform to common sense: “poor people voted for Jair Bolsonaro [for] moral reasons, not economic ones.”
If this is said, nothing more is needed to immediately make a second turn in understanding: the content of these non-economic motivations is not moral conservatism and the agenda of customs.
Conservatism would then be the result of something deeper: the daily disrepute and humiliation to which these layers of society are subjected. To say, therefore, that Jair Bolsonaro was elected because the poor are religious and conservative is to point out an effect rather than a cause, without asking what causes the poor to be conservative.
To gain understanding the question should be formulated as follows: why do the poor embrace religion and conservatism?
The second element of the pair of arguments used in the work then comes into play: Brazilian racism, and more specifically, the culturalized racism of the 12th century. This racism would have a very unique characteristic, being a territorialized or regionalized racism, and opposing a white European immigrant to the south, and a black and mixed-race person to the north. This phenomenon is, in the narrative of the work, epitomized in the figure of the poor white person and the black evangelical. In the empirical part of the work, this characterization is supported through the description and analysis of XNUMX interviews conducted with six representatives of each of these social groups.
When characterizing the poor, however, an apparently ambiguous strategy is used. Although the explanation for voting for the right based on the poor's lack of intelligence is initially rejected, it is immediately stated that they are the ones who “understand the least how the social world works,” even though they are the primary victims of prejudice in the service of oppression. The fact is, therefore, that the poor are subjected to a situation of precariousness, which is not only material but also symbolic (and cognitive).
Having overcome these not unimportant theoretical premises, the following argument is to mobilize the United States as a factor that serves to characterize the current world order, and also to completely dispel any illusion that Bolsonarism is a Brazilian jabuticaba, a singularity. Thus, unlike the imperialisms known until now, American imperialism would combine in a unique way hard e soft power. This production of consent through propaganda gained unprecedented momentum with the advent of big tech and new gurus like Steve Bannon.
Understanding the rise of the far right among us is the next challenge we face. We begin by noting that Jair Bolsonaro did not create, but rather awakened, a pre-existing and dormant racism in Brazilian society. The shift made is understandable insofar as it deals with the changes that the “institution” of racism in Brazil has undergone, especially in the last century. One of these central transformations was to gradually oppose a southern European region to a mixed-race north, and by symmetry and association a civilized, modern, efficient pole to another backward, impure, mixed-race and corrupt one.
This culturalization of racism opposing southern and northern culture is a process that has been taking place gradually since the 1930s, when the imagination of the Brazilian man was reconstructed, resulting in the cordial man and the nation of samba and football.
There are also two specific chapters that analyze the figures, as proposed by the author, of the poor white man from the expanded South and the evangelical black man. The interviews conducted are reading material that is justified in itself and cannot be ignored.
In recent years, Jessé Souza has presented Brazil with a series of courageous, nonconformist analyses, marked by originality, which outline a portrait of Brazil in this century and its social structure.
There is one aspect that deserves special attention in the approaches developed by him, not only for its theoretical dimension, but mainly for the relatively immediate political consequences that it may give rise to.
Social classes, the central object of his theoretical inquiries, would be constituted not from economic determinants, but from moral and subjective determinants. This understanding would then allow us to explain why the poor vote for the rich, and – even more surprisingly, why some rich people would vote for the poor, or in defense of the interests of the poor.
In this conception, self-esteem and social recognition are the measure of this moral determinant. In one fell swoop, the classification of classes according to income and everything that this has in common with the economy as a determinant of individual decisions is rejected, as is the parallel adoption of a criterion of self-identification and awareness in the formation of social classes. The poor who do not want to be humiliated would have found this appreciation and dignity in the church, among other places.
His characterization of class seems quite clear and simple to anyone who is using social structure as a starting point for understanding politics and history.
The subjects are then the poor, or working classes, the middle class, and finally, the elite. These groups are measured as a percentage of the population. If on the one hand, the elite and the middle class are quantitative minorities, on the other, they are materially and symbolically hegemonic.
If the elite is materially and economically dominant, a typical trait of the middle class is the monopoly of legitimate knowledge. By exclusion, the popular classes are defined by this double lack, material and symbolic, they lack not only money but also dignity.
When we use the notion of cultural capital, we see that this capital (legitimate knowledge) in Brazil has historically been controlled by a white middle class of European origin. The idea of cultural capital, which is far from being new, appeared in the social sciences in the 1960s, combining elements of French Marxist structuralism with notions from North American sociology. The fundamental point of this view is that, ultimately, all classes hold some capital to a greater or lesser extent, be it symbolic or material, and the distinctions between classes, as a result, are quantitative.
The consequence is that labor as an element of analysis in its intrinsic opposition to capital is hidden or simply loses relevance. The same secondary or irrelevant condition is also reserved for the phenomenon of exploitation. Social dynamics are seen as a struggle for the distribution and appropriation of capital in its different forms.
There is yet another element in this definition of class. Derived from the legitimate criticism of an economistic reductionism, the notion of social class is displaced to the axis of moral choices: “people have as the ultimate reason for their social action the moral dimension, that is, the struggle for social recognition that guarantees self-esteem and self-confidence for each of us.” Once recognition by others begins to determine the conformation of classes and social subjects, the door is opened to a subjectivism of discourse that brings with it serious consequences.
When a homogenizing criterion is adopted, that is, material or symbolic capital in its various forms, the first consequence is that conflict, if it does not disappear completely, ceases to be a defining and constitutive element of classes and class relations, and becomes a secondary and occasional element. On the other hand, the field of decisions and rationality is circumscribed to a self-referential cycle where social recognition has no substrate, but mere reflexivity, circular and empty reflexivity.
The combination of these two and only criteria, that is, the mobilization of symbolic capital against humiliation and the search for recognition, produces subjectivism, the realm where discourse reigns.
It seems clear that the rejection of economism does not impose or authorize ignoring the material and objective dimension of life in favor of a world guided simply by the search for recognition that shapes mentalities. Without the dimension of work, without the perspective of how the objects that will be shared and distributed in society are produced, we fall into the abyss of relativism and voluntarism. The fight against exploitation and oppression is left behind and the motto of social recognition takes center stage.
The noticeable development of this theoretical approach is the characterization of the Brazilian social issue as a challenge to overcome archaic mentalities that are foreign to our time.
“This division (the regional division between white people from the South and São Paulo and the rest of Brazil) is already in people’s minds, whether it’s the perpetrator or the victim. And it is archaic and repressed: a mere disguise for the atavistic “racial” racism.” This is emblematically the sentence that closes Jessé Souza’s book.
So, in a way, what is suggested is that the scourge that afflicts Brazil is racism, now culturalized and territorialized. Archaic, therefore, an obstacle to modernity (although unjust and capitalist), and installed in people's minds. It is hard to believe that violence, poverty, prejudice, machismo, patrimonialism, can be the result simply of what is in people's heads, the product of mentalities.
Mentalities do not conform by themselves. There is a politics that feeds on hate, but hate does not spring from nowhere. It is fueled by hunger, police brutality, violence against women, and precarious work. Nothing comes from nowhere. Like a shadow, hate accompanies a monster.
It seems reasonable, however, to assume that if the social question were essentially a matter of mentalities, good will and intelligence would potentially be capable of resolving it. The persistence of capitalism and its intrinsically unjust nature is certainly due to factors more effective than simply mentalities. It is sustained by material conditions of need and abuse. The precariousness of work, induced scarcity, the fragmentation of social life, and alienation, before being a perception and an understanding, are intentionally and systematically reproduced material conditions. And it is these material conditions that must be changed.
If this is not the case, we will repeatedly blame ourselves for our lack of efficiency in communication and effective use of social media, or, more generally, we will continue to lament the lack of political education, the lack of awareness. Because this model of analysis is centered on mentalities, we embrace a kind of masochistic voluntarism, as a victim who punishes herself for the abuses of the aggressor. We thus forget that doing educates, that facts speak. Racism, oppression, and exploitation are not simply discourses, perceptions, and awareness that determine themselves.
Because when it was said almost two centuries ago that reality determines consciousness, the purpose was not to make people believe that consciousness was not relevant, but rather that it is not independent of reality. So it does not serve us to talk about ending racism without putting an end to the police system that kills the most people in the world, victimizing mostly black people and young people. It does not serve us to “put” it in people’s heads that the Unified Health System is great when they have to pay exorbitant prices for health plans, or that education should be public when the majority have to finance their university education and go into debt.
Facts speak. If the left does not use its power to change material reality, then it will not convince. If the left does not discuss and confront the cause and origin of racist oppression and its functional and intrinsic relationship with capitalist exploitation, we will continue to discuss secondary issues, and hide behind excuses such as “we do not use technology”, we do not communicate well, we do not speak the “language of the people”.
*Everaldo Fernandez is a professor at the Faculty of Law of the Federal University of Amazonas (UFAM).
Reference
Jesse Souza. The poor right: the revenge of the bastards: what explains the adhesion of the resentful to the extreme right. Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization Publishing House, 2024, 224 pages. [https://amzn.to/4f6aKGu]
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