The second circle — center and periphery in times of war -

The second circle — center and periphery in times of war

09/10/2024

Culture • Geopolitics • Books

By ANDRÉ SINGER, BERNARDO RICUPERO, CICERO ARAUJO & FERNANDO RUGITSKY*

Organizers introduction to newly released book

Narrow margins in global hell

Dantesque hell has the shape of an inverted cone, whose nine descending floors become smaller and more terrifying with each step. The image is apt. crash The 2008 financial crisis opened the demonic gates, and, especially after the election of Donald Trump in 2016, we wander in limbo, characterized by the derailment of capitalism and democracy.¹ In recent years, the interregnum has entered a new phase, moving down a level.

In it, the prevailing drift seems to have deepened, as a result of the global bipartition that is structured around the conflict between the United States and China. Just like Dante when he enters the second circle, we believe that the current polarization increases the scourges and, in contemporary language, reduces the chances of a peaceful solution. The hypothesis will be presented below, in order to provide a backdrop for the various analyses elaborated in the chapters of this collection.

The polarity was made explicit by the G-7 in May 2023 in the symbolic city of Hiroshima. When the conclave between the US, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, Canada and Japan decided to reduce the “‘excessive dependence’ on China in critical supply chains”,² Beijing's harsh reaction made clear the significance of the Western decision (considering Japan as the Asian arm of the West). Xi Jinping's government denounced the intention to isolate and weaken his country, recalled the ambassador to Tokyo and banned Micron, the only US company to manufacture chips type Dram (Dynamic Random-Access Memory).³

According to Nouriel Roubini, relationships that were cold have become glacial.⁴ If 2008 caused the rift that led Beijing to slowly move away from Washington,⁵ the Hiroshima summit confirmed the dispute as hegemonic.

Significantly, three months after the G-7 meeting, at China's initiative, four members were included in the BRICS group (Egypt, Ethiopia, Iran and the United Arab Emirates), the former Middle Kingdom applying to lead the Global South.⁶ The White House unified the rich, and Xi countered by trying to vocalize the poor. For us, who live on the periphery, the global division became clear, implying a rearrangement of the conditions under which the interregnum unfolds.

First, with the return of the international trenches, politics at its worst—counting the war capacity in each trench—is taking over again. The advance of destructive forces sets the tone for the dance. Just look at the rearmament of Germany and Japan, a clear change in the pattern that had prevailed since the end of World War II. Interviewed for this book in June 2023, sociologist Wolfgang Streeck pointed out that “40% of global military spending is done in the United States,” and there “are these huge military bureaucracies, with people thinking freely about how to use them.”⁷ At the other end of the spectrum, the Chinese regime has been promoting a tougher repression since 2012, with a clear sense of united order against the external enemy.⁸

Secondly, something, still vague, that harks back to the Cold War era has once again stirred the atmosphere. Looking back, it is worth remembering that when the nation of the Great Wall decided, in the early 1960s, to emerge from the Soviet shadow and assume the role of a “beacon” of truly existing socialism, it was already reflecting the unstoppable impulse, which the 1949 revolution itself had given rise to, for one of the most populous nation states on the planet to stand out on the geopolitical scene.⁹ Half a century later, China may have replaced Russia in the ring where it will decide against the US who will lead the exit, if there is one, from the interregnum.

It could be argued that the Chinese mode of production is also capitalist, which removes the ideological content of the conflict. However, this is not what the People's Republic claims, which defines itself as a “socialist market economy” and, contradictorily, uses centralization and state planning to take advantage of the neoliberal order, contrasting its hybrid model with that prevailing in the West. Uncle Sam, on the other hand, likes to present himself as a defender of democracy against tyrants who use an iron fist to stifle people's freedoms.

The ideological cover, therefore, serves both contenders, with the arms race unifying the people around their respective rulers. In practice, it represents a solution to the impasses created by internal conflicts and economic contradictions. In both the US and China, the drums of war cover up the suffering of the lower classes.

Thus, the return of politics, which could be considered auspicious, by assuming the form of geopolitical tension, narrows the available alternatives. In particular, the truly democratic option, an angle favored by the authors gathered in this collection, finds itself squeezed between conditions that push each country or bloc of countries towards a “united order.”

The militarization of international relations is beginning to have harmful effects on domestic freedoms. In addition to the restriction of political rights and repression in Germany and the United States, to give two notable examples, the escalation of Israeli-Palestinian tensions, combined with the vigorous student protests in the United States, is dividing the Democratic Party in the United States and could cost it its continued presence in the White House.¹⁰ A possible victory of Donald Trump in November will give new impetus to the extreme right, reinforcing the wave of planetary autocratization noted by the project “Varieties of Democracy” (“Varieties of Democracy” — V-Dem).¹¹

The links between authoritarian regression and bipolarization are, however, more complex. If the estrangement between the US and China came to light in 2008, the rivalry has been intensified by the commercial and technological hostility since Trump. The crisis of capitalism and democracy, which has been ongoing in the West since the financial crisis, has paved the way for the rise of the extreme right, which is betting its future on the “clash of civilizations”. The double derailment has thus led to the bipartition of the world, which in turn requalifies the interregnum.

The rise of the far right, it is worth remembering, was the result of an earthquake whose epicenter is in rich countries. From the financial crisis, discontent emerged that spread to the periphery, generating, with the help of digital mobilization, a wave of protests in the early 2010s: the Arab Spring, the Indignados Movement in Spain, the “Occupy Wall Street"in the United States, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, etc. In just a few years, pressure from below has forced the renewal of the left. From Syriza to Bernie Sanders, via Podemos, Jean-Luc Mélenchon and Jeremy Corbyn, all have risen from positions that were previously marginal.¹²

Significantly, in the same year that Donald Trump was elected president, the only self-declared socialist senator in the US — and who had remained isolated during his more than ten years in the Upper House — almost successfully challenged, in the Democratic Party primaries, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton, who had become, over the years, a kind of symbol of what is now called “progressive neoliberalism”.

But then came the cold shower. Unable to build solid electoral blocs or overcome obstacles put in place by the elites, the breath of fresh air from the left failed to implement an alternative direction. The hopes raised by Tsipras, Iglesias and Corbyn seem, from today’s perspective, to have been little more than a mirage. For various reasons, they were unable to muster enough strength to make a way out of the democratic crisis viable. Ultimately, the only deviant case is provided by the most powerful nation on the planet, the United States, where a centrist leader adopted measures originating from the left of the Democratic Party, resulting in a new model, which will be analyzed later.

Following the failure of the left, the other pole of the ideological spectrum was occupied by the extreme right.¹³ In some cases, old center-right parties were reduced to irrelevance and gave way to new groups, with discourses and practices that were both authoritarian and anti-government. establishment. In others, traditional conservative groups have made a notable shift, dragging the terms of public debate with them. It is not clear at this point whether there is a coherent set of far-right policies and, behind them, social forces capable of sustaining them.

In any case, the imbalance of the renewal, with the pendulum tilted to the right and the experiments on the left proving to be fleeting, can be interpreted structurally. The reconfiguration of capitalism with the displacement of a significant part of the production of goods to Asia, since the 1980s, fragmented the working classes of the developed center and weakened their organizations. In the vacuum that followed, with industrial jobs and union density declining, opportunities were created to create discord among the popular classes. This opened an avenue for social suffering to be channeled against false adversaries.¹⁴

In Europe, in particular, the process reached its climax when the Arab Spring turned into civil wars that brought down the state structures involved, resulting in a humanitarian and migratory tragedy. When it reached the other side of the Mediterranean, it unleashed a xenophobic hysteria, much to the taste of the rising far right.

If the Western conservative shift created the conditions for bipolarization, China did not stand by passively. According to Margareth Pearson and co-authors, around 2013 the Chinese government began to increase the party-state's intervention in the governance of companies, especially technology companies, establishing red lines that economic actors could not cross.¹⁵ As we know, technology and weapons go hand in hand, and the United States understood the change as a security threat, beginning to take measures that contributed to putting an end to globalization.

Behind the scenes of the current battle of chips between Joe Biden and Xi Jinping are their respective national military apparatuses, knowing that the power of each armed force today comes from semiconductors.¹⁶ In short, the arms race, which was expected to end definitively with the dissolution of the Soviet Union, was restarted.

In the West, the intensification of geopolitical disputes and military escalation are fueling nationalist sectarianism, helping to cement internal defensive unity. In the land of the Forbidden City, Xi Jinping’s hardening stance has removed any chance of democratization from the horizon. Everywhere, pacifist mobilization is faced with uninhibited state repression, in addition to the difficulty of garnering significant popular support. Finally, it is important not to underestimate the effects that this turnaround is having on internal conflicts in the periphery in general.

During the first decades of the old Cold War, room was opened for concessions by the great powers to the then Third World. But Latin Americans know that alternatives that challenged the privileges of Northern capital were violently suppressed, often by military coups. In the region, the Cold War took the form of a dirty war. In a period of militarized bipolarization, would it be surprising if the intransigence of the International Monetary Fund's adjustment programs were combined with authoritarian regression?

Even in the absence of external blockades, the challenges for Latin American economies to alleviate their condition of dependence are enormous. Twenty years ago, at the height of movements critical of globalization, the material conditions for shielding nations from the global financial maze were perhaps greater. Today, however, with the production of goods fragmented among numerous countries and the working classes entangled in global consumption and debt circuits, opening a parallel path of development, outside the predominant financial and commercial flows, seems more difficult.

Even though neoliberal globalization is coming to an end, it has left as a legacy the deepening of Latin American dependence — both in terms of external and technological vulnerability and the tightening of the bond between domestic capitalist classes and the hegemonic interests at the center of the system.

However, we are recording an ambiguous situation here. However narrow the possibility may be, we cannot rule out the possibility of finding solutions that are favorable to the periphery. The intensification of the geopolitical conflict should intensify the dispute over zones of influence, which could open up opportunities for Latin America to renegotiate the terms of its insertion into the global circuit of goods production. For Brazil, given its prominent position as a regional power and the pragmatism of its foreign policy, there may be room for maneuver in the sense of forging topical alliances — without harming its commitment to democracy, peace and multilateralism — that offer new economic horizons.

War times

The political scientists (and a sociologist) and economists gathered here began their work when the Russians crossed the Ukrainian border in February 2022, and ended it amid the horror of the humanitarian catastrophe caused by the State of Israel in Gaza. They debated and wrote about the following topics with the clear perception that something was contracting in the world space. For the first time since the configuration that emerged from the fall of the Berlin Wall, a declining power — but still in possession of the second largest nuclear arsenal on the planet — made an open, undeniable challenge to the establishment, through the extreme use of armed force against a European country. Moscow's audacity, supported to a certain extent by Beijing, cannot be dissociated from bipolarization.

The gravity of the war spiral forces us to reflect briefly on it. Let us first consider the situation of the former Soviet Union. Defeated in the Cold War, the former super power saw its population decline, with its territory reduced by about 25%. It had lost control over its former “satellites” in Eastern Europe and, in view of NATO’s intervention in the late 1990s, its influence over the Balkans. Domestically, the economy had worsened in the years immediately following the dissolution of the Soviet Union, thanks to the shock therapy recommended by ultra-liberal economists, with GDP falling by half and obvious effects on the population’s standard of living. The economic collapse added to a deep wound in national pride, touching the chords of what Lenin called “Great Russian chauvinism”.

The story, however, was not over. At the dawn of the 2000s, Boris Yeltsin was sadly ending his presidential term, with a reputation for preferring the comforts of the bottle to the exercise of power, and his successor was a former KGB agent, previously his chief minister and, as the world would gradually discover, with a very different addiction. Skilled in forging deals between the new magnates of the economy and the Armed Forces, Putin was beginning his rise to become the undisputed head of the Russian state. Holding the levers of executive power with an iron fist, the brutality with which he repressed his opponents — arbitrary arrests, assassinations, poisonings, fatal “accidents,” etc. — soon had an impact on foreign policy.

The invariable treatment proves it militarily given to the countries of the Caucasus. It is true, on the other hand, that NATO's excessive advance into Eastern Europe in recent years has only fueled the old Russian desire, embodied by it, to reestablish the authority lost in that region. From there to open war against the West, via Ukraine, the only thing missing was the alliance with China, formalized at the beginning of 2022.

This European war would soon share the stage with another, this time in the Middle East. The conflict in Gaza, although of more remote origins, reinforced the divergence between the US and China and the militarization of the divided space. The cruel and bloody attack carried out by Hamas in October 2023, killing more than 1.200 Israeli and foreign citizens, most of them civilians, including children, in addition to the capture of 200 hostages, triggered an absurd reaction on the part of Israel, not by chance governed by the extreme right. The Israeli state has so far claimed more than 40 Palestinian lives, according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.¹⁷ Added to the casualties in Ukraine, the slaughter on both fronts has already claimed the lives of between 150 and 200 people.¹⁸

In view of this bleak panorama, and while respecting the natural intellectual, disciplinary and methodological diversity that characterizes the Thought and Politics in Brazil Research Group, associated with the Center for the Study of Citizenship Rights (Cenedic-USP), we sought to locate the critical points of the situation, a task that was joined by colleagues from other institutions, to whom we would like to thank for their significant collaboration. In addition to outlining the general contours of the contemporary situation, the articles emphasize the consequences that they bring to Latin American democracies (Part 2) and the theoretical instruments forged in the region to understand the complex intertwining of politics and economics, geopolitics and class struggle (Part 3), the understanding of which is becoming increasingly urgent.

The volume opens with an attempt to establish theoretical frameworks for understanding the direction the Biden administration has offered the United States from 2021 onwards. Written by political scientists André Singer and Hugo Fanton, chapter 1 raises the hypothesis that the White House has strived to build what the authors call, using Gramscian-inspired terminology, a “new Americanism”. It consists of an unprecedented model that involves reindustrialization with energy transition, aiming at the reconstruction of the former working class, creating the foundations of a State that, although not a welfare state, seeks to meet the most immediate demands of the middle and popular classes. According to Riley and Brenner, this is a “neo-progressivism”, an orientation distinct from that which dominated the Democratic Party until Barack Obama.¹⁹

At the aforementioned G-7 meeting, the US program was extended to OECD allies, that is, the club of the rich. Whether or not the call for the allies will be successful, only time will tell. In any case, the new Americanism does not have the dense reformism that marked the New Deal. According to Hugo Fanton, one of those who traveled to the US with support from Unicamp, visiting several cities and conducting dozens of interviews, the Biden Plan is characterized by three dimensions: fiscal expansionism in favor of manufacturing production in sectors considered strategic, incisive action to contain Chinese growth and labor protection measures, with full employment and encouragement of union action.

In Chapter 2, in which he presents the analysis of the fieldwork, Fanton, however, seeks to show that fiscal policy fell short of real needs; that the internal division of the Democratic Party resulted in the dehydration of the social dimension of the program; that the weight of the Trumpist opposition, in alliance with conservative sectors of the Democratic Party, hindered attempts to raise taxes on capital; and that the financial market managed to impose structural limits on the scope of the program. On the other hand, there was progress in union organization, indicating an opening through which the reconstruction, from the bottom up, of a force opposing the extreme right could take place.

Chapter 3, written by economists Carlos Raul Etulain, a professor at Unicamp who also benefited from funding from that institution, and Jorge López Arévalo, a professor at the Autonomous University of Chiapas (Mexico), highlights that Biden’s countercyclical conduct was one of the “most important in […] history and the largest in the world,” abandoning budgetary austerity. The Keynesian orientation was resumed, at least in terms of fiscal policy. There was also a strengthening of protectionism, marked by the frequent adoption of punitive tariffs, import restrictions, and orders for domestic content. In other areas, however, such as immigration, the program did not change the conservative exclusionary tide, not to mention foreign relations.

If the researchers' trip to the United States identified significant contradictions, those faced by the Chinese Communist Party since it separated from the United States are also not negligible. By producing an independent bourgeois class from within, the conversion to capitalism was not, and is not, a smooth event. It is full of unprecedented tensions, especially in the labor market and in relations between the countryside and the city, as indicated in chapter 4, written by economists Isabela Nogueira and Iderley Colombini.

The strategic decision to leap into the upper echelons of developed capitalism made China the country that benefited most from neoliberal globalization, but internally it practiced guidelines that did not resemble neoliberal recipes. Except for one decisive aspect: making the immense labor force available for accumulation, initially predominantly by foreign firms, then increasingly by Chinese enterprises.

The contradictions found in the three chapters within the US and China explain, at least in part, the movement of the two giants towards militarization. In chapter 5, Wolfgang Streeck, professor emeritus at the Max Planck Institute in Cologne, in an interview given in June 2023, states that we are seeing a new stage of the interregnum, “which I would provisionally call a bipolar global economy: a war economy, divided into two halves, China and the United States.”²⁰ For him, this would have been “unimaginable” half a decade earlier and could “crystallize as a stable order for 30, 40 years, as in the post-war period”.

Even if the hypothesis is not confirmed, there is a good deal of evidence to suggest that the unipolar period is over. In chapter 6, which concludes the first part of the volume, political scientist Sebastião Velasco e Cruz analyzes medium- and long-term factors that led to the undoing of the US-led order. The disastrous exit from Afghanistan (August 2021), followed by the Ukrainian War and the ineffectiveness of the US response — economic embargo, financing of Zelensky, encouragement of Putin's destabilization — and, finally, the attack by Hamas and support for Israel's response confirm, for Velasco e Cruz, the progressive “end of the Pax americana".

Latin American perspectives

The second part of the book seeks to map out Latin American options in the bipartisan context. In Chapter 7, economists Carlos Aguiar de Medeiros and Esther Majerowicz project the chances of a resumption of industrial stimulus in South America and Brazil. After analyzing the incentives for manufacturing in the United States and Europe, as a reaction to the challenges posed by China and the worsening of the environmental problem, the authors turn to the South American case.

The emphasis is on opportunities in the energy and transport sectors, as well as in the Amazon rainforest. Although the ever-renewed but unpromising commitment to fiscal austerity represents a clear obstacle, Medeiros and Majerowicz believe that government intervention could reverse the industrial fragility revealed in recent decades.

Chapter 8, written by economists Fernando Rugitsky and Pedro Mendes Loureiro, however, shows the difficulties of finding a sovereign development model here. The governments of the so-called Pink Tide, which spread across South America in the 2000s, benefited from tree de commodities which temporarily mitigated the external vulnerability of their economies. For the first time since the 1970s, Latin America grew faster than rich countries.

But the relief was short-lived. When the prices of exported products began to fall in the following decade, the costs of joining the Chinese locomotive became clear. The material difficulties—recession, pressure for austerity, exchange rate volatility—were compounded, in many cases, by a notable political shift. The regions responsible for generating primary export products, such as the Brazilian Midwest (soybeans and cattle) or the Bolivian Media Luna (natural gas), became established as territorial bases for political blocs that imported the latest far-right tendencies from the North to Latin America.

In Chapter 9, economist Lena Lavinas and sociologist Guilherme Leite Gonçalves examine the Brazilian situation from another angle. After skillfully reconstructing the origins of mass financialization in Brazil, the authors describe the wave of over-expropriations that followed the ousting of the Workers' Party (PT) from the Planalto, with the impeachment Dilma Rousseff in 2016. They then assess how Lula's current term is interspersed with tensions, seeking to reverse the dismantling he inherited and, simultaneously, continue a certain financialization of social programs. If the second trend prevails, not only will the constitutional model have been eroded, but the very possibility of sustaining an alternative course will be weakened by the expansion of financial dynamics.

In other words, the young Brazilian democratic plant awaits an economic perspective capable of opening horizons for a population still pressed for basic needs such as income, housing, health, education and security. If this does not happen, we must consider the possibility that in 2026 we will witness a dispute similar to that between Trump and Kamala Harris, which today keeps those who believe in democracy breathless.

This would be yet another case of national politics mimicking its North American counterpart, as analyzed by political scientists André Singer, Cicero Araujo and Leonardo Belinelli in chapter 10. They show that the two societies have many differences, but also significant similarities. Both faced the problem of deindustrialization, which in its own way contributed to undermining the foundations of democracy there and here. At the same time, evangelical churches, many of which originated in the United States, support conservative agendas in Brazil. In a deeper, cultural sense, the neo-sertanejo of the green-yellow interior seeks to imitate the country North-American, creating a relatively common symbolic universe.

Critical thinking

In view of the problems raised in the preceding chapters, the revival of a style of historical-structural thought, cultivated in Latin America and the subject of the last section of this collection, gains special interest. The debate between Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Francisco de Oliveira and Florestan Fernandes, to which political scientist Bernardo Ricupero draws attention in chapter 11, regarding the extent to which the 1964 coup could be understood as equivalent to a bourgeois revolution, is a good example.

In addition to the different positions — Cardoso arguing that the politically reactionary movement would have revolutionary economic consequences, Oliveira that it would correspond to a counterrevolution and Fernandes that the form of the bourgeois revolution in Brazil and in the periphery in general would be a counterrevolution — it is worth highlighting how the discussion held about half a century ago proves useful today.

As in the present, Cardoso, Oliveira and Fernandes indicate that politics would have gained centrality in the type of capitalism implemented by the military dictatorship. In other words, the economy should not be thought of as a space in which capitalists and workers freely establish exchanges, but as a dimension in which the use of force, typical of the State, is always decisive. If this became evident with the coup that ended the Republic in 1946, today even thinkers close to the perspective of classical Marxism, such as Riley and Brenner, need to recognize the intertwining of politics and economics, coining a term such as “political capitalism”.²¹

But it is also possible to say that Brazilian thought, more than providing a repertoire of hypothetical questions and answers to address the problems we face — as is commonly imagined — is constitutive of the very way we understand the issues. This is the exercise that economist Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa undertakes in chapter 12. When addressing the concepts of “underdevelopment” and “dependence” in the long term, he identifies a historical-structural “style of analysis” cultivated by Brazilian authors for almost half a century. Alexandre de Freitas Barbosa sees, in particular, a common problem, which would continue from Caio Prado Jr. to Florestan Fernandes and his disciples, passing through Celso Furtado and Ignácio Rangel.

Such observations have a notable affinity with those of Karl Mannheim. The sociologist of knowledge, using the considerations of an art historian, Johann Eishner, notes that “we identify a work without a precise date by tracing the presence in it of characteristics of the style of a particular period; on the other hand, our knowledge of the style of that period will be deepened in other points by the specific work”.²² Therefore, in both fields, more than the content, it is important to identify the form, artistic or of thinking, underlying them.

Thus, the style of thought present in the various worldviews is perceived less by the responses to various problems than by the way in which they present the questions. It would be necessary to work with a group of authors in order to be able to notice the common “style” assumed in their thoughts. This is precisely what occurs with the “historical-structural style”, capable of framing the dilemmas of capitalism practiced in the periphery.

Recovering a different way of understanding the phenomenon of dependency, among those of the style of thought discussed here, economist Leda Paulani, in chapter 13, points out in what sense it could be said that we are entering a new phase of the process, which she calls “dependency 4.0”. By offering a detailed reading of a strand of dependency theory and reviewing it in light of contemporary formulations on financialization, Paulani illustrates the critical potential of recovering classic debates and categories to investigate contemporary dilemmas. In her interpretation, the Brazilian case is an example of the form of subordination of the periphery to a global capitalism dominated by rentierism.

Finally, political scientist Camila Goes, author of chapter 14, which concludes the volume, explores how Francisco de Oliveira sought to decipher the way in which, in Brazil, neoliberalism provides the key to understanding hegemony in the Gramscian sense. According to the sociologist from Pernambuco, the presidency of Fernando Henrique Cardoso could either be interpreted as the realization of a bourgeois hegemony or identified with a “neoliberal totalitarianism.”

Taking this perspective to the extreme, Lula’s first election would have led to a situation of “hegemony in reverse,” in which the moral leadership exercised by the subaltern classes would be combined with blatant bourgeois domination, perhaps rendering Gramsci’s category obsolete. In a complementary move, however, Góes points out the affinity between Oliveira’s analysis of what he called the “era of indeterminacy” and the interpretations of the current period by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Chantal Mouffe, Nancy Fraser, and Wolfgang Streeck, who explain it, inspired by Gramsci, in terms of “interregnum.”

Scopes and limits

Despite the book's scope, relevant topics were left out of the scope of the collection. Among them, it is worth highlighting, given its gravity and urgency, that of ecological pressure. Even though it is mentioned here and there, we were unable to give it a separate treatment, for which we would perhaps need a broader theoretical framework.

However, we believe we have brought a general diagnosis for debate. According to it, we would be faced with a narrower circle of alternatives than in the previous stage of the interregnum, increasing the authoritarian threat. The intensification of the dispute for geopolitical leadership, on the international level, as well as in its regional developments, implies the intensification of state violence, externally and, potentially, internally, which could become part of the panorama brought about by militarization.

However, from the point of view of the productive articulation of capitalism, “deglobalization,” which is the most direct consequence of the geopolitical struggle, could open up space to reverse, even if partially, the process that is at the origin of the weakening of the working class. With the reversal, increased resistance would emerge. The attempt by the US and Europe to attract back part of the value chains favors spaces for negotiation between the classes, which would mean the return of politics in the emancipatory direction.

In the case of the United States, in particular, the promotion of a buoyant labor market by the Democratic administration contributed to the resumption of labor conflict, with strikes and heroic unionization efforts, as in the cases of Starbucks stores and Amazon warehouses. However, far from reversing decades of dismantling, such struggles illustrate the narrow gaps to which we referred at the beginning. In short, we must consider the tenacity of the forces that, in the most diverse ways, both in the center and on the periphery, seek to contain the advance of authoritarianism and militarism.

So far, even when they are in charge of states, the leaders of the extreme right, with a few known exceptions, have not managed to eliminate the democratic game. It is too early to say whether the factors listed in this book will be enough, taken together, to halt the regressive march and pull the various societies out of the quagmire in which they find themselves. The door of history tends to close, but it remains ajar. How can we get through it?

The question refers to politics not in the gray and militarized form it takes in the arena of the great powers, but, on the contrary, in the sense of reconnecting those at the bottom with the transformative perspective. The various interpretations collected in these pages do not, of course, claim to point to solutions. If they provide clues as to where the “narrow door” might be, they will have already made some contribution to halting the infernal descent.²³

*André Singer He is a professor at the Department of Political Science at USP. Author, among other books, of Lulism in crisis (Literature Company). [https://amzn.to/48jnmYB]

*Bernardo Ricupero He is a professor in the Department of Political Science at USP. Author, among other books, of Romanticism and the idea of nation in Brazil (WMF Martins Fontes). [https://amzn.to/4gVZizw]

*Cicero Araujo He is a professor at the Department of Philosophy at the University of São Paulo. Author, among other books, of The Form of the Republic: from the Mixed Constitution to the State (Martins Fontes). [https://amzn.to/3ZXI2Up]

*Fernando Rugitsky is professor of economics at the University of the West of England, Bristol, and co-director of Bristol Research in Economics.

Reference

André Singer, Bernardo Ricupero, Cicero Araujo and Fernando Rugitsky (orgs.). The second circle: center and periphery in times of war. Campinas, Editora Unicamp, 2024, 464 pages. [https://amzn.to/3U38Df5]

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Notes

See Singer; Araujo & Rugitsky, 2022.
Schossler, 2023.
Baker & Sanger, 2023.
Roubini, 2023.
See, on this subject, Tooze, 2018.
Argentina and Saudi Arabia also had their applications for incorporation accepted, but later withdrew. In the Argentine case, this was due to a decision by the government of Javier Milei.
See chapter 5 of this book.
Yang, 2022.
See Kennedy, 1987, p. 397 et seq.
More on the crackdown on protests in college from the USA, available here. Regarding the German case, it is worth mentioning the banishment of Yannis Varoufakis, available here. Regarding the cancellation of Nancy Fraser's academic visit to the University of Cologne, available here.
See Lührmann & Lindberg, 2019.
Available here.
Available here.
Hochschild, 2016.
Pearson et al., 2022.
Miller, 2023.
Updated data available at https://www.ochaopt.org/.
At the time of writing (May 2024), estimates suggest that soldier deaths in the war in Ukraine have already surpassed the XNUMX mark, and civilian deaths are estimated at over XNUMX Ukrainians. For civilian deaths, see the latest UN report on the matter, available at this link. For estimates of soldier deaths, see The Economist,, available at this link; as well as the report of the The New York Times, available at this link.
Riley & Brenner, 2022.
It should be clarified that, for our part, the use of the notions of interregnum and bipolarization suggested by Streeck has no relation whatsoever to recent developments in German party politics. See, in this regard, this link.
Riley & Brenner, 2022.
Johann Eishner apoud Mannheim, 1999, p. 43.
Benjamin, 1994 [1940], p. 232: “But the future did not become for the Jews a homogeneous and empty time. For in it each second was the narrow door through which the Messiah could enter.”