By LUIZ ROBERTO ALVES*
The elite elected the greatest evil in the republic; now seeks the third way while maintaining the liberal fetish that enriches it
The Brazilian economic power that claims to be a wall demolisher stuck its neck out and took up the search for a third electoral route. Neither the captain nor Lula for 2022. It is not all power, as much of it has always been on the wall of Casa Grande, waiting to parasitize the landlord of the time. Now, it is known that gaps have opened and this part of power opens its bids. Not without intelligence or a speech that tends to coherence in its own way, that is, maintaining the liberal fetish that enriches it and, not even remotely, considering that the secular humiliated and offended should come first in the queue of rights. Who knows, the campaign could be based on studies and analyses. But before that, it is necessary to remove the sinister figure of the Planalto. Urgent.
At a time when the Lula-thief's bipolar discourse is taking hold in disturbed minds, as the regular procession of justice unfolds processes and sees with more dignity the verse and reverse of Moro & Cia's plots, the new repent (as in Italy) also arise in order not to harbor so many remorse arising from the linguistic knavery that took the ex-president to vicarious prison, in whose emptiness the ferocious-disturbed and the (in the biblical sense) now mutating economic legion elected the greater evil of the republic.
It would be good, from now on, that a certain PT advisor, always more realistic than the king, did not wear himself out giving answers to the business elites that escaped the wall, because they will have a lot of work and their time-space is very different from the life of a party that already had Apolônio de Carvalho, Paulo Freire, Chico Mendes, youth and grassroots groups, certainly before the bland idea limited to “black capes” (as my worker friends used to say) of staying in power for dozens of years .
There are already enunciations of the path of the former walled. Incapable of going to the streets intensively and extensively, kneading clay and losing the symbolic “caviar” (which would be the attitude of the tertius iungens), they give long interviews and write good formal texts, try to split political nuclei and co-opt them. What is impossible for them is to understand the real Brazil. However, just like the old elites who beat the nail and horseshoe of the Estado Novo, who burned their eyelashes in the candles of the pre-coup marches of 1964, who transformed the “citizenship” of the 1988 Constitution into a gluttony of profits in cities and fields (and they almost traveled to invade the Capitol in the Trumpist rage) also the new well-spoken elites do not have any historical problem. What they think is projected onto what Brazil thinks and an immediate metonymic effect takes place: they are Brazil, because the enunciating part of a project is realized as o statement from across the country. Problem solved! (although nothing settled…). Carlos Guilherme Mota analyzed this projection well from a cultural point of view. Celso Furtado, Caio Prado, Dupas and other sensitive people have already shown all this very well, although the extras of the total-brasil-image have never read it; and if they did, they understood nothing. In other words, those elites of money and possession cannot think about the humiliated and offended because the latter do not exist; they've been around since the Colony, even if some are young today. They are Brazil. They take advantage of Brazil. We'll have to put up with your so-called social-democracy speeches again. And for more than a year, with the chance of the decrepit presidentialism we have (which thinks it is realistic being a tightrope walker) to still offer them positions, as happened in the Lula and Dilma governments. Hopefully this doesn't happen again.
In this way, they repeat their methods. This means that they propose Tertius Gaudens, which this columnist developed in a previous text, that is: “to be in the middle of the electoral process and find gaps and fissures in the current candidacies to, then, build the pleasure of victory for the benefit of the Tertius Gaudens”. Their supposedly happy-elect cannot be someone who thinks structurally (at the risk of understanding the country!) but who structures impact strategies, as liberalism likes to do. Perhaps an increased family allowance is part of the strategies, as well as new hallucinations about primary and secondary education and cultural advances of a financial nature to guarantee the support of intellectual sectors.
From the texts that such powerful groups began to publish in the mainstream press, Bolsonaro-Guedes-Mourão (and a significant part of the troupe) are the scum, the evil, the incompetence, the usual cavalry. However, on the other hand, Lula is the enemy of the economy-goddess, which is the same thing as being an enemy of Brazil in reading that part that is realized as the whole. If necessary, these elites will exacerbate in their discourse. For the world of rampant ignorance, they will make comparative simulations with what does not exist in reality, that is, communism, socialism, the implementation of censorship (lies will help to demonize a necessary participatory and transparent regulation of the entire media system, including the data theft of millions for trading by big tech), plus the end of the spending cap, the horror of abortion, non-party school, inflation and much more. Even the monthly allowance (which one?). For the intellectualized and more divided world, they will do math, discuss the angelic agribusiness, make frames with technical and technological strength (who knows digital and planetary citizenship), maybe they will find fault with the “socialist” group of the American Democratic Party (Brazil first) and, especially, will show the unionist threats to the employment of the vast youth (was it the angel Gabriel who made the youth unemployed?). More than anything: they will work towards naturalizing and normalizing liberalism and its tricks, not its tricks. For these elites (although we have not had a single modernizing and liberal historical moment that was actually at the service of the impoverished majorities) liberalism, with neos and treos, is an anthropomorphic entity, a kind of handsome, smiling young man who comes to dinner next Saturday and took the opportunity to ask one of the family's daughters to be engaged or married. Natural, very natural. Sartreanally, hell is other people. However, they may radicalize, but they will not have the right to deny the universal ethics that Paulo Freire dealt with. But they don't like the brilliant master, our centenary, one bit.
This is not PT's time-space. Or Citizenship, or Psol. The time of the old party born in rebellion and in the conquests that led to redemocratization is very different. It is time for party organizational culture. Time for building memory, renewed and innovative discussion of forces and, as Celso Furtado, Agnes Heller and Paulo Freire systematically thought, continuous act to the feeling that individual conscience can align with the strength of social consciences in movement in the country (which will produce broad political awareness), it will be possible to break the brutal inequality (which is symbolic before economic) and, in this lasting wave, the cultural forces that shape the world of work will open the floodgates of the ethnic-political creativity of Brazilian diversity. We will break brutal liberalism.
No new process will come from the economy as a liberal phenomenon, because it got stuck in the disaster of neoliberalism and it has no more creative vocabulary left, but observations of nothing and anything. Repetitions and skating. But creation can come from oikonomos, that is, preferential care for the humiliated and offended within a budget-tax revolution. The death of this well-known and pamphleteering economy (which is repeated in the media every day and which makes us bored) is not the passing of another way of organizing social values in a new key of political culture. But there is a demand for new intelligences and searches supported by human history and geography. Go to the bottom of what Josué de Castro and Milton Santos thought, mediated by the ecological ties of Chico Mendes. There will already be a governance policy. It does not program or plan, as these are attributes of the former. But future governance is enunciated in the first moment of making the policy. This is also Freirean.
There will probably be a mix of tertius, as even Ciro Gomes will assert himself as one of them (probably dated), even though he is set aside by a significant part of these elites. Ciro can only be tertius of himself, because his recognized intelligence and good explanations about reality carry, however, the ostensive mark of anachronism and of an individual mythology that does not recognize the other. That's why he participates in elections with a ticket bought for a short course in important universities in the world. Or anything else. The problem is that he unvotes himself. He is an ex-voto. Any enunciative invention in him will be the new one to demand attitudes from Prometheus, if he doesn't turn Sisyphus. But, let it be said, apart from the sinister figure of the Planalto, there is intelligence in the electoral game. People deserve respect, which Ciro and the elites do not have for Lula. And he deserves it, he has the historic right to be respected and he continues to be the most lucid person in electoral politics in contemporary Brazil. The disrespect towards D. Marisa was already above all human measures.
I hope, therefore, that the next campaign is of a good linguistic and ethical level, so that the children of this land will have the right to understand that this is not the country of beatings and dirty tricks, because change is possible.
Paulo Freire would have turned 100 this Sunday, September 19th. In fact, his energy completes the centenary cycle and goes on… Missing the always master and friend. The one who dared to think and say: “I would really like it, you know, if one day a man, or a woman, from the back of the meeting room, would raise their hand and start saying: 'Look guys, from an epistemological point of view... ' Another country. Another time-space. Not today's.
* Luiz Roberto Alves is a senior professor at the School of Communications and Arts at USP.
