By TARSUS GENUS*
Class consciousness will no longer have the grandiose syntheses of the grand narratives of social democracy and revolutionary socialism.
The historical weakness of democratic political forces and leftist parties, in general, to defend the country, the rights of workers – practically absent from the moments of resistance to preserve their rights devastated by Bolsonarism, the weak resistance of the academy – intimidated by the advance of fascism – and the almost sepulchral silence of the vast majority of the state bureaucracy at all levels, in their resistance to the dilapidation of the National State, contributed a lot to the creation of the adventurous spirit that tried to set up a coup d'état in our country. The social base mobilized in this period was always mostly Bolsonarist and popular and it explicitly said that it wanted to transform its necrophiliac policy into a new state order run by a delusional fool.
In summary, the coup did not happen because Lula won the election cleanly and won the support of a significant part of the center and the so-called civilized right, because the Armed Forces mostly did not adhere and the Federal Supreme Court, through the majority of its ministers, resolved to uphold the Constitution. There was no significant popular pressure to erode the coup d'état and oppose a mass movement, politicized and democratic, to its destructive objectives. This is not about “betrayal”, but about the absence of an organic leading group on the left, capable of having an authorized public voice to save the country from the fascist marginalia that prowled the barracks, threatened the institutions and promised a dictatorship that, close to the regime of 1964, would leave this as a mere experiment of the civilized right.
A civilizing process in crisis means, beyond changes in the ways of producing, a change in the behavior of political subjects and changes in the behavior of the social bases that today make sense of the democratic order. The industrial enterprise was the ballast on which apologetic, conservative, reformist or revolutionary conceptions of order were built.
For conservative forces, the problem is clear: how to maintain order within a flow of ideas, movements, disorders, productive regulations, where the new ambitions of private accumulation can, at the same time, conflict, compete and stabilize - minimally – without impugning the predominant forms of combination of social peace, which are at the same time conflictive and stabilizing. For the forces of change, the question is different: how to recycle itself, as a political organization, to maintain democracy as an incessant “becoming”, for a more humane and enlightened world?
The question is not wasteful, but the answer is not easy. If it is true that fascism blocked the lights, where concrete societies were illuminated by revolutions, the costs of changes for equality left brutal traces, which offered the capacity to restore the darkness or rebuilt, from its rubble, the possibilities to delegitimize the construction of a new social order that would reconcile humanity with nature, social subjects with endless democracy and the reconstruction of the idea of a planetary community, based on the premise that men and women are “born equal in rights”, an idea suppressed by the concreteness of “the growing primacy of the monetary economy (…) one of the most notable manifestations of the ongoing virtualization (…) where the biggest market in the world is that of the currency itself.” An extension of the real company, it is the virtual antithesis (existing as another reality) of the modern industrial community.
“The classic organization (of that company) gathers its employees in the same building or in a set of departments”(…), but, in new companies, whose point of full maturity has not yet been found, “the center of gravity of the organization is not one more set of departments, workstations and time books, but a coordination process that always redistributes the space-time coordinates of the work community and each of its members differently, depending on different requirements.” Virtual reality is no less reality than the present reality, but one of the main vectors for the creation of (new) realities”. The national political community of workers, politically organized in the parties where the companies of classic industrial capitalism predominated, does not speak to the future already deterritorialized by virtual reality, which is another concrete and another formally organized type.
The virtual company – for example – can no longer be “situated” in a “precise” way, (since) its elements are nomadic, dispersed, and the pertinence – for example – “of its geographical position has decreased a lot”. From these Pierre Levy coordinates, if accurate, it can be deduced that – when the production of this new virtual reality is fully matured – we will surely have a new type of capitalist society or, if possible, a socialist society not yet imagined.
The forms of political organization of communities, classes, estates, movements, which will suffer this turmoil, which will take place within the current industrial order for a certain time, will no longer be the same and politics will be totally reorganized: both in its subjective production , as in your results.
The modern party-form of industrial society in the liberal-democratic regime – therefore, of all parties – was constituted in a more stable world, legally, and with minimally stable forms of production in industry, which shaped political parties to be “capable of ” to answer for their audiences the questions posed in that flourishing historical situation of liberal democracy: a party-class relationship always explicit in the programs of each party organization, more idealized or more pragmatic, more utopian (in the sense of both Lenin and Bloch) of “more concrete” or “less concrete” utopias. Private property, the market and forms of State were the clearest points that divided the parties, both those who saw in capitalism the eternal mode of social reproduction, and those who designed new ways of life, other forms of State and social solidarity .
I maintain that it is easier to adapt, to these new times, the parties that defend the eternity of the order of capital – without utopias – because they can organize themselves in gangs that dispute power through violence, through the control of opinion in social networks or – simply – through neo-fascist organizations. Contrary to the parties and political groups that defend a future socialist society, based on the sharing of opportunities and the effectiveness of fundamental rights, which will go through a more difficult situation, because it is no longer the organic “class consciousness” that pleads for changes, but the sum of the conscious individualities of a community of complex desires and needs, material and spiritual, that will hit the wall of class privileges, these yes!, that organically control the movement of money.
The identity formed by the classes that guided modern politics remains, today, more for its alienated opposite than for its affirmation of a common life, which is available both to be kidnapped by fascism and to be valued by the ideas of a democratic community. Bauman, in Identity, showed the bankruptcy of the identities of the industrial age in frank decay, already in 2004, when he saw posters on the walls of Berlin, which ridiculed the “loyalties” of the industrial society already upset by the virtual-real: “Your Christ is a Jew. Your car is Japanese. Their pizza is Italian. Your democracy, Greek. Your coffee, Brazilian. Your holiday, Turkish. Its numerals, Arabic. Its letters, Latin. Only your neighbor is a foreigner!”
While this concrete universality had not become dominant, the “pure” classist character of the political struggle still maintained its status of validity, today defeated when identities marked by difference, which in Lula’s first election had not yet become , still so evident in ordinary life.
From then on, classes still remain at the center of the understanding of present history, but no longer to reveal any possibility of the future. The individualism of modernity projected in the scenario of political liberalism, provided that the sum of individuals – brought about by the capitalist society of stable classes – established their relations of collective interest from the sum of the desires and impulses of free individuals in the political sphere, the from a common life that is both conservative and revolutionary.
The modern factory was, then, the operational base of the dissolution of the proletarian individuality, observed the old Marx, as much to storm the sky collectively as for today, outside the Marxian prediction – in the failure of the proletarian revolution – to see in the entrepreneurship of oneself a way out more possible than the revolution, to better pave their monotonous and low-income life. It is a mistake, but it is a mistake full of immediate attractions and with a certain historical perspective.
Our problem – the problem of parties of the democratic and truly libertarian left – is not, therefore, simply “returning to the bases”, because there is no longer the collective subjectivity that formed us and could, as much tend towards revolution as towards struggles. deep democratic reformers. Class consciousness will no longer have the grandiose syntheses of the great narratives of social democracy and revolutionary socialism, as it – redone – will have to compose on the horizon a constellation of possibilities of the various consciousnesses of free individualities, of various groups, of classes and subclasses combined, for the salvation of misery and oppression, as well as of Humanity itself, today dispersed by the fear of final war and planetary destruction.
The class struggle did not end, but it changed subjects, forms and addresses. The policies against hunger and social desertion typical of national neo-fascism, foreign policy as an engine of the internal economy and the possible fiscal framework, may give rise to a new reflection for the left, in a time that is not epic in which death lurks more than death. life, more war than peace and above all an enormous void of definitions about the future.
*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. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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