Politicizing the economy -

politicize the economy

10/11/2022

Bolsonarism • Partners • Lula Government

By CRISTIANO ADDARIO DE ABREU*

Disseminating economic nationalism is the way to reverse the popular rise of fascists in Brazil

The material, economic improvement of the Brazilian people in the years of the PT in the Presidency of the Republic is the logical-argumentative center of the PT and progressives in the political debates in Brazil, and it should continue to be so, but with a more robust institutional communication plan, that includes this economic panorama in political, cultural, and national axis. Let us remember Lenin: “economy is concentrated politics”.

Bolsonarism proved that the people want faith and dreams in polis, the people want to debate ideology and other possible (or even impossible…) worlds, even if Bolsonarism has proved this from the side of a nightmare. About fascism, Walter Benjamin already said that against the empty aestheticization of politics, we had to politicize aesthetics. Perfect: but in addition to politicizing political rituals, it is also necessary to politicize the defense of the progressive economic project.

The hysteria of attacks against left-wing ideology has paralyzed progressives in fear of being accused of being ideologizing. Meanwhile, the extreme right surfed wildly in an ideology totally detached from any materiality, proving the lack of ideological debate in the polis Brazilian: they prohibited the left from talking about ideology, but occupied the public space spewing a ghostly ideology that is pure ideology, in the worst sense of the term. They created a gap in the public debate, and then filled it from the other side, succeeding because of the imbalance they created. It is necessary for the left to face an open ideological debate with this specter fake to save polis Brazilian

Ideological tripod of Bolsonarism: economic ultraliberalism, military and police corporatism, religious fundamentalism (evangelical Talibanization)

Here is a tripod for understanding the dynamics of Bolsonarism's colonial fascism. Many may consider such a descriptive choice of Bolsonarism to be arbitrary (the militias were missing... digital world, with its apparatus of robots and volunteer mules on networks, triggering narratives for different groups, with videos and texts biased towards each receiving group: this is the directed rhetoric of the phenomenon, made by professional intelligence groups specialized in data manipulation and artificial intelligence, creating parallel worlds of diverse bolsonaros (there is bolsonaro[I] the most reactionary evangelicals, the most progressive, the ultra liberal gay Bolsonaro in economics, the older Catholic conservative...).

Soon, with social networks and digital communication, Bolsonarism was invented using digital platforms to build its myth aimed at who will receive the information: information is privatized, made to order for what the receiver wants to hear[ii]. And this is very serious: this is the destruction of -Polis, from the public space of confrontation of narratives and perceptions of reality, in which through debates, theses against antitheses, we collectively arrive at political syntheses of that moment, we collectively arrive at what the North American political culture calls compromised. That's the policy!!!

Politics is impossible to be done in the capitalism of digital platforms, which has hijacked the public space, and distorted the perception of reality, in the service of the economic interests of the big monopoly capital that they represent. The Brazil of Bolsonarism is a CASE extremely dangerous form of social experiment, carried out under the monopoly control of platform capitalism Big Tech and which have already made Brazil the world's biggest case of a cognitive civil war.[iii]

The creation of diverse bolsonaros, targeted to their bubbles is a political crime, carried out by the bolsonarista apparatus under Steve Bannon (who is now imprisoned) who led the re-election campaign of Jair Bolsonaro,[iv] but that was only possible due to the logistical support of these monopoly digital platforms of the Big Tech, who slyly sell themselves as politically neutral: but they are not! The explosion of the extreme right in the world, a framework in which Bolsonarista Brazil is an experimental vanguard, the most important of all, is the result of the monopoly capitalism of digital platforms, and the history of collaboration between platforms and the wave of the international extreme right begins to be deciphered and written.[v]

Big tech regulation and national option in digital communication

This manipulation of digital platforms, carried out by international groups under Steve Bannon and other mafiosi of the planetary extreme right, who created Jair Bolsonaro, threw Brazil into a permanent civil war, as public debate becomes impossible, with this creation of parallel realities. The parallel Brazils, created on the networks, made politics impossible, thus throwing Brazil into a permanent civil war.

The solution to this is political, and resuming, or rather rebuilding, a legitimate space for public debate is an inescapable historical imperative for national salvation today. And this imperiously involves regulating digital networks and platform capitalism. It is vital for the post office to have its own email, and also a network such as whatssap: public and national of the Brazilian Post, thus enabling national options for digital communication. In addition to a regulatory agency for the internet: a kind of ANVISA for the internet has to be created.

These two proposals (in addition to three others) were approved at the National Congress of ANPG (National Association of Graduate Students) in July 2022 in Brasilia, proposals taken by me and approved in the itinerant phase at USP and then in the final phase at UNB, showing a civilizing contribution of the Brazilian student movement to the center of current political issues, and even mental health, in contemporary Brazil, while the National Congress hides, for fear of retaliation, from this debate that is central to the European Union,[vi] and around the world. With emphasis on French legislation[vii] About the subject.[viii]

Without social control of Big Tech's international monopolies on digital communication, without social control and national digital communication options breaking their monopoly, without such responses the future will be fascist. As Naomi Klein has already wisely warned.[ix]

It's vital: an email, and a network like whatssap from Correios, and the creation of a regulatory agency for the internet, which forces the opening of the algorithms of social networks and platforms. If this already existed, the phenomenon of Bolsonarism would hardly have been so successful. Because the existence of tailored Bolsonaros for those who see and hear in their network bubbles is a political crime, only achievable by big tech, which are not neutral in the manipulation and commercialization of algorithms, and in the passive acceptance of such communicational crimes of propagation of lies in blocks on the networks they control.

The internet is already the center of polis and the Internet must be occupied and regulated, or there will be no democratic future. Not in Brazil, not in the world.

Media monopolies cannibalized by big tech monopolies

But monopoly narratives, previously created by the old media, which are now cannibalized by the Big Tech monopolies, today reach Orwellian levels of alchemical transformations, by making any lie become the truth, in a way never dreamed of by Randolph Hearst or Roberto Marinho at the time. But the lies, or almost lies, that intoxicate everyone on the networks today, stem from a generalized pattern of production of lies coming from the time, so close in time, but already so far away structurally, from the narrative monopoly of the large business communication groups: TVs to front.

Coming from this time, the anti-communist monopoly media discourse, and anti any form of left bias, against state-owned companies and against the strong state. This being a picture of a media narrative dictatorship reproduced for more than 40 years in everyone's mind, of only defending economic liberalism, of only accepting in public debates the so-called neoliberalism (gerontoliberalism[X]… as I call it), and censure any defense of a more statist and regulatory dimension of the economy. Such a narrative monopoly, coming from the old media, is one of the legs of the tripod of Bolsonarism (economic ultraliberalism). This mental confusion of confusing state and regulatory agencies with communism reached heights with Bolsonarism, but it is a creation of more than 40 years of communicational lobotomy on the Brazilian people, in the mechanical defense of sacred economic neoliberalism. Such economic neoliberalism became a New Scholasticism, the petrified Aristotelian philosophical school, which continental European universities continued dogmatically reproducing until the French Revolution, while society experienced an explosion of publications with the intellectual revolution of the Enlightenment.

Such narrative shielding of a single discourse in economics, made by the old media, turned economic liberalism into a social monster in Brazil. Such fanatical discourse generated an army of zombies who repeat that State and regulatory agencies are communism, and anyone who studies economics at least knows that they are capitalism. The media lobotomy generated an army of fanatics, who believe that capitalism should not have a State, and that pure liberalism exists: they believe that liberalism and capitalism are the same thing.

They are not: as Fernand Braudel teaches us, capitalism is the home of monopoly,[xi] of the economic floor in which the State is synchronic with capital, liberalism is more the small trade and the anarchy of crime, while strategic productions (energy, weapons, high technology...) need to be under state protection, to guarantee national sovereignty and minimal popular. Liberalism is an ideology, and capitalism a historical practice. Under capitalism, the bigger the markets, the bigger the state: both are two sides of the same coin. But the legend of pure liberalism, created by the old media (Globe, April…), upon reaching the Age of fake news of digital communication, it became a mule without the head of ultraliberalism: one of the bases of the central tripod of Bolsonarism.

Well, this ultraliberal fanaticism contradicts another tripod of the phenomenon: that of military/police corporatism. The former captain, expelled from the Army for planning to plant bombs in barracks (to defend his salary increase at any cost), became a federal deputy defending, caninely, higher wages and benefits for all uniformed categories in Brazil. His model is Pinochet's Chile: which privatized almost everything, but did not touch the payments and state pensions of: military, police, and the judiciary. It is increasingly obvious that the more liberal the economic agenda, the more authoritarian the political boots will have to be to make it real.

Like Pinochet, one of Jair Bolsonaro's heroes (alongside Argentine dictator Videla, Paraguayan pedophile dictator Stroessner[xii], as well as the torturer Carlos Alberto Brilhante Ustra...), he so didactically taught: the ideal laboratory of “neoliberalism” took place under Pinochet's boots from September 11, 1973. Interestingly, Jair Bolsonaro and Paulo Guedes began to poke us with the “ pure liberalism”, to the hysterical joy of TV commentators, of all the old monopoly media, just when a popular uprising in Chile began to take place to free Chile from that cursed “neoliberal” heritage that suffocates them.

Bolsonarist sphinx: contradiction and unconfessable affections

But the so-called contradiction between ultraliberalism and military corporatism in no way affects the converts: logical coherence does not interest them. Only aesthetics with sound and fury, revolt without a project, and other explosions of the bestial mythology of Bolsonarism interest them. Bolsonarism is a leap in the celebration of illogicality, it is the most dangerous historical phenomenon ever experienced in the history of Brazil.

Bolsonarism can already be considered a true political Satanism: it is a hysterical sect, devoid of any logical pattern. His logic is selective (therefore, a logical contradiction), his true logic being the manipulation of the passions. Above all, frustrated emotions, hatred. The hatred that is the mainspring of Bolsonarism, manipulating the mental scum of society, the ignorant, averse to studying and reading, and who feel now, for the first time, debating and influencing history.

Irrationalism and illogicality in Bolsonarism are not just weapons of seduction for a rematch of stupidity: it is a weapon with economic direction. The hatred of knowledge is a manipulation of the legitimate hatred of capitalism's monopolies, which impose queues, prices and solutions, in which there is no social control or collective right. The case of vaccines is exemplary: Pfizer or Johnson & Johnson were not questioned, Bolsonarism did not question Big Pharma industries, or propose the strengthening of national laboratories that break patents. No: Bolsonarism leveraged passions, in this case a terrible and powerful passion, fear in the pandemic, for an uprising against science and scientists. The left needs to talk about Big Tech and Big Pharma, explaining the problems and proposing national solutions, to break the Bolsonarist wave.

Illogicality and Religious fundamentalism (Evangelical Talibanization)

It is necessary to deal with the last leg of the Bolsonarist tripod: religious fundamentalism. Detaching words from Acts, these evangelical sects that defend Jair Bolsonaro, or rather their Bolsonarist pastors, have nothing of Christians, serving an agenda of lies and death, an agenda that, if it has any metaphysical direction, can only be the opposite of Christianity . We need to say these things without fear, to destroy such an absurd phenomenon that is Bolsonarism. With its illogical “myth” destroying any connection between Words and Acts, one sees in the Central Plateau an agent of the opposite action to that indicated in the sentence: “And the verb (Logos) became flesh and dwelt among us.” such a sentence New Testament, which announces the materialization of God in Jesus, is also a metaphor for logical, honest deduction, put into practice in politics, and in everything in life. Connecting thoughts, words and acts, put into actions that feed each other when confirmed in history (when true) in the construction of life, building history and its meaning. That's living, and that's politics, so negativized by the media and false moralists.

A political leader structured on the destruction of the meaning of words, on the confusion of the senses, and on giving up thinking… He can only be an agent of absolute evil on Earth. This agent of a Malthusian agenda to promote death, carried out by this government in a proven way in the pandemic,[xiii] seeking to kill deliberately,[xiv] how was Jair Bolsonaro's management in the health crisis. The left cannot be afraid to speak to the real People: affirming the fact that Bolsonarism is Satanism in politics. And that the pastors who support him are Jim Jones of death, anti-Christians in everything. It is necessary to speak this, literally, with the people.

Christianity was already called by Nietzsche the Platonism of the masses, and the structuring of this religious universe is the marriage of Platonism, of Greek philosophy where Platonism is central, with the religious traditions of the eastern Mediterranean, which mixed since the Empire of Alexander . Christianity moves away from mythical circular thinking towards logical linearity. There are two words in ancient Greek to say word: myth e Logos. The first is the mythical, fanciful word, from the children's enchanted speeches, and the second is a word with continuities and logical sequences.

The nickname of Mito for this satanic beast placed in the presidency in 2018 is no coincidence: the president who only lies[xv] honor to be identified as a compulsive mythomaniac, a pathological liar. Nothing is more anti-Christian than such toxic lies chronically issued by someone who should be a leader, but only leads Brazilian society down the drain, down the drain of history and collective self-destruction.

When the pocket triggers the brain

Leaving the metaphysical discussion, but still in illogicality as a political weapon, we can say that, as our teacher Marilena Chauí teaches, when people who don't like politics, don't understand politics, have never read a book about politics, never talk about politics... these people start talking too much about politics... it's because fascism is in the room. And Bolsonarism is a celebration of irrationality taken to a level unimaginable by any preceding fascism. Italian and German fascism were at least economically nationalist: they defended productivism, national and arms industry, and something close to full employment. This point is an Achilles heel of Bolsonarism, with which this text ends.

A central illogicality of Bolsonarist bestialism lies in loving the country from the mouth out, without any project to defend it, without defending national industries, nor defending national technologies, nor defending employment in the country (Agro does not generate jobs to solve this issue in a country of 215 million people…). Here we return to the beginning of the text, the economy (it's the economy, stupid...).

Bolsonarist nationalism is fake: a yellow-green hysteria, disconnected from any national project. And behold, to combat this, it will be necessary to talk about ideology (national ideology, economic policy ideologies), and seek to teach that liberalism is just as ideological as communism (if not more so…). Pure liberalism only exists in books, and its dogmatic logical-deductive vision is ahistorical: one is never liberal enough, because reality does not support pure liberalism (not even Pinochet in Chile privatized its central industry: copper).

Capitalism, as US history teaches us, is a plutocracy with its monopolies protected by its State, a State that does not stop forging wars in defense of the monopoly of power and strength of this oligarchy throughout the world. As general sanctions, and specifically the boycott against Chinese 5G technology,[xvi] that the US and the European Union[xvii] also do against China,[xviii] teaches us that liberalism is an ideology for poor and disarmed countries of the south. A country that has no industry is a colony, and follows the economic liberalism deified by Pauloguedian Bolsonarism.

And explain that the defense of state and regulatory agencies was carried out by non-socialist leaders, such as Getúlio Vargas and Charles de Gaulle, and that the strengthening of national structures is a practice of historic conservative leaders such as Bismarck (who created the public pension system German, who inspired the Brazilian), and progressives like Lincoln (who nationalized the North American railroads in the Civil War and created, for the first time in the country, the income tax, in addition to a federalized banking system under national control, via the power of the White House in determining the authorizations of dollar-issuing banks greenback).

The defense of national economic structures, with state and regulatory agencies (American model) is not communism, it is the defense of the national system of political economy, defended by Lincoln and the theorists of the American System, by Friedrich List and his historical school of economics, a tribute to the American system, by North American institutionalists, and later by progressive leaders of Latin American labor, such as the aforementioned Varges, Peron and Lázaro Cárdenas, in addition to the entire social- postwar European democracy.

Not to mention the ill-fated Benito Mussolini and Adolfo Hitler, who followed this tradition on the extreme right, and that most of those boçalized by Bolsonarism do not want so much political authoritarianism, but rather more State in the economy: economic chaos leads to flirtation with political authoritarianism , but what most Bolsonaristas would really like is more production and employment, with more productive leadership in the economy.

It takes courage from the left, and that people stop running away from this debate, defending state-owned companies and regulatory agencies in the economy. And explain: this is not socialism, this is the defense of the National System of Political Economy. The PT, which is not a socialist, should assume that it is a defender of the National System of Political Economy, and not fear the ideological debate on the economy. For this I indicate a politician from the Brazilian First Republic, the paper writer Amaro Cavalcanti, who, regarding the theater of ideologizing shadows in the economy, which already accused any active action of the State of socialism, the old statesman already warned in 1892: “In the field of science and In practice, we find three economic systems, which could be described as the socialist system, the individualist system, and the positive or experimental system: the first two. they try to solve the problem by means of absolute formulas; the latter, according to the historical elements of each people and the relativity of circumstances”.[xx]

Wise words from this old defender of the National System of Political Economy. Perhaps more other systems can still be listed, but to respond to the ultraliberal hysteria of the boçalized extreme right in Brazil today, using Amaro Cavalcanti is already a healthy bunch of economic history. The cretinous contradiction of nationalism with economic ultraliberalism needs to be attacked head on, and with that we convert more support, and destroy more and more, the liberal cosmovision of those fanaticized by economic and religious dogmas, which under mythical idolatry, deny logic and history, and they seek to make us regress to the economic farm of the Old Republic, underdevelopment and the halter vote.

Brazil was one of the countries that grew the most in the world in the XNUMXth century, under the impact of dynamic thinking, as it was historical and far from dogmatic, which was developmental thinking. Amaro Cavalcanti, with his nineteenth-century paperism, was the forerunner of this intellectual tradition, which was continued in several schools. It takes courage from the left to resume the debate on national development, and the PT needs to assume itself as a defender and contributor to the tradition of the National System of Political Economy: do you want to talk about ideology? Because this is the PT ideology in economics.

The peak of developmentalism occurred with Vargas creating state-owned energy and basic industry companies. Because today the oil of the 1849st century is the information passed on the networks. And if Brazil saw the USA and Germany enter the Second Industrial Revolution (steel, petrochemicals, electricity, automotive...) in the days of Amaro Cavalcanti (1922-XNUMX), for Brazil to only manage to enter it with Vargas, when he created the state-owned companies that directed a productive capital that the Brazilian bourgeoisie never directed, today in the Digital Era, waiting too long will put democratic survival in Brazil at risk: it is necessary for Lula to create state-owned digital communication companies. Lula's participatory budget plan, which will certainly have to use the internet, is a great sign to help with the pressure to regulate the digital sector. As well as the need for labor regulation of the uberized.

The choice of the government now elected in 2022, from the broad democratic front, between making state-owned companies in the digital sector or not, will be the choice between the return of Lula being a return of Vargas (who created Petrobras in 1954) or the return of a Peron (which was followed by military coup plotters), will be the successful reconfiguration of Brazilian democracy in the XNUMXst century, or its collapse, into digital platform fascism.[xx]

*Cristiano Addario de Abreu is a doctoral candidate in economic history at USP.

Notes

[I] The name of the being appointed to the presidency in 2018 will be used in lowercase on purpose, so that we do not collaborate for its hyper exposure.

[ii] https://www.instagram.com/reel/CkZqPlWDKvw/?igshid=MDJmNzVkMjY%3D

[iii] https://www.em.com.br/app/noticia/pensar/2022/10/21/interna_pensar,1409943/castro-rocha-brasil-e-laboratorio-de-criacao-de-realidade-paralela.shtml

[iv] https://www.diariodocentrodomundo.com.br/equipe-de-bannon-dirigiu-campanha-de-bolsonaro-diz-boaventura-de-sousa-santos-por-milton-blay/

[v] https://www.redebrasilatual.com.br/blogs/blog-na-rede/o-golpe-de-estado-continuado-por-boaventura-de-sousa-santos/

[vi] https://olhardigital.com.br/2022/04/23/pro/uniao-europeia-google-meta-algoritmos/

[vii] http://umdadoamais.com/algoritmos-publicos-como-a-franca-esta-fazendo-e-por-que-deveriamos-fazer-tambem/

[viii] https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/dossierlegislatif/JORFDOLE000031589829/

[ix] https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2017/11/08/cultura/1510165556_897934.html

[X] https://gmarx.fflch.usp.br/boletim-ano2-09

[xi] BRAUDEL, Fernand. The dynamism of capitalism. Editions Flammarion, Paris, 1985.

[xii] https://epoca.globo.com/7-fatos-sobre-ditador-e-pedofilo-reiterado-elogiado-por-bolsonaro-23486277

[xiii] https://www12.senado.leg.br/noticias/materias/2021/06/24/pesquisas-apontam-que-400-mil-mortes-poderiam-ser-evitadas-governistas-questionam?fbclid=IwAR05geSFw5p9ZwWq7asLWrU8uBndMzwPjIQC8G9I1WfgqXZ3DQrCDMw9-vA