By TARSUS GENUS*
In Argentina, not even those who will vote for the madman deserve what will happen with his victory, but much less those who resisted in the name of democracy and human dignity
The economic and social transformation of the French Revolution and the American Revolution modulated the so-called “political progressism” to allow, not only a molecular transition of portions of the masses – from the base of society towards its summit – as well as to gradually incorporate the vast masses of the countryside and the city in the new society, with its new workers, consumers and excluded people. The irrelevant ones, however, who tend to become the majority in the reign of capital are the “reserve army” of modern industrial production, plus the precarious, intermittent, without class identity, with few resources to survive: “the outsiders”, who live their marginal lives outside the rules other than those of the “perfect” market.
Just as the Church made an agreement with the modern State, to maintain its influence and power in the emerging new world, the need to partially cede the absolute powers of the modern State – through more democratic rules – allowed the “popular classes” to seek sharing of wealth and political participation, in a parallel way to the revolutionary ideas, which also emerged (and were exhausted) in the ascendant capitalist world.
The majority electoral machines and the media control of opinion, however, called on everyone to accept anything but what is there. But the “anything” is mainly politics as a mere spectacle and ordinary life as a sociopathic delirium. Here comes Javier Miley and Jair Bolsonaro.
The different forms of populism that emerge in this vast world are always compatible with the conditions specific to capitalism in each place, sometimes on the right, sometimes on the left of the more backward, or more “progressive” political spectrum, but always opposing “destructive” Revolutions. ” of the capital system and provoking compromises in what gave rise to special moments of anger and fantasy, in two of the great revolutions of modernity: the American and the French, through which democracy was evoked as a “universal value”.
The failure of the Russian Revolution to create a new democratic type and the bankruptcy of European social democracy, as a new democratic utopia, is now assailed by an outbreak of sociopathic populisms that, this Sunday, will knock on our door again.
I write on this melancholic and rainy Saturday a few hours before the vote that will choose the next president of Argentina begins. Torrential rains from climate change? I don't know, but the alarm of history is on in every sphere of the day. But why “melancholic”?
Then it's simpler: when the most prepared ideologues of liberal-rentism in the media begin to place an equal sign between Lula and Jair Bolsonaro, Javier Milei and Sergio Massa, it is because all boundaries between sanity and insanity have disappeared, between civilization and barbarism, between the serious and the playful. And when the moment of truth arrives, in this specific case, when the test of concepts challenges intelligence, the monsters land and it turns out that the “populism” of these scribes is a rhetorical resource of an absurd political theory.
Let's assume that both – for example – Javier Milei and Sergio Massa – are populists, but then the next question could be: are they both normal people? No one is normal up close, neither is it from a distance. It all depends on what is expected of normality in a given cycle of history. What I wonder is whether the columnists, who constantly try to brandish the word “populism” against any people upon whom they direct their class prejudices, don’t know – or haven’t studied to know – that populism is, in fact, not a disease of democracy, but an evolutionary symptom of capitalism's adjustment.
Populism emerges in modern political democracy as an expression of capitalist evolution, to mediate inequalities maintained in its long course of domination, both in successive stages within the geopolitical domain of the great powers, and in countries on the periphery of their system. Populism is a political form of integration of the masses so that the system can function with a social peace that the creation of its wealth, spontaneously, cannot impose. In serious crises of the capitalist world-system like now, populism then becomes ill and becomes, not a process integrating the system, but a denunciation of its insanity.
To deviate from the answer to whether Javier Milei is a sociopath or not, concepts disappear into the irrational and anything goes settles into the hell of incoherence. Everything can be said, because what is said soon disappears into thin air, which means consecrating as normal that a sociopath can be President of our neighbors, as it equates to a candidate who takes advice from a dog that has been dead for ten years (the “libertarian” anarcho) ) to the other – a traditional politician committed to liberal democracy (the former Peronist) – because both would be “populists”. Such a rhetorical exercise, in practice, indicates that liberal democracy is so destroyed, that the state of civilization is so finished, that there are only two theoretical solutions left, but only one “practical” solution.
The theoretical solutions would be, one, the revolution, and the other a fascist dictatorship, but as there is no possibility of a revolutionary solution, there remains – in fact – only one: the “way” of the model of meritocratic ultraliberalism, which Jorge Lemann certainly can teach us patiently, as it turned out very well in the case of the American Lodges. This exit would be led, and victorious, not by a politician, but by a “syndic”, or by a madman removed by sword and fire from the polls or a coup d'état.
The melancholic Saturday, therefore, is portraying the possibility of the victory of a president audited by dead dogs and Saturday's torrential rain could be an announcement of the tears of the Earth in imbalance, flooded, and, at the same time, calcined by hatred and selfishness . Not even those who will vote for the madman deserve what will happen in Argentina with his victory, but much less those who resisted in the name of democracy and human dignity.
*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). https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I
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