Exhausted political rituals

Image: Johannes Schröter
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By TARSUS GENUS*

How the left is losing ground and why Sebastião Melo's alliance was perfect for him to establish himself

1.

The perfect alliance of real estate companies that now control the city, blessed by most of the traditional media – shielded by the most loyal contingent of its political commentators and its system of far-right party alliances – has once again handed the city over to health and climate denialism and traditional conservatism. Its well-crafted electoral program and the providential convincing by the traditional press that the demolition of a large part of the city had no immediate culprits worked like a glove to attract a generation of voters, rich and poor, that we were unable to win over. Let's wait for the investigations by the police and the justice system to see if this strategy will be successful.

Thirty years ago, I published a text in which I positioned myself, both inside and outside the PT, on what awaited us in the next cycle of development and crisis of the capitalist system, arguing that the left should reform itself to keep up with these changes. “Pessimist” in the pay of right-wing “reformism” was the mildest compliment I received at that time, since I also argued that the left should step forward and sponsor a labor reform to promote the protection of new forms of service provision, which would be driven by new infodigital technologies, which, on the one hand, would increase precariousness and intermittency, and – on the other – would bring new types of dependent service providers to the market.

He also said at that time that “the nature of the urban-industrial development underway does not provide for a significant “molecular transition” of individuals from the lower classes to a higher social status (“from the bottom up”), since this type of development would also “dispense” – for the benefit of capital – with the technical recovery of the workforce (…), since the tertiary sector required less labor. Thus, an abundant contingent of young workers “could be filtered among “the best unemployed young people and those just starting out in their careers” (and), in this way, capital would be able to “include” and “mold” them, according to new productivity techniques and new management methods”.[I]

This indicated that the “narrowing of the labor market and the new types of “offer” for social insertion through work, were significantly altering work itself as a factor of identity (and that) “for most people, and especially young people, work was no longer a source of “identity” and belonging to society”,[ii] that would be transferred to market compulsions.

The second industrial revolution was the social material basis on which the humanist, enlightened-democratic, revolutionary or social-reformist intellectuals – revolutionary or social reformist – focused to produce the main concepts that inspired the left, until the end of the last century. These were formatted from a series of theoretical elaborations, in which the class collectives would be in movement and/or in negotiations, to realize their political purposes.

This industrial society, based on the exploitation of absolute and relative surplus value, based on work and discipline in the modern factory, had already begun to be surrounded by a constellation of manual and intellectual services and with new tools and information technologies. This society of masses and collectives was then replaced by the society of individuals, grouped, isolated or in networks, through which new political cultures were formed, far removed from the way in which these were composed in the consciousness of individuals and collectives, in the more traditional class society.

In the early 1930s, Bertrand Russell was already writing about the enigma of how capitalist countries would organize the various fractions of capital to share profits, between financial “rentism” on the one hand and, on the other, the “fair” and due profit of industrial capitalism. The issue, according to Bertrand Russell, would be to maximize the profit of the “whole”, in such a way as to open up the possibility of paying workers humanely, so that liberal democracy would bring more peace, fewer wars and the “benefits” of the industrial system would be distributed internally to rich countries. At the end of this cycle, something new, apparently unusual, emerged: the end of world wars as occurred in the last century.

2.

This year's elections in Brazil took place entirely at the beginning of this cycle of wars that have taken place in various parts of the world, in which military conflicts are no longer determined by decisions made by homogeneous blocs, with confrontations taking place in continuous theaters. These wars arise from conflicts spread over geopolitical interests around power strategies in the now new global world-system.

This new structure has led to a diversity that is reflected in the conduct of countries and nations in conflict, both in terms of arbitrating conflicts and in reducing (or forcing) localized clashes. Wars no longer revolve around confrontation between blocs, as in the “Cold War,” but rather between poles with new identities and interests, in new forms of confrontation.

Internal political disputes in countries that do not lead these conflicts (but are drawn into them due to the functioning of the global market and the type of shared sovereignty) challenge the stability of democratic political regimes, as they are within this new global situation that they do not control. In this new context, health and climate transition denialism affect economic, communicative and productive integration with the rest of the world and become decisive in electoral processes.

The elections in Porto Alegre, as in large cities and metropolises, are not exempt from this influence, not only because the new “world wars” are no longer marked by opposing social and economic systems, but also because wars ideologically disorganize the political forces in dispute, in addition to obscuring the differences between the competing parties. Furthermore, also because the policies of minimum unity, for the support of local and regional governments, have lost the link with the two great utopias that drove them in history in the last century.

In the Brazilian case, the links between right-wing and center-right parties, on the one hand, with the utopia of american way of living offered by the American colonial-imperial system and, on the other hand, the links between left-wing parties and the utopia of equality, originating in the Soviet system, were dissolved. Thus, political disputes are removed from history and brought into everyday life, in which what is valuable and impressive are the direct messages – whether moral or immoral, humanist or non-humanist – whose value is inscribed in their greater (or lesser) speed of implementation.

We can point out, as an example, the two biggest shortcomings suffered by progressive candidates who have been present here in our state. Despite the speed of humanitarian aid, during the flooding catastrophe, there was an unintelligible discontinuity in the actions of the Federal Government in Rio Grande do Sul. The Union could have “taken advantage” of the tragedy to launch, from the state, an Interinstitutional Agency specifically for controlling the climate emergency, structured around a sustainable development project, exemplary for the rest of Brazil, integrated with policies for recovering infrastructure and companies.

The second gap, which gave comfort to the Union – not to the state – was the announcement of a Federal Agency to deal with climate issues, an agency that had no content, but was just a label. Having filled the state's treasury with money, and quickly leaving the scene, the state government took the credit and the Federal Government got the runaround.

3.

Let us look at the reactions of two great world leaders in a similar situation: Vladimir Lenin argued that the slogan “Peace, Bread and Land” of his April theses (1917), when he classified the First World War as a “bourgeois war of capitalism”. In its preparatory moments, he also designated as “socialists in words and chauvinists in deed” the partisans who supported their respective governments, which were preparing for war.

Churchill – for his part – said that “if Hitler invaded Hell, he would make an alliance with the devil in the House of Commons”, after the German invasion of the USSR, in the Second World War. The climate preparing for the global war, of a multipolar nature (still ongoing) is not a linear conflict between powers, as in the time of the two Great Wars, but its “climate” aims to “smooth”, on a large scale, the strength of extremist liberalism in all Western countries, to procreate the war tensions that were planted after the end of the USSR.

Although the process is different and has different causes compared to the wars that occurred in the last century, one does not need to be an “expert” to see that Lenin’s slogans and Churchill’s position would not be adaptable to any nation in the world today. The “externalities” are not the same, because at that time the national powers defined the conflicts as conflicts between nations, and today the widespread wars do not oppose powers defined by more or less unjust social systems, but are disputes over territorial control and energy sources for the unlimited and predatory use of the planet’s wealth.

This difference is already expressed today in “historical” defense agreements such as the one between the United Kingdom and Germany, to reinforce military forces close to Moscow that led the aforementioned countries to sign an agreement (…): “the newspaper reported The Times, citing UK Defence Secretary John Healey. “The deal will allow UK and German forces to conduct joint military exercises on NATO’s eastern border with Russia, likely in Estonia and Lithuania, and will facilitate joint arms procurement and closer cooperation in developing new-generation weapons, the newspaper reported.”[iii]

The end of the Cold War left us with a more complex model of war that, in recent years, has changed the configuration of the world of wars. There were two historical factors that worsened the current global situation: the major changes in the conception of space and time, due to new digital technologies; and the material possibility of capitalist governments deciding on progressive and dispersed wars, by governments that would be completely removed from the theater of operations, which force delegated wars, in a situation that can change sovereign controls in seconds.

The new relations between the internal political issues of the richest sovereign states and global political issues (economic, cultural, religious or identity-based) have thus begun to “threaten” the precarious stability of vast regions of the globe, already linked to a new situation of multipolarity, which is forever changing the forms and even the immediate objectives of world wars. Israel’s genocide in Gaza and the cynical American position on the matter are cruel proof of these new times.

In this new period, the transformation of the “cold war” into “hot wars” was disseminated in the foreign policy ideal of rich and technologically advanced countries, promoted from a distance, between the different countries and nations of the world system, which dispute global hegemony, sometimes isolated, sometimes grouped together, always through refined technological means.

The full dominance of financial capital over public and private business and the lack of resistance in peripheral and semi-peripheral countries to capitalism (without concern for the industrial whole) also generate the depreciation of rights and social services, both in countries that are outside the organic core of capitalism, and in other countries, less advanced but also richer.

Fascism promises the rise of those “below” through violence and thus obstructs popular unity in the struggle against oppression and poverty, when hope does not overcome fear. All this could already be seen in the beginning, in the 30s, “in the German slave-owning and militaristic method of organizing work to combat unemployment, which is also an inevitable result of a capitalism free from democratic control (…). In the past, absolutism has always been accompanied by some form of slavery.”[iv]

The concern expressed by Bertrand Russell focused on concrete capitalism, English and European, which not only had to prepare to halt Hitler's rising regime, but also to defend the maintenance of the English parliamentary system, which – according to him – could not give up a modern democracy, fully integrable into the imperial system.

He said that “there were activities in which the motive of private profit would lead, on the whole, to the favoring of the general interest, and, in other (opportunities) this would not happen. Finance is now, in this case – regardless – continues Russel – of what it was in the past – should be closer to the need for government intervention (…) as a single whole, with the objective of maximizing the profits of the whole – he argued – and not exclusively of the financial sector”.[v]

4.

The unsurprising result of the elections in Porto Alegre, despite the fierce and courageous fight of our candidate, isolated from the Federal Government and with the Workers' Party in need of renewal, is a warning to all of us: we must understand that the time when the indispensable three meals a day were enough is over. Today, not only is domination much more complex than before, but also our system of alliances for governing, similar to all the others that came from the 1988 Constituent Assembly, no longer allows us to say that hope has overcome fear. It would be better to say: caution has overcome hope and dissolved utopia.

*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).

Notes


[I] GENRO, Tarso. Article “The Crisis of Urban Unionism and the Regeneration of Solidarity”. CAMARGO COELHO & MAINERI S/C. LABOR LAWYERS ASSOCIATES. Porto Alegre: 1996, np.

[ii]Same, n.p.

[iii]'Historic' UK-German defence deal to boost forces near Russia. Sputnik,2024. Available at https://sputnikglobe.com/20241020/historic-uk-germany-defense-agreement-to-bolster-forces-near-russia-1120611257.html>.

[iv] RUSSELL, Bertrand. Praise of leisure. Translation: Nathanael C. Caixeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1977, p. 94.

[v] RUSSELL, Bertrand. Praise of leisure. Translation: Nathanael C. Caixeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar Editores, 1977, p. 63.


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