By MAYRA GOULART & THEOFILO RODRIGUES*
Commentary on the book by Fábio Palácio.
It has been more than ten years since the disruptive events of June 2013. That year, the country recorded the lowest average unemployment rate in its history, around 5,4%; inflation was relatively stable, around 5%; interest rates were at their lowest level ever recorded; the minimum wage was being valued above inflation; millions of people were being lifted out of poverty. Although Brazil remained an unequal country, this was no different from what it had always been. The violence of the demonstrations, therefore, was surprising in its appearance. But, as Marx noted in The capital, if the appearance and essence of things coincided immediately, all science would be superfluous.
In recent years, there have been many attempts to understand the phenomenon, seeking to go beyond appearances to investigate the essence of the events. Despite the amount of research in this direction, it is difficult to say that science has reached a consensus on what happened. It is still too early if we think about a scientific chronological scale, which requires time for observation and emotional distance from the object studied.
In relation to 2013, this separation has been difficult, since these were events that marked the transition to a difficult period of democratic regression in Brazil, as interpretations on the subject corroborate.
It is in this context that the book deserves attention. Under the June sky: the 2013 demonstrations in the light of cultural materialism, by Fábio Palácio. Fábio Palácio uses the theoretical approach developed by the Welsh Marxist Raymond Williams to analyze the events of June 2013, focusing especially on the issues of communication and culture.
The central question of the book is stated at the beginning of the introduction: “It is necessary to investigate how a movement that promised a democratic revolution could end up in a conservative counterrevolution” (p. 16). The interesting thing about this formulation is that the term “end up” does not express the intention of presenting a causal connection between the two things. The reflection, carried out based on Raymond Williams’ concept of “emergence”, brings with it an inflection beyond the constraints of instrumental rationality, incorporating, in dialogue with another legacy – the Gramscian one –, the idea of “structures of feeling” as a determining element in the configuration of processes of hegemony and counter-hegemony.
In this sense, hegemony cannot be understood as the imposition of a single cultural standard. It is formed by a set of mechanisms of coercion but also of consensus formation. Furthermore, cultural hegemony is not a total phenomenon. The real culture of a period is understood as structures of feelings that include counter-hegemonic dispositions.
The actual lived experience is always diffuse, as were the demonstrations of June 2013 and the events that followed them. In this sense, the concepts of emergence and structures of feeling become useful tools not only for identifying vanguards, but also for highlighting that the lived experience is not previously shaped by categories that determine its meaning in a univocal way.
A few words about cultural materialism are in order here. For a long time, Marxists viewed historical materialism through the metaphor of the building, in Althusser's well-known expression in State ideological apparatuses. The structure of the building, that is, its lower part, would be society and the economy. This base would serve as a foundation for the upper part of the building, for its superstructure, which would be represented by ideology, consciousness, culture, communication, institutions, etc.
This interpretation was based on German ideology, a youthful work by Marx and Engels that inverted the idealist reading proposed by Hegel, for whom ideas would shape social being. But it was also present in Marx's mature work, more precisely in the famous Prefácio of 1859. In the intellectual dispute of their time, Marx and Engels were right to invert the debate proposed by the idealists.
In a not so well-known letter to Bloch from 1890, Engels explains that Marx and he needed to emphasize the importance of economics at a time when their opponents denied it. Something similar to what Lenin once called the “theory of the bending of the stick”: when the stick is too much inclined to one side, it is necessary to force it to the other, so that it finally ends up in a fair position – a formulation that is also present in the positions by Althusser.
The problem is that, over time, this inversion generated insufficiencies and erratic interpretations, which separated consciousness, culture and communication from the economy into distinct or even opposing fields. It is worth mentioning: Marx himself, in his mature work, The capital, had already demonstrated the role of consciousness in the construction of the material world. But what remained in later historical materialism, with a few exceptions, was the dichotomous reading, which separated consciousness from material life.
It was to correct the course of historical materialism, to update it, that Raymond Williams conceived the methodological approach of cultural materialism, dialectically articulating these dimensions. It is from this theoretical basis that Fábio Palácio highlights the constituent and material character of culture.
Questioning Marxist interpretations that grant ontological priority to an idea of “material life” that is alien to the dimension of feeling, thought and culture, and recovering the principle of dialectics as a central element of Marxist criticism of Hegelian idealism, Fábio Palácio invests a good part of his book – a chapter of over 50 pages derived from his doctoral thesis defended at the School of Communications and Arts at USP – to explain to the reader the theses of cultural materialism. And he uses two concepts from this theoretical framework – hegemony and structures of feeling – to structure his interpretation of June 2013 in Brazil.
The phenomenon cannot be studied in isolation, especially since Brazil is part of an international system in which similar phenomena are observed. Fábio Palácio perceptively observes that the international environment affects national dynamics. His second chapter reviews political movements that occurred in the first two decades of the 21st century that are related to the Brazilian case.
The author categorizes these events in two ways: (i) movements linked to hegemonic forces, that is, articulations linked to the interests of preserving order, such as the so-called color revolutions – including part of the “Arab Spring” and the Latin American initiatives against Chávez in Venezuela and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil.
(ii) Movements linked to counter-hegemonic forces, such as the Indignados in Spain and the Occupy Wall Street in New York, among many others. Herein lies a strong point of Palácio's work: demonstrating that, contrary to what reductionist opinions present in the Brazilian left claim, the major international protests of the 2011-2013 cycle were not homogeneous and cannot be reduced to a mere orchestration of a command center of the Open Society of George Soros, the Koch brothers or the Ford Foundation.
Armed with the tools of cultural materialism and his good reading of the international context, Palácio manages to identify in the third chapter the reason why, despite an apparent tranquility, the context that led to June 2013 held within itself the elements for the outbreak of what followed. Those demonstrations brought with them a new ethos, a new structure of feeling.
The progressive governments of Lula and Dilma Rousseff enabled significant advances in the economic field of redistribution. Although insufficient to reduce the abysmal social inequality in Brazil, public policies such as the increase in the minimum wage, the Bolsa Família program, the Mais Médicos program, and the expansion of access to higher education through Prouni and Reuni, among many others, created a false impression of social satisfaction.
However, in the field of consciousness, in the arena of the dispute of ideas, almost nothing was done by these progressive governments. This opened the way, Palácio will say, “for the reactionary right, investing heavily in new digital media, to offer its own interpretation, depoliticizing the achievements, identifying them as the fruit of merit and individual initiative, and not of a deliberate political project” (p. 51).
From this perspective, the author argues that the demonstrations of June 2013 signal the emergence of a new structure of sentiment, led by emerging forces that are organized based on new forms of communication: social media. The theme of the internet and networks occupies a relevant space in the analysis. Unlike idealistic interpretations, Palácio criticizes the illusion of technological determinism, according to which networks would produce waves of free and autonomous participation by themselves.
Marxist Fábio Palácio sees the internet as a new arena for class struggle. Another important element of the author's work is the fact that his insertion into discussions on communication is carried out from a sophisticated perspective, developed through empirical studies on digital activism.[I]
Fábio Palácio rejects the technological determinism common in readings about the rise of the far right in Brazil and around the world. The idea that “social changes are a natural consequence of technology, which, in turn, is conditioned only by its own internal rationality” (p. 21) is questioned, since, for the author, “the meanings of new technologies can only be assessed in light of an examination of the broader social structures that determine these technologies in their conception, as well as in their uses” (p. 22).
Furthermore, Fábio Palácio – based on data from the 2014 Brazilian Media Survey – makes clear the reach of traditional media and their contribution to the dissemination of feelings of dissatisfaction that, on the networks, were disseminated in relatively restricted groups.
Furthermore, while there are innovative practices in the field of communication, such as Mdia Ninja, and new deliberative possibilities opened up by the internet, there is also the colonization of networks by often unspeakable interests, which shape preferences and vampirize democratic struggles. In Gramsci's terms, these are the new private apparatuses of hegemony. Palácio does not corroborate the post-Marxist optimism of Hardt, Negri and Castells about social networks on the internet.
In short, the work brings at least three relevant contributions: firstly, a strong criticism of conspiracy theorists who see exogenous factors in everything, but ignore the structure of feelings that shape social formations; secondly, the understanding of the internet as a new arena for class struggle; finally, the fight against economistic reductionism.
From the long lineage that comes from Marx and Engels and passes through Lenin, Gramsci, Bakhtin, Williams and Eagleton, Palácio presents himself as an honest disciple, indicating that his contribution to Marxism would be precisely in the discussion on the plane of civil society, rejecting false dichotomies and reinforcing the dialectic that characterizes this tradition.
In his words: “Gramsci avoids a mistake that can end up being suggested by pyramidal models of “base and superstructure”, in which the base is below and the superstructure is above. Gramsci does not see the superstructure as a second-order abstraction, a mere reflection of the economic base of society. On the contrary, the superstructure is in the State, but also in civil society. This is not only the world of economic relations. There is also politics, ideology, culture. This is the conception that will later be developed by Williams” (p. 59).
For the author, it is necessary to use a theoretical lens that challenges the primacy of the economic in order to understand a movement whose causes are also located in the realm of feelings. As demonstrated throughout the text, the 2013 demonstrations are not the product of an economic crisis, but of the frustration of future expectations on the part of those who were in some way affected by the processes of economic and symbolic inclusion carried out during the administrations of the Workers' Party.
There is one last attribute to be highlighted in Fábio Palácio's work, which is its aesthetic dimension. The book is engaging not only because of the depth of its narrative but also because of the way it is written. Without excessive formalism and without shying away from dealing with highly complex and abstract themes, each word seems carefully selected and placed, providing a unique fluidity that captivates from the first page to the final outcome.
The author's ability to construct elegant sentences and vivid descriptions is remarkable, transporting the reader into the narrative in an unparalleled way. The clarity and precision of the writing make reading a pleasurable experience, while the depth and analytical density of the text ensure that the conceptual debate is conducted with the necessary rigor.
In short, the book provides a practical application of a renewed materialism that is necessary for understanding our world in the 21st century. In the case of Brazil, if Fábio Palácio's book leaves a message for our time, it is the idea that the new Lula government that is beginning does not have the right to make the same mistakes of the past. Redistributive economic policies are welcome. These elements are indeed indispensable and essential. However, without a strong investment in the dispute of ideas and feelings, in organization and political education, the left will not be able to accumulate the political and social strength necessary to achieve the qualitative leap required by history and advance towards a post-capitalist society.
*Mayra Goulart is a professor in the Department of Political Science at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ).
*Theophilo Rodrigues is a professor in the Postgraduate Program in Political Sociology at Cândido Mendes University (Ucam).
Reference
Fabio Palace. Under the June sky: the 2013 demonstrations in the light of cultural materialism. São Paulo: Literary Autonomy, 2023, 326 pages. [https://amzn.to/3B1UfNy]
Note
[I] I am referring to the research “On the networks and in the streets: cyberactivism in light of cultural materialism”, coordinated by Palácio at the Federal University of Maranhão (UFMA). The study analyzed experiences of digital activism led by two youth movements: the União da Juventude Socialista (Socialist Youth Union) – left-wing – and the Movimento Brasil Livre (Free Brazil Movement) – right-wing. The results of the research were published not only in the book, but also in conference proceedings and academic journals.
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