By DANIEL AFONSO DA SILVA*
The initial moments of the Lutopetismo in power produced the “silence of the intellectuals”. A silence that, in truth, was fading all that intellectual strength inherited from the 1930 momentum until it was extinguished.
On numerous occasions, in connection withThe meaning of Roots of Brazil — foreword written by him to the 1967 edition of masterpiece by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982) —, Antonio Candido de Mello e Souza (1918-2017), in writing and in person, always reiterated the centrality of momentum 1930 in Brazilian national life.
Those who saw and heard it will easily remember it. The cadence of his exposition was affectionate and the strength of the images mobilized, generous. Everything alluding to a certain retrospective astonishment in the face of what Brazil has become. Always emphasizing the existence of a before and an after 1930. A kind of turning point. A path of no return. That the most boys, in the words of the master, they will never be able to imagine. Likewise, the works of the main interpreters of that time.
As is well known, the core of that famous preface by Antonio Candido was an ode to the analytical innovations of Gilberto Freyre (1900-1987), Sérgio Buarque de Holanda (1902-1982) and Caio Prado Junior (1907-1990) in the interpretation of Brazil. Always emphasizing a before and an after. Before and after 1933 and Casa Grande & Senzala. Before and after 1936 and Brazil roots. Before and after 1942 and Formation of contemporary Brazil.
Everything magnetized in the driving force of momentum 1930. Which, ultimately, shaped the multiple dimensions of all the movements that brought Getúlio Vargas (1882-1954) to power, constituted Varguism and Getulism and redefined the country's destiny. Despite the Estado Novo.
On the trails of the idea of formation — which Antonio Candido himself, in his Formation of Brazilian Literature, of 1959, had helped to assess —, the Brazil of 1930 was complete. Its condition as Brazil was unequivocal. From the pens of the Arcadians of Minas Gerais to the disconcerting drawings of Machado de Assis (1839-1908), the country had in every way formed and internalized a genuine national feeling among its inhabitants. So that, in short, in a hundred or so years, between Cláudio Manuel da Costa (1729-1789) and the contemporaries of the Wizard of Cosme, Brazil became Brazil and Brazilians, Brazilians.
But something was missing.
The heavy burden of the past was still difficult to overcome. The colonial experience still haunted the crew. Having taken slavery to the limit of its own exhaustion exacted a very high price. Who knows, perhaps unpayable. So, after the transition from Monarchy to Republic, after the Abolition and after Machado, the challenge was to mitigate the negative externalities of this burden. And that was precisely what momentum 1930 started to do.
Getúlio, Vargasism and Getulism were syntheses of many processes. Pasts and futures all came together there. As in a two-faced experience. Not without tensions. The first and most fundamental ones were those of 1932 and 1934. Which, read sideways, were a simple reaction by the people of São Paulo. But when viewed in greater detail, they were the affirmation of demands for the acceleration of modernization.
In São Paulo and in Brazil, there was certainly a desire to do everything quickly. Goodbye, Old Republic. Goodbye, old and new ancients. Welcome, new moderns. A bliss based on reason and rationalization, knowledge and wisdom. Which ended up driving the people of São Paulo to take the lead and found USP — the University of São Paulo — to serve this more than consequential purpose: to bring clairvoyance to the process of modernization.
Product, therefore, of that momentum In 1930, USP was created, of course, to train the elites of São Paulo, but it soon began to serve the entire country. As a model of reason and rationalization of efficient and lasting processes of knowledge production and learning. It immediately imposed a farewell to dilettantism — typical of educational institutions until then — and a call for the construction of systems of thought with means of verification anchored in methods, techniques, concepts, and rational theories originating from the Humanities.
The global university experience, since Bologna and Paris in the Middle Ages, has already demonstrated that the Humanities constitute the heart of any higher education institution that desires the epithet of University. For it is they, the Humanities, that irrigate with reason verifiable standards of any truly honest intellectual production.
By Humanities, we mean — remember John Neiville Keynes (1852-1949) — Arts that taught how to think, as in Philosophy, the core of the Humanities, which only teaches how to philosophize — remember Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). Thinking and philosophizing are very old knowledge. They predate the Sciences. And, above all, the Human Sciences, a product of the demands for specialization of the Enlightenment. Knowledge that carries scientificity, but should never be confused with the closed circuits of the spheres of existence investigated by the Human Sciences.
It was, therefore, to these Arts, Humanities and knowledge that the founders of USP — and, subsequently, the founders of other Brazilian universities — entrusted their destiny.[I] The year was 1934 when the momentum 1930 was moving full steam ahead.
Twenty years later, in 1954, the momentum 1930 was a headless year. Getúlio left life to enter history. As if in a dramatic gesture. But with a purpose and reason: to perpetuate the spirit of 1930.
Everything — and even death — except the end of 1930.
And it was, of course, the spirit of 1930 that pulsed strongly in the achievements of the new bossa nova during the presidency of Juscelino Kubitschek (1902-1976). But now, stripped of the perversity of Vargasism and the authoritarianism of Getulism. Until Brasília came along.
Brasília was an old demand, meditated upon since Independence. But after Brasília came Jânio Quadros (1917-1992), who did what he did: assassinate Getúlio once again and open a new season of experimentation.
Leonel Brizola (1922-2004), still in 1961, from the South, tried to stop the disaster. Later it was the turn of Tancredo de Almeida Neves (1910-1985), Afonso Arinos de Mello Franco (1905-1990), Francisco Clementino de San Tiago Dantas (1911-1964) to try to remedy all that through parliamentarism and the enthronement of President João Goulart (1919-1976). But it didn't work. 1964 was already looming over everyone's homes. And it didn't take long for it to enter and disjoin the momentum 1930
That plot materialized by Senator Auro de Moura Andrade (1915-1982) — “Attention! The President of the Republic has left the seat of government. He has left the nation headless. […] He has abandoned the government! […] (…) therefore I declare the Presidency of the Republic vacant” — was a response to the allegory of the “sea of mud” among the elites since the misfortunes of 1930, 1932, 1937 and 1954. It was, essentially, a reaction to the malaise of the momentum 1930
Thus came AI-1. Which was, of course, institutional violence, but also power grab historical. I had the feeling that Getúlio's page would be turned once and for all. But, once again, it didn't work out.
The 1965 elections were held and the spirit of 1930 once again prevailed in important places such as Rio de Janeiro, Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina and Mato Grosso. This led the military leaders to change their plans. They quickly enacted AI-2 and AI-3. They hampered political conduct. They advocated a new Constitution. They ejected the moderate Castello Branco from power. They established AI-4. They affirmed their hard line. They created a new regime and consolidated their plot with AI-5.
It was the end of illusions. After 1965, the almost naive atmosphere of 1964 no longer existed. The weight of the Cold War had now explicitly contaminated everything. The fear of a Balkanization of the Americas, the Cubanization of South America and the Algerinization of Brazil set off all the red alerts in Washington. The inauguration of the Berlin Wall in 1961, which had given concrete form to the Iron Curtain predicted by Winston Churchill (1874-1965) since 1946, now became an issue almost within reach in the form of the Brazilian internalization of the East-West tension inaugurated in 1917. The North American humiliation in Vietnam and the May 1968 events in Paris were seen as spasms of these contradictions. Producing constraints on one side and liberation, libertinism and liberalization on the other. Arriving in Brazil as a source of inspiration for the Opinion, Tropicália and saying goodbye to the “Fights, never again" From now on it would be pua. And pua strong until 1973-1974, when the hard line gave way for the presidency of Ernesto Geisel (1907-1996) to begin.
Saying quickly what was done slowly, under the Geisel presidency all the negotiations were made regarding everything that would come into force from 1973 to 2013.
As a principle, there was the simple proposal of a “slow, gradual and safe” opening. Which, seen as a whole, was a clear, mature rehabilitation of the spirit of 1930.
As a result, the protest candidacy of Dr. Ulysses Guimarães (1916-1992) came about in 1973. From this combination — rehabilitation of momentum 1930 and political permissiveness —, paths were opened for the rise of the MDB — Manda Brasa —, the projection of Amnesty, the recomposition of the party system, the hypertrophy of popular participation, the democratic electoral successes in 1976, 1978 and 1982, the frustration of Direct Elections Now!, momentum Tancredo de Almeida Neves, the New Republic, the Constituent Assembly, the 1988 Constitution, the new regime, the Collor de Mello presidency and all the claims of political, economic and social stabilization until the hecatomb of June 2013.
It seems like it wasn't, but it was: forty years, 1973-2013, of construction vanished in a few nights of convulsion.
Those nights of that June closed the momentum 1930. But, unfortunately, they threw the country into the unknown.
It was the first time in the country's history that Getúlio was not called upon to mediate a crisis. The first time that momentum 1930 allowed itself to be used — to follow or reject — as a reference. The first time, therefore, that Brazil flirted with abysses without any anchor of salvation.
O impeachment 2016 was, in every way, more painful than 1992 precisely for this reason. In the same way that the arrest of President Lula da Silva in 2018 only occurred as a result of this undeniable complete loss of sense.
A serious country — read: with some backing — does not arrest the President of the Republic, period.
By depriving a president of the Republic of his freedom, the entire country succumbed to a heavy darkness. Bidding farewell to the pacts for redemocratization and also ending the movement for a “slow, gradual and safe” opening. As a result, Jair Messias Bolsonaro became president, against whom the most sophisticated peripatetics were able to simply formulate a “Not him!”
It would be comical if it weren't tragic, that slogan "Not him!" covered up all the deeper processes, negated the good fight and gave Bolsonaro a set of surplus powers that he never had.
Bolsonaro was merely the result of a suppression of references that gave the country the majority temptation to “deconstruct everything that is there”. Starting with the legacy of the 1930 momentum. Which was ignored in the crisis of June 2013 and squandered in the four-year period 2019-2022.
But go back to the beginning and nestle into the nights of June 2013. Nothing there was simple.
Say and think what you want to think and say, but the protests of those nights gave rise, strictly speaking, to a legitimate and honest revenge by those Brazilians who noticed that the wave of the 2008 global financial crisis had turned into a tsunami and was very close to destroying what was left of hope for good days.
So let's go back to 2008.
2008 was, indeed, different. Different from 1929 and different from all the acute crises before 2008.
It was not, of course, the end of the capitalist accumulation system, nor the end of the accelerated financial globalization that began in the 1970s. But it was, honestly, the moment when the entire West — and not just Brazil — began to face precipices.
Staying in the United States, the Occupy Wall Street - and occupy all parties — was much more serious, profound and penetrating than all previous movements of popular protest in centuries. But, unlike anything seen, for example, since the Pearl Harbor commotion, now the protests were all — although noisier — sterile and far from being emancipatory.
None of the people who attended the protests in the United States after 2008 had any illusions of emancipation. Everyone took to the streets knowing that all the milk had already been spilt. This was very different, for example, to give just one simple example, from the atmosphere in Selma, during the time of Martin Luther King Jr. (1929-1968), where everyone saw ways to overcome the situation. In 2008, no. 2008 was, therefore, different.
Crossing the Atlantic, the 2008 crisis completely disjointed the European construction, intoxicating the collective consciousness about the tragic and thus imposing a frank disregard for the signs of the ruins of total wars.
Unlike May 1968 — when the rebels, according to Raymond Aron (1905-1983), had neither conscience nor cause, but had some hope of emancipation — the European insurgents after 2008 succumbed to the all or nothing, certain that they would only get nothing since De Gaulle and Churchill, now, have become, among them, chimeras.
Crossing the Mediterranean, one can see the agony of Africans and Middle Easterners in the turmoil of what has come to be known as the Arab Spring — another direct product of the 2008 financial crisis. It was a desperate moment. It ended up throwing these parts of the world far beyond the end of history and the clash of civilizations. In a turbulent sea, without a rudder or compass to guide them.
Moving forward into Asia, curiously, Adam Smith (1723-1790) finally achieved his place in the sun in Shanghai, thereby putting an end to the universalist vigor of Western values.
Yes: a lot of information and a lot of contradiction. But that was all what the June nights internalized in Brazil.
The protagonists in the movement even tried to explain. But no one wanted to listen.
It wasn't about the pennies, they said. It wasn't about Marx or Jesus, therefore. But, to put it simply, it was believed to be so. Which made the whole thing even worse. Feeding the beasts that paved safe paths to the unknown. Which showed its face in the 2018 presidential elections and, more broadly now, in the 2024 municipal elections.
In normal times, a Pablo Marçal would never come close to the political Olympus. Unlike his traveling companion, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, who wallowed for decades in the underworld of parliamentary representation, Marçal came as a novice and virgin to compete for the most important city hall in the country and almost won.
Getúlio turned over in his grave. Jânio Quadros did too.
In response, well-informed people such as Minister José Dirceu were quick to dispel the enthusiasm by predicting that the Marçal factor is nothing more than a “problem for the right” and for “Bolsonarism”.
OK everything is fine!
But how can we explain the overwhelming success of the “right” and “Bolsonarism” based on the Marçal factor?
With all due respect to Minister José Dirceu, but everything is much more complex: neither Marx nor Jesus.[ii]
Without the reference of the momentum 1930, nothing, at the same time, older and more modern than the Marçal factor and, in the same way, nothing, at the same time, more perverse and inconsequential than the Bolsonaro presidency.
But what about Lula da Silva's third presidency?
Without support, there is no salvation. And President Lula da Silva was mobilized back into power as a reaction to 2018 and 2016 without dwelling on the void left in 2013.
Still on 2013 and after, it is worth noting that we said goodbye to momentum 1930 without inserting anything expressive in its place.
Otherwise, where will the new interpreters from Brazil be — replacing the magicians of the 1930s — to signal, after June 2013, what to think and what to do?
But, of course, it was all a process.
Going back to the recent past, remember that the frustration with the initial moments of the Lutopetismo in power produced the “silence of the intellectuals”. A silence that, in truth, was fading all that intellectual strength inherited from the momentum 1930 until it fades away.
It borders on a truism to say that this erasure produced 1. the severe and incorrigible impoverishment of public debate in the country and 2. the acceleration of the demoralization of the Humanities within Brazilian universities.
So what came after 2013 made everything that was already fragile even worse. The production of knowledge and wisdom that, by dint of momentum 1930, had moved away from dilettantism, now, in the 2024st century, it began to flirt with indigence, inside and outside universities, reaching its most recent zenith now, in XNUMX, with the release of “Unitopia” by Brasil Paralelo (BP).
It seemed like the end of the world. The noise was gigantic. Prognosticators of ill omen emerged from many places. Some very eloquent, while others were simply shrill. All in communion. Calling for an almost union-like reaction to a structural evil. Which resembled Armageddon, the end of times, the Final Judgment. To the point of justifying the call:
“Friends: Brazilian public universities are going to be the target of a hate campaign by ‘Brasil Paralelo’, which will be launching a documentary in the style of a professional reporter on Brazilian public universities on September 17th at 9:20 p.m. This is a commissioned piece with the purpose of creating a campaign to discredit public universities. We need to sound the alarms in the other ADs and mobilize our field to take up the comments and denounce the channel for defaming public universities. This is clearly an orchestrated attack against public policies, such as the “day of fire,” which, by the way, is not just one day, but the entire month. Universities are under heavy attack; it is a cultural war to discredit and justify a campaign to privatize higher education in the country once and for all. Full alert!”
All students attending Brazilian universities were included in this call.
But, despite the fervor, it would not be the case to comment, validate or disapprove the documentary without seeing it. To the documentary then.
A copy One of its advertisements openly stated that “Brasil Paralelo cameras have entered Brazilian public universities. What we discovered will be revealed by professors, students and staff who experience the reality of the classrooms. Don’t miss what we’ll reveal on September 17th, at 20:XNUMX p.m. You’ll watch the first episode of our new series Unitopia.” It was, of course, exaggerated and appealing, designed, above all, to sell. It’s worth remembering that BP is, above all, a company.
Forgetting the exaggeration and giving the project a vote of faith, we move forward with the documentary with the hope of finding something new and innovative. Something that would, in fact, expose the stage of agony, anguish and degeneration of Brazilian universities.
But, no: nothing.
Neither the end of the world nor “a hate campaign”. Neither a “disqualification campaign” nor a movement to “justify a campaign to privatize the country’s higher education once and for all”.
Nothing: simply, nothing. Just a simple — and even honest — piece of reflection.
But then why so much noise from both sides?
It would be curious if it weren't tragic.
Among the critics of the BP project are, clearly, those immoderate people who have joined the ranks of the “Not Him” movement. People who sincerely condemned the documentary without seeing it. Because if they had seen it, they would have been able to see that the lethality of “Unitopia"It does not go against the grain of universities — which, to a large extent, have already died — but, on the contrary, it seeks to recover the missing link between the nights of June 2013 and the rise of the Olavo-Bolsonaro movement, expressed in the temptation to deconstruct everything that is there.
"Unitopia" therefore goes far beyond universities. It is an attempt to occupy the space that intellectuals who are heirs of the momentum 1930 became vacant after the nights of June 2013.
What to say? What to do? Cry?
Goodbye, Machado. Goodbye, Getúlio. Goodbye, Brazil.
And to the winner, chloroquine!
*Daniel Afonso da Silva Professor of History at the Federal University of Grande Dourados. author of Far beyond Blue Eyes and other writings on contemporary international relations (APGIQ). [https://amzn.to/3ZJcVdk]
Note
[I] On this subject, empty, especially the special issue of the journal Advanced Studies (v. 8, n. 22, 1994) of the IEA in commemoration of USP’s 60th anniversary. https://www.revistas.usp.br/eav/issue/view/729
[ii] And, here, the reference, so that there is no doubt, is, yes, to the classic work of the Frenchman Jean-François Revel.
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