By GABRIEL BRITO*
It doesn't matter if Pablo Marçal is elected or not. The political and institutional system can even stop it. To then restart his management of the city crowned by the big capitalists of the city
There's no way around it. Pablo Marçal is the biggest political-media phenomenon of the 2024 municipal elections. As explained in this video by Ícaro de Carvalho,[1] Winning or losing the election for mayor of São Paulo has little bearing on this consideration. Pablo Marçal has already won, at least as far as he is personally concerned.
Here, it is worth looking for the reasons for its success, which are independent of the electoral results. It is possible that we will even see his candidacy challenged, due to the obvious electoral crimes of abuse of economic power, as demonstrated by Tabata Amaral's campaign committee and even journalistic investigations that show how Pablo Marçal turns his electoral campaign into a kind of financial pyramid. Ultimately, its political work system promotes incentives similar to vote buying.
However, an eventual defeat of his candidacy, at the polls or through electoral justice, cannot affect the causes of the rise of this authentic son of neoliberalism. That's what it's all about: Pablo Marçal is a rare successful case of a system that imposed an individualized struggle for survival on the working class.
Slaughtered by economic reforms dictated by big monopoly capital and its ideology – there is nothing technical about late economic liberalism – Brazil abandoned its immense mass of workers to every man for himself, under the false mask of entrepreneurship, nothing more than a updating the capital-labor relationship and its new forms of subordination and super-exploitation (of both human beings and nature).
Where did your support base come from?
We are facing the consequences of economic reprimarization under the guidance of the banking-financial system and its private accumulation of wealth through the spoliation of nature and financial investments backed by current extractivism, hence the brutal advance on forests, rivers, indigenous lands, etc. An agrarian-financial model that looks like a digitalization of 19th century Brazil.
This is in a highly urbanized country, with a population concentrated in 10 large metropolitan areas, where life is hellish for the majority (not surprisingly, increasingly larger shares claim mental health problems). The latest round of privatization of public and state assets, reforms that make work precarious and increase job turnover, the deindustrialization typical of dependent capitalism, associated with the advancement of the internet as a space for the circulation of products and varied wealth, has created an unprecedented mass of people desperate for survival strategies.
Pablo Marçal and his self-help courses that promise wealth are a product of this void of social and economic horizons. His followers are the people whom our model of capitalism threw onto the battlefield without weapons or any protection. Unlike Jair Bolsonaro, he is a true outsider who can credibly state that the State does not work, as he and his followers have actually been aborted from the supposed ideal of progress.
It is worth remembering what Paulo Guedes said at the famous ministerial meeting of Jair Bolsonaro's gang, on April 22, 2020, at the beginning of the pandemic: “there is no money for a small company”. In other words, there are no real incentives for what would be true entrepreneurship, which could be broadly associated with the fourth industrial revolution and a digital-informational economy with added value, including in education and health systems, social integration and environmental sustainability.
Thus, the pandemic radicalized an economic model that further fragmented the working class and accelerated new forms of production and circulation, through digital platforms for the mass of workers and home office for a slightly more qualified segment, but also absorbed by the deepening of competition between workers.
“The digital work platforms analyzed were created in a context in which work occupies all spaces of life […]; in which trade unions are extremely fragile, making their struggles difficult; in which nation-states are captured by large corporations, and they are the ones behind the platformization of services; in which the precariousness of work is extremely high and companies that own digital platforms will intensify it even further; Finally, in a context in which neoliberal rationality makes us believe that there are no alternatives to the proletariat, other than accepting the precarious jobs offered to them out of benevolence”, defines Vanessa Patriota, auditor at the Public Ministry of Labor, in her book (Badly) camouflaged subordination: capitalist domination at work on digital platforms, in a review written by work sociologist Ricardo Antunes.
His analysis dialogues directly with Ricardo Antunes' own findings regarding this process, in his recent books, especially the collection of texts entitled pandemic capitalism. The Covid-19 health crisis was perceived by the sociologist as a new moment of destruction and productive reorganization of an even more deadly capitalism, manifested in increasingly extreme weather events, where Brazil became a privileged stage.
All of this meant a new stage in the process of income concentration and widening inequality, a context in which the cost of living continued to increase. No wonder these same workers have a second job and become addicted to games and bets. Anything goes to increase your income. On the other side of the coin, an unemployed and underemployed mass sees this same low-value-added digitization of the economy destroying the value and need for their work, which will still be deepened by the advancement of Artificial Intelligence. Not to mention the ramifications of organized crime across the most varied sectors of the formal economy, with the financialization inherent to this process.
This is where the unbelievable 13 million followers on Instagram of the “benevolent” Pablo Marçal come from, after all, a seller of illusions who produces absolutely nothing tangible. But it has a real success story to sell.
In the land of the blind...
Pablo Marçal is, therefore, the king of the discouraged, of neoliberal subjects. The guy who made it in the jungle of every man for himself and, in fact, a self-made man. The example to be followed by the millions of young workers that capitalism produced and ideologized, but did not include in its promised world of prosperity. He is the leader of Brazil that neoliberal reforms, especially the latest ones, produced. His followers are nothing more than people without a collective, supportive horizon, without CLT and without retirement.
The rich businessman – or coach – set up something similar to a pyramid scheme and rewards followers who voluntarily share their videos. In the end, the viewing of their videos in incomparable numbers is the result of the “entrepreneurship” of a huge number of underemployed or young people who are still unemployed, but who are skilled users of digital tools, who do not have the slightest ethical or moral discernment of the messages propagated. Or worse: they have exactly the ethical and moral discernment of Pablo Marçal.
If in recent years we have been manipulated by robots, trolls e bots who falsified the perception of reality in the service of old parasites of power, the military and the business community embedded in the State, we have now “evolved” to a stage in which the political debate was directed by a retinue of teenagers and young people who just want to know about the 1.000 reais that can receive as a reward for their digital leafleting work.
Therefore, it doesn't matter if Pablo Marçal is elected or not. The current political and institutional system may even be able to stop it. Soon after, he restarted his management of the city crowned by the big capitalists of the city. Thus, the malaise of our civilization will be reinforced among the excluded, segregated and precarious population, who will continue to be condemned to work insanely for survival and create the most unpredictable strategies to achieve what the system, in fact, denies them.
*Gabriel Brito He is a journalist, reporter for the website Outra Saúde and editor of the newspaper Correio da Cidadania.
Note
[1] Ícaro de Carvalho is also a product of new communication platforms. Presents itself as copywriter of the internet, that is, a marketing writer, an area in which he delved deeper. Directly involved in the rise of the neo-fascist and Bolsonarist production company Brasil Paralelo, and today apparently disconnected from this political sector, seems qualified to describe the Pablo Marçal phenomenon, since his own popularity on social media and the products he sells in his company O Novo Mercado bear similarities to the central character of this article. In short, another child of the process described here.
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