By CLARISSE GURGEL*
If the left decides to occupy the streets, it will have to face a real encounter, in alleys, alleys and armed ditches.
There are many who think that Lula, once again, is not establishing a frank debate, even within the Workers' Party, about Bolsonaro's impeachment. According to many, for the PT summit, it would be preferable to keep Jair M. Bolsonaro in the 2022 election than to give the capital a chance to find a more aligned name, capable of defeating Lula at the polls.
The capital, in turn, is already beginning to test its alternative names on the streets. However, it finds limits in concreteness, beyond the support in networks and in the organizational forums of the acts. Present at the demonstrations were Brizola's PDT and Marcelo Freixo's neo-PSB, which Denise Frossard already has enough of. But the capital wanted, in the streets, there, together and mixed, the PSDB and the PT. After all, where was Dória, this Saturday, when Avenida Paulista was taken over by screams, in defense of the impeachment of the current president, seen as his archenemy? The right wanted this big meeting.
The fact is that the streets offer something that no virtual network or application can. Something that approximates propaganda, agitation and direct action. These three dimensions of political action, when combined face-to-face, enhance the truth. As purges sessions, some names that dared to appear in the acts, in real life, were booed and harassed. This was the case of Ciro Gomes and Paulinho da Força, in São Paulo. Such refuge on screens led some to prefer to send videos, duly projected on big screens, on the avenue. This is the security available to remote activity and which has already become evident in the deepening of intolerance in politics, also making clear what can no longer be tolerated.
On the other hand, there is the face-to-face relationship that, until now, only the churches, the drug trade and the militias have had, in the last thirty years, deepening, however, the alignment of Brazil with the USA, via neo-Pentecostalism, entrepreneurship and bullet . In such a way that the right and, more precisely, the ultra-right, has exercised a monopoly on face-to-face political work for at least three decades in Brazil. And with it, the monopoly on disobedience.
This refuge on screens, by the way, has been the hallmark of this algorocracy, supported by the radicalization of a constituent element of capitalism – its genuinely illusory, fanciful aspect, which ranges from merchandise to fictitious capital. Fake news is cool, close to a fake bank, fake vaccine, fake stabbing, fake obituary, fake elections… Not only is the production of the fake cheaper – after all, it is more costly to raise money to produce a vaccine than to promise it in minutes , for short. This reproducing character of the farce, incidentally, gained a great boost in the pandemic.
In such a way that everything seems to carry a risk of having a hoax revealed. Not only classes, meetings, seminars have become predominantly remote. The manifestations are transmitted live, through several channels, on the network. Even the most intimate relationships have become increasingly virtual: nudes, matches, virtual-sex. At the same time that everything is tested, because everything has an image, everything is denied, because every image can be a manipulated and manipulative selection.
But it is interesting how this intimate finds the same border, when only in virtuality. And the term is happy, because, like the virtual, it is an intimate that carries in itself much of a speculative character, of promise: an intense night is projected, full of madness. A night that never comes. In such a way that, like a love encounter that never takes place or work colleagues who never meet, the acts seem to promise something, whose failure actualizes their need.
It is what capital wants, that the left always offers “citizenship platforms”, as test tubes to solve its cadre crisis, until 2022, and, thus, produce a residue, a slurry of all the demonstrations, if it does not go viral. , pardon the word, in a new dramaturgy. In a parallax hunger, in search of everything, the right grabs even the rest. And in order not to miss what Rousseau called the “opportune moment”, those in the streets seem to be ready to prevent the right from surrounding the acts and calling them their own.
This tension requires that the demonstrations leave the circuit desired by the capital and, unfortunately, by Lula himself, who timidly supports the acts so that, at the same time, they do not lead to impeachment and do not lose his star stamp. The big night is always postponed. It is therefore necessary that the acts force, even more, a closer encounter between those on the left, the poor and those who work. Be it in its preparations, be it in its accomplishment, be it in its unfolding. But, for that, the left needs to get out of a network of equivalences, in the strongest sense of the term, and stop believing in a great night.
There are situations in which the subject seeks a partner on a dating app just to establish a deeper relationship on the app. It is the case where the means becomes an end, but whose end adjusts perfectly to the new molds of the means. It's not for sex, it's for conversation. And then, the fuck is in the conversation. Note, however, that this displacement takes on the character of moralization: always accompanied by this more measured posture of the couple, there is the statement that the two are in the app in search of a truer relationship. This “more true”, in many cases, implies a constancy in the network. In such a way that the criticism of the pragmatic and instrumental use of the medium ends up renewing the very usefulness and necessity of the instrument, in a more-enjoyment.
The same seems to occur in the demonstrations in opposition to the Brazilian genocide. Now, capital – liberal in politics, liberal in economics and humanist in discourse – demands that the left accept the parties of the right in their actions, condemning what they understand to be the political pettiness of sectors linked to the PT and the PSOL, with eyes turned only to the elections. In other words, differently, the right seeks a conversation, but it's not just to have sex. The left, on the other hand, would be protesting to win votes, making use of the instrument of marches and demonstrations in search of a greater approximation between voters and candidates, such as in a network of relationships or any uberization, whose main objective is to accelerate circulation, bringing the service closer. of the consumer.
Thus, what is expected is that, in the name of something greater, a “common good” – democracy -, the left will allow the right to participate in the marches, in the midst of the crowd. In this way, the right criticizes the use of acts for electoral purposes, because, only through a broad agenda, it is able to repeat, as a farce, the tragedy of 2013, reusing the acts for electoral purposes.
However, the right is beginning to testify to its limits, on the streets, in the face of an even more experienced left with a lot of capacity for aggregation. In this way, the left signs its name and has the chance to demarcate the limits for the composition of something that, in addition to being a united front, is a cultural front. The Brazilian people seem to be making a choice, and it involves something other than the right. The message is for Goebbels and his followers, who will have to learn that a lie, when repeated many times, no longer becomes the truth in Brazil.
It now remains for the left to reinforce its lines, dig its tunnels and basements to occupy other, much riskier streets. If the left decides to even occupy the streets, it will have to face a real encounter, in alleys, alleys and armed ditches. Demarcating will require far less virtual means. But that way, he will not have an algorithm capable of diverting, like arrhythmia, the desires of a people that enjoys nothing else. It won't have fake paste. These are meetings in the dark, without visibility, many times. But they are much more intimate encounters. So that the left is involved and the people show that truths, when repeated many times, become change.
* Clarisse Gurgel Professor of Political Science at the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO).
