It wasn't me who said it, it was President Nicolás Maduro who classified this strange alliance, where State and society, civil society and political society, are not separated by the perimeter of the law. He told the world that his alliance would win any fight against the alliance of the right, of traditional conservatism, of the center-right, of the extreme right, part of which was organized with groups known to be coup plotters — always active in Venezuela — (it would win) because his Government it was the result of a military-police-popular alliance, of a national and anti-imperialist nature, to build a socialist regime in Venezuela.

Socialism aside, if we had any doubt about whether the confrontation in Venezuela was between two political blocs indifferent to democracy anchored in the Rule of Law, this doubt would end there, with these statements by Nicolás Maduro. The declaration is, however, the basis on which a civil war in Venezuela can be avoided, with independent verification of its results and an audit of its fraud protection mechanisms. Based on the history of the conflict, both parties may have cheated or tried to cheat the results after a popular revolution, as can be deduced from what happened in the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua.

I make this premise as a starting point for a fundamental political reasoning, because the defense of democracy without misleading adjectives — which guarantees rotation in power, based on periodic elections with verifiable results — is the most effective barrier to putting an end to both military caudillismo -police, like the beast of Nazi-fascism, on the rise across the globe.

I say this for two reasons: first, because depending on the situation of the economy and global politics, which affects the traditional media market, sufficient conditions for democratic coexistence will not be created, which would exclude the possibility of the extreme right legally coming to power; and, secondly, because the upper middle classes will be mostly uniform, in their adherence to fascism, if it reveals itself again as a real possibility of power. It has already occurred in Brazil, Argentina and other countries around the world.

A military-police-popular alliance (taken here as “popular” the part of the people armed by the government of Jair Bolsonaro, added to the poor sectors affected by the money diverted from their budgetary purposes to buy votes) — this alliance — could have been installed in the Brazil.

The coup pole would only have to have prestigious cadres from within the state corporations themselves in command and the coup, with the victory of this mob in the Brazilian elections, or even with the suspicion that the election would be stolen by Lula, would open the way of a bloodbath and a de facto dictatorship would be installed here, within a vulnerable rule of law.

The note from the PT Executive was silent in not clearly highlighting the need to establish assumptions of legitimacy for a new government in Venezuela, through the presentation of the electoral records, which Nicolás Maduro did not do and the opposition did not do either. The courageous decision of the Lula government, together with the governments of Mexico and Colombia, was, therefore, correct, when it replaced the “military-police” courage of those in power and who have control mechanisms over the State administration, with the explicit verification of popular will.

The Cold War established a very convincing historical morality in several generations, based on ethical assumptions and empirical observations, verifiable to the “naked eye”: the USSR and its “satellites” represented resistance to Nazism, proven in the 2nd. World War, when imperialism showed - it was thought at the time - the climax of its inhumanity when attacking Vietnam, which sought - with its heroic resistance to build (and did build) - a free and sovereign nation, through a just war of liberation national.

This finding becomes important to analyze the political phenomena of this stage of globalization, because it is impossible to use the same analytical categories from the “cold war” era to understand the present, where the supposed “good” and “evil” are merged – in the current cycle — in the interests of the great nations that are dominant over the second and third worlds. Isn't China, for example, the largest nation holding public bonds in the American Empire? Isn't it true, by any chance, that both China and the USA have economic and “political well-being” relations with nasty dictatorial governments around the world to protect their immediate historical interests?

The relationships of reciprocal support between the “greats” of globalized capitalism are shaped around the most immediate themes of the process of imperial-colonial domination, no longer by the great civilizational narratives in the name of democracy, socialism or the reverential projects of His paternalism. English Majesty, with the fictitious illumination of equality and democracy.

In a passage from the text “Introduction to reading Winckelmann”, written by Gerd Bornheim (Reflections on ancient art, Ed. Movimento, p.12), Goethe's famous meeting with Napoleon in Jena is reported. It is the meeting of two symbols of a time in which the Emperor, who in his youth cherished the idea of ​​becoming a European Caesar, “as if asking Goethe” for his glorification, to be done through a historical “drama”, which would be written by the brilliant German poet and philosopher.

Goethe, the Homeric Greek, is reluctant to commit to Napoleon, the epic Roman: “how can we glorify someone who disfigures the Greek”, asked the philosopher, looking at poetry from outside the charms of romantic subjectivity. Trump, Putin and Zelensky are the most acute faces that pass through the world, with different currencies of valuing the repeal of modern humanism and with different forms of appropriation — by the branches of financial capitalism — on different continents of the world. Its mainstays are wars, which is neither epic nor Homeric, but tragic.

Another memory that haunts me is a passage from Ten days that shook the world (John Reed) who, shortly after the Bolsheviks took power, made a historical report on the greatness, problems and initial tragedies of that moment in European and world history, which swept away tsarism, its autocracy and the peasant servitude that sustained it . I'm talking about the automatic response, given by a worker-soldier of the Revolution, who responded to questions about the difficulties of implementing socialism, with a monotonous phrase: “there are only two sides, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat!”. That's what John Reed says.

The dominance of this political and material contradiction did not disappear in absolute terms, but it was mitigated — for a long period not yet defined — giving way to political forms, dictatorship or democracy, which would be suitable — in each country — or to prevent a strategic alliance from the extreme right to the right, and with the pale center (traditional) in its various gradations, or for the traffic to barbarism. This possibility can occur in any country where the election is considered illegitimate by the majority of the population or where it is stolen by the extreme right, as Jair Bolsonaro tried to do in Brazil, to give solidity to the alliance already in the formation of a new government.

In the unity of the two episodes by Goethe and John Reed, it is possible to notice convergences and differences. Napoleon and Goethe talked about the meaning of the democratic Enlightenment in Europe – with its promises of freedom, equality and fraternity – which could be said to expand freedoms. And also the options posed by modern individualism, mercantile relations with “free” subjects (from feudal oppression) in a State organized by Law, with norms representing these interests, which would divide consumption to “give something” to human “leftovers”. of the reserve army of the proletariat and the other poor and disadvantaged.

John Reed and his politicized worker, on the other hand, looked at a “world not yet existing”, a utopia potentially free from all oppression and exploitation, which would — always — oppose two fundamental classes in confrontation, which would have to occur until the “ideal” arrival of the proletariat in total control of the State. It turns out that the proletariat, which has always been assigned to a theory of revolutionary power, would be represented — in the practices of the state government — by a superior bureaucracy, which would reproduce — from within the State itself — a caste superior to the real workers of socialism. real, which did not even interfere with the rules for distributing needs within the regime.

In its dominant territories, to establish the interests of hegemonic nation-states in the contemporary world, the democratic Enlightenment organized a Europe dedicated to War. A model subservient to colonial-imperial models of exploitation — originating from the economic and territorial interests of its States — allied with each other and conniving with the Arab feudal monarchies, or not conniving, when their immediate interests are harmed.

On the other hand, the Russian Revolution became a revolution of the late Enlightenment, where not only the social achievements in health, culture, education and the fight against poverty of the Bolshevik Revolution were buried, but also the democratic freedoms, still in force in the formal rule of law of countries constitutionalized by the democratic center, together with the forces of the traditional left.

Just as Ukraine, however, has its Azov Battalion, made up of Nazis and fascists, Russia has its battalions of fascist mercenaries, well paid by Vladimir Putin's government, agreed on private contracts with the Russian State, dominated by the new bureaucracy of the capital system installed there. The Venezuelan opposition, which is now asking for the minutes and also not presenting them, is the same one that has already attempted cruel coups against the regime of Hugo Chaves and Nicolás Maduro and that, with Donald Trump, appointed the laughable Guaidó as president of the nation, without elections and outside the law.

On the other hand, governing with a “military-police-popular alliance” — as Nicolás Maduro insists — does not invest any government with legitimacy to lead a country in which the Constitution itself was the product of a process recognized, throughout the world, as democratic. and that through successive elections he displaced the superior elites of the traditional oligarchies, who did not even care about the alternation of power, as it was certain that, in rigged elections, power would always remain in the same privileged hands.

Recount and independent verification, transition agreement within democracy, new elections with or without a transitional government, are some of the possibilities for restructuring democracy in Venezuela, which has managed to get rid of its old political and economic oligarchies, but cannot take off towards a situation of permanent and undeclared civil war, which could destabilize a large part of Latin America, which is slowly rising to its sovereignty with democratic stability.

*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). [https://amzn.to/3ReRb6I]

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