By TARSUS GENUS*
The complicated relationships between tactics and ethics, sometimes strategy and ethics, acquire special relevance at certain times, to resist the advance of animality in politics
For my friend Rogério Viola Coelho
First of all, I record my position of respect for those who have been supporting null or blank votes in the second round of state elections, in which a minimally progressive candidate is not running for the second round. I think that at this moment, however, in a situation where fascist ideology and power are advancing in our country, we have to adopt a political morality and an ethics of purposes, adequate to the importance that these elections will have in the future of Brazil and of the Brazilian left itself. as a decisive force in the continental democratic struggle.
The complicated relationships between tactics and ethics, sometimes strategy and ethics (fused in the acute moments of the end of cycles), acquire special relevance at certain times, to resist the advance of animality in politics at times when society is returned to the “state of nature”. In these, arguments lose value in the face of irrational actions and social democracy, which was not organized to respond within order to the harassment of the offensive of ultraliberalism articulated with fascism on the rise of the planet.
I understand that the support of political currents of the center, right and center-right for President Lula, in the second round, is in the same context of our behavior, as a party and broader democratic movement here in the State, regarding voting or not voting for the candidate that does not represent – in the concrete political dispute of the State – the notoriously fascist positions of the candidate of the unnamable in Rio Grande do Sul.
The basic question that arises, in both situations, is the following: what is the position that most sustains the vote for the candidate of the tottering Brazilian democratic field, which, without a strong center party, programmatic and rooted in the population, did it achieve the miracle of a broad anti-fascist electoral front, which aims to resist the extreme right, which already holds 40% of the country's voters?
These are dystopian times that appear as “special” in the perplexed minds of the common man, but which, in fact, are repetitions of the capital domination system that wants to recycle itself, but which believes it can no longer do so within the democratic pact, which he even supported in other historical situations. It is a moment in which society eliminates class differences in the imagination of the majority, which now refer only to the present: democracy or strength, patience in democratic construction or the immediacy of dictatorship, dispute for consensus or facilities for the elimination of adversary; present and past, thus integrated in every movement of politics, whose limit will be peace or war, the ferocity of fascism or the recognition of the other in the context of democratic civility.
The material foundations of industrial society raise ethical assumptions that direct people towards more (or less) solidary (and conflicting) relationships, to live in a more collective or more isolated way. Its existence revolves around consumption (in the market), and around material production (or ideas) for the market, in the society of mercantile production. The organization of the family, the planning of its expenses, education, religion, technical training, culture and science available, guide people towards this sense of living: in a more (or less) harmonious way, in a way not to endangering (and they could not do so) their living in the torrent of unchosen everyday life.
The cultural and political action of fascism directly affects the doubts that arise from these conditions of existence when the crisis causes them to lose their fascination. With his subjectivity influenced by what comes from outside his soul, the new ethical-moral balance is traced, both inside and outside his body and mind. This relative peace, broken at a certain moment in history, goes into a moral and existential void, rough territory destructive of their social bonds. Because society no longer functions within the old order, without empathy for a new order having arisen. Here monsters are born, here – still maintaining larger or smaller spaces of democracy and integration in common life – the possibilities of fascism are born.
The modification of the democratic and profoundly unequal standards of modern capitalist society, however, generates responses and imbalances, with strong points of tension: the tension of the possibility of revolution without permanence; the tension of social reformism towards a life with more solidary distributive forms of the social product; and, finally, the dystopian tension that plagues us today. It is the destruction of the two previous forms of predicates of change, that is, the tension of destructive fascism, both of humanist emotions and of ties of minimal solidarity and tolerance with those who are different.
The strangers, the miserable, the nonconformists who threaten the precarious moments of social communion that it is still possible to obtain through democratic dialogue must therefore be eliminated. It, fascism, imposes hierarchy through fear – it installs the patterns of domination of darkness – as a force that is made right, not by domination by law obtained within the standards of modern political democracy. This is the crisis of a time that has ceased to be one of social revolution and reform and has become a time of dystopia that suppresses the differences between good and evil, between man and animal, between crime and politics.
I argue that in view of the victory of dystopia on a global scale, the ethical assumptions that guide people in the sphere of politics must radically change: the separation between morality and ethics, that is, between the immediate awareness of the need to resist the virus of fascism in life common and the purpose of action, as the morality of politics, acquire a different hierarchy. Fascism produces neither reform nor revolution nor democracy nor freedom nor public spirit nor possible conformity within the order. When it, fascism is installed, it only reproduces itself, as absolute evil. This is the minimum to consider at present and everything that collaborates to block it is virtuous and ethical, moral and democratic. Why?
He cannot survive without killing, nor drive without violence, nor drive without horror.
A new political time is then formed, pressed between the need to revive democracy and give free course to action that blocks animalized evil and the solutions of hatred that, if victorious, occupy the State, suffocate consciences and murder the what is most precious in capitalist democracy in modern times: the possibility of fighting for others, of defining minimum standards of equality before the law and of seeking the right to happiness, without being the target of private violence consented to by militias and state violence , already in the hands of criminals. It is the moment when not being fascist, not supporting fascism, is a moral and political virtue, even if only in the fearful silence that only dialogues with resistance and transforms it into a precarious virtue, in the face of the moment of absolute danger.
“As a reality that must be reached – said the old Lukács – the postulation of the ultimate end cannot mean any abstraction from reality, any attempt to impose certain ideas on it, but rather the knowledge and practical transformation of those forces that act in the universe. within social reality”.
Voting against the fascists on all fronts”, even if it is in leaderships that will be doubtful in the future – but that in the present do not want to be outside the democratic field – can be decisive for the return of democratic civility and the rediscovery of the utopias of equality and freedom, for the not too distant future. With Lula's victory!
*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).
The site the earth is round exists thanks to our readers and supporters. Help us keep this idea going.
Click here and find how