The Brazilian (and Argentine) tragedy

The Brazilian (and Argentine) tragedy
x Gabriel Brito: Interview with Maria Orlanda Pinassi :: "A fight against order and that aims beyond capital"

We begin the interview [1] recalling his text published in January 2018, which spoke of the “structural crisis of politics” in Brazil, still under the direction of Temer, and in Argentina, already in the second half of the Macri government . The reasons would be the reunion with its dependent colonial conditions reinforced by the crisis, next to an almost irremediable emptying of official policy. What comments do you have on this analysis in the light of the current moment of the two countries?

His approach gives me the opportunity to make some theoretical clarifications. In the 2018 text that you mention [2], I make use of the concept of structural crisis of the policy based on the analysis of Mészáros. For him, this concept only makes sense if it is understood in the indissoluble relationship that it establishes with the structural crisis of capital itself, a phenomenon that contaminates the entire social metabolism of the system from the late 1960s. But what exactly does this mean? First of all, this capital crisis is not paralyzing. Quite the contrary, it is a rampant process of accumulation that generalizes and advances on every pore of society. Capital acts, as a sui cause in an authoritarian, predatory and totally decompromised way with human needs (materialized in use values).

For this reason, politics needs to free itself from its own history based on formal pacts and rights inherited from its revolutionary period. But that does not mean an emptying of official policy as you say. The policy will be reconfigured to ensure the deepening of social inequality.

In an uneven and combined way, the policy in structural crisis paves the paths of de-financialization, internationalization and deregulation of the economy, of structural unemployment and the precariousness of the immense working mass. In addition, it is clear, of the irresponsible and degrading appropriation of the planet's natural resources. The State confers legality to an irrational destructive production.

We can go even deeper into this concept by accompanying Florestan Fernandes's analysis of our specific historical reality. In "Notes on Fascism," a text written in Toronto in 1971, he states that "the political crises facing Latin American countries are [always] structural crises." [3]

I see in a complementary way the analyzes of these two authors and both help to think that the structural crisis of Latin American politics, defined in its irremediably colonial and dependent roots, meets and potentializes the structural crisis of system politics.

It is always good to remember that the initial meeting of the structural crisis in Latin America took place through the multiple dictatorships of the 1960s, 70s, 80s. Militarized control was the way to integrate that part of the continent into neoliberal imperialism. Since then, the successive military and civil governments, more or less democratic, without exception, fulfill, each in their own way, the political function of managing that subalternized integration. And regardless of the form they assumed during these long years - if neoliberalism of boots, orthodox, social and boots again - all gave and continue to make an effective contribution to the march of the counterrevolution.

Thinking in this way is that I start that text of January 2018 saying that “Be it through blows, be it through the polls, it is of little interest that one is illegitimate and the other legitimate, the important thing is that Fear here, Macri there, anchored in immoral congresses and liars, conduct their respective governments as required by the music of state policy. ”

Many things happened at this time in Brazil and Argentina, the fact is that through the parliamentary institution, there and here, we continue to take long steps to hell. However, Bolsonaro is not equal to Macri who ideologically aligns himself better with Temer. Bolsonaro belongs to another strain. He is certainly the most grotesque representative of the extreme right that stands out in the world, because he was carved to disqualify our political image and redirect the country to its peripheral place, where it never really came from.

One more note about this, and that perhaps it can make a difference between the two countries was the popular rejection of Macri in the primary elections, while Brazil "raised" the worst of its options in the most dramatic lawsuit in its history. That means that under Bolsonaro Brazil lives its structural crisis of politics in its purest state, an unprecedented social, environmental and human tragedy. If the Argentine situation seems less disturbing, excessive confidence in the electoral process can lead to the reissue of a progressive farce and lead the country to a reality much less favorable than it was in the Kirchner era.

In the Brazilian case, how do you synthesize the first months of the Bolsonaro government in its historical significance?

From the first moment, I defend the idea that Bolsonaro is not exactly a road accident, nor a historical setback. He is an uncomfortable, disconcerting type, to say the least, more convenient for the reduction of Brazil in the hierarchies of a new international division of labor. After nine months of intense institutional clearing - in the labor, jubilatori, scientific and educational, health, environmental, and complete disdain areas even for the illusory bourgeois morality, the Bolsonaro government confirms its crusade for the extended renewal of our structural dependence this time in a more indisputable way. By proudly showing off our subalternity in the face of the Yankee empire, it breaks the dreams of the liberals of the right and the left with the cantinela of development and national sovereignty.

Yes, we are the backyard upstairs. It's that simple. The ideological misery of this government prone to contempt, makes an apology for violence, dictatorship, for the violation of human rights, invites glamor to the cruelest figures of torture in Brazil and makes the American flag . But, if 2019 is not 1964, it is not its antithesis either. I prefer to understand this our dramatic moment as a bleak and more prepared synthesis of technocratic fascistization that began 50 years ago.

The most worrisome part of all this is the impatience with which the project How to devastate a country in a few months is materialized, a plutocratic project of a nation that is widely exclusive and shielded in the formulation of a rigidly stratified and relatively simplified sociability. The educational restructuring with the School without Party, or the Future-Se and the militarization of public schools envision the consolidation of this project that expels the middle class from history, ironically the class from which the bourgeoisie originates. At the top of the pyramid the rich, obviously, those who will have privileged access to knowledge; in the sequence, their guardians recruited in the popular litters (remember Saló de Pasolini?) and released according to the conscience and discipline of the military order; and, beneath them, the millions of outcasts without school, without work, without a roof, without health, without rights, consumed only by their biological needs, living in the fringes of the reconfigured society to be cruel, and only cruel.

To what extent do the Amazon fires dialogue with this context, even though it is an old problem?

Since the time of the colony, fire has been the best means of eradicating forests and native populations, opening spaces for pastures and plantations. With the Green Revolution, the agricultural modernization project implemented in the dictatorship, deforestation with a chainsaw, whether with the currents and followed practices of fires, becomes more aggressive, especially in the areas of land conflict and agricultural borders. At no time, however, did they reach the proportion of this August in the Fire Day sequence (10/08). According to the INPE (National Institute for Special Investigations) registry, there was a 82% growth between 2018 and 2019 with 71,497 fire sources that mainly punished the Amazon Region and the Cerrado. But not only, other regions also show an increase in fires in ecological reserves. [4]

Obviously, this demonstration of obtuse omnipotence of entrepreneurs, represented by land and business owners related to agriculture, hydroelectric, mining, national and international, reverberates the favorable gesture of the presidency that, through the hands of the "environmentalist" Ricardo Salles, provided of an efficient "flexibilization" of all environmental protection mechanisms and traditional populations in the countryside.

After much internal and external criticism, the government, by way of "combating" that practice, lowered Decree No. 9,902 of August 28, 2019. In truth, that was the justification given to increase the militarization of the already ostensible apparatus of repression installed in the south-east of the Pará since the guerrillas of the 60s, 70s and 80s. As the fire continues to burn throughout the country.

Still about the fires, what do you think of the predominant debate? Does it agree with the geographer Ariovaldo Umbelino, who said that even the environmental movement, leaving aside the question of land ownership, lowered its criticism and consequently its capacity for interpellation? Anyway, does the environmental issue involve a possible wick for a new anti-capitalist political cycle?

I fully agree with Professor Ariovaldo. Environmental movement that does not question the ownership of the land, that does not denounce the spurious uses made of it and that does not combat the social relationship based on the super exploitation of labor, ends, in a few cases, for forging romantic criticisms of anti- humanists, now futurists, now nostalgic. I am talking about increasingly dangerous dystopia that proliferate throughout the world.

This applies to the environmental movement and to all movements of women, of blacks, of LGBTQ that anchor their criticisms of society in post-modern identity principles that, as we saw in the recent past, create reified relationships, individualized and missed each other. . Any emancipatory criticism of development controlled by capital needs, necessarily, to be imbued in a revolutionary, radical, non-vindictive, propositional social perspective, inclusive in a system that has not long been able to reproduce without leaving ruins and more ruins in its path.

Another proposal of his 2018 article has the following phrase: “the last mass popular demonstrations occurred in 2015 with secondary students and more recently with the struggles of indigenous people in various regions of the country. The streets are being occupied by trade union centrals and social movements more concerned with transforming them into levers for electoral purposes than in fighting the thrusts of the current Brazilian State. ”Wouldn't that, even with new shades, be the characteristic of registered opposition acts? in 2019?

Over the last decades, Lulismo created and recreated mediation mechanisms with the capital of voter demands. The appearance as negotiating union leadership of the 70s, the institutionalization of the struggles in the 80s, the option for parliamentary policy of the 90s, the conciliatory policy in the highest executive position of the country of the 2000s. The most Recent is the Lula Libre that mobilizes the partners of the trade union, political and social movements, the same ones that call general strikes and one-day demonstrations.

Regardless of my opinion about the fairness of liberation (which would be absolutely consistent since justice in punishing Lula's personal enrichment dodges against really relevant and stinking crimes and criminals), I think that in the face of the seriousness of the social, political and economic situation of the country, the tasks are much greater and difficult. For a long time we have been hostages of the "less bad" and the risk we run if that had to happen is to fall into the illusion, as in Argentina, of a progressive dislocated in time. This time much more isolated on the continent and in the world and with much less room for banking social relief policies.

Faced with the ultraconservative wave that the world is attending, with its allegedly anti-systemic speeches and an emptying of the State, are we not facing an extremely complex dilemma for the left? How to get out of that crossroads without appearing as a defender of a system that increasingly penalizes the lives of the popular and working masses against international capital?

 I see no prominence for the left, accustomed to the conflicts and tensions of the previous period, in this described reality. The institutionalizations of the defensive struggles - in the union and in the parliamentary political party - supervised by the welfare-social-social state accommodated the left in a comfort zone where they refuse to leave, make self-criticism, have a realistic perception of The story itself, of time itself. The left sheltered in the shadow of the State. They fail to create new strategies, nor perceive the richness of the struggles of those who face capital, who do not claim, nor expect anything else from there.

Despite the profound decline of politics, what we attend most among the left is the appeal for immoral, representative, liberal democracy. That is, the structure of the system's operation completely collapsed, but liberalism remains the only way out for them. Yes, the lefts were engulfed within the structural crisis of politics.

That is why the ultra-conservative forces assume, from the local color and as a state policy, a leading role for the unprotected, disillusioned and desperate masses of their own countries.

Europe confirms the rise of offensive xenophobia with Santiago Abascal (Vox, Spain), Mateo Salvini (Northern League, Italy), Victor Orbán (Fidesz, Hungary), Alexander Gauland and Alice Weidel (AfD, Germany), Marine Le Pen (Grouping National, France) and Jussi Halla-aho (Party of the Finns, Finland). The disgusting result of the European shielding of refugees from the horrors of their countries and their extermination by mass drowning in the Mediterranean Sea. In South Africa, Zambia and Nigeria, mainly, there is a peculiar type of apartheid - or Afrophobia - that instigates the working, poor and black population of these countries against working immigrants, poor and black people from, mainly from Zimbabwe, Lesotho and Mozambique. [5] In the Americas of Trump and Bolsonaro, intensify measures against refugees, received with the refinements of an increasingly explicit evil by rulers and citizens of good.

Faced with the current state of destruction of the politics of the bourgeois (des) order, I reaffirm that the only way out for barbarism is to reinvent politics as a class struggle, a struggle that must be recreated well away from the tutelage of the State, regardless of the institutionality, radically critical of private property and any developmental perspective. A fight against order and that points beyond capital. This, however, cannot be done by those who stay in the same place, looking for their own navel, prevented from walking forward because of the weight of the past they carry on their backs.

* María Orlanda Pinassi is Professor of Sociology, FCL / UNESP. Integrates the Advisory Council of the magazine Tool.

Full text at: https://www.lahaine.org/cL54