Whom does the National Justice system serve?

There is always a power and its representative or operator. In sports teams, the club presidents and captains; in churches, the bishops and parish priests or pastors; in companies, the shareholders and chief executives, and so on. But there is a Power that guides society and that also has its executives. This Power can lead to famine amidst an abundance of food, cause brothers of ethnicity and faith to hate and fight each other to the death, provoke destruction and war. This Power belonged to feudal lords, Popes, and Emperors. Today it belongs to the international financial system, which I abbreviate as "banking," much more complex and invisible, but no less dangerous and cruel for that.

He also presents himself through his executives. Power has been represented by religious figures, by the armed forces; now it is the judiciary that administers his will.

Although focused on my greatest interest, the Brazilian homeland, this branch of government and its executive branch are not unique to Brazil. They are found throughout the world. But we will only deal with Brazil.

This article is divided into two parts: the origin and the justice.

THE ORIGIN

The reading that the great sociologist Jessé Souza (JS) makes of the masterpiece by another important analyst of Brazilian society, Gilberto Freyre (GF), will guide us to an understanding of class society in Brazil. I am referring, specifically, to "The Elite of Backwardness, from slavery to Lava Jato" (Leya, RJ, 2017) and "Casa-Grande & Senzala, formation of the Brazilian family under the regime of the patriarchal economy" (Imprensa Oficial, Recife, 14th Brazilian edition, 2 volumes, 1966).

Brazil was colonized by a country with a small population and territory. Continental Portugal has 88.705 km² and, in 1600, had nearly one million three hundred thousand people. Therefore, the simple occupation for the maintenance and defense of the discovered country – Brazil, in the 16th century, had its space defined by the Treaty of Tordesillas, the area east of the straight line from Marajó (Pará) to Laguna (Santa Catarina) – would already be a formidable undertaking.

Black slavery and the "Arab way" of coexistence were the choices made by the Portuguese aristocracy for Brazil. The so-called "Arab way," or "Moorish" or "Mohammedan way," refers to the polygamous family with the peculiar characteristic of the son's connection to the father through faith, and therefore through customs and rituals; the son becomes equal to the father. Here, the patriarch's will prevails, but the polygamous family, in addition to its economic and political importance, will generate those who occupy "positions of trust," whether for the control of goods and labor, for the hunting of slaves, or for other functions of intermediation and overseership where Jessé Souza sees the "genealogy of the middle classes among us." And he adds: "their function as overseer of the elite is preserved in some factions and modernized... (as) the maintenance of social distance in relation to the popular sectors."

It should be noted that the Portuguese Empire, unlike others that existed and would emerge at the time, did not have a single colonial model, nor even one with similar principles. This is very well presented by the historian Charles Boxer, in "The Portuguese Maritime Empire" (Edições 70, Lisbon, 2nd Ed., 2017), and by the jurist António Manuel Hespanha, "On the Eve of Leviathan" (Almedina, Coimbra, 1994).

According to Philip Curtin (The Atlantic slave trade: a census, WUP, Madison, 1969), ten million Africans came to the Americas, and practically half of them to Brazil, up to the 18th century. The demographic disproportion and the concern with implementing a social (political, institutional) system resistant to revolts, capable of keeping the entire local population subservient to colonial interests, are clear.

"A society that would develop... through religious exclusivism unfolding into a system of social and political prophylaxis" (GF, 1st vol.). But religion itself would bow "to the personal authority of the landowner and slave owner (because) the chapel was a mere extension of the big house" (JS).

We see, through the analysis of these brilliant exegetes, that Brazilian society, in its early stages, had all powers monocratically concentrated in one person. And this way of viewing collective life adjusts to economic and technological evolution, external influences, but it will underlie the Brazilian psychosocial landscape.

The next step, as explained by Jessé Souza, is familism. I quote: "patriarchal protection is... an extension of the patriarch's will and emotional inclinations. (But) familism tends to establish some form of bilaterality, albeit incipient and unstable, between favor and protection, not only between the father and his dependents, but also between different families, creating a complex system of alliances and rivalries."

Portuguese exclusivism will generate an autarkic component in Brazil, with the "big house/slave quarters" subsystem as its main element. This system "accounts for the uniqueness of our social and cultural formation" (JS).

"It is sadism transformed into authoritarianism... that leaves the private sphere and invades the public sphere, inaugurating a profoundly Brazilian dialectic of privatization of the public by the powerful" (JS).

The 19th century, with the arrival of the Portuguese royal family in Brazil, brought new variables, the most important of which, in my opinion, were urbanization and the transfer of the seat of national power from the Northeast to the Southeast.

However, in addition to the plantation/slave quarters subsystem, there was "The Colony in Motion," as Sheila de Castro Faria called it in her doctoral thesis (Editora Nova Fronteira, RJ, 1998). These were the people/families who built an internal market – production, transport, marketing, and services of all kinds – outside the plantation cycles and, obviously, outside the status associated with the plantation house.

It literally constituted a marginalized population, which nonetheless managed to become wealthy, as can be read in the surprising article by this same historian, "Freed Women – Wealth and Social Stigma" (UFF RevistaTempo, no. 9, Jul-2000), as well as in works by the excellent historian João Fragoso ("Merchants, Farmers and Forms of Accumulation in a Slave-Colonial Economy", UFF Thesis, 1990, and "Archaism as a Project. Atlantic Market, Agrarian Society and Merchant Elite", with Manolo Florentino, Diadorim, RJ, 1993).

Surely my astute reader has already noticed that Brazil's independence had less of an impact on national society than the arrival of King João VI. As Gustavo Barroso analyzed, long before formally ceasing to be a Portuguese colony, Brazil was already a British colony and would only free itself from this, well into the 20th century, to become a colony of the United States of America (USA) and, currently, of the "banking" system.

Jessé Souza divides Brazil into four major social classes: the elite of landowners, which I will call, with a dose of irony, the aristocracy; the fractions of the middle class; the semi-skilled working class, which would be better designated as: laborers and peasants (city and countryside workers); and the rabble, which is his expression for the lumpenproletariat.

The middle class, which will make up almost the entirety of the Judiciary, originated, as we have seen, from the family groups of the plantation owners and from that "colony in motion," a felicitous expression coined by Sheila Faria.

I conclude this section with one more reflection. We know, and the authors already cited give us abundant lessons, that enrichment, although fundamental, is not the only factor for class change. In this regard, I cannot fail to refer to the fundamental Pierre Bourdieu: "Distinction" (Zouk, RS, 2nd Ed., 2015) and to the studies compiled by Sergio Miceli in "The Economy of Symbolic Exchanges" (Perspectiva, SP, 8th Ed., 2015).

Upon assuming a role in the power structure, the middle class – by definition, the one in the middle – will position itself either toward the aristocracy, a minority in population, or toward the workers, peasants, and lumpenproletariat, a vast majority. From this comes an initial, petty, but sometimes unconscious impulse: to divide with less, to have more left over, and it adheres to the interests of a class that will not assimilate it, but will always buy it.

Here is the bribery that, when looked in the mirror, the middle class, in all its factions, seems to feel so much loathing – a false revulsion towards those who defraud taxes, bribe, and cut in line – especially when some executive favors, even minimally, the majority. The aristocracy doesn't defraud taxes, they simply don't pay them because their earnings are directed to tax havens, and they don't cut in line because they have exclusive access. The aristocracy always finds someone who will get their hands dirty for them.

JUSTICE

What is the purpose of justice in our social structure?

First and foremost, guarantee privileges. When an aristocrat directs his son towards the judiciary, he doesn't expect to see a notable jurist, but someone who will overturn, through jurisprudence or arbitrary action, a legal provision that bothers him.

We are simply continuing the tradition of forming and establishing the majority of the judiciary's components, both past and present.

What does the competitive world mean for the judiciary? What does a minimal state mean for the judiciary?

These are the issues that place the actions of the judiciary, in this post-2016 coup Brazil, in contradiction with its own origins and power.

Let us now analyze them. Jessé Souza, following Gilberto Freyre, in "Sobrados e Mucambos" (José Olympio, RJ, 1951, 3 vols.), considers that, in 1808, Brazil received, with the Portuguese court, the "competitive capitalist market and the centralized bureaucratic state" (JS). The decline of the rural patriarchy and the rise of urban culture began. And, soon after, English colonization.

This new colonization deserves brief comment. Modern England was built on finance. This is not a matter of opinion, but a historical account, starting in 1600 with the creation of the Dutch East India Company. This was followed by commercial rivalry with Holland throughout the 17th century – remember the Anglo-Dutch Wars – the creation of the Bank of England, the models of colonization in the USA (public and private), and the use of debt (or financing) in the Industrial Revolution. This English management of power only encountered opposition at the end of the 19th century, with the rise of American industrialism.

In Brazil, colonized by England, throughout the remainder of the 19th century until the Revolution of 1930, the issue of debt always prevailed. One of the first acts of Dom Pedro I was to send emissaries to London to renegotiate the debt left by the Portuguese monarchy.

The close link between the rural aristocracy and the export-oriented economic model led our earliest jurists to choose this area for their literary production. The "Principles of Commercial Law and Maritime Laws" by José da Silva Lisboa dates from 1798. And we were training lawyers who were concerned with the issues of the aristocracy, of the landowners, namely, commercial matters, criminal matters, the defense of property, for which civil laws were also being consolidated.

As the last president of the Old Republic would say, "the social question is a matter for the police," which is still, very discreetly, the thinking of the financial aristocracy of our day and their henchmen.

Thus, the judiciary was established and developed to defend the minority of the population that bribes and assaults the State itself. Today, after carrying out the coup, with other support, the judiciary oversteps its bounds, judging identical cases differently, even with different defendants.

Had he remained in defense of the aristocracy, he would have been the judiciary that Brazil has always known. Now, as a banking executive, he acts in pursuit of that system's objectives. Among them is the destruction of nation-states.

Stranger than pursuing its own extinction – without a state there is no legal structure and the law of the jungle prevails – the judiciary evokes a competitiveness characteristic of those who are, by their very nature, monopolistic. I don't know of, and I ask my dear readers to point out, a justice system that is competitive with itself; two courts competing for the same case? You choosing a cheaper judge?

By adding the defense of the most privileged class to that of foreign interests, justice in Brazil ceases to be, first and foremost, justice, and secondly, Brazilian.

That's what I have to regret.