What kind of republic do we want?

Five centuries into the civilizing process – from the export of Brazilwood to rentier capitalism, which, in the country's poverty, makes a feast for the internationalized financial system – two hundred years after decolonization (notwithstanding the economic and political dependence that persists to this day), and after 133 years, completed this month, of republican experience, without republicanism and almost always without the people, we are, in Darcy Ribeiro's imperishable engraving, "a country yet to be": the permanent expectation of a future that stubbornly refuses to arrive, the nation betrayed by its ruling class, the same as always, the one that was born with the landowners of the colonial plantation house and the owners of slave ships to now settle in FIESP and Faria Lima: a bourgeoisie without pioneers, heir to export agriculture sustained by the slave labor of Africans and the semi-slave labor of over-exploited emigrants; An alienated and alienated “elite,” economically and ideologically bound to the domination projects of the metropolises; an elite that can say: “the country is doing badly, but my businesses are doing well.”

Understanding the present is the challenge facing the Brazilian left.
How can we explain our failure to build a fraternal society in one of the richest and most beautiful provinces in the world? How can we explain our present history, marked by the emergence of a far-right with popular roots, capable of fracturing the democratic-institutional process, sustained until now by fits and starts, at the price of so much suffering? How can we explain the political and social resistance to abolition (almost 400 years of exploitation of African labor)? Our country holds the miserable title of the last slaveholding bastion in the Americas, only to condemn its victims to destitution and hunger at the end of the regime.

How can we explain, even today, the victory of large landholdings over agrarian reform – a capitalist project carried out by developed nations for something like two centuries? Nothing is more indicative of the backwardness and reactionary nature of our ruling class. Consider this: in 1823, during our first Constituent Assembly, José Bonifácio (the patriarch of Independence, who wished to form the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil, and the Algarves) presented a project for agrarian reform and the gradual abolition of slavery; in 1964, President João Goulart's defense of agrarian reform was one of the reasons cited by the military for his deposition; in the second decade of the third millennium, the peasants of the MST (who fight for land to produce on it) are criminalized by the repressive apparatus, and indigenous people are murdered or expelled from their lands by land grabbers.

How can we explain almost 70 years of national attachment to an archaic monarchy, and the resistance to republicanism, the persistence of landowning power, oligarchies, bossism, class segregation, structural racism and income concentration, poverty at levels of misery that characterize the major Brazilian cities, starting with São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro? Poverty that becomes naturalized, as do class oppression, unemployment, and hunger (in a country that is the world's third-largest food exporter).

How can we explain the preeminence of export-oriented agrarianism? In the colony and the empire, we depended on the export of wood, sugar, cotton, gold and silver, and coffee beans; we even exported indigenous people captured by the bandeirantes, pioneers in the mass murder of the natives. In the midst of post-industrial-monopolistic capitalism, we are exporters of grains, meat, and minerals. in naturawhich we re-import, for example from China, in the form of rails. 

How can we explain a Republic (one that survives dictatorships and military coups) that has discarded the basic principles of republicanism and been privatized by big capital? 

Deprived of popular support, which ignored it because it was born from a military coup, the Republic, in its first and dramatic 133 years of existence, would live under the tutelage of the barracks, regardless of the character and origin of the government. The agonizing moment of today – the extinguishing of the lights of the far-right, corrupt, and murderous government – ​​is not a unique case in a range of authoritarian experiences that also includes coups d'état and military dictatorships. The demilitarization of the Republic, without which it will not survive and we will not achieve democracy, is not the task of a government, even one consecrated by the ballot box; it needs to be a project of social clamor.

How can we explain that, at this point in humanity's journey, the project of the Brazilian ruling class is one of "peace" that excludes social justice? How can we explain that the mantra of "fiscal balance" is demanded as a priority over development, which generates jobs and income and is the only known antidote in capitalism against unemployment and hunger? How can we explain the absence of a national project beyond the interests of the ruling class?

According to Professor Lincoln de Abreu Penna (What kind of republic do we want?(Ed. Autografia. Rio de Janeiro. 2022) we will find the reasons for this disarray – political, economic and social – in our social formation, dominated by slavery, patrimonialism, authoritarianism, and in our historical inability to remove the slave-owning legacy that in many aspects conditions structural racism and the practice of class conciliation, which resulted in what we are: a large periphery within the periphery of capitalism.

The past explains the present, and the dead reign among the living. What could be a great economic power (therefore capable of social development) is a project of dependency founded on the political and strategic national subordination (subordination, therefore, of the current armed forces of the Brazilian state) to the economic-military logic of the USA, as we once were to England, as we once were to Portugal.
If we are faced with the legacy of a past that is so relevant today, it is necessary to study it. Knowing the roots of our formation is essential to understanding the present; studying the past is crucial to preventing its survival in the present, and thus paving the way for the construction of a new social pact that could result in a society founded on democracy and socialism – the defense of which, incidentally, has been forgotten by the organized Brazilian left. Hence the end of revolutionary projects, the victory of an increasingly well-behaved reformism, the fears of the possibilities of rupture, the disappearance of revolutionary parties, subsumed by uncritical institutionalization and an electoralism that imposed the tactics and practices of conservatism. This phenomenon, as Lincoln reminds us, dates back to the Cold War and the communist priority given to anti-imperialist struggle, which resulted in the abandonment of the denunciation of capitalism and the society founded on class exploitation, and, ultimately, the abandonment of the defense of socialism. The consequence of so much ideological deviation would be the invention, among us, of a nationalist bourgeoisie to which the communists would offer an alliance, which was ultimately rejected.  

The abandonment of ideological battle continues to this day, with the well-known consequences. The revolution transitioned to reformism, the left transitioned to social democracy, which transitioned to the center, which transitioned to the right, which transitioned to the far-right, which flirts with fascism. The Brazilian crisis mirrors the crisis of the Western left, punctuated by the decline of traditional left-wing parties (as exemplified by the disasters of the Italian Communist Party and the French Communist Party), the general crisis of European social democracy, the victory of the far-right in Italy and, in alliance with the right, in Sweden, after the Trumpist surge in the US.

The structural crisis of communist and left-wing parties in general was one of the many consequences, in Brazil and in the world homogenized by the tactical-ideological dictates of the CPSU, of the paralysis of revolutionary thought and theory, halting action.

Without reflection, there is no possibility of interpreting the historical process; without reflection there is no theory, and without theory there is nothing: no tactics, no strategy, no action. 

Knowledge of Brazilian social formation, writes Lincoln Penna, is of substantial importance for unveiling the reasons for all the ills that have coexisted with our extremely fragile republic, "a solution of the dominant elites after the abolition of slavery," operated by their armed wing, the army officers based in the Court: "Its inauthenticity [...]of the RepublicThis can be explained by the course charted by those who have always held the power to command, since the times of the trading posts at the beginning of the mercantile enterprise that accommodated us in the Portuguese colonial empire.

We managed to build a country, to structure a state that today aspires to modernity, albeit at the price of a history marked by violence: from the genocide of the original populations, the enslavement of blacks, to the misery of a capitalism that concentrates income and produces poverty. But we failed in building a fraternal society. The Rome dreamed of by Darcy Ribeiro remains far from us.

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The (forgotten) lessons of the past – Gilberto Carvalho was one of the few voices that, in time, warned the PT's complacency about the need to reflect on the events of 2013, beyond appearances. He was not heard. He speaks again now, and warns again: “The Lula government was a porous government, which opened itself to society, but social participation was limited because it catered to an elite, to organized society, with awareness and experience in organization. We failed to dialogue with the great mass.” For him, the 2013 protests and “the absence of people to defend our project in the face of impeachment” demonstrate “that inclusion was economic, well done, meritorious, but there was no citizen inclusion.” He concludes that without dialogue with the masses, the risk will be repeating 2013 and 2016. Let us trust that he will be heard this time.cf. https://apublica.org).

Pablo Milanés – After Gal Costa, we lost Pablo Milanés, a singer of peace and Latin American solidarity. My condolences to our dear Cuban friends.