Every right to speak is mine if the speaker is a worker.

 A specter haunts the Brazilian left – the specter of identity politics focused on “minorities”.

This text risks not seeming very sympathetic to sectors of the Brazilian left that have embraced identitarianism as an almost exclusive form of political subjectivation. Rather, it is a call for reflection on the need to consider the social cement with the potential to unite broad sectors of society, currently fragmented under the fallacy imported from European and American theories of self-perception as "minority" groups, occupied with their specific struggles (ethnic, gender, regional, cultural) whose access to speech is determined by what is called "place of speech." On the other hand, this text does not intend to deny the contribution of studies and processes of cultural and identity mobilization, since my "place of speech" is precisely that of someone who has taught the subject of Language, Culture and Identity in the Literature course at the Federal University of Maranhão for almost 10 years and has conducted research in this field, more specifically on the subject of digital activism. It is not a matter of "one thing OR the other," but of "one thing AND the other."

Jessé Souza has been warning us for some time about the “folly of Brazilian intelligence” in its eagerness to import, almost uncritically, Eurocentric and American theories, which, although making valuable contributions to the progressive field, fail to account for the specificities of a society whose ruling class is configured as an “elite of backwardness” marked by slave-owning characteristics and hatred of the poor. It is precisely this point that I am interested in developing.

Unlike European societies, where liberal democracies, fearing a wave of popular revolts like the Russian Revolution, understood the need for political, economic, and social concessions to keep workers minimally included in the system, our "elite of backwardness" refuses to lose even a millimeter of its class privileges. As the Black doctor Suzane Pereira da Silva aptly reminded us, "the big house freaks out when the slave quarters produce doctors." But who is this immense slave quarters that makes up the whole of Brazilian society? The Brazilian slave quarters, beyond being inhabited exclusively by the country's Black majority, includes brown women and men, Indigenous people, LGBTQ+ individuals, those from the periphery, fat people, thin people, short people, bald people, etc... all united by a common trait: they lack capital! They do not own the means of production (industrial, cultural, academic, communicational...) and, with some luck, they derive their livelihood from the cheap and precarious sale of their labor to the "elite of backwardness" or, even worse, they find themselves left to their own devices in the precarious world of informal labor or, if you prefer, they are those whom we want to portray as "entrepreneurs," when in fact they are a result of the dismantling of labor relations, known as uberization.

The relevance of identity politics has been notable since May 1968 in France and the American civil rights movements, and in this text, I do not intend to deny their contributions to the construction of a more pluralistic and democratic progressive field model, seeking a left-wing profile that can distinguish itself from the authoritarian traits that permeated the Soviet regime. However, this desire for negation, especially of the figure of Joseph Stalin – despite his errors and deviations, his historical importance cannot be denied, especially in times of Brazilian-style fascism – has led sectors of the identity movement to a stance bordering on negationism or, at the very least, a certain negligence towards one of the premises of Marxism: the class struggle. The same identities that served to give voice to so-called "minorities" (much more in the sense of empowerment than in a numerical sense, especially in the Brazilian context) have also served to silence and delimit who can speak about what – the already widely disseminated "place of speech" – weakening the possibility of establishing bonds of solidarity between identity groups that, in the end, share in common their condition as members of the social group that Zygmunt Bauman called the "outsiders" of global capitalism.

This does not mean that "place of speech" is not a relevant aspect of the discourse on the exclusion of identity groups, but it is necessary to understand the need to establish bonds of solidarity between these various segments of society, giving otherness the possibility of identifying itself in difference, of defending both broad and shared causes in the context of the predatory capitalism in which we live, as well as those of an identity nature, not necessarily their own, but whose relevance is recognized.

Here is the crux of the matter I intend to address: we are not "minorities," and I consider this self-designation a mistake. By adhering to this lexical choice, we give authoritarian enemies, such as the fascist who occupies the Presidency of the Republic, the discourse of "majority," "democratically elected" by "universal suffrage," granting them the authority to declare that "minorities should adapt."

For example, a UOL article points out that Black people make up 54% of the population, yet constitute only 17% of the wealthiest. IBGE data indicates that women make up 51,7% of the national population and, despite being the majority among those with higher education degrees, earn considerably less than men. In both cases, the numerical majority is underrepresented in the instances of access to capital and, consequently, is denied access to power.

The issue of indigenous peoples decimated and robbed of their lands (means of production) and of Black people, abandoned to their own fate, now without shelter or food and underqualified for the job market in the "abolition" process, is emblematic in this respect—one of the first cases of fake news in our history. The racial agenda in Brazil, therefore, beyond a mere aspect of identity, needs to be understood as a structural issue of our predatory model of (sub)capitalism.

My central point is that it is necessary to demand the correction of distortions that lead to majorities being silenced in the decision-making bodies of the res publica, which is increasingly administered as a family-militia-speculative-corporate res private entity.

If data on the Black and female population alone point to their majority aspect, I suggest we imagine how much more dominant that identity would be, which, within the context of capitalism, is the primary one: that of the salaried/precarious worker.

I believe that a statistical and sociological adjustment of the concept of "minority movements" is necessary, a concept uncritically imported by our intelligentsia (that "foolish intelligence" to which Jessé Souza refers), in order to re-signify these social groups as a MAJORITY, always excluded, seeking recognition as such. This recognition necessarily implies conquering the representative instances of decision-making and formulation of public policies within the state apparatus.

To paraphrase good old Marx, the one whom a postmodern left seems increasingly reluctant to quote: Oppressed identities, lacking capital throughout the world, unite!