Against the schemes of the right: supporting Dilma Rousseff

It is well known that the Brazilian right wing, especially that alliance of forces that has always held state power and treated it as private property (patrimonialism), supported by private and family-owned media, is taking advantage of the massive street demonstrations to manipulate this energy in its favor. The strategy is to further undermine President Dilma and demoralize the PT, thus creating an atmosphere that allows them to return to the position they lost through democratic means.

While we cannot refrain from criticizing the PT government (and we will return to this topic), but only constructively, we cannot naively allow the political and social transformations achieved in the last 10 years to be discredited and, if possible, dismantled by conservative elites. These elites aim to win over the imagination of the protesters for their cause, which is hostile to a participatory democracy of a popular nature.

It would be a great irresponsibility and a shameful betrayal on our part to hand over to the old and rotten political class what we have built for decades, with so much opposition: a new historical subject, the PT and popular parties, with the inclusion of millions of Brazilians in society. This class now seems happy with the possibility of acting without a mask and showing its previously hidden intentions: finally, it thinks, we have a chance to return and put all these people who demand reforms back in the place that has always historically belonged to them: in the periphery, in ignorance and silence. There, they neither bother nor create chaos in the order that we have built for centuries, but which, if we look closely, is order within ethical and social disorder.

This claim is linked to something earlier that made history. It is known that with the victory of capitalism over the state socialism of Eastern Europe in 1989, President Reagan and Prime Minister Tatscher inaugurated a worldwide campaign to demoralize the state, considered inefficient, and politics as an obstacle to the business of large globalized corporations and the logic of capitalist accumulation. The aim was to achieve a minimal state, weaken civil society, and open ample space for privatizations and market dominance, until achieving the transition from a society with a market to a society of pure market in which everything, absolutely everything, from religion to sex, becomes a commodity. And they succeeded. Brazil, under the hegemony of the PSDB, aligned itself with what was considered the most modern and effective framework of world politics. It carried out extensive privatization of public assets that were detrimental to the general interest.

That this was a global disaster is proven by the abysmal gap that has been established between the few who control capital and finance and the vast majority of humanity. An entire people like Greece is sacrificed, without any consideration, on the altar of the market and the voracity of the banks. The same could happen to Portugal, Spain, and Italy.

The 2008 economic and financial crisis, which took root in the core countries that invented this social perversity, was a consequence of this type of political choice. It was the very states they fought against that saved them from complete bankruptcy, a crisis brought about by their measures built on lies and greed (greed is good), as Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman constantly accuses. According to him, these leading figures of speculative finance should all be in jail as criminals. But they remain there, smug and laughing.

So, if we must criticize our political class for being corrupt and the State for still being, to a large extent, a hostage of neoliberal macroeconomics, we must do so with discernment and a sense of measure. Otherwise, we are playing into the hands of the right wing. This right wing takes advantage of this criticism, not to improve society for the benefit of the people who shout in the streets, but to reclaim its former political power, especially that linked to state power, from which it guaranteed its easy enrichment. The private and family-owned media, whose names need not be mentioned, are particularly fervently engaged in this endeavor to return to the old status quo.

Therefore, the demonstrations must continue in the streets against the right-wing schemes. They need to be vigilant against this infiltration aimed at changing the course of the protests. They invoke public safety and the need to establish order. Who knows, they might even dream of the return of the armed forces to clean up the streets.

Therefore, we repeat, it is necessary to strengthen Dilma's government, to demand profound political reforms from her, to avoid the historic conciliation between the forces in tension and the opposition, so that together they can once again silence the clamor of the streets and maintain a status quo that prolongs shared benefits.

Political analyst Jeferson Miolo cleverly suggested in Carta Maior (July 7, 2013): “There is a serious political urgency in the air. The real dispute at this moment is over the fate of the world's seventh-largest economy and the channeling of its fantastic wealth towards neoliberal financial spree. The actors on the right are well-positioned institutionally and politically… The possibility of reversing these trends lies in the streets, if we know how to channel their enormous mobilizing energy. Why not establish public classrooms in every city in the country, spaces for public deliberation and direct participation to build proposals with the people about the national reality, the plebiscite, the political system, the taxation of large fortunes and capital, tax progressivity, the plurality of the media, abortion, same-sex marriage, social, environmental and cultural sustainability, urban reform, republican reform of the State and so many other historical demands of the Brazilian people, in order to support and influence the policies of the Dilma government?”

In this way, the machinations of the right wing will be confronted, and it will be possible to more forcefully demand fundamental political reforms that address the infrastructure demands of the people in the streets: better education, better public hospitals, better public transportation, and less violence in the city and the countryside.