Marcelo Ridenti: The US and USSR waged a cultural cold war between capitalism and communism.

By Pedro Alexandre Sanches, from Opera Mundi - Professor Marcelo Ridenti, a tenured sociology professor at Unicamp, explained on the program 20 MINUTES This Monday (10/10), with journalist Breno Altman, the concept of cultural cold war. 

Ridenti used the term to broaden its symbolic scope to encompass the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union and the conflicts in the post-World War II world, in the dispute between capitalist and communist ways of life. "In the symbolic field, and this is the idea of ​​the cultural Cold War, wars are not fought only with weapons, but also in symbolic struggles, to win the hearts and minds of one side or the other," he states.

According to the sociologist, in the current moment in Brazil and the world, the effectiveness of the far right lies in catalyzing hatred and resentment against injustices that are real and concrete. In this context, the left, which traditionally criticized the capitalist system and bourgeois democracy, is forced to defend these institutions as it sees the barbarity of a world of destruction and devoid of culture approaching. 

“The far right is taking advantage of the anti-establishment sentiment worldwide. We have to understand that this movement is gaining ground because it is able to catalyze or gather the hatred that people have for a society that, at its core, is unjust. The left is failing to translate this into a transformative, democratic, and socially inclusive way of expanding society, and is losing out to these false illusions,” he argues.

Em The Secret of American Women: Intellectuals, Internationalization, and Funding in the Cultural Cold War (published by Unesp), Ridenti discusses the internationalization of communist culture and how Latin American thinkers, such as the Chilean Pablo Neruda and the Brazilian Jorge Amado, were part of this process.

In the post-World War II era, intellectuals and artists participated in the international cultural Cold War through the World Peace Congress, on the communist side, and the Congress for Cultural Freedom, on the capitalist side, conceived in reaction to the former. 

“Picasso gained pop artist status through the peace doves he drew over time, while these world peace congresses were in effect,” the writer documents. “The word peace attracted not only communists, but a whole field, including religious ones, that no longer wanted to hear about war,” he said.

Ridenti draws a parallel between the current Brazilian political landscape and the period before the Cold War, during the Allied front created against Nazism in World War II. 

According to him, one could speak of a cultural cold war in the current Brazilian electoral contest, where the opponent comes to be understood as an enemy. “Sometimes the line between a democratic contest of persuasion and a cultural war is thin. In both presidential campaigns, we see some cultural sectors being contested on both sides, and fortunately, the majority is on the side of Lula's democratic candidacy,” he stated.

When asked by Altman if the "cultural Marxism" so touted by far-right propaganda exists, the sociologist replies: "That's a label invented by Olavo de Carvalho. It's an ideological construct of the right, but it has some basis, because Marxism has a very expressive cultural production. This doesn't mean that there is a so-called cultural Marxism that instrumentalizes people for a policy formulated by evil Marxists who want to end the idea of ​​God. That's utter nonsense." 

Especially after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the left progressively relinquished control of the political and cultural movement, according to Ridenti, paving the way for the advance of the right.

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