Fornazieri: a brutalized populace is fertile ground for demagogues like Doria.

247 - "Progressive and left-wing parties and social movements need to be active and engaged in this struggle over worldviews and values ​​through propaganda, education, and the organization of various social groups and segments. Without creating this fertile ground for the development of a politically active national-popular will and force, Brazil's future is doomed, and no progressive modernizing transformation will be effective. The vast fields of the periphery will be at the mercy of conservative religious reform and organized crime. The working-class figures of demagoguery, charlatanism, and other authoritarian expressions will have fertile ground to reap votes and electoral victories," says Professor Aldo Fornazieri.

Read his article below:

The brutalization of the Brazilian people

by Aldo Fornazieri, in GGN newspaper

Given the historical failure of progressive and left-wing sectors, it is necessary to recognize that they themselves were co-architects of this failure and that they contributed significantly to maintaining the subordination of the popular classes to the hegemony of the country's economic and political elites. In other words: they contributed to keeping the Brazilian people in a brutalized state.

As is well known, the idea of ​​a brutalized people was coined by the journalist, jurist, and politician Aristides Lobo in the context of the military parade that proclaimed the Republic. Witnessing that parade, led by a monarchist marshal, Lobo wrote: "The people watched this brutalized, astonished, surprised, without knowing what it meant." The thing of the people – the res publica – was thus born without the people. Worse still, it was born without the people, without weapons, and without land, right after the Abolition, carried out by a princess who was more of a sacristy-bound religious fanatic than a true stateswoman.  

Thus was born Independence, emerging from the foolish cry of the son of the metropolitan monarch. The new country that was born was not sovereign, but an extension of the Portuguese Crown. It should also be noted that all pre-independence revolts were defined by two characteristics: either they were conspiracies of small groups or they had a popular dimension, but localized and isolated in certain provinces. There was never a national-popular movement that built a sense of unity among the people. The only movement that managed to imprint a national-popular dimension, even if partial, was the Revolution of 1930 and Vargas's regime.

But Vargas's regime was also a state-led path to modernization, as were the redemocratization of 1945, the military coup of 1964, the Diretas Já campaign with its outcome in the Electoral College, the Constituent Assembly, and finally, the Workers' Party governments. All these processes, some with directions contrary to others, as was the case with the military coup, sought the modernization of the country and change through the State, from above, with negotiations and conciliations with the elites. The so-called popular classes never had a leading role. The new Constitution did not signify a democratic and citizen-based refounding of Brazil, because the people were not called upon to express their opinion about it through a referendum. The people were never the constituent subject of national sovereignty.

In making these historical observations, the intention is not to belittle the important contributions of Vargas's regime, the former PTB (Brazilian Labour Party), and the PT (Workers' Party) to social progress. What is meant is that, even with these advances, the historical defeat of progressives and the left cannot be ignored. And more than that: what is meant is that progressives and the left adopted strategies that can be included within the concept of passive revolution, developed by Antonio Gramsci based on a history book of the Neapolitan Revolution of 1799, written by Vincenzo Cuoco.

Change of Strategy

In short, Gramsci understands passive revolutions as all processes of transformation that can come about through reforms, wars, coups, etc., without going through a "radical-Jacobin" type of political revolution. This means: without the effective participation of the popular classes, which, in this way, do not create a collective national-popular will. In other words: there is no constituent process, of society against the State, of a people with national consciousness. Thus, many revolutions have a restorative character, and many progressive governments end up failing, opening the doors to conservative restoration. In Brazil, there wasn't even a radical-Jacobin agrarian reform like the one that occurred in France. The changes that occurred in the countryside fell far short of the land distribution process that took place in the United States.

When popular and progressive sectors participated in these modernization attempts, they failed. They failed with Vargas, with Jango, with the Diretas Já movement, with the Constituent Assembly, and with the PT governments. The periods following these governments were marked by conservative restorations. The unique characteristic of these governments, parties, and movements is that they always sought to act more within the State than within civil society and social movements. In moments of conflict and rupture within the weak democratic processes, they lacked the strength to resist, they lacked the strength to impose a "radical-Jacobin" moment.

All this indicates that the left is adopting wrong or partial strategies. There is no way to sustain more radical reforms and changes without the popular classes and social movements articulating themselves into consistent civil society organizations, undergoing a process of cultural and conscious change through intense critical and formative work, and becoming the center of political struggles and mobilizations. There is no way to create a national-popular collective will, Gramsci warns, without the various urban and rural social groups bursting into political life.

Progressives and the left are unable to wrest control of the subordinate classes from the hegemony of conservative elites, who only allow struggles to be defined within the framework of corporatism and, even then, with recurring setbacks in guaranteeing rights. Gramsci advocates that the anti-hegemonic struggle and the construction of a new hegemony require an intellectual, cultural, and moral reform coupled with a program of economic reform. Parties and movements must subvert "the entire system of intellectual and moral relations," freeing the people from their condition as "manipulated masses," as brutalized beings.

The impotence of progressive and left-wing parties to promote intellectual, cultural, and moral reform, articulated with a program of economic reform, opened the field of the peripheries for evangelical and Pentecostal churches to carry out religious reform. Religious reform leads the peripheral masses to an even more acute, more conservative condition of subordination, deepening their status as a "manipulated mass" that submits itself to retrograde, anti-social, and anti-rights leaders, parties, and governments.

Progressive and left-wing social parties and movements need to be active and engaged in this struggle over worldviews and values ​​through propaganda, education, and the organization of various social groups and segments. Without creating fertile ground for the development of a politically active national-popular will and force, Brazil's future is doomed, and no progressive modernizing transformation will be effective. The vast peripheries will be at the mercy of conservative religious reform and organized crime. The demagogic and charlatanistic figures, along with other authoritarian expressions, will have fertile ground to reap votes and electoral victories.

Aldo Fornazieri - Professor at the School of Sociology and Politics (FESPSP).