Post-coup Brazil: a new type of dictatorship
Marcio Sotelo Felippe, a Master in Philosophy and General Theory of Law, states that the 2016 coup provoked a new form of dictatorship, disguised as a sham democratic state governed by the rule of law; according to the lawyer and former prosecutor, the country continues, in practice, without a constitution.
From the website Brasil de Fato, by Marcio Sotelo Felippe - What is the nature of the regime that was installed in Brazil after the coup?
To understand this, it's necessary to pay attention to a few points. What distinguishes democracy from dictatorship is the existence and effectiveness of rights. The rights possible within a capitalist structure represent what is called bourgeois democracy. It is not democracy in its full, absolute concept that is incompatible with capitalism.
Under capitalism, we see formally free individuals establishing labor contracts. The worker on one side, the owner of the means of production on the other. A contract presupposes autonomy of wills. But is the worker truly autonomous when entering into such a contract? No, and except in appearance, they are not in a situation essentially different from that of a slave or serf.
Firstly, due to economic constraints. He can do nothing but sell his labor power under conditions he cannot choose, or he will not survive. For those who cannot do so because the capitalist structure, by its very nature, does not allow for the inclusion of all citizens, there is, among other things, an efficient instrument of control: Criminal Law. There is no real democracy where there is no autonomy of will. In capitalism, the employment contract is a disguised way of subjugating men to men.
Secondly, wage labor only provides the worker with what is necessary for survival, but it generates superior value that is appropriated by the capitalist. Just as slaves and serfs received only enough to maintain themselves and reproduce their labor power, but produced a surplus that the social, political, and legal structure guaranteed for the owner of the means of production, so it is also in bourgeois society.
What characterizes and distinguishes capitalism from other modes of production, such as slavery and feudalism, is that in the latter there was no separation between political-legal and economic power. In capitalism there is. The State appears as a neutral entity, regulating the only formally free contractual relationship between worker and capitalist. But it is responsible for the appearance that conceals the essence of a relationship of domination and is its guarantor. In Marx's words, "Privilege is replaced by right" (The Jewish Question).
A democracy is a real community of free and equal men. In "On the Jewish Question," Marx takes a passage from Rousseau's Social Contract: man must cease to be a perfect and solitary whole and become a part of a greater whole; he must replace his physical and independent existence with a partial and moral existence. He must be deprived of his own strength so that he may receive other strengths, which are foreign to him and which he can only use with the help of other men.
Bourgeois society is the antithesis of a true human community. It is a struggle of all against all, in which hegemony, of course, can only belong to the strongest, and the State is the entity responsible for this order of chaos. Just as one cannot speak of democracy under a slave-owning or feudal regime, one cannot speak of democracy within a capitalist structure.
So, is saying "bourgeois democracy" logically impossible, a contradiction in terms? No. It's as if full democracy, the real human community of free and equal men, were the sun, and fundamental rights and guarantees (for example, those in Article 5 of the Federal Constitution) were the scarce rays that reach the frozen poles.
The relationship between one thing and another is that of part and whole. Rights are the logical anticipation of a free and truly democratic society. They are the fruits of the historical conquests of workers, of much blood shed in social struggles throughout the development of bourgeois society. A perfect democracy would be a community in which even the expression "rights" would have no meaning because human life would be so full that mentioning it would be pointless.
Post-coup Brazil is a new type of dictatorship. The political and legal structure of bourgeois democracy was maintained, but only in form, a specter, without content, without what truly matters to workers and the excluded: citizenship and rights. Without a Constitution. Without resources for health, education, social security, public policies, destroyed in a process of political and social barbarity. And with ingredients of fascism: the ideological domination of one part of society to support the annihilation of the rights of another part. A classic element of fascism.
We had the dictatorships of 1937 and 1964. Now we are living through the dictatorship of 2016.
*Marcio Sotelo Felipe He is a lawyer and was the Attorney General of the State of São Paulo. He holds a master's degree in Philosophy and General Theory of Law from the University of São Paulo (USP).
Read The article is available on the Brasil de Fato website here.