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Diversas teorias serão publicadas, mas pode-se antecipar que a vitória de Joe
Biden sugere a recuperação do centrismo político, o qual tem sido desafiado
por forasteiros políticos de todos os tipos durante a última década. A janela
para alternativas experimentais à política consagrada pelo establishment —
representada, para muitos moderados, tanto por Trump como por Bernie
Sanders, independentemente das políticas diametralmente opostas de direita e
esquerda — será declarada ultrapassada.
Esta eleição foi diferente. Foi sobretudo um referendo sobre em qual ameaça o
povo estadunidense prefere que seus líderes se concentrem: no coronavírus e
sua catástrofe econômica, ou numa série de bichos-papões de esquerda. Em
outras palavras, foi mais uma disputa entre atrações principais e espetáculos
secundários do que entre políticos de dentro e fora do sistema. A campanha
politicamente vazia de Biden certamente não fez jus às atrações principais,
mas quando os eleitores estadunidenses o escolheram, por apenas uma fração
dos votos, escolheram um líder que pelo menos pareceu se preocupar com fim
da pandemia em vez de, digamos, na suposta ameaça que os antifas
representam.
https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1270333484528214018
[TWEET: O manifestante empurrado pela Polícia em Buffalo, pode ser um
provocador ANTIFA. Martin Gugino, 75 anos, foi empurrado após parecer
sondar as comunicações da polícia com a intenção de apagar seu
equipamento. @OANN eu vi, ele caiu com mais força do que foi empurrado.
Ele queria o rastreador. Será uma armadilha?]
Em muitas questões, do clima à saúde, as promessas ambiciosas de Biden em
relação à crise e à recuperação econômica não foram muito específicas e, por
sua vez, as promessas específicas feitas por ele também não foram muito
ambiciosas. Mas Biden pelo menos reconheceu a gravidade da situação
estadunidense, na qual 230.000 pessoas morreram, 12 milhões perderam
o seguro de saúde patronal, oito milhões foram empurrados para a pobreza e assim
por diante. Esse reconhecimento parece ter sido suficiente para distingui-lo de
Trump, o qual rotineiramente desvaloriza tanto a saúde pública quanto as
dimensões econômicas da atual catástrofe.
A crise aumentou a atenção das pessoas para a incerteza sobre seu próprio
bem-estar. Biden fez o mínimo necessário para tirar proveito disso. Ele
previsivelmente se recusou, por exemplo, a incluir uma ampla expansão do
seguro de saúde pública em sua campanha, mesmo durante uma crise de saúde
pública e quando uma super maioria da nação a apoia. Mas não seria correto
sugerir que os democratas não demonizaram histericamente seus oponentes;
como sempre, havia paranoia e “vilanização” para todos os lados. Mas o que
importou, no fim das contas, foi o fato de a pandemia ter sido a preocupação
de Biden. Os eleitores associaram ele, e não Trump, à atenção à crise atual.
Sobre os autores
MEAGAN DAY
BRANKO MARCETIC
TRADUÇÃO
GIULIANA ALMADA
Uma guerra com o Irã não seria diferente, nem produziria o tipo de vitória
rápida e temporária nas relações públicas que a mudança de regime
proporcionou a Obama e Bush em suas guerras.
Como vários especialistas destacaram, o Irã é um país de massa física e
populacional cuja geografia física imponente torna, nas palavras da empresa de
inteligência Stratfor, uma “fortaleza” que “é extremamente difícil de se
conquistar”. Ao mesmo tempo, o país pode revidar aos EUA por meio
de proxies regionais ou ataques cibernéticos por todo o mundo. Se as últimas
duas décadas serviram para qualquer coisa, foi como um horrível lembrete dos
limites profundos do poderio militar estadunidense.
A resposta é: a mesma base jurídica frágil que essas figuras que agora
proclamam clamorosamente seu choque e horror apoiam quando os seus
chapas estão na Casa Branca.
Barack Obama foi eleito em 2008 prometendo uma ruptura com a política
externa de Bush, após uma onda de eleições de meio de mandato em que os
republicanos perderam o controle de ambas as casas do Congresso em uma
onda de repulsa a Bush. Porém, uma vez no cargo, em vez de cumprir essa
demanda popular, Obama expandiu o projeto de presidência imperial que
Bush perseguira de maneira radical. Talvez o ponto principal nisso tenha sido a
ampliação do programa de assassinatos por drones, estendendo-o a vários
países (sem autorização do Congresso, naturalmente) e o institucionalizando
na forma de reuniões semanais na Casa Branca, nas quais o presidente e seus
consultores examinavam casualmente um “lista da morte” de suspeitos de
terrorismo e escolhiam qual deles deveria morrer em um ataque aéreo
robótico.
Na época, comentaristas tanto de esquerda e quanto de direita apontavam que,
mesmo que você confiasse na capacidade do próprio Obama de supervisionar
esse programa de assassinatos de maneira responsável e humana (uma
contradição tanto na teoria quanto na prática), em um sistema democrático em
que líderes e administrações mudam regularmente, e às vezes drasticamente,
esses poderes extraordinários podem cair nas mãos de alguém muito diferente
— por exemplo, de um paranóico provocador de guerras do tipo Richard
Nixon.
Sobre os autores
BRANKO MARCETIC
“Vocês não podem comprar a revolução, não podem fazer a revolução. Vocês
só podem ser a revolução.” Este é o cerne da mensagem que o anarquista
Shevek proclama para uma manifestação em massa de trabalhadores
sindicalistas e socialistas reunidos na Praça do Capitólio na cidade de Nio
Esseia no planeta de Urras no clássico romance utópico publicado por Ursula
le Guin em 1974, Os despossuídos.
Quando Shevek pergunta aos socialistas de Nio Esseia o que Anarres (que eles
vêem como sua “lua”) significa para eles, eles respondem que toda vez que
olham para o céu noturno, eles são lembrados de que existe uma sociedade
sem governo, sem polícia, e sem nenhuma exploração econômica e que ela
não pode ser descartada como uma mera fantasia utópica. Em outras palavras,
tanto Shevek quanto os leitores de Le Guin percebem que a política não gira
apenas em torno da adoção de práticas corretas, mas também depende de
significados simbólicos para os outros.
Le Guin teve uma longa carreira e toda a sua obra vale a leitura, mas os livros
que cimentaram sua reputação foram escritos entre o final dos anos 1960 e
meados dos anos 1970, durante um período de ansiedade da Guerra Fria e de
aguda crise social e cultural nas sociedades ocidentais. Dentro desses
contextos, romances como Os despossuídos e A mão esquerda da
escuridão (1969) ganharam reconhecimento imediato pela clareza da visão
pela qual diagnosticavam os males da época e ofereciam visões de valores e
sociedades alternativos que pareciam alcançáveis através do trabalho duro e
de um auto-exame convicto. Os romances foram rapidamente estabelecidos
como clássicos do gênero, mas essa não é necessariamente uma vantagem a
partir da perspectiva de hoje.
Em sua introdução a uma reedição recente de A mão esquerda da escuridão,
China Miéville observa que “os livros mais azarados são aqueles que são
ignorados ou esquecidos. Mas guarde um pensamento também para aqueles
fadados a se tornarem clássicos. Um clássico é muitas vezes um volume que
todos pensam que conhecem.” Existe algum desincentivo maior para se ler um
livro do que o conhecimento de que ele é visto como uma obra valiosa e
inovadora, importante para a sua época? Para Miéville, a desfamiliarização do
gênero realizada no romance o torna inquestionavelmente um precursor das
teorias e movimentos queer de gênero e fluidez sexual do nosso presente no
século XXI, mas isso ainda deixa em aberto o pensamento de que poderia ser
melhor ler livros mais recentes.
O protagonista do romance, que atende pelo ressonante nome George Orr, tem
sonhos indesejados que mudam a realidade. Seu psiquiatra, Haber, ao invés de
tentar curá-lo, busca usar esse poder indiretamente para transformar o mundo
para o benefício da humanidade. Claro, toda tentativa de transformação para o
bem é sempre acompanhada por alguma consequência monstruosa inesperada.
[Os próximos 3 parágrafos apresentam detalhes do enredo que podem ser
vistos como spoilers de A curva do sonho]
Os alienígenas telepatas ensinam a Orr que “tudo sonha”, até as pedras, e que,
portanto, a única maneira de viver em harmonia com o que de outra forma
seria o caos é sintonizar-se conscientemente com o todo. O romance termina
com uma resolução digna de Philip K. Dick, na qual Orr, não mais
atormentado pelos seus sonhos efetivos, agora está feliz trabalhando com o
projeto de utensílios de cozinha alienígena. É difícil não ver esse final como
uma brincadeira com a ideia de “trabalho alienado”: seria uma espécie de
“negação da negação” se o trabalho fosse conduzido para benefício mútuo
com alienígenas com os quais o trabalhador estivesse telepaticamente
sintonizado.
Sobre os autores
NICK HUBBLE
SOFIA SCHURIG
Não estamos pedindo para ser milionários, estamos pedindo salários justos,
uma pensão e assistência médica pós-aposentadoria.
Cap
tura de tela do “Labor Action Tracker”, criado pela Universidade de
Cornell. Por conta de uma disputa entre o número de greves
contabilizado pelo governo e o número dito por trabalhadores, a
universidade criou um site onde sindicatos e movimentos podem
registrar, mostrando quantas greves existem atualmente no país.
Como aponta Reich, “o que está acontecendo é descrito com mais precisão
como falta de salário mínimo, falta de subsídio de risco, falta de creche, falta
de licença médica remunerada e falta de saúde”.
“A menos que essa falta seja corrigida, muitos americanos não vão voltar para
trabalhar em breve”, conclui o autor.
Sindicalize-se
Ao falarmos da classe de trabalhadores que não teve oportunidade de trabalhar
em casa durante a quarentena, mas também não recebeu aumentos ou uma
maior segurança no ambiente de trabalho, é necessário falar do setor de
serviços. Trabalhadores da rede McDonald’s estão organizando uma
paralisação contra o assédio sexual contínuo de funcionários e uma campanha
para que os trabalhadores da rede se sindicalizem.
Em vinte de outubro deste ano, pelo menos meio milhão de trabalhadores sul-
coreanos deixaram seus empregos em uma greve geral. Os setores da
construção, serviços e transportes foram somente alguns dos diversos setores
paralisados. A greve está sendo organizada pelo maior sindicato do país, a
Confederação Coreana de Sindicatos, com mais de um milhão de membros, e
está se alastrando pelos centros urbanos e rurais com a ambição de organizar
toda a população para janeiro.
Reação ao neoliberalismo
Isso vem após décadas de políticas econômicas de austeridade. Durante a
ditadura de Chun Doo-hwan na década de 80, reformas neoliberais abriram o
mercado do país e recursos para investidores estrangeiros — e tudo estava
bem, até a crise financeira de 97. Com a falência financeira, o país foi forçado
a pedir ajuda ao Fundo Monetário Internacional (FMI). O empréstimo veio,
mas com restrições: as políticas de ajuste fiscal e estrutural desmantelaram as
proteções aos trabalhadores, empresas públicas foram privatizadas e mercados
domésticos foram abertos para o capital estrangeiro. Em 2004, mais de 40%
da capitalização total do mercado de ações sul-coreano pertencia a
estrangeiros, principalmente dos Estados Unidos, União Europeia e Japão.
Sobre os autores
SOFIA SCHURIG
Há vários motivos para que não nos convençamos por ele. Alguns deles são
relativamente bem explorados na esfera pública. O discurso antivacina parte
de um anticientificismo vulgar, que se vale de notícias falsas para gerar um
ceticismo antissistema com consequências nefastas para a saúde pública. Sob
a perspectiva propriamente moral, poderíamos, ainda, questionar se nenhuma
perda de liberdade justifica nenhum bem-estar coletivo, ainda que a perda
individual seja mínima e o ganho de bem-estar seja imenso.
Cohen foi um filósofo político marxista – algo raro, já que, segundo ele
próprio, a ideia de fazer filosofia moral ou política parecia para boa parte de
seus colegas uma perda de tempo falaciosa. Um de seus méritos, que me
parece ainda insuficientemente apreciado pela academia brasileira, foi
empregar o rigor lógico da filosofia analítica para criticar categorias políticas
importantes do liberalismo e do libertarianismo – inclusive a de liberdade.
Acontece que essa ideia não basta para resolver sequer problemas morais
simples. Digamos que A e B sejam sujeitos em uma sociedade libertária, e que
B, por não ter uma casa ou por qualquer outro motivo, decida montar uma
barraca em um imóvel pertencente a A. Como o Estado libertário
compromete-se firmemente com a defesa da propriedade – que é vista como
um desdobramento das liberdades básicas –, é muito provável que agentes
desse Estado removam B do terreno de A, à força, se necessário. Essa coação
sobre B acarreta uma indiscutível redução de sua liberdade, já que uma ação
sua – montar e habitar uma barraca em um certo local – é impedida por
terceiros. E, no entanto, ela é aceita por libertários. Por quê?
A resposta óbvia é que nem todas as liberdades são iguais. Algumas são
legítimas, outras não. Essa ideia também é muito intuitiva e se mostra no uso
da palavra: não tenho a liberdade de roubar seu celular, por exemplo, e se o
fizer deverei ser punido por isso, talvez com encarceramento (no Brasil,
chamamos esse tipo de pena de “privativa de liberdade”). Mas, se isso é
verdade, então deve haver algum critério para distinguir as minhas liberdades
de não tomar vacina ou de incitar violência contra instituições – defensáveis
para certo discurso libertário – das liberdades de roubar seu celular ou ocupar
seu quintal – condenáveis para esse discurso.
Esse critério só pode ser moral. Devemos poder separar de algum modo
liberdades “boas”, no sentido de moralmente valiosas e merecedoras de
proteção pelo Estado, de liberdades “ruins”, ou ao menos pouco valiosas.
Mas, para isso, precisaríamos ter uma concepção de justiça independente da
concepção de liberdade, sob pena de circularidade lógica. E isso os libertários
não têm, já que, como vimos, sua concepção de justiça é estabelecida em
termos da maximização de liberdades.
Poderíamos parar por aqui. Essa crítica já mostra que não é possível defender
um direito exclusivamente com base em liberdade. O argumento de que
obrigar pessoas a tomar vacina diminui sua liberdade só pode terminar com
uma vírgula, não com um ponto final: ele pede a explicação do porquê essa
liberdade é moralmente preciosa e como seu valor se justifica em relação aos
outros sujeitos.
Sobre os autores
Como o neoliberalismo
naturalizou o sofrimento e
esvaziou a democracia
POR
ROBERTA PEDRINHA
Sujeito neoliberal
Nessa órbita, o neoliberalismo, para além de uma forma de dominação
capitalista, atua enquanto racionalidade, maneira de ver, compreender,
perceber e sentir o mundo, na metamorfose do próprio sujeito, pela introjeção
subjetiva, através do imaginário. Nesse viés, o autor debruça-se a desvendar o
imaginário neoliberal, com destaque para o capítulo três do seu livro, que
caminha a partir de Castoriadis, Freud e Lacan. Para daí enunciar como as
categorias do mundo social se concatenam, como conectam ideias dos outros,
como se organizam nas imagens de si, nas práticas cotidianas, pela
mobilização de todo tipo de recurso tecnológico, de entretenimento ou de
dispositivo publicitário. Verifica a maneira na qual são internalizadas tais
imagens, o modo como ocorre a interiorização no imaginário subjetivo, de
naturalização de atitudes disruptivas, de concorrências e disputas, de
introjeção da lógica mercantil, da concepção da gestão empresarial e dos
valores do capital ilimitado, que conduzem ao esquecimento da finitude
humana, da condição de fragilidade, na aproximação com o pós-humanismo.
Afinal, é no campo das subjetividades que nasce o sujeito neoliberal.
Acerca da raça, sabe-se, com Frantz Fanon, que não é critério físico,
biológico, antropológico ou genético, constitui-se como construção social, que
adveio com o colonialismo, que passou a fixar a existência negra na
subalternidade, que estabeleceu a negação da sua humanidade ou o seu
escalonamento. Nesse diapasão, verifica-se que a desigualdade, agigantada
pelo neoliberalismo, no Brasil, reforça o componente racial em sua
estruturação. Pois, resta nos substratos sociais mais baixos a população negra,
como denunciado por Lélia González, em o lugar do negro, que se confunde
com o espaço do rebotalho, da miséria, que pode ser concebido do quilombo à
favela.
Esvaziamento democrático
Cumpre frisar que o neoliberalismo se contrapõe aos princípios democráticos.
Pois, não é a democracia, entendida como soberania popular, que regula o
capital, mas é o capital financeiro quem condiciona a democracia pelo novo
colonialismo neoliberal. Constata-se que da fusão do poder econômico com o
político resulta a hegemonia do executivo, como superpoder. Daí, exacerba-se
a concentração de riquezas, de onde se assiste ao quadro desolador de miséria,
pelo empobrecimento radical da população global. A crise democrática
desenha-se por modalidades híbridas, uma vez que não se tem uma
democracia nítida, nem uma ditadura nos moldes clássicos. Exsurgem as
expressões talhadas por Boaventura de Souza Santos,
como: democradura e ditacracia que mesclam características de ambas as
formas de governo.
Nesse rumo, a democracia perde seu conteúdo, sua essência enquanto sufrágio
universal, supremacia do voto igualitário, pluralidade partidária, capacidade
plena eleitoral, liberdade de expressão e autonomia. Boaventura de Souza
Santos, assinala que se necessita de uma hermenêutica da suspeita. Esta deve
ser indagadora, que requeira a separação entre as esferas econômica e política,
em prol da cisão no que tange à concentração de forças e injunção de poderes.
Do contrário, perpetuar-se-á o acirramento das desigualdades estruturais e a
verticalização das relações sociais.
Saída Comum
Oautor oferece em seu último e quarto capítulo a propositura de alternativas,
visando romper com a desigualdade estrutural, a economicização, a
mercantilização de pessoas, a manipulação da verdade, a relativização de
valores imprescindíveis como justiça, igualdade e vida. Nesse rumo infere a
aposta na mitigação do direito à propriedade, para caminhar rumo à
construção coletiva, o comum da humanidade, na linha do que foi descrito na
obra Comum de Christian Laval e Pierre Dardot, com quem trava
interlocução, em permanente diálogo.
Sobre os autores
ROBERTA PEDRINHA
BRANKO MARCETIC
The 1989 cult horror classic Society is remembered for its
sensational effects and disturbing undertones. But it's the
movie's grisly portrayal of the rich exploiting the poor that's
the scariest thing of all.
Society feels like it was meant for our era of Jeffrey Epstein, QAnon, and oligarchic
scheming. (Wild Street Pictures)
The rich are not like you and me. Studies have shown again and again that the
wealthier you are, the less stressed, empathetic, and morally scrupulous you’re
likely to be. The psychological effect of money can be so powerful, the rich
may as well be a different species.
This was the conceit of 1989’s Society, one of the more fantastically deranged
cinematic artifacts from the era of low-budget body horror. This kind of thing
wasn’t unusual for cinema in the decade of Ronald Reagan, when movies
like Trading Places and Wall Street called attention to the class divide that
had become more visible than seemingly ever in American society.
But Society stands out not just for the sensational physical effects that
solidified it as a cult classic for horror fans, but the directness and savagery of
its class critique. For all the pastel colors, poofy hair, and teen sex antics that
date it firmly to the 1980s, Society oddly feels like it was meant for our era of
Jeffrey Epstein, QAnon, and oligarchic scheming.
“It was my first time directing,” he says. “When it came out, it was seen as
awkward, but a generation later, it just looks like that’s what the 1980s were.”
Up One Day
As Yuzna tells it, he had been a student radical in the 1960s with all that it
entails: taking drugs, marching in the streets, and eventually dropping out of
college and joining a commune in the country, where he waited for the
revolution. But the revolution never came, so he had to go back to work.
He spent the next while working a variety of jobs and running different
businesses, saving some money. It wasn’t until his thirties that he decided
he’d try his hand at making movies, moving to LA with a couple of kids in
tow. With the money he’d saved up, he produced the classic Re-Animator and
developed several more projects, including Honey, I Shrunk the Kids, which
he’d pitched and wrote the story for before being taken off the project.
Around that time, screenwriter Zeph Daniel, then going by Woody Keith, was
pursuing the same dream, signing up for a screenwriting course at the
Hollywood Scriptwriting Institute. It was there that he wrote the screenplay
for Society, and where he met Rick Fry, his cowriter who contributed what
Daniel describes as his gift for dialogue. Daniel had come from a well-off
Beverly Hills family similar to Billy’s, and has said that the movie is “about
things in our society that shouldn’t be there but are.”
“Let’s just say I started writing it about things that happened a long time ago,”
he told me. He points to the Nathaniel Hawthorne short story Young
Goodman Brown as a key inspiration.
Yuzna had just had another project fall through, this one
with Alien screenwriter Dan O’Bannon about a woman who finds out that all
men are aliens, when he says Fry handed him the script for Society. He liked
its sense of paranoia, which reminded him of his just scuttled movie with
O’Bannon, and he felt “it would be a fun way to make a new monster, to make
the monster class conflict.” With Re-Animator a big success, and Yuzna
owning the rights, he struck a deal to direct two pictures: Society and, as a
backstop in case his first outing as director was a failure, the Re-
Animator sequel.
Yuzna says the finished movie is basically just as it came to him, with one key
difference: while in the original script the elite were part of a satanic blood
cult, Yuzna wanted something more “fantastical” and, as a fan of effects, a
climax that would let him put something on screen he’d never seen before. It
was just as well he did. The Japanese company financing the movie
introduced Yuzna to practical effects wizard Joji Tani, a.k.a. Screaming Mad
George, maybe best known for the wild effects in John Carpenter’s Big
Trouble in Little China. The two hit it off instantly, owing to their shared love
of surrealism; Yuzna has said the infamous “shunting” scene — a
portmanteau, says Daniel, of “shun” and “hunt” — was partly influenced by
Salvador Dali’s The Great Masturbator.
Given the fickle, plodding nature of film production, both Yuzna and Daniel
were exhilarated by the speed with which the movie got off the ground. Daniel
recalls their first day of filming in Paradise Cove.
“Brian was sitting in a director’s chair, the big one, and he told me, ‘We’re
making our movie!’” he says. “He was like a kid.”
But the giddy high of seeing their vision come to life — including the retch-
inducing finale, which saw a troupe of extras that included Daniel and the
filmmakers’ friends and family literally dive into their roles with gusto — was
ended by its chilly reception. A Cannes critic called it “sodomy gore,”
while Variety dismissed it as “rough trade porno.”
Yuzna thinks that, at the height of the Reagan era, when many Americans still
broadly thought of themselves as temporarily embarrassed millionaires, “it
was the wrong kind of joke to tell at the time.” What saved the movie was a
world market that didn’t have the same taboo. The film was a roaring success
in France, Italy, and particularly the UK, where class is an inescapable fact of
existence. Audiences there must’ve been especially amused by the movie’s
theme, the “Eton Boating Song,” sung normally by aspiring English youth on
the elite assembly line, but with new lyrics:
The movie eventually found its audience. It first made a lot of money on home
video through the 1990s, and then, say Yuzna and Daniel, it had a mini-
renaissance after 2000, partly thanks to a rising nostalgia for the 1980s. But it
was after the global financial crisis, Yuzna says, that he started getting a lot
more calls asking him to screen the movie.
For all the anger and fright Reagan’s policies inspired, the movie’s indictment
of the rich and portrayal of class antagonism feel far more from this era than
his. “If you don’t follow the rules, Billy, bad things happen,” Billy’s
psychiatrist tells him. “Now some people make the rules, and some people
follow the rules. It’s a question of what you’re born to.” By the end of the
movie, it’s put to him more directly: “The rich have always sucked off low-
class shit like you.”
We gradually realize that the sick ritual at the heart of the story is one that all
of Beverly Hills high society is involved in: parents, police, the judicial
system, even paramedics. It also stretches beyond, with the judge mentioning
to one young Society member he’d be an ideal candidate for an internship
under him in Washington.
The reveal that Billy is, in fact, adopted, was one Yuzna brought to the movie.
In story terms, it explains why he’s been kept in the dark about the nature of
Society, and why he’s targeted by it. But it also has a deeper significance.
“You’re not one of us,” Billy’s told. It’s not enough to be nouveau riche,
Yuzna explains. To be accepted into the upper crust, you have to have more
than money; you need to join bloodlines.
The air of sexual predation throughout is another element that seems a better
fit for a movie about class inequality today. We’ve now had several decades
worth of scandals that at least purport a link between society’s powerful elite
and human trafficking: both unproven episodes with allegations of something
much larger, like the Franklin Credit Union scandal of the 1980s and
Belgium’s Dutroux affair in the 1990s, and cases where this link is very real
and proven, like the involvement of UK members of parliament in child abuse
and its subsequent cover-up, and, of course, the Epstein scandal.
Fittingly, Society offers no real closure for the viewer, and the fact that its
protagonists escape in the end doesn’t seem to make a difference to the
movie’s villains or the world they operate in. “What are they going to do?”
chuckles Yuzna. “Go to the police and say, ‘The rich are exploiting us’?” As
Billy’s told at the end by one of Society’s elite: “We don’t lose. Ever.”
It’s bleak stuff. But as awful as it is, maybe it’s what people want to see in our
neo-Gilded Age of massive inequality and hyperexploitation. There’s been an
explosion of interest in anti-capitalist entertainment of late, with Western
audiences, unable to find the systemic critiques they’re looking for in English-
speaking cinema, turning to Korean projects like Parasite and Squid Game.
Yuzna says he’s had interest from Korean filmmakers in securing the rights
for a Society remake.
“Horror movies give you a chance to deal with uncomfortable topics in kind
of an entertaining way, but you get a distance from it,” he says. “I don’t want
to see a movie about someone dying of cancer. But if it’s not cancer but, say,
an alien disease . . .”
And maybe this, beyond all its gross-out effects and taboo-breaking, is what
continues to make Society such an uncomfortable watch, whether on
Halloween or any other night. The world it presents is sickening, no doubt.
But it’s the reality of class warfare waged by those at the top against the poor
and working class that’s the scariest thing of all.
LEONARD PIERCE
The story of Dungeons & Dragons isn’t just about nerds
creating a wildly popular game and then losing control of it.
It’s also about how the dictates of the free market inevitably
end up stripping even our leisure activities of joy.
Dungeons & Dragons is a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends and deforms any
artistic endeavors to its own ends. (Esther Derksen via iStock / Getty Images)
Our new issue, “The Working Class,” is out in print and online now
Review of Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons & Dragons by Jon
Peterson (MIT Press, 2021)
D&D is the hobby’s 800-pound gorilla (or, in game terms, its seven-headed
hydra). But it’s not just because it was the first role-playing game — most
fans would argue that it isn’t the best. A big part of D&D’s fame is the history
of the game as a business. The unexpected success of D&D, the financial
struggles that deepened as it grew bigger, and the loss and alienation of
its two cocreators make for a narrative as compelling as any crafted in the game
itself — and show the perils of putting profit before purpose in any artistic
medium.
Following the death of D&D’s creators, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, in
2008 and 2009 respectively, there has been a surge of interest in the origins of
TTRPG, particularly as the game’s fanbase has expanded during COVID-19.
Enter Jon Peterson’s Game Wizards: The Epic Battle for Dungeons &
Dragons. Peterson focuses on the business end of D&D, examining a period
of roughly a dozen years from the game’s creation in the mid-’70s to Gygax’s
loss of control of TSR, Inc., its publisher and the company he founded. It’s a
surprising, fascinating, and often depressing look at the legal wrangling,
corporate warfare, and bitter personal recriminations that followed the game’s
path from an amusement for a tiny group of like-minded enthusiasts to an
international business.
The Rise and Fall of TSR, Inc.
Peterson is a good choice to write Game Wizards, the first in a proposed series
about the history and culture of games from MIT Press. He’s enthusiastic about
the hobby without being an uncritical fanboy, and his knowledge of TTRPGs
(and D&D in particular) is broad and deep. His writing style is unflashy but
compelling, and he constructs the story of TSR’s rise and fall soundly and
cleverly. He keeps the bigger picture at the forefront but provides enough
detail to keep readers engaged, and the book is as well-documented as any
academic work — something of a miracle given the often contradictory and
ever changing stories told about TSR by its principals over the years.
But why should anyone outside the realm of TTRPG hobbyists care
about Game Wizards? In a general sense, the hobby has a lot of appeal to us
socialists, who look at the state of the world and wish that we could construct
an alternate one where life is more just and people are more willing to stand
up to tyranny. Like any hobby, TTRPGs have gone through social and
political revolutions. While D&D’s original players were largely
Midwesterners with a libertarian bent, the hobby soon became influenced by a
wave of ’70s psychedelia as it traveled west, and has been pulled in every
other possible direction, from neofascist to old-school socialist.
But Dungeons & Dragons is also a perfect illustration of how capitalism bends
and deforms any artistic endeavors to its own ends, and how, whatever the
specific details of the situation or the intentions of the people involved, the
demand for profit will always subsume the desire for aesthetic value or artistic
integrity. Just as television puts the goals of its creators behind the demands of
advertisers, and movies are more answerable to accountants and marketers
than to audiences and filmmakers, role-playing games bend the knee to
owners who care more about the bottom line than the needs of play and story.
Peterson notes early on that D&D was an unlikely success. Although Gygax
left behind a comfortable living in insurance to pursue his gaming hobby, he
likely never expected to make more than a modest income. A big reason why
is that D&D was never actually meant to be a product. He wasn’t initially
interested in selling the slick, glossy product line we see in bookstores today;
he wanted to sell a set of rules, essentially guidelines for play that could easily
be adopted and adapted to whatever scenario other hobbyists cared to cook up.
He wanted this because that’s exactly what he had done as a game player and
creator himself, folding J.R.R. Tolkien–style fantasy into his passion for
wargaming.
Role-playing games bend the knee to owners who care more about the bottom
line than the needs of play and story.
It was only when the rules caught a unique moment in the cultural zeitgeist
and became more successful than he and Arneson had anticipated that the
TTRPG changed from a hobby to an industry, and TSR, Inc. shifted from, as
Peterson puts it, “a club to a company.”
To grow, the company had to expand. To expand, it had to acquire capital and
take on debt. And to pay off debt, it had to expand even further. As TSR’s
stockholders began to think the company’s financial expansion was more
important than paying its authors, artists, and designers a fair price for their
work, the workers — not just the company’s employees, but the founders
themselves — felt the familiar sting of alienation from their labor.
Arneson, who always found the creative end of things more enjoyable, wanted
to pursue other TTRPG projects, but TSR denied him credit for his work,
triggering years of lawsuits. Their conclusion guaranteed him a lifelong
income but left him bitter at the feeling he was underappreciated for the
creative work that made D&D a reality. Gygax, meanwhile, overestimated his
own head for business and eventually found himself marginalized and
ultimately forced out of his own company. He lost control of the phenomenon
he created and worked on less prestigious projects; the company continued to
grow but had a number of rocky years of declining reputation, poor
leadership, and financial chaos until it was finally swallowed up by a bigger
company with more money to spend.
In 1997, TSR was acquired by a Seattle company called Wizards of the Coast,
and a few years later, that company was snatched up by gaming giant Hasbro,
becoming another revenue-generating machine in their huge corporate portfolio.
The results have been predictable. D&D may be more popular than ever, but
it’s just another profit-making entity in a company flush with them, and the
company will surely abandon the title the moment it starts to make a
downturn, to be bought by another company more interested in the value of
the name than the worth of the game.
What’s more, the behind-the-scenes corporate drama that powers the narrative
of Game Wizards continues well past the sale of TSR, Inc. and its D&D-
related properties to Hasbro. Gygax’s widow, Gail, has carried on an ugly and
very public feud with investors, relatives, and other claimants to his legacy,
while over the past year, no less than three groups have emerged to present
themselves as the “new” TSR, Inc., including one fronted by Gygax’s son
Ernie, who quickly distinguished his with absurd, overblown claims and racist
and transphobic statements. (Like father, like son: Gygax himself didn’t think
TTRPGs would or should appeal to women because of a “difference in brain
function”). It’s a grim story about fallen heroes where evil wins in the end, and
it’s not getting any better.
It would have been easy enough to release the basic structure of D&D, freed
from the litigious claws of copyright enforcement, to the general public to do
with it whatever they wanted. “Home brews” — campaigns, settings, and even
rule sets derived from D&D’s mechanics but tailored toward the creative
desires of small groups and individuals — have always been a big part of the
TTRPG hobby. Some of the biggest innovations and most creative
expressions came from creators who took the original framework of the game
and created their own worlds in which to play, including some (the wildly
successful Eberron setting, for example, and the gothic-horror Ravenloft) that
TSR made part of its official licensing.
Some of the most enjoyable moments of my life have been spent around a
table, rolling funny-looking dice and pretending to be a wizard.
This was codified during the Wizards of the Coast years when, recognizing
the popularity of home brews, the endless knockoffs of their intellectual
property, and the difficulty of enforcing their copyright, TSR released the
Open Game License (OGL). This allowed other publishers and creators to
release products, within defined limits, using the D&D framework but not
bound by the company’s IP restrictions. While it eventually became just
another revenue extraction stream for Hasbro, the OGL pointed out a direction
that could have freed the entire TTRPG hobby from capital’s clutches.
Without the market’s demands and the accompanying dictates that stifle
creativity in favor of profitability, TTRPGs could have been part of the public
domain, with gamers free to build and expand on whatever ideas they wanted,
either their own or ones drawn from other sources. The games could have
been like baseball. While Major League Baseball (MLB), for example, enjoys
a vastly profitable and government-supported monopoly on
the professional game, no one owns baseball itself, and outside the confines of
MLB’s multibillion-dollar marketing machine, millions of people watch and
play baseball, compete in tournaments, and enjoy it as a rich and malleable
hobby that belongs to the people. There’s no reason other than greed that
TTRPGs can’t do the same thing.
But Marvel’s and DC’s growth from small companies making comics for kids
to corporate juggernauts churning out content for billions has made the love
many of its fans once had for the characters turn to dust. Crafts were once an
in-home leisure activity passed on from parents to children; now it’s
a megabillion-dollar industry whose major players are
both greedy and politically toxic. Disney’s gatekeeping of their products to
maximize profit has made them vast amounts of money, but it’s torn out the
heart and soul that once marked those products.
This is more than just hipster disdain for the sudden popularity of what once
was enjoyed by a select few; it’s a recognition that capitalism will always put
profit first and art second — or last. It’s naive to think the same thing won’t
happen with TTRPGs. These are all specific problems of capitalism: comics,
movies, hobbies, and games exist in formerly self-described socialist states,
but were considered the property of the people, not just commodities
controlled by already wealthy investors.
Game Wizards is not just a captivating story about how one man lost control
of his dream. It’s also an object lesson in the way capitalism invariably strips
even our leisure activities of their communal joy.
The Strike at Kellogg’s Is Now
Entering Its Second Month
BY
ALEX N. PRESS
Workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the United States
are still on strike. As the company drags out the bargaining
process, workers, now without health insurance, are
demanding a contract without concessions.
Kellogg’s cereal plant workers and their families demonstrate in front of the plant on
October 7, 2021, in Battle Creek, Michigan. (Rey Del Rio / Getty Images)
Our new issue, “The Working Class,” is out in print and online now.
One month ago, roughly 1,400 workers at Kellogg’s cereal plants across the
country went on strike. The workers at the four facilities — in Battle Creek,
Michigan (the company’s hometown and site of its headquarters); Lancaster,
Pennsylvania; Memphis, Tennessee; and Omaha, Nebraska — opposed the
company’s offer on a new five-year contract.
The key issue is Kellogg’s desire to expand a two-tier system in the contract.
The workers are members of the Bakery, Confectionery, Tobacco Workers
and Grain Millers’ International Union (BCTGM), a union that has struck at
both Frito-Lay and Nabisco in recent months. They say the company’s desire
to expand the contract’s tiers would undermine their union by pitting workers
against one another while also placing a target on the back of those workers
slotted into the higher tier, as the company would see them as a cost in need of
cutting.
The specifics of how this works are as follows: in a previous contract, workers
agreed to the creation of a “transitional” class of employees who receive lower
pay and benefits. That category is capped at 30 percent of the workforce, a
means of keeping Kellogg’s from simply hiring more and more lower-cost
workers. But in the latest negotiations, the company is pushing to lift that cap,
all but ensuring the company will steadily phase out the livable wages and
benefits current workers have secured in favor of transforming Kellogg’s jobs
into low-paid work.
At John Deere, where ten thousand United Auto Workers (UAW) members
are still on strike after recently rejecting another tentative agreement, the
company’s proposal to weaken benefits for new hires has provoked ire and
outrage among a workforce already subject to a tiered system that was
originally instituted in 1997. At Kaiser Permanente, too, some fifty thousand
health care workers are preparing to walk off the job to resist, among other
issues, the company’s desire to lower wages for people hired beginning in
January 2023.
Yet the company is still resisting, trying to coerce those who kept its profits
flowing for the past year — some of whom worked more than one hundred
days straight — even at risk to their health and that of their families.
Kellogg’s shut off workers’ health insurance when the strike began, a heinous
attempt to force workers to agree to concessions, and a reminder that tying
health care to employment status always gives the boss an advantage.
“Most are doing okay, but a few have health conditions that now don’t have
any medical insurance, because the company cut our insurance off,” Bradshaw
told me of Kellogg’s decision to deny strikers their health insurance. “We
have people with scheduled surgeries, and some who, just as we speak, have
been diagnosed with cancer — who have worked more than twenty years,
who today can’t even get chemo and other treatments they need. Kellogg’s is
playing really dirty!”
The next day, the committee offered its latest update. Negotiations had ended
at 5:19 p.m. after the company gave the union its last, best, and final offer.
The committee wrote:
That offer does not achieve what we were asking, a pathway to fully vetted workers
without takeaways. The company said they would get off their two-tier and get to a
pathway, but they could not find a fully benefited way to achieve this. With this issue,
we were unable to address the other items that are still on the table. We cannot
recommend this offer and will not bring it back for the membership to vote on. We
agreed that we will not have concessions, and that is all their last offer was.
We will be home tomorrow. We will continue this fight for as long as it takes!
There are no more bargaining dates on the calendar. Workers say donations to
their strike fund are appreciated, as they will hold the line until the company
changes its tune.
The Labour Left’s Fatal
Contradictions Are Still
Unresolved
BY
JAMES A. SMITH
In the best moments of Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership, the
Labour left captured an insurgent, democratizing spirit. Yet
two years after the Left’s defeat, the top-down approach that
led to the fatal “second referendum” policy continues to
hamper its recovery.
Jeremy Corbyn, former leader of the Labour Party, at an event during the Labour Party
conference in Brighton, UK, 2021. (Hollie Adams / Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Our new issue, “The Working Class,” is out in print and online now.
Minutes after the exit poll, the Labour left’s narrative was set. Brexit, not
socialist policies, had cost Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party the 2019 general
election. Those within the movement who had counseled against a second
referendum on EU membership claimed vindication. Those who took us
toward that policy could either — like Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell
— plead guilty, or protest fatalistically that while the policy was bad, the
Brexit pincer grip would have damned us whatever was done. Left
influencers’ former flirtation with anti-Brexit politics evaporated as
completely as the dodgy People’s Vote campaign itself.
With Britain finally out of the EU, we’re all Lexiters now (though pollster
YouGov reports that 59 percent of Labour members want to rejoin). But there’s a
deeper problem: the dynamics within Corbynism that allowed the radical left’s
shot at state power to be squandered remain substantially uncorrected.
We’re seeing similar dynamics play out again, through the Left’s response to
the COVID-19 pandemic, and the bandwagon in favor of electoral reform. Of
course, there are many plausible stances the Left could take on such fraught
questions. But the apparent unanimity of the Left on these issues is itself
ominous — not least because of its family resemblance to the capture of
crucial parts of the Left by “Remainism” in the run-up to 2019.
Unsolved Weaknesses
It’s worth emphasizing that the obliteration of Corbynism was not inevitable
after the 2019 general election. As I wrote the week after polling day, the core
political claims of the Left’s “centrist” rivals inside Labour were, if anything,
even more humiliated by the result than Corbyn was. The Left’s real defeat
came in the Labour leadership election that followed, which revealed the
pliability and political shallowness of much of the membership Corbyn had
always relied on.
Today, this dynamic tends to take the form of some combination of the
following habits: anti-populism (a misanthropic suspicion of “the people” as
tendentially reactionary, racist, and ignorant); hyper-partisanship (the reflex to
blame “the Tories” and their supporters, rather than the four-decade cross-
party consensus on neoliberalism); a revulsion at petit-bourgeois nationalism
untempered by an equal dislike of Davos-class globalism (when distance
from both is needed to avoid being subsumed by one or other side in an intra-
elite conflict); and a “retreat from class” toward liberal bourgeois institutions
and procedures.
The dynamics within Corbynism that allowed the radical left’s shot at state
power to be squandered remain substantially uncorrected.
These are the self-defeating temptations of a political faction that wants the
best for people and rarely gets it, and that is increasingly drawn from a class
different to the one it sets out to liberate. In its most glorious moments,
Corbynism transcended these constraints of vision. But the Left’s mistakes —
from the second referendum policy to the election of Sir Keir to the flagship
positions taken after — have invariably been coded by them.
Far from the Left “winning the argument,” as Corbyn himself put it, this has
resulted in superficially left-wing ideas around climate, racial justice, anti-
fascism, and indeed a new settlement on the role of the state, being stripped of
their liberatory, democratizing content, and put in the service of projects —
Bidenism and Johnsonism — that are only interested in relegitimizing elite
power.
As theorists as diverse as Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, Adolph Reed, and
Nancy Fraser have argued, the apparent defeat of the 1968 “New Left” was
followed by many of its demands, aesthetics, and frames of feeling being
embraced by victorious elites as part of neoliberalism’s “new spirit of
capitalism.” As Fraser reflects:
Conscripted in the service of a project that was deeply at odds with our larger, holistic
vision of a just society . . . utopian desires found a second life as feeling currents that
legitimated the transition to a new form of capitalism: post-Fordist, transnational,
neoliberal.
Proportional Representation
For all the opportunity afforded by the dire Sir Keir, leadership from the
Labour left of the movement Corbyn bequeathed them has been nonexistent.
From this awful vacuum, two recognizable positions have emerged as the
post-Corbyn left’s main raison d’être: replacing Britain’s “first past the post”
(FPTP) voting system with proportional representation; and pursuing a “zero
COVID” strategy of maximum containment of the virus. Both appear to be
highly popular on the Left, but — I claim — can unfortunately trace their
lineage back to the same “from above” instincts that brought us to the second
referendum position.
This is not the place for a thoroughgoing “Left case against proportional
representation” — and I acknowledge there are reasonable arguments for it.
What is troubling, however, is the apparently unanimous support electoral
reform has in Constituency Labour Parties and within the membership
of Momentum, after barely any public discussion.
Momentum even took PR as its number two policy aim for 2021 — easily
swatted away by Sir Keir for the irrelevance it was — at a conference where
the only issue was the marginalization of the Left through internal party rule
changes. This is the spontaneous priority we emerge from the radical
liberatory experimentation of the Corbyn project with? Really?
The best case for PR is the virtual Tory hegemony that FPTP has yielded over
the past half-century. But Corbyn’s 2017 performance under FPTP would
have won handily in any previous election since the millennium. Do we now
join with the Labour right and the entire political class in pretending that
never happened? It will never happen again if we adopt a system which has in
every other national context made power brokers of centrist liberals.
FPTP, it should be added, was hardly bad for Labour governments in the
1960s and ’70s. If we wanted to argue that something has changed in British
democracy that illegitimately makes Tory hegemony structurally
insurmountable, a more obvious and direct target would be media ownership.
Unlike PR, this is something the Left could meaningfully campaign over
without the blessing of the Labour conference or leadership, and — such are
the sins of journalists — with the appropriate populist framing, could rightly
garner visceral public support.
Instead, the post-Corbyn left has spent the pandemic urging a strategy that —
if pursued — could only entail yet more unquestioning submission to a
government it supposedly regards as “far right”; to pharmaceutical companies
it had spent the 2019 election representing as vultures circling our most
intimate data; to borders it fulminated against whenever they were mentioned
by Brexiteers; and to police it was at the time calling to be abolished as agents
of racism and gendered violence.
It needs to be reckoned with that the Left has not just been unreflectingly
complicit with mainstream liberal opinion in this, as it was sometimes argued
to have been over Brexit. It has been the most pro-lockdown of anyone: the
UK’s main zero-COVID campaign describes itself as “jointly convened by
Diane Abbott MP and the Morning Star.” Meanwhile, the closest thing to the
Labour left in government, in the Welsh Assembly, has followed the Scottish
National Party in driving through an illiberal regime of vaccine passes —
winning on the technicality of an opposition MP failing to join the Zoom vote
in time.
We will see who benefits from the Left’s abandoning any critique of anti-
COVID measures to the fringe right, when healthy vaccinated people
reasonably blanche at the prospect of future lockdowns, indefinite boosters,
and vaccines for healthy children, and the probable long-term obesity and
mental health disaster set in motion by lockdowns starts to kick in.
To refer to my checklist again: as with the second referendum and PR, the
Left’s instinctive reaction to the lockdowns was anti-populist: it anxiously
suspected the public of being selfish yahoos, when they were in the main
either deeply compliant or sensibly flexible (e.g. defying the ban on seeing
loved ones outside or visiting beaches, but in many cases continuing to mask
in crowded areas after the mandate to do so expired).
Everything that has happened since has been a journey away from that, and it
may be the case — with the Brexit question closed — that it will be a long
time before the Left gets such another opportunity to differentiate itself from
the neoliberal centrists the Labour Party forces it to fraternize with.
NATHÁLIA URBAN
“daqueles que acabaram com o genocídio dos povos indígenas, daqueles que
inventaram o Império dos Direitos Humanos, dando ao mundo a maior obra
de fraternidade universal que um povo já contribuiu, do intrépido que deteve
os turcos no Mediterrâneo e, ainda, daqueles que regaram com o seu sangue
os campos da metade da Europa para fazer uma Espanha à medida dos seus
sonhos!”
Não é surpreendente que ele ignore o genocídio dos povos originários da
América, a escravidão e todas as outras mazelas que o colonialismo provocou,
o preocupante é que sua retórica esteja exercendo influência em outros países
do mundo, em especial daqueles que sentiram na pele a fúria do colonialismo
hispânico.
Foro de Madrid
Graças ao Foro de Madrid – uma iniciativa lançada em 2020 na Espanha,
Portugal e países latino-americanos, criada “para conter os avanços do
comunismo” –, o Vox está tomando um papel de liderança, no nosso
continente, nessa cruzada de guerra cultural proposta pela extrema direita
global. Em um vídeo gravado para o Vox pelo filho de Jair Bolsonaro, o
deputado federal Eduardo Bolsonaro, membro do Foro de Madrid, ele disse
que “nossos inimigos sabem que se deixarem que falemos a verdade,
ganharemos essa guerra cultural”.
O denominador comum usado para unir vários atores à essa narrativa é, por
sua vez, um eurocentrismo construído a partir da tradição do colonialismo
espanhol e português, que mistura um apego desenfreado ao
embranquecimento social e cultural e o cristianismo usado como ferramenta
de dominação, como o que aconteceu a 600 anos atrás.
Não é à toa que o Vox e outros signatários da Carta de Madrid, documento que
assinala a aliança entre conservadores ibéricos e latino-americanos, se
sentiram tão compelidos em impulsionar Jeanine Áñez, a ditadora que
assumiu o poder no Bolívia após o golpe de 2019, para o Prémio Sakharov
para a Liberdade de Pensamento dado pela União Europeia, ela acabou
perdendo o prêmio para opositor russo Alexei Navalny. Ao se autoproclamar
presidenta da Bolívia em 2019, Áñez bradou “A Bíblia volta ao Palácio”
fazendo uma crítica ao pluralismo cultural e religioso promovido pelo
Movimento ao Socialismo de Evo Morales, de etnia aymara, cujo partido não
só é de maioria indígena como, ainda, promoveu uma reforma constitucional
para reconhecer o plurinacionalismo boliviano.
Ascensão do Vox
OVox foi fundado em 2013 por militantes mais radicais do PP, tradicional
partido de centro direita espanhola da era democrática que, no entanto, sempre
tolerou quadros de extrema direita em suas fileiras, levando em consideração
que o regime fascista em seu país só terminou tardiamente nos anos 1970. A
memória ainda muito recente do fascismo fez com que a extrema direita não
conseguisse se organizar em um partido próprio, ainda que continuasse a
existir e atuar, fazendo a Espanha parecer imune a onda da extrema direita que
assolava a Europa desde os anos 1980 e que piorou após a crise de 2008.
“Nossa intenção com esta carta é fazer ao mesmo tempo um alerta ao povo
espanhol, um apelo à sua consciência histórica e à sua razão política, em face
do ressurgimento da supremacia e do fascismo que nos leva de volta à parte
mais escura da Europa imperial”.
“Enviei uma carta ao rei espanhol [Felipe VI] e outra ao Papa para que os
abusos sejam reconhecidos e um pedido de desculpas possa ser feito aos
povos indígenas pelas violações do que hoje chamamos de direitos
humanosHouve massacres… A chamada conquista foi feita com a espada e a
cruz. Eles ergueram igrejas em cima de templos… Chegou a hora de se
reconciliar, mas primeiro eles deveriam pedir perdão.”
Sobre os autores
NATHÁLIA URBAN
A crise política que gera o fascismo original é mais grave que a crise
política brasileira que gerou o neofascismo. Ambas possuem
elementos gerais comuns: estão articuladas com uma crise econômica
do capitalismo; apresentam uma crise de hegemonia no interior do
bloco no poder – disputa entre o grande e o médio capital, num caso, e
disputa entre a grande burguesia interna e grande burguesia associada
ao capital internacional, no outro –; comportam uma aspiração da
burguesia por retirar conquistas da classe operária; são agravadas pela
formação abrupta de um movimento político disruptivo de classe
média ou pequeno burguês; comportam uma crise de representação
partidária da burguesia; são marcadas pela incapacidade dos partidos
operários e populares apresentarem solução própria para a crise
política – os socialistas e comunistas foram derrotados antes da
ascensão do fascismo ao poder (Poulantzas, 1970) e o movimento
democrático e popular no Brasil vem sofrendo uma série de derrotas
desde o impeachment e revelando incapacidade de reação (Boito,
2018 e 2019). Essa semelhança entre as duas crises é muito forte e é
de importância maior para caracterizar o fascismo e explicar a sua
origem nas sociedades capitalistas (Poulatazas, 1970). Há, contudo,
um componente fundamental que diferencia a crise política na qual
nasceu o fascismo original da crise política na qual nasceu o
neofascismo. E essa diferença nos leva de volta para a questão da base
de massa do fascismo.
Referências
Nota
[1] “È un grave errore il credere Che il fascismo sia partito dal 1920,
oppure dalla Marcia su Roma, con un piano prestabilito, fissato in
precedenzia, di regime di dittatura quale questo regime si è poi
organizzato nel corso di dieci anni e quale poi oggi lo vediamo.
Sarebbe, questo, um grave errore. (Togliatti, 2010, p. 20-21) La
dittatura fascista è stata spinta ad assumere le forme sue attuali da
fatori obbiettivi: dalla situazione economica e dai movimenti delle
masse Che da questa situazione vengono determinati. (…) (Togliatti,
2010, p. 21) Tra il 23 e il 26 (…) Nasce il totalitarismo. Il fascismo
non è nato totalitario, esso lo è diventato” (Togliatti, Corso sugli
avversari, p. 32).
Referência