Monday, 29 October 2018

Fascism Comes to Brazil

Fascism, the grey beards observed, is the price the working class pays when it fails to make a revolution. In the early 21st century, matters are a touch more febrile. The gibbering menagerie of ranting rabble-rousers, tinpot authoritarians and outright fascists are visited upon us when the centre left and social democracy cannot deliver even the barest reforms and political empowerment for its base. As Brazil's awful presidential election result shows, the bar for a fascist insurgency has been lowered and with terrible consequences for us all. Not to worry though. The markets are happy.

The record of the PT in power leaves a lot to be desired. Their performance was patchy, the movement that powered them to office in 2002 was demobilised and warned not to rock the boat too much to embarrass their ministers, while those self-same politicians were, with alacrity, going native and grubbing it up in the stinking corruption Brazil's political institution are mired in. But this disaster is not solely and entirely the fault of the compromises the Workers' Party made with capital. In the first round of the elections the challenges of the bourgeois parties collapsed, mostly because their vote - liberal, neoliberal, conservative - rallied behind and threw their lot in with Bolsonaro. Not forgetting the antipathy legions of well heeled Brazilians feel toward the uppity workers and their party, on matters of economic dislocation and uncertainty Bolsonaro's candidature offered a means of restoring order and giving those identified with an unwelcome way of the world - gay people, women, ethnic minorities and indigenous peoples - a good hiding.

Though if anyone's expecting the new president to take on crime, they're all set to be disappointed. A big show of cleaning matters up will be made, a few sacrificial lambs for the baying petit bourgeois are inevitable. But as with other authoritarian states, crime is baked in. Drugs, prostitution, smuggling, the state at regional and local levels will make use of the dictatorial turn and monopolise criminal enterprise in their own hands. The core support will buy the illusion and sleep more soundly, while cops become the pimps and pushers and political oppositionists will suffer the full force of the inevitable "anti-corruption" drive.

Understanding the likes of Bolsonaro and his movement is the necessary spadework to build a strategy that can defeat fascism there and here. Singly unhelpful then is the growing clamour to blame the recrudescence of the far right on hateful speech and bad-tempered political discourse. This piece from Simon Jenkins is pretty typical. Unregulated speech bypassing established institutions (like the press, funnily enough) is the driver of extremism, they argue. Fake news is polarising the electorate and opening the gates to one, two, many Bolsonaros.

Utter poppycock. Giving platforms to the far right is stupid for all kinds of reasons, and especially deserving of scorn are media outlets who parrot and amplify far right talking points and arguments off their own bat. But this rhetoric, the vacuous and pitiful rubbish peddled by Bolsonaro for instance, gets a following because it resonates with the circumstances and interests of millions of people. Blaming social media is easy and lazy when the key to political change can always be traced back to political economy and the sharpening conflicts occurring there. No wonder Western liberals are resistant: they can't even recognise a social process when it's making them obsolete. And how shocking it is to find many of their Brazilian number have jumped aboard Bolsonaro's bandwagon.

The defence of democratic institutions is vital always and everywhere, which means it's too important to be left to professional pundits paid to misrecognise the tragedies unfolding in front of their eyes. Unlike the United States where the institutions and antipathy by a large section of the ruling class have, to a degree, limited Trump, it's unlikely the constitutional trappings of Brazilian democracy will hold Bolsonaro back. He has promised blood, and woe betide anyone who think he's just posturing. Therefore resistance to and fightback against Bolsonarist fascism is inevitable from below, from the feminist movements and trade unions, the leftist parties, organisations of LGBTQ+ and ethnic minority activists. It's their very existence that's on the line, and they carry the hope of Brazil and the world on their shoulders. They are deserving more than liberal condescension and crocodile tears, they need our sympathy, our support, and our unconditional solidarity.


Anonymous said...

"Unconditional solidarity" is a good thing to talk about. However, what actually was needed in Brazil was for the left to offer unconditional solidarity to the PT, which was the only party which could defeat Bolsonaro. It didn't, it was fragmented and hummed and hawed, and many members of the PT itself collaborated with the corporate and judicial coup-mongers who destroyed their movement in the first place. There is absolutely nothing that the European or North American left can do to help Brazil now. Your conclusion -- that a bunch of divided bodies, many based on single issue politics and eager to collaborate with whoever throws them a bone, are the only ones who are fighting against the Brazilian reaction -- is sadly true, but you fail to recognise that this means that the Brazilian reaction has won, at least until someone can reconstruct the leftist coalition which was destroyed in 2015-6.

And that could take fifty years, and Brazil doesn't have fifty years to play with.

Speedy said...

There is an element by which social media reinforces extremist views - it amplifies and "sandboxes" opinions. People spend much more time on social media than traditional these days. If I believed my own FB stream I would think another EU refrendum was just aorund the corner.

However, it also needs to be recognised that the Left (in the West) contributed to this situation via its "revolution through the organs", essentially, successfully moving the centre of reasonable opinion toward its own, hence previously commonly-held prejudices, around gay people, immigrants etc, were made unacceptable. The hugely positive result of this has been the decline or racism and homophobia over the past 50 years, a grotesque example of its blowback has been the many thousands of working-class white girls abused as a result of the fear engendered by identifying the perpetrators.

In much the same way that the ideology of Thatcherism transformed the perception of people today, so did this ideology.

I don't think you can map the situation in Brazil, where the economy has collapsed and crime (even by Brazilian terms) skyrocketed. But you can look at Brexit in the UK, the National Front in France, Salvini in Italy, etc.

Here, populists are homophobic, racist, etc because these signify to their supporters that they are not part of the status quo. Social media "packages" the problems - say immigration - as the prime issue, so it becomes a self-fulfilling loop. However the real problems are structural - a decadent ruling class (in the case of UK/ France/Italy/ US) and the residue of industrialised economies (where the manual labourer no longer has identity, earning power or pride), the watering down of democracy (a natural result of globalisation) and the impact of mass immigration on identity, community and earning power.

Yet the Left offers few actual answers, so far as I can see. The economic proposals of Labour are drowned out by the noise (and its own twisted position) on Brexit, it speaks plainly on some issues, but dissimulates on others. Its own thinking is far from coherent, so the apparently clear (but deeply incoherent) messages of the populists cut through.

CCAAC said...

The BBC is fake news personified, half the people in the UK don’t know about the war in Yemen. The unfree press that make up the UK news landscape tell you what they want you to hear. It is unadulterated propaganda and brainwashing.

The slow decline of this form of media was in part due to the rise in so called social media, facebook etc, and now this form of media is being brought under the direct control of the establishment (a perfectly acceptable term for any Marxist).

Unregulated free speech for all!

We at the committee offer some answers:

1) Banning of Halloween merchandise and Christmas lights outside people’s houses as a war on consumerism and destruction of the planet

2) Ban of puppets and cartoon characters in adverts as a fight against infantilism, consumerism and propaganda

3) A mass audit of everything that gets produced with each item given a score related to its need. A score of 10 means the good is of high necessity, a score under 4 means it is useless shit no one needs. All goods scoring less than 4 to be phased out with all due urgency. Goods scoring less than 7 to be drastically reduced.

4) Resource savings, labour and material, from point 3 to be put to productive use in public goods

5) The time savings achieved by points 3 and 4 to eventually reduce working week to 15 hours core, 5 hours community work and 5 hours of voluntary work which allow purchase of category 5 and 6 goods, sub goods intangible. I.e. not physical goods as such but things like spa weekend or visit to Paris for weekend etc. Based on availability.

6) Gradual transition to production based on need and not ability to pay. So for example coastal housing to be given to those who work in lung busting sectors of the economy and others with repertory problems, another example leg room on planes to be given to disabled or elderly rather than rich. This to go alongside gradual mass expropriation

7) Public transport to be greatly invested in at expense of private cars, which will be available for hire. Licence for private cars to be based not on ability to pay but need.

8) Drastic reduction in armed forces spending and arms trading. Arms trading to be made a crime equivalent to murder.

9) The history of the establishment, both as a concept and a word, to be taught in all schools

Anonymous said...

10) Eat the rich, either with a side salad or a touch of mustard.