It did not go unnoticed among those who followed the launch event of the pre-campaign of former President Lula (PT), on the last May 8th, the exchange of the term “clarification” for “obscuração”, made by the presenter of the event. Incomprehensible to any ordinary worker who lives outside the Twitter bubble, the use of the new “anti-racist” dialect is one of the signs of the transformation of the left that, as narrated in this report by Gazeta do Povo , moved away from unions to embrace identity causes. According to backstory published by the press, Lula himself is criticized for exalting picanha instead of dialoguing with vegetarians and vegans, and using terms such as “Indian” and “Galician”.
In the middle of the year electoral process, it is not to be expected that the PT will be the target of an attempt at “cancellation”. However, the collision between the ideals, language and priorities of the trade union left and the one that grew between tablets and smartphones generates some bangs, in Brazil and in the world. In the United States, for example, Harvard professor Cornel West, one of the most relevant Marxist intellectuals in the country, publicly discussed with the writer Ta-Nehisi Coates, one of the “priests” of the new “anti-racism”, author of a book that extols the administration of Barack Obama, which brought in a few billion more for large technology companies and began to plunge the country into an unemployment crisis. “Coates is the neoliberal face of the black struggle for freedom,” West wrote. In yet another expression of contempt for workers, Coates has already stated that he does not feel any pity for the police and firefighters killed in the World Trade Center, since the police would be a “threat of nature”.
In addition to specific government plans, elections and local particularities, the migration of the left from “root” Marxism, clinging to the class struggle, to the culture wars of postmodernism is a global phenomenon, whose roots go back to the philosophy that emerged from the centuries. XIX and XX. Director of the Center for Ethics and Entrepreneurship at Rockford University, Canada, philosopher Stephen Hicks is one of the contemporary thinkers to address this issue.
In his book “Explaining Postmodernism : Skepticism and Socialism from Rousseau to Foucault”, Hicks explains that, as heirs of modern thought, characterized by the protagonism of ideologies (or the different “isms” – individualism, capitalism, communism, socialism – that emerged from the Industrial Revolution and the birth of the market), Marxists believed that their political-economic system was supported by rational thought and evidence.
The systematic exploitation of workers, as well as the self-destruction of the market, which would inevitably lead to a proletarian revolution and the rebirth of a more prosperous and egalitarian economy, therefore, were taken as propositions that could be subjected to the scrutiny of reality. “Practice is the criterion of truth”, defended Marx himself. In other words, truth is the expression of concrete reality.
And then came the 20th century. And, despite the relevant advances in medicine, work, human relations and social development, science and reason, offspring of the triumphant enlightenment, would be instrumentalized to justify theories of racial superiority, new models of totalitarian States and gas chambers. .
On the one hand, fascism and Nazism would take over Europe, decimating millions of lives. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s “noble experiment” was reaping the rewards of revolution. Two world wars – the last of them, ended with the first attack on the atomic bomb in history, another stain on the curriculum of scientific advance subjugated to ideologies – and a Cold War, each with its millions of dead, were the balance of the era that intended rational. On top of all that, there were the gulags. The walls. Hunger and the systematic persecution of those who dared to denounce it – see the case of journalist Gareth Jones, a pioneer in writing about the Holodomor.
Not to mention that, since the beginning of the last century, the three predictions of original socialism had failed: the proletariat had not become even poorer, nor were there fewer and fewer people enjoying good material conditions. Faced with this scenario, the left had to change its strategy. One of the artifices used was a discursive transformation: if, before, wealth was seen as positive, provided it was distributed equally, with the failure of the socialist model and the proof that capitalism was the one that best met this need, the acquisition of goods has become the problem itself.
Marcuse enters the scene
Graduated in philosophy in Germany, Herbert Marcuse was one of the greatest disseminators of the writings of the Frankfurt School, a group of intellectuals who focused on the failure of rationalism that marked the time – without, however, associating it to communism itself. “Politically, Marcuse identified deeply with Marxism and was busy adapting it to capitalism’s unforeseen flexibility to resist revolution,” writes Hicks. In short, Marcuse tried to justify the success of capitalism to the seduction of the proletariat for its benefits, integrated not only to the economic system, but to the human soul – the new object of the revolution. For Marcuse, “capitalism not only oppresses the masses existentially, it also represses them psychologically”, as Hicks explains.
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