About the Western progressist neoliberalism and the “new enlightened despotism” as a tool against emerging third world countrys — The case of Brazil.
Tags: Marxism, Politics, Brazil, Socialism, Philosophy

It is true that the most reactionary part of Brazilian society does not care about the environment, and encourages fires, illegal logging, and illegal mining, as a way to increase economic productivity, as they sell to the foreign market. Most of these products manage to leave the country legally, mainly agricultural products, due to the corruption of Brazilian public agents through large amounts of foreign currency, by the way, a fact that has long been known and explored by several multinational companies of developed countries. This is, again, not an internal problem, but the relationship of the subordinate landlord Brazilian ruling class with the ruling class of developed countries.

But this does not even remotely represent the history of this country or most of its population. Brazil is one of the countries, if not the leader in this regard, that has protected its environment and its forests. Even in its most absurd and reactionary periods, it never polluted and deforested in the same proportion as any of the developed countries that use the environmental discourse today, as to a real issue, but with a deviation of purpose, based on one-dimensional arguments, without temporality, and, therefore, fraudulent.

This way of thinking the problem used in recently argumentation about the “internationalization” of Brazilian Amazon, of course, follow the logic of civilized vs barbarian, camouflaged as a progressive and humanitarian environmental issue. Even so, because of the desire to feel superior, dozens of progressives from developed countries appear to buy perfectly this rhetoric that is a superstructural necessity to justify the massacre and robbery over Brazilian heads and territory. After all, that when, overnight, fed like a guided horde from tabloids that appear to have progressive rhetoric but defend imperialist prey, dozens of young hedonists, arrogant and alienated about their situation became profound connoisseurs of the history of the struggles of third world people, their history and their culture to the point of being able to issue a coherent opinion on a subject that they do not know anything about.

Much of Bolsonaro’s ideology is the result of the ideology of the right-wing military and the Brazilian ruling class that prevailed more ostensibly between the years 1960 to 1985, which with the military, economic, and ideological help of the US, imposed a bloody military dictatorship that lasted for 21 years(1964–1985), just to prevent structural reforms carried out by the nationalist left together with the masses in the economy, society and in the land division. This coup was aimed only to keep Brazil in a submissive condition and linked to the North American geopolitical strategy for the cold war. It was, of course, an agreement between both the ruling classes of such countries, in which only the executioner, that is, the military, is still to blame, while the mastermind, that is, the ruling class of developed countries, especially the US, goes on and continue to “spread democracy across the globe” because it is a more “civilized country”.

That is why it is strange that anyone really thinks, publicizes, or propagates that there is any real problem between US strategy for South America and the current Brazilian government, and therefore, between the governments of both countries, when in a vexatious and pathetic way, even though they deplore the current US president, the supporters of Bolsonaro and the extreme-right are the greatest Americanophiles in all Brazilian territory. Such nonsense could only come from someone dishonest or without critical recourse. Yet it is, and as astonishing as it sounds, this is exactly what the foreign policy coverage of most developed country’s newspapers seems to want us to believe.

Supporters of Bolsonaro, as always, parading around with the North-American flag.

Those who think that Bolsonaro, his ideology, his followers, and allies are just “trumpists”, or tools of “trumpism” in Latin America, are also wrong. Worse than that, this way of thinking about the problem only deceives people on a large scale, in the case of big western media outlets. Bolsonaro and his crew believe they are following US interests in the region, precisely because their ideology is based on the US ideology for Latin America during the cold war that is being revitalized in what the Brazilian political scientist Moniz Bandeira called “The second cold war” between the US and his allies and China and Rússia and their allies. This is not a matter of government policy, but a matter of state policy. They believe from the bottom of their hearts that Brazil has to be linked to North American defense and State doctrine and policy for Latin America. Because of that, even if they hate Joe Biden and the left-liberals of the USA, they will continue with their original plan that always was: automatic alignment with the American State policy.

Bolsonaro during the Brazilian Independence Holiday. Isn’t it strange how much he salutes and carries the North-American flag around?

It would be hilarious to see such newspapers, many linked to progressive liberal thinking, to try to explain to their audiences why the Brazilian extreme right-wing and Bolsonaro supporters march in the streets carrying USA flags, I would enjoy watching then explaining why Bolsonaro supporters carry banners written in English begging for a new North American coup in alliance with Brazilian military against “communism” in the South American country, I would enjoy watching then explaining why Bolsonaro saluted the American flag and sang “U.S.A, U.S.A” genuinely and pathetically like a child fascinated by Hollywood movies when before being elected doing a pre-election campaign in the USA for American businessmen.

Bolsonaro fans, as always, write their coup messages also in English so they can be understood by their first world idols.

Yes, Bolsonaro and his supporters are pigs, they are uncivilized and they are ugly to behold in their ignorance. But make no mistake, they are more than useful for the interests of both, the local ruling class, internationally submissive, and its main hierarchical superior, the empire and its tentacles and strategic allies. While fulfilling the strategic interests of developed countries for the region, as subordinate vassals without any love for Brazil or notion of national sovereignty, they still take all the blame for this, and developed countries still have the opportunity to criticize a situation in which they are more than participants, but accomplice and main beneficiaries. They manage to profit twice from the Brazilian tragedy by reversing the complete failure of such a puppet government implemented in the presidency of Brazil in a cruel politically correct “soft power”.

After the 2008 crisis, the political organization of Latin America changed drastically. The policy of coups and regime-change operations carried out by the US and its allies in Latin America was abruptly intensified by the need to remove Latin American governments, as in the case of the Workers’ Party in Brazil, following not a socialist, but mild left-liberal tendencies alongside with orthodox macroeconomics, which suffered a congress coup in 2016 and had their biggest name illegally arrested since an espionage scandal and lawfare blatantly favorable to the US, or utopian socialists of a nationalist and pan-Latin American character, ie, Bolivarian, as is the case of MAS in Bolivia, which suffered a military coup but it has already re-established itself, and from the PSUV in Venezuela, which has been under enormous external pressure for a long period of years.

bolsonaro fans also often carry neo-Nazi symbols from Ukraine, a country currently on the far right after undergoing a process of “regime change” by the US and the European Union, and with whom Bolsonarists and the far right in Brazil have strong relations.

Look at the attempted agreement between the European Union and MERCOSUR, this is something that most overthrown, or disorganized and pressured governments belonging to the South American bloc would never accept under normal conditions. But with Bolsonaro at the head of Brazil, and a small wave of right-wing liberal rulers, such an agreement so harmful to the development of the South American economy, as it deepens its technological dependence, became an object of desire for the South American liberal right and it did not take long, turned into an object of blackmail and harassment in the negotiation by part of the European nations, taking advantage of a moment of disorganization on the continent to force the approval of an agreement, which had been shelved for years, now in terms more than beneficial to them. Almost like kicking a drunk that makes really bad choices after supporting him to drink.

The case of Brazil is representative, not only because the country is the geopolitical leader of the region, but because the country did not even really challenged the North American ideological hegemony in reality, on the contrary, it defended many of its assumptions, mostly in economics, which in large part it frustrated most of the Brazilian radical left throughout the more than ten years of the Workers’ Party government. Even so, the Workers’ Party was hit, because to the Empire, its allies, and the big corporations, the proposal of progressive soft-neoliberalism for the third world of such party was insufficient after the 2008 crisis. At the time Brazil preached friendly relations with the USA and the European Union, although a founding member of the BRICS alongside China, Russia, India, and South Africa, the country, therefore, so the country was also an important point of balance between the interests of the West and the most important contestants of the current order, Russia and China.

But to compete with China and the transition from the economic pole of capitalism to Asia, the US, its corporations, and a good part of European countries and their multinationals, wishes for Latin American countries a model government that represses, exploits, and intensify for the countries of Latin America the exploitation of resources and labor in their territory without even sweetening the pill or trying to hide such treachery towards their peoples. Even though they hide their intentions with occasional progressist rhetoric their intentions are usually not that nice. Such as the case of the North American President, Joe Biden, which, by the way, was personally involved in the US espionage case against Petrobrás that took place in 2013, one of the pivots for lawfare against left-wing in Brazil, which since then took place under the creative name of operation “carwash”. This is because central countries need to increase their extraction of surplus-value, expanding productivity in their zones of influence outside their territories, where under capitalism in its current decentralized format and aimed at rapid financial flows, most of the resources are extracted and it is most of the workforce.

This happens in such a way because, even if the central countries encourage a philosophically idealistic ideology and, therefore, illusory, which speaks of decolonizing languages, they effectively continue to colonize, in material reality, an endless number of peoples and nations. What is this that is happening in Brazil if not a proxy neo-colonial policy?

Since the 80’s of the 20th century, after the decline of the USSR and the communist world, the process commonly mistakenly called by the name of globalization, but which in fact is just the financialization and total fluidity of capital and information flows restricted to control of the ruling class as just demonstrated in the recent refugee issue, intensified. It is common for developed countries to take advantage of the enormous economic, military, diplomatic and state organizational disadvantage of third world countries, to use their multinational corporations as a weapon of war. At the same time, forcing the change of legislation, weakening regulations and labor laws, making the National-States of such third world countries act only to repress and discipline their working class, so that the large contingent of labor in developed countries is outside them, making them, in “thesis” safer against internal popular revolts in the heart of capitalism, while reaching artificial levels of productivity, appropriating such capital obtained from the effort, sacrifice and death of third world country’s populations. Needless to say, such a process makes the quality of life in such countries appalling, increases violence to an extreme, and encourages the worst possible people to assume economic, political, and military power in that subject nation.

This is exactly why the new ideology supporting imperialism in its progressive version of the XXI century is so cruel to observe when you are an inhabitant of an emerging country. It blames third-world countries for problems generated by the exploitation they suffer and uses modern forms of media to massify such thinking in a simple way, using prejudiced reasoning that developed countries historically know how to use very well to mobilize their populations towards their interests of economic and geopolitical dominance. The moral reasoning, arising from universalism and ethnocentric standardization, is that it is fair to intervene to “civilize” the barbarians.

Clearly, this rhetoric is, in realpolitik, an ingenious device for specific geostrategic purposes applied by developed countries, gestated within some of their largest corporations, who have in some cases even supported the greatest barbarities imaginable such as Nazism or the Brazilian Military Dictatorship, but today profit from social causes they don’t care about, in cooperation with a good part of the establishment, to replicate in material reality a State policy developed from 200 years of imperialism.

Even if at the same time camouflaging themselves by making rhetorical and ideological criticism of a distant period at the beginning of this whole process of colonization and imperialism this ideology is still purposefully insufficient in face of the criticisms of the greatest nationalist leftist theorists of the third world on the same subject made in the 20th century. At the same time effectively increases public support to interventions against third world countries, and obtains the support of progressist majorities of central countries alienated from reality by the power of capital as they believe more and more, deluded by the narcissus ideology, that it is fair to violate the national sovereignty of another country by moral principles most common to the western world, and therefore easily manipulated for economic purposes, even though a good part of such problems and distortions experienced by third world countries, such as violence and authoritarianism, is most of the time the result of the relationship that the ruling class of such a subject country has with the ruling classes from central countries of the capitalist system, that is, the developed countries.

For example, people from developed countries have a perception, by both political sides, left and right, that Latin America is too violent.

We often hear prejudiced comments about Latinos being violent, about drug trafficking, and about high rates of murders and kidnappings in Latin countries as if this could be only a matter of culture, coming from the political right of such countries. At the same time, we can hear the political left of such developed countries criticize the violence and authoritarianism of Latin American States. Both sides of the ideological spectrum in developed countries blame the Latin countries and mislead the economic relationship present in the process of violence that Latin America is experiencing.

They both don’t question which countries do all these drugs go to and what is the money that encourages all these deaths, moreover, they also don’t ask why the Latin American National States have become increasingly police-oriented, that is, the US international policy of the “war on drugs” imposed on Latin American countries is one of the greatest social disasters of the late twentieth century and it is responsible for, together with the police of each of these Latin countries, the death of a huge number of innocent citizens, guilty only of having been born poor and living in the “wrong” neighborhood, in the Brazilian case, mostly black young men.

Still, despite the obviousness of such a desperate situation, if you are a Third World inhabitant, you will continue to find “gringos” guiltily asking you about the problems of your country, and preaching like the Jesuits of modern colonization, as they bring you the good manners of the “civilized” world because you are a lucky “barbarian”. It is a sign of the times, and one of the cruelest features of the cultural superstructure of imperialism in the 21st century. And it continues to happen, again and again, until the idea becomes hegemonic, the lie becomes the truth and it is the turn of an entire suffering people to be plundered in material reality for the benefit and prosperity of the developed world.

IMPORTANT OBSERVATION: As it developed in a particular historical period, distinct from the European labor movement, the Latin American labor movement, despite being strongly influenced by what was happening abroad, especially with the revolution of 17 in Russia, often took very different directions and solutions of what happened in Europe and the USA.

One of the particular features here is a strong presence of utopian socialism. Some of the founders of the Brazilian socialist movement, for example, were readers of Owen, Fourier, St Simon, others were avid readers of anarchist authors. For this reason, the utopian conception of building socialism through elections, or with the support of the national bourgeoisie, or using the apparatus of the bourgeois state without a bigger rupture is common. Paradoxically, by direct action without revolutionary theory, if you are more influenced by anarchist readings.

The situation began to change after the Russian Revolution of 1917. Even so, as Brazilian theorist Darcy Ribeiro debates, much of the method of thinking used by a large part of working-class populations here comes from theology and mythological discourse.

As a result, the movements for national liberation and social justice are often linked to theological, mythological conceptions of a common future worth living, even though there is a failure in the conception of a path, in the construction of a theory and revolutionary strategy based on the material reality that allows left movements on that continent to take power and establish themselves trough a independent and socialist path.

The key to understanding this phenomenon is the economic dependence experienced by all these countries and the primarization of their economy. Even when declared socialist governments take power, using the bourgeois state apparatus without drastically altering it in an economic and political direction guided by scientific socialism, the mechanisms of economic dependence continue to operate like currents and often such governments fall, come under pressure or fail.

The case of MAS and PSUV is exactly this. Although there are socialist aspirations, a socialist political culture, there are great difficulties from a theoretical point of view precisely on the question of the contradiction of such aspiration with the analysis and practice in reality. The coup suffered by Morales reveals aspects of this problem. As many examples also teach us in the 20th century of Latin American history, as was the case of Brazilian President João Goulart, struck down with US help in 1964.

That doesn’t mean they’re necessarily bad, it’s not. This is not child criticism. As a Latin American Marxist, I believe that they fall better into the category of utopian socialists than into the category of social democrats or left-wing populists. Of course, they are not scientific socialists, that is, they are not Marxists, although they have readings of it. And, of course, nothing prevents them from heading towards scientific socialism, depending on their influence and the material situation in which they find themselves.

Niterói, 30/12/2021