Author: Demétrio Magnoli

Source: The State of S. Paulo - SP - OPINION - 12/11/2009

Journalism is done in the heat of the hour; History, only after events fell asleep in the bed of the past. In the crazy year of 1989, Timothy G. Ash achieved the feat of bringing the two together, in the book Nós, o Povo (Companhia das Letras, 1990). Writing shortly before the fall of the Berlin Wall, he translated the broader meaning of the revolutions that destroyed "real socialism".

“Karl Marx played with the ambiguity of the German expression burgeliche Gesellschaft, which could be translated both as civil society and as bourgeois society. Marx (…) deliberately leveled the two “cities” of modernity, the fruits of the Industrial and French Revolution, the bourgeois and the citizen. (…) What most of the opposition movements across central Europe and a large part of the people who support them is really saying is: Yes, Marx is right, the two are closely linked - and we want both! Civil rights and property rights, economic freedom and political freedom, financial independence and intellectual independence, each of these terms supports the other. So, yes, we want to be citizens, but we also want to be middle class, in the same sense that most citizens in Europe's most fortunate half are middle class. ”

The wave of triumphalism that followed the fall of the Wall was expressed in the speech of “New World Order”, by George H. Bush, and in the almost simultaneous, soon famous, article by Francis Fukuyama. The “end of history” thesis announced the “end point of humanity's ideological evolution” and the “universalization of Western liberal democracy”. Fukuyama made a diagnostic error. Today we know that he also made a prognostic error.

The first mistake: the triumph was not “liberal capitalism”, but a more complex system, which I will call “market capitalism”. In the classic liberal model, the State fulfills only the functions of sentinel of external sovereignty, internal order and sanctity of the currency. Market capitalism is something quite different, which developed under the signs of mass democracy and the Welfare State. In the 1920s, public social spending in the USA did not reach 5% of GDP. Today, such spending exceeds the 20% of GDP mark - and this in the country that is the icon of “liberalism”. How to stick the label of liberalism on a system in which liberals do not recognize themselves?

Modernity is the combined fruit of complementary, but contradictory, principles of freedom and equality. Market capitalism was created by competition between the “party of the liberals” and the “party of the social democrats”, who alternate in power in the mass democracies. Under the impact of the workers' movement, political rights became universal and social rights were invented. All this happened on this side of the Iron Curtain, because on the other side of the geopolitical frontier the Soviet system prohibited political parties and nationalized union organizations.

The fusion of the liberal model with the social-democratic program produced an original system, expressed differently in the countries of Western Europe and North America. In the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx brought the workers into the revolution, who "have nothing to lose, except their fetters". Market capitalism granted workers political and economic citizenship, thwarting the revolutionary claim. He triumphed in 1989 because he was no longer “liberal” - and the workers had a world to lose.

The second mistake: History has not ended, as the spectrum of Leviathan rises once again, in the form of state capitalism, and challenges the hegemony of market capitalism. China's bureaucratic one-party power is the most insinuating expression of state capitalism, but the model appears in the different guises of authoritarian post-communist Russia, Iran's theocratic autocracy and Hugo Chávez's caudillist Venezuela regime. This nostalgic left of “real socialism” is rearticulated around this regressive project, but stripped of the flag of the revolution.

In market capitalism, a clear dividing line separates the spheres of economics and politics. State capitalism brings the two spheres together, subordinating the economic elite to the political elite and making a privileged class of great businessmen orbit around a state that can do anything. There is nothing truly new about this: Japan Meiji, fascist Italy, Nazi Germany and apartheid South Africa are among the precursors to current systems of state capitalism.

Nationalism and authoritarianism are inherent features of state capitalism. The political elite extracts its legitimacy from an imaginary pact with the nation's grand destiny. The promise of power serves as a tool to silence or eliminate the opposition, which is represented as a representation of foreign interest. Political life is impregnated with a corrosive acid, which consists in the identification of the dissonant voice with the fifth column. Since freedom cannot be divided, State capitalism operates by restricting both economic and political rights.

Recently, on this page, Fernando Henrique Cardoso offered an outline of the power bloc organized around Lulism. In its design, it stands out the tripod constituted by a State emptied of public meaning, state companies captured by a party machine and semi-private companies managed by alliances between big businessmen and pension funds under the control of union members. This is the embryonic stage of Brazilian State capitalism.

In the 2006 elections, Geraldo Alckmin was challenged to defend market capitalism. He acted disagreed and, instead of confronting ideas, offered a surrender without fighting the discourse of State capitalism. Lula and his candidate will reissue the challenge in 2010.

Demétrio Magnoli is a sociologist and doctor of geography
Human by USP.