*By Maria Carolina Trevisan and Gustavo Aranda, from Free Journalists
A world reference in the field of social science, award-winning thinker Boaventura de Sousa Santos was in Brazil to launch his new book A Difficult Democracy (Boitempo Editorial). In an exquisite analysis of the current political situation, Boaventura discusses what he calls “low-intensity democracy”, reflects on the causes of the crises that involve countries in Latin America, Europe and Africa and, above all, warns of the urgent need to 'reinvent the lefts', subtitle of the work. The sociologist draws attention to the political, economic and social consequences after periods in which power was with the left. He warns of the fascist threat open under the banner of fighting corruption, which is imposed as a protection for democracy.
“Frustration can take the form of a political option for fascism, especially if the frustration is experienced very intensely, if it is intensified by the reactionary media, if there are scapegoats, foreigners or social strata historically victims of racism and sexism at hand”, he writes. For him, the growth of fascist movements “is functional to reactionary right-wing governments insofar as it allows them to legitimize more authoritarianism and more cuts in social and economic rights, more criminalization of social protest in the name of defending democracy.”
Recognized and award-winning author worldwide, Boaventura writes on sociology of law, political sociology, epistemology and post-colonial studies, social movements, globalization, participatory democracy, state reform and human rights, in addition to doing fieldwork in Portugal, in Brazil, Colombia, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Bolivia and Ecuador. Among his most important books are A discourse on science (1988), For Alice's hand: the social and the political in post-modernity (1994), Reinventing democracy (1998), Democracy and participation: the case of the participatory budget in Porto. Alegre (2002), If God were a human rights activist (2013), The color of time when he flees: a history of the present – chronicles 1986-2013 (2014), The right of the oppressed (2014) and The popular justice in Cabo Green (2015).
Boaventura received the report for a conversation about Brazil, colonialism, the left and democracy. “Capitalism never acts alone. He works with colonialism and he works with patriarchy, that is, with racism and violence against women. It is not a form of domination that is able to live exclusively with wage labor. You have to disqualify human beings, whether workers, young black people, black women, women in general, and therefore colonialism has not ended. We live in colonial societies with post-colonial imaginaries.”
About Brazil, Boaventura says: “The country will be at an impasse for a while. Neoliberalism is a farce and it is being implemented here exactly as a farce, until popular leftist forces realize that a political alternative is possible. Left-wing parties, under no circumstances, should ally themselves with right-wing parties. The left has to ally itself with the left. If an alliance with other leftist parties is not possible, remain in the opposition until these conditions are created. We cannot govern on the basis of conciliation with right-wing groups that leave us at the right moment, as happened with the PMDB and PSDB, let us not be naive.”
He says that the way out may be in a new left-wing party, one that is based more on social movements and less on party interests. “President Lula is a very important factor. If he returns to the presidency, he will not be able to govern as he did. If he doesn't become president again, the myth will be intact. The acceptance it continues to have is absolutely remarkable and every political scientist in the world should study. Lula was a very important part of the past, he will be an important part of the future. But we need to say publicly that we are aware of eventually putting pressure on a president Lula or a candidate for Lula to soften the idea of conciliation a little and to unite more with the popular movement. We are not going to be in a decade of Lula peace and love. There are no conditions for that.”
Read the full conversation with the Portuguese sociologist and professor below:
Brasileiros – In your most recent book, “A Difficult Democracy”, you have the following statement: “we live in politically democratic but socially fascist societies”. What did you mean?
Boaventura de Sousa Santos – It is a phrase that seeks to show that really existing democracies are partially false, they are truncated. They have nothing to do with the democratic ideal of popular sovereignty and free action by citizens, who feel spied on their representatives and, therefore, between represented and representatives the distance will be minimal. On the contrary, distances are now maximum in many so-called democratic societies.
On the other hand, democracy is an ideal of free action and sovereignty, which does not have to be confined to the political system. It so happens that liberal democracy has always been designed to apply exclusively to the political system, and therefore not be able to extend to the family, social relations, companies, the streets, communities, public space, universities, etc.
“Democracy is indeed a democratic island in the archipelago of despotism. Despotisms in the family, at school, in the factory, in the company, on the street, so much violence, so much brutality in the world system.”
Exactly when democracy does not work, precisely because a large part of social relations are outside democratic control and are managed by even democratic and more fragile wills in these social areas (whether in the family, in the company, on the street), they are subject to a situation in that their life aspirations are hostage to a veto of the most powerful. Social groups that are subject to a veto right by the most powerful, such as the young black man who goes on the street and is approached by the police, ask him for identification without any reason, just because of his skin color. He is being subjected to a form of social fascism. Why is social fascism? It is not political fascism because that was a political system that opposed to democracy. This one guest with democracy in all areas where the coexistence of social relations is not democratic. Unfortunately, a large part of our societies and a large part of our population do not experience democratic social relations in which there is a balance of power. They sometimes live in situations of despotic power, that is, they live in situations of social fascism. This coexistence is what is present.
So in countries where there is greater inequality, democracy is more fragile and more subject to social fascism?
Much more fragile. And it can be an instrument to increase this fragility. Why, since the 1980s, has neoliberalism been trying to destroy the social rights of workers, has it been trying to destroy the power that the State had in social distribution? At the same time, he is very much adept at democracy and democracy today is in fact, in one of its versions, characteristic of our time, democracy is an instrument of imperialism. Destroy Libya to impose democracy, destroy Iraq to impose democracy, destroy Syria to impose democracy, destroy Afghanistan to impose democracy.
“The democracy that I call 'low intensity' has become an instrument of imperialism. This is not the democracy we are fighting for and this is exactly the characteristic of our time: different concepts of democracy divide the democratic camps, so to speak. We need to know which side we are on.”
The democratic field that I identify with, which is a struggle for the radicalization of democracy, for the expansion of the democratic field, 'high-intensity democracy' is the one that effectively fights against the forms of social fascism in our society, therefore seeking to broaden the field of free democratic action, so that the archipelago of despotism is smaller, gradually smaller, and ideally does not exist.
Bringing it to our reality in Brazil, it is increasingly evident that capital is in charge of our democracy. How do you see this situation?
It is clear that capitalism never acts alone. He works with colonialism and patriarchy, that is, with racism and violence against women. Capitalism is not a form of domination that is able to live exclusively with wage labor, it has to disqualify human beings, whether workers, young black people, black women, women in general, and therefore colonialism has not ended .
“It is one of the points of my work today: contrary to what people think, we live in colonial societies with post-colonial imaginaries. Colonialism does not have to be just foreign territorial occupation, as it has historically been. It can take other forms: internal colonialism in the form of xenophobia, racism, Islamophobia. Capitalism in the XNUMXth century has nothing to do with capitalism in the XNUMXst century.”
But people continue to talk about XNUMXth century capitalism and XNUMXst century capitalism. I do the same with colonialism: the historical, territorial occupation, was a form. We have to analyze the other forms of colonialism, because there are many people who live in our society under the rule of colonial revolutions, the big house and the slave quarters. And therefore, in societies that have been historically colonized, this continues in other forms.
In fact, in the 1960s, important sociologists from this country, such as Dom Pablo Gonzáles Casanova, theorized the idea of “internal colonialism”. Elites were created with the idea of myth of racial democracy, through the eyes of intellectuals, some of them quite important, such as Gilberto Freire. It allowed, for a long time, the idea of the myth of racial democracy. It was necessary to reach the XNUMXst century for Brazil, many decades after the administration, to reach the conclusion that it really is a racist society and that is why it was necessary to have quotas, for example, for the inclusion of young people in society, because it is not all inequality in Brazil was justified only by class differences, which are obviously very strong. There was an articulation here between race and class, and gender, obviously, because women also make up a very substantial group of the poorest in this country.
This is the constellation of dominations that dominates our societies. What happens is that these dominations work together, the movements that fight against them are separate: feminists can fight only against patriarchy, but they neglect the anti-colonial, anti-capitalist struggle; Quilombola movements can fight against colonialism in society, but they neglect the anti-capitalism and anti-patriarchal struggle, the indigenous themselves are the same.
“The movements are divided and the domination is united. This is the situation we have. We need to unite the movements. When capitalism is reinforced, colonialism and patriarchy are also reinforced.”
For example, when looking at the government of President Dilma, there were women and there were blacks. At the moment when there was a coup to force neoliberal capitalism, women disappeared and blacks in ministries disappeared. And there was that ridiculous thing about the president saying he hadn't found women for ministries. That absurdly caricatured thing in a country where the majority are women.
How was it possible for the impeachment process to happen that way, so disrespectful to the first woman president of Brazil, elected with 54,5 million votes?
It's hard to say because it's speculative. But she was a victim of discrimination, no doubt about it. This also shows that the progressive parties and the popular movement were distracted for 13 years because they thought that society had been profoundly transformed. Left forces took over the government, but they did not take over social power. And they didn't even care to democratize society. In the future, there will be no democratization of the state if there is no democratization of society, which is a much broader task. Therefore, all these achievements seem to dissolve in the air, from one day to the next, and it was seen that it was all a certain veneer. Once this veneer had passed, the maids had to be servile, as they had been before, they were having too many rights, they no longer depended so much on philanthropy.
“Class in Brazil is always racist and is always patriarchal. It brought us great virulence and it is proving to be great virulence right now.”
Were the left surprised by this weakness of democracy? Was there an oversight? How can the left be reorganized?
What is the left? We have the left organized in a plurality of parties and we have the left which are the social movements that fight against oppression and different forms of domination, and which were or were not linked to parties, many of them in a non-partisan structure, so to speak. It is evident that popular parties and governments, as in Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuela and here in Brazil, which emerge from the emergence of strong popular mobilization, create an illusion in social movements that their friends had come to power. And therefore they rested. When exactly it should have been the other way around because the moment the friends came to power, they knew that these friends were going to be subject to multiple pressures to distance themselves from their friends, and therefore rule the country against them. Even if I didn't believe it, there had to continue to be pressure from below.
This is something that we fight in every country. The social movements of Ecuador and Bolivia fought hard for a Constitution and when it was promulgated, they rested. This was the first day of the struggle: to fight for the Constitution to be fulfilled. Not. rested. In Brazil, social movements have somehow rested. Perhaps the only one that did not rest and continued with an intervention activity was the MST, one of the largest social movements in Latin America and perhaps in the world, and therefore continued with a certain activism.
Many others thought that, having friends on the Plateau, they could rest. Finally we were going to have a slightly more inclusive society. This neglected the rear of the movements. As far as parties are concerned, the protagonist party, PT, is always the same idea of taking the government or taking power.
“There really was the illusion that in a political system that was not reformed, you could govern the old-fashioned way for other purposes. With the same alliances, the same forms, with the same ideology that comes from the second Republic, which is a pact between the elites, where the popular classes should not enter to disturb the game.”
But in fact, as societies cannot be planned like an assembly line, there was a disturbance here and in 2003, a worker managed to reach the Presidency of the Republic. From there, a first fissure is created in the very hegemony of the dominant classes: someone who does not belong to the elites, the first move is to try to absorb. Which was, in a way, easy, insofar as, as I say, it is enough to see President Lula's “Letter to Brazilians”, saying that he would not change the country's international and financial commitments, a development model that was not sustainable. in the long term, it was a model of continuity of colonialism, which was extractivism and the extraction of natural resources, made possible due to China's development impulse, in a context of high commodity prices. It was a win-win situation. It is easier to govern in such a situation.
Since then, banks have never made so many profits. Brazil has transformed more than 50 million people through Bolsa Família and inclusion policies. One cannot trivialize the idea that so many millions who don't eat once a day have started eating 3 times a day that this is not a revolution. Obviously it is a revolution, but it was carried out with the same model of development and the same political system that favored the elites and the ruling classes.
The moment the win-win solution enters into crisis, the model practically collapses. It also collapses on account of international situations, for example the price of oil, which has halved from one week to the next. It wasn't the markets, it was an intention of US imperialism, in my opinion, which wanted to neutralize Russia, which has a lot of oil, to neutralize Iran, which with the end of the embargo was going to enter the international oil market and it was necessary to lower the price, and Venezuela. It was necessary to neutralize Brazil, which was playing some international role as one of the emerging countries. That was a bit of a mistake: the hegemony of the ruling class itself ended. In other words, will it withstand its hegemony until the coup is produced? Is the coup the end point of ruling class hegemony? From that moment on, she breaks down. Exactly what we are seeing.
In the face of the fight against corruption and the erosion of political parties, the Judiciary has gained strength. What is your opinion about this painting?
As corruption is systemic, the hegemony that allowed the second Republic has completely collapsed and the ruling classes are eating each other, with daily eavesdropping scandals in which the newspapers that created the coup and promoted the coup are currently attacking the coup plotters, so to speak, as if democracy is really now being restored, putting only the putschists in sight. We had already seen that they were scammers, hadn't we? It is a crisis of hegemony in Brazilian society, which cannot, at this moment, have any very creative solution. The creative solution in a situation in which, on the one hand, the ruling class has clearly lost its hegemony, it is clearly without a direction to go, they put each other in prison, so to speak, on the other hand, the popular classes do not they still have an organized capacity to respond, they were taken by surprise, there was a great shock, the measures that are being prepared have not yet reached people's pockets, it takes time for this impoverishment, the scrapping of education, health, to reach society, it takes a while to filter down to the bottom.
There was an impasse between a ruling class that has a very strong crisis of hegemony, and the dominated classes, the popular classes, which have not yet managed to organize themselves as a response.
“We have here a duality of powerlessness: that of the ruling class and that of the popular classes. Of the three sovereign bodies, all of them somewhat delegitimized, the only one that was not elected – the Judiciary – assumes a position of managing this impasse for some time. It's natural. And it can manage it in several ways: keeping itself in the field of the Judiciary, or one of its members starts to establish itself as a political leader. This will create a huge disturbance in popular movements and for Diretas Já.”
The idea is being built that labor and social security reforms are the only way to save the country. What consequences can this neoliberal policy bring us?
The measures that are being imposed here are the measures that were imposed on the Portuguese in 2011. It's exactly the same thing: welfare crisis, labor laws, privatizing health and privatizing education. The neoliberal recipe is global, with nuances from country to country. In Europe, we have been experiencing it, Greece itself, also in some violent form, and Portugal, in 2011, managed to get rid of it. Which shows the following: this neoliberal recipe is global, it is presented with total rigidity, that is, either these reforms are carried out or there is no foreign investment, or there is no competitiveness, or the end of the recession, and therefore the country does not you can move forward, you really have to make these reforms.
We can say that, perhaps, the fact that Temer has fallen out of favor at Globo is part of the conviction that he does not have enough power to carry out the reforms. And probably in a system of indirect elections or any other way, someone can have enough legitimacy – if it's someone from the Judiciary, probably even more legitimacy, because it doesn't bear the taint of corruption, and that's going to be very important: it's not the popular movement. fighting corruption, because whoever is a candidate is the one who fought against corruption. This completely changes the try scenario. But the objective is to apply these measures, obviously.
And this is what we have to see that is a great farce of neoliberalism. It has already been shown that this is not so. There is a great power of conviction, due to the oligopoly of the media, which shows and enters into this form of alienation of the popular classes and wants to convince the popular classes that live above their means, that their pension, even if it is meager, is in danger. if it is not privatized, it is better that we liberalize the labor market and make it precarious because we are going to increase jobs. That's a little bit of the logic there.
What happens is that when this resists successfully, it effectively proves to be a sham. The best example is the Portuguese case: between 2011 and 2015 we had a reactionary government, which applied these measures. At the end of 2015 there are elections, and the Portuguese, as always, since 1974, vote for the left, but the right governs. Because the right is united and the left is disunited.
For the first time in 40 years, the three major left-wing parties have decided to come together, not to merge, at all, but with a government agreement that puts a stop to the precariousness of labor laws and the privatization of social security, among other austerities. . It was possible to create an alternative through something very courageous, which is the “geingonça” State – a derogatory word created by the right and which is working.
It's been working for at least 4 years, the Germans already have a word corresponding to contraption and so do the English. In other words, we have transformed a negative name against the left into a positive name, and we are very proud of this contraption. It is a government pact but it had this effect. It's just that we've done the exact opposite of what the neoliberal recipe says. And the results we are having are exactly the opposite of what they said: the country has never had so little unemployment, we are at 9%; it is one of the fastest growing countries in Europe, being above 10%; the public deficit is decreasing; public debt is maintained because it is impossible to decrease from one year to the next, and the country is doing exactly the opposite of what the neoliberal recipe says, and it is rising again.
In other words, neoliberalism is a farce. Capitalism is rigid only as long as it does not have to confront an alternative. It is easier, in order to guarantee their accumulation, to produce the impoverishment of the popular classes, the precariousness of labor laws, the privatization of social security – because it is a huge lump of money – that runs in the financial system that dominates this country, obviously. They want those advantages, don't criticize them for it. We have to criticize is to promote enough forces to resist against it. The moment they have to confront a political alternative, they adapt. They said that there would be no direct investment in Portugal, direct investment is increasing, and that is why Portugal is growing.
Neoliberalism is a farce and it is being implemented here in Brazil exactly as a farce, until the popular forces of the left realize that a political alternative is possible, eventually such as political reform, because this, as you see, is only possible under one condition, which is the great political reform. Therefore, Brazil will be at an impasse for a while.
“Left parties, under no circumstances should ally themselves with right-wing parties. The left has to ally itself with the left. And therefore, if an alliance with other leftist parties is not possible, remain in the opposition until these conditions are created. Going to govern on the basis of conciliation with right-wing groups, with right-wing parties, which at the opportune moment leave us, as happened with the PMDB, with the PSDB, let's not be naive, we can make the mistake once. But let's not make the same mistake many times, because if not, a politician here said that the left is stupid. It’s stupid if you keep making the same mistakes.”
Some politicians tend to classify the Workers' Party, and its leaders, as "enemies". What does this construction mean?
It is really the loss of face of this farcical democracy. Because in democracy there are no enemies, there are adversaries. It's the big distinction. The enemy is the one you want to destroy, the adversary is the one you have to articulate in the opposition and try to win or lose, but who have a contrary position that can be democratically elaborated, to win or lose. The enemy is to destroy. The logic of friend-enemy, of German Nazism, the idea is that we are divided between two waters. In fact, all conservatism, the project that is underway at the moment is not liberalism. It is the one that no longer tolerates democracy, even of low intensity, it becomes more “fascising”, so to speak, for example, it begins to have no confidence even in the political class, and wants its own to govern – it is the case of Macri, Trump, Macron – it is businessmen who become politicians.
They lose confidence because in the democratic game they are very impatient. The right here in Brazil, given that the change in the price of commodities was leading to a crisis in the system, in her second term, President Dilma had to take anti-popular measures, and have a minister [Joaquim Levy] who was totally contrary to everything she had proposed in the electoral campaign. So, it was foreseeable that there would be a crisis and that in the next elections this political orientation would lose the elections. They were impatient. We have never seen in any other country, a few months after a president wins the elections, his impeachment is being asked, without any proof of a crime of responsibility.
“This is the great news that Brazil has given the world. Unfortunately, this is sad news: perhaps the most honest policy in Latin America has been impeded by the most corrupt politicians in Latin America. In full democracy. This is what shows the failure of the democratic system.”
What is your opinion about the current Diretas Já movement?
The Diretas already have an interesting impulse, which is to restore democratic legitimacy. It's an idea of giving the people the floor. It is also the most effective way to stop these laws because no one who is going to say in an election campaign that when he comes to power he is going to apply those laws is elected. It probably depends on how the media are going to work, especially in a country that spends 4/5 hours a day watching television, I think it would be difficult for them to happen.
The fight is exactly between those who want to apply the measures and those who want to stop the measures. What has actually been seen is that they do not want to go back on measures at all, because many genuinely believe that this is the only way to restore their profitability. But there are many other possible measures, if only financial capital was not as voracious as it is in Brazil, which has the highest interest rates in the world. And that 7,9% of GDP is used to pay debt interest, something that no other country in the world does.
What time is that of the reinvention of the left, subtitle of your book?
It is very difficult to predict because sociologists are good at predicting the past, but the future we are not very good at. Obviously, with the media bombardment that took place, signaling the measures and the demonization of the left and the party that was the protagonist during this period, we are going to need some time, because the person on the street who is not a militant begins to feel in the pocket the scrapping of the health system, which is already weak but will be much weaker; payment for your children's education; the possibility of losing the house and being evicted; the salary that will go down; the distance between the periphery and the center, which Haddad had somehow tried to shorten, will increase; so you will start to feel it, but human suffering is never politically active.
“Suffering for the sake of suffering doesn't go there. It is necessary to organize politically, so that political forces, social movements and parties can capture the dissatisfaction that will be generated. But it takes a little time because people still haven't seen the consequences. There is room for a new leftist party of another kind.”
How much time? Depends on how long indoctrination. Indoctrination has many limits, it cannot fully indoctrinate because human beings live in History and outside of History. Nobody would expect Portugal to be politically creative and now it has been creative. Tomorrow it could be Brazil, it could be another country. What is needed is the aggregation power of the forces of the left – and it will not be easy. It's gonna be hard. What happened to Jeremy Corbin, which no one expected, unlike the young people who created Podemos, young English people decided to sign up for the Labor Party en masse. That's what brought him to power. They thought the party had been completely mischaracterized by Tony Blair, had supported the war in Iraq and had done all that mischief. Through massive enrollment, they altered party policy.
In Brazil, I run all over Brazil, young people are not being attracted at all to the PT, some to the PSOL, but I work a lot with rappers, these are the young people I see, who are doing political activity extraordinary in this country but outside the partisan movement. This will last some time, we don't know how they will reorganize, I think there is effectively room for a new leftist party of another type.
What is your opinion about the presence of former President Lula in the crisis and in the process of exiting the crisis?
Former President Lula is as much part of the problem as he is part of the solution. I have respect for him, I'm his friend. He is a man who is without a doubt the most remarkable figure in the history of Brazil after Independence. He is to whom Brazil forever owes an absolutely extraordinary debt. But it is evident that he is a man held hostage by his past, as we are all too. He is a man who had, as no one else has, and as President Dilma did not have, the ability to reconcile classes. He is a person who really managed to make a very strong conciliation policy. This is remarkable work that he did and that transformed Brazil. Brazil is very different today from 2003. And his legacy will even be against him, but it was because of him that people think what they think in Brazil today. The possibility of a better society.
President Lula, evidently at the moment, as there has been no renewal in the left-wing parties, is the only name on the left with any viability to win the elections. If the left wants to win the elections, it has to be with President Lula. It is evident that this is important to win the elections. Now, with President Lula, there will be no renewal of the PT, there will not be a very deep political renewal. Because this renewal involves transforming the PT into a party-movement, through participatory democracy within the party, as in Podemos, through an articulation with the PSOL and with the social movements, which I think at this moment, with the logic of conciliation that President Lula has in his imagination, will be very difficult to take.
With Lula, it will not be possible to create another political party. And I think that Brazilian politics has room, eventually, for a new party based on this still incipient social mobilization. What is curious is that what in Portugal was possible by uniting the left through partisanship, in Brazil is being done through social movements. We have two fronts: Popular Brazil and People Without Fear. There are two articulations that speak to each other, in which some organizations are in both, so I think that this deep articulation is taking place. Whether tomorrow will transform or have a partisan voice depends a lot on the future.
President Lula is a very important factor, evident that the right knows exactly what I am saying, there is a fraction of the smarter right that is even capable of thinking that maybe it would be good for President Lula to return to the presidency, to destroy in a once and for all the Lula myth. Because he will not be able to govern as he did, there is no political reform that would allow him to govern otherwise, commodity prices are what they are and therefore the myth is destroyed once and for all. If he doesn't become president again, the myth is intact. The acceptance he continues to have, which is absolutely remarkable, is that every political scientist in the world should study, the man most demonized by the press continues to have enormous popular acceptance. It was a very important part of the past, it will be an important part of the future, and this part of the future has a very clear side and a less clear side. It is necessary that we publicly say that we are aware of this, to eventually put pressure on a President Lula or a Lula candidate to soften the idea of conciliation a little and to unite more with the popular movement, which was also their tradition. But he didn't have to take a big position between them, he was everyone's friend, Lula peace and love. We are not going to be in a decade of Lula peace and love. There are no conditions for this.
Can this moment of deep crisis turn into an opportunity?
It is an interesting moment in Brazilian society, of renewal. Democracy defends itself on the street right now. The street is the only public space that is not colonized by the financial market, so it is an important space for peaceful demonstrations. It will be problematic because there will be infiltrators and agents provocateurs to provoke violence, to say that they are all violent and to provoke police brutality.
The street is very good at expressing the political aspirations of the popular classes and young people, but it cannot formulate policy, it is not capable of formulating policy. All this will take its time.
“The big problem is that this crisis of hegemony can turn into a very strong social crisis. That unravels the social fabric.”
But Brazil will reinvent itself. Crises, if they are not permanent – and neoliberalism wants a permanent crisis because then the crisis itself becomes a solution and destroys opportunity – and this in Brazil is not because it is a political, hegemonic and economic crisis, it creates opportunities. Let's see how the popular camp articulates itself, it can react by restoring democratic energies and that is why the Diretas Já is a sign in this sense. The important thing is to block the measures. This is the fight that Brazil will be involved in in the near future.
Watch the interview:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RYAQZQCdOg8
