November 5, 2021
26th
October, 2021
Weekly Editorial – Politics of
hunger
Famished
population surrounds garbage truck with bags to collect leftover food from a
supermarket in Pernambuco. Photo: Reproduction
The proposal by Bolsonaro and the Planalto generals, who intend to raise the
value of the so-called “Brazil Allowance” to R$ 400 by the end of 2022, served
to demonstrate what we have always pointed out: in the dispute between the
“occasional humanists” – whose spokespersons are the editorialists of the press
monopolies, backed by the opportunists – and the blatantly coup-mongering far
right, there is not a trace of genuine popular interest involved. This is a
dispute in the camp of reaction, about which is the most effective way to keep
the masses of the people out of the political process.
It is clear that Bolsonaro’s maneuver, which does away with the infamous
spending cap approved under Michel Temer, has an obvious electoral nature. In
any case, what’s new in a democracy as oligarchic as this one we have, in
which, in the end, it is more than established that anything goes to grab a
piece of state power, without which the centuries-old parochial interests of
the “political bosses” cannot prosper? These “social programs” have always been
just that: a tiny crumb of the budget thrown to the poor, to keep them under
police and electoral control, when in reality the big sum of money, generated
by the working masses themselves, goes to the magnates who control the state
apparatus. In short, these are programs to keep the masses from fighting and to
make them vote – with their stomachs. Let’s remember, for example, Lula’s
reelection and, above all, Dilma’s two elections, when the beneficiaries were
blackmailed into voting for their “godfathers”, otherwise the program would be
cut off. These are the terms of this electoral machine that has always been
oiled in Brazil by the misery and enchainment of huge portions of its
population.
The proof that such programs do not affect, in the least, the social-economic
structures that generate inequities is, first of all, their perpetuation over
time and, secondly, the fact that they have been applied continuously by
Fernando Henrique Cardoso, Lula, Dilma, Michel Temer and Bolsonaro, that is, by
representatives of almost the entire official political spectrum. In fact, the
only substantial difference lies in the fact that the far-right captain has
paid more than any of his opponents: the amount disbursed by the Union alone as
“emergency aid” in 2020 – approved by Congress, it is true – was equivalent to
ten years of Bolsa Família. The great “clash” proposed, so far, by Luiz Inácio,
is to oppose to the government’s R$ 400 (which is equivalent to 36% of the
hunger minimum wage of R$ 1,100), the demand for R$ 600 (which would be
equivalent to 54% only of the same hunger minimum).
Yes, the situation of the masses in Brazil in 2021 is such that the chances of
a candidate being reelected are substantially increased by the fact that he
promises to pay workers in poverty a third of the current minimum wage.
But even these crumbs sound unacceptable to the starched “economic analysts”,
salaried lackeys of financial capital, who hire them not to reach scientific
conclusions, but to wrap in confused verbiage the paradigms of savage
capitalism that they preach as if defending a religion. The so-called “fiscal
responsibility” should be above, for example, the need that millions of
Brazilians have to feed themselves; just as the “floating price policy” should
determine that fuel should follow the dollar exchange rate, even if at the cost
of pushing parts of our population to use firewood for cooking or thousands of
truck drivers to the horrifying condition of paying to work. Those same
chicago-boys – who supported, by the way, en masse, the rise of Bolsonaro –
repeated for years on end that the union, labor and social security “reforms”
would be able to boost, as never before, the rotten economy of bureaucratic
capitalism, and now what do we see? The country came out of this “neoliberal”
shock in a violent leap backwards. It’s curious to register that one of the
national economic popes, even considered “progressive” by sectors of the
opportunist left, Delfim Neto, the longest serving Finance Minister under the
military regime and one of the signatories of Institutional Act No. 5
(AI-5), declared in a recent interview that he would sign the infamous
arbitrary rule again. Nothing more symptomatic of how these people think: the
role of so-called “orthodox” economists is just to do the math, regardless of
whether the balances they claim can only be obtained by the “heterodox” methods
practiced in the basements.
In any case, the causes of hunger and of the economic debacle persist; they are
structural and insurmountable in the framework of the current
economic-political order of domination. The monoculture-exporting latifundium,
the Brazilian bureaucratic monopolies and the foreign imperialists installed in
the country, claiming benefits and fiscal exemptions of all kinds, the rapacity
of imperialism, that drains not only a good part of the capital accumulated
here, but also the natural and mineral wealth of our soil and subsoil – in an
almost typically colonial model -, these are the factors of our many economic,
political and ideological miseries. Bringing them to an end will be the task of
the new generations. The beginning of their end is the firm awareness on the
part of the oppressed that it is necessary to break, in a radical and
consequent manner, with negotiated solutions and with the periodic trafficking
in illusions.