Extract from ContExploration.net
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8008 |
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title |
'The World Changed, But the Left Stayed the Same' |
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date published |
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author |
Cristovam Buarque |
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Brazil's Cardoso:
'The
World Changed, But the Left Stayed the Same'
Written by
Cristovam Buarque
Thursday,
30 December 2004
Shortly
after the November 2, 2004
CRISTOVAM BUARQUE: Is social thought
stalled while scientific thought is advancing?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE CARDOSO: This change
happened very rapidly. It wasn’t only technology. Also in the relationships
between people. The structure of society was altered. And the thinkers did not
register how much it was being altered.
And now there was a shock there in
Public opinion changes like this,
suddenly. As if there had been a short circuit. A mechanism exists allowing you
to determine people’s reaction in real time. The political parties are going to
have to organize for this.
CRISTOVAM: Isn’t this going to be
the end of political leadership? The politicians are going to be dragged along
by public opinion.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: That’s the way
public opinion is; it changes rapidly. Many years ago, when I was president of
the International Society of Sociology, I held a meeting of sociologists in
That association was composed
basically of Europeans and North Americans. Then I said, “Let’s meet in
“The great line of change was the
Marxist theory of change, with class conflict, economic crisis, some
foreseeable change. Or else the Functionalist Theory, change by small
increments in a certain direction. Perhaps the two might work depending upon
the moment. But, now,” I said, “the change would be different.”
Why did I write that? I was in
In February of 1968, I had lunch, as
I did every Wednesday, with [Brazilian economist] Celso Furtado, [Brazilian sociologist]
Luciano Martins, and [current Brazilian Minister of the Controller-General’s
office] Waldir Pires.
We got together every Wednesday. One
of those Wednesdays [Brazilian politician] Paulo de Tarso
We were; earlier I had studied in
“A degree of rationality has been
achieved here that eliminates risks. What’s going on now is a debate about
salaries. Only, the union has as much research as the government; then they’re
going negotiate and arrive at an understanding.”
Well, in that epoch it was said that
the difference between [French President Charles] de Gaulle and Louis XIV was
that de Gaulle could walk down the street and be applauded, while Louis XIV was
jeered. That they were equal. Another Roi Soleil. Well, three months later,
everything almost fell apart.
CRISTOVAM: I heard something similar
from [Brazilian anthropologist] Darcy Ribeiro about
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: I was in
I said, “This here is going to come
to a halt.” One day I was having dinner with a great Argentine sociologist
named Gino Germani, who was the greatest Argentine sociologist of that time.
Dining in a restaurant there in
I said to Ruth, “I want to return to
Ricardo had been named ambassador to
That was at the end of August.
Almeida did not stop pacing from side to side. After dinner, he asked, “When is
it that you are going to leave? Perhaps, I don’t know if there’s time, you will
be witnesses to the turning of a page of history.”
CRISTOVAM: The turn he imagined was
to the left?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: No, to the right.
CRISTOVAM: He named him commander of
the army.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: He named him
commander. It’s difficult, therefore, to perceive when the thing is going to
turn.
CRISTOVAM: But the people who talk
about the end of history suppose that there are not going to be more short
circuits.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: They’re wrong.
There can be a short circuit. What characterizes a short circuit is its
unexpectedness. It’s the same thing with the markets. There are moments when
you think that there’s no risk, but then comes the unexpected. Risk is
something that you can calculate. The 11th of September [1973] created a total
change. It was unexpected. And it caused a short circuit; it provoked a change.
CRISTOVAM: But in that epoch,
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: In France there
certainly was that debate… But what was debated in
I had written the book Dependência
e Desenvolvimento (Dependency and Development in Latin America) in that
epoch. They had killed Guevara, who was the prospect of the revolution in
In
I took [Brazilian historian] Mário
Pedrosa with [Brazilian sociologist] Luciano Martins to
Afterwards there was a strike in the
Renault industry; that was, indeed, a workers’ struggle. I mean to say that the
short circuit occurred due to an educational reason: they wanted to make a
change in the educational system; the
CRISTOVAM: The Marxist theories
didn’t work to explain…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Anything. Not a
thing. Afterwards there was a short circuit. But society has structure. You can
see that it doesn’t change suddenly because it has things, forces, that serve
as restrictions. That dialectic between the unexpected and the structure is
what is interesting to see in present-day society. And there’s no theory for
this.
Perhaps the Chaos Theory, which is
basically the theory of the unexpected. I think that we have to begin to get
used to the expected. Today more than ever because of those modern means with
the unexpected… And how do you conceptualize this in a discipline like social
sciences that wants to make everything begin with regularities and cause and
effect?
CRISTOVAM: What were the great
unexpected occurrences during your lifetime?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Well, for me, the
military coup of 1964 in
CRISTOVAM: But in the world, which
occurrences surprised you with the greatest dose of the unexpected during your
lifetime? Which major short circuits did you witness?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: 1968 in
CRISTOVAM: The fall of the
FERNANDO HENRIQUE:
Who knows, when you have the taking
of the
CRISTOVAM: Weren’t your election and
Lula’s unexpected occurrences? The Left coming to power?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Totally. A book
came out… I’ll show it to you… It’s called O sapo e o príncipe [The frog
and the prince]. It’s by Paulo Markun and it’s about Lula and me. (Fernando
Henrique displays the cover of the book and continues.) The other day Lula said
something about this: “See there? I’m always doing the heavy lifting and he’s
not.”
CRISTOVAM: Besides the Left arriving
in power being a surprise, isn’t it also a surprise that we arrived without a
new proposal for the people? We arrived on the coattails of the Right.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: The surprise
wasn’t in arriving. It was arriving in two ways…. (Laughter) Why? Because the
world had changed a great deal. And the so-called Left did not change. It gets
elected and the discussion goes, “Ah, Lula is going over to the other side.
Fernando Henrique went over to the other side.”
You get elected, as Lula did, with
all his political experience and there’s no way to put it into practice.
Because the world has changed. The world has changed, hasn’t it? It changed a
great deal, profoundly. Which does not mean that there is no tendency for it to
continue changing.
CRISTOVAM: Do you suppose that this
lack of a thinking Left that we’re experiencing in
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: It’s general…
It’s general… In
[British Prime Minister Tony] Blair,
[former Director of the London School of Economics and Political Science]
Anthony Giddens, later you see that no sort of agiornamento occurred
because there was a lack of power to do what is possible to do.
What is possible to do? It is in the
area of justice and of society. The Left today is more about guaranteeing
rights and giving equality, more voice. That much more than controlling the
means of production. For the classic Left the idea is that: collectively
controlling the means of production. But there’s no way to…
The classic Left wanted that and the
Communist Left, control of the State by one party. Today, I think that
progressive thought is much stronger in the civil society, isn’t it? And trying
to open the way to participation with the objective of giving equal opportunities.
And the Left was often showing its age in the sense that it wanted to still
think that the State and the party are going to bring about the change.
CRISTOVAM: Now the idea of the State
is that of the Soviet Left. Marx saw the State in a different way…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Marx was much
more progressive. Where Marx never was very specific was in the theory of
revolution. Where he was specific was in the analysis of capitalism.
But, even there, make note of the
following: how is it that we were trained? Wasn’t it in the idea of
exploitation? The exploitation of man by man. Today, the worst problem is that
of those human beings who don’t even serve to be exploited; they are the
“marginalized.” [The people] that are no longer even an army of reserve…
CRISTOVAM: They’re discardable…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE:
Discardable…Discarded! The system treats them as irrelevant. It’s tragic. We’re
living in a world where you have an immense mass that is irrelevant for the formation
of wealth… And that was not thought about that way…
CRISTOVAM: And what is our proposal
for those people?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: That’s the
problem. You know that earlier when I spoke to you about the book
Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies [by Ian Buruma and
Avishai Margalit] I made a reference to Frantz Fanon who wrote Les Damnés de
la Terre (The Wretched of the Earth).
This had nothing to do with
traditional Marxist thought that always held the excluded, Les Damnés de la
Terre, in contempt. To use the language that Marx used in economy, “Les
faux frais de la production,” the costs of false production. Engels had a
horror of the peasant class…
CRISTOVAM: So did Stalin…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: So did Stalin… It
was the “rural idiocy.” So then Mao expressed the opposite position… That,
after all, is a retrogression from the Marxist point of view. Les Damnés de la
Terre are who are going to make the revolution and let’s have equality. And
let’s kill off the city because the city is a source of evils.
In Marxist theory, the city is just
the opposite: it’s the cradle of liberty. They also came to invent the evil
that is the countryside. The countryside is where it’s going to happen… Once
again that ended. Today no one thinks in terms of Mao Ze-dong.
Well, what then is the expectation
that you can have? It’s necessary to have a highly asymmetrical globalization
that disperses those people, but that, on the other hand, is provoking, via
immigration, the fear of the undeveloped, isn’t it? It’s a situation of fear,
of fear itself. The extreme is the fear of the Muslims.
CRISTOVAM: Of all the
“dispossessed,” right?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Fear of the damnés…
If you see the Muslims as damnés, the fear is substantive today. Because
the Muslims, some Muslims, some that became terrorists, have the capacity to
use that modern thing and strike a blow here and there in the heart of the
system.
They exploded the train in
CRISTOVAM: When you speak of Frantz
Fanon, we could list 10, 15, 20 names of that epoch. Now there are no names of
intellectuals thinking differently. The counter culture has died.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Today it doesn’t
exist…
CRISTOVAM: Wouldn’t it be probable
for an alternative way of thinking to come out of
They can close the frontier in
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: In
From the point of view of those here
(
In Brazil, it’s something else
entirely. Because in
They speak the same language. They
are more equal to the integrated and what they want is to be integrated
themselves. Isn’t that right? They are not in a proposal to destroy that
society for cultural or religious reasons… What they’re wanting is to be
integrated…
CRISTOVAM: What did you think of the
results of the U.S. election?
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Here in the
United States, I followed the campaign… I followed the primaries; I
participated in the American Democratic convention; I went there; I took part
in a round table discussion with [former U.S. President Bill] Clinton in
Boston… In Cambridge, actually…
I stayed to watch what they were
doing and at first I was very alarmed because they weren’t saying anything… It
was in the debates that [Democratic candidate John] Kerry finally said
something. And that’s when they managed to have a polemic. They didn’t even
manage to discuss if the war was just or unjust; it was whether the President
was leading well or if he was efficient or not…
Isn’t that right? [President George
W.] Bush tried to situate the conflict by attacking Iraq and not bin Laden.
Why? It didn’t stick… Patriotism is in the war. Kerry had to attack on the side
of incompetence… Who is the best Command in Chief?
He tried to present the social
question: “You, Mr. Bush, are governing for the rich and I am going to govern
for the others, for the middle class.” And what did Bush do? He did not
respond. He let everything revolve around a question that, let’s say, is not
even in play. Who was the best Command in Chief, right?
He won as if he were the best
Command in Chief and added religion to this for a society that is afraid
because of September 11.… What they call “moral values” here and what there
in Brazil we would call “backwardness”: against gay marriage, against
scientific research. In short, all those antiquated values with a religious
tint. And that’s what won here…
CRISTOVAM: In the lecture we just
attended, [former UN High Commissioner for Human Rights] Mary Robinson said
that until last week she saw Bush as the incarnation of evil and the United
States as something different from him. With the election, it all came
together.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: To a certain
point. Because, in truth, this is a complex society. Half and half. The
difference is that you have a curious map in the USA: taking New England,
California, and New York, everything is blue, the color of the Democrats. And
the red American half they call “Jesusland.”
Here there is a Jesusland that is
religious, in the sense of ideology, not spiritual belief, of ideological
backwardness that is great, but you also have the other side…
CRISTOVAM: Just like one thousand
years ago. Christianity versus Islam. The time of the Crusades.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: We are returning
a little to the Crusades. But the language is the same. Several times Bush has
said, “We are being guided by the hand of God.”
CRISTOVAM: The same phrase that bin
Laden always uses…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: The same thing,
the same phrase. It means… One sees the other as an enemy. Democracy remains in the middle of that. Democracy is “how to
compromise” [spoken in English], something that was difficult to understand in
Alliance,
negotiation, all that was seen as if it were betraying the ideal. Which means
to say, in democracy you have to have a predisposition to accept the other.
When you fundamentalize and radicalize, you don’t have that anymore. That’s
where the space of democracy disappears.
CRISTOVAM: You can be isolated in
the idea but in politics you have to conciliate...
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: That’s another
interesting point: how can you keep your values at the same time that you’re
creating conditions so that those values will permit you to work and not so
that they will paralyze everything?
When the value is that sort of
fundamentalism, there’s only one solution: it’s killing the other. Eliminating
the other. Winning from the other. You have no road that leads to saying,
“Let’s build a road so that I can advance more than he. Let’s build a common
road.” . . .
I think that the fundamental thing,
returning to what I was saying before, about change in the contemporary world
is changing opinion. And, because of that, this election in the USA was grave
because American public opinion lacked the strength to change.
It changed a little. Perhaps it did
not encounter expression of the need for change in someone because in the
beginning Kerry had difficulties in gaining acceptance. But the fact is that it
did not succeed in changing. And today’s globalized world depends a lot upon
change here in the USA.
The other day I said here, “The
election for president of the USA is going to be a universal vote, not only of
those in the USA because the decision of the President affects everyone.” Which
means, it’s a complicated business.
CRISTOVAM: But it’s not only here.
Democracy was invented when the power of the Chief of State was restricted and
lasted only a short time. Today, any president can make decisions that have
repercussions all over the world.
Can you imagine a Caribbean island
permitting a bank to launder narco-traffic money? Or a base for terrorists
making nuclear arms? And the president is elected with the votes of his or her
population. Democracy can no longer be restricted to only one country.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: But, that is a
great problem at the global level having to do with the nation-state. Which
means, democracy was a thing made within the nation. And it created the State.
The nation-states. Today, you can no longer govern only from the perspective of
the nation-state. It doesn’t work. You can’t solve the problems of the
environment like that.
CRISTOVAM: Not to mention thinking
in the short-term between two elections…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: Not to mention in
four years… You won’t resolve terrorism, or drug trafficking, or criminality,
which is also using modern instruments. It’s not only the progressive side that
uses modern instruments, what I called in that document for the UN, “uncivil
society”…
CRISTOVAM: The Devil also likes
electronics…
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: The Devil also
likes electronics. That’s how it is with electronics, it’s not only God.. God
and the Devil (Laughter). Well, then how do you deal with those environmental
problems within the nation-state? It doesn’t work.
On the other hand, how do you make
those states, above all the more powerful ones, give up a little of their
sovereignty? Now here in the USA, sovereignty is not even discussed; they’re
only discussing the sovereignty of others. They want to have the right to
interfere in other countries, of unilateralism…
CRISTOVAM: The solution would be international moral rules, for arms, for the environment.
FERNANDO HENRIQUE: No one resists.
This business of preventive war is something crazy. It’s the opposite of a
world organized in a civilized manner. It’s barbarism; it’s a Hobbesian world.
Not even Hobbesian because there in
the Hobbesian world it’s the struggle of everyone against everyone and here
it’s one against everyone. And none of the others has the strength to confront
this one.
Cristovam
Buarque has a Ph.D. in economics. He is a PT senator for the Federal District
and was Governor of the Federal District (1995-98) and Minister of Education
(2003-04). You can visit his homepage – www.cristovam.com.br
Fernando
Henrique Cardoso (born June 18, 1931) was the president of the Federative
Republic of Brazil from January 1, 1995 to January 1, 2003.
--
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