Os subdesenvolvidos

O brasileiro carrega um sentimento de autodesprezo por si próprio e pela própria periferia. Processo de favelização e de epistemicídio não existe em canto do mundo algum. Sua interpretação da história é falsa, não científica, suas ações e sentimentos são mesquinhas, vive em completo remorso, amargurado, angustiado, cheio de desprazer, não persiste em enriquecer-se intelectualmente, muito menos em criar uma sociedade minimamente decente. Sua "alma" é medrosa e está presa num estado de competição que só gera mais desigualdades. Não há bondade no universo nacional dos subdesenvolvidos, não há pleno amor mas campanhas de interesses. Os miseráveis sem futuro não amam a si mesmos basta olhar o que os desclassificados consomem como cultura, ouvir o vocabulário de sarjeta e os discursos sem fundamentação de seus chefes. A gramática vulgar é dominante, não transcende versículo bíblico, não consegue se sustentar fora das mentiras teológicas. O que caracteriza a psicologia do terceiro mundista é a falsidade, a graça consigo é um fenômeno alienante. A aberração no raciocínio é o pressuposto necessário para se tornar cristão.

Wanted

O Tribunal Penal Internacional confirmou as acusações de crimes contra o genocida ugandês Joseph Kony, após duas décadas. O facínora considera-se a reencarnação do Espírito Santo e quer impor, através de sua milícia que se autointitula Lord's Resistance Army, uma teocracia em Uganda. São mais de trinta acusações contra o fanático religioso: assassinato, destruição e saque de vilas, tortura, escravidão sexual e estupro. As mais de vinte mil crianças sequestradas serviram de prostitutas aos seus soldados.

Os subdesenvolvidos

Dois em cada três brasileiros cheiraram cocaína e tomaram álcool etílico com tang. Cinco em cada oito brasileiros gostam de chupar cu e cometeram algum estupro. Oito em cada dez brasileiros não sabem se expressar e passam o dia vendo vídeos pornográficos e ouvindo música de merda. Treze em cada quinze brasileiros já pensaram em se matar. Dezessete em cada vinte brasileiros não sabem quem foi Mozart. Vinte em cada vinte e dois brasileiros nunca leram um livro. Vinte em cada vinte e três brasileiros tem como personalidade os criminosos cristãos de colarinho branco. A maioria dos brasileiros acredita no conto da cobra falante e diz ter visto a face de Jesus no mofo do teto do quarto.

Human, all too human

Its true that psychological explanation of religious states and occurrences has hitherto stood in a certain ill-repute, insofar as a theology calling itself free has been pursuing its unprofitable business in this domain: for its purpose was from the first, as the spirit of its founder, Schleiermacher, leads us to suppose, the preservation of the christian religion and the continuance of christian theology.

Before we go on to inhibit this condition in its further consequences let us confess to ourselvers that the man in this condition has got into it, not through his "guilt" and "sin", but through a succession of errors of reason, that it was the fault of the mirror if his nature appeared to him dark and hateful to such a degree, and that this mirror was his work, the very imperfect work of human imagination and judgement.

The idea of a god is disturbing and humiliating as long as it is believed, but how it originated can at the present stage of comparative ethnology no longer admit of doubt; and with the insight into this originarion that belief falls away. The christian who compares his nature with of god is like Don Quixote, who under-estimated his own courage because his head was filled with the miraculous deeds of the heroes of chivalric romances: the standard of comparison applied in both cases belongs in the domain of fable.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

O fazedor de teatro

Este cheiro repugnante / A engorda de porcos dá alguma coisa

Por toda parte esse cheiro de porcos / de um chiqueiro ao outro / De fato aqui não há nada / Além desses chiqueiros e igrejas / e nazistas

Acredite / já não há mais neste povo / a menor gentileza / Aonde quer que vamos / inveja / mentalidade abjeta / xenofobia / ódio à arte / Em nenhuma parte tratam a arte / com uma estupidez assim / Arte / aqui não sabem mesmo / o que é isso / O verdadeiro artista / é jogado na lama / mas todos correm atrás / do mentiroso e do preguiçoso / se curvam / diante do charlatanismo

Um lugar de pessoas estúpidas / estupidificação da humanidade

É isto / não assimilam nada / tudo é dito / não escutam nada / tudo é mostrado / não veem nada

Chegamos num lugar / e é um lugar estúpido / encontramos uma pessoa / e é uma pessoa estúpida

Um Estado completamente estúpido / povoado / por pessoas completamente estúpidas / e pouco importa com quem falamos / percebe-se / que é um imbecil / e pouco importa quem escutamos / percebe-se / que é um analfabeto / são socialistas / eles dizem / mas são apenas nacionais-socialistas / são católicos / eles dizem / mas são apenas nacionais-socialistas / são pessoas eles dizem / e são apenas idiotas

Aqui tudo cheira mal / Em cada canto / tudo vira o estômago / Onde havia um bosque / há uma pedreira / onde havia um prado / há uma fábrica de cimento / onde havia um homem / há um nazista.

Thomas Bernhard

1931 - 1989

Porque não me ufano

A religião sempre foi usada para acobertar crimes. Percebam como a religião está a acobertar os crimes e os criminosos de hoje. A religião era e continua sendo um chicote, uma rédea habilmente tecida em uma rede que manteve e ainda mantém os povos do mundo em escravidão.

O Brasil está transformando toda reunião administrativa em consagração religiosa. A teocracia será o único destino dos subdesenvolvidos sem futuro. A bandidagem continuará prosperando por séculos. 

Dialética do marxismo cultural

Para Marx a dialética não se deixa intimidar por nada, além de ser essencialmente crítica e revolucionária. Esta é uma tentativa de seguir seu exemplo. Marxistas que honram a própria tradição não podem aceitar a caracterização do marxismo cultural formulada pelo inimigo, assim como Marx, Engels e os companheiros da Liga Comunista não aceitaram o fantasma brandido pela santa aliança anticomunista do século XIX e por isto em 1848 redigiram o histórico Manifesto Comunista justamente para definir comunismo nos seus próprios termos.

Iná Camargo Costa

Art and force of false interpretation

Curt Stoeving | 1894

All the visions, terros, states of exhaustion and rapture experienced by the saint are familiar pathological conditions which, on the basis of rooted religions and psychological errors, he only interprets quite differently, that is to say not as illnesses. Thus the daemon of Socrates too was perhaps an ear-infection which, in accordance with the moralizing manner of thinking that dominated him, he only interpreted differently from how it would be interpreted now. It is not otherwise with the madness and ravings of the prophets and oracular priests; it s always the degree of knowledge, imagination, exertion, morality in the head and heart of the interpreters that has made so much of them. For those men called geniuses and saints to produce their greatest effect they have to have constrained to their side interpreters who for the good of mankind misunderstand them.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Why am i not a christian

A religião e os seus cultos dominam todos os meios pelos quais o subdesenvolvido é colocado, servindo de número aos interesses pastoril. A fé é um mero mercado. Os pastores e seus pupilos transmitem às miseráveis comunidades suas próprias tensões e mantém todos numa escuta angustiante como se um milagre estivesse a ponto de ocorrer. A habitação da demência se estende por todos os grotões sem futuro da periferia do capitalismo. Os colonizados temem a liberdade e o questionamento. Não há pensamento crítico, não há conteúdo intelectual, apenas veneração da loucura. A modernidade para os sequelados da religião engendra medo e drama.

Why I am not a christian

Religion = reverence for madness

The Power

Manowar | 1996

Kill all those who stand against you look into their eyes

Drink their blood and laugh as they pay for all their lies

Porque não me ufano

A pobre e desorganizada sociedade brasileira está oferecendo praticamente crença popular dos tempos da idade média para os subdesenvolvidos: uma superstição mesquinha, grosseira e terrível. Não há espaço para a modernidade na periferia do capitalismo.

Esse "Brasil do futuro" está caminhando para trás: a teocracia se alastrou feito câncer pelo tecido social. 

Dangerous game

Anyone who again makes room for religious sensibility within himself will then have to allow it to grow: he cannot do otherwise. As a consequence his nature will gradually change, it will come to prefer that which adherers to and dwells beside the religious element, the entire horizon of his judgement and sensibility will be clouded round and religious shadows will flit across it.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Why am I not a christian

The influence religious and his work has never yet grown great without his blind pupils. To help a illusion to achieve victor means merely to unite it with stupidity.

Porque não sou cristão

Sem os discípulos cegos, a influência religiosa e de suas mentiras nunca se tornariam grandes. Ajudar no triunfo de uma ilusão significa, no mínimo, irmaná-lo à estupidez. Se a fé não produzisse alienação, nela os cegos não acreditariam.

Porque não me ufano

Segundo portal do governo, Brasil tem 800 mil casos de estupro a cada ano. Assustadores dois por minuto. 

O Brasil é uma sociedade bárbara. Miserável, desorganizada e ultra-violenta. Um país subdesenvolvido que produz muito pouco conhecimento. Infelizmente, não há espaço para construir uma boa sociedade neste grotão de perversidade.

Proselitismo religioso

Estado Laico é um conceito ilusório

Em pleno século XXI, o MPF tem de recomendar à PRF que encerre a prestação de serviços de assistência religiosa a servidores. Máquina pública está viciada em doutrinar os subdesenvolvidos. Não tem jeito de remediar.

Nas sociedades mais desenvolvidas a busca de ajuda em sistema de crenças sobrenaturais contra o stress, o perigo e a morte é menos apaixonada do que na periferia do capitalismo: não se busca a cura, mas angariar novos adeptos.

Teocracia

As redes sociais estão deletando contas que questionam o proselitismo religioso.

Vida intelectual da classe trabalhadora

Fernado Ortiz escreveu um capítulo interessantíssimo sobre a prática de leitura nos talleres de tabaco de Cuba. Remete à passagem de Chomsky sobre os artesões e as garotas inglesas que possuíam conhecimento de obras clássicas da literatura e tinham boas livrarias. Em ambos os contextos, o trabalho fornecia muitas oportunidades para leitura, discussão e enriquecimento mútuo.

Bibliozine

Em 1971, Ursula Le Guin escreveu o ensaio The View In para o zine Scythrop, antigamente intitulado Australian Science Fiction Review.

People in my line of work are forever being asked three questions: what name do you write under? Where do you get your ideas? Why do you write science fiction?

To the first I answer. What name do you beat your wife under? To the second. Out of my head. That is, I would make these answers if I didn't always remember them several hours later. To the third I have never had a satisfactory answer even several hours later. I shall attempt now to produce an unsatisfactory answer, since John Bangsund asked me Question Three, and John is a man worth answering.

I write science fiction because that is what publishers call my books. Left to myself, I should call them novels.

Porque não me ufano

A luta de classes não pauta a leitura dos brasileiros. Não se ensina nas escolas-prisões a ler a produção cultural da humanidade com a lente da luta de classes. Não há espaço para o Brasil desenvolver a consciência socialista. Feriado é mero pretexto para consumir álcool, drogar-se. O Brasil é uma periferia que não produz conhecimento, mas violência. O comunismo é humanismo integral, não há espaço para falação de merda, que é inerente a estrutura mental e à desordem das cidades dos subdesenvolvidos.

On bullshit

O nível oral não anda a esclarecer nada, basta ouvir os meios de comunicação que a massa de analfabetos secundários acessa diariamente, não passa de gritaria e manipulação da opinião pública, e essa confusão oral continua cultivando a ignorância. A mídia, quando não está destilando o obscurantismo, não evolui do senso-comum.

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches

The more the domination of the religions and all the arts of narcosis declines, the stricter attention men pay to the actual abolition of the well.

Friedrich Nietzsche 

1844 - 1900

Disenchantment of the world

One

The dead do not exist. Or they exist only in the memory of the living, present and future. The fear of dying is no doubt also a fear of the loss and destruction of what the dying themselves regard as significant and fulfilling.

Two

The only way in which a dead person lives on is in the memory of the living.

Three

People today see themselves as isolated individuals totally independent of others. To further one's own interests, by accumulating money, then seems the fulfilling thing for a person.

Cosmos

I

The significance of language for the evolution of culture. Language is, in fact, the first stage ot the occupation with science.

The everyday christian

If the christian dogmas of a revengeful god, universal sinfulness, election by divine grace and the danger of everlasting damnation were true, it would be a sign of weakmindedness and lack of character not to become a priest, apostle or hermit and, in fear and trembling, to work solely on one's own salvation; it would be senseless to lose sight of one's eternal advantage for the sake of temporal comfort. If we may assume that these things are at any rate believed true, then the everyday christian cuts a miserable figure; he is a man who really cannot count to three, and who precisely on account of his spiritual imbecility does not deserve to be punished so harshly as christianity promises to punish him.

Friedrich Nietzsche 

1844 - 1900

The size of our love

Our love is the size of these tumors inside us
Our love is the size of this hospital room,
you're my hospital groom

Put the ring on my finger, so tight it turns blue
A constant reminder I'll die in this room
if you die in this room

Sit like a watchdog and patiently wait
Listen for footsteps down the hallways
visit beds like they're graves

Days go by so slowly
Nights go by so slowly
In a hospital room
In a box built for two

I fight for air, fight for my own air
Forget all the things I can do alone
I fight for a heart. I fight for a strong heart
I fight to never know this sickness you know
But I know its my own, I gave it a home

Our love is the size of these tumors inside us
Our love is the size of this hole in the ground
where my heart's buried now.

Sleater-Kinney | 1999

Menschliches, Allzumenschliches

People whose daily life appears to them too empty and monotonous easily become religious: this is understandable and forgivable; only they have no right to demand religiosity of those whose daily life is not empty and monotonous.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

The loneliness of the dying

Collective immortality-fantasies undoubtedly live on with only slightly abated vigour in our societies. A perfectly sensible schoolbook describes what people tell children when a person has died:

"Your grandfather is in heaven now" — "Your mummy is looking down on you from heaven" — "Your little sister is an angel now."

This example shows how firmly established in our society is the tendency to conceal the irrevocable finitude of human existence, especially from children, with collective wishful ideas, and to secure the concealment by a strict social censorship.

Norbert Elias

1897 - 1990

Problems of medical sociology

Dying, however it is viewed, is an act of violence. Whether people are the perpetrators or whether it is the blind course of nature that brings about the sudden or gradual decay of a human being is ultimately of no great importance to the person concerned. Thus, a higher level of internal pacification also contributes to the aversion towards death, or more precisely towards the dying. So does a higher level of civilizing restraint. There is no shortage of examples. Freud's protracted death from cancer of the larynx is one of the most telling. The growth became more and more ill-smelling. Even Freud's trusted dog refused to go near him. Only Anna Freud, strong and unwavering in her love for the dying father, helped him in these last weeks and saved him from feeling deserted. Simone de Beauvoir described with frightening exactness the last months of her friend Sartre, who was no longer able to control his urinary flow and was forced to go about with plastic bags tied to him, which overflowed. The decay of the human organism, the process that we call dying, is often anything but odourless. But developed societies inculcate in their members a rather high sensitivity to strong smells.

We are not yet fully aware that dying in more developed societies brings with it special problems which have to be faced as such.

Present-day medical measures relate mainly to individual aspects of the physiological functioning of a person — the heart, the bladder, the arteries and so on — and as far as these are concerned medical technique in preserving and prolonging life is undoubtedly more advanced than ever before. But to concentrate on medically correcting single organs, or areas of organs that are functioning more and more badly, is really worthwhile only for the sake of the person within whom all these part-processes are integrated. And if the problems of the individual part-processes cause us to forget those of the integrating person, we really devalue what we are doing for these partprocesses themselves.

I am not quite sure how far doctors are aware that a person's relationships to others have a codetermining influence both on the genesis of pathological symptoms and on the course taken by an illness.

What does one do if dying people would rather die at home than in hospital, and one knows that they will die more quickly at home?

Norbert Elias

1897 - 1990

Les amants de la liberté

Para mim, Simone e Sartre eram o melhor casal do mundo: estavam unidos pela maneira de ver o mundo e pela escrita. 

Claudine Monteil

Casa-grande & senzala

A Inquisição escancarou sobre nossa vida íntima da era colonial, sobre as alcovas com camas que em geral parecem ter sido de couro, rangendo às pressões dos adultérios e dos coitos danados; sobre as camarinhas e os quartos de santos; sobre as relações de brancos com escravos - seu olho enorme, indagador. As confissões e denúncias reunidas pela visitação do Santo Ofício às partes do Brasil constituem material precioso para o estudo da vida sexual e de família no Brasil dos séculos XVI e XVII. Indicam-nos a idade das moças casarem - doze, quatorze anos; o principal regalo e passatempo dos colonos - o jogo de gamão; a pompa dramática das procissões - homens vestidos de Cristo e de figuras da Paixão e devotos com caixas de doce dando de comer aos penitentes. Irregularidades na vida doméstica e moral cristã da família - homens casados casando-se outra vez com mulatas, outros pecando contra a natureza com efebos da terra ou da Guiné, ainda outros cometendo com mulheres a torpeza que em moderna linguagem científica se chama, como nos livros clássicos, felação, e que nas denúncias vem descrita com todos os ff e rr; desbocados jurando pelo "pentelho da Virgem"; sogras planejando envenenar os genros; cristãos-novos metendo crucifixos por baixo do corpo das mulheres no momento da cópula ou deitando-os nos urinóis; senhores mandando queimar vivas, em fornalhas de engenho, escravas prenhes, as crianças estourando ao calor das chamas.

Gilberto Freyre

1900 - 1987

Ragazza punk

Ciao amore come va?

Porque é que Marx tinha razão

 

Marx foi o primeiro a identificar este objeto histórico conhecido como capitalismo: o primeiro a nos mostrar como surgiu, por que leis se regia e como podia ser erradicado. Se Newton descobriu as forças invisíveis que chamamos leis da gravidade e Freud deixou exposto o funcionamento de um fenômeno invisível conhecido como inconsciente, Marx desmascarou nossa vida cotidiana e revelou a identidade até então imperceptível que chamou de modo de produção capitalista.

A literatura marxista extraordinariamente rica e fértil é motivo mais do que suficiente para se alinhar ao legado marxista. Alienação, a "mercantilização" da vida social, a cultura da ganância, da agressão, do hedonismo insensato e do crescente niilismo, a constante perda de sentido e valor sofrida pela existência humana: é difícil encontrar uma análise inteligente dessas questões que não seja significativamente influenciada pela tradição marxista.

The Helmsman

"Am I not the helmsman here?" I called out. “You?” asked a tall, dark man and passed his hands over his eyes as though to banish a dream. I had been standing at the helm in the dark night, a feeble lantern burning over my head, and now this man had come and tried to push me aside. And as I would not yield, he put his foot on my chest and slowly crushed me while I still clung to the hub of the helm, wrenching it around in falling. But the man seized it, pulled it back in place, and pushed me away. I soon collected myself, however, ran to the hatchway, which gave on to the mess quarters, and cried out: "Men! Comrades! Come here, quick! A stranger has driven me away from the helm!" Slowly they came up, climbing the companion ladder, tired, swaying, powerful figures. "Am I the helmsman?" I asked. They nodded, but they had eyes only for the stranger, stood around him in a semicircle, and when, in a commanding voice, he said: "Don’t disturb me!" they gathered together, nodded at me, and withdrew down the companion ladder. What kind of people are these? Do they ever think, or do they only shuffle pointlessly over the earth?”

Franz Kafka

1883 - 1924

The loneliness of the dying

 

The social problem of death is especially difficult to solve because the living find it hard to identify with the dying.

Death is a problem of the living. Dead people have no problems. Of the many creatures on this earth that die, it is human beings alone for whon dying is a problem. They share birth, illness, youth, maturity, age and death with the animals. But they alone of all living beings know that they shall die; they alone can anticipate their own end, are aware that it can come at any time, and take special precautions - as individuals and as groups - to protect themselves against the danger of annihilation.

Among the greatest dangers to humans are humans.

Not only means of communication or patterns of constraint, but the experience of death, too, can differ from society to society. It is variable and group-specific; no matter how natural and immutable it seems to the members of each particular society, it has been learned.

It is not actually death, but the knowledge of death, that creates problems for human beings. We should not be deceived: the fly caught between a person's fingers struggles as convulsively as a human being in the clutches of a murderer, as if it knows the peril it is in. But the fly's defensive movements when in mortal danger are an unlearned gift of its species. A mother monkey may carry her dead offspring for a while before dropping it somewhere and losing it. She knows nothing of death, either her child's or her own. Human beings know, and so for them death becomes a problem.

It would be worthwhile to present a survey of all the beliefs that people have held in the course of centuries in order to come to terms with the problem of death and its incessant threat to their lives; and at the same time to give an account of all they have done to each other in the name of a belief that promised that death was not an end, that the rituals attending it could secure them eternal life. Clearly there is no notion, however bizarre, in which people are not prepared to believe with profound devotion, provided it gives them relief from the knowledge that one day they will not exist, provided it gives them hope in a form of eternal existence.

Undoubtedly, in advanced societies groups of people no longer insist so passionately that only their own supernatural belief and its rites can secure for their members an eternal life after the earthly one.

Norbert Elias

1897 - 1990

Red Diaper Baby: a boyhood in the age of McCarthyism

In a North American Communist family during the Cold War, truth was a slippery commodity. Communists, my mother and father included, were masters at disguising the truth. They were not sociopaths; far from it. They were true believers in a faith that was widely reviled. And their faith held that the morality of everyday society was a fraud, one put in place to keep people from challenging the powers that be. o stretch the truth, to lie if necessary, to have a secret life from which you carefully excluded almost everyone - all of this was fine provided it served the higher truth, the higher purpose to which your waking hours were dedicated.

James Laxer

1941 - 2018

Mozart: Zur Soziologie eines Genies

A sociologia normalmente é tida como uma disciplina destrutiva e redutora. Não partilho desta visão. Para mim, a sociologia é uma ciência que deveria nos ajudar a entender melhor, e explicar, o que é incompreensível em nossa vida social. É por isso que escolhi o subtítulo aparentemente paradoxal "A sociologia de um gênio". Não é meu propósito destruir o gênio ou reduzi-lo a outra coisa qualquer, mas tornar sua situação humana mais fácil de entender, e talvez ajudar, de maneira modesta, a responder à pergunta do que se deveria ter feito para evitar que acontecesse um destino como o de Mozart. Ao apresentar sua tragédia como tento fazer — e é apenas um exemplo de um problema mais geral —, pode ser que as pessoas se tornem mais conscientes da necessidade de se comportar com maior respeito em relação aos inovadores.

Nobert Elias

1897 - 1990

Porque não me ufano

Note como as estruturas sociais e institucionais (Congresso Nacional, por exemplo) não encorajam o debate e a crítica racional. Mas são usados como meio de manipular opiniões políticas. As estruturas públicas da sociedade subdesenvolvida estão a ser transformadas em instrumentos para a disseminação de mentiras teológicas, preconceitos religiosos e a ideologia do consumo. Na periferia do capitalismo, partidos políticos e igrejas rivais vivem da estrutura pública e fazem dela mero aparelho de propaganda, utilizando meios não racionais de persuasão. Por isso diploma não tem relevância para os gestores do Estado brasileiro. A única coisa mais importante para o subdesenvolvido é a conta bancária. Por outro lado, aí está o maior perigo, o populacho muito pouco instruído e infantil acredita nas personagens grotescas e perversas da arena política. Nesse contexto, somente um lado segue prosperando sem fazer nada.

Dicionário

O que há de mais racional que um dicionário? Ele instrui, informa, ensina mesmo, desde que o leiamos, e não só o consultemos; sem longos discursos, sem vã retórica, ele distribui o saber sóbria e democraticamente a qualquer um que o procure.

Nascido no século XVI, ou seja, na aurora dos tempos modernos, acompanhou de modo dinâmico, às vezes militante, a conquista do espírito da objetividade, e por isso mesmo de tolerância: mediador de um saber acessível a todos, participou da constituição de uma prática democrática do conhecimento.

O dicionário nos chama de volta à ordem. Ele nos diz que só existe verdadeira comunicação, interlocução leal, com o uso rigoroso das sutilezas da língua. Às vezes ouço algumas pessoas acusar um autor de "jargão"; tenho vontade de responder, como Valéry: "Você é daquele tipo de gente para quem o dicionário não existe?" O dicionário nos lembra que a língua não é dada de uma vez por todas e de modo inato; que ninguém é por si mesmo a norma da clareza; que a boa comunicação não pode ser fruto de uma frouxidão de fala; em suma, que cada um deve lutar com a linguagem, que essa luta é incessante, que ela demanda armas (como o dicionário), de tão vasta, pujante e sinuosa é a linguagem. A existência obstinada e renovada dos dicionários, o cuidado com que são concebidos e feitos, tudo isso diz que há neles como que um desejo social: se os conflitos humanos são inevitáveis (é o que se afirma), que pelo menos não seja nunca por culpa de mal-entendidos de palavras. As palavras não são verdadeiras nem falsas, uma vez que a linguagem não tem o poder de se provar; mas podem ser justas: é para essa música das relações de linguagem que nos convida um bom dicionário.

Roland Barthes

1915 - 1980

The Influence of Marxism

Radioactive | 2020

Scientists brought up in Eastern Europe like Marie Sklodkowska-Curie, and perhaps those trained or working in the Swiss universities, heavily colonised by the radical eastern intelligentsia, were clearly cognisant of Marx and debates about Marxism.

Eric Hobsbawm 

1917 - 2012

As palavras de Saramago

É preciso pensarmos todos na situação real, sem ilusões, e termos uma proposta de transformação, que responda a coisas tão elementares como a justiça social. Há uma frase feita que se transmite: um mundo mais justo. Mas o que se trata é simplesmente de um mundo justo. Estamos habituados a não poder ter aquilo a que temos direito que nos limitamos a pedir um pouquinho mais. Até a própria linguagem política está contaminada.

On bullshit

Formação da opinião pública em escala industrial não abandona o senso comum e o discurso motivacional. É a contribuição da tecnologia digital para o aumento e a perpetuação da desigualdade de renda.

"Só existem artistas"

O escritor de arte do século XX Ernst Gombrich chegou na Inglaterra refugiado e foi acolhido pelo Warburg Institute, permanecendo pelo resto de sua carreira. Em 1950, fez o seu nome ao publicar A história da arte, pela Phaidon Press. No ano 1959, tornou-se diretor da renomada instituição. Foi um crítico ácido das mediocridades em sua própria disciplina e amante da ciência. Travou embates com os seus contemporâneos: o marxista Arnold Hauser e o crítico Erwin Panofsky.

Apollo e Dafne

Dafne perseguida por Apollo e se transformando em loureiro, 

escultura de Gian Lorenzo Bernini | 1625

Já que não podes ser minha esposa, serás a minha árvore; sempre a terei nos cabelos, na cítara e aljava, ó loureiro; entre os chefes do Lácio ouvirás os alegres cantos e as triunfais pompas no Capitólio. Serás fiel guardiã do palácio de Augusto, e às portas estarás protegendo o carvalho; como jamais corto os meus cachos juvenis, com perpétua folhagem, serás sempre honrada.

Ovídio

The ecological rift

Planet Earth, creation, the world in which civilization developed, the world with climate patterns that we know and stable shorelines, is in imminent peril. The urgency of the situation crystallized only in the past few years. We now have clear evidence of the crises... The stating conclusion is that continued exploitation of all fossil fuels on Earth threatens not only the other millions of species on the planet but also the survival of humanity itself - and the timetable is shorter than we thought.

Plutosfera

Todas as ações da classe dominante da periferia do capitalismo orientam-se por um único lema: defender e aumentar seu patrimônio (o lícito encobrindo o ilícito tornou-se prática normalizada no Estado) e manter os cordeiros no curral bem dóceis. Dóceis e alienados. A religião e a música comercial são utilizados como instrumentos para o controle dos subdesenvolvidos. Não deixar brecha na mente para o pensamento dialético penetrar, mas corroer cada milímetro dos neurônios. Os subalternos não possuem meios intelectuais para romper com a plutocracia.

Casa-grande & senzala

No Brasil o confessionário absorveu os segredos pessoais e de família, estancando nos homens, e principalmente nas mulheres, essa vontade de se revelarem aos outros que nos países protestantes provê o estudioso de história íntima de tantos diários, confidências, cartas, memórias, autobiografias, romances autobiográficos. Creio que não há no Brasil um só diário escrito por mulher. Nossas avós, tantas delas analfabetas, mesmo quando baronesas e viscondessas, satisfaziam-se em contar os segredos ao padre confessor e à mucama de estimação; e a sua tagarelice dissolveu-se quase toda nas conversas com as pretas boceteiras, nas tardes de chuva ou nos meios-dias quentes, morosos. Debalde se procuraria entre nós um diário de dona de casa cheio de gossip no gênero dos ingleses e dos norte-americanos dos tempos coloniais.

Gilberto Freyre

1900 - 1987

The Tyranny of the Clock

In no characteristic is existing society in the West so sharply distinguished from the earlier societies, whether of Europe or the East, than in its conception of time. To the ancient Chinese or Greek, to the Arab herdsman or Mexican peon of today, time is represented in the cyclic processes of nature, the alternation of day and night, the passage from season to season. The nomads and farmers measured and still measure their day from sunrise to sunset, and their year in terms of the seedtime and harvest, of the falling leaf and the ice thawing on the lakes and rivers. The farmer worked according to the elements, the craftsman for so long as he felt it necessary to perfect his product. Time was seen in a process of natural change, and men were not concerned in its exact measurement. For this reason civilisations highly developed in other respects had the most primitive means of measuring time, the hour glass with it's trickling sand or dripping water, the sundial, useless on a dull day, and the candle or lamp whose unburnt remnant of oil or wax indicated the hours. All these devices where approximate and inexact, and were often rendered unreliable by the weather or the personal laziness of the tender. Nowhere in the ancient or medieval world were more than a tiny minority of men concerned with time in the terms of mathematical exactitude.

Modern, Western man, however lives in a world which runs according to the mechanical and mathematical symbols of clock time. The clock dictates his movements and inhibits his actions. The clock turns time from a process of nature into a commodity that can be measured and bought and sold like soap or sultanas. And because, without some means of exact time keeping, industrial capitalism could never have developed and could not continue to exploit the workers, the clock represents an element of mechanical tyranny in the lives of modern men more potent than any individual exploiter or any other machine. It is valuable to trace the historical process by which the clock influenced the social development of modern European civilisation.

It is a frequent circumstance of history that a culture or civilisation develops the device which will later be used for its destruction. The ancient Chinese, for example, invented gunpowder, which was developed by the military experts of the West and eventually led to the Chinese civilisation itself being destroyed by the high explosives of modern warfare. Similarly, the supreme achievement of the ingenuity of the craftsmen in the medieval cities of Europe was the invention of the mechanical clock, which, with it's revolutionary alteration of the concept of time, materially assisted the growth of exploiting capitalism and the destruction of medieval culture.

There is a tradition that the clock appeared in the eleventh century, as a device for ringing bells at regular intervals in the monasteries which, with the regimented life they imposed on their inmates, were the closest social approximation in the middle ages to the factory of today. The first authenticated clock, however, appeared in the thirteenth century, and it was not until the fourteenth century that clocks became common ornaments of the public buildings in the German cities.

These early clocks, operated by weights, were not particularly accurate, and it was not until the sixteenth century that any great reliability was obtained. In England, for instance the clock at Hampton Court, made in 1540, is said to have been the first accurate clock in the country. And even the accuracy of the sixteenth century clocks are relative, for they were only equipped with hour hands. The idea of measuring time in minutes and seconds had been thought out by the early mathematicians as far back as the fourteenth century but it was not until the invention of the pendulum in 1657 that sufficient accuracy was attained to permit the addition of a minute hand, and the second hand did not appear until the eighteenth century. These two centuries, it should be observed, were those in which capitalism grew to such an extent that it was able to take advantage of the industrial revolution in technique in order to establish its domination over society.

The clock, as Lewis Mumford has pointed out, represents the key machine of the machine age, both for its influence on technology and its influence on the habits of men. Technically, the clock was the first really automatic machine that attained any importance in the life of men. Previous to its invention, the common machines were of such a nature that their operation depended on some external and unreliable force, such as human or animal muscles, water or wind. It is true that the Greeks had invented a number of primitive automatic machines, but these where used, like Hero's steam engine, for obtaining 'supernatural' effects in the temples or for amusing the tyrants of Levantine cities. But the clock was the first automatic machine that attained a public importance and a social function. Clock-making became the industry from which men learnt the elements of machine making and gained the technical skill that was to produce the complicated machinery of the industrial revolution.

Socially the clock had a more radical influence than any other machine, in that it was the means by which the regularisation and regimentation of life necessary for an exploiting system of industry could best be attained. The clock provided the means by which time — a category so elusive that no philosophy has yet determined its nature — could be measured concretely in more tangible forms of space provided by the circumference of a clock dial. Time as duration became disregarded, and men began to talk and think always of "lengths" of time, just as if they were talking of lengths of calico. And time, being now measurable in mathematical symbols, became regarded as a commodity that could be bought and sold in the same way as any other commodity.

The new capitalists, in particular, became rabidly time-conscious. Time, here symbolising the labour of workers, was regarded by them almost as if it were the chief raw material of industry. "Time is money" became on of the key slogans of capitalist ideology, and the timekeeper was the most significant of the new types of official introduced by the capitalist dispensation.

In the early factories the employers went so far as to manipulate their clocks or sound their factory whistles at the wrong times in order to defraud their workers a little of this valuable new commodity. Later such practices became less frequent, but the influence of the clock imposed a regularity on the lives of the majority of men which had previously been known only in the monastery. Men actually became like clocks, acting with a repetitive regularity which had no resemblance to the rhythmic life of a natural being. They became, as the Victorian phrase put it, "as regular as clockwork". Only in the country districts where the natural lives of animals and plants and the elements still dominated life, did any large proportion of the population fail to succumb to the deadly tick of monotony.

At first this new attitude to time, this new regularity of life, was imposed by the clock-owning masters on the unwilling poor. The factory slave reacted in his spare time by living with a chaotic irregularity which characterised the gin-sodden slums of early nineteenth century industrialism. Men fled to the timeless world of drink or Methodist inspiration. But gradually the idea of regularity spread downwards among the workers. Nineteenth century religion and morality played their part by proclaiming the sin of 'wasting time'. The introduction of mass-produced watches and clocks in the 1850's spread timeconsciousness among those who had previously merely reacted to the stimulus of the knocker-up or the factory whistle. In the church and in the school, in the office and the workshop, punctuality was held up as the greatest of the virtues.

Out of this slavish dependence on mechanical time which spread insidiously into every class in the nineteenth century there grew up the demoralising regimentation of life which characterises factory work today. The man who fails to conform faces social disapproval and economic ruin. If he is late at the factory the worker will lose his job or even, at the present day [1944 — while wartime regulations were in force], find himself in prison. Hurried meals, the regular morning and evening scramble for trains or buses, the strain of having to work to time schedules, all contribute to digestive and nervous disorders, to ruin health and shorten life.

Nor does the financial imposition of regularity tend, in the long run, to greater efficiency. Indeed, the quality of the product is usually much poorer, because the employer, regarding time as a commodity which he has to pay for, forces the operative to maintain such a speed that his work must necessarily be skimped. Quantity rather than quality becomes the criterion, the enjoyment is taken out of work itself, and the worker in his turn becomes a "clock-watcher", concerned only when he will be able to escape to the scanty and monotonous leisure of industrial society, in which he "kills time" by cramming in as much time-scheduled and mechanised enjoyment of cinema, radio and newspapers as his wage packet and his tiredness allow. Only if he is willing to accept of the hazards of living by his faith or his wits can the man without money avoid living as a slave to the clock.

The problem of the clock is, in general, similar to that of the machine. Mechanical time is valuable as a means of co-ordination of activities in a highly developed society, just as the machine is valuable as a means of reducing unnecessary labour to the minimum. Both are valuable for the contribution they make to the smooth running of society, and should be used insofar as they assist men to co-operate efficiently and to eliminate monotonous toil and social confusion. But neither should be allowed to dominate mens lives as they do today.

Now the movement of the clock sets the tempo men's lives — they become the servant of the concept of time which they themselves have made, and are held in fear, like Frankenstein by his own monster. In a sane and free society such an arbitrary domination of man's functions by cither clock or machine would obviously be out of the question. The domination of man by the creation of man is even more ridiculous than the domination of man by man. Mechanical time would be relegated to its true function of a means of reference and co-ordination, and men would return again to a balance view of life no longer dominated by the worship of the clock. Complete liberty implies freedom from the tyranny of abstractions as well as from the rule of men.

George Woodcock

1912 - 1995

Porque não me ufano

O Brasil é um espaço de violência social. O que se assiste é a violência social alojada no interior das relações e agasalhada na própria cotidianeidade da sociedade subdesenvolvida. É mera geografia agregada à exploração capitalista. Modos arcaicos e semi-avançados na maneira de extrair mais valia continuarão existindo por séculos.

Marx's Model

Marx offers a more global account which stresses connections between changes in one society and changes in others.

Marx is much more concerned with the mechanics of social change, especially in the case of the transition from feudalism to capitalism. Change is viewed in essentially dialectical terms.

The Marx model is used in classic studies such as E. P. Thompson's famous Making of the Working Class (1963), as in Maurice Agulhon's The Republic in the Village (1970), a study of eastern Provence in the first half of the nineteenth century, or Emilio Sereni's Capitalism in the Countryside (1947), which deals with Italy in the generation after its unification in 1860.

A queda do muro de Berlim

Após a união entre as Alemanhas Oriental e Ocidental em 1990, os aluguéis em Berlim Oriental começaram a subir e o desemprego a aumentar. No verão, quando os soldados russos em Potsdam podiam ser vistos de uniforme tomando sorvete e misturando-se com as pessoas comuns de uma maneira quase impensável anteriormente, era também possível ver berlinenses orientais carregando cartazes com a mensagem WIR WOLLEN UNSER MAUER WIEDER. O que aconteceu em 1990 não foi tanto um casamento entre dois parceiros iguais, mas o caso de um peixe maior engolindo o menor.