Porque não me ufano

A sociedade brasileira não sabe destinar a escola a construir uma boa sociedade e muito menos que tipo de escola construir. A manipulação pela ideologia neoliberal é hegemônica. Ninguém vê a face escondida da instituição.

Note: a economia periférica não supõe um domínio científico crescente e muito menos eleva o nível cultural da mão-de-obra. Educar é um ofício que perdeu o seu sentido e benefícios simbólicos. Na periferia do capitalismo não há emancipação pelo conhecimento.

Education for Freedom

Education for freedom must begin by stating facts and enunciating values, and must go on to develop appropriate techniques for realizing the values and for combating those who, for whatever reason, choose to ignore the facts or deny the values.

Aldous Huxley

1894 - 1963

Historiofotografia

As estadunidenses Margaret Bourke-White (1904 - 1971) e Dorothea Lange (1895 - 1965) tiravam fotografias sociais para campanhas de reforma social. Suas lentes tinham como foco acidentes de trabalho, cortiços, mães desafortunadas, crianças famintas duramente exploradas e campos de extermínio nazista.

Go, New York, go!

 

We have chosen courage over fear. We have chosen prosperity for the many over spoils for the few. We have chosen to make a new future for all of us, we have chosen a mayor who is relentlessly dedicated to make life not just possible but aspirational for working people. We have chosen that over the distractions of bigotry and the barbarism of extreme inequality.

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

How fascism works

Governo Trump fechou a maior biblioteca da Nasa. O fascismo é, antes de tudo, antiintelectual.

The future will be nazi

A IA Grok, de Elon Musk, andou tecendo elogios à Adolf Hitler.

O teatro da violência

A política em geral pode ser vista como um drama, ou até melodrama, com líderes se apresentando como salvadores da pátria ou heróis numa peça moral em que o enredo principal é a luta contra o mal. Nesse teatro, a violência é um dos roteiros principais.

Sociologia da miséria

A loucura de fim de ano, em que nada muda, é o tempo de licenciosidade oficial. Putaria, como se diz no popular. As atividades mais comuns, que também duram o ano inteiro (o que pode produzir o subdesenvolvido?) incluem comer pão com linguiça, beber álcool e fumar maconha na maior escala possível. Escala industrial. Assediar membros do sexo oposto e engajar o maior número de pessoas em rituais de agressão mútua, atormentar animais (se for possível atropelar, melhor ainda), trocar palavras e gestos insultuosos, cantar música vulgar e ruim até o transe virar gritaria nonsense e encenar vários tipos de combate são o ethos da ralé. Entrar em coma devido ao álcool ou outras substâncias ilícitas faz parte do costume das massas incultas, quando muito provavelmente a aglomeração dos veranistas acaba em distúrbios e assassinatos. Tudo isso e mais com odor de esgoto emanado da pobreza absoluta.

Porque não me ufano

Para o subdesenvolvido o que importa são as aparências, os embrulhos e que não existe nada realmente importante dentro. A palavra não tem valor, a vida da mente não tem relevância, a qualidade de vida não se desenvolve.

É difícil evitar duas perguntas: são os ritos do capitalismo repetidos inconscientemente realmente necessários? Ou são uma maneira de anestésico das massas e uma maneira de aumentar o lucro da sociedade de consumo?

O Brasil é mero símbolo adequado do capitalismo, da ânsia do dinheiro fácil, não importa as consequências para os pobres ou para o meio ambiente. A malandragem nacional quer a partir da corrupção chegar ao paraíso celestial.

La carte postale

Si je dis que j'écris pour des destinataires morts, non pas à venir mais déjà morts au moment où j'arrive au bout d'une phrase, ce n'est pas pour jouer. Les destinataires sont morts, la destination c'est la mort.

Jacques Derrida

1930 - 2004

Underworld

Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.

Writers must oppose systems. It’s important to write against power, corporations, the state, and the whole system of consumption and of debilitating entertainments. I think writers, by nature, must oppose things, oppose whatever power tries to impose on us.

Don DeLillo

Pourpalers

 

Le rôle de la gauche, qu’elle soit ou non au pouvoir, c’est découvrir un type de problème que la droite veut à tour prix cacher.

Nous ne souffrons pas d'incommunication, mais au contraire de toutes les forces qui nous obligent à nous exprimer quand nous n'avons pas grand-chose à dire.

Car la question est bien comment faire le mouvement, comment percer le mur, pour cesser de se cogner la tête. C'est peut-être en ne bougeant pas trop, en ne parlant pas trop, éviter les faux movements, résider là où il n'y a plus mémoire.

Gilles Deleuze

1925 - 1995

Roupas

O estadunidense Thorstein Veblen (1857 - 1929) sustentou em The Theory of the Leisure Class: an economic study of institutions que a moda, uma busca incessante de novidade, era exigida pelo princípio central da vestimenta, "o desperdício conspícuo", que permitia aos ricos mostrar a todo mundo que tinham dinheiro para jogar fora.

Peter Burke

Sur la philosophie

La philosophie consiste toujours à inventer des concepts. La philosophie a une fonction qui reste parfaitement actuelle, créer des concepts. Personne ne peut le faire à sa place. Bien sûr, la philosophie a toujours eu ses rivaux, depuis les "rivaux" de Platon jusqu'an bouffon de Zarathoustra. Aujourd'hui, c'est l'informatique, la communication, la promotion commerciale qui s'approprient les mots "concept" et "créatif", et ces "concepteurs" foment une race effrontée qui exprime l'acte de vendre comme suprême pensée capitaliste, le cogito de la marchandise.

La philosophie n'est pas communicative, pas plus que contemplative ou réflexive: elle est créatice ou même revolutionnaire, par nature, en tant qu'elle ne cesse de créer de nouveaux concepts. La seule condition est qu'ils aient une necessité mais aussi une étrangetê, et ils les ont dans la mesure où ils répondent à le vrais problémes. Le concept, c'est qui empêche la pensée d'être une simple opinion, un avis, une discussion, un bavardage.

Gilles Deleuze

1925 - 1995

Cultural Revolution Posters

Fruits and melons that are eaten 

raw must be washed properly | 1975

Quotations from Chairman Mao Tsetung

 

Se Mao Tsé-Tung estivesse vivo, 

estaria a completar 132 voltas ao redor do sol.

Idealism and metaphysics are the easiest things in the world, because people can talk as much nonsense as they like without basing it on objective reality or having it tested against reality. Materialism and dialectics, on the other hand, need effort. They must be based on and tested by objective reality. Unless one makes the effort, one is liable to slip into idealism and metaphysics.

Un portrait de Foucault

Nietzsche se félicitait d'avoir le premier fait une psychologie du prête, et d'avoir analysé la nature de son pouvoir (le prête traite la communauté comme un "troupeau", et le dirige en lui inoculant le ressentiment et la mauvaise conscience).

Gilles Deleuze

1925 - 1995

Bezbozhnik

I

Livres pensadores, marxistas, ateus entre outros intelectuais marginalizados precisam de novos tipos de instituições, nichos ecológicos em que a criatividade e o pensamento radical sejam encorajados. As instituições educacionais são muito inertes, o capital intelectual transmitido aos jovens está sendo danoso, não forma leitores e muito menos militantes da teoria crítica. Novas ideias brilhantes e um clima de igualdade não irão florescer nas instituições do Estado e muito menos um processo de intercâmbio intelectual está a ser desenvolvido. Não há história sendo escrita, não há habitat intelectual construído. Tudo nos leva a considerar que a combinação de vigorosa atividade intelectual com uma atmosfera de camaradagem não existe e nunca existirá na periferia do capitalismo.

The future

Under capitalism the social status of the poet has changed. Shakespeare was attached to the Earl of Leicester. Although a bourgeois in origin and outlook, his status was feudal Milton, on the other hand, was for many years a Commonwealth official, and foreign secretary to Cromwell. His status was bourgeois. But there was the closest union between his politics and his poetry. After the Restoration there was a partial return to the semi-feudal conditions of patronage. Poets like Pope and Gay enjoyed the hospitality of the landed gentry, who subscribed to their poems and employed them as secretaries. But with the Industrial Revolution all feudal survivals were finally swept away. Poetry became a commodity, the poet a producer for the open market, and with a decreasing demand for his wares. During the past half-century capitalism has ceased to be a progressive force, the bourgeoisie has ceased to be a progressive class, and so bourgeois culture, including poetry, is losing its vitality. Our contemporary poetry is not the work of the ruling class — what does big business care about poetry? — but of a small and isolated section of the community, the middle-class intelligentsia, spurned by the ruling class but still hesitating to join hands with the masses of the people, the proletariat, who alone have the strength to break through the iron ring of monopoly capitalism. And so bourgeois poetry has lost touch with the underlying forces of social change. Its range has contracted — the range of its content and the range of its appeal. It is no longer the work of a people, or even of a class, but of a coterie. Unless the bourgeois poet can learn reorientate his art, he will soon have nobody to sing to but himself Shakespeare’s masterpieces were written to be declaimed with voice and gesture before a crowd, sweeping a thousand heartstrings with the magic of a word. This has gone out of our poetry. Even Shakespeare is no longer a draw. I am not forgetting all that has been achieved in purely literary forms, such as Shakespeare’s own Sonnets or Keats’s Odes. But all poetry is in origin a social act, in which poet and people commune. Our poetry has been individualised to such a degree that it has lost touch with its source of life. It has withered at the root.

George Thomson

1903 - 1987

The age of the man of letters

Thomas Henry Huxley, best known for his public defence of Darwin, was another polymath who once thanked the gods for his "diversity of tastes", declaring that "if I had as many lives as a cat, I should leave no corner unexplored". Like Darwin, Huxley studied medicine, but did not take a degree. Like Darwin, his life was changed by an expedition, in his case to the Torres Straits and Australia between 1846 and 1850, as surgeon on HMS Rattlesnake. Huxley became interested in zoology, carrying out research on sea anemones, jellyfi sh and sea urchins. On his return to Britain, Huxley taught geology as a lecturer at the School of Mines in London. Geology and a concern with evolution led him to palaeontology, studying dinosaurs and the skull of a Neanderthal man. Following a meeting with Herbert Spencer, Huxley was introduced into the circle of the Westminster Review and came to write for it regularly, discovering a gift for lucid and vivid popularization. He also gave public lectures on a wide variety of topics, including the famous lecture, "On a piece of chalk", delivered to the working men of Norwich in 1868. Huxley’s collected essays and lectures run to nine volumes and include a debate with Matthew Arnold over the relative place in education of literature and science.

Renda Básica de Cidadania

Neste livro, eu destaco o capítulo sobre Renda Básica de Cidadania. Sua defesa é o verdadeiro mecanismo contra a barbárie. É o passo mais significativo em busca de um ideal igualitário. Não tem nada a ver com caridade. É uma justa transferência de recursos e um grande passo para a construção de uma boa sociedade.

Money not books

The death of reading in Brazil.

Un portrait de Foucault

Quelle est notre éthique, comment produisons-nous une existence artiste, quels sont nos processus de subjectivation? En quels lieux et comment se produisent de nouvelles subjectivités? Y-a-t-il quelque chose à attendre des communautés actuelles? La subjectivation, c'est la production des modes d'existence ou styles de vie.

Gilles Deleuze

1925 - 1995

Joseph Stalin's 146th birthday

 

Розы для Сталина

Boris Vladimirski | 1949

Porque não me ufano

Note, o terceiro mundista não tem nenhuma nova relação com a vida e com a linguagem. E muito menos apresenta novas lutas contra o poder. A família brasileira não funciona como porta de entrada para a alta cultura e a sociedade de gente de letras. O destino do periférico é geralmente previsível e muitas vezes trágico. Caminha para o fascismo.

La vie comme oeuvre d'art

 

Il y a des choses qu'on ne peut faire ou dire qu'à force de bassesse d'âme, de vie haineuse ou de vengeance contre la vie.

Un portrait de Foucault

Foucault invoque toujours la poussière ou le murmure d'un combat, et la pensée elle-même lui apparaît comme une machine de guerre. C'est que, dès qu'on fait un pas hors de ce qui a été déja pensé, dès qu'on s'aventure en dehors du reconnaissable et du rassurant, dès qu'il faut inventer de nouveaux concepts pour des terres inconnues, les méthodes et les morales tombent, et penser devient, suivant une formule de Foucault, un "acte périlleux", une violence qu'on exerce d'abord sur soi-même. Les objections qu'on vous fait ou même les questions qu'on vous pose viennent toujours du rivage, et ce sont comme des bouées qu'on vous lance, mais pour vous assommer et vous empêcher d'avancer plutôt que pour vous aider: les objections viennent toujours des médiocres et des paresseux; Foucault l'a su plus que tout autre.

Il arrive souvent une aventure aux grands écrivains: on les felicité d'un livre, on admire ce livre, mais eux ne sont pas contents, parce qu'ils savent combien ils sont encore loin de ce qu'ils voudraient, de ce qu'ils cherchent, et dont ils n'ont encore qu'une idée obscure. C'est pourquoi ils ont si peu de temps à perdre dans les polémiques, dans les objections, dans les discussions.

On parle, on voit, on meurt. Oui, il y a des sujets: ce sont des grains dansants dans la poussière du visible, et des places mobiles dans un murmure anonyme.

Porque não me ufano

No Brasil, as ligações entre grupos de extrema direita e grupos criminosos têm como traço comum a lavagem de dinheiro, a perpetuação da ignorância e dos feudos e a violência. Também é frequente que os integrantes de organizações criminosas tragam votos para as forças políticas mais inescrupulosas. A ignorância talvez seja o maior instrumento de poder na periferia do capitalismo.

Goth

Porque não me ufano

Na sociedade subdesenvolvida e pobre, dividida em classes, não há espaço para a dialética, a concepção metafísica prevaleceu porque corresponde aos interesses das classes dominantes. Manter a estrutura viciada e excluir o desejo de mudança da mentalidade dos subalternos são as normas nacional. A arte do diálogo é incapaz de existir neste contexto. Populacho não foi instruído a pensar as contradições da realidade nem mesmo se aprofundar na teologia. As pessoas estão plenamente satisfeitas com elas mesmas e com as condições econômicas desumanas da periferia.

O Brasil tem todas as característica de uma sociedade feudal. A dialética não faz parte do ensino formal, a vida social é profundamente estratificada e as pessoas crescem, vivem e morrem fazendo as mesmas coisas monótonas e pertencendo à classe social em que nascem. A discussão sobre os problemas coletivos não faz parte da vida dos cidadãos. Nenhuma alteração significativa acontece. E a falta de compreensão dialética dos problemas sociais leva as pessoas a aderirem com fervor às caricaturas de comunidades e a cultuar personalidades fascistas. A invenção de novas possibilidades de vida, como dizia Nietzsche, é uma utopia irrealizável.

Origin of the religious cult

If we transport ourselves back to the ages in which the religious life flourished most vigorously we discover a fundamental conviction which we no longer share and on account of which we see the door to the religious life once and for all closed to us: it concerns nature and our traffic with nature. In those ages one as yet knows nothing of natural laws; neither earth nor sky are constrained by any compul-sion; a season, sunshine, rain can come or they can fail to come. Any conception of natural causality is altogether lacking. When one rows it is not the rowing which moves the ship: rowing is only a magical ceremony by means of which one compels a demon to move the ship. All illness, death itself is the result of magical influences. Becoming ill and dying never occur naturally; the whole conception of a 'natural occurrence' is lacking - it first dawns with the older Greeks, that is to say in a very late phase of mankind, in the conception of a moirat enthroned above the gods. When someone shoots with the bow, there is still an irrational hand and force at work in it; if the wells suddenly dry up, one thinks first of all of subterranean demons and their knavery; it must be the arrow of a god through whose invisible action a man suddenly sinks down. In India according to Lubbock)‡ a carpenter is accustomed to make sacrifices to his hammer, his axe and his other tools; a Brahman treats the crayon with which he writes, a soldier the weapon he employs in the field, a mason his trowel, a labourer his plough in the same way. The whole of nature is in the conception of religious men a sum of actions by conscious and vol-itional beings, a tremendous complex of arbitrarinesses. In regard to everything external to us no conclusion can be drawn that something will be thus or thus, must happen thus or thus; it is we who are the more or less secure and calculable; man is the rule, nature is irregularity - this proposition contains the fundamental conviction which dominates rude, religiously productive primitive cultures. We men of today feel precisely the opposite: the richer a man feels within himself, the more polyphonic his subjectivity is, the more powerfully is he impressed by the uniformity of nature; with Goethe, we all recognize in nature the great means of composure for the modern soul, we listen to the beat of the pendulum of this mightiest of clocks with a longing for rest, for becoming settled and still, as though we could imbibe this uniformity into ourselves and thereby at last come to an enjoyment of ourselves. Formerly the reverse was the case: if we think back to rude, primitive conditions of peoples, or if we look closely at present-day savages, we find them determined in the strongest way by the law, by tradition: the individual is tied to them almost automatically and moved with the regularity of a pendulum. To him, nature - uncomprehended, dreadful, mysterious nature - must seem the domain of freedom, of caprice, of a higher power, indeed, as it were a superhuman stage of existence, a god. But every individual living in such ages and conditions feels how his existence, his happiness, that of the family and the state, the success of any undertaking depends on these arbitrarinesses of nature: certain natural events must occur at the right time, others fail to occur. How can one exercise an influence over these terrible unknown powers, how can one fetter the domain of freedom? thus he asked himself, thus he anxiously seeks: are there then no means of regulating these powers through a tradition and law in just the way you are regulated by them? - The believer in magic and miracles reflects on how to impose a law on nature - : and, in brief, the religious cult is the outcome of this reflection. The problem these men pose themselves is intimately related to this one: how can the weaker tribe nonetheless dictate laws to the stronger, dispose of it, regulate its actions (so far as they affect the weaker)? One will think first of that mildest kind of constraint, that constraint one exercises when one has gained the affection of someone. It is thus also possible to exercise a constraint on the powers of nature through prayers and pleadings, through submission, through engaging regularly to give presents and offerings, through flattering glorifications, inasmuch as by doing so one obtains their affection: love binds and is bound. Then one can conclude treaties under which both parties commit themselves to a certain course of conduct, pledge securities and exchange oaths. But much more important than this is a species of more violent constraint through magic and sorcery. Just as man is able with the aid of the sorcerer to harm an enemy stronger than himself, just as the sorcery of love can operate at a distance, so the weaker man believes he can influence the mightier spirits of nature too. The chief means employed by all sorcery is that of getting into one's power something belonging to another: hair, nail, food from his table, even his picture or his name. Thus equipped one can then practise sorcery; for the basic presupposition is that to everything spiritual there pertains something corporeal; with its aid one is able to bind, harm, destroy the spirit; the corporeal provides the handle with which one can grasp the spiritual. So that, as man thus influences other men, so he also influences some spirit of nature; for the latter too has its corporeal aspect by which it can be grasped. The tree and, compared with it, the seed from which it originated - this enigmatic juxtaposition seems to demonstrate that one and the same spirit has incorporated itself in both forms, one small, one big. A stone that suddenly rolls away is the body in which a spirit is active; if a rock lies on a lonely heath and it seems impossible that human strength could ever have sufficed to take it there, it must have moved there itself, that is to say it must harbour a spirit. Everything that has a body is accessible to sorcery, thus the spirits of nature are so too. 

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Begriffsgeschichte

O historiador filosófico Reinhart Koselleck

1923 - 2006

Koselleck cresceu na era de Hitler e escreveu sua tese de doutorado sobre a relação entre o Iluminismo e a Revolução, que se transformou no livro Kritik und Krise, publicado em 1959. O que mais atraia o pesquisador era a história intelectual. Em 1997, 30 anos de trabalhos, Koselleck publica um dicionário histórico dos principais conceitos da antiguidade clássica até o presente. Em 1979, reúne ensaios sob o título Vergangene Zukunft, elaborando a ideia de Sattelzeit.

Isto não é um romance

É difícil fazer do ato de escrever um romance o tema de um romance. Mais difícil ainda é encontrar espaço e tempo para escrever literatura de verdade sem se preocupar com a demanda de mercado.

Porque não me ufano

Observe que a combinação de vigorosa atividade intelectual com uma atmosfera de camaradagem não compete ao Brasil. Não há história intelectual.

Perceba que nem mesmo o advento do calendário judaico-cristão faz o terceiro mundista raciocinar: onde estamos e que rumos tomamos? A consciência alienada está constrangida a percorrer às cegas os caminhos de uma sociedade pobre e desorganizada. Não irá ocorrer transição para o comunismo não existe a mínima brecha para isso. A característica do Brasil continua a ser escravocrata.

Descodificação e conjunção de fluxos descodificados

O cinismo

Já não é a idade da crueldade nem do terror, mas a idade do cinismo, que é acompanhado por uma estranha piedade (e ambos constituem o humanismo: o cinismo é a imanência física do campo social, e a piedade é a manutenção de um Urstaat espiritualizado; o cinismo é o capital como meio de extorquir sobretrabalho, mas a piedade é este mesmo capital como capital-deus de onde parecem emanar todas as forças de trabalho). Esta idade do cinismo é a da acumulação do capital, dado que este implica o tempo, precisamente para a conjunção de todos os fluxos descodificados e desterritorializados. Como Maurice Dobb mostrou, é preciso haver, num primeiro tempo, uma acumulação de títulos de propriedade, por exemplo da terra, numa conjuntura favorável, num momento em que esses bens custem pouco (desintegração do sistema feudal); e é preciso haver um segundo tempo, em que estes bens são vendidos num momento de alta de preços, e em condições que tornam particularmente interessante o investimento industrial (“revolução dos preços”, reserva abundante de mão de obra, formação de um proletariado, acesso fácil a fontes de matérias-primas, condições favoráveis à produção de instrumentos e máquinas). Há todo tipo de fatores contingentes que favorecem essas conjunções. Quantos encontros foram necessários para a formação da coisa, a inominável! Mas o efeito da conjunção é certamente o controle cada vez mais profundo da produção pelo capital.

Gilles Deleuze e Félix Guattari

The brain and the chariot

Do horses on occasion have glimmerings of patriotic fervor? Do dogs feel for humans something akin to religious ecstasy?

Carl Sagan

1934 - 1996

Critique of Hegel's Dialectic and General Philosophy

The act of superseding as an objective movement which re-absorbs alienation into itself. This is the insight, expressed within estrangement, into the appropriation of objective being through the supersession of its alienation; it is the estranged insight into the real objectification of man, into the real appropriation of his objective being through the destruction of the estranged character of the objective world, through the supersession of its estranged mode of existence, just as atheism as the supersession of God is the emergence of theoretical humanism, and communism as the supersession of private property the vindication of real human life as man's property, the emergence of practical humanism. Atheism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of religion; communism is humanism mediated with itself through the supersession of private property. Only when we have superseded this mediation – which is, however, a necessary precondition – will positive humanism, positively originating in itself, come into being.

But atheism and communism are no flight, no abstraction, no loss of the objective world created by man or of his essential powers projected into objectivity. No impoverished regression to unnatural, primitive simplicity. They are rather the first real emergence, the realization become real for man, of his essence as something real.

Karl Marx 

1818 - 1883

Rotting Christ

35 years of Evil existence.

The brain and the chariot

 

Our ability to read and make maps, to orient ourselves spatially in three dimensions and to use the appropriate symbols - all of which are probably involved in the development if not the use of language - are severely impaired by lesions in the parietal lobes, near the top of the head.

One soldier who suffered a massive wartime penetration of the parietal lobe was for a full year unable to orient his feet into his slippers, much less find his bed in the hospital ward.A lesion of the angular gyrus of the neocortex, in the parietal lobe, results in alexia, the inability to recognize the printed word. 

The parietal lobe appears to be involved in all human symbolic language and, of all the brain lesions, a lesion in the parietal lobe causes the greatest decline in intelligence as measured by activities in everyday life.

Chief among the neocortical abstractions are the human symbolic languages, particularly reading and writing and mathematics.

Carl Sagan 

1934 - 1996

Dead society

There's a pretty distinct gab between rich and poor. It's a society ruled by neoliberalism. High class get put into the exclusive residential area. Lower-class get the slum. And the demagogues continue to side-track the more backward sections of the masses.

League of Militant Atheists ☭

 

Emelian Mikhailovitch Iaroslavski

1878 - 1943

Chile: Hitler's people

The masses, fools, all. They're swine in human clothing domesticated by the establishment. Going to church, watching TV, keep doped. Just being depoliticized.

Porque não me ufano

A indústria cultural na subdesenvolvida sociedade brasileira corrobora a glorificação da estupidez.

The poverty of the ethnography of poverty

A atual globalização cria espaços mais padronizados e homogeneizados. A globalização na periferia não ajuda na diferenciação. A globalização não oferece ferramentas para que culturas diferentes se sustentem. Se é que podemos falar de cultura em territórios carentes de estrutura, desorganizados e desiguais. Há mais homogeneização e pobreza do que diferença. Mesmo nos micros espaços das ruas da periferia.

América Latrina

"Os chilenos precisam de deus"

Vejamos rapidamente a genealogia de José Antonio Kast:

Seu pai, Michael Kast, foi militante da Juventude Hitlerista desde os 14 anos e soldado nazista; seu irmão, Miguel Kast, foi membro dos Chicago Boys e ministro de Pinochet e presidente do Banco Central na ditadura. Antonio Kast é um defensor da ditadura de Pinochet, negacionista das alterações climáticas, contra o aborto e um ortodoxo católico.

O único interesse dos cristofascistas é se dar bem com o poder econômico (ânimo por fortuna, alto postos e dinheiro, nothing more) e destruir o pensamento crítico para pavimentar o caminho da teocracia. Cargos oficiais sem consciência. 

Próximo ano será a vez do Brasil eleger os seus pares nazistas.

The attitude of the workers’ party to religion

The philosophical basis of Marxism, as Marx and Engels repeatedly declared, is dialectical materialism, which has fully taken over the historical traditions of eighteenth-century materialism in France and of Feuerbach (first half of the nineteenth century) in Germany - a materialism which is absolutely atheistic and positively hostile to all religion. Let us recall that the whole of Engels's Anti-Dühring, which Marx read in manuscript, is an indictment of the materialist and atheist Dühring for not being a consistent materialist and for leaving loopholes for religion and religious philosophy. Let us recall that in his essay on Ludwig Feuerbach, Engels reproaches Feuerbach for combating religion not in order to destroy it, but in order to renovate it, to invent a new, "exalted" religion, and so forth. Religion is the opium of the people - this dictum by Marx is the corner-stone of the whole Marxist outlook on religion. Marxism has always regarded all modern religions and churches, and each and every religious organisation, as instruments of bourgeois reaction that serve to defend exploitation and to befuddle the working class.

Marxism is materialism. As such, it is as relentlessly hostile to religion as was the materialism of the eighteenth-century Encyclopaedists or the materialism of Feuerbach. This is beyond doubt. But the dialectical materialism of Marx and Engels goes further than the Encyclopaedists and Feuerbach, for it applies the materialist philosophy to the domain of history, to the domain of the social sciences. We must combat religion - that is the ABC of all materialism, and consequently of Marxism. But Marxism is not a materialism which has stopped at the ABC. Marxism goes further.

Why does religion retain its hold on the backward sections of the town proletariat, on broad sections of the semi-proletariat, and on the mass of the peasantry?

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

1870 - 1924

Porque não me ufano

Repartições públicas e escolas por toda a periferia do capitalismo têm se tornado cada vez mais locais de oração. O cristofascismo se alastrou como câncer pela periferia do capitalismo. O Brasil está trilhando o caminho para a teocracia. 2026 será ainda pior. 

Porque não me ufano

A justa relação entre Estado e sociedade civil não existe na periferia do capitalismo. Vivemos mais do que nunca a hegemonia da pequena política neoliberal. Estamos distante de ver a volta da predominância da grande política com uma retomada do papel protagonista da esquerda e da democracia, pois são bastante débeis os recursos políticos, organizativos e teóricos de que dispõe o terceiro mundista. A plutocracia triunfou.

The flies in the market-place

Flee, my friend, into your solitude! I see you deafened with the noise of the great men, and stung all over with the stings of the little ones.

Admirably do forest and rock know how to be silent with you. Resemble again the tree which you love, the broad-branched one - silently and attentively it overhangs the sea.

Where solitude ends, there begins the market-place; and where the market-place begins, there begins also the noise of the great actors, and the buzzing of the poison-flies.

In the world even the best things are worthless without those who represent them: those showmen, the people call great men.

Little, do the people understand what is great - that is to say, the creating agency. But they have a taste for all showmen and actors of great things.

Around the inventors of new values revolves the world: - invisibly it revolves. But around the actors revolve the people and the glory: such is the course of things.

Spirit, has the actor, but little conscience of the spirit. He believes always in that which he believes most strongly - in himself!

Tomorrow he has a new belief, and the day after, one still newer. Sharp perceptions has he, like the people, and changeable humours.

To upset - that means with him to prove. To drive mad - that means with him to convince. And blood is counted by him as the best of all arguments.

A truth which only glides into sensitive ears, he calls a lie and nothing. Truly, he believes only in gods that make a great noise in the world!

Full of ceremonial clowns is the market-place, - and the people glory in their great men! These are for them the masters of the hour.

But the hour presses them; so they press you. And also from you they want Yes or No. Alas. you would set your chair between For and Against?

On account of those absolute and impatient ones, be not jealous, you lover of truth! Never yet did truth cling to the arm of an absolute one.

On account of those abrupt ones, return into your security: only in the market-place is one assailed by Yes? or No?

Slow is the experience of all deep fountains: long have they to wait until they know what has fallen into their depths.

Away from the market-place and from fame takes place all that is great: away from the market-Place and from fame have ever dwelt the devisers of new values.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude: I see you stung all over by the poisonous flies. Flee there, where a rough, strong breeze blows!

Flee into your solitude! you have lived too closely to the small and the pitiable. Flee from their invisible vengeance! Towards you they have nothing but vengeance.

Raise no longer an arm against them! Innumerable are they, and it is not your lot to shoo flies.

Innumerable are the small and pitiable ones; and of many a proud structure, rain-drops and weeds have been the ruin.

You are not stone; but already have you become hollow by the numerous drops. you will yet break and burst by the numerous drops.

Exhausted I see you, by poisonous flies; bleeding I see you, and torn at a hundred spots; and your pride will not even upbraid.

Blood they would have from you in all innocence; blood their bloodless souls crave for - and they sting, therefore, in all innocence.

But you, profound one, you suffer too profoundly even from small wounds; and ere you had recovered, the same poison-worm crawled over your hand.

Too proud are you to kill these sweet-tooths. But take care lest it be your fate to suffer all their poisonous injustice!

They buzz around you also with their praise: obtrusiveness is their praise. They want to be close to your skin and your blood.

They flatter you, as one flatters a God or devil; they whimper before you, as before a God or devil; What does it come to! Flatterers are they, and whimperers, and nothing more.

Often, also, do they show themselves to you as amiable ones. But that has ever been the prudence of the cowardly. Yes! the cowardly are wise!

They think much about you with their circumscribed souls - you are always suspected by them! Whatever is much thought about is at last thought suspicious.

They punish you for all your virtues. They pardon you in their inmost hearts only - for your errors.

Because you are gentle and of upright character, you say: "Blameless are they for their small existence." But their circumscribed souls think: "Blamable is all great existence".

Even when you are gentle towards them, they still feel themselves despised by you; and they repay your beneficence with secret maleficence.

Your silent pride is always counter to their taste; they rejoice if once you be humble enough to be frivolous.

What we recognize in a man, we also irritate in him. Therefore be on your guard against the small ones!

In your presence they feel themselves small, and their baseness gleams and glows against you in invisible vengeance.

Saw you not how often they became dumb when you approached them, and how their energy left them like the smoke of an extinguishing fire?

Yes, my friend, the bad conscience are you of your neighbor; for they are unworthy of you. Therefore they hate you, and would rather suck your blood.

Your neighbor will always be poisonous flies; what is great in you - that itself must make them more poisonous, and always more fly-like.

Flee, my friend, into your solitude - and there, where a rough strong breeze blows. It is not your lot to shoo flies.

Thus spoke Zarathustra.

Friedrich Nietzsche

1844 - 1900

Libraries

Libraries were very important to your intellectual development when you were a kid, weren't they?

I used to haunt the main public library in dowtown Philadelphia, which was extremely good. That's where I read all the offbeat anarchist and left-Marxist literature I'm always quoting. Those were days when people read, and used the libraries very extensively. Public services were richer in many ways back in the late 1930s and early 1940s.

I think that's one of the reasons why poor, even unemployed people living in slums seemed more hopeful back then. Maybe this is sentimentality, and it involves comparing a child's perceptions ans an adult's, but I think it's true.

Libraries were one of the factors. They weren't just for educated people - a lote of people used them. That's much less true now.

I'll tell you why I asked. Recently I went back to visit the public library I used when I was a kid, on 78th and York in New York. I hadn't been there in thirty-five years, and it's now in one of the richest districts in the country.

I discovered they had very few political books. When the librarian explained that branch libraries carry mostly bestsellers, I told him I'd be happy to donate some of our books.

He expressed mild interest and suggested I fill out a form. When I went over to the desk to get one, I found out that it costs 30$ to recommend a book you think the library should purchase!

It sounds similar to what you find in the publications industry in general, including bookstores. I travel a lot and often get stuck in some airport or other... because it's snowing in Chicago, say. I used to be able to find something I wanted to read in the airport bookstore - maybe a classic, maybe something current. Now it's almost impossible. (It's not just in the US, by the way. I was stuck at the airport in Naples not long ago and the bookstore there was awful too).

I think it's mostly just plain market pressures. Bestsellers move fast, and it costs money to keep books around that don't sell very quickly. Changes in the tax laws have exacerbated the problem, by making it more expensive for publishers to hold inventory, so books tend to get remaindered (sold off a cost and put out-of-print) much sooner.

I think political books are being harmed by this - if your go into the big chains, which pretty much dominate bookselling now, you certainly don't find many of them - but the same thing is true of most books. I don't think it's political censorship.

The right wing is promoting the idea of charging people to use the library.

That's part of the whole idea of redesigning society so that it just benefits the wealthy. Notice that they aren't calling for terminating the Pentagon. They're not crazy enough to believe it's defending us from the Martians or somebody, but they understand very clearly that it's a subsidy for the rich. So the Pentagon is fine, but libraries aren't.

Lexington, the Boston suburb where I live, is an upper-middle-class, professional town where people are willing and able to contribute to the library. I give money to it and use it, and benefit from the fact that it's quite good.

But I don't like the fact that zoning laws and inadequate public transportation virtually guarantee that only rich people can live in Lexington. In poorer neighborhoods, few people have enough money to contribute to the library, or time to use it, or knowledge of what to look for once they're there.

Let me tell you a dismal story. One of my daughters lived in a declining old mill town. It's not a horrible slum, but it's fading away. The town happens to have a rather nice public library - not a wonderful collection, but good things for children. It's nicely laid out, imaginatively designed, staffed by a couple of librarians.

I went with her kids on a Saturday afternoon, and nobody was there except a few children of local professional families. Where are the kids who ought to be there? I don't know, probably watching television, but going to the library just isn't the kind of thing they do.

It was the kind of thing you did if you were a working-class person fifty or sixty years ago. Emptying people's minds of the ability, or even the desire, to gain access to cultural resources - that's a tremendous victory for the system.

Noam Chomsky

The booksellers

Como nos conta Robert Darnton, em seu ensaio O que é a história do livro?, os leitores do século XVIII não apenas davam atenção para a mensagem verbal do livro, mas também para o seu material: 

Os leitores discutiam o grau de brancura, a textura e a elasticidade do papel. Eles empregavam um rico vocabulário estético para descrever suas qualidades, tal como o fazem hoje em relação ao vinho.

Claro, ainda há outros estágios no ciclo de vida de uma edição, como os fenômenos da preservação, da evolução na história do livro e o que os leitores fazem dele.

Em muitos espaços do mundo, lá está a obra, em seu aspecto físico, como elemento essencial no desenvolvimento da cultura.

Junk news

Exposição de fuzis para estudantes é a nova chupeta dos jovens sem futuro. No Paraná, os professores e aposentados não praticam a leitura, porque os pirralhos seriam diferentes? É projeto político afastar a garotada o mais rápido possível do pensamento crítico.

Para que desenvolver a vida da mente se você pode encher o oponente de bala? Não há imagem melhor que retrate o universo dos subdesenvolvidos, dos atrasados intelectualmente.

Porque não me ufano

A tribuna da Câmara dos Deputados virou um ringue de MMA. A hegemonia da pequena política se estabeleceu. É a luta pela predominância fascista: encher de porrada o oponente, caçar comunista (chega a ser patético) e provocar a raiva do populacho subdesenvolvido com objetivo de conquistar likes como se a escória dissesse amém.

Fascisme et grand capital

É preciso retomar a lição de Daniel Guérin para combater o fascismo por meio de pesquisas eruditas:

Quem são os financiadores, as tropas, a demagogia fascista, a tática fascista, a verdadeira doutrina fascista, o fascismo contra a classe trabalhadora, política econômica do fascismo, política agrícola do fascismo, etc.

A hegemonia da pequena política

A palavra "reforma" foi sempre organicamente ligada às lutas dos subalternos para transformar a sociedade e, por conseguinte, assumiu na linguagem política uma conotação claramente progressista e até mesmo de esquerda. O neoliberalismo busca utilizar a seu favor a aura de simpatia que envolve a ideia de "reforma". É por isso que as medidas por ele propostas e implementadas são mistificadoramente apresentadas como "reformas". O que antes da onda neoliberal queria dizer ampliação dos direitos, proteção social, controle e limitação do mercado etc., significa agora cortes, restrições, supressão desses direitos e desse controle. Estamos diante de uma operação de mistificação ideológica que, infelizmente, tem sido em grande medida bem-sucedida.

Carlos Nelson Coutinho

1943 - 2012

Skepticism

One

If we had functioning labor unions, the working class would be concernes with the world. But you should have been out making money or watching TV, going to church, keep you doped. Just being depoliticized.

Changing minds is not easy. Especially when beliefs are deeply held.

Porque não me ufano

A apatia é um fenômeno de massas e um importante fator para a conservação da plutocracia nacional. A direita não precisa mais de coerção para dominar, impõe-se através do consenso passivo: a aceitação resignada das classes subalternas do existente como algo "natural".

Porque não me ufano

O Brasil é como uma sociedade camponesa do século V. Noventa por cento dos periféricos acreditam literalmente em milagres religiosos e acham que o mundo foi criado há alguns milhares de anos. Esse tipo de alienação social não é possível encontrar em sociedades desenvolvidas do primeiro mundo.

A periferia do capitalismo tem uma população muito despolitizada e essa é uma das causas do fundamentalismo religioso. A vida social e política não oferece oportunidades para formar comunidades alternativas e se associar a coisas que sejam realmente significativas. Afogar-se na lamúria cristã é a única saída para o subdesenvolvido, visto que não se pode brindar ao eleitorado fanático algo de concreto e moderno, oferta-se coisas simbólicas como "deus nos ajude" e perpetua-se a miséria. É nesse contexto que mora o perigo, essa grande parcela da população pode facilmente servir de base para qualquer movimento fascista. E é o que irá ocorrer em 2026.

Spectator Sports

In our society, we have things that you might use your intelligence on, like politics, but people really can't get involved in them in a very serious way - so what they do is they put their minds into other things, such as sports. You're trained to be obedient; you don't have an interesting job; there's no work around for you that's creative; in the cultural environment you're a passive observer of usually pretty tawdry stuff; political and social life are out of your range, they're in the hands of the rich folk. So what's left? Well, one thing that's left is sports - so you put a lot of the intelligence and the thought and the self - confidence into that. And I suppose that's also one of the basic functions it serves in the society in general: it occupies the population, and keeps them from trying to get involved with things that really matter. In fact, I presume that's part of the reason why spectator sports are supported to the degree they are by the dominant institutions.

And spectator sports also have other useful functions too. For one thing, they're a great way to build up chauvinism-you start by developing these totally irrational loyalties early in life, and they translate very nicely to other areas. I mean, I remember very well in high school having a sudden kind of Erlebnis, you know, a sudden insight, and asking myself, why do I care if my high school football team wins? I don't know anybody on the team. They don't know me. I wouldn't know what to say to them if I met them. Why do I care? Why do I get all excited if the football team wins and all downcast if it loses? And it's true, you do: you're taught from childhood that you've got to worry about the Philadelphia Phillies, where I was. In fact, there's apparently a psychological phenomenon of lack of selfconfidence or something which affected boys of approximately my age who grew up in Philadelphia, because every sports team was always in last place, and it's kind of a blow to your ego when that happens, people are always lording it over you.

But the point is, this sense of irrational loyalty to some sort of meaningless community is training for subordination to power, and for chauvinism. And of course, you're looking at gladiators, you're looking at guys who can do things you couldn't possibly do - like, you couldn't pole - vault seventeen feet, or do all these crazy things these people do. But it's a model that you're supposed to try to emulate. And they're gladiators fighting for your cause, so you've got to cheer them on, and you've got to be happy when the opposing quarterback gets carted off the field a total wreck and so on. All of this stuff builds up extremely anti-social aspects of human psychology. I mean, they're there; there's no doubt that they're there. But they're emphasized, and exaggerated, and brought out by spectator sports: irrational competition, irrational loyalty to power systems, passive acquiescence to quite awful values, really. In fact, it's hard to imagine anything that contributes more fundamentally to authoritarian attitudes than this does, in addition to the fact that it just engages a lot of intelligence and keeps people away from other things. So if you look at the whole phenomenon, it seems to me that it plays quite a substantial social role. I don't think it's the only thing that has this kind of effect. Soap operas, for example, do it in another domain-they teach people other kinds of passivity and absurdity. As a matter of fact, if you really want to do a serious media critique right across the board, these are the types of things which occupy most of the media.

Noam Chomsky