The middle class is to be dangerous, either morally dangerous because they are unproductive social parasites - swindler, embezzler, thieves, prostitutes, drug addicts, and they like - and politically dangerous because they are disorganized, unpredictable and tendentially reactionary. The middle class is thought to be merely a residue of underdevelopment social forms a kind of historical refuse.
18.5.26
A country of illiterates
The closer I look at the lives and activity of the middle class, the more I see how she is depoliticized and ignorant. These are people who are unfamiliar with new ideas. They are and indeed and how much part of the circuits of social and biopolitical production of underdevelopment.
The power of money
That which is for me through the medium of money – that for which I can pay (i.e., which money can buy) – that am I myself, the possessor of the money. The extent of the power of money is the extent of my power. Money’s properties are my – the possessor’s – properties and essential powers. Thus, what I am and am capable of is by no means determined by my individuality. I am ugly, but I can buy for myself the most beautiful of women. Therefore I am not ugly, for the effect of ugliness – its deterrent power – is nullified by money. I, according to my individual characteristics, am lame, but money furnishes me with twenty-four feet. Therefore I am not lame. I am bad, dishonest, unscrupulous, stupid; but money is honoured, and hence its possessor. Money is the supreme good, therefore its possessor is good. Money, besides, saves me the trouble of being dishonest: I am therefore presumed honest. I am brainless, but money is the real brain of all things and how then should its possessor be brainless?
Shakespeare stresses especially two properties of money:
1. It is the visible divinity – the transformation of all human and natural properties into their contraries, the universal confounding and distorting of things: impossibilities are soldered together by it.
2. It is the common whore, the common procurer of people and nations.
The distorting and confounding of all human and natural qualities, the fraternisation of impossibilities – the divine power of money – lies in its character as men’s estranged, alienating and self-disposing species-nature. Money is the alienated ability of mankind.
Karl Marx
1818 - 1883
The perversity in power
The social production of underdeveloped Brazil includes: the poor, the unemployed, the unwaged, the homeless, and so forth. Numbers of the people are deprived of adequate income, food, shelter, quality education, health care.
A country of illiterates
Brazil is no place for an marxist: to be an intellectual is to be a moral leper, an economic misfit, a social liability. A corn-fed hog enjoys a better life than a creative writer.
The perversity in power
The loss freedom in the absence of employment choice and in the tyrannical form of work itself be major deprivation.
The perversity in power
The virtues of the market mechanism are now standardly assumed to be so pervasive that qualifications seem unimportant.
The need for critical scrutiny of standard preconceptions and political-economic attitudes has never been stronger.1 Today's prejudices (in favor of the pure market n1echanism) certainly need to be carefully investigated and partly rejected.
17.5.26
Categorical imperative
Immanuel Kant found prostitution objectionable and takes a hard line against lying.
The categorical imperative requires that I treat all persons (including myself) with respect — as an end, not merely as a means.
The perversity in power
What importance that is attached of economics to inequality and income inequality in Brazil?
Deprivations that relate to other economics variables, such as unemployment, ill health, lack of education, and social exclusion.
Should be no inequalities in the distribution of money. Behold value and goal of economic egalitarianism.
Income poverty and income inequality. Inequalities in individual advantages and substantive freedoms.
The serious public participation in the valuational debates is a crucial part of the exercise of democracy and responsible social choice. Deprivation in terms of incomes can deprivation can yield of capabilities.
And what about Brazil?
Nations with highly developed economies, strong welfare states, quality education and rigorous urban planning have managed to eradicate slums.
16.5.26
Neuromancer
The Zaibatsus, the multinationals that shaped the course of human history had transcended old barriers... hives with cybernetic memories, vast single organisms, their DNA coded in silicon. Kingpins in a given industry, would be both more and less than people. A gradual and willing accommodation of the machine, the system, the parent organism.
William Gibson
15.5.26
Neuromancer
In an age of affordable beauty, there was something heraldic about his lack of it. The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force-feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic.
13.5.26
Neuromancer
"The matrix has its roots in primitive arcade games," said the voice-over, "in early graphics programs and military experimentation with cranial jacks." On the Sony, a two-dimensional space war faded behind a forest of mathematically generated ferns, demonstrating the spacial possibilities of logarithmic spirals; cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes. "Cyberspace. A consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions of legitimate operators, in every nation, by children being taught mathematical concepts... A graphic representation of data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system. Unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters and constellations of data. Like city lights, receding..."
"What's that?" Molly asked, as he flipped the channel selector.
"Kid's show."
A country of illiterates
American social ethics seems to find it possible to be very nonsupportive of the indigent and the impoverished, in a way that a typical Western European, reared in a welfare state, finds hard to accept.
Who is Brazil copying?
A country of illiterates
In Brazil, the inequality it's not a topic central subject of public attention. In the other hands, three centuries ago, Adam Smith, who is often thought of as "the Father of Modern Economics", was deeply concerned with the gulf between the rich and the poor.
The Dialectic of Sex
What woman can afford to frown when a passing stranger violates her privacy at will? If she responds to his, "Baby you're looking good today!" with "No better than when I didn't know you," he will grumble, "What's eating that bitch?" Or worse. Very often the real nature of these seemingly friendly remarks emerges when the child or the woman does not smile as she should: "Dirty old scum bag. I wouldn't screw you even if you had a smile on your puss!"... "Nasty little brat. If I were your father I would spank you so hard you wouldn't know what hit you!"... Their violence is amazing.
The oppressed groups must also appear to like their oppression-smiling and simpering though they may feel like hell inside. The smile is the child/woman equivalent of the shuffle; it indicates acquiescence of the victim to his own oppression.
In my own case, I had to train myself out of that phony smile, which is like a nervous tic on every teenage girl. And this meant that I smiled rarely, for in truth, when it came down to real smiling, I had less to smile about. My "dream" action for the women's liberation movement: a smile boycott, at which declaration all women would instantly abandon their "pleasing" smiles, henceforth smiling only when something pleased them. Likewise children's liberation would demand an end to all fondling not dictated by the child itself. (This of course would predicate a society in which fondling in general was no longer frowned upon; often the only demonstration of affection a child now receives is of this phony kind, which he may still consider better than nothing.) Many men can't understand that their easy intimacies come as no privilege. Do they ever consider that the real person inside that baby or female animal may not choose to be fondled then, or by them, or even noticed? Imagine this man's own consternation were some stranger to approach him on the street in a similar manner — patting, gurgling, muttering baby talk.
12.5.26
Unemployment and capability deprivation
Unemployment has other serious effects on the lives of the individuals, causing deprivation of other kinds, then the amelioration through income support would be to that extent limited. There is plenty of evidence that unemployment has many far-reaching effects other than loss of income, including psychological harm, loss of work motivation, skill and self-confidence, increase in ailments and morbidity (and even mortality rates), disruption of family relations and social life, hardening of social exclusion and accentuation of racial tensions and gender asymmetries.
Rubble
people are broken
your lives is trash
their families are scum of capitalism.
No love, no future, no beauty
no poetry in third world.
11.5.26
Aliens
The tenets of scepticism do not require an advanced degree to master, as most successful used car buyers demonstrate. The whole idea of a democratic application of scepticism is that everyone should have the essential tools to effectively and constructively evaluate claims to knowledge. All science asks is to employ the same levels of scepticism we use in buying a used car or in judging the quality of analgesics or beer from their television commercials.
But the tools of scepticism are generally unavailable to the citizens of our society. They're hardly ever mentioned in the schools, even in the presentation of science, its most ardent practitioner, although scepticism repeatedly sprouts spontaneously out of the disappointments of everyday life. Our politics, economics, advertising and religions (New Age and Old) are awash in credulity. Those who have something to sell, those who wish to influence public opinion, those in power, a sceptic might suggest, have a vested interest in discouraging scepticism.
Carl Sagan
1934 - 1996
A country of illiterates
In Brazil the classical liberal ideals, as expressed and developed in their libertarian socialist form, will never be achievable. There is no space.
In Brazil a popular revolutionary movement it doesn't exist. It will never exist.
Contemporary barbarism is the only reality for brazilians.
A country of illiterates
Brazil have not developed the cultural and moral resources or the democratic forms of social organization that make possible the humane and rational use of material wealth and power.
A country of illiterates
Real poverty (in terms of intellectual deprivation), in a significant sense, more intense in underdeveloped countries, like Brazil.
A barbaric country
In Brazil, public action aimed at reducing inequality and poverty they are very ineffective and inefficient. Missing practical policy making.
A country of illiterates
Poverty must be seen as the deprivation of literacy rather than merely as lowness of incomes.
A country of illiterates
In Brasil, there is a purposeful massive failure of public policy in the extreme neglect of literacy (more than half the adult population - women above all - are still illiterate). Being literate doesn't mean knowing the result of 5 x 5.
Kalash, mon amour
Katyusha | 1938
Rastsvetali iabloni i grushi,
Поплыли туманы над рекой.
Poplyli tumany nad rekoj.
Выходила на берег Катюша,
Vykhodila na bereg Katyusha,
На высокий берег на крутой.
Na vysokij bereg na krutoj.
Выходила, песню заводила
Vykhodila, pesniu zavodila
Про степного, сизого орла,
Pro stepnogo, sizogo orla,
Про того, которого любила,
Pro togo, kotorogo liubila,
Про того, чьи письма берегла.
Pro togo, chi pisma beregla.
Ой ты, песня, песенка девичья,
Oj ty, pesnia, pesenka devichia,
Ты лети за ясным солнцем вслед.
Ty leti za iasnym solntsem vsled.
И бойцу на дальнем пограничье
I bojtsu na dalnem pograniche
От Катюши передай привет.
Ot Katyushi peredaj privet.
Пусть он вспомнит девушку простую,
Pust on vspomnit devushku prostuiu,
Пусть услышит, как она поет,
Pust uslyshit, kak ona poet,
Пусть он землю бережет родную,
Pust on zemliu berezhet rodnuiu,
А любовь Катюша сбережет.
A liubov Katyusha sberezhet.
10.5.26
On Literature and Art
Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happines. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought six, result misery.
Mr. Micawber
The present splendid brotherhood of fiction-writers in England, whose graphic and eloquent pages have issued to the world more political and social truths than have been uttered by all the professional politicians, publicists and moralists put together, have described every section of the middle class from the “highly genteel” annuitant and fundholder who looks upon all sorts of business as vulgar, to the little shopkeeper and lawyer’s clerk. And how have Dickens and Thackeray, Miss Brontë and Mrs. Gaskell painted them? As full of presumption, affectation, petty tyranny and ignorance; and the civilised world have confirmed their verdict with the damning epigram that it has fixed to this class that “they are servile to those above, and tyrannical to those beneath them.”
Karl Marx
1818 - 1883
Famines
The causal connection between democracy and the nonoccurrence of famines is not hard to seek. Famines kill millions of people in different countries in the world, but they don't kill the rulers. The kings and the presidents, the bureaucrats and the bosses, the military leaders and the commanders never are famine victims.
Morrer em liberdade
Em 10 de maio de 1933, os nazistas incluíram Freud em suas perseguições, numa espetacular queima de livros. "A exclusão da literatura de esquerda, democrática e judaica teve precedência sobre todo o resto", escreveu o historiador alemão Karl Dietrich Bracher. "As listas negras que estavam sendo compiladas a partir de abril de 1933" incluíam os textos de social-democratas alemães como August Bebel e Eduard Bernstein, de Hugo Preuss, o pai da constituição de Weimar, de poetas e romancistas (da lista constavam Thomas e Henrich Mann) e cientistas como Albert Einstein. "O catálogo recuava a ponto de incluir desde as obras de Heine e Marx até as de Kafka. As queimas de livros realizadas a 10 de maio de 1933, nas praças públicas das cidades e centros universitários, simbolizavam o auto-de-fé de um século de cultura alemã. Acompanhado por desfiles de estudantes à luz de archotes e discursos apaixonados de professores, mas encenado pelo Ministério da Propaganda, esse ato de Barbárie inaugurou uma época que Heinrich Heine havia resumido com as palavras proféticas de que, onde se queimam livros, ao final também se queimam pessoas". As publicações psicanalíticas, com os livros de Freud à frente, não estiveram ausentes do grande incêndio da cultura.
Peter Gay
1923 - 2015
9.5.26
Aims
What do the Capitalists Want?
What is the capitalists program?
The brazilian workers don't to know.
Stalin, builder of the USSR
Stalin — Man of Steel came from the fragrant south, from Georgia, land of golden wine and dark-eyed women. He was born to a shoemaker father in a little town of the hills. As a lad of fourteen — his nickname then was Soso — he came upon the problem of oppressed nations when his proud father got him into the Tiflis Theological Seminary, run by Imperial Russia to control the Georgian Church. Bright Georgian boys were taught that the tsar was the head of god’s Church. This would help suppress the Georgian land by religion.
Soso didn’t like the doctrine. He found a forbidden book by a German Jew named Karl Marx. He read: "The philosophers have only interpreted the world; our business is to change it". He joined the Social Democratic Labor Party, organized Tiflis railway workers into a union, and was promptly expelled from the seminary.
Young Soso, the student, vanished; he became an organizer of workers, living dangerously under many names. He was daring and energetic; he organized workers in the Caucasus and elsewhere. He led the oilworkers of Batum in a strike against the foreign Baron Rothschild; shook ancient Tiflis with a modern May Day demonstration; joined Lenin at a conference in Stockholm; edited a Bolshevik newspaper in Petersburg, the capital of the tsar. The tsar’s police listed him as the "terrible Vissarionovich, who wants to change the world".
In the years before the revolution Stalin was not just a man of action. He was thinking out the problems of his people and writing articles about them. He was writing science and it was dry as dust and clear as the stars of the desert. He was working out the definition of a nation. What is a nation? How does it come to be? What rights has a nation May it develop without limit or what should limit it? How can nations get the benefits that come through union without too greatly giving up their individuality?
Anna Louise Strong
1885 - 1970
8.5.26
Planet of slums
The absence of an effective democratic forum has been consequential in brazilian failing.
Inequality, endemic poverty, lack of transparency in business, the lack of public participation in reviewing financial and business arrangements, lack challenge the hold of selected families or groups, these are characteristics of a disorganized society.
Do poor people care about democracy and political rights?
Dude, it's painfully obvious:
The ordinary citizens are given little political opportunity to express their views and even less to dispute claims trade by the authorities in office.
In the other hands, the downgrading of rights and freedoms is certainly part of the values system of the government leaders in third world countries.
Porque não me ufano
Graças ao extraordinário exercício de epistemicídio imposto como condição artística do ruído contemporâneo, os ouvidos dos brasileiros se tornaram menos intelectuais. O condicionamento levou o subdesenvolvido a suportar como algo natural um volume de som bem maior e muito mais barulhento, e não se escuta nenhuma voz da razão, mas a falação da sociedade de consumo sem maturidade. Os sentidos foram embotados, pois é exceção dos ouvidos que ainda fazem distinções sutis entre dó sustenido e ré bemol. Em geral, já não se entende a música assim como não se entende de arquitetura e estrutura. Nesse contexto o ouvido ficou mais grosseiro e o mundo mais feio e hostil aos sentidos desenvolvidos. A expressão do sublime faleceu. Agora a música da lugar à vulgaridade. Mundo feio e burro, sem inteligência criativa, ouvido embrutecido, o olhar deixou também de ser crítico, dos órgãos dos sentidos débeis chegamos à barbárie. Uma sociedade bela jamais existirá e o alienado frui diretamente o que é feio sem entendê-lo. De modo que há na periferia uma dupla corrente de evolução: de um lado uma massa de pessoas incapaz de entender o significado das coisas e de pensar e de outro uma minoria - prestes a desaparecer - cada vez mais exigente, elevada, e delicada mais atenta para o significado da vida e preocupada pelo desenvolvimento da qualidade de vida. A feiura sensorial é dominante na estrutura e na vida privada do subdesenvolvido, por isso busca na música o feio, o repugnante, o popular, o ordinário com satisfação cada vez maior. Espaço para a grande arte encolheu e irá desaparecer, e os ruídos constantes estão em todos os lugares majoritariamente, no polegar de cada alienado, dentro da escola. Uma sociedade dotada de uma razão em comum, baseada no amor, na amizade, na contemplação da vida não será fruto do Brasil. Infelizmente, na periferia do capitalismo não há espaço para uma boa sociedade. Aos olhos do conceito de bem-estar, a periferia é pobríssima e muito frustrada. E a pobreza não inspira no colonizado do terceiro mundo nem mesmo um sentimento de revolta. É uma sociedade desumana. E será assim por muito tempo.
Planet of slums
Political liberty and civil rights:
for poor people
in third world countries
have little use anyway.
In Brazil,
In Brazil,
poverty and misery
will never be erradicated.
7.5.26
Dialética da escola-prisão
A crise da palavra é visível no campo educacional. O esvaziamento político e de sentido e o empobrecimento conceitual estão se acentuando. A sociedade instagramável está favorecendo os grandes desequilíbrios sociais e está reforçando as desigualdades criando concomitantemente novos excluídos do pensamento crítico.
Laboratory of underdevelopment
The capitalist state exists to maintain socio-spatial inequalities. There will be no transition to communism in Brazil. Its education system is not vanguard. Nothing to be done.
6.5.26
Porque não me ufano
Não se pode falar em desenvolvimento ou em "país em desenvolvimento" sem o ponto de vista da qualidade de vida.
5.5.26
Fahrenheit 451
"People don't talk about anything".
"Oh, they must!"
"No, not anything. They name a lot of cars or clothes or swimming-pools mostly and say how swell! But they all say the same things and nobody says anything different from anyone else".
Ray Bradbury
1920 - 2012
Fahrenheit 451
Peace, Montag. Give the people contests they win by remembering the words to more popular songs or the names of state capitals or how much corn Iowa grew last year. Cram them full of non?combustible data, chock them so damned full of "facts" they feel stuffed, but absolutely "brilliant" with information. Then they'll feel they're thinking, they'll get a sense of motion without moving. And they'll be happy, because facts of that sort don't change. Don't give them any slippery stuff like philosophy or sociology to tie things up with. That way lies melancholy.
Ray Bradbury
1920 - 2012
Fahrenheit 451
- Patience, Montag. Let the war turn off the "families." Our civilization is flinging itself to pieces. Stand back from the centrifuge.
- There has to be someone ready when it blows up.
- What? Men quoting Milton? Saying, I remember Sophocles? Reminding the survivors that man has his good side, too? They will only gather up their stones to hurl at each other. Montag, go home. Go to bed. Why waste your final hours racing about your cage denying you're a squirrel?
Ray Bradbury
1920 - 2012
4.5.26
Porque não me ufano
Somente no primeiro trimestre deste ano, o número de desempregados no Brasil somou 6,6 milhões de pessoas. O desemprego na periferia chegou a um nível assombrador, daquele que remete à Alemanha do início da década de 1930. O Partido dos Trabalhadores está administrando muito mal o subdesenvolvido país.
O custo humano está sendo incalculável na periferia do capitalismo. Pobreza incessante, homens instruídos e inteligentes sem ocupação, burgueses e pequenos burgueses orgulhosos da miséria ao entorno e desfavorecidos sendo alimentados por parentes e amigos, quando ainda se encontra solidariedade.
A miséria econômica gera busca desesperada no milagre do empreendedorismo e na panacéia dos aplicativos. E a medida que as vozes racionais perdem seus lugares, os oradores do entretenimento seduzem todos: papito, papito!
Muitos sucumbiram e gastam seus últimos recursos em bebidas e um bom número de jovens que passaram pela escola (e ainda estão em ano escolar) foram condicionados a aceitar os remédios charlatanescos que os reacionários e congêneres vendem.
Porque não me ufano
No Brasil não existe complexidade humana, intensidade na vida ou singularidade de experiência, basta ouvir como os subdesenvolvidos tratam sua própria língua. E isso não é tudo. O irracionalismo é a norma. A competição selvagem entre os comerciantes, a péssima distribuição de renda, as estruturas habitacionais hiperconcentradas, o urbanismo caótico, os representantes políticos que visam apenas o lucro e a perpetuação da miséria e, óbvio, a educação que está cada vez pior.
O Brasil é uma sociedade deformada e sem competência para instrução e a convivência harmoniosa, para o falar com fundamento, a conversa amigável e inteligente sem gritaria. Os preconceitos teológicos foram muito difundidos e estão consolidados. Ninguém tira da cabeça do terceiro mundista seus estereótipos e crenças enraizados. Não há espaço para amadurecimento, para a racionalidade. E a pobreza acentua a desarmonia social, piora o convívio, aprofunda as mentiras. A violência doméstica aumenta e a perturbação domina.
O amor periférico é em si mesmo uma questão de interesse apenas para atingir uma vantagem financeira. Todos querem se dar bem sobre o próximo. Há truculência e nervosismo causados pela desigualdade econômica e pela exploração no mundo do trabalho. É um país onde a emancipação social jamais será realidade.
3.5.26
Down and Out in Paris and London
It is altogether curious, your first contact with poverty. You have thought so much about poverty - it is the thing you have feared all your life, the thing you knew would happen to ou sooner or later; and it is all so utterly and prosaically diferente. You thought it would be quite simple. it is extraordinarily complicated. You thought it would be terribl; it is merely squalid and boring. It is the peculiar lowness of poverty that you discover first; the shifts that it puts you to, the complicated meanness, the crust-wiping.
You discover, for instance, the secrecy attaching to poverty. At a sudden stroke you have been reduced to na income of six francs a day. But of course you dare not admit it - you have got to pretend that you are living quite as usual. From the start it tangles you in a net of lies, and even with the lies you can hardly manage it. you stop sending clothes o the laundry, and the laundress catches you in the street and asks you why; you mumble something, and she, thinking you are sending the clothes elsewhere, is your enemy for life. The tobacconist asking why you have cut down your smoking. there are letters you want to answer, and cannot, because stamps are too expensive. and then there are our meals - meals are the worst difficulty of all. Every day at meal-times you go out, ostensibly to a restaurant, aloaf na hour in the Luxembrg Gardens, watching the pigeons. Afterwards you smuggle your food home in your pockets. Your food is bred and margarine, or bread and wine, and even the nature of the food is governed by lies. You have to buy rye bread instead of household bread, because the rye loaves, though dearer, are round and can be smuggled in your pockets. This wastes you a franc a day. Sometimes, to keep up appearances, you have to spend sixty centimes on a drink, and go correspondingly short of food. Your linen gets filthy, and you run out of soap and razor-blades. Your hair wants cutting, and you try to cut it yourself, with such fearful results that you have to go to the barber after all, and spend the equivalente of day's food. All day you are telling lies,and expensive lies.
You discover the extreme precariousness of your six francs a day. Meand disasters happen and rob you of food. You have spend your last eighty centimes on half a litre of milk, and are boiling it over the spirit lamp. While it boils a bug runs down your forearm; you give the bug a flick with your naul, and it falls plop! straight into the milk. there is nothing for it but to throw the milk away and go foodless.
You discover what it is like to be hungry. With bread and margarine in yor belly, you go ou and look into the show Windows. Everywhere there is ood insulting you in huge, wasteful piles; whole dead pigs, baskets of hot loaves, great yellow blocks of butter, strings of sausages, mountains of potatoes, vast Gruyère cheeses like grindstones.
You discover the boredom which is inseparable from poverty; the times when you have nothing to do and, being underfed, can interest yourself in nothing. For half a day at a time you lie on your bed, feeling like the jeune sqelette in Baudelaire's poem.Only food could rouse you. You discover that a man who has gone even a weel on bread and margarine is not a man any longer, only a belly with a few accessory organs.
When you are approaching poverty, you make one discovery which outwighs some of the others. You discover boredom and mean complications and the beginnings of hunger, but you also discover the great redeeming feature of poverty: the fact that it annihilates the future. Within certain limits, it is actually true that the less money you have, less you worry. When you have a hundred francs in the world you are liable to the most craven panics. When you have only three francs you are quite indiferente; for three furher than that. You are bored, but you are not afraid. Yout think vaguely, "I shall be starving in a day or two - shocking, isn't it?" And then the mind wanders to other topics. A bread and margarine diet does, to some extent, provide its own anodyne.
George Orwell
1903 - 1950
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud
It is superfluous to say anything about the general situation of the world. Perhaps we are only repeating the ridiculous act of saving a birdcage while the whole house is burning.
A country of illiterates
86 bookstores closed in just six years in Rio de Janeiro. It's practically a war zone, a clear field for theocracy.
2.5.26
1.5.26
The privatisation of stress
The privatisation of stress is a perfect capture system, elegant in its brutal efficiency. Capital makes the worker ill, and then multinational pharmaceutical companies sell them drugs to make them better. The social and political causation of distress is neatly sidestepped at the same time as discontent is individualised and interiorised. Dan Hind has argued that the focus on serotonin deficiency as a supposed “cause” of depression obfuscates some of the social roots of unhappiness, such as competitive individualism and income inequality. Though there is a large body of work that shows the links between individual happiness and political participation and extensive social ties (as well as broadly equal incomes), a public response to private distress is rarely considered as a first option. It is clearly easier to prescribe a drug than a wholesale change in the way society is organised. Meanwhile, as Hind argues, “there is a multitude of entrepreneurs offering happiness now, in just a few simple steps”. These are marketed by people “who are comfortable operating within the culture’s account of what it is to be happy and fulfilled”, and who both corroborate and are corroborated by “the vast ingenuity of commercial persuasion”.
Mark Fisher
1968 - 2017
Diana's tree
the silence
no coming together
take heed of me my love
take heed of the silent woman in the desert
of the traveller with the empty glass
and the shadow of her shadow
Alejandra Pizarnik
1936 - 1972
30.4.26
Porque não me ufano
No Brasil, o livro está sujeito a grupos sociais antiintelectuais homogêneos, como uma conduta social desprovida de polidez, um padrão de vida baixo, hábitos arcaicos, mal gosto e formação cultural deficiente. Não há espaço para a construção de uma sociedade letrada, não é parte nem mesmo do esforço da educação formal, que está cada vez pior. O livro só tem valor em países economicamente avançados. Essa é a verdade. Na periferia do capitalismo, a cultura literária é de baixíssima densidade. O peso do analfabetismo é monstruoso, principalmente o analfabetismo secundário, onde a matéria escrita praticamente inexiste.
É preciso retardar os passos do pensamento crítico. As letras não são consideradas ornamento pessoal e muito menos como fator de potencialidade das faculdades e de transformação social, evolução do poder cognitivo e de proliferação de criatividade. O resíduo que se acumulou durantes décadas de subdesenvolvimento deteriorou muito rápido o conceito de educação.
Dialética da escola-prisão
Ao visitar certas escolas primárias, o cidadão mais consciente sentirá uma angústia, no mínimo, que transborda na gritaria, no despreparo da organização educacional e nos erros de gramáticas dos trabalhos feios colados nos corredores. Eis o clima que revela o fator subjetivo de todos os envolvidos no campo da educação. Tem "funcionário" que fica dormindo pendurado no celular.
Planeta favela
Na beira do rio poluído, rio-esgoto como tantos rios do Brasil, juncado de destroços, restos de comida, trapos, eletrodomésticos, latas de cerveja, garrafas, pinos de cocaína, bitucas de cigarro, merda humana, pneus, parecia um território em guerra, eu dera com um gato morto, obviamente torturado e cortado por algum delinquente subdesenvolvido da periferia do sul. O gato era pouco mais do que um amontoado de pelo se decompondo, um esqueleto cheio de vermes acumulados no corte de seu ventre, à beira do líquido tóxico do canal. Via-se, à volta do que sobrara da garganta também aberta pelo canivete do marginal nativo, uma correntinha encharcada de sangue e terra a mostrar que o bichano pertencera a alguém. Belo animal que hoje não passava de uma carniça repugnante, apodrecendo na torpeza da cidade corrupta.
29.4.26
Porque não me ufano
A sociedade subdesenvolvida perpetua sua bestialidade. O terceiro mundista não tem caráter humano e não possui um direito natural de convivência. Os provincianos se entredevoram-se e, infelizmente ainda hoje, não cessaram de hostilizar-se e matar-se mutuamente.
A revolução cultural chinesa
A: Estou a dizer que o consumidor é um verme. Ou seja: um individuo semelhante aqueles organismos muito simples que só tem boca, intestino e ânus. Tais organismos mais não fazem do que ingerir, digerir e expelir.
B: Mas também o chinês comprador das calças esta nas mesmas circunstâncias, pelo menos no tocante a produtor de calças.
A: Há uma diferença. O consumidor é um verme não tanto pelo facto de consumir como pelo de estar convencido, tal como os tais organismos muito simples, de que a sua função é consumir. O consumidor, em suma, encontra-se disponível para o consumo, seja ele qual for, como a minhoca se encontra disponível em relação a qualquer qualidade de terra que passe pelo tubo do seu intestino.
B: Temos então assim o consumidor reduzido a um verme...
A: Se as palavras "verme" e "minhoca" te repugnam, por darem a impressão de estabelecer uma comparação pouco dignificante, digamos antes que o consumidor não passa de um elo de ligação entre a produção e o consumo. Um elo humano, é certo. Mas nem por isso deixa de ser um elo. Também o produtor é um elo, mas nesse a ligação faz-se em sentido oposto: do consumo para a produção. Enfim, poderemos dizer que produtor e consumidor representam, um, a extremidade anterior da já citada minhoca, e o outro... a sua extremidade posterior.
B: Produtor e consumidor? Só eles? E o médico, não? Nem o artista, o operário ou o camponês? Só o consumidor e o produtor?
A: Na palavra "produção" e na palavra "consumo" cabem todos os produtos e mercadorias, mesmo as mais requintadas e extravagantes.
B: De maneira que o homem ocidental sé pensa em produzir e consumir, não é isso?
A: É isso mesmo.
B: E em si próprio não pensa?
A: Esse ele próprio de que estas falando não existe. Ou, melhor: existe apenas nos dois momentos alternados da produção e do consumo. Mas uma vez que o consumo, no fundo, é aquilo que caracteriza verdadeiramente o consumidor (não existe produtor que não consuma, porque, de contrario, morreria de fome, mas existe — e de que maneira — o consumidor que não produz, digamos antes que a finalidade da sociedade moderna é o consumo, ou seja, o esterco.
B: O esterco?
A: Isso mesmo: o esterco. Ou seja: a expulsão, por parte do .corpo, de tudo aquilo que sobra, depois de feita a digestão. As pessoas consomem mais do que podem e a maior variedade de coisas que possível seja; é o consumo o ideal do consumidor e este esforça-se por estar a par do seu ideal. Mas o resultado final é o excremento. A civilização do consumo é uma civilização excrementícia. A quantidade de esterco expelido pelo consumidor é, efectivamente, a melhor prova de que o consumidor... consumiu. Nas cidades modernas, a produção e o consumo, ou seja, o alimento industrial e o excremento que constitui o seu resíduo, andam sempre a par, tal como nas casas modernas vamos frequentemente encontrar a cozinha junto da casa de banho. Afasta-te do centro e vai dar uma volta pelos subúrbios; logo veras as fabricas com os seus barracões e os seus altos-fornos em que se produz; e, não longe das fabricas, veras também os terrenos nus onde são despejadas as imundícies, os detritos, os desperdícios. A cidade consumiu o produto, digeriu-o e defecou os resíduos.
B: Numa grande cidade moderna, contudo, não existe apenas a produção industrial: há muitas e muitas outras coisas, como, por exemplo, a cultura.
A: Pois claro que há a cultura. Livrarias, tabacarias com montes de jornais e revistas, cinema, radio, televisão. Livros condensados, revistas ilustradas, livros de bolso, enciclopédias, antologias, obras de divulgação, traduções. Mas esta cultura é consumida de maneira idêntica aquela por que se pauta o consumo dos produtos industriais. E ingerida, digerida e depois expelida sob a forma de uma enorme e excrementícia quantidade de lugares-comuns. Os omnívoros consumidores da cultura não se nutrem dela: consomem-na, mas continuam a ficar, por assim dizer, em sentido cultural, perpetuamente subalimentados. O consumo cultural produz apenas esterco cultural, nada mais.
Alberto Moravia
1907 - 1990
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