Among the Wreckage of the Present

Pondering in the eye of the storm of what might be the “worst crisis in our national history”, Paulo Arantes gropes around among the ruins of a “perfect storm” in an attempt to understand what is new and bad in the new Brazilian time. More than shedding light on the arguments presented in O novo tempo do mundo (literally, “The new time of the world”), which had just been released, these four (and a half) interviews conducted between 2014 and 2015 deploy the book’s categories and principles to diagnose an entire collapsing cycle in real time. Contrary to the good old progressivism from which the left has become almost indistinguishable, he insists that what was falling apart at that decisive moment was not an expanding horizon; what was actually happening was the aggravated confirmation of a brutal decrease in expectations that had been deepening in the preceding decades. This is because, for us Brazilians, the downfall of our half century of developmentalist modernization and shift into the new global era of decreasing expectations coincided with the excitement caused by the process of ending the military dictatorship. Seen from this perspective, the two decades of PSDB and PT administrations could only be read as a unit, as part of the same emergency contraption to stop social disintegration. Without overlooking, among other things, the curious (to say the least) fact that neoliberalism here is an invention of the left, Arantes focuses on the main absurdity: that, in this presentist regime of reduced horizons, politics has become synonym for mere management—of barbarism, in this case. Therefore, it is not surprising that it was in the antipolitics that broke out in the streets in June 2013 that we saw the re-emergence of that essential channeling of human expectations. By the way, as Arantes remembers, this is also the key to understanding the novelty of the insurgent right that, not incidentally, is now starting to show its teeth.

(Review by Artur Renzo)

Keywords: Impeachment; Dilma Rousseff; Lula; Petismo; Workers’ Party (PT); PSDB; PSOL; Human Rights; June 2013; new right; presentism; new world order; decreasing expectations; punitivism; management; World Cup; Wolfgang Streeck; Loïc Wacquant; crisis; wait; time; politics; dictatorship; coup; 1964; developmentalism; progressivism; polarization; cultural wars