On Monday November 09 they accomplish twenty years of the dropped of the Wall of Berlin, erect the hurries in 1961. The current generation of youths (between eighteen and twenty-five years) has little or any notion of those meanings for the contemporary politics. I affirm that based on my own recent experience in teaching in university; also working with specialization and academic master and phd. degree.
The end of USSR came after the popular reaction to the last Stalinist sigh in the form of a military Coup d’État in August 1991. With the end of the Cold war, the defeat and the dissolution of the old Soviet Union (USSR), rendered between August and December of 1991, played in the common ditch the ideas of equality and during one decade, it was associated that liberal democracy as an only form of democratic regime. Starting from the defeat and subsequent dissolution of the old Soviet Union culminates a process where willfully it gets confused the platform of the equality with economical inefficiency and outdated ideas.
A lot of nonsense was talked, as the End of the History and the humanity’s unyielding march heading for the corporate capitalist globalization. Nor everything was or so simplistic, and the Wall falling was commemorated by several sections of the left, all of them very critical about the totalitarian State.
The common sense, bombed by the industries of symbolic goods (corporate media) in general, it just notices the effect of the Corp. Globalization, as the materialization of the victory political, economical and military victory of the USA and the Empire loyal block, NATO. This generates a series of misunderstandings and deficits in the formation of those that are in the daily political work and, specifically, the Brazilian citizenship pays the price for this gap. The problem is noticed in two examples. When confusing the left politics essentially with the largest intervention of the State in the economy. Another relates this field of the thought just with totalitarianism and unique party. Concepts are translated badly explained in clichés and labels of little or any depth. Just to exemplify the volume of the non senses, there are a lot of political analysts thereabout saying that "such a political operator is of left because it defends larger intervention of the State in the capitalist economy". Well, for that crooked concept, Franklin Delano Roosevelt would be also of "left."
These misunderstandings are a part of the damned inheritance of Iron Curtain. The common sense associates to the thought of distributing goods and equalitarian to the characteristics of a society governed under dictatorships of Marxist inspiration. This is a true just partially. Nor all socialism is dictatorial and less still Marxist. It is right that the Marxism – with all their derivations – was the majority thought in the lefts. But it is far away from being the only. The collisions inside the socialist field begin in 1848 and they culminate in the splits among federalists (anarchists) and centralists (Marxists) in the 1st International Association of the Workers (AIT, 1864-1871).
Already in the 19th century the problem of the freedom and of the state road divided waters. And, for being righteous, everything that happened in the societies governed by the Nomenklatura as dominant class was foreseen by Marx’s opponents inside of AIT. Everything said by Mikhail Bakunin happened, when the authoritarian left could build a society even worse than the Welfare States in post- 2nd world war. When not considering the problem of freedom and centralizing the essential decisions in professional managers based on a doctrine with "scientific" pretension, the society passes was just an object to control and not a collective of subjects to be emancipated through the direct administration in the world of the work, culture, politics and leisure.
I understand that it is urgent to rescue the critic to the totalitarianism done by the democratic left just to oppose a false alternative. The neoclassical economists affirm the unique way of thinking nowadays politics based on neoliberals axioms. And, they are all false! The vulgar association disseminates the faith that market "competition" is synonymous of political freedom. It is not. The first State that the neoliberal orthodoxy has taken of assault was Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile. The Chilean economists formed by Milton Friedman, nicknamed of Chicago Boys, they turned real the market authoritarianism. From 1973 to 1990, the tortures in DINA’s prisons were the military branch of a neoliberal system.
Partly the problem continues. The dictatorial regime of China proves that the dictatorship of a unique party and partial authoritarian control of the society goes in perfect "harmony" with the big transnational corporations. China dominant class, Party Mandarins, are entrepreneurs’ double and interdependent economically of the United States. That can be everything, but less the expression of the political freedom with distribution of income and power.
It is more than proven. A fair society cannot be based nor in the competition and either in any form of unique thought. I see two fundamental challenges for the current lefts (radical in democracy and in class struggle). One is to deepen the forms of social democracy with direct participation in the fundamental decisions. Another is to liberate once and for all the whole damned inheritance which come form the extinct Soviet Block and their derivations.
