In this post, I will discuss several views on the role of Brazil and the United States after the global crisis of 2008. The expression "new Rome", which opens the text, refers to the sort of domination, which I attribute to this former country since the Second World War. Of course, the expression implies the U. S. sovereignty cannot be compared to the vast majority of past world powers. Despite the differences due to the impressive escape of one and a half millenia, it only resembles more closely the hegemony exercised by the Roman Empire at its own time.
INTRODUCTION
A mindset strongly opposed to amending the Constitution has gained acceptance among Brazilian jurists, who reckon PEC 157 (which triggers constitutional revision by a majority of Congress) a sort of coup d’État.
Through the "New Republican Manifesto in Defense of the Constitution – denouncing the coup by PEC 157" posted on the Internet, a conscience contrary to the revision not only spread, but transformed into a true mobilization, especially in Brazilian public universities. The principal merit of the vast movement which followed was to encourage discussion of the issue of constitutional revision.
On the opposite side to the manifesto, the Lawyers Association of Brazil (OAB) has supported PEC 157, thus positioning itself in favor of constitutional revision. A second point of convergence in the debate has thus been formed, so that all the legal and social trends of the country have got represented.
By strange coincidence, while jurists, political scientists, sociologists and economists discussed the Brazilian PEC 157, came the crisis of 2008, whose peak ocurred in the following year. So, in a nutshell, I will reflect on the world brought forth by the financial crisis, and Brazil's as well as the States' role in it. My immediate goal, in short, will be showing that the discussion of the PEC has to take into account Brazil's insertion in the context of the profoundly changed world post-2008.
The interaction between these two issues was made possible, by adopting the categories of mode of production and economic infrastructure. Obviously, these categories derive from Marx and Engels, as explained in my book The social function of profit (Sao Paulo: Themis, 2008). But my use of them is not due to any adherence to historical materialism. It has a lot more to do with the fact that those concepts have become part of the heritage of social sciences. They are concepts embedded in social thought, which, as such, I adopt.
And I do so in search for a new type of critical theory, which should be built, by the combination of those categories with lessons often quoted and vaunted, but misunderstood by the liberal tradition. These lessons are, first of all, the neutrality of the mode of production (including capitalism), from the standpoint of justice and ethics, and the monumental contribution of post-industrial capitalism to a better distribution of income and wealth. Not to mention, of course, the superiority of the scheme based in capital, when it comes to wealth creation.
The critical theory of society can not, however, fail to bring about one necessary change in the understanding of social infrastructure. The modification can be stated as follows: on the one hand, the greater importance of economic factors in the long term should be recognized, on the other hand, the achievements of human thought have established that not every profound change in social fabric is well explained in economic terms. To insist on the metaphor of Marx and Engels, this appears to occur because the link with the social superstructure can be as important as the infrastructure itself. A better description of that link should be considered the modification needed in the understanding of infrastructure.
Throughout history, religion has been the primary means by which the interpenetration of culture and economy takes place. Other phenomena such as macro and micro politics, ideology and art have also assumed that role, but they often do so with the help of (anti) religious concepts.
Religion makes the link between infra and superstructure in two ways: by drawing itself the great social transformations or by providing the metaphysical interpretation of non-religious phenomena that determine them. Only when it becomes revolutionary, religion imposes social transformation. While working as a conservative element, it simply reflects the aspirations implicit in other human activities in terms of the deepest concerns of the individual and the community.
But in both cases, religion helps to connect social culture to economy, by defining or contributing to the definition of local, national and civilizational identities. In all these three levels of social interaction, problems and conflicts which determine the social developments are related to what most characterizes historical orders, in short their transindividual identity.
The establishment of collective or transindividual identities is determined or facilitated, by religious beliefs. Even when the predominant position in a social environment is atheism, anti-religious categories of thought influence the formation of collective identity. And there's nothing more important for a social group, than its identity, namely the way it sees and is seen by the surrounding society.
That was the reason why, after the withdrawal of economic and military support of the Soviet Union, the countries that remained under her influence for decades broke up. Conflict and political reorganization, which took place in Eastern Europe, Western Asia and elsewhere, generally followed the logics determined by the transindividual identities involved. In all such cases, the main factor of transformation involved in the resetting of collective identities was religion.
This is just one example of how cultural issues are often as important for the formation and transformation of societies as economic issues. In terms of the metaphor of Marx and Engels, cultural issues are so relevant when they work as links, which mount the superstructure on social infrastructure.
In The clash of civilizations, Samuel Huntington demonstrated the importance of civilizational elements for understanding the changes in the world after 1989. Although his argument is supported by very considerable reasons, a huge number of smaller struggles and fights can be said to produce cumulative results even larger than those of civilizational conflicts.
I mean we need not rise to the level of civilization to understand how non-economic factors determine historical changes. Both group, national and civilizational factors assume that connotation, when they engender serious problems of identity. That is why identity, and not civilization is the clue to be followed, if we are to find the non-economical, prevailing factor which determines social changes.
Still, matters of identity do not usually act the same way as the infrastructure for one basic reason: the emergence and solution of problems of identity are usually much more concentrated in time. What garantees revolutionary potential to an identity problem is its fleeting and temporary crisis. The performance of infrastructure is very different. It is much more permanent. For this reason, the explanation of social conflicts based on identity cannot be reduced to economic explanations.
Although of special importance for the development of social sciences, the concepts of mode of production and infrastructure provide a partial view of historical development. Together, they allow the student access to a true and comprehensive theory of historical reality. However, that theory is only partial. We always need to complement it with another theory focused on the relationships (links) between social infrastructure and superstructure. I think that social theory must be found in conflicts and matters of identity, which are usually defined or covered with religious significance.
In an effort of synthesis, it can be said that in the past three decades, the great dilemma of social theory is how to combine a pair of seemingly opposing scientific conclusions, namely: the fertility of the Marxian categories of mode of production and economic infrastructure, and on the other hand the lessons trumpeted, but often misunderstood by liberalism.
I have treated this subject in very broad terms, in my book about the social function of profit. Unfortunately, some ram so poorly understood my earlier work that considered it completely abstract and removed from history. This is certainly a deep mistake. My book is saturated with history, though history mathematicized, i.e. represented by a rudimentary symbolism based on the four operations.
On the other hand, the very broad approach of my previous book brings the demand for other complementary and more specific questionnigs. That's what I try to make in relation to post-2008 world in this post.
Speaking of history lessons, one of the most important on economic depressions, like that of 2008-2009, is that they have the potential to generate large redistributions of world power, by engendering extremist regimes (right or left). The Great Depression of the 30s of last century, for example, triggered the most pestiferous of all wars, and through it the largest redistribution of power in the twentieth century.
Until now, there are no clear signs that the crisis of 2008 has produced systems with those characteristics. However, unrest in the Arab world and in Europe, in 2010-2011, suggest that such a result may still be produced. If political unrest were to affect the oil market, or to release a domino effect, the communication of problems to much greater economic powers, such as China, might undoubtedly settle a vicious cycle.
At first glance, the idea of linking up negative developments may seem unlikely. The enormous potential of China is likely to make it particularly unimpregnable by political riots. However, there are data that contradict this conclusion: the possibility of China's growth start to decline in a sharp way will be demonstrated in Chapter 6. At the same time, the extensive and voluntary cooperation between China and Western powers seems strange. Not to mention that the contradiction implicit in the fact that the most rapid process of capitalist development in history was commanded by a Communist Party makes the current position of China in the world even more puzzling.
If we look for parallels in recent history, the friendly and cooperative attitude of China towards the United States is closer to the distension of Gorbatchev era than to the real rivalry between U.S. and Soviet Union, in previous decades. Of course there is more between heaven and earth than is dreamed of by our vain philosophies. However, is not this warning worth reading by all, including enthusiastic and hasty adherents of China’s rise?
To understand the present age, we need to dust the critical readings, and the hermeneutics of suspicion. We need to be very suspicious of events too clear, as well as of the configuration too crystalline of the real, not by being proactive, but by handling with ability a tested methodology.
China’s astoundig economic growth may well be one of those nodules, whose hypertrophy, in the epidermis of time, calls the attention of all, without having the potential to really explain the processes underneath them. We must be cautious about the euphoria that makes one see everything in the colors of a new international order under the leadership of China.
At any rate, the perplexity, discomfort, and suspension of breath caused by the 2008crisis, while the debate on the constitutional revision proposed by PEC 157 swelled in Brazil, have renewed my former interest in the relations between law and history. As a matter of fact, in the 1980s, a youthful spirit of insatiable curiosity led me to read in full, and to write copious notes on the History of Western Civilization, by Edward McNall Burns, on A short History of Brazilian Society, by Manoel Maurício de Albuquerque and on the Newest History of Philosophy, by Cretella Junior, my Professor at Sao Paulo School of Law, among other works of History and national problems.
In 1988, I decided to systematize the accumulated bills in a relatively long text, which I eventually wrote and submitted to the Professor of Philosophy of the Education at University of Campinas, Regis de Morais, and to my former teacher at USP, Goffredo Telles, senior.
From Regis, I received advice to give my notes a bit of rest, before transforming them into a book. Goffredo, on his turn, suggested that the text should be divided into two, given its miscellaneous content. I wellcomed both councils, delivering my notes to rats criticism, to use Marx's expression. The sharp criticism lasted from 88to 91. In that latter year, some of the material was published under the title The drama of law.
The new Rome is the resumption of the second part of the miscellaneous notes systematized by me and commented by Regis and Goffredo, more than 20 years ago. It is at the same time, a large complement to the text of that time, focusing on the development of Brazil an era of globalization and high finance.
Several reasons led me to return to my old notes, adding new reflections to those of the 80s. First, the sum of my old thoughts with the current rescues a number of insights of my earliest stage as a thinker. A second motive is the extraordinary impact that the crisis of 2008 has and is still expected to produce on world events. Finally, the exercise will allow me to restart my dealings with capitalist development from the point of my personal relationship with two well-known Brazilian intellectuals: Goffredo and Regis.
Gilberto Freyre said Brazil is to the United States such as Russia is to Europe. Russia transplanted values and techniques of temperate Europe to her boreal climate, and so developed an alternative to European civilization. Similarly, Brazil has implemented technical features and values from the U. S. with the same undeniable vocation to build a civilization alternative to that country.
Although importing techniques, values and institutions from the States, Brazil has distanced itself progressively from the civilizational model of its northern neighbour. One of the fundamental differences that arose between the two peoples is seen in the legal field. The United States have a unique and synthetic Constitution, with seven articles, which was brieflyamended 27 times in almost 230 years. The Brazilian people, in contrast, was ruled by eight long Constitutions amended about 150 times in the past 70 years.
The data suggests that constitutional problems are related to political and economic plots, which are to be understood if the settling of legal issues is to be expected. Only by drawing that broad framework can the question about changing the Constitution be properly answered.
Brazil and the United States have vocations with historical points of similarity, but which remain fundamentally different. Few times it has taken so long, and so wide a discussion to answer a legal question. I admit that is the case of this article. My only reply to such a fair observation is that the answer requires a historical journey in time to be sought and produced. To that journey, I invite the reader.
If Brazil wants to build his history in close friendship with his neighbour from the north, we need to make it ours and not theirs. Not everything that is good for America is good for Brazil. However, the construction of the future can not be summed up in a daring replacement of that sentence for simple variants. Maybe not everything that is good for China is good for Brazil.
If Brazil and the U.S. raise different civilizational models, parallel and close, that never meet, reflections of these models should be distinguished (perhaps first) in the constitutional level. There as here, the legal and constitutional foundation of social order has been used as a lever for development, though in very different ways. The first point of distinction is that, in North America, economic ascension has been performed upon a very stable constitutional basis. Among us, instead, the intense dynamics of rules and decisions has been an instrument of the most important changes.
There are many reasons for that legal polarization: the United States built their uses on the basis of the common law, while Brazil built his on the Roman-Germanic tradition honed by a peculiar development of the notion of legality. Above the Colombo’s dock, in the vast continent that opens toward the polar ice, the influence of liberalism was established as in no other planet's interior. One of its most unique reflections was the construction of the constitutional order nearly apart from the economy. In Brazil, there was the opposite: the constitutional treatment of economic order came to be responsible for the dynamism of the upper stratum of the legal order from 1934.
That is why, in our country, constitutional changing can only be understood in the light of economic development. The constitutional analysis of political tools is helpful, but greatly insufficient. The insistence on using it exclusively, to illuminate the meaning of rule-making in the highest sphere of law, is doomed to failure.
Ferdinand Lassalle taught that the Constitution, as a book, should mirror the Constitution as fact, especially what he called the real factors of power (institutions and social movements). At his time, Constitutions still did not deal with economic and social matters. The first document to do so, in World History, was the Mexican Constitution of 1917, followed by that of Weimar, in 1919. The United States never joined the trend. Brazil, by contrast, yielded to it, from 1934. Since then, the statement of Lassalle began to receive a repair, even more primordial than the real factors of power he referred to. The book of the Constitution started to reflect the state of productive forces and relations.
The desire for constitutional change, which pervades our country, only finds complete elucidation in Brazilian Economic History of the last 70 years. When we completed the long reconstruction of the necessary conditions to the resumption of sustained growth, the elan constituent increased. Are we not before clear evidence that the thinking of the Constitution should reflect those changes?
The call for major changes did not stop with the work of the Constitutional Assembly in 1987-1988. It continues in the streets, in homes, bars, businesses, and institutions engaged in that struggle. At least in those which have not become deaf. Knowledge consists of hearing from them.
