Full professor and retired researcher at Unicamp's Institute of Economics (IE), economist Marcio Pochmann has just finished a book in which he discusses the country's future based on a deep dive into the past. The book New Horizons of Brazil in the 4th structural transformation – which will be launched next Tuesday (29/11) by Editora da Unicamp – recalls the history of 200 years of Brazil's independence to propose reflections on what can be expected from the country in the coming years.
For the economist, the world finds itself facing three major movements that point to profound transformations, for which Brazil needs to prepare. The first of these would be the change of the world's economic axis to the East due to an exhaustion of the Western model of modernity, after 500 years of hegemony. “And China’s dynamism is not just economic. It’s cultural, technological, political, geopolitical, monetary, military,” he says. “There are signs that indicate that today – and increasingly in the future – dynamism will tend to be in the East”, he warns. Climate change is also shaping a new world and Brazil will play an important role in this process. Furthermore, the consolidation of a new digital era is underway and, at this point, Brazil shows no indication that it can be a protagonist. In short, the 2020s are crucial for the country's future.
House authors
With the launch of Márcio Pochmann's book, the Editora begins the publication of the 15 works approved in the notice issued in celebration of its 40th anniversary, completed in 2022, according to the director, Edwiges Morato. With the notice, the Editor sought to encourage professors and researchers with doctorates from Unicamp to present proposals for the publication of monographic works or collections.
Gathered under the “Authors of the House” label, the works reflect a part of the University's significant scientific and cultural production, in various areas of knowledge. All of them will be launched by the beginning of 2023.
The first book from the “Autores da casa” label is, at the same time, part of the series “Discussing Brazil and the World”, also launched in 2022 by Editora da Unicamp. The series brings together original works and translations and aims to discuss sociopolitical themes of great contemporary interest and academic and cultural relevance. Pochmann's book, which begins the publication of the “Autores da casa” label, will be the third in the series “Discussing Brazil and the World”.
In conversation with Journal of Unicamp, Pochmann says that Brazil has the necessary elements to promote a surge in development, but today it does not have strategic thinking. See the main excerpts from the interview with Márcio Pchmann:
You say that this book addresses a forgotten topic, or even absent, in Brazil today, the future. Has Brazil stopped discussing its future?
Marcio Pochmann – The book aims to touch the nerve of the debate about the future because, in a way, there is a kind of cancellation of this subject in the country. Issues of the future are presented as if they were something worse compared to those of the present. 40 years ago, around the 1980s, when I was just graduating, the debate about the future was very common in Brazil. Universities took a position, there were right- or left-wing ideological views, reports, books, government missions were published, and non-governmental organizations were consulted. Anyway, the debate about the future was very present.
There was a broad discussion about what we would be like, for example, in the 2000s. But the fact is that this topic is absent in the country today. It is difficult to find any publication – whether from companies or government organizations – that deals with this. The electoral debate itself is impoverished about what is expected of Brazil in the next four, five years or even less, in 2030, 2040. The book proposes to rescue the theme of the future based on the concept of structural transformation – what can be also understood as a change of era. And, to explain what this change of era would be, I had to delve into the past to identify that post-colonial Brazil is a country that experienced three major transformations.
What would these three transformations be?
Marcio Pochmann – The book shows that the first of these was the founding of the nation – independence –, which was not, obviously, just the 7th of September and the Grito do Ipiranga. It was, in fact, a process of substantial change that resulted in the emergence of a country with the capacity to position itself before the world.
The second was Brazil's entry into capitalism, which occurred with the abolition of slavery, the birth of the Republic, the Constitution of 1891, that is, the events of the 1880s, when we stopped being a country based on forced labor and in a market economy. In fact, this process dates back to 1850, with the Land Law – which defined private property – and the introduction of the Commercial Code, which established that the State would value contracts between different actors. The end of the slave trade suffocated what was mercantilism, which came from the colonial period.
That was when we actually entered the world capitalist system, but in a peripheral condition, because we continued to be producers of primary goods in relation to access to manufactured goods. In any case, obviously, what was slave-owning Brazil and what will emerge around the birth of capitalism is something very different.
The third structural change is the transition from an agrarian society to an urban industrial society. The reference is the Revolution of 1930 – which, in reality, marks another movement, the abandonment of a primitive, agrarian, illiterate country, the change from a way of life linked to farms to an urban, industrial way of life. What Brazil was like in the 1920s and what it would be like 40 or 50 years later is completely different.
Are there any common characteristics in this set of transformations?
Marcio Pochmann – These transformations result from a clash of antagonistic political forces. On one side, the revolutionaries. On the other, the reactionaries, who try to keep things as they were before. And, in a way, a characteristic of these transformations is a kind of modern conservatism, which grants progress, but which in a certain way maintains the past.
This look at the past helps me understand this first quarter of the 21st century, which indicates a structural change in the country. We no longer have an urban and industrial society. We are urban, but no longer an industrial society. And we are facing three large-scale movements that are already shaping Brazil in the present and the future.
And what are these movements?
Marcio Pochmann – The first of them is the exhaustion of the Western Modernity project. Brazil and the American continent are the product of a modernity project created around 500 years ago, with the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the great navigations, industrial capitalism itself. In other words, Brazil's project was very inclined to consider the Western experience. Europe, Eurocentrism and the United States, more recently, that is, our perspective has always been a Western perspective.
But what we are observing today, in this first quarter of the 21st century, is a shift of the dynamic center from the West to the East. China's rise is not a mere coincidence. And China's dynamism is not just economic, it is cultural, technological, political, geopolitical, monetary, military. So, we want to draw attention to the signs that indicate that today – and increasingly in the future – dynamism will tend to be in the East.
This being true, we can say that the Western Modernity project was a point in world history that lasted 500 years. Because until the 15th and 16th centuries, what was modern was oriental. The ancient silk routes, at least until the fall of Constantinople in 1453, were the integration of what was most advanced, such as spices. In a way, these exchanges were the most advanced for those agrarian societies. From East to West, to backward Europe.
There was an interregnum of the silk routes because the capture of Istanbul by the Turks prevented the continued passage through the Mediterranean Sea and this created a movement between the very rich cities of Italy – such as Genoa and Naples – with the Portuguese and Spanish empires, back in the 1480s. 90/XNUMX. The idea was to reach the Indies and China via the Atlantic Ocean, thus generating the great navigation routes that resulted in the conquest of something that they were unaware of, the American continent.
So, we are a product of this modernity project that, today, shows signs of exhaustion. There is already literature that talks about postmodernity, liquid modernity, the collapse of modernity, indicating that there are limits to this project and that, therefore, we need to reconsider what is going on in the world.
In other words, Brazil has no experience of dealing with the East. And, if this is true, it means that it is no longer the Atlantic Ocean that is the center of movement by sea, but the Pacific.
We have no way out of the Pacific and, perhaps for this reason, we need to review the form of integration with Latin American countries, trying to identify this ongoing project and considering that we are facing another modernity. Furthermore, our entire education and teaching project is based on a Westernized vision. For us, science, culture, philosophy began in Greece and we know that this is not quite true. We need to recognize that there is knowledge in the Arab and Hindu peoples. Therefore, the entire modernity project that we pursue is being called into question.
How does environmental care relate to these changes?
Marcio Pochmann – The second point is directly related to the emergence of a new climate regime, the Anthropocene, the result of this European modernity project, which considered nature as an unlimited resource, which separated the human way of life from nature which was, so to speak, a of the specificities of the original peoples present here before the arrival of the colonizer.
Unfortunately, in Brazil – and on the American continent – there are few studies on what the original people were like, who 500 years ago are resisting this project of Western modernity, but there are studies that show that the population estimated just before 1500 – in the case of the continent American, from Alaska to Argentina – was, if not superior, equivalent to the Western population. The populations living in the region of current Mexico City totaled around 250 inhabitants – a larger number of people than there were in Paris at the time. The Inca Empire (Peru and surrounding areas) occupied a territorial space that was equivalent to that of the Roman Empire.
Since the late 1980s, we have been believing that it is possible to combine economic growth with environmental sustainability. But what is being revealed by reports from the IPCC [acronym in English for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], among others, is that the Earth's temperature has already risen and is likely to rise even further. In other words, this sustained development strategy has not yielded results and this calls the entire economic model into question. The Anthropocene will require substantial changes in the way we produce and consume. This is a point we need to consider. In fact, it is an issue we cannot escape.
What would be the third element of this transformation?
Marcio Pochmann – The third structuring element of this transformation is what we can call the New Digital Era. We went through an agrarian era, in which everything revolved around the land. Then we arrive at the Industrial Era, which revolves around the industrialized way of living. And we are now entering the Digital Era, a gigantic challenge for Brazil because it is dividing the world into two types of countries. On the one hand, there are those countries that produce and export digital goods and services. On the other, those who are importers, as they consume without producing. And, in this international division of labor, the best possibilities for occupation, work, income, concern those who have the capacity to produce and export digital goods and services. Unfortunately, Brazil is placed in the second group.
Today we are the 13th economy in the world – we were once the sixth –, but at the same time we are the sixth country in the world in terms of population. We are the fifth country in territorial extension and we assume the position of being the fourth country in terms of consumer market for digital goods and services – which we do not produce.
That's why the country is stuck. Because it cannot produce quality jobs. The possible occupations are very precarious, without rights. Occupations that dissolve the centrality of the salary relationship and replace it with another relationship – that of debit and credit. In other words, to survive, people carry out a huge variety of simple occupations. They work 70, 80 hours a week on a digital platform for transporting people, goods or merchandise. At night they work as a security guard and at the weekend they become salespeople on these platforms. In other words, people will do anything to survive.
And this “anything” does not confer identity, belonging. It is a working class that does not identify with the representation structures we have today – whether political, party, unions, neighborhood or student associations. In other words, the institutions of interest representation, typical of the industrial era, are being crumbled in this new era. This does not mean to say that this new society does not demand institutions that represent it, but those that are closest to this society today are those linked either to organized crime or to churches. This is because they are more totalizing institutions of representation, which look at the whole.
These are associations that somehow offer some identity of belonging, of sociability, that respond to everyday life. This is a key question to understand well-known institutions in Brazil – if you take Euclides da Cunha and Guimarães Rosa, for example, they draw attention to the “jagunço system” – which prevailed in the 1st Republic. Canudos – the War of Canudos – reveals the second largest concentration of people in Brazil (25 thousand) after Salvador – led by a religious fanatic, on the margins of capitalism. Or Virgulino Lampião, who lived off social banditry.
What we are seeing today are these institutions absorbing a very important part of this mass subjected to a digital era, to which the action of the State or traditional institutions of representation are unable to respond. This is contaminating traditional institutions – the State, the Judiciary, the police. In other words, we have a dispute over the meaning of the future in Brazil. And what future will that be? It's in our hands. It's open. Future is not luck, it is choice. We Brazilians are making choices. For good and for bad. We are shaping Brazil for the next 40, 50 years.
And in your opinion, what kind of choices are we making?
Marcio Pochman – Just like in the period in which the previous transformations took place, there were advances and setbacks. The game is being played. Brazil managed to establish a modern and adequate Constitution to face reality, but the regulation of this Constitution fell short. Brazil has been in stagflation for nine years. The economy does not grow. There is a deepening of underdevelopment since, without increasing wealth, there is an increase in the number of rich people. This is strange, but it's the truth. And this is the result of a political majority that leads us today, that really has no future, that prefers to live in the present. For them, the Amazon problem is for 50 years from now.
Does the book, then, outline an optimistic vision of the future of Brazil?
Marcio Pochmann – Economist Celso Furtado, a reference for me, said that Brazil is the country of lost opportunities. My effort in this book is to show that Brazil has opportunities that no other country has, that it can be much better than it is today. We are a country that does not have an economic problem, we have R$7 trillion deposited in the financial system, money accommodated by interest. This could be applied in the production sector. Brazil is a country under construction, it lacks everything, it lacks infrastructure, it doesn't have a home for everyone. This money could be suitable for this type of country building.
We have technology to build the country, we have qualified labor, the necessary economic elements. The problem is political. We cannot bring together these founding elements in a convergence that allows us to create a better tomorrow than the present.
Do you see prospects for change in this situation?
Marcio Pochmann – The proposal of the book is to work with horizons, and the horizon I am dealing with has as its central element the 2020s – the one in which we are living. And this decade points to the end of money as we know it today, it points to a dynamism centered on the Global South and we are part of the Global South. Furthermore, we have a direct relationship with China, our main trading partner. In other words, we have the main elements that would allow us to take a leap forward in this decade. Now that is within the realm of possibility. The book is on the plane of ideas, and ideas do not change reality. People are the ones who change reality – organized society and institutions.
Service:
Book: New horizons in Brazil in the fourth structural transformation
Author: Marcio Pochmann
Technical data: 1st edition, 2022; 176 pages; format: 16 x 23 cm
Area of interest: Economy
Price: $ 60,00
Unicamp Publisher
Launch: 29/11/2022, at 12pm, at the Livraria da Editora da Unicamp, at the Central Library.
