5

Edgar de Decca takes to Lisbon
the Brazil that discovered Portugal

ALVARO KASSAB

O Professor and historian Edgar de Decca takes up a Unicamp chair this week at the Instituto Superior de Ciências do Trabalho e da Empresa (ISCTE), in Lisbon. Chosen through a competition, De Decca carries in his luggage an unpublished master's thesis by Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, discovered by him while mining the collection entrusted to Unicamp by the family of the intellectual from São Paulo.

Presented in 1957 at the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política de São Paulo, the play, entitled Elements formadores da Sociedade Portuguesa na epo das Descobrimentos, is more than a detailed account of the cosmopolitan atmosphere that drove the great adventure carried out by the colonizers. In De Decca's own assessment, the document deepens, 20 years later, what Buarch's work outlined in Raízes do Brasil, a classic that brought to light the formative elements of our society. "There is a fantastic line of continuity between the two works", assesses De Decca.

Sérgio Buarque's thesis is part of the program that the historian will take to Portugal, whose chronological outline covers the period between Independence and the works of the intellectuals who emerged in the 30s in Brazilian historiography. Literature, especially the authors of Romanticism and Modernism, also plays an important role in the course to be taught from October to December by the professor from the Department of History at Unicamp. The professor sees in fiction an essential element for things of historiographical rigor.

In short, De Decca will move physically and intellectually in the territory that forged our identity, embedded within it the contradictions of a relationship marked by permanent tension, as he himself remembers. It contains, according to De Decca, "love and hostility, the father who shelters us and the father who turns his back on us". In this dialectical contest, the son does not always assimilate the legacy suggested by the father. He often rebels against the mandate that foresees the emergence of a new civilization, breaks with traditions and sets out in search of a language and culture that distances him from the Iberian matrices.

An unsolvable problem? It would be, says the professor, if the universe of history did not exist. It is based on him, and his respective narrative, that De Decca builds his work. The historian does not hide the fascination he has with the elements that made up our identity. "I have a special interest in the way this story was told and constructed to bring us closer to and distance us from this father that we sometimes idealize and sometimes reject", he reveals.

This affinity permeates the researcher’s intellectual trajectory. In 1981, for example, De Decca released 1930 - The Silence of the Vanquished (Brasiliense, 8th edition), a work that placed some of the approaches at the time under suspicion. De Decca subverted the order by delving into archives and privileging facts that marked the history of the 30s Revolution from another perspective, that of the trade union movement, disregarding the version disseminated by the elites.

A bet, reveals the historian, developed at the Institute of Philosophy and Human Sciences (IFCH) at Unicamp, whose role was paradigmatic in the scenario of Brazilian historiography from the mid-70s onwards. History began to be told in a different way. Including the voice of the excluded losers.

Interview: Edgar de Decca

Unicamp Newspaper - What period of history will you focus on in your chair?

From Decca - The starting point is the key moment in the formation of this idea of ​​Brazil, which occurred from the 19th century onwards, when the country became an independent nation, even if it was with the help of a Portuguese emperor. Enter the father figure...

JU - Are you advancing into the field of psychoanalysis?

From Decca - That's almost it. This is an important figure. Brazilian nationality itself has to be built by an emperor who would stay for a certain time and leave us with the heir, so that the continuity of this relationship, almost of a Freudian nature, is maintained. This idea of ​​identity constituted at the time of the formation of the Brazilian national state is what attracts me most. The starting point is this. All the movements that in a certain way culturally bring us closer, distance us or tear us apart, come from this moment of institution of the idea of ​​nation, territory, people, which the 19th century will seek to forge. Obviously, I will compare this entire cultural movement to what attracts me most, which is exactly the 1930s, when Brazilian thinkers acted systematically. This is another part of my research, which revisits, for example, the work of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, especially when he writes Raízes do Brasil. When searching for our roots, Sérgio will find them in the Iberian world.

JU - Where do you go to find the elements that ended up constituting our identity?

From Decca - I seek this long trajectory that goes from the formation of the national state to a rethinking of Brazilian Modernism in the figures of Mário de Andrade and Oswald de Andrade, in Gilberto Freyre, Caio Prado Júnior and, above all, in Sérgio Buarque.

JU - You also venture into the territory of literature.

From Decca - Without a doubt, since Brazilian Romanticism, the task of building a literature that distinguished itself from Portuguese literature. At least the intention was to link our literature to the canons of the Enlightenment, Romanticism and other places and other cultural centers, as was the case of France, which served us as a literary model throughout the 19th century. I analyze the Brazilian historical novel, mainly from José de Alencar until reaching the 20th century, to Euclides da Cunha, Lima Barreto and Modernism, starting from Macunaíma. They will be precisely the symbols of this literature, which at the same time seeks a place and tries to be the writing of Brazil. It is a fiction that is almost ashamed of being fictional. To be fiction it has to be in this new place of identity. The path taken by Brazilian literature fascinates me a lot. It's almost a shame of fiction, of supposed alienation from reality, of evasion. It had to be linked to the idea of ​​the national.

JU - How do you see the separation of historical discourse from literary discourse?

From Decca -It's a mistake, because they are two narratives that, from the point of view of their attributes, are very similar. What separates them are the referential aspects, but, as narratives, they are bathed in the components of imagination and fictionalization. So I'm interested in the plots, the stories that are told. I don't care if they are literary, fictional or historiographical.

JU - Could you explain why the cut in the 30s?

From Decca - One of the important points of this research is that getting married is a very happy thing. Last year, I chaired the commission for the centenary of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda, in Campinas. Researching its collection at the Central Archives, I discovered an unprecedented thesis. At first I didn't even believe that there could be any unpublished writing, much less the size of a thesis. How can you imagine that a thesis by one of the most important intellectuals of the 20th century could be unknown to the general public? And indeed it is. I didn't even believe it was actually a master's degree. Good biographers of Sérgio, who I know and respect a lot, such as Maria Odila Dias, Franciscos Iglesias and Sueli Robles, even if they knew, never disclosed it. The reason is yet to be discovered.

JU - What do you intend to do with this material?

From Decca - We are negotiating its publication with the family, even though we have a priori authorization to publish it. My trip to Portugal is also important because perhaps I can do more detailed research on this work, which Sérgio Buarque defended as a master's thesis at the Escola Livre de Sociologia e Política, in São Paulo, where Florestan Fernandes graduated. This institution created by Roberto Simonsen, who is one of my main characters in The Silence of the Vanquished, has always fascinated me. A large generation of intellectuals from São Paulo was formed there and to this day it is very little studied. I discovered that Sérgio Buarque defended his master's thesis in 1957, two months before defending his doctorate at USP, which was about the famous book The Vision of Paradise [1958].

JU - What is the thesis basically about?

From Decca - The title is already surprising. The thesis is called Forming elements of Portuguese society at the time of the discoveries. Which means the following: what is outlined in Raízes do Brasil as the formative elements of our society, is scrutinized 20 years later.

JU - Can we say that this is a more mature approach from an intellectual point of view and academic rigor?

From Decca - Yes. My hypothesis, which is increasingly confirmed, is that there is a fantastic line of continuity between Raízes do Brasil and this master's thesis. In Raízes do Brasil he scrutinizes in a very rich way the aspect of the 50s, which is social history. What was worked exhaustively in the imaginary territory in Visão do Paraíso, he dedicates to the study of a social history very much in the style of the French Annales School when researching the aspects of Portuguese culture and society that came to make the great adventure of discovery .

JU - What is the key to the thesis?

From Decca - The question is: how was this culture formed that doesn't like to look inside its own land and prefers to venture out to sea? Why is Portugal empty in the interior, as is Brazil? It's a little like this idea that Sérgio puts forward in Raízes do Brasil that we are a people of crabs who only stay along the coast and do not go into the interior where the entrances and flags are, therefore, the great experience of constituting the territory, of redefining the border. And the border of culture, not the geographic and territorial border.

JU - Do you think that this thesis will offer a new dimension to the work of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda himself. What is its importance for Brazilian historiography?

From Decca - Without a doubt, he will resize Sérgio Buarque’s role. The importance is not only for history, but also for our literature. It is a literary text that has not yet been worked on. And I'm very interested in that. My last two articles about Sérgio Buarque are to study his text, the metaphors and images that produce his narrative universe. Figures of speech are very powerful in his work: the tiler and the sower in Raízes do Brasil, for example. They are always pairs of conflicting oppositions, they are metaphors of an interpretative force that encompass large territories of the past and our own culture. His text deserves this attention, especially in this perspective that no one has looked into to study its composition.

JU - What were the sources used by the historian?

From Decca - What fascinates about this text is that it seems to me that it was only possible because it was written through the eyes of a spy, hence my interest in metalanguage. The sources that are capable of exposing Lisbon and other Portuguese cities from the time of discovery are infiltrated Venetian travelers, who made secret reports.



"Brazilian biographical writing has a distant inscription"

JU - For what purpose?

From Decca - Merchants were interested in Mediterranean trade and the commercial markets of the Iberian Peninsula. They entered through Seville and reached Lisbon. There is a whole exchange of impressions and information that is circulating. They were very knowledgeable. On the other hand, the Portuguese visited the squares of London, Antwerp, Hamburg, etc. This meta-text fascinates me even from the fictional side. It is very interesting because the historical documents that will support this Buarchian narrative portray Portuguese society from an almost clandestine perspective, that is, the spy's gaze. I find this game of metaphor, of narrative composition, very rich. The opening of the thesis is also very beautiful. It is a tribute to Leopold von Ranke, an author who rewrites the history of Europe. Sérgio feels like he is his follower. He opens his text by showing how Ranke tries to say how it was possible to form European territory with so many wars and so many disputes. Sérgio asks where the borders of Europe are. One of them is Portugal.

JU - What are the elements of the text that contribute to a new approach to Portugal at the time?

From Decca - Sérgio broadens the horizon, showing how this context of discovery is established. The richest part is precisely the assembly of the work. He researched documents in Portugal and Venice. He lived in Rome for two years in the 50s. I have a friend, Ettore Finazi Agró, a literary critic at the University of Rome, who is in a group of which I am part and who studies the intersection of literature and history at the level of narrative, who advised me to go to Venice if I wanted to follow Sérgio's entire route. Certainly, the Venetian archives will also give me a very large dimension of what this Mediterranean navigation was like. It is very interesting how, in historical research, these things come together. Years ago, when Peter Burke wasn't even known in Brazil, I was in the city of Venice and I saw a book that fascinated me a lot, called Venice and Amsterdam. It was a comparative history of the two trading cities - one, Amsterdam, of the Hanseatic league and the other, Venice, an important city of Mediterranean trade. I bought the book in Venice and brought it to Brazil. And, shortly after the publication of O Silêncio dos Vencidos, I offered Brasiliense the translation. And the publisher asked me for the preface to the book, which was published in Brazil because I was fascinated by how the merchant elites of these two republican cities were formed. It's interesting that you connect points that were frayed in the past. Suddenly Lisbon and Venice were joined by the work of historian Peter Burke and, now, almost like a fiction, in my own experience as a historian, Venice is getting closer to Lisbon.

JU - Where does this thesis differ from Raízes do Brasil?

From Decca - I would say that Raízes do Brasil is an insight, a historical-sociological interpretation essay by Sérgio Buarque, although several chapters are based on primary sources, especially literary ones. He shows us this immense richness in the use of literary sources in historiographical work. But the strength of Raízes do Brasil is less the historian's refinement of the document and more the interpretative effort. It is another essay, which is very different from a monograph, that is, from your master's thesis, whose adherence to the document, the historian's enormous complicity in relation to the sources and empathy towards them transforms the historian. Sometimes you find yourself entangled in the documentary universe and start to trace your narrative through interfaces and intersections. In Raízes do Brasil, Sérgio has not yet completed this work. In his master's degree, we already have this interface texture, of documentary intertextualities with the writing of history, this narrative that is almost constituting a new hermeneutic territory.

JU - How do you intend to approach the thesis in your chair?

From Decca - When we refer to Sérgio Buarque, the image of Chico Buarque's father always comes to mind. The secretary of the president of ISCTI, for example, was surprised by the fact that there was a thesis about Portuguese society. This always raises eyebrows. Just as Editora da Unicamp recently published Abel Barros Baptista, a Portuguese literary critic seeking to rethink Machado de Assis's place in Brazilian literary territory. The richness of these exchanges is precisely the possibility of catching the unusual.

JU - How to show Portuguese society at the time...

From Decca - The most interesting thing is to bring something that is not what you imagine. The thesis has very important points. For example, showing the cosmopolitan character of Lisbon. Therefore, what in a certain way is this urban world whose hierarchies are much more tenuous than those of the old regime. Lisbon had a very large cultural multiplicity and diversity. There was the presence of various nationalities - Africans, Arabs, Muslims, Italians... For Sérgio Buarque, this is an important element for the cultural negotiations that will come ahead. The Portuguese adventurer is an adventurer who is used to dealing with differences. He has less difficulty facing negotiation, conflict, difference. His places are less fixed than those of other cultures. Despite the old Portuguese regime, commercial bourgeois development had created a less stratified society, according to Sérgio Buarque. This allows the social subject to have very strong vertical and horizontal mobility, which enables them to undertake an adventure of this nature. Precisely because of their mobility and adventure, the issue of work becomes a serious issue. Therefore, Portuguese territory is an empty territory. The work society, whose Protestant ethics so much touts the worker's bond with the soil and the earth, with crafts and commerce, will not happen in Portugal. It is a country of emptiness. Sérgio Buarque's descriptions are very beautiful. What are Portuguese interiors? It's a desert. They are a people who educated themselves for adventure.

JU - What would be the common identity elements of our people?

From Decca - We have almost atavistic elements. For example, longing. The Portuguese are always leaving, always far from themselves. Leaving in the sense of leaving a part of you everywhere. This component in the work is very important for you to see how Sérgio creates this place in which we will inscribe our origins. There is a shift. Brazilian historiography, in a certain way, ends up placing the place of the foundation in the First Mass and in the Letter of Caminha. There you cut out the foundational place. Suddenly, you see in his work that the place of origin is further from what you imagine. You see the future in the past. The title itself is surprising. The word “formation” in the 40s and 50s had a very strong meaning. These are the first works of Marxist origin that are being published whose term formation, which comes from the German “formen”, begins to appear in works such as Caio Prado Júnior's, Formação do Brasil Contemporâneo, for example. But formation can also be read in the sense of Minha Formação, by Joaquim Nabuco. There is a game of images and languages ​​that also refers to the question of origin. Both in the sense of the dialectical Marxist conception, as well as in the idea of ​​the formation of biography. Brazilian biographical writing has a distant inscription. Is there. Brazil emerged long before the discovery, as an idea, as a dream. And Vision of Paradise consolidates this entire archetype.

JU - Could it be an outcome of a line of thought?

From Decca - Yes, that comes with Roots, The Formation of Portuguese society and Vision of Paradise. But at the same time, Sérgio dedicates himself to interiors. Then you can see the complementarity of these works mentioned with Caminhos e Fronteiras, by Monções. But always the movement, also in his posthumous work, The Far West... These are the three works that are intertwined with those others. Visão is after Monções, and Caminhos e Fronteiras. But it is interesting to note that there are two projects that complement each other. One project to understand the origin, and another to understand the constitution of the territory, the constitution of an adventitious culture. Paths and Borders is what moves and what limits; Monsoons, is also something that takes you; The Far West is where this fantasy can extend. There is clearly unity.

JU - Did you get to know him?

From Decca - One of my books, The Silence of the Vanquished, I gave to Sérgio Buarque personally. This book, in a certain way, was a tribute to the generation that had almost compulsorily retired due to AI-5. I belonged to the first generation that received a doctorate from this generation that Sérgio Buarque was part of. We were students at the time of Maria Antonia's effervescence. I started Physics and then became a historian. We were together inside Maria Antonia's building defending ourselves from the Communist Hunt Command. When I defended my doctorate, I, out of deference, handed the book to Sérgio Buarque and Caio Prado Júnior. It was a debt that my generation owed them. The gesture meant that we were continuing an endeavor.

JU - It is known that The Silence of the Vanquished breaks with some of the canons of historiography, especially by analyzing the Revolution of 30 from the perspective of trade unionism. How was his work received?

From Decca - It's a very complicated thing, because my book is very critical of the interpretations commonly made in Brazil, which have always come from the point of view of a culture of those who are elite. My book tried to rescue the silence that fell on historical experiences that are, in this case, the world of work in Brazil after slavery. We were from Unicamp when I was designing the book. The Edgard Leuenroth Archive was being formed. With him arrived the great documentation of the experiences of foreign immigrants, the anarchist newspapers... There was a whole expectation of rewriting the history of Brazil taking into account the pressures that came from below. And this was, in a certain way, a decisive moment in Brazilian historiography. In fact, we were aiming for a new approach. This was in the mid-70s and of course it could cause some animosity. This new generation could deny our heritage. But I think that in the same way that The Silence of the Vanquished ended with a question about the formation of the PT, Sérgio Buarque was there at the founding of the party. Marilena Chauí, who was also there, prefaced my book. We had the same question, the same desire to rewrite history to design a new society, a new future. The Silence of the Vanquished had a fifth chapter with an issue that was delicate at the time, and still is: this place where the PT sometimes has to oscillate in terms of alliances with the arch made up of parties, and/or sometimes has to adhere to the social movements that break legality.

JU - How do you see this?

From Decca - It's natural. Social movements are powerful because they invade the territory of the constituted. It's this thing about the president taking off the MST hat, putting the MST hat on his head, this thing about you dealing with this ambiguity in left-wing politics in Brazil. How can you be the spokesperson for social movements and, at the same time, operate at the level of legality, when you at the social level have to recognize that the struggle can break institutional and legal territory. The risk is great. Studying the labor movement of the 20s, I discovered that there were discussions of this nature.

JU - To what extent has Brazilian historiography ignored this movement?

From Decca - I had never taken it into consideration. This book is from 1981, exactly when the PT was being formed. It is no coincidence that, in the fifth and final chapter, I purposely gave the title "The Workers' Party and the democratic question". It is a study of a party that aims to be a spokesperson for popular desires and social movements and how it can play in the sphere of legality. It was a problem that the PT faced in 1981 and faces today. I made a point of addressing these impasses. The book begins with a metaphor from Borges that reality is nothing more than the world that we build in the territory of language and how there are lines that tear apart this territory that seems so homogeneous, until other voices begin to emerge . It is the moment of political opening in Brazil. The book has a meta-history that is the history of speech in Brazil. This was noticed by linguists. They realized that the book was a challenge, an inquiry into the territory of language, that is, where discourse was producing its silence. And it was not a problem of the past, but of the present. How do we constitute silence in political discourse, in historiographical discourse? It is not a book that could appeal to a certain messianism of giving a voice to the disadvantaged, this almost religious thing. It's the opposite. It was an inquiry into the tricks of power and language. And how you can silence yourself. That is to say: speech can be constitutive of its own silence.

JU - Giving a voice to those who cannot tell the story.

From Decca - Yes, even because the story of 1930 is told by the one who assumed power. There are several layers of silence. It is not a book that has a Manichaean dimension, but rather a binding in which epistemic territories are constructed which, once you adhere to a discursive system, silence its own constitution. You deny yourself, you give up your conviction. The historical fact is doubly silent. Because power narrates it. And because when narrating, the other identifies with the narrated, forgetting and placing the lived experience in their own silence. In short, the old story that the winner always tells the story. As incredible as it may seem, I study a loser who was included by labor legislation, and with the pelaguismo, official unions began to recruit workers to wear the Vargas government's shirt.

JU - You said that you had recently been at Unicamp when the book was launched and that the moment was decisive for Brazilian historiography. How important is Unicamp in this context?

From Decca - There was an urgency to construct the figure of other social subjects in the historiography of the mid-70s and early 80s. The gap was very large, even though you can say that there were great works, such as Casa Grande and Senzala. But Gilberto Freyre's bias was from the big house, very different from the approach intended in the historiography that Unicamp was beginning to establish.

JU - Which would be?

From Decca - It was discovering the logic of the history of those social subjects. When we studied the factory, we didn't want to understand it in the logic of capital. We wanted to understand the factory from the worker’s perspective. We did not want to study the factory according to the logic of the one who dominates, but rather to study how it is possible to work within those rules, within those norms; how you react, how you accommodate, how the universe works inside and outside the factory for you to constitute yourself as a social subject. It's a totally new, unprecedented approach. Compared to the advances made in Brazilian historiography, and Unicamp played a fundamental role in this, it is similar in the 70s to the role played by English, American, French and Italian historiography. Among many colleagues, professors Michael Hall, Stella Bresciani, Ítalo Tronca and the late professor Lapa, who were so committed to creating the Department of History at Unicamp, bear witness to this historiographical innovation.

JU - Can it be said, then, that Unicamp has become a paradigm?

From Decca - Undoubtedly. To give you an idea, I directed a very successful collection at Editora Paz e Terra called “Oficinas da História”, whose line prioritized this perspective of the world of work. And I set out to translate the book The Formation of the English Working Class, by Edward Palmer Thompson, into Brazil. Many tried to translate and had not succeeded until that moment, in 1987. The boom in this new historiography in Brazil was so great that all the major newspapers published an article precisely because it was a new perspective on the world of work being brought. To give you an idea, in 1989 I arrived in France and Thompson's version had recently been published there. We published before the French. And it was from Unicamp that works emerged that are today shaping generations of undergraduate and postgraduate students in Brazil. It was our group that brought little-known works by Hobsbawm about the world of work. There was also an immense renewal in research on slavery in Brazil. Studies on the world of slaves and urban cultures in the 19th century enabled new approaches.

JU - At that time, IFCH brought together several departments and units of the Human Sciences.

From Decca - Yes. And then I want to pay tribute to the fact that Unicamp offered and still offers an Institute of Philosophy of Human Sciences, in which not only history played a fundamental role, but also anthropology, sociology, politics, economics and literary theory. This historiography would never be established without the work of the other departments that formed this institute. The greatest legacy that Unicamp can produce is precisely the IFCH. Because it was only because we were together, crossing the street, that all of this was possible. It was an institute of fantastic vitality. I think it not only consolidated a new tradition, but also the historiography that emerged after Unicamp became different. Which university in South America, for example, has an archive the size of Edgard Leuenroth? Or that dean, seeing the need for us to think about the new frontiers of the humanities, acquired collections like that of Sérgio Buarque de Holanda?

JU - What was the atmosphere like at the time?

From Decca - There was this transgressive side. It is no surprise that today I see names of political scientists who became psychoanalysts. There was an ideal in all of us. For us, Unicamp was a “vision of paradise”, when we learned that there was a university in the middle of the woods where you could try everything. There was a conviviality that extended from department meetings and classrooms to long nights out in bars and restaurants in Campinas.

JU - How do you see the current political moment?

From Decca - I think there are two problems that I would like to address in this question. I have a predilection for anarchists, despite having participated in the field of ideas in the discussions that culminated in the formation of the PT. I have a very careful perception in the territory of politics. I think that there is in our culture, it is important to emphasize, a very exacerbated belief in the party and the State. Civil society seems to need a project managed by the Brazilian state, whose archetype is very strong. You have to be careful, I've seen this story before. This is not the first time that a party has come to power and worlds and funds have been expected from it. It was like this at the time of the direct-já, in the first post-dictatorship civil government, with Collor and the Real Plan. The PT case, for its pros and cons, also had the same problem. Hope is placed in the party and the State that I think is unreasonable. This reveals the weakness of civil society. This exacerbated criticism, whether in the opposition or within the party's own ideal, reveals an exacerbated belief in the demiurge of politics. I'm a little skeptical. Perhaps I have always liked the PT not for what it really is, but for what it once virtually pointed out.

JU - Where?

From Decca - To utopia, for example. Everything that happens in politics falls short of the dream you have. Politics has this ability to always disappoint us. It is a game of alliances, in short it is the territory of the institutional. We respect democracy and the rules have to be played in this territory. But I think it's good that we don't have too many expectations about this. What matters most, and this is what I would like to expect from a PT government, is that a stronger civil society be created. This is my view regarding the current moment, without going into the merits of value judgments, whether I like the government's policy or not.

JU - What, for you, are the government’s strengths and weaknesses?

From Decca - In the area in which I work most, which is the educational area, Cristovam Buarque's management frustrates me. And then the role of the state is decisive. If in other areas the importance of the state is less important because it has freed itself from economic processes to allow the market to move more easily, there are strategic areas in which we are waiting for a better definition of the government program. But that's also a thing for another discussion.

JU - Why?

From Decca - I think that at the heart of The Silence of the Vanquished remains the problem that the PT is experiencing today. PT's biggest critics will certainly be within it. The more the party assumes the sphere of legality, the more the side that formed it and which is its original identity will appear, that is, its link with social movements.

JU - How to manage this tension?

From Decca - She is insoluble. In other historical experiences, the strength of the party prevailed and social movements were stifled. Communism proves this. This tension is at the origin of left-wing parties. They will always be on the razor's edge between legality and adherence to a sphere of struggles, demands, expectations and changes that sometimes undermine the status of legality.

JU - Do the losers have a chance?

From Decca - The defeated is a condition of the universe of discourse. The excluded person is from the social universe. It's two things. In the movement of 30, São Paulo's elites were momentarily defeated, but they were never socially excluded. The labor movement in 30 was defeated and, however, was included in politics by Vargas' labor legislation. This question is very important so that we can understand the point of view of what we want to designate. The loser is not always excluded. Now, there are excluded people who are on the margins of Brazil's history. I have a book practically ready about Euclides da Cunha, this is an author who touches on the sphere of exclusion.

JU - What will happen to Brazil if this exclusion continues at this rate?

From Decca - There's a cauldron there. Urban violence, unemployment, injustice... all the study I have done in the last three years on Euclides da Cunha has placed me facing the terrain of exclusion. When you see the progress of the MST, compared to that of Antonio Conselheiro, the concern is great. Conselheiro was confined to a small territory there in Bahia. Today there are dozens of Antonios Conselheiros, swarming around. You may not have the same religious profile, but if you look at it from the point of view of the characterization of the movement and the social and organizational composition, sociologically speaking it is the same thing. And this is growing. Canudos is expanding. Although we find the fact that the MST leadership wants to set up a camp like Canudos in Pontal do Paranapanema to be jargon, they know what they are talking about.

JU - Why Canudos?

From Decca - The fascination of Os Sertões is the stateless society. I compare the figure of the Counselor with that of Zaratrusta, by Niestche. The stateless society fascinates me in the world of exclusion. Who dominates Rocinha hill? The state? At the same time as it is scary, it is fascinating.

JU - All dogmas are unstructured...

From Decca - Undoubtedly. Our analytical categories point to new forms of organization. You have to reread everything.

JU - Is the PT's arrival to power part of an evolutionary line in Brazilian politics?

From Decca - No. I think that in history, chance predominates. They also didn't expect to get where they are. It is not a redemption. I don't have a messianic view of history. The impasse is that there is no good side to history when the loser wins. This is not a play on words, in history it is a new configuration that becomes reality. There are archetypes in our politics that are the same, from the PFL to the PT. I show in Silence of the Vanquished that the left's interpretation of 30 is identical to the right's. The logic is the same with the PT coming to power. A historical, sociological and anthropological analysis of this movement is very premature. Despite the national organization of the PT, which from the point of view of a national party is admirable for its ability to be established throughout the national territory, there is a figure who is Lula.

JU - What assessment do you make of the role played by the president in these first months of government?

From Decca - The Brazilian population does not support the PT. There is also a messianic component there, where the strength of populism is very strong. This is a populism that, contrary to what has always been done by bureaucratic elites, comes from below. It's scary to say the least. There are historical experiences of populism that come from below that need to be reevaluated. They have other nuances. Many who were fascinated by Collor at one time are now fascinated by Lula. There are wings of the PT that imprisoned Lula's image in their favor; the problem is that our leader wears several shirts at the same time. That's why the little hat rotates all the time... I think that, symbolically, for those who work in the world of politics, this symbolic configuration needs to be taken seriously. There is an anthropological and political cultural complexity that is very little explored and analyzed. At the same time, it has a characteristic that is the question of whether it is the PT that is in power. There are so many disliked and disaffected people that one has to wonder if it is really the PT that arrived at Planalto. In fact, there are groups that manage to weave an arc of alliances that provide Lula with institutional political support.

JU - How do you evaluate the president's behavior in light of this strategy?

From Decca - He goes over it. He is a union leader, he ignores legality. Perhaps the defects and qualities lie precisely in this behavior. He is a politician who, to become the leader he is, always had to work on this margin. That's why instead of giving interviews, he goes to the pulpit and speaks to the masses; he works with this territory of legality. Now, when legality tends to do something he doesn't want, he goes to the grassroots and talks to them. It's a tremendous skill. And it is at the heart of what I worked with: the populism that won in Brazil is a populism formed in bureaucratic elites, which comes from the top down. Populism in Brazil was born in the antechambers of the Brazilian State and now we are experiencing a new experience, with this populism that comes from below.

JU - What to do with the large mass of excluded losers?

From Decca - That big capital produces the unemployment zone is historically known. Everyone has the idea, for example, that the Industrial Revolution, with the discovery of steam engines and large manufacturing units, changed the entire system of work and labor relations, generating employment. In fact, it excluded much more than it included. It is much more the small initiative than the large one who makes inclusion. It is this ability that society has in not transforming itself into a commodity and a market. Social policies will be the key to this inclusion. There is no other alternative. They are not profitable, they are not seen as automatic responses to the capitalist market, but it is our only way out. And that's anywhere in the world. Neoliberal policy tends to fail.

Top