Authoritarianism

"O objetivo do curso é examinar a história política recente do Brasil, ressaltando, no contexto do regime ditatorial implantado após 1964, o processo de reestruturação do aparelho do Estado e a reconfiguração da cena política. Considerando as profundas mudanças operadas na estrutura econômica e nas relações de força entre as diferentes classes e grupos (políticos e ideológicos), o curso terá também como alvo privilegiado a dinâmica social, enfatizando as sucessivas crises de uma dada estrutura de poder até seu desaparecimento negociado, bem como as dificuldades para a constituição de uma nova ordem política de 1985 em diante.

O curso está organizado com base em aulas expositivas e seminários. Todos os apresentadores deverão entregar após o seminário um relatório sobre a atividade. Ao final do curso o estudante deverá elaborar um ensaio sobre tema livre, a partir dos assuntos tratados no curso. Para a avaliação será levada em conta a participação efetiva em sala, os comentários e um ensaio final a respeito de um dos itens do programa, a ser discutido com o professor.

OBS.: A (imensa) bibliografia complementar será referida em aula, a cada sessão."

This article analyzes – by means of a one year period of participant observation inside an Italian paratrooper barracks, as well as a series of in-depth interviews with expert witnesses – the process which forms authoritarian and evidently fascist personalities within the Italian armed forces. The rituals, practices and adaptation mechanisms typical of the organization under observation are discussed. Further, the authors sustain that the Italian case shows a substantial blending of the roles, practices and ideologies of the army and the police force, with dangerous consequences for public security.

This study examines democratic orientations and their determinants in post-Orange Ukraine from the perspective of a political culture theory. The research question is, to what extent is political culture in Ukraine supportive of democracy. This paper uses data from different waves of the Pew Global Attitudes surveys, the World Values Surveys, and the International Foundation for Electoral Systems surveys to examine public views towards democracy in Ukraine. The paper compares democratic values in Ukraine with those in Poland and Russia, two similar post-communist countries with differing political cultures and divergent trajectories of democratization. It also examines changes in the levels of pro-democratic attitudes in post-Orange Ukraine compared to the Orange and pre-Orange periods. Finally, this study implements multiple regression analysis of the determinants of democratic attitudes. The analysis shows limited effects of historical democratic legacies and Catholicism on pro-democracy views. With some exceptions, adherents of major parties do not differ significantly in terms of their degree of support for democracy. This study suggests that partially democratic and partially authoritarian political culture impedes the future prospects for consolidated democracy in Ukraine.

The relationship between capitalism and democracy has historically been a complicated one whose contradictions were reinforced by capitalist crises. In this context we address the following key questions: (1) how have the relationships between capital and democracy been constituted during the principal organic crises of historical capitalism? (2) How can we understand those relationships within the current deep crisis? In so doing we develop our principal hypothesis concerning the crisis of democracy today: while the crisis of Fordist capitalism in the 1970s was a crisis of too much democracy (at least from the particular perspective of capital), the crisis of neoliberalism today (from the perspective of the political economy and of society in general) is a crisis of not enough democracy. The crisis of democracy in this sense constitutes the principal impasse for sustainable exit strategies from the contemporary organic crisis.

This paper analyzes the future of the global left and world socialism in the context of the current global financial and economic crisis, which marks the fourth organic crisis of global(-izing) capitalism. It does so through the lens of several lead questions (...). First, has capitalism in its neoliberal form reached its limits of capital accumulation and social reproduction? And if so, what are the dominant political projects with regard to exit strategies from the crisis? To what kind of fundamental re-organization of the regime of accumulation and mode of regulation of capitalism as well as world order is capitalism’s fourth organic crisis going to lead? It is clear that the particular answer(s) to this set of questions are not only going to structure the political framework in which left and socialist political agency is going to occur across the globe but they can and will lead to quite different socialist strategies in their particular spatial-temporal configurations. It is therefore of paramount importance to come to an agreement about the nature of the global crisis in order to discuss and coordinate socialist strategies properly. Second, if it is true that the Green New Deal was the most coherent hegemonic project and exit strategy from the crisis, what explains its failure and the ensuing shift to the global age of austerity? In my view, this needs to be seen in light of (1) the tremendously increased structural power of capital, (2) the overall weakness, social and political fragmentation and – especially in the European Union – spatially unequal development of social and political opposition, which could be coopted and hegemonically absorbed in order to renew capitalism (in ways similar to the labor movement militancy and the fear of Soviet-style revolutions enabling Roosevelt to pursue the New Deal even against opposition of large segments of the U.S. capitalist class during the 1930s or the role that the strong [new] social movements during the late 1960s and 1970s unintentionally played in generalizing neoliberalism hegemonically), and, as a consequence, (3) the strong right-wing populist, political articulation of the crisis in the “West”, which reinforced the shift to the politics of austerity. From this follows the third set of questions: What are the (more narrowly defined) economic consequences of the failure of the Green New Deal in the “West” and the new beggar-thy-neighbor policies of "competitive austerity" (Albo 1993), which, from the perspective of the “national competition-state" (Hirsch 1996), seek to secure for themselves a larger piece of the same (shrinking) cake? If it is true that “decades of austerity” (as predicted by the British Prime Minister David Cameron) and a “global slump” (McNally 2011) with years or even decades of slow economic growth in the West are to be expected, how is that going to affect the historical and political conjuncture for the political left in Europe and North America? What impact will it have on the historical and specific making, un-making and re-making of class, its economic, social and political fragmentation and the distributional room for maneuver needed by the ruling classes' in the various regional contexts? And based on this analysis, what kind of coalitions between non-antagonistic social forces – envisaged in the North-Atlantic Left Dialogue’s and Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s debates about the “mosaic left” (Hans-Jürgen Urban), the “connective party” (Mimmo Porcaro), “radical” resp. “revolutionary realpolitik” (Michael Brie/Rosa Luxemburg) and the “Four-in-One-Perspective” (Frigga Haug) – can be built around a concrete and viable transition program addressing the multiple levels of the fourth organic crisis of capitalism which stretches across the levels of accumulation, ecological reproduction and social reproduction? What are the most important specific challenges for such a perspective? And how can they be linked across national borders not only within the European Union, where the dangerous unequal development of the crisis is the biggest obstacle to progressive change, but also between the European Union, North America and the rest of the globe?