33. ANTIRACIST RE-READINGS: THE RIO DE JANEIRO VACCINE
REVOLT AND A REMINDER OF WHAT POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY DOES
AND WHAT IT CAN ACHIEVE
https://doi.org/10.36592/9786587424163-33
Norman R. Madarasz1
- Lima Barreto.
The disproportionate vulnerability of continental African-Americans to Covid19 and official narratives justifying the daily violence suffered by them flows through
a process similar to the negation of truths. One of the uncanny effects of a truth is the
negationism it also produces, the stress here being on a psychological side effect and
not on negation, objection or refutation. As far as pandemics are concerned, history
shows in a timely manner how truths are often negated before acquiring broader
acceptance. Yet negationism is one thing, willful omission of crucial information is
another. The moral effect these stances play on undermining truth is equally
devastating.
With the pandemic caused by Sars-CoV-2, the circuit linking omission to
negationism has entered another round. As for racism, philosophy can certainly attest
to how assertions on its conceptual inexistence often projects veils of ignorance over
its concrete workings. A constant buzz of white noise obliterates what is tirelessly
asserted by victims of racism, namely that the world is not the same place for those
who suffer from it as it is for Whites. The explosion of Antiracist movements in Brazil
and the U.S. has concentrated public attention on the homicidal violence committed
by the police forces of these countries against Black and Brown persons. It has sparked
deep preoccupation at the militarization of the chain of command of police forces. And
Associate Professor in the Graduate Programs of Philosophy and Literature and Linguistics at the
Pontifical Catholic University of Rio Grande do Sul (PUC-RS), Porto Alegre, Brazil.
An earlier version of this article in Brazilian Portuguese was published in the Revista Latinoamericana
do Colégio Internacional da Filosofia - Tiempos, v. 5, 2020, pp. 1-15.
1
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it has also channeled calls to defund the inflated budgets paid to the sector at the
expense of crucial social investments, especially in racially distinct communities. The
overlapping of the pandemic with Antiracism forces the scene of political philosophy,
if it expects to maintain its intellectual legitimacy, to go local.
tle if anything to do with relativism. Instead, it talks to a
structural dynamic by which a truth emerges, pointing to the productive drive of
philosophical analysis itself. The local is what opens up as a conceptual situation, one
that can be analysed thoroughly by means of the resources of history, sociology and
economics. Thinking the local implies correction. It can be what leads the traditionally
exclusionist logic of political philosophy to surrender to what is manifest. Without
focusing on how injust
structural variations and conflicting relations constitutive of human societies can end
up missing crucial undercurrents. A case in point: the way in which nature and society
enter into conflict in moments of pandemics has caught political philosophy
unprepared.
As a result of underreporting and under-analysing the effects of previous
pandemics one questions whether political philosophy, let alone historiography, is
looking in the right direction. As the number of Covid-19 fatalities soared in the U.S.,
political philosophy remained silent about how in 1968-1970, 100,000 U.S. citizens
died from the H3N2 virus, the so-called Hong Kong flu.2 AIDS in richer countries and
malaria in poorer ones follows the same fate when left in the hands of theorists, they
who tend to deem these epidemics to be non-causal factors on political conflict, let
alone on ethnic and class cleansing, and thus condemn them to oblivion.
What type of structural resistance makes political philosophy focus only on
macroscopic causal agents? For all the microphysical turns carried out to refine its
findings, most political philosophy still seems to lose sight of the structuring power of
the epic literary form it regularly applies to achieve discursive, if not always scientific,
coherence. At any rate, if one takes into consideration the way economic policy
decisions have set the priorities for research over the last four decades, the
unpreparedness of political philosophy to understand the opportunity pandemics
present to racist, authoritarian governments comes as no surprise. Health care and
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: 1968 Pandemic (H3N2 Virus).
https://www.cdc.gov/flu/pandemic-resources/1968-pandemic.html >. (Last accessed on September 7,
2020.)
2
Norman R. Madarasz | 599
medicine themselves, with thousands of its front-line workers and professionals
succumbing to Covid-19 around the world, seem to exempt themselves also with great
difficulty from this disorganization.
Political philosophy seems to perpetrate an ethical flaw when failing to
postulate, by means of apriori synthetic judgments, the irresistible temptation
authoritarian leaders have to instrumentalize epidemics and pandemics, whether in
liberal or post-colonial governments. Although it occurs in the theoretical blueprints
political philosophy is known to produce, such omission becomes the symptom by
which the art of governing is distorted into cynical demographic engineering. On the
tables where deadly policy decisions are made, the pandemic phenomenon clearly
leaves the confines of nature. By the intentional passivity shown by our governing
bodies when faced with this contagion, a pandemic tends to exceed most other
catastrophes. It in fact shares ranks with the most mortal technologies created by
competent decision-makers.
Now, technology is not only the product of human creativity, although it most
clearly expresses the arrogance of exceptionalism. Even if one can frequently read how
there are few theoretical domains in which the exception is as valued as in political
philosophy, what is less written is how exceptionalism is almost always linked to
inequality and racism. First, as it regards the source: inequality and racism against
scientists, intellectuals and artists perpetuated by police and military power. Second,
regarding its conditions: economic and social inequality as well as racism toward
persons left on the margins by financial capitalism and the central banking elite. Their
executives control more than ever the democratic mode of government beyond even
the means of production and financial valuation reproducing the sacrosanct right of
private property.
While exception grows on the surface of political philosophy, racism is often
isolated in a discourse that seems to have only historical value. By contrast, when that
exceptionalism fragments, political philosophy manages to integrate antiracist
struggles hand in hand with the very exploitation of the environment that has caused
the current pandemic. The need to include history to understand its own scientificity
makes it crucial for political philosophy to break with its recurring habit of honouring
narrative structure.
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Meanwhile, the modeling of exception seems to bind theoretical attention to
figures of government and governance while leaving the critique of demographic
engineering on a second plane. Beliefs may then emerge about the latter having no
causal force over growing social malaise. But false beliefs in theory can perpetuate
inequality on the conceptual plane, whilst conceptual instability comes to structure
political philosophy itself. The proof of this is in the omission of a debate on the causal
force of epidemics regarding the conceptual structuring of philosophy itself. The
drawbacks were overwhelming for our craft at least until the Sars-Cov2 pandemic.
Since then, they risk becoming disastrous.
In hindsight, we researchers need to face up to our collective failures due to a
desire to avoid the implications of epidemics on the way in which we think the political
and the historical alike. Epidemics seem to trigger mental illness in many liberal
theorists with a degree second only to determinism. Political philosophy has still yet to
accept how its purpose is to submit to real social transformation, instead of integrating
it in order to preserve its own prestige. Still, we discover that the representation of the
political consequences resulting from epidemics leads directly to the ethical question
as to the ends and directionality toward which political philosophy itself tends. One
wonders how conceptual analysis of epidemics faces off with the goal of a just society.
In face of so many devastated lives, what justifies the theoretical resignation to the
continued existence of poverty even while we pontificate over the normative principles
of sound governance? In other words, what theoretically justifies how political
philosophy conveniently washes its hand of the inequality reproduced by the asserted
necessity of private property?
Should there be any doubt as to how a political philosophy that justifies
inequality feeds into racism and contempt for the climate crisis; how a theoretical
pursuit obsessed with justifying the privatizing of lands feeds into the removal of
public safeguards that protect disenfranchised populations, like Indigenous persons
and continental descendants from the enslaved and enslavers; and how self-interested
theories produce disgraceful practices; it might then be useful to reread the narrative
on one of the greatest atrocities suffered by Brazilians in the twentieth century. The
in the city of Rio de Janeiro triggered by the Compulsory Vaccination Law passed in
Norman R. Madarasz | 601
down in the historical education received by Brazilian children and meant to spark
allergic reactio
of philosophical history extending class warfare. A critical rereading of this instance in
state terror will then allow us to draft an appraisal of political philosophy according to
its fundamental orientations.
1 Democratic dictatorship and the distorted destiny of the masses
Considering the events surrounding the Rio de Janeiro Vaccine Revolt from the
perspective of its effects, the now official story tends to justify why dictatorial powers
were taken by a president and a mayor merely a decade and half after Brazil had
become a constitutional republic. Necessity pointed to accelerating much needed
revitalization of the downtown core of the capital, we are told. Added to a form of
governing by decree came the workings of a megalomaniacal physician required to
push through the new vaccination technology on the general population. Also granted
full dictatorial powers by the president, he went on to carry out his program of
immunizing residents in the harbor areas of the city.3
With the actors now in place, the official version can now apply the great men
historical narrative, albeit with a certain twist of irony. Through the conspicuous eyes
of the natives of Rio de Janeiro (th
hand on government could be derided for the disaster wrought by its bid to conduct
was urged on by its Carioca counterpart, even if the similarity of vision between the
two oligarchies was never in fact denied. On the ground, the result had these two fronts
joining forces in a massacre of the Afro-Brazilian, Northeastern and Pardo populations
residing in the center of the old city. Not coincidentally, the center sat adjoining the
slave-trading counters through which millions of kidnapped Africans were sold as
property after sailing into the Guanabara Bay for over two centuries.
According to historians, Rio de
unmatched in South America during the nineteenth century. 4 On account of them,
We have drawn much of the data about this monumental event from Nicolau Sevce
A Revolta da
Vacina, the first edition of which was published in 1983. The third edition contains a afterword from
2010, Editora Cosac Naify, São Paulo.
4 Sevcenko transmits the report made by the Paulistan hegemony about the port of Rio de Janeiro:
has an antiquated and restricted structure, absolutely incompatible with its condition as an energy pole
3
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how common persons are often depicted as an obstacle to progress, exactly as they are
in the narrative about the yellow fever epidemic of 1850. Due to the high number of
-epidemic
vulnerability and how this exposure would have prevented the arrival of much needed
manpower from Italy to substitute the enslaved. The struggle to eradicate disease
l.
One would surely not be wrong to contest such a narrative, though. There was
little if any opinion favorable to the abolition of slavery in Brazil in 1850, apart from
pressured Emperor Peter II, barely twenty-five years old at mid-century, to make his
supposedly pro-abolitionist word turn into deed. Historians do recognize that the
epidemic contributed to positive legislation with the Eusebio de Queiros Bill banning
Br
internationally as its colonial oligarchs kept stalling any real moves to abolish slavery. 5
Once we manage to link the yellow fever epidemic with the multiepidemiological situation of 1904 (yellow fever then being joined with bubonic plague
and small pox), the official version of the Revolt starts to fall apart. Lauded for
an unrelenting battle against the evils both natural and social that had ravaged Rio de
Janeiro. The same narrative attempts to celebrate the recently achieved constitutional
Republic as it decayed into social Darwinism, the most pernicious variation of social
engineering. According to the still official tale, engineers would have saved a
misinformed urban population enduring a form of lethal ignorance worse than the
diseases themselves.
In the history lesson repeated to Brazilian high school students on the
Republic
the population at large it simply refused vaccination against small pox. The size of this
demographic mass and the urgency for mass vaccination grew into an ideal
justification for instituting dictatorial powers to the physician, mayor and president.
5
Pimenta, 2018, p. 196.
Sevcenko, op. cit., p. 35. (Henceforth, my translations.)
Norman R. Madarasz | 603
What the narrative does not contemplate is that, seen from the perspective of the
emancipated from slavery, the plan did not benefit them in any way. In fact, it was
quite the opposite. Despite being prohibited by the pro-slavery constitution of 1831
from frequenting schools and learning to read and write, it was not ignorance that held
the day amongst freed persons so much as the well justified fear of forced dislocation
toward the hills, swamps or even more decrepit regions of the city.
vulnerability to epidemics is part
plans of urban revitalization did not include keeping residents in the area, let alone
renovating the buildings in which they lived. The Compulsory Vaccination Bill was
voted on October 31, 1904 and enacted as law on November 5 of the same year.
According to the official version of the train of events, in reaction to the decree, city
residents grouped together in Tirandentes Square in a bid to prevent federal agents
from carrying out their campaign.6 To disperse the masses, government forces opened
7
Spreading through all neighboring areas in the city, and
at one time moving dangerously close to the Presidential Palace in the Catete district,
the revolt tended to concentrate in the port areas of Gamboa and Saúde.
8
These
districts were to be bombed by battleships from Guanabara Bay and invaded by the
army. Soldiers allegedly sought the leader
from a battle between scientific reason and mass ignorance, the struggle has to be
understood today as yet another transnational act in the nineteenth century of an
impoverished community aiming to protect its residents from predatory bourgeois
projects of modernization.9
According to Sevcenko, the powers granted to the physician Oswaldo Cruz were of a dictatorial nature,
and constructions. In addition, [the
law] established its own jurisdiction, provided with a judge specially appointed to settle questions and
Ibid, p. 42-43.
7 Ibid., p. 31.
8 Sevcenko unequivocally registers the anonymous nature of the insurrection, which resisted leadership
attempts made by both the League against the Compulsory Vaccination Law and federal and municipal
f choosing leaders or platforms, but more
Ibid., p. 17.
9 Citing a description made by novelist and journalist Afonso Henriques de Lima Barreto, Sevcenko
6
Ibid., p. 54.
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The question of race seldom enters into the representation of the events, which
is striking and worrisome given that Blacks in Brazil, unlike even southern states in
the U.S. at the same time, made up the majority of the population. That it is often
described as if it were comprised of foreigners leaves little doubt about intention. The
oligarchs to simply replace the freedwomen and men with
emancipated. The defeat of the Afro-carioca population in this conflict amounted to
extending the remains of slavery to other forms. It marks the beginning of structural,
only become more rigid with time.10
More than just a prudent rereading of the events, it is a duty to be sceptical
regarding the whitewashed versions of history. According to them, so-called poor
communities, non-distinct regarding race, would have simply rejected, because of
sheer ignorance, the health benefits of vaccination against small pox. By contrast, what
can be assessed from the ground view is how the revolt was likely triggered by the
the vaccine was but a spark to this broader struggle to maintain hearth and heath. In
exchange for defending themselves with stones, these residents were massacred by
bullets, bayonets and bombs. Through the cruelty typical of the anti-political posturing
of social engineering, a most decadent from of constitutional government, entire
families we
fallen to a genocidal form of gentrification.
Were we to extend our analysis by means of structural comparison, the Vaccine
Revolt represents for Rio de Janeiro what the 1871 Commune does for Paris. It does so
both in terms of the resistance mounted as well as in its aftermath. 11 Recall that the
The 2020 Atlas on Violence in Brazil, published by the federal government-linked IPEA think tank,
shows an increase in violent deaths amongst persons of color of 11,5% over an eight-year period from
2012 to 2018, as opposed to an almost symmetrical decrease of violent deaths during the same period
amongst whites by 8,5%. <DOI: https://dx.doi.org/10.38116.riatlasdaviolencia2020>
11 By terming the Revolt
motim
close, but never gives himself over to establishing a structural and symbolic relation between the two
revolts. When commenting on the interest had by then mayor, Engineer Pereira Passos, the historian
10
cobblestone pavement constituted the inevitable scenario of the various riots (motins), revolts and
the urban planners perceived it soon enough. Broad paved avenues made
Communes of Paris
that the 1871 Commune did not fall due to the famous openings of the Haussmannian boulevards. It
Norman R. Madarasz | 605
1871 Commune was brutally suppressed by an army loyal to the French nobility holed
bourgeois empires. Victims of a terrifying state of siege imposed by the victors that had
lasted for months, thousands of French workers, intellectuals and artists created a
radically socialist autonomous government and declared political independence for
Paris. The Council acted from March to May to organize and defend the population.
Like their kin in Rio de Janeiro, the Parisian poor had also been subjected to forced
dislocations and to the destruction, often for allegedly sanitary reasons, wrought upon
entire districts by urbanization. Historians have suggested that roughly 10,000
persons were massacred in Paris by the French liberal-conservatives (though the
numbers continue to be contested), with hundreds deported. In Rio de Janeiro, the
real facts risk never to correct the official narrative about those days of fire. According
left a balance of 30
deaths, 110 wounded and 945 arrested, of which 461 were deported to the northern
12
Even as they overlooked the modernization of nearby Buenos Aires, the barons
and marquis whose names spread over the cartography of Rio de Janeiro could not
successful elimination of at least part of the residential poor. Beyond what the
administrative records show, as a result of the Vaccine Revolt there were possibly
thousands of Afrobrazilians rounded up and detained on Cobra Island, which served
as a concentration camp. When the most recalcitrant of the rebels refused to
collaborate, they were deported to the northernmost state of Acre, thrown again
without a trial into slavery. Such was also the destiny for the Communards deported
to New Caledonia.
As enlightening and well-
s
fundamental book is on the events and as critical as is the narrative he has spun, it is
curious not to find in his report any suggestion that the people of the city center were
was the greatest and most successful popular revolt in France of the nineteenth century,
notwithstanding its crushing end. By condemning with passion the authoritarianism and violent
government, Sevcenko does not seem to
perceive the genocidal nature of the use of all sectors of the armed forces against the districts in the port
region, nor specially the racial profile of its residents.
12
Ministério
da
Saúde,
Centro
cultural
da
saúde:
http://www.ccms.saude.gov.br/revolta/revolta2.html>. Consultado em 1 de junho de 2020.
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largely freed persons of African descent. The closest an observation of his gets is when
persons is in an era when the government stepped up its efforts to attract foreign
13
Who would these persons in fact be if not descendants of the enslaved
and enslavers who sixteen years earlier, on May 13, were granted their freedom? In the
suggests is how our Republic democratized the quarters in which the enslaved lived
(the senzala): once the legal privilege of a private citizen flaunting his slaves was
prohibited, the State moved to treating everyone according to practices warranted by
the symbolic existence of the category of the senzala.
14
Even considering that
Brazilians of African descent make up half the population, the question remains as to
The official version of the Revolt tends to reduce the number of deaths, possibly
by thousands, as it also tries to divert from the issue by shifting attention to the
disorganized military coup attempt against President Rodrigues Alves prepared at the
Praia Vermelha Naval Base. As writer Abdias de Nascimento has shown,
inconsistencies regarding the numbers of registered Black Brazilians exist in census
counts published during the first decades of the twentieth century. Moreover, there
Negro
Mulato
-Brazilian community went
through much of the twentieth-century appearing as a minority in the country, an
official trend most specifically witnessed in the city of Rio de Janeiro. 15 But to consider
the atrocity suffered by the black community in this revolt as only relative to the
version of history that is told by the defeated would amount to a second conceptual
covering over. It would amount to ignoring a crime against humanity that was
plausibly the cornerstone to strengthening a national political philosophy constituted
by institutionalized and structural racism. 16
Ibid., p. 62.
Ibid., p. 70.
15 The city of Rio de Janeiro has been the capital of successive state formations: of the colony, from 1763
to the
Rio de Janeiro. From 1815 to 1822, Rio de Janeiro was then capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal,
Brazil and the Algarve, then of the Kingdom of Brazil, the two Empires of Brazil and from 1889 to 1960,
of the Republic. Thereafter until 1975, it was its own capital as it was the only city belonging to the
previous federal district, called Guanabara State. Since 1975, it has remained the state capital of the
larger state of Rio de Janeiro.
16 Almeida, 2019.
13
14
Norman R. Madarasz | 607
It is the task of political philosophy to prevent its field from succumbing to an
ideology when serving to shape state structures. To prevent this from happening,
political philosophy in Brazil (and beyond) has a duty to take positions as to the details
of history and let itself be immersed by them. Its aim to achieve objective truth depends
upon it. This is not as slight or calm a gesture as frequent calls to listening to the other
might suggest. Although reviewing the principles of political philosophy might not
it does aim to participate in the process of creating truth from a viewpoint that has no
other version.
2 Political philosophy and its doubles
Critically telling either histories or stories involves reexamining the parameters
that structure the way a theoretical discourse aspiring to scientific pretensions of
verification and validation are set up. A critical political philosophy can thus be
understood as a theory that presents the political in the shape of a space of speeches
and acts in which truths are created. Clearly, it is not merely a field subservient to lies
and vulnerable to the opportunism of those with a hunger for power. Upon identifying
this space, it is possible to observe that there are only three possible directions to be
taken. Three directions in which the two first are related, whilst the third is irreducible.
Three directions, but with their doubles.
By naming these directions, our aim is to stress the elements of the discursive
production behind political philosophy and its presuppositions. Our interest is not to
review how Plato or Aristotle may have classified state forms. Nor it is to leave off from
the assumptions about supposedly transhistorical invariables, such as human nature,
race, natural hierarchies, struggle for power or the inevitability of economic inequality.
We focus instead on the structures validated by political philosophy. By doing so, we
also seek a topological ground in which the difference between a real direction in
political theory is inscribed into the very fabric of an organizational, practical form, be
it statecraft or government.
Regarding past attempts that have given this space some topological detail and
conceptual density, we can laud French structuralism for its commitment to not giving
up on how the political produces truths. Post-structuralist thinkers, from Michel
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Foucault to Alain Badiou, Jacques Rancière and Chantal Mouffe, have produced
important deconstructions regarding the key concept of sovereignty as the political
prime mover. These approaches have taken a great deal from the perspective of the
history of African, Amerindian and pre-Greek Indo-European history, languages and
mythology. They have been enriched by case studies in the struggle for decolonization
during the more recent modern period. Moreover, it is structural analysis that has
shaped contemporary knowledge as to how the transformation of feudal domains into
market societies transformed the formative locus of the State. In the past, two castes,
the nobility and clergy, were bound by a legal compact that legitimized power by divine
right, which also authorized the monopoly over land possessions. The modern order
came to justify ownership of individualized private property, which included enslaved
and indentured persons, by groups made up of a third component, that of small owners
and the mass of labourers. Their existence in the feudal context was latent at best.
Although Karl Marx and writers who have extended his historical analyses integrated
the working class viewpoint into political theory, it was really only through the fullscale implications found in the concept of otherness or alterity, as it moved from
Simone de Beauvoir to James Baldwin, that political philosophy managed to broaden
its parameters.
Regarding the historical progression of this theoretical body, the secularization
of the legal order came to reformulate the State based on the representational
instantiations of the popular or general will. Yet, the theoretical bind that bolstered
claims to extend the idea of popular will to the field of state formations still relied on
holdovers from natural law and social contract theories, like the structuring capacity
of the sovereign and sovereignty. By means of general will, a new political structure
would turn obsolete the former process of legitimization of power, which had derived
from divine right and moral law. This change would usher in the spirit of liberty that
has since crossed civilizations and continents by repositioning the supreme power of
State in the circulatory rhythm of the markets of domestic industry and international
trade.
The problem with this descriptive model of state functioning, which is based on
secularization and the diminished role of clergy as a landowner, has always been the
overdetermined legitimization of the concept of sovereign. The discursive structure of
political secularism differs precisely from the trifuncional feudal model of State by the
Norman R. Madarasz | 609
way the codified legal archive, namely the formal constitution, stipulates the nature,
character and limits of a political order, along with its moral and indeed commercial
possibilities. While it is doubtless true that freedom was primarily an inalienable right
espoused by social-contract and natural-law theorists, it was furthermore a practical
concept required to broaden commercial autonomy according to the British and Dutch
models. Submitted to an incorporated conception of the sovereign, feudal political
philosophy had for a long time molded itself according to the sacralisation of the law.
Whatever shifts or mutations would arise in the theoretical foundations of its
applications were recast as effects of the social traditions and ideologies specific to the
growth of the nation-state.
What the doctrine of reason of State continued to shield through the concept of
sovereignty was a discursive, creative force limited by the social contract doctrine. This
force sought to preserve a fundamental, if not always asserted right, according to which
17
On the ground, though, with
slave-based economies heading the way, the right to acquire was less that of a life than
of invasion, treachery, plunder and rape by those who had seized power to commit acts
of primitive accumulation and appropriation by dispossession.
Nonetheless, other operators serving as conceptual focal points in political
philosophy can easily be found. Their surface content may not allow much theoretical
extrapolation upon first view. Take for example the conceptual operator of cleanliness.
Standards of bodily cleanliness have increased with the development of technology,
higher aesthetic standards accompanying wealth is a case in point. Consider, however,
how some societies seem to believe they favor a greater degree of household cleanliness
than others. Whether cleanliness can really be reduced to a national tradition is easily
debatable. From the perspective of exchange relations, either you clean your own
house or someone else does. In oligarchic societies, if you do not clean your own house,
lazy sloppiness aside, it means you are able to pay someone else to clean yours. As such,
cleanliness is clearly an offshoot of economic means. In a supposed cleanliness
obsessed society, like Brazil for example, it is characteristic to hear upper middle class
households pride themselves on how they tend to maintain higher standards of
17
annex of his book The Era of Non-Productive Capitalism (2017, p. 282.) These lines of action
materialize his bid to restructure capitalism into a productive economy, as opposed to the nonproductive hegemonic form currently stripping society from the results of its historic struggles while
lining the pockets of central banks and billionaires.
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cleanliness than most found in, say, Canada or France. Yet, when considered through
forms of government, it is easy to see how social-democratic societies place as much
importance on the cleanliness of its public spaces as its private abodes. By contrast,
one can spot an oligarchic society by the cleanliness of its private spaces and the utter
decay in which it seemingly condemns its public commons. Maintaining these
standards requires having a reserve army of domestic workers to attend to the
cleanliness of the private domain. Such a result might only be a factor of available time.
Were the domestic sector of the population not overly busy cleaning the households of
the rich, they would surely be attending as meticulously to their own.
To such topical scrutiny developed in the guise of geopolitical assessments, one
can easily encounters other perennial questions such as those regarding whether some
nations are less inclined or more resistant to democratic forms of government than
others. The question is frequently asked of Arabic and Muslim nation-states, most
1970s about South America. Meanwhil
assist military tyrants individually to topple democratically elected progressive
governments in Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil, or even in otherwise longstanding
democracies, like Chile. Meanwhile, through the Condor Plan it would organize the
torture and extermination of social workers, intellectuals and social democrats. By
contrast, one often finds less of the same type of inquiry regarding nations with short
histories of democracy, such as Spain, Portugal or Italy. By the mere fact of being
European and Catholic, these states would supposedly have had the essence of
democracy carved into their souls.
In our bid to trace the three directions structuring political philosophy with
their symmetric doubles, the distinguish factor will not be cleanliness nor an innate
sensitivity to democratic forms of government. By maintaining that political
philosophy is limited to three directions, the focus on the concept of the sovereign
proves to fall short of the complexity expected of this field. However, the structuring
force of a State in the midst of a public space in continuous movement, between
expansion and retraction, is maintained by the partial transparency afforded by selfreferential discourse, one that blends creativity and obedience. Sovereignty has
nothing to tell us about diversity, racism and reparation for enslaving peoples, as a
contemporary political philosophy must. As we seek to unfold what we see as the
Norman R. Madarasz | 611
typology of directions in political philosophy, it seems more cogent to derive the field
from the concept of constitution, constitutionality and constitutionalism.
Social contract theories reinforce themselves by disconnecting natural right
from what had reinforced the position of the sovereign in its ancient fusion into a
unique figurehead of the nobility with the clergy. The new legal parameters of
constitution came to gradually invest collective participation of the public in the
construction and maintenance of the social and administrative State by means of a
growing sensitivity to rights. Therefore, by constitution, let us understand the
discursive entity that sets fundamental (or supreme) laws, rights and norms, the form
of which oscillates according to the historic and religious characteristics of a class or
specific political culture. Viewed abstractly from within the historical forms of political
theory, constitutionalism aims above all to ensure the internal coherence of an
organizational logic, either as an extension or substitution of the principles of
domination through force. Constitutions organize political processes by setting the
parameters that enable them to become concrete factors of integration. As it is carried
out at the level of nation-states, constitutionalism establishes the translation between
As seen from this angle, political philosophy works to refine its capabilities of
analysis and interpretation of normativity and prescriptions always from the limits of
discursivity. In other words, its theoretic center lends itself to better scrutiny when
thought from its parameters. To resist such transparency, the center would seek to
dissolve these limits in the name of fighting off excesses and insurrections. In its initial
historical manifestations, this tendency would pressure political philosophy to
surrender to the seductions of power, instead of struggle to reach the conditions of
universal inclusion of citizens into visions of wealth redistribution
a perspective
advantage in overseeing political science from the perspective of its parameters is to
see it as a continually formative and thus dialogical process.
The first direction of political philosophy, recognizable by the concrete projects
of magna cartas, declarations of independence or the other varied promulgations of
universal rights of man or woman into which it has materialized, may be named the
constitutional direction per se. Had we to attribute a symbol to it, the incandescent
light bulb would surely summarize the combined force of nature and culture involved
612 | Sub specie aeternitatis: Festschrift for Nythamar de Oliveira
in the discovery of its technical model. Two centuries earlier, Thomas Hobbes had
asserted not
18
Leviathan already bares the complexity of conceptual creation
when applied to concrete livelihoods. Based on the hypothetical premise of saving
human animals from their own destruction, after they had been transformed into
hordes of psychopathic assassins due to the scarcity of goods found in nature and a
soul ill-executed by the creator, his oft-slandered political blueprint is a jewel of
conceptual creation. First, Hobbes preserves in the judicial order of the State what
Nature created most perfectly, that is, natural laws. Second, Hobbes subtly submits the
concentration of powers in a sole figurehead, the sovereign itself, to a network of
told, the State would not exist as a po
malformed as the soul itself, for onl
laws are perfect. Consequently, a human
is,
limited morally by the civil law exactly insofar as it still concedes to the subject a
fundamental right to resist: just in case, and on an individual basis, the State should
put its life at risk.19 It ought to be clear that there is no authoritarian State anywhere
that recognizes the legitimacy of this right universally and literally, let alone a dictator
who would respect it. As such, one witnesses, if one chooses to, the reversal in Hobbes
of the essential dynamic between sovereignty and constitutionality.
The color to represent this foundation direction in modern European political
philosophy, the constitutional direction, is white. As such, it evokes the incandescent
18
rational and most excelle
Leviathan, Introduction.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of al Commonwealth Ecclesiastical
and Civill,
No man is
bound by the words themselves, either to kill himself or any other man; and consequently, that the
obligation a man may sometimes have, upon the command of the sovereign, to execute any dangerous
or dishonourable office, dependeth not on the words of our submission, but on the intention; which is
to be understood by the end thereof. When therefore our refusal to obey frustrates the end for which the
19
Norman R. Madarasz | 613
light bulb, with its glow, wealth and transparency. Human ingenuity makes the State
into a structure the coherence of which is ensured by the corporal variations amongst
The symmetrical double of this direction cannot be considered in and of itself.
In the three orientations, the deformations of the first reference are not sufficient to
make them distinct. In the case of the destruction of the principles of a constitutional
political philosophy, as in the case of the Vaccine Revolt, there is no model, but only a
destructive mutation of the first. To consider this deviation, we point to the
transformation of political philosophy into social engineering when it literally distorts
and undermines all of the possible creations emanating from human communities
through their arts and technologies. To raise the Vaccine Revolt to a status structurally
similar to that of the Paris Commune is to draw attention to yet another revolt in the
Americas spawned by the continental African-American community as it faced the life
threatening prods of a predatory State that had unwillingly and cynically conceded its
emancipation. The citizen virtue of rejecting laws of exception when they jeopardize
the lives of the disenfranchised is the very basis of the constitutional direction
and
its willed destruction is the result of treachery on behalf of the colonial elite through
measures of social engineering, urbanism and architecture. Citizen virtue denotes
ethical conduct linked to a principle of moral excellence, promoted by the integration
of the collectivity in participatory works of knowledge and science. In light of what
citizens can create, a State is a work of justice. However, it is so only insofar as it is
increasingly fruit of collective creation in which freedom is shown to be a complex
relational process instead of the dogma into which it has stagnated.
What limits political philosophy from securing itself as an extension of
collective creativity? What can prevent its slide into engineering and disaster? One of
the responses could be the nature itself of its discursive composition. Decades after
mapping human nature and potential in the Leviathan, theories of the social contract
split themselves increasingly from the analytical field of psychological inquiry into
human nature, while keeping for its own domain the nature of the political and of law.
In this movement of discursive filtering, having recourse to empirical analysis became
increasingly necessary. The study of history in the nineteenth century, the time of its
consecration as a science, came to compensate what the distancing from psychology
left pending for political philosophy. The insertion of history into a now legalized form
614 | Sub specie aeternitatis: Festschrift for Nythamar de Oliveira
of psychologism typical of the constitutional direction did not create a new science,
though. In fact, history risked neutralizing the applicability of the prescriptions issued
by the latter. Political philosophy reinforced the legal and administrative apparatus in
which citizen virtue and ethics were recast, even allowing for a religious form of
morality to dictate over the rights granted to citizens. Still, this direction in political
philosophy did not eye with less suspicion the lessons history could bring to the
theoretical realm.
Following up on this dispute with history, a second direction in political
philosophy emerged in response to the need of recognizing demands to integrate
broader sectors of the population into the public conceptual space. It would use the
expedient of justice to determine the conditions of its inclusion. In this movement, it
is less history per se that is coveted for an interdisciplinary partnership than
economics, or rather political economy. In the beginning of the twentieth century, the
example of creating an income tax in the United States of America represents a true
leap for a community hoping to give itself the means to carry out its social objectives.
Taxation was a revolutionary program. Depending on how it is crafted, it still is. Up
until the first World World, revenue from income tax had financing wars as its main
goal.20 It might seem ironic that an overall progressive tax reform
that is, one not
limited to income, but focused on inherence, capital gains and dividends
encounters
such dire opposition today precisely when society requires the State to increase its
spending. But this opposition is simply proportional to the measure of wealth
concentration that has occurred over the past three decades. Since then, plutocracy
has clasped onto tax-exemption and new financial instruments to forge astronomical
profits in what has become a non-productive capitalism. Tax havens, initially created
by the City of London to perpetuate its global rule, ushered in a return to a mode of
government by the rich merely for the rich. 21
A progressive tax system is the main reform that has to be put on the agenda by
political philosophy in Brazil, provided the funds collected be reinvested in society
and not in banks and financial institutions. Most liberal democracies would also do
Cf. Thomas Piketty. Capital et idéologie. Éditions du Seuil, Paris, 2019 (2019); Emmanuel Saes and
Gabriel Zucman, The Triumph of Injustice. How the Rich Dodge Taxes and how to make them pay.
W.W. Norton, New York, 2019 and also Kevin Phillips, Wealth and Democracy: A Political History of
the American Rich. Broadway Books, New York, 2003.
21 Cf. Ladislau Dowbor, A Era do Capitalismo Improdutivo. Outras Palavras & Autonomia Literária, São
Paulo, 2017.
20
Norman R. Madarasz | 615
well to ditch the neoliberal stripping of public patrimony and criminalize tax havens.
The gains from which wage earners would indirectly benefit from such progressive tax
legislation could even eliminate the need for a universal basic income. Moreover,
determining the right amount of such a basic income depends on rates of inflation,
levels of goods and services tax as well as general cost of living. If a society still desires
to give itself the wherewithal to survive and political philosophy the means to
demonstrate how its concrete inscription does not imply the exclusion of prescriptions
that aim for universal assent, then there is little other option than to flatten the curve
of wealth concentration, the true economic curse of our times.
Integrating discursive fields is not without its own problems, even in as
transdisciplinary a field as political philosophy. While constitutions already play a part
of the revolutionary spirit of natural right and the social contract, it has always been
manifest how imperfect they actually are. On the margins of this artful practice, to
which philosophy has been such a major contributor, reparatory maneuvers emit a
constant buzz. From the margins of constitutionality, an extra-legal resource is carved
out, one specifically aimed at the ethical space triggered by the demand for rights.
Modern constitutions tend to follow this path, recognizing and activating this resource.
That this amounts to a revolution in thought, of a revolution that surpasses the spirit
of secularism by integrating it as an instrument by which to recognize injustice within
the constitutional order itself, is what can be properly observed in the second direction
of political philosophy, the amendment-based or extra-constitutional direction.
The spirit of constitutional amendments deals with correction, as recognized by
State and society alike. Ever since the Haitian Revolution of the Enslaved, historically
excluded populations in the Americas have urged for their own rights to also be
written. From the First Amendment to the Constitution of the USA, until the glorious
but tragically flawed Thirteenth22, the margin created by constitutional amendments
makes up the membrane by which the flux of real life permeates into the supreme law
Written in two sections, the Thirteenth Amendment or Emancipation Proclamati
1. Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall
have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Section 2. Congress shall
"13th
Amendment". Legal Information Institute. Cornell University Law School. Retrieved August 7, 2020.
(My emphasis). Through this loophole, the amendment quite literally legalizes slave labor for
22
complex. (2003). See also, Duvernay (2016).
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and the theories by which they are upheld. When voted in legislative assemblies,
ural form proves that it does not fail to integrate social
struggle into its own field. The juridical truth consecrated by such modifications always
has legislative potential on its side, provided this truth be recognized for the right
reasons. Inasmuch as it does, its symbolic object builds upon inclusive policies as that
which bolster accountability instead of a misleading universalism or a camouflaged bit
of private interest. The symbolic object of the second direction in political philosophy
meets the long flow of rivers, ancient and dusky, as deep as the soul, as Langston
Hughes once sang. The color shining forth from them is deep blue.
Yet the amendatory discursive structure of the second direction in political
philosophy does not altogether escape from destabilization. It risks crashing against a
reef once interlocutions are allowed with the reductive versions of the economic
sciences. With economic theories recognizing the supreme value of labor as a drive to
create wealth, the extra-constitutional direction compensates its conceptual lacuna
with concrete objectivities, such as wealth redistribution and labor law. The
constitutional and extra-constitutional directions of political philosophy assert the
possibility of transcending racial, gender and economic disparities in the name of
higher moral principles. Yet they all too often surrender to the misunderstood
obstacles of middle-term projects, especially those reiterating how economic equality
would transform individuals into clones of one another.
Within the discursive structure of constitutional political philosophy, attempts
at including economics have often worsened its internal coherence. When surrounded
by a historical economic sequence, in which the system produces not only inequality,
but misery and psychosomatic suffering, political philosophy can end up normalizing,
even naturalizing, constraints determined by its own parameters. By legitimizing
rational arguments on natural hierarchies and wealth disparity, it can frequently lead
oppressed subjects to obsequiousness, submitting them to the humiliation of
impoverishment and servitude.
Nevertheless, in the case of the second political direction, limits to including
economic discourse into its camp is not so much impossible as it is undesirable. The
logic of constitutional amendments in a good number of functional democracies
produces not only concrete, but ethical results, the most spectacular of which was no
doubt the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, by which freed African-
Norman R. Madarasz | 617
American persons were granted the right to citizenship and to vote. The fact that
thousands of persons head to the streets to protest again racism and political violence
is without a doubt a contingency, even when it happens during a pandemic. Yet their
goal
our goal
is one and the same: it takes aim at those in charge of the absurd
management of this pandemic in both the U.S. and Brazil.
The roots of political violence committed in different, but equality abusive,
degrees in Brazil and the USA exposes the double of this second direction. The political
carries out, over and above the collective fear experienced daily in Brazilian favela
communities and disenfranchised American neighborhoods, the erasure of the means
of survival of African-descendants in both countries. As previously in the Vaccine
Revolt, militarized police forces, vetted on sturdy budgets, extend the legacy of
institutionalized slavery by marking persons according to the color of their skin.
Policing has come to reinforce the system of social exclusion now reproduced by
structural racism. The prison complex has reverted, in the U.S. at least, what the
aforementioned amendments no longer allowed. Perhaps no event better marks the
limitations and helplessness revealed by extra-constitutional political philosophy than
precisely the partiality with which terror was wrought by the federal State during the
Vaccine Revolt in Rio de Janeiro
and by the all-white racist police forces operating
in inner cities in the U.S.
Giving oneself the wherewithal and sensitivity to fully understand the
implications of such terror still requires the critical openness reserved for a third
direction in political philosophy. Meanwhile, the double of the second direction is
without a doubt a repressive police state having no accountability with justice,
furthermore a state legitimized by a cast of intellectuals, attorneys and judges. Joining
them are the modern day technocrats, experts in computer mining, and professionals
of the State. In its unfolding, this double of extra-constitutional political philosophy
tends to present arguments favoring inequality between classes, genders and ethnic
groups as a mere extension of hierarchies allegedly found in nature. Justifying the
existence of inequality shows why there is no way to go further with institutional
constitutionality.
The judicialization of political philosophy typically veils subliminal levels of
class and racial bias. In the end, it amounts to justifying the cruelty suffered by poor
sectors of the population
and by the poorest even more , persons doomed to misery,
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stripped even of minimal access to socialization, much less to a social safety net.
Historically, theoretical racism would be transformed into white supremacist hatred.
Its acting out went by lynchings, destruction of neighborhoods and intimidating voter
restrictions, in virtue of clauses that would exclude those who could not read from the
political process when thugs did not keep them away from polling booths. This was but
a second form of exclusion after the enslaved had been constitutional forbidden in
Brazil or prevented by law in the U.S., from benefiting of an education. Barred from
reading and writing skills, the central slave-trading powers aimed at keeping the poor
from the political process. When they got closer to the latter, white supremacy would
turn, as it did in Memphis and Louisiana in 1866 and Tulsa, Oklahoma in 1921, to
massacre. In Brazil, the yearly massacre by law enforcement of male Afrobrazilians
under the age of twenty-five has already reached genocidal proportions.
In cases where the conflict of discourses mutates the unitary space of political
philosophy and spills over into the social places of constructive political practices, a
third direction, the infraconstitutional, may be cited. Its color, like its glow, is red. The
technical complexity of its symbolic object is clearly more advanced as is its own
organizational structure. Its application aims to split lost time by spectroscopy in order
to weld it to a new reality. The infrared beam can also detect the unmistakable heat
triggered by the fever symptomatic of Covid-19.
Like infrared light, the infraconstitutional orientation does not lend itself to
being perceived in its totality. Analogous to it, the infraconstitutional direction carries
within itself important information as to its formal organization. Spectroscopic
movements break down the information against the threat of reduction or deletion.
This information cannot be derived from visibility, at least not externally. Viewed from
within, it might very well be unrecognizable, were political philosophy not intent on
integrating scientific standards for increased stability of its own translations of
discursive practices. As such, political philosophy may emerge as a fundamental
science in which demonstrations draw thought closer to the real by showing how truths
are created from within the latter. These truths prove to emerge in and through shifting
the lateral forms of practical organization, in relation to which leaders become an
impediment.
Deviations from infraconstitutional thought appear when the latter allows itself
to be fooled by the idea that the creation of common political space may only occur in
Norman R. Madarasz | 619
-
à venir
likes of Angela Davis and James Baldwin have shown that, without integrating a
critical, antiracist history of continental slavery, the future is literally unable to arrive.
Infrared philosophy already has a future to fix, indeed, a racist future to rid.
Without embracing antiracism, not even post-conventional moral arguments
can prevent shackles from binding its aspirations for inclusion. In the second direction,
the sophisticated versatility of Realpolitik adorns the theoretical apparatus with a
conviction that the rationality underlying the integration of amendments to a
constitution is upheld by the spirit of conciliation that mends divergent discourses.
Not infrequently, amendments are shipwrecked as a result of the inertia of their own
scientific rationality. After all, the amendatory orientation functions insofar as
discourses adjacent to political philosophy repair instances of exclusion and violent
oppression suffered by the disenfranchised.
The third orientation really emerges discontinuously in another phenomenal
realm, one that is no less structuring for political philosophy. It completes the impeded
intersectionality of a discourse previously excluded from science and doomed to
irrational destruction. When the infrared thermometer identifies the fever underlying
a dramatically unjust society due to wealth disparity, it is rare for it not to accuse the
sanctity of private property. The sacralisation of private property could be carried out
only with the appropriation of Indigenous persons or those brought from the African
continent, doomed to be sold, violated, raped and reduced as commodities in the slavetrading motor of Atlantic capitalism. Critical history bears out the story according to
which capitalism grew thanks to machines, fruit of the-all mighty Industrial
Revolution. Prior to that, capitalism had already operated beyond even its own internal
commercial contradictions at the level of indentured and slave-based labour. From
them, natural resources were extracted externally and internally, the very force of
which the glorious industry of advanced countries was so in need. As such, a sentence
comes to assert the infrared orientation in terms of the Covidtime in which one discusses how persons can think a new democratic structure for
society, there canno
23
El País Brasil, June 14, 2020.
< https://brasil.elpais.com/brasil/2020-06-14/nao-se-pode-pensar-a-democracia-real-no-brasil-se-oracismo-nao-for-um-ponto-central.html%E2%80%9CN%C3%A3o?fbclid=IwAR0x6wUsDNWtMZSLLqiJmfIsJNWP88LwVWfY8RPzus46Qx5TI59LVaHSlo>.
23
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These days, the struggle against the privatization of the commons also takes
place in the struggle against violence against women, and particularly against women
Amefricans
of color. It is the struggle to
to cite Brazilian philosopher Lelia Gonzalez, still remain the most vulnerable to suffer
different forms of sexual violence. Their living spectres are projected onto the
complicity of the misleading rational perfectibility of a constitutional political
philosophy. As Angela Davis has written when reflecting upon the conditions and
Rape, in fact, was an uncamouflaged
24
By integrating rape and slavery through spectroscopy steeped
in the black and brown in order to make the red beam flash, voices are heard that can
no longer silence the urgency of statements
Parem de nos matar
The infraconstitutional orientation opened by the critical dimension of theory
amounts to signing onto the surging forth of newly situated and embodied
subjectivities. Their emergence occurs in confrontation with the rule of law, the norm
from which they had previously been excluded. But if the amendatory blue-orientation
ends up punctually integrating previously excluded perspectives, only the force of the
infrared orientation can overthrow the scientificity of liberal political discourse. When
managing to present it as a concrete option, hegemonic institutions may attempt to
discredit its aesthetic and fictional aspects. They distort its truth through an ideal of
validation that only works well when coexisting with obscure ideologies.
3 Epilogue
Considered according to the two first directions in political philosophy, the
current pandemic unquestionably caught the humanities unprepared. The rupture
observed between a philosophical education and history is so deep one cannot merely
lament it was created by an all-out attack against scientific research, travestied as a
national policy of higher education. Suddenly the pandemic surged to face nature and
its inhabitants off regarding a constitutional order and the discourses reproducing it.
If science promotes measures by which to control the pandemic, it also keeps itself far
24
Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class. Random House, New York, 1981, p. 10.
Norman R. Madarasz | 621
too submissive to the interests of plutocrats for there really to be a public calamity
produced by the disease.
By the end of the 1990s, Susan George, the political scientist and founding
member of the ATTAC research group, used the recourses of fiction to integrate what
constitutional political philosophy demeans as conspiracy theories. In her Lugano
Report,
nd
political members of the global elite. Its proposals were aimed at passively shrinking
down the size of the human population so as to attend to the needs and ends of a
capitalist world system. In the hands of the elite, pandemics represent the perfect
storm. Where George may have been inaccurate was only in the conviction, expressed
by her characters, that a soon-to-come pandemic would be unleashed by supergerms,
generated by the reckless planetary use of antibiotics. 25
Fictional supplementation becomes a formal tool in the infraconstitutional
direction. The risk of seeking this kind of interface with political philosophy is to open
the political space too far. Messianism and other forms of obscurantist delusions are a
symptom of such opening. In cynical hands, they aim at creating false hopes, emotional
confusion and predictable retaliatory hate crimes when the degree of their foolery is
exposed.
But opening is what is nonetheless at stake, as the task is to situate the political
from within a process l
and limit prove to be porous. Analysis of non-recognized forms of political subjectivity
becomes the new challenge. They have to be sought without the guarantees of
instantiation. Anchoring proposals in deductive arguments is not only wished for, but
possible. Michael Neocosmos, for example, stresses how his research into the
and discussing this excessive subjectivity
this thought in the strict sense, for
expressive subjectivity is not thought, but mere expression of interest
justifying its
existence, outlining some of the categories necessary for it to begin to be apprehended
in thought, and identifying the way it is still marked by and linked to expression and
26
Susan George, The Lugano Report: on Preserving Capitalism in the Twenty-first Century, Pluto
Press, London, 1999.
26 Michael Neocosmos, Thinking Freedom in Africa: Toward a Theory of Emancipatory Politics. Wits
25
to a vision of representation in which what people say when
622 | Sub specie aeternitatis: Festschrift for Nythamar de Oliveira
no possibility for social margins to be filled by widespread infrared concrete political
action. Pressures and restrictions aided and abetted by transnational corporate media
suffocated most proposals that could favor another economic system the basis of which
would be to engaging with the communist hypothesis. Symptomatic of it all was how
the key sentence in the penultimate paragraph of the Communist Manifesto had
always been occluded as much in positive references to the book as in those deriding
democratic parties
27
It has taken half a century since The Lugano
Report for a communist economic and political system to acquire a level of technical
and organizational sophistication able again to show the lie of the primacy of the
scarcity of goods. By pulling millions from poverty, China has gone from a limitless
repository of cheap labor, ready to accommodate the relocations of globalization, to
carry out the most sophisticated social-democratic economic organization of the 21st
The proof lies in the way it managed to contain the spread of Sars-CoV-2 and
treat cases of Covid-19. After the 2008 collapse and the following recession, China had
already saved the economies and financial markets of the West through its
monumental public infrastructure works.28 In the promissory figure in which a billion
persons have been drawn from poverty in the world, seventy percent of them are
Chinese.29 Through the existence of China, in light of the pandemic and the antiracist
struggle triggered in liberal democracies weighed down by unprecedented degrees of
concentration of wealth, political philosophy confronts the need for a structural
revision that is at the very least comparable to the achievements of this millenary flux
of State and economic form.
To complete the symmetry, the third direction of political philosophy also
confronts its degenerate double. We have seen how crushing normalization delimits
the first constitutional direction of political philosophy and how terrorizing repression
pulverizes the second, the extra-constitutional. The third direction, for being
they think at a distance from the state is taken seriously. The political problem consists in how to sustain
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, Vintage Press, London, 2018, p. 52.
Jabbour, Dantas E Espíndola, 2020.
29 Dowbor, 2017, p. 150, citing various sources.
27
28
Norman R. Madarasz | 623
infraconstitutional, contains a totalizing, purportedly totalitarian opposite, but in
appearance. Less discursive than the doubles of the first two directions, its opposite is
opaque and brutal. Neither constitutional nor extra-constitutional political philosophy
aim to inscribe in their models the hundreds of thousands of deaths by Covid-19 in
Brazil and the United States. Only the third orientation manages to associate
to better vindicate
perhaps
these deaths with racism and the most vulgar class discrimination.
The double of the third direction is thus death. Its realization is given through
the brutality of assassination, of extrajudicial execution and genocide. A genocide
provoked by passive inactivity and negationism by governments built upon economic,
military and religious powers. The future of political philosophy struggles with
complete symmetry. But through its most hopeful incentives, this art of thought,
reason and art stands in front of the racist gun of pandemics, as does the future of us
all
though no future more so than that of our fellow continental African-Americans.
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