Roberto Mangabeira Unger I

Appendix to the New Edition:
Five Theses on the Relation of Religion to Politics,
Illustrated by Allusions to Brazilian Experience


1 The Personality Thesis
An exemplary experience of possibilities of personal connection–of intense and transfiguring relationships among individuals–forms a central part of the visions developed by the historical religions of salvation. Each such vision promises a happiness dissolving or attenuating the conflict between our need for one another and the jeopardy in which we place one another. To experience some measure of this reconciliation is to become free; the promise of happiness is a promise of freedom. The narrative structure of belief in the historical religions exhibits a world in which this promise of happiness makes sense. The ethical imperative in the historical religions shows how this world can be made real, strengthening its purchase on everyday life.
Such a view of religion privileges the forms of religious consciousness that place the personal above the impersonal (e.g., the religion of the Bible over the doctrines of Plato or Spinoza). It may, however, embrace even a religion, like Buddhism, that rejects the all-the-way-down reality of individual experience. What the narrative structure of such a religion seems to deny, its ethical imperative may reaffirm. Moreover, this understanding of religion also suggests a way to evade the choice between metaphorical and literalist accounts of religious belief.
The basic relation of religion to politics arises from the formative role assigned to exemplary personal relations in religious experience and vision. The most significant form of political theology is not the official teaching about the state, but the image of possible human association that is acted out in the community and the deeds of believers. For example, in Brazil the Pentecostal movements, making conversions by the millions, offer practical liberalism–communities of the elect, marked by the qualities of self-reliance, trustworthiness, self-cultivation and mutual respect. These qualities are scarce in a world of patrons and clients in which power, exchange, and sentiment remain mixed up. By contrast, the radicalized Catholic Church promises progress through prophetic resistance and confrontation, as well as through engagement in “secondary associations” with an adversarial relation to the established powers of government, capital, and television.

2 The Democracy Thesis
The moral and political ideals of a culture have often amounted to a transaction between the vision of exemplary personal relations voiced by an influential religion and the concerns of dominant classes. Thus, nineteenth-century bourgeois conceptions of married happiness built a precarious bridge between Christian hopes and Victorian realities. However, the bond between democracy and the religion of the Bible is more intimate and internal than this history of equivocations and attenuations might lead us to expect. The nature of this link is best illuminated by first probing the troubled relation between two master themes of the religion of the Bible: the idea of spirit as the infinite caught in the finite, as transcendence over context, and the organization of moral experience around love rather than altruism.
What is the connection between these two themes? According to Hegel, love is the relation in which we most fully recognize and accept one another as spirits; that is to say, as beings whose powers of insight, association, transformation, and self‑transformation go beyond all the practical and discursive worlds we make and inhabit. The trouble with this Hegelian formula is that we are not yet fully these context-transcending beings; we must become them. One way in which we do so is by advancing the democratic project, understood to include the progressive freeing of activity and relationship from a background grid of entrenched social division and hierarchy. The religious element in democracy is the search for social arrangements that make us more fully available to one another as the context-transcending individuals the religion of the Bible proclaims us to be. The weak point, however, is the failure to translate this asserted connection between religious vision and democratic progress into a promising institutional conception.
The consequences of this failure are manifest in the Brazilian dealings between religion and politics. Three political theologies are on offer in the country.
The first such theology is the residue of the traditional social teaching of the Catholic Church. The interwar corporatist communitarianism of "Quadragesimo Anno," with its design of a "third way" between capitalism and communism, lost its attraction: first, because of its proximity to fascist corporatism; and second, more profoundly, because of its unwarranted reliance on established economic institutions–corporations and unions of workers and employers–as an adequate template for the communitarianism it proposed. This neo-feudal doctrine has been followed by a demand for a social solidarity increasingly devoid of institutional content. The empty space is occupied by the familiar tax-and-transfer programs of contemporary social democracy, unsupported by any attempt to democratize access to productive resources and opportunities.
The second political theology is the attempt, characteristic of the Pentecostal movements, to secede into a purified world of reciprocal respect and self-improvement, exacting occasional concessions from government while accepting the established order. However, the unchallenged and unchanged larger world strikes back against the little worlds of the would-be secessionists and self-improvers, limiting their development and arresting, in the chains of outward control and inward submission, the dynamic of exemplary personal relations.
The third political theology is the liberation theology of the radicalized Catholic Church. Its political instrument is the de facto partnership between the Church and the PT [Partido dos Trabalhadores]. Unlike the other two political theologies, it renounces institutional conservatism and confronts entrenched power. However, it does so without proposing any real set of institutional alternatives in the organization of state, economy, civil society, and family. The commitment to a practice–grassroots organization and self-organization–fills the void left by the absence of a reconstructive vision. As a result of this default, a growing divergence arises between the transformative or prophetic intention and the redistributive or ameliorative content of the social campaigns in which the radicalized Church engages. The grassroots activism degenerates into a new form of guidance, in which the activist priest or partisan replaces the patron. Thus, the institutional emptiness of the third political theology ends up complementing rather than contradicting the institutional conservatism of the other two political theologies.

3 The Macro–Micro Thesis
Tocqueville remarked that the French Revolution was momentous because it combined a political and a religious revolution. The rational kernel in the mystical shell of the idea of political revolution is, today, the macropolitics of institutional change. In the idea of religious revolution, the rational kernel is the micropolitics of change in the dominant styles of personal relationship and expression. What this translation leaves out on the religious side is the element of urgent and enacted belief, making sense of the imperative of change and rooting it in a larger vision of human possibility and solidarity.
Although the link between macropolitics and micropolitics is widely acknowledged to be indispensable, it is in fact rarely secured. Where one of these forms of politics becomes strongest, the other often remains weakest. As a result, programs of institutional change are commonly perverted or reversed in their effects by the style of personal association that they have left unchanged. Cut off from hopes of social reconstruction, the cultural-revolutionary politics of personal relations turns inward toward private experimentalism and narcissism.
A religious consciousness, freed from the spiritual defect of world-abandonment and from the political defect of institutional fetishism, can resist this severance of macropolitics from micropolitics. Its overriding political work is to remind the institutional imagination of the recalcitrant realities of personal need–especially people’s need for one another–while challenging the narcissistic perversion of individual emancipation and experimentalism. To accomplish this work, however, the religious consciousness requires insight into social and institutional possibility. But there is no place in contemporary high culture where it can safely find such instruction. It must somehow compensate for the consequences of this intellectual absence by developing surrogate practices of institutional imagination.
In Brazil, as in much of the world, the bridge between macro- and micropolitics remains unbuilt, in part because religion has failed to build it. The political theology of the Pentecostals focuses on a microworld exempt from the macroworld it has failed to challenge or change. The political theology of the radicalized Catholic Church reduces the problem of reshaping the macro- and microworlds to the promotion of a practice of engagement and resistance. The political theology of the traditional Church has retreated to the nostrums of tax-and-transfer social democracy, having lost confidence in the formula of corporatist communitarianism. All three political theologies are now institutionally empty. Their institutional emptiness weakens their prophetic force and disorients their political vision.

4 The Antiparticularism Thesis
A religious experience grounded in the personalist dynamic of transcendence and love undermines ethnic, national, cultural and gender privileges and exclusions, even when it seems to give such distinctions a religious meaning and value. This subversive potential has two main roots in religious experience–at least, in the religion of the Bible. The first root is the effort to act upon the insight that there is more in us than in the particular discursive and practical worlds that we construct and inhabit. We can develop arrangements respecting and moderating this disproportion. The second root is the impulse to make ourselves practically and passionately available to one another as individuals, rather than as placeholders in the divisions and hierarchies of society and culture.
The historical religions seem to differ in their explicit valuation of the significance and finality of national distinctions: Christianity and Buddhism on one side; Hinduism and Judaism on another; and a broad range of religions (e.g., Japanese and African) in between. Even in the supposedly particularizing and exclusive religions, however, prophecy opposes to the mystery of national election and distinction (related to our embodied and situated character) the counter-mystery of our power to act on the knowledge that the divisions within mankind belong to the plot rather than to the message and must, in the end, be defied.
The privatization of religion in contemporary liberal-democratic societies muffles this subversive and universalizing impulse by compelling it to speak in the public world a purely secular language of rights and enlightenment. The most ferocious religious assertions of particularism are thereby deprived of their religious enemies. Moreover, the institutional emptiness of the dominant political theologies makes these theologies powerless to resist what is becoming the dominant form of group chauvinism in the contemporary world: the assertion of an abstract will to collective difference, which becomes ever more intense as actual differences of custom and sensibility wane.
One people struggles to be apart from its neighbors less because it has a distinct form of life to maintain than because it does not have one but wants one, or wants to think it already has one. The peoples who have done best at sustaining practical autonomy are the most relentless pillagers of world practices and institutions, in the opportunistic search for what works best. The failure to develop or sustain real differences makes the assertion of these imagined or desired differences all the more relentless: abstract identities, unlike concrete arrangements, lie beyond compromise or recombination, and impotence makes for rage.
The more fully and freely religion engages in politics, the less likely it is to join this battle solely on the particularizing side. The better a political theology equips itself with an institutional imagination, the more it can help to develop different forms of life and to strengthen, with this experience of collective power, the magnanimity of the self-possessed.
The religious life of the Brazilian people allows us to see these circumstances from yet another perspective. The absence of a real struggle within and outside religion between universalizing and particularizing tendencies helps to keep the level of religious energy low for the vast majority of Brazilians. Both traditional Catholic religiosity and its Pentecostal rival enter social life in a way that is neither political nor strictly privatized but, rather, domestic: a set of ritual practices, half-believed beliefs, and fragmentary commonalities, reinforcing family life and dulling despair. What the traditional Catholic rituals and beliefs do for the salaried middle classes, their Pentecostal counterparts have come, increasingly, to do for a mass of workers trying to lift themselves up to a condition of self-reliance and self-improvement. High-energy religion exists at the margins. Low-energy religion remains the rule. This generalized religious demobilization, obscured by the more notorious religious conflicts highlighted in the contending political theologies, is both cause and consequence of the suppression of problems of race and gender.

5 The Missing Agent Thesis
As the content of religious belief shifts, so must the agents of religious action change. Who are the agents of a practice of religion placing exemplary personal experience at the center, recognizing the relation of faith to democracy, connecting the large world of institutions to the small world of personal relations through a practice and vision of social reconstruction, and letting loose the particularism-subverting force of its prophetic intimations?
The modern history of religion has seen the diffusion of the idea of the priesthood of all believers. But there are two problems. The first problem is that the religion described in the first four theses requires that all believers be prophets as well as priests. The second problem is that the characteristic experience of living faith has today become one in which the same people are simultaneously believers and nonbelievers. Neither the church nor the political party, nor the partnership between the two, can adequately speak for such a religion and such an experience. Who, then, can?
The moral and psychological danger is that such a religion may provide the vehicle and opportunity for charismatic leadership–not just in politics narrowly understood, but in every setting of social life. The followers of the charismatic leaders, like the workers mobilized by the prophetic activists of the radicalized Church in Brazil, then feel torn between the sense of being inspired and the sense of being excluded from the power and the grace of original inspiration. The antidote is to link the large world of institutions and the small world of personal relations in ways that make people parties to conflicts of vision, and remind them of their power to resist, transcend, and connect, diminishing reliance upon the privileged agency of charismatic leadership. To that end, we need political and economic institutions and styles of personal association accelerating experimentalism in every domain of social life. It is the way to make everyone a prophet.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger II

The Boutwood Lectures
Corpus Christi College
Cambridge University

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

Second lecture: The transformation of experience

In my first lecture, I outlined a program for the advancement of our democratic, experimentalist, and productive ideals and interests, by devices and in a language addressed to the circumstance of contemporary societies, especially of the European social democracies. This program rejects a return to the historical form of social democracy. However, it also refuses to acquiesce in the hollowing-out of the social-democratic project that now commonly goes under the label the third way.
I described this program in six large convergent directions: the financing and facilitation of the new; the endowment and the equipment of the individual worker and citizen; the democratizing of the market economy, that is to say, the decentralization of access to productive resources and opportunity; the organization of a caring economy and its superimposition on the production system; the development of an institutionalized high-energy politics requiring greater civic engagement and encouraging the accelerated practice of structural reform; and the independent organization of civil society outside the state but beyond the limits of private law.
The spirit of this program is the attempt to combine empowerment with connection. The forms of empowerment most readily available to us in the contemporary world are acquired at the price of disconnection from others. The forms of connection to which we have easiest access are sustained at the price of some belittlement, some diminishment of our powers of individual and collective self-transformation. What we should chiefly desire is to find ways to empower ourselves, individually and collectively, that also connect us, and ways to connect us that also empower us.
The chief instrument for the development and the execution of this program, understood as a direction rather than as a blueprint, is the quickened practice of institutional experimentalism: motivated, directed, and cumulative experimentation with the institutional forms that now define representative democracy, market economy, and free civil society. In the history of modern social thought our idea of structural discontinuity has ordinarily been associated with a conception of revolutionary or total change. Our commitment to gradualism has ordinarily been connected with repudiation of the idea of structural reinvention. We must jumble these categories up. We should associate the disposition to structural discontinuity with an acknowledgement that the reinvention of structure ordinarily takes place step-by-step and part-by-part.
Social alternatives in the contemporary world have vanished in the form in which they were familiar to us: large-scale ideological abstractions like socialism. We must, therefore, recover and rebuild, from the bottom up, from the inside out, the practice of working alternatives out, in imagination and in reality. The solution is to imagine and to generate the alternatives as the extension or the deepening of the small-scale variations already available to us.
After the collapse of communism and the discrediting of traditional socialist ideas, there is a limited repertory of institutional alternatives available in each domain of social life. To understand this repertory, to explain its genealogy, to criticize it, and then to expand and renovate it is the true object of constructive social thought and action in the contemporary circumstance. Our goal, however, should not be simply to replace some institutions by others. It must also be to change the character as well as the content of the institutions, their relation to the constructive freedom or action by which we defy or reshape them.
We should not want institutional and discursive systems that are presented to us as brute natural facts on a take it or leave it basis. We should want institutional and discursive systems that lay themselves open to challenge and revision. Such orders of society and of culture allow us to attenuate the contrast between the normal activities by which we pursue our interests and ideals in a framework taken as given and the extraordinary activities by which we re-imagine and remake parts of this framework.
We have a fundamental stake in this transformation of the quality of institutional life: to make a social world that is a more suitable habitation for us as beings who exceed all cultural and social systems that we create and inhabit. Such systems are finite. We, relative to them, are infinite. There is always more in us than there is in them.
This interest of ours in arranging society and culture in a way that bears the imprint of spirit – spirit transcending circumstance -- can be made to converge with our moral interest in the relative equalization of economic circumstance as well as with our material interest in quickening of the pace of invention, innovation, and practical progress. The zone of possible intersection among these interests, translated into a project of cumulative institutional renovation, is the program and the practice that I here outline and defend.
Although I presented this program in terms that are specially directed to the circumstances of the contemporary European social democracies, I do not regard this proposal, defined in such general terms, as a local program. It is a universal program in its intentions. It is not just one of many ways; it is another way, a second way. Nevertheless one of the aims of this program is to facilitate the creation of real difference in the world, so that in the future the nature of the national difference in a world of democracies can more fully represent a moral specialization within humanity. The powers and possibilities of mankind develop, if they are to develop at all, in different directions, as unique forms of life, with distinct institutional embodiments. Thus the idea of many ways as the alternative to the One True Way may seem irresistibly attractive; it combines practicality with modesty. The thesis of the many ways is nevertheless false and dangerous.
In the circumstances of poorer as well as of richer countries, to democratize the market and to deepen democracy we must renovate, with the limited tools at hand, the institutional repertory available to us. If the contemporary societies are to become more truly different in the future – different on the basis of democracy and experiment rather than different solely by the force of tradition, compulsion, weakness -- they must pass through a common gateway of institutional innovations. I here call this threshold the second way. to pass through this gateway so that they then can become more truly different in the future. The need to pass through the gateway rests on two grounds: one, arising from the requirements of effective rebellion; the other, throwing light on a disturbing ambiguity in the idea of the many ways.
A universal orthodoxy cannot be adequately be resisted by local heresies. Only a universalizing heresy can successfully combat a universal orthodoxy as the liberals and socialists of the nineteenth century understood. The peculiar character of the present contest of collective identities, and of the national and ethnic animosities to which they give rise, lies in their relative emptiness. The will to collective difference is aroused as actual difference wanes. Actual difference diminishes because under the conditions of world history countries can remain strong and independent only by pillaging practices and ideas from others and because all are now subject to the worldwide seduction of a culture promising material gratification and moral fulfillment to the ordinary man and woman. What is the distinctive will that combines the pillaged practices with the local residues? It needs instruction, and cannot get it from traditions and preconceptions it has already begun irretrievably to dismantle.
Moreover, the idea of the many ways conceals an ambiguity. Established on one of two possible basis, a special way – any one of the many ways – turns out to be precarious. Established on the other basis, it proves to be illegitimate as a route to the alliance of democracy with development. If the local heresies are adopted for merely pragmatic reasons, they will be abandoned at the first sign of difficulty and fail to resist the gravitational pull of the dominant solutions. (Consider any relatively successful example of the combination of economic orthodoxy, like Chile in the last two decades of the twentieth century.) If, on the other hand, the local heresies are anchored in reified or religiously-based collective identities, they may resist the dominant solutions. However, they will resist them only by losing communion with democratic and experimentalist ideals. (Consider any of the many contemporary societies, such as Iran, in which economic arrangements have been explicitly informed by a national theology.)
The second way can respond to two major opportunities. One opportunity results from the emergence throughout the world of a new logic of practical social coordination and innovation: a form of production characterized by the softening of hierarchical divisions between supervisory and executive roles, by the fluid mixture of cooperation and competition, and by the turning of production into a practice of permanent learning and innovation. This advanced form of production and learning now flourishes in the relatively isolated advanced sectors of richer as well as poorer economies.
The network of these advanced networks has now become the driving force in the world economy. The vast majority of mankind remains excluded from these advanced sectors even in the richest and most learned countries. The two great devices that have been available to soften the social consequences of the divisions between economic vanguards and economic rearguards – redistributive tax-and-transfer and the politically supported diffusion of small business and small property – have become inadequate to the task. Are we condemned merely to sweeten this division or can we begin to reshape and to overcome it, thus anchoring social cohesion in the arrangements governing economic growth?
We have an opportunity to generalize the reach of this new logic of production and innovation beyond the frontiers of the isolated sectors where it now flourishes. This generalization can take place only through the reinvention of relation between government and the private economy: the development of a new institutional repertory of forms of decentralized partnership between government and private enterprise. To this end, we must reject the choice between the American model of arm’s-length regulation of business by government as well as the northeast Asian model of the formulation of unitary trade and industrial policy by a central bureaucracy and the business leaders it consults. We must work instead toward a form of strategic coordination between the state and private business that is decentralized, participatory, market-deepening, pluralistic, and experimental. Such a form of coordination is worked out together by decentralized, independent public entities and ephemeral groups of firms. It works on the principle that every form of public help to the producer must be justified in part by its direct contribution to the entrance of new agents into the market and the radicalization of competition. Its characteristic product is not a master plan but a set of alternative and even conflicting strategic conjectures, allowed to coexist for the sake of seeing which work best. The aim is to democratize the market – to democratize it, not just to regulate it, nor merely to compensate, through redistributive programs, for its inequalities. This goal in turn leads into the other parts of the program of the second way.
Another major opportunity to open up the second way arises from the clash of collective identities. The peoples of the world want to be different. Increasingly, however, they are not. Collective identities are aroused and poisoned in the very process of being emptied of concrete content: nations and communities may hate one another all the more for becoming more alike, for wanting to be different and failing. The solution that converges with the interests of democracy and practical progress is to replace this fantastical or willed difference with the ability to create real difference. To strengthen this capacity is one of the purposes of a democratizing and experimentalist alternative. Such an alternative can help turn the national difference into a product of moral specialization within humanity. The turn expresses the truths the that the roots of a human being lie in the future more than in the past and that under democracy, prophesy speaks louder than memory.
These may seem nearly empty abstractions. They nevertheless have powerful practical implications. One of these consequences has to do with the character of globalization. The present global order is being organized on the principle of freedom of movement for goods and capital but not for people. Labor remains arrested within the nation-state or within a community of relatively similar states like the European Union.
The effects of this contrast between the mobility of things and the imprisonment of people are far-reaching. One of these effects is drastically to restrict the equalizing and liberating potential of globalization. Another effect is to slow the transformation of national difference by democracy. In a world of democracies each nation-state or community of states should develop a distinct range of forms of life. If they now need to pass through similar innovations in the ways they empower individuals, democratize markets, and deepen democracies, it is only so that they may later become more truly and more freely different.
Because such distinct forms of life, with their embodiment in institutions and practices, represent a partial, slanted version of humanity, the individual must free to rebel against them and to escape them. The freedom of the individual to leave one of these worlds and to join another one is a precondition of the legitimacy of each of them. Otherwise, the strong will and the intransigent imagination will be crushed and diminished, and prophecy will find it impossible to speak louder than memory.

I have so far described the second way as a project in political economy. It intends to initiate, although by gradual means, a fundamental change. Such change, has regularly depended on calamity, especially war. It is one of the goals of this program to make change less dependent on crisis. However, humanity has not yet loosed this dependence. For this reason, the material interests served by the innovations of the second way are not enough to support the advance; they can always be accommodated, in part and for a while, by the established institutional order. The conviction and the energy for transformation cannot rest on such interests alone. They need to be informed, reinforced, and inspired by a vision of unrealized human opportunity.
Every momentous change is at once political as well as religious. The program of the second way requires us to reorient politics, to reorganize the world economy, to reshape our understanding of society, and to reorient our moral experience. Consider each of these domains in turn.
Take first the reorganization of politics. Two types of political action are familiar to us in modern history. There is the revolutionary or radical politics in which a cadre of personal leaders mobilizes an energized majority to bring about large-scale institutional transformation. It is a limiting case; often no more than a fantasy. Then there is the routine politics by which professional politicians negotiate deals among the large organized interests while conciliating the unorganized with modest transfer and symbolic concessions. It is style of politics predicated on the absence of crisis and on the moderation of social and ideological conflict.
We need a third type of politics: a transformative politics combining negotiation among the organized interests with the mobilization of the disorganized majority. Such a politics should have as its object the piecemeal but cumulative transformation of the institutional structure of society. It should dispense with crisis as the condition of change.
This transformative politics does not replace not the replace our ordinary interest-seeking activity by a mythical idea of selfless devotion to the common good. It is deepens, or rather extends, this ordinary activity. As a result, much of the exceptional practice of changing parts of the established setting of action and thought gets absorbed into the normal practice of pursing your interests or going about you job within that setting.
Transformative politics is therefore a species of a practice that should become omnipresent in the life of a democratic and experimentalist society. It is a practice that diminishes the distance between our framework-preserving and our framework-transforming activities.

Turn now to the second of the four domains in which I proposed to explore the idea of the second way: the reorganization of the world economy. The world economy is now organized on principles hostile to the emergence and the advancement of a progressive alternative such as this one. More generally, the present world economic order remains slanted against the future creation of real difference.
The arrangements and the dogmas of the present world economic order enforce and accelerate convergence toward the institutions and practices established in the rich North Atlantic democracies. To change this situation, three sets of reforms are needed.
The first reform concerns the international economic organizations, especially the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank. These agencies should not be allowed to operate as the long arms of the dominant project in political economy. Insofar as they have universal responsibilities, they must have minimal powers; their roel should be to uphold the clearing mechanisms and to provide the bridge loans that help keep the international economy open. To the extent they help define and support particular trajectories of national development, they must be made pluralistic. Either they must be broken up into many rival organizations or they must become shells accommodating teams of technicians ready to help countries and their governments to work out the strategies of national development they may embrace.
The second reform has to do with the reorientation of the world trading system. This system should not have as its generative principle the maximization of free trade as free trade is now understood. Free trade is a means, not an end. The objective of the global trading regime should be to maximize development possibilities and alternatives generated in national experience and national debate. For example, the present regime presupposes a concept of property that outlaws, under the label of subsidy, many forms of market-deepening coordination between government and private enterprise. In this way it helps freeze into place the existing international distribution of comparative advantage among countries.
The third reform regards the relation between the mobility of capital and the immobility of labor. I have already referred to the anti-liberal hypocrisy that calls free system money and goods are free to roam the world while people remain imprisoned within the borders of states. An economist would say that the efficiency cost of a policy enforced price differential, or so-called price wedge, is proportional to the square of that wedge. In the world today, these policy-enforced price differentials for commodities or financial assets rarely exceed two to one, but the price differentials for the returns to labor regularly exceed ten to one. No reform in the world would have a greater equalizing effect than the gradual acquisition by labor of freedom to cross national frontiers in the name of freedom as well as of equality. It would be impractical and self-defeating to press for an immediate and unrestricted right of migration. However, our practical and our moral interests point in the same direction: toward giving capital and labor together freedom to move, in small, cumulative increments.
How can a reform of the world economy guided by these three sets of reforms plausibly come about? Envisage a three-step sequence. The first step is for alternatives -- real alternatives -- to be established in particular nation-sates, especially in some of the large marginalized continental countries -- China, India, Russia, Indonesia, and Brazil --that are now the natural seats of resistance in the world. Almost alone they command the combination of the practical and spiritual resources with which to imagine themselves as different worlds, even though each of them has recently been inhibited in the achievement of this potential for deviation and rebellion. The second step is that there is pressure, as a result of this exercise in national heresy, to change the rules of the international economy. The third step is that this change of the rules in turn encourage the further advance of heresy in the institutional setting and the strategic orientation of national development. If, however, the European community should conspire with the United States to impose institutional uniformity and convergence upon mankind, then it will be our task in the rest of the world to defy this Metternichian settlement and to overturn it.

I now come to the third domain of transformation that needs to accompany and to confirm advance in the direction of the second way: revision of our practices of social and historical understanding. Suppose a progression in three moments.
First, we must repudiate the scientific or pseudo-scientific prejudice that would model social analysis on the image of natural science. Our study of nature is irredeemably entangled in antinomies that have become manifest in the history of modern philosophy. These antinomies ultimately arise from the disconnection of thought from action: the scope of a way of thinking that extends far beyond the horizon of our immediate existence and activity. Such antinomies express the most basic fact about us: that we are something relatively infinite caught within finite realities: the body, society and culture.
On one side, we face the antinomies of time. If time is an illusion, then so are our causal judgments. However, if time is for real and the universe has a history, then our causal judgments lack a secure basis in general laws, because these laws will also have a history.
On the other side, we confront the antinomies of experience. When we reason we may conclude that we have no direct access to the world, but remain prey to the phantasms of ours minds. When, however, we experience, it is reasoning that comes to seem fantastical, and we go on to live undaunted in the world of the manifest.
In our study of society, however, we can be relatively free of these antinomies. We can hope to gain, in relation to our social and cultural artifacts, a more god-like position. We can know them from within as their makers. This relation may increase in immediacy as we succeed in creating structures that have as one of their defining attributes to ease their own remaking, to diminish the distance between our framework-preserving and our framework-changing activities.
Is not to affirm any intellectual prestige or hierarchy but to inhabit more fully the world we are in that we should cast off pseudo-scientific prejudice. We should understand and practice social knowledge as centered on itself: a way of understanding more direct, more complete, and less contradictory than that the knowledge we can hope to gain of nature. We can then enable ourselves to repudiate a false distinction forced on us by the scientistic prejudice, the distinction between practical insight and theoretical knowledge.
We should see our theoretical knowledge of society as the deepening or extension of our ordinary practical acquaintance with social life, rather than as its overcoming by higher insight. The task of the imagination is to do the work of crisis without crisis, placing the actual under the light and the pressure of the possible. Seen in this way, imagination of things human is inseparable from human action and, in particular, from transformative action. For it is by putting pressure on the established social world, and by discovering transformative opportunity in the midst of recalcitrance and constraint, that we break the spell of the actual over our minds. Theory can continue this work; it cannot begin it. And it shares with the practical thinking that arises immediately from our efforts and engagements a crucial feature: our ability to imagine the next steps, and thus to place established reality within a penumbra of proximate and accessible variation, never depends on the power to discern the remote moves, much less to map out the horizon of the possible. A list of possible social worlds forms no part of such knowledge; the concept of such a list is a superstition weakening our powers of resistance and of insight on the pretext of arousing them.
The second moment of this intellectual transformation is the recovery and reconstruction of the idea of structural discontinuity. It is the formative arrangements and beliefs of a society change discontinuously; that they are at once faithful and contingent. In the history of modern thought this idea has become mixed up with the dogmas of historical fatalism: for example, that there are indivisible systems like capitalism; that each such system conforms to an internal logic; and that they succeed one another according to some pre-established evolutionary sequence, driven by irresistible laws of change.
We must rescue the idea of structural alternatives from such illusions. At the same time, we must assert the idea of structural alternatives against the practice of the positive social sciences. As now practiced in the universities, these sciences regularly deride the idea of structural alternatives, and rationalize the established social order. Their dominant spirit is a right-wing Hegelianism. It is a spirit inimical to the imagination of transformative possibility. For that reason it is also a mystification of social and historical experience.
The third moment in this intellectual turn is the confusion of genres. Each of the social disciplines is chained, to its own methodological agenda. Separated as they are, these disciplines are unable to confront their own limitations except when forced to face them by some shaking up in the world.. How can we best bring them up short, the better to make them face their imaginative shrinking of the possible? We best combine these disciples and subvert them by trying to understand present reality and transformative possibility in a single situation, a single country, a single moment, a single circumstance. The overthrow of the superstition that sees social knowledge as a lesser version of natural science, the recovery of the idea of structural alternatives, and the confusion of genres describe the gradual development of an intellectual climate propitious to the development of progressive social alternatives. We cannot move in a direction like that of the second way without equipping ourselves with such methods and ideas. To approach the understanding of society in such a spirit is both an expression of our ability to turn the tables on our contexts and a requirement for continuing to do so. It is a form of enlightenment without which we cannot make ourselves more fully free.

The final domain in which to address the development of an alternative is the criticism and redirection of our moral experience. I proceed metaphorically, by a series of equivalent formulations.
The first formulation has to do with the relation between our capacity to recognize the mutable character of social life and our willingness to accept the immutable conditions of human existence. We want a form of life that allows us more fully to recognize that everything in the organization of society is contingent. We must disrespect the institutional orders that contain us, the better to respect one another as beings who transcend these limited and limiting structures. Through this deliberate practice of institutional iconoclasm, we come to see all the more clearly the unchanging features of our existence as persons who will waste and die. Such a consciousness of our own humanity is both condition and consequence of a change in the organization of society. At the same time, however, it also an independent discovery of the mind, animated, in the development of this belief, by a single and wide purpose.
The second formulation has to do with the relation between two sources of human sadness. We are sad because the intensity of our desires immeasurably exceeds their objects. The objects of our desires are relatively trivial in comparison to their intensity, with the result that we find ourselves belittled and humiliated in the circumstance of ordinary life. However, we are also sad because we demand from one another more than we can give one another. Like the porcupines described by Schopenhauer, we freeze when apart, wound one another went together, and move uneasily back and forth in search of the uneasy middle distance. This unease in the company of others is the second great source of our sadness.
Our aim in the reconstruction of moral experience should be to deal with the first source of sadness in a way that allows us to address the second source. We can do so by developing forms of thought and of life that make us more fully the masters and that give us objects worthy of our energy. These social and cultural works must be distinguished by another pair of attributes. They should arrange our affairs as to blunt the conflict between the requirements of innovation and of cooperation. And they should afford us an experience of community that turns difference into a device of union, dispenses with sameness of experience or outlook, and thrives on heightened reciprocal vulnerability.
Now, this reshaping of experience can be described in a third form, related to the shape we should desire our lives to exhibit. In a society that is relatively free, relatively equal, and relatively rich, each of us could become many different people. We must nevertheless settle on a particular course of life. We must other possible selves the better to become a single self. Each of us must therefore mutilate himself. We must nonetheless continue to feel the hurt at the point of amputation, and learn to experience the ghostly movements of the missing limb. Later on, in a particular course of life, organized around compromises, we begin to give such compromises the power to define us. Having done, we begin to die little by little. A mummy forms around us; mutilated at the beginning, we are mummified toward the end.
To continue to live until we die, and to be sure to die only once, we must rip this mummy apart from the inside out. Before we can conceive the desire and develop the power to do so, we must unsettle ourselves, deliberately and repeatedly. It is a responsibility of the state to help us organize a life in which this uncompromising ambition becomes thinkable and feasible in the ordinary conditions of an ordinary human life. What great force could drive us into so hard a campaign?
Our greatest achievements in science, in art, and in politics arise from our disposition to subvert ourselves: to turn, for better and for worse, against ourselves. The task is to bring our self-subversion to the center of human experience, expunging its poison and increasing its fecundity. Society and culture should help us live out clearly and courageously this ordeal of self-subversion, unsubdued, unshaken, unterrified -- resigned yet unresigned -- struggling with the world and with ourselves, dreaming with eyes wide open, longing, striving, searching, seeking, until, restored to a child-like zeal and intensity, our hearts of stone turned into hearts of flesh, we learn to hear in the cry of every newborn a prophecy of the marriage of greatness with love.

Roberto Mangabeira Unger III

The Boutwood Lectures
Corpus Christi College
Cambridge University

Roberto Mangabeira Unger

First lecture: The transformation of society

The world is restless under the sway of the idea that there is only one way to freedom and prosperity: the institutions and practices now established in the rich North Atlantic democracies. The world is right to be restless; there is a better alternative. Briefly to expound, to develop, and to defend this alternative is the single purpose of these two lectures.
In the first lecture, I discuss the reorientation of the dominant project in political economy and the remaking of institutions that this reorientation requires. In the second lecture, tomorrow, I turn from the second way writ small to the second way writ large, and explore the changes in the character of politics, of thinking about society and of moral experience that can and should accompany this institutional reconstruction. My remarks are untimely, in form as well as in content. In presenting them I am mindful of Voltaire's warning that those who lack the spirit of the age nevertheless have all of its defects. However, I cannot be useful to you unless I remain faithful to myself.
In this first lecture, I divide the argument into four steps. In the first step, I present a view of what has been the distinctive character of European social democracy as one of the two faces that this dominate project has presented to the world, a face that is now in the process of being disfigured, of losing its distinction. In the second stage of the argument, I criticize the outcome of the present redirection of European social democracy. In the third step, I outline an alternative. And at the fourth moment of the argument, I bring out the general vision that animates this alternative and further develop its character by contrast to other positions.

First, then, European social democracy. European social democracy was defined historically by a withdrawal undertaken for the sake of an advance. The European social democrats abandoned the attempt to reorganize production and politics. Retreating from these two realms, they attempted to rearrange distribution or redistribution. There they hoped to diminish economic insecurity and inequality.
Consider a view of this social-democratic compromise focusing on the common elements of the experience of social democracy in Europe, looking beyond the enormous differences among the forms that experience took in different European countries. It is a view untainted by sentimentality and edification. Seen in a such a light, social democracy has been distinguished by the following attributes.
A first pair of features has to do with the protection of a core of social insiders against market instabilities. A relatively privileged segment of the labor force was protected against instabilities in the labor market through a high level of job security, accorded by law and contact. Mangers and owners were safeguarded against instability in the capital markets, especially in the market for corporate control by arrangements promoting long-term stakes by banks and other institutional investors.
A second pair of characteristics has to do with the defense of business against competition. Small business was protected against competition by big business and by foreign enterprise. Thus, many of the European social democracies avoided, with some success, in town as well as in country, the squeezing out of the small-scale owner and entrepreneur. Family business, big and small, with its retinue of nepotistic practices was also defended against meritocracy as well as against competition.
A final pair of characteristics has to do with the large-scale management of the economy. National governments brokered distributive deals among the powerful organized interests, especially big business and organized labor. deals about wages and subsidies as well as about the way in which the benefits and burdens of major public policies would be shared. The organized representation of these interests to fashion such distributive social contracts is what came to be recognized as the institutional apparatus of social partnership. The practice of social partnership was complemented by the development and the maintenance of a high level of redistributive spending, paradoxically financed by the largely regressive, transactions-oriented taxation of consumption.
What has been the recent fate of European social democracy? It can be summarized in a simple movement. The first four characteristics have been sacrificed to the maintenance of the last two: social partnership and redistributive social spending, financed by regressive taxation. At the limit, the first five characteristics, including the institutional machinery of social partnership – all but one of the defining features of historical social democracy -- have been sacrificed to the maintenance of the last. A high level of redistributive social spending, has therefore become, by default, the final bastion, the residue, the ultimate line of defense of social democracy in its homeland.
Full-blown social democracy, with all six characteristics I enumerated, encouraged a high level of investment by firms in their own core work force. It stimulated such investment so, however, at the cost of restraints on organizational and technological innovation. It also assured a high level of job security to a major part of the population. It gave that assurance, however, at the cost of deepening the gap between benefited insiders and excluded outsiders.
Conventional social democracy has therefore been in trouble: moral and social trouble as well as economic trouble. The two types of trouble -- costly restraints on innovation and cosseting of entrenched insiders to the detriment of insecure outsiders -- have most often come together in high levels of unemployment.
Social democracy needed to be reformed. Its reform through hollowing out, however, has merely generalized an insecurity from which only a Europeanized and internationalized elite remains protected. By their commitment to a high level of redistributive entitlements -- the last plank in the historical platform of social democracy -- the reformers claim to reconcile economic flexibility with social inclusion.
The resource transfers undertaken by a financially overstretched state are nevertheless an inadequate and fragile base on which to support the claim of inclusion. The outcome of the historical retreat of social democracy has been less the synthesis of flexibility and inclusion than the extension of insecurity. Most people remain bereft of the educational and economic means with which to reach the new commanding heights of the internationalized economy. The division between insiders and outsiders has been reinvented -- and internationalized -- rather than overridden.
A spiritual movement has accompanied the hollowing out of social democracy. This movement is the privatization of the sublime: the containment of energy and hope within the most intimate recesses of private experience and the abandonment of public life as a proper sphere for the advancement of large projects. In this circumstance, both high and popular culture have come to be dominated by fantasies of adventure, escape and empowerment. Such experiences invoke the very experiences denied in the humdrum worlds of politics and work. They express a lament over a sense of entrapment: awareness that the diminished life one lives is the only life one is ever going to live.
The hollowing out I have described has a name; it is called the third way. The third way is the first way -- the supposed one and only road to freedom and prosperity -- sweetened with the sugar of compensatory social policy. The doctrine of the Third Way exhibits the predicament of the progressives in the contemporary world. They have no program. Their program is the program of their conservative adversaries with a discount. They appear on the historical stage as the humanizers of the inevitable, unable to give more than trivial content to the idea of progressive social reconstruction today.

What complaints can we justifiably make against this evisceration of the historical content of social democracy? A schematic account of the segmentation of the economy in a confident, egalitarian social democracy like Sweden reveals the nature of the trouble. Imagine the economy divided into three sectors. There is the old economy of the traditional mass-production industries, struggling to make good in the face of low-cost world competition. There is a vital, prosperous new economy, steeped in flexible production and knowledge-intensive services. And there is a caring economy, , especially of the young, the old, and the infirm. The caring economy has been the source of most new jobs, and most of them are paid for by government.
The fundamental mechanism of this three-sector system is that the money generated in the new economy and, to a lesser extent, in the old economy goes to government in the form of big tax checks. The government breaks these big checks into little checks and sends them around to the other people, particularly to workers and to clients in the caring economy.
This is an unsustainable operation. It is unsustainable practically because of the almost unlimited demands that social spending places on an ever-narrower social base of successful enterprise. Above all, it is unsustainable morally and psychologically. The social cement thins when people cease to know one another because they inhabit social worlds connected only by the transfer of money at a distance.
The three-sector system I have invoked has seen the concentration of the most desirable work -- jobs offering wealth, power and fun -- in the hands of privileged and global elites. The rest of society remains condemned to varieties of "make work," ennobled at times by the responsibility to care for others. The production system has been sundered from the practical organization of social solidarity. Although it helps pay the bills, it does nothing to uphold social union.
These problems can be addressed only by deconstructing and reversing the compromise that shaped historical social democracy in the first place. It is impossible to address them without reorganizing production or without changing the relation among the old economy, the new economy, and the caring economy. The reorganization of production, which historical social democracy abandoned, is in turn impossible without the creation of a high-energy politics. Such a politics is sustained by a high level of popular political mobilization. And it addresses the creation and the contest of alternative trajectories of cumulative institutional change.
Once we understand that the contemporary social democracies can solve their most basic problems only by redefining the original compromise, we can begin to recognize the weight of deeper concerns, cast aside at the formative moment of European social democracy. These concerns are two sides of the same question. How is it that in the circumstances of the contemporary societies we can empower ourselves individually and collectively in ways that also connect us rather than reducing us to self-aggrandizement? How can we imagine and develop social connections that also empower us rather than trapping us in closed communities and fossilized traditions? It only when we begin to present to ourselves the task, or at least the possibility, of re-imagining and remaking the institutions of society that these larger questions can be again come clearly into view. Our interests and ideals in history are always bent under the weight of the practical arrangements that represent and realize them in fact. We cannot begin to re-imagine and redefine our interests and ideals until we also begin to experiment with their institutional expressions .

What is the alternative? I outline an institutional alternative, addressed to the circumstance of contemporary North-Atlantic social democracy, and described in its vocabulary, but intended, nevertheless, to reach outward. The alternative is not a blueprint; it is a direction. If in the circumstances of contemporary politics and thought I present a view that is remote from what exists, you may say that that is interesting but utopian. And if I present a view that is close to what exists you may say that that is feasible but trivial. And thus all proposals are made to look utopian or trivial.
This false rhetorical dilemma, which now inhibits and demoralizes the programmatic imagination, arises from reliance on a bastardized standard of political realism. This is the idea that a proposal is realistic to the extent that it is close to what already exists. This fake criterion of political realism is in turn the manifestation, in thought and in discourse, of our lack of access to a credible vision of transformation, of how structural discontinuity happens. In fact, a transformative proposal is the demarcation of a direction that can be imagined at many points close to what exists or far from what exists. It gains concreteness of texture through the description of the many next steps to be taken with the institutional and ideological material at hand. The direction I propose follows six main axes of transformation. These axes overlap or converge in a direction. It is, therefore, in this spirit that I propose the following outline by way of example, an outline of the next steps in the European circumstance.
The first axis is to finance and to facilitate the creation of novelty, of invention, of new forms of production and initiative. It is to prevent those who now control the crucial investment decisions from limiting the scope of this innovative activity. Three elements are necessary to the creation of the system I propose.
The first element is to marshal the saving of society, including its pension savings. An example of how to do so is to establish quasi-public venture capital funds at the margins of the traditional capital markets for investment in startup enterprises. Such funds would be competitively managed by a cadre of specialized fund managers compensated or prejudiced by success or failure.
A second element is to create along the periphery of the university system , with governmental support, a decentralized system of centers designed to facilitate the translation of scientific and technical knowledge into practical initiative. The result is to extend to the whole economy the familiar system of agricultural extension: of decentralized governmental help for the family farmer, above all technical support in the form of access to knowledge.
A third element is to encourage organization of a regime of cooperative competition allowing small- and medium-sized firms and teams of workers and technicians to compete in some respects while pooling resources in others. In this way, they can reconcile the benefits of scale and flexibility. The general intention of this first line of development is to affirm the ascendancy of the real economy over the interests and prejudices of finance, and more generally, to lighten the burden of the present structure of the economy in general and of the capital market in particular on the practice of permanent innovation.
A second axis of development in this proposal is the attempt to equip and to endow the individual worker and citizen. First, we endow him through the gradual generalization of a principle of social inheritance: everyone inherits from society or from the previous generation a basic set or fund of resources on which to draw on at turning points in his life. Second, we reorganize education on the basis of universally guaranteed minima of investment and performance and of a commitment to renewed mastery, in both original education and life-long education, of a core of generic conceptual and practical capabilities. Third, we define a form of flexible association between local and central government, providing for corrective intervention and reorganization when the minima fail to be satisfied.
The third axis of development in this project is to democratize the market. To democratize the market, not just to regulate it, not just to compensate for its inequalities by retrospective tax and transfer. To democratize it means progressively to decentralize access to productive resources and opportunities by the invention of new forms of decentralized allocation of capital and expertise and new forms of exchange. Such a project must begin in the rejection of the choice between the American model of arms-length regulation of business by government and the Northeast Asian model of centralized formulation of unitary trade and industrial policy by a bureaucratic apparatus.
The better way is strategic coordination between public entities and private firms that is decentralized and participatory and that is dedicated to the experimental coexistence of pluralistic trade and industrial policies. The responsible funds and support centers – intermediate between government and private enterprise – must be independent and accountable only in the long run to the society, through its political institutions. The second step of this effort to democratize the market is the gradual creation of alternative regimes of private and social property, co-existing experimentally within the same economy. Such regimes would begin in the different kinds of relations that would arise between such centers or funds and the firms they assist or among the firms themselves. The purpose of the effort to democratize the market is radically to expand the instruments and the varieties of initiative and innovation.
The fourth axis of this project is the development of the caring economy and its combination with the production system. We should combine voluntary and mandatory social service and facilitate the movement of individuals between the production system and the caring economy . In principle, every able person should have a position in both the production system and the caring economy. The objective of this effort is to ensure the practical organization of social solidarity in a fashion that directly engages people in one another's lives beyond the limits of the family.
The fifth axis of this alternative is to develop the institutions of a high-energy democracy. Such a democracy unites a high level of popular political mobilization with the acceleration of reform experiments. It sharpens the contrast and the contest among alternative projects for society. It tends toward a combination of the attributes of representative and of direct democracy. A high level of popular political mobilization requires devices such as the public financing of political campaigns, extended free access to the means of mass communication in favor of social movements as well as political parties, and ways to combine acceleration of the opportunity for the political transformation of society requires the invention of ways of combining central responsibility with local initiative. Such combinations of the central and the local allow decisive experiments to be tried out at the center but at the same time to be overridden or hedged by countervailing movements at the local level.
The sixth axis of this proposal is the independent and general organization of civil society outside the state. Only an organized society can generate alternative futures and act them out. The traditional apparatus of private law, of contract or corporate law, is an insufficient instrument for this organization of civil society. We must imagine a public- law framework entirely independent of government, making it easier for civil society to organize itself around neighborhoods, around jobs, and around topics of common interest such as health and education. The purpose of this social law, in between public and private law, is not, as it was in the first half of the twentieth century in Europe, to dampen conflict. It is to excite difference and originality. It is to make us more godlike.

What spirit animates such a program? This proposal has its purpose the heightening of the powers of ordinary men and women. By the devices with which it furnishes them, it helps them find light in the shadowy world of the common place. The institutional and discursive structures that we build and inhabit make us who we are. They, however, are finite, and we are not. There is always more in us, more capability of insight, of production, of emotion, of experience, of association, than there is in them. It should form part of our purpose to create institutions and discourses that recognize, respect, and nurture disposition to live as content-shaped but also context-transcending spirits. Not just to replace one ordering of society and of thought by another, but to create orderings that invite their own piecemeal revision. Such arrangements and methods establish a more suitable setting for a person who is never exhausted by any organization of society and culture.
Our existential interest in making the world less hostile to our inexhaustibility converges with our moral interest in the equalization of social circumstance and with our material interest in the acceleration of practical progress. These interests do not converge necessarily and spontaneously; it is we who can make them converge by developing our ideas and our practices in a particular direction. In so doing, we slowly turn society into a mirror of the imagination. This is less the humanization of the inevitable than it is the divinization of humanity, translated into a series of institutional and discursive next steps, according to the circumstances and the materials of a particular time.
This ascent of humanity to more godlike status can be further defined in relation to classical liberalism, socialism, and to the dominant economic ideas about progress and growth. This is not an anti-liberal program. It rescues the classical liberal idea of the construction of the strong self while repudiating the classical liberal dogmatism about institutions. It says, in effect, we can respect one another only by refusing to sanctify, for the sake of our individual and collective self-construction, the established scheme of society. We should to so less become more equal than to become bigger, greater.
By contrast to classical socialism, this view rejects state control of the means of production as the means by which humanity can rediscover itself in work. Instead, it identifies the salvageable aspiration of socialism as the forging of collective solutions to the collective problems of humanity. In so doing, it turns the table on what was the greatest historical defeat of the Left, the abandonment of the petty bourgeoisie and the dismissal of its central aspiration of modest prosperity, independence, and initiative. It remains the most powerful practical aspiration moving much of the world. We still need to respond to it in ways that disentangle it from the restrictive forms of small-scale production and that associate it with new forms of cooperation and solidarity.
What is the relation of this project to conventional ideas about practical progress or economic growth? In the short run, the basic constraint on growth is the relation between the cost of the factors of production and the opportunities for gain. In the long run, the basic constraint is the translation of knowledge, especially of technical and scientific knowledge, into practical initiative and invention. In the long medium run, however, the basic constraint on economic growth lies in the relation between cooperation and innovation.
A market is a simplified form of cooperation among strangers: unnecessary with there is high trust and impossible when there is no trust. Practical progress requires the combination of innovation and of cooperation. However, innovation and cooperation also interfere with each other. We advance practically by inventing regimes of cooperation that are relatively more hospitable to innovation. As a result, innovation need not threaten, nor be threatened by, the expectations and prerogatives embedded in the established cooperative regime.
Looked at from this standpoint, the whole point of the second way is the gradual development of a form of cooperation between government and private enterprise among firms, among groups, and among individuals that has built into it a bias toward experimentalism. In our institutions and in our machines, we embody everything that the mind is capable of repeating. It is the fundamental practical ambition of this project to save more of our time for the activities that we cannot yet repeat and therefore cannot yet embody in the form of machines. It is to intensify our experience; to render manifest palpable and fertile the decisive and dramatic character of lived human experience; to break the spell of formulaic repetition over life.
Great reform in modern history has generally depended upon crisis and calamity, and in particular upon war. Catastrophe has been the midwife of transformation. It is part of the ambition of this program to diminish the dependence of change upon crisis. However, the institutions the program describes do not yet exist; the dependence of transformation upon crisis persists. For this reason, a program such as the one I have outlined cannot advance in the practical circumstance of contemporary societies, in Europe or elsewhere, unless the cold calculus of practical interest is modified and transfigured by a vision of unrealized human opportunity. Therefore the purpose of my second lecture will be to explore {text missing from recording} for the doctrine of the second way to be realized in fact.
The European nations devoted the first half of the twentieth to slaughtering one another and the second half to drowning their sorrows in consumption. Toward the end of the twentieth century, exhausted by their sufferings and by their pleasures, they placed themselves in the care of politicians, entertainers, and philosophers who taught the poisonous doctrine that politics must be little for individuals to become big. Then the peoples of Europe fell asleep. If, in the first half of the twenty first century, they fail to awake, they may well remain rich. However, they will also be less equal, less free, and less great.

Madame Satã mostra força com direção criativa e verdade das atuações

Madame Satã
Por Ricardo Paiva

Madame Satã, filme dirigido por Karim Anouiz, estréia em circuito nacional e pelos elogios colhidos junto a crítica, além da violência presente em sua temática, vem se juntar a Cidade de Deus como representantes de sucesso da safra recente do cinema nacional. A película é baseada na biografia do lendário Madame Satã, publicada pela coleção Encanto Radical e escrita por Rogério Durst.
O diretor centrou a produção na década de 30, mais especificamente em 1932, o período mais conturbado da vida de João Francisco dos Santos, o Madame Satã. João, que nasceu em 1900 e morreu em 1976, foi um pernambucano de Glória do Goitá que migrou para o Rio de Janeiro. Mas, além de nordestino, era negro, homossexual, pobre e transformista. Tendo tais características, foi descriminado durante toda a sua vida e virou lenda na história cultural da Lapa e do Rio de Janeiro por não se curvar às agressões e humilhações que sofria pela sua condição. Alvo de preconceito, João sempre se envolvia em brigas e confusões e brigava freqüentemente com policiais.
FORÇA NA TRAGÉDIA - O filme é uma obra densa, carregada emocionalmente e muito intensa, assim como foi a vida do mítico Madame Satã. Karim optou por dedicar grande parte do filme ao ano de 1932, pois foi nele que o personagem principal, até então camareiro da atriz e cantora Vitória dos Santos, deu um novo rumo a sua vida. Nos bastidores do show de Vitória, João sonhava em ser ele a estrela do espetáculo e da noite carioca. Homem sensível, ia de reações mais ternas como as que oferecia a sua família até reações violentas nas ruas. Vivia com Laurita, prostituta que ele acolheu quando chegou na cidade, assumindo sua filha e convivendo com elas e Tabu, também homossexual e companheiro de profissão em programas. João não aceitava ofensas, pois tinha elevada auto-estima. Era um sonhador, amava a vida e por isso sentia grande revolta interior quando era negado a ele e as pessoas que amava, o direito de viver com dignidade.
Amigo de Amador, dono do bar Danúbio Azul, convence o amigo a deixar apresentar seu show, onde cantava e dançava. Depois do Danúbio, vive um turbilhão de emoções e mudanças na vida. No bar, João brilha com suas performances. Na frente do bar, João mata. No universo marginal da noite, vai conhecer seu amor Renatinho, arrumaria outras várias brigas e desavenças. O lado lúdico e ameno da vida de João se realizava nessas noites, onde ele podia brilhar e alcançar o glamour que de dia lhe era negado pela sociedade que insistia em lhe descriminar e cruzar seu caminho.
UM FILME DE ATORES - Nessa jornada pela dignidade, a trama do personagem é defendida com maestria pelo jovem ator Lázaro Ramos. O ator, de personalidade discreta, parece que em cena incorpora algo e busca forças no além para encarnar o a figura lendária e trágica que foi Madame Satã. A força do filme reside principalmente nas interpretações tocantes de Marcélia Cartaxo como Laurita, Flávio Bauraqui como Tabu e especialmente do duelo de interpretação entre Lázaro e Emiliano Queiroz, o Amador. As poucas cenas de Lázaro com Emiliano são especialmente bonitas, pois marcam o que para João seria o início do sucesso e a esperança de uma vida feliz. No bar do amigo, após seus primeiros shows, ele sonhava alto e para um desatento, porém afetuoso amigo, falava parecendo estar em outro mundo. João queria e achava que poderia ser uma estrela da noite.
QUALIDADES TÉCNICAS – Madame Satã foi uma lenda justamente pelas atitudes explosivas, pela expansividade, alegria e pela intensidade com que vivia. Talvez, por isso, o filme é dono de uma estética toda especial, com fotografia perfeita e de cores fortes. Os movimentos de câmera parecem existir para definir os estados emocionais dos personagens. As cenas são guiadas pelas emoções e pelo forte componente emocional do enredo e trazem uma linguagem ousada e colorida, caracterizando bem o que era o mundo de João. A estética não poderia ser contida, nem o filme poderia ser sem vida. As sensações são preponderantes na estória e as críticas feitas ao estilo e a alusão à cosmética de Cidade de Deus talvez não caiba aqui.
O filme é bem resolvido na sua proposta: enfocar um curto, porém rico período de vida de uma instigante figura humana. Mesmo não tendo a perfeição técnica que foi apontada pelos críticos em Cidade de Deus, a obra é um notável retrato dos excluídos. Talvez o maior mérito do diretor resida aí. Na tentativa de diminuir o espectro de análise sobre um especial personagem e sua família, o filme revela com mais profundidade o mundo interior e a violência de um ser humano sensível e revoltado com sua condição.

Spencer é valente e ama o cinema e o jornalismo

Fernando Spencer
Ricardo Paiva

Como conclusão de curso de jornalismo na Universidade Católica de Pernambuco, as estudantes Viviane Freitas e Mariana Tavares realizaram em 2001 o vídeo Valente é o Spencer, num título fruto de feliz idéia que remete ao nome Valente é o Galo, curta famoso do jornalista e cineasta Fernando Spencer feito em junho de 1974. No trabalho das alunas da Unicap, o próprio Spencer e várias pessoas a ele ligadas falam de sua trajetória como profissional e sua conhecida paixão pelo cinema e pelo jornalismo.
Não poderia ser outro o mote de um vídeo sobre o querido jornalista pernambucano. Paixão pelo trabalho é algo característico da trajetória desse homem de 75 anos que, escrevendo sobre cinema, marcou época no jornalismo pernambucano. “Eu sempre gostei de cinema. Meu pai era um funcionário público que me levava desde os 8 anos para assistir filmes”. Em sua casa, existem centenas de filmes, trechos de tantos outros, trilhas sonoras preferidas em fitas, discos de vinil e até disco 78 rotaçoes. “A pessoa quando é apaixonada por uma forma de arte acaba sendo sempre um colecionador. Eu desde sempre guardo filmes e mesmo discos, pois outra paixão minha é a música”.
SUPER 8 - O seu primeiro filme foi A Busca, ainda em 35 mm. Mas, no Super 8 é que foram várias as suas incursões, totalizando trinta e dois curtas acabados. O Super 8 foi uma forte demonstração de resistência cultural, pois sem apoio de estado, independentes, de forma caseira, amadora e na base da raça, vários cineastas fizeram quase duzentas produções. De Spencer, se destacam entre vários outros feitos em 36 mm e 15 mm, os realizados em Super 8: Cinema Gória, Capiba, Ontem, Hoje e Sempre; Bajado, um Artista de Olinda - feito com Celso Marconi, que junto com o Grupo 8 e Spencer teve papel fundamental no cinema pernambucano - e Valente é o Galo.
O cineasta possui todos seus trabalhos em Super 8, alguns em vídeos, outro em rolos, outros em BetaCam. “Eu tinha muita vontade de lançar meus curtas ou apenas alguns deles em DVD, de repente com apoio da FUNARTE, FUNDAJ... Mas, é difícil ”. Falta acabar muita coisa e na mente dele, toda hora surgem idéias, parecendo que para ele é muito incomodo ficar parado. Essa mania de trabalhar foi que o fez ser um incansável na busca de seus objetivos, mesmo que fosse incompreendido por alguns. “Sobre o título que me deram de cineasta do filme inacabado, eu nunca tive raiva ou fiquei incomodado, pois era verdade mesmo. Cinema no Brasil sempre foi muito difícil”.
TIO JOCA - O jornalismo impresso é uma paixão tão forte quanto o cinema e também nesse ramo, o produtivo e versátil jornalista possui alguns projetos pelo acalentados ao longo dos anos. Entrou no Diário como revisor em 1956 e paralelamente às críticas que fez no Diário de Pernambuco de 1958 até 1998, Fernando também exerceu sua faceta de escritor, poeta e cronista. Em pastas, estão separados seus contos, poesias e crônicas. Alguns deles já foram publicados, como foi no caso de Paisagem Urbana, inspirado pela comoção pelo assassinato dos meninos da Candelária. Mostrou ainda o cd Viagem Azul, 8 ½ Poemas de Fernando Spencer, cd que traz oito poemas e cujo título homenageia filme do italiano Frederico Fellini, um de seus maiores ídolos junto com Charles Chaplin e John Ford.
Ao falar do trabalho em jornais, ainda mais emocionado fica quando lembra dos tempos do “Júnior”, caderno com 8 a 12 páginas, ilustrado pelo famoso artista plástico Cavani. O relato sobre a época de trabalho com os escritores infantis que produziam para o Diário emociona o editor “Tio Joca”, como era assinado o nome de Spencer no caderno. Idéia que foi inspirada no “Tio Juca”, também figura em suplemento do Diário de Pernambuco na década de 50. “Geneton Moraes Neto (hoje diretor de jornalismo do Fantástico da Rede Globo) começou comigo, aos 17 anos, levei texto dele para a redaçao, mostrei ao editor que se admirou depois que eu disse que quem escreveu tinha apenas 17 anos”.
Outras experiências saborosas dizem respeito aos pseudonimos que usou durante o exercício diário de escrever para jornal impresso. Desde adolescente, como adorava jornal, deixava seus próprios escritos nos jornais. “Eu escrevia algo, deixava na porta, eles publicavam”. “Durante um tempo usava o recurso de assinar com outro nome suas crônicas, era o Fernando Saldanha, que só foi descoberto pelo seu editor quando eu estava tomando café com Ronildo Maia Leite, quando ele me apresentou Antonio Camelo”. Outro pseudonimo era o de Sérgio Nona, mas esse existiu já na época em que trabalhava de fato como jornalista. Já estava contratado e possuía prestígio no Diário, quando “encarregado de escrever sobre música, adotei o Sérgio Nona, com o qual assinava matérias sobre mpb, lançamentos, depoimentos com artistas e novidades musicais”.
FAMÍLIA - O maior orgulho de Spencer são seus curtas-metragem, mas algo de muito especial para ele são seus filhos. De dois casamentos, tem quatro homens e duas mulheres. Ricardo é o mais velho do segundo casamento e quem é mais ligado ao trabalho do pai, pois se formou jornalista, tendo se envolvido com cinema e se especializado em efeitos especiais. Ele ri lembrando dos tempos que seu filho trabalhou com ele antes de viajar e do que aprontava. “Ele sempre mexia com essas coisas de efeitos especiais, brincava com os meninos aqui da rua, maquiava todo mundo. Chegou a levar gente para Agamenon Magalhães, as pessoas ficavam espantadas com os ferimentos que ele produzia, depois notavam que ninguém tinha sido atropelado, que era só o trabalho de maquiagem que ele fazia”.
De tantos projetos que sonha em realizar, entre cd’s de poesia, livros com contos e poemas, além de transferência do arquivo pessoal e de sua cinemateca para a FUNARTE do Rio de Janeiro, parece mais feliz quando fala de seu sonho de colocar sua coleção em forma de alguma cinemateca de alguma universidade pernambucana, “talvez, uma Universidade Federal de Pernambuco ou uma Universidade Católica de Pernambuco, que teriam muita estrutura e espaço para abrigar a inestimável coleção de filmes, fitas, cd’s, revistas, jornais, posters e artigos. E um desperdício essas universidades não terem uma cinemateca e eu aqui com esse arquivo bom”. FANTASIA - Um precioso projeto para o cineasta parece ser o livro em que pretendia reunir seus artigos selecionados das colunas do Diário de Pernambuco de 1958 até 1998. “E difícil mais ainda publicar livros hoje em dia. Eu tenho esse desejo de fazer ainda essa compilação, já esta tudo em pastas, falta quem ajude, tenho vários amigos, mas não me sinto bem pedindo”. O nome seria Passageiro da Fantasia, o que realmente resume bem sua vida. O valente Spencer apenas quis que todos entendessem e amassem o cinema. Tendo desempenhado papel fundamental na história do cinema pernambucano, ele próprio se encarrega de definir o objetivo que norteou sua vida: “fazer filme é que sempre me importou. Para mim, aprender cinema era a melhor coisa, passar minha mensagem e estórias para outras pessoas que também gostassem de cinema”.

Braços estendidos para uma verdade humanista

Clamor, Uma Vitória de uma Conspiração Brasileira

Ricardo Paiva

A Editora Objetiva já coloca desde o começo do ano nas livrarias Clamor, Uma Vitória de uma Conspiração Brasileira, de Samarone Lima, jornalista cearense radicado em Pernambuco que fez sua vida acadêmica como estudante na UFPE e trabalhou alguns anos lecionando na Unicap. O livro percorre todos os principais passos que marcaram a concepção, a trajetória, lutas e conquistas do movimento Clamor, que nascido em 1978, buscou desaparecidos políticos e mortos, perscrutando as dificuldades e tentando desmascarar algumas sombras nas ditaduras.

O jornalista, familiarizado com estudos sobre a América Latina, o Cone Sul e afetivamente ligado a algumas questões caras à defesa dos direitos humanos e a luta na época da ditadura, pesquisou em São Paulo as lições de humanidades presentes nesse lançamento editorial.Trabalhando em cima de arquivos da Arquidiocese de São Paulo, sob a orientação do sociólogo Sedi Hirano, esse sensível profissional que é Samarone trabalhou com pesquisas desenvolvidas para uma bolsa de mestrado na USP pela Escola de Estudos Hispânicos.

Sob o título inicial de A Penumbra Compartida, o autor certamente se viu constantemente desafiado pois cumpriria estudos e pesquisas de rigor científico que conviveriam com seu inato sentimento de revolta perante a história política das ditaduras na América e Cone Sul. Além de arquivos da Cúria Arquidiocesana em São Paulo e fontes no Brasil, A Penumbra Compartida – nome da tese de mestrado apresentada em 2000 na USP - investigou arquivos da Argentina, Chile, Uruguai. As atrocidades perpetradas no Cone Sul e as ditaduras massacrantes sobre os povos renderiam várias vertentes para o trabalho realmente de repórter que logicamente haveria de ser para além de São Paulo e em vários livros que a pesquisa foi buscar.

O livro, indo do conhecido e covarde caso – pois contra crianças - Anatole e Vicky e da orfandade que lhes é impigida brutalmente, parte para outras ações do Clamor, registrando os recursos de que o pastor James Wright, o advogado Luiz Eduardo Greenhalgh, a jornalista inglesa Jan Rocha - com o apoio decisivo de Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns - cimentaram para aqui e ali resolver casos ou ao menos ajudar a saber o que na época foi feito com vidas humanas.

A melhor característica dessa pesquisa foi a riqueza de fontes que Samarone se municia para falar de tudo o que cercou o movimento – ele encontra registros de ajuda de gente espalhada pela América até relatos da pouca conhecida contribuição de brasileiros juristas como Fábio Konder, José Carlos Dias, Hélio Bicudo e soma o que colhe às perspectivas que suscitassem perguntas sobre o movimento de solidariedade. Do pequeno levante que fraternalmente se formava para servir de contraponto às brutalidades das torturas,assassinatos,desaparecimentos em outros casos latinos e brasileiros.

As pequenas lutas do Clamor, pela pouca estrutura e perigo envolvido, foram heróicas e nobres, porque se não resolviam a complexa tragicomédia de erros de políticas anacrônicas e amorais da ditadura,pontuavam momentos e criavam focos de resistência e esperança. Se as violências foram desabridamente maiores que os desaperecimentos e mortes resolvidos e descobertos, a corrente de solidariedade mesmo assim fincou sua importância no tempo. É sobre os pequenos gestos humanos e solidários que se construiram grandes vitórias da democracia contra a ditadura, talvez queira ensinar o autor.

Cristóvam Buarque

Visão de Mundo

Cristovam Buarque:

sem medo de ser governo

Ministro da Educação não faz o discurso fácil de oposição interna à política de Antonio Palocci, mas também evidencia que seus marcos são bem outros. Num governo até agora confuso e com um apego às instituições que parece, muitas vezes, frouxo, ele se destaca pela coerência, pela consistência e por seu radical republicanismo. Por Rui Nogueira.

Em 1996, durante uma visita a Cuba, Cristovam Buarque, então governador do Distrito Federal, iniciou uma conversa com o comandante Fidel por volta das 23h30 e só foi dar o assunto por encerrado às 5h do dia seguinte. Um assessor de Fidel avaliou a conversa dos dois e disse que o ditador havia gostado muito do papo, mas fizera um reparo e um pedido: achava que Cristovam deveria falar, um pouquinho que fosse, dos problemas da saúde. Educação, educação, educação, assunto que chegou a agoniar Fidel, é mesmo uma obsessão do doutor em economia, ex-reitor da Universidade de Brasília (1985-1989), ex-governador do Distrito Federal (1995-1998) e agora ministro da Educação do governo Lula.

Cristovam Buarque, 59 anos, é o protótipo republicano da obsessão, como o leitor pode ler nesta entrevista concedida numa manhã de sábado, em Brasília, horas antes de ir almoçar com o colega de ministério Antonio Palocci (Fazenda). Chegou ao posto como uma escolha quase natural e convive pacificamente com o cavalo-de-pau que o ministro Palocci deu na economia e no Orçamento Geral da União, com um superávit primário oficial - 4,25% do PIB - capaz de deixar desesperado qualquer ministro da Educação, em qualquer lugar do mundo. Menos Cristovam, que faz da tal convivência pacífica um desafio e uma guerra criativos.

Durante as duas horas de conversa com Primeira Leitura, expôs-se como alguém que aguarda a oportunidade certa para fazer muito além do óbvio. Acha, por exemplo, que o Brasil não pode conviver com 20 milhões de analfabetos, cifra que denuncia uma República de 114 anos ainda inconclusa. "É muita gente que não sabe ler na bandeira as palavras 'Ordem e Progresso'; faz lembrar os republicanos que, ao inscreverem o lema, consideraram que faziam uma bandeira para todos. Na verdade, só 30% dos brasileiros, naquele fim de século 19, sabiam ler a inscrição". Para Cristovam, o Brasil continua a viver, 114 anos depois da República, o mesmo dilema: "Ou o Brasil muda a bandeira ou alfabetiza 20 milhões de brasileiros".

O ministro agarrou-se à bandeira da alfabetização porque, como ele mesmo confessa, no ensino fundamental e médio, e até mesmo no de nível superior, por causa da autonomia parcial das universidades, tudo o que ele pode ser é um "inspirador" de ações. A outra bandeira, que ele discute com empolgação, é a da boa economia política. Cristovam vivencia convicta e estoicamente a camisa-de-força do fiscalismo do ministro Palocci, mas é o servidor público da Esplanada que tem na cabeça e na ponta do lápis a "fase dois" da educação e das políticas sociais em geral.

O bom leitor vai notar o sincero desinteresse do ministro por críticas e intrigas ministeriais, tanto quando notará a denúncia da excessiva preocupação dos políticos do PT com a taxa de juros, em vez de se importarem com a taxa de analfabetismo, e a certeza de que vivemos o tempo de uma grande perplexidade, a de que "o crescimento econômico não reduz a pobreza". É por isso que Cristovam quer mais de tudo, mas não encara a ortodoxia da equipe econômica como inimiga de nada. "A luta contra a pobreza está no Orçamento, não na política econômica, que tem pouco a ver com a redução da pobreza, mas muito a ver com o aumento da riqueza." Se não houvesse nenhum outro, com certeza, há um político maiúsculo na equipe do presidente Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
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Primeira Leitura: O sr. foi reitor de uma das maiores universidades públicas do país, a UnB (Universidade de Brasília), o que equivale a governar muitos dos municípios, foi governador do Distrito Federal, trabalhou em organismos internacionais envolvidos com políticas públicas e agora dirige a educação. Apesar de toda essa experiência, o que foi que mais o impressionou ao desembarcar no Ministério da Educação? O que mais o surpreendeu negativamente?

Cristovam Buarque: O baque imediato a gente sente quando não tem como fazer o que quer porque as escolas não são do ministério. O Brasil tem cerca de 180 mil escolas, e, desse total, são realmente nossas [do Ministério da Educação] uma escola para surdos-mudos, uma escola para cegos [o Instituto Benjamin Constant, no Rio] e o Colégio Pedro 2o [Rio]. Além disso, há as escolas técnicas e os chamados colégios de aplicação das universidades. Podemos dizer que temos também os colégios militares. Ao todo, são 202 escolas federais entre as 180 mil, e, mesmo assim, cada uma delas com sua independência. As demais pertencem aos Estados e municípios, que fazem realmente a educação do país. Há 52 universidades federais, que são autônomas, e não podemos determinar o que elas devem fazer. Este é o baque: o Ministério da Educação é apenas um órgão de inspiração.

Mas tem o poder do dinheiro, do repasse dos recursos...

Engano seu. Não é o MEC que financia a educação básica no Brasil. Hoje, varia um pouco de ano para ano, mas nós gastamos cerca de R$ 66 bilhões com a educação. Desse total, R$ 18 bilhões são da União, mas veja como esse dinheiro é investido: R$ 3 bilhões são para pagar inativos, R$ 10 bilhões vão para as universidades, e sobram cerca de R$ 5 bilhões, que é a contribuição do MEC à educação básica sob a forma de distribuição de livros, merenda escolar e Fundef [Fundo de Manutenção e Desenvolvimento do Ensino Fundamental e de Valorização do Magistério]. Esse é o baque de quem quer fazer, mas não tem as mãos para executar o que deseja. As pessoas dizem que eu brigo muito por recursos. De fato, se a gente quiser mudar a educação brasileira, será preciso aumentar bastante o que se gasta em educação. Atenção: o que se gasta nas três esferas, União, Estados e municípios, pois eu nunca falei em aumentar os gastos só da União. Mas a contribuição da União no bolo total tem de aumentar, pois ela contribuiu pouco para a educação básica na comparação com Estados e municípios.

No caso do Fundef, a participação da União está sendo questionada no Supremo Tribunal Federal (STF).

É verdade. A União nunca cumpriu a lei do Fundef, que manda investir R$ 799 por criança. O governo Fernando Henrique deixou com menos de R$ 400, nós subimos para R$ 400, mas não chegamos nem a R$ 500. Quatro governadores já entraram na Justiça, e eu disse para um deles, para o governador do Ceará [Lúcio Alcântara, PSDB], que considerava isso o primeiro precatório em defesa das crianças. Até aqui, só se faziam precatórios para pagar servidores. Legalmente, o governo federal pode até encontrar instrumentos que driblem, adiem, o investimento por meio de tecnicalidades, mas os governadores têm razão.

O sr. não parece, apesar de tudo, nem frustrado nem desanimado para tocar adiante a tentativa de resolver os problemas da educação.

Nem um pouco frustrado. Essa é uma realidade que vai permanecer, e eu não pretendo federalizar as escolas, como o México está pensando em fazer. Sou defensor da descentralização. É fato que precisamos ter um diálogo mais constante com os secretários da Educação dos Estados e municípios, e eles nunca serão fortes se nós não aumentarmos a nossa participação financeira na educação.

Mas os governadores estão querendo uma Desvinculação de Receitas dos Estados (DRE) e negociam isso na reforma tributária. O mesmo mecanismo que existe no governo federal, a chamada Desvinculação de Receitas da União (DRU), que autoriza o Ministério da Fazenda a reter e remanejar livremente 20% das receitas, algumas delas constitucionalmente carimbadas.

Discordo radicalmente dessa pretensão. Pelas nossas contas, se a reforma tributária autorizar os Estados a ter uma DRU, o prejuízo, só para a educação, pode chegar a R$ 17 bilhões, dos R$ 66 bilhões que são investidos hoje. Eu acho que nós precisamos investir uns R$ 25 bilhões a mais, por ano, nos próximos 15 anos, rateados entre União, Estados e municípios. Imagine, então, tirar agora uns R$ 17 bilhões. Seria uma tragédia, um sinal não só de que o Brasil quer deixar como está, mas de que aceita até piorar a deseducação que temos. Um sinal contrário ao que outros países fizeram nos últimos 30 anos e deu certo.

O recente relatório da Unesco é eloqüente sobre esse assunto.

O relatório da Unesco [órgão das Nações Unidas para a educação e a cultura] coloca o Brasil nos últimos lugares quanto à avaliação dos nossos alunos. Eu analisei os primeiros daquela lista, e olhe só o que eu vi: três dos países que estão lá na frente, Coréia do Sul, Irlanda e Espanha, eram muito parecidos ou piores, em alguns aspectos, do que o Brasil cinco anos atrás. A Espanha tinha, em 1970, um grau de analfabetismo próximo ao brasileiro. A Irlanda idem.

Qual foi o milagre?

Priorizar a educação. Fizeram um pacto nacional pela educação, acima dos partidos. A educação é um projeto que os governos seguintes têm de continuar para dar certo. De resto, todo projeto importante para a construção de uma nação passa de um governo para outro. A construção da usina hidrelétrica de Itaipu atravessou vários governos. A diferença é que a obra física não pára porque fica visível a interrupção. Obra social você interrompe, raramente se percebe, e só anos mais tarde é que a gente começa a sentir os efeitos. A Irlanda, quando estava à porta de entrada na União Européia, reuniu em um castelo 30 líderes, de todos os partidos e várias representações sociais, para saber o que fazer para que o país virasse de fato um país europeu. Não havia nada predeterminado, era uma discussão absolutamente aberta, mas eles saíram de lá com as três metas básicas de investimento: educação, saúde e ciência e tecnologia. O Brasil tem de fazer um pacto pelo "educacionismo", do mesmo jeito que houve o abolicionismo.

Como é que isso se faz, na prática, no Orçamento de investimentos?

Na hora de fazer o Orçamento, você diz que, em primeiro lugar, vêm as crianças brasileiras, a educação, e elas precisam de xis. Depois, a gente discute quanto e como vai gastar com o resto.

Dirão os bons ortodoxos que, desse jeito, não sobrará dinheiro para mais nada.

Não é verdade. No Brasil, sobra, sim. Aqui é possível fazer a revolução educacional, pagar a dívida e ter o superávit primário.

O sr. sempre me pareceu um sonhador com os pés no chão. É um fanático defensor da estabilidade da moeda, do controle da inflação, mas me parece que não estava preparado para chegar ao Ministério da Educação e ter de conviver com uma camisa-de-força ortodoxa do tamanho do aperto imposto pelo ministro Antonio Palocci (Fazenda), com um superávit que é oficialmente de 4,25% do PIB, mas, na prática, fica entre 5% e 6%, nas médias trimestrais de poupança fiscal.

Em primeiro lugar, eu sempre defendi que, nas atuais condições e por alguns anos, não há outra política econômica a não ser esta política ortodoxa. Não perco tempo a discutir se ela boa ou ruim. Não se esqueça de que cheguei a defender a permanência de Pedro Malan [ministro da Fazenda de FHC] à frente da economia, mesmo em caso de vitória do PT, por mais cem dias no governo. Em 2001, eu já dizia que nem mesmo Malan nem mais cem dias resolveriam. No mundo de hoje, repito, nas atuais condições do país, essa ortodoxia é necessária e única, embora eu não a deseje para sempre. Tem de ser passageira, mas eu não tenho a medida do tempo necessário. Do ponto de vista político, o governo Lula saiu do medo para a esperança. Ele não podia sair da esperança direto para as mudanças; teve de passar pela etapa da confiança. Se o governo Lula não tivesse garantido essa confiança de todos, sobretudo dos que não são amigos, ele não ia fazer as mudanças. O governo Lula é vitorioso do ponto de vista do diálogo e da confiança. Se o superávit é de 4,5% ou 6%, eu lhe confesso que não sei dos detalhes. Mas assumo que tem de ser esse mesmo. Os ministros Palocci e Guido Mantega [Planejamento] estão metidos com esses números, administrando o dia-a-dia dessa conta, e sabem o que é preciso fazer. A minha pergunta não discute esses percentuais. O que eu pergunto é: com esse superávit, é possível fazer o que eu quero fazer? É, sim, desde que não apenas os governos, mas o Brasil inteiro queira fazer, o Congresso, as Assembléias, as Câmaras de Vereadores, as empresas e toda a sociedade organizada queiram fazer. A renda nacional está hoje perto de R$ 1,3 trilhão. O Brasil tem 33% de receita, uns R$ 420 bilhões, tire os R$ 50 bilhões do superávit e uns R$ 40 bilhões da dívida. Há dinheiro para investir nas três esferas. Repito que eu não falo em gastar mais R$ 25 bilhões apenas na esfera federal nem acho que isso tem de ser feito em um ano. Se me derem mais R$ 25 bilhões para gastar no ano que vem, sobrará dinheiro porque não teremos projetos amadurecidos para gastá-lo. Esse aumento é paulatino, é um percurso. Eu nunca pedi mais dinheiro para este ano, estou fazendo tudo com dinheiro do ministério, com o que está previsto no Orçamento.

E nós próximos anos? O arrocho do ministro Palocci vai continuar!

Para o próximo ano, União, Estados e municípios deveriam definir já um aumento substancial. Ir subindo um pouco a cada ano para chegar a 7% do PIB, que é o que o Plano Nacional de Educação aprovou há alguns anos e o presidente Fernando Henrique Cardoso vetou. E o PT sempre disse que era contra o veto. Feitas as contas, é claro que há o dinheiro.

E aqui vem outra pergunta: politicamente, haverá força suficiente para tirar de alguns e colocar na educação? Haverá? Tirar de quem?

Quando chegar o momento, eu estou disposto a dizer, a participar dessa discussão como ministro e como militante da educação.

O PT, no governo, perdeu o ardor de militante?

Como ministro, nós temos de ter a responsabilidade e a competência, mas temos de ter, também, a sensibilidade e a combatividade de militante. Do equilíbrio dessas quatro coisas é que se vê se o sujeito é um visionário, um estadista ou um provocador. Nunca devemos fazer nada sem saber se é ou não possível politicamente. Se não é, eu não me sinto irritado, angustiado, desesperado; acho apenas que ainda não chegou o momento. O que eu não vou é deixar de lembrar que educação não é custo, é investimento. A campanha de erradicação do analfabetismo em que eu envolvi o ministério custará R$ 1,5 bilhão, em quatro anos, se não conseguirmos nenhum tipo de ajuda voluntária. Todos os estudos mostram que a alfabetização dessa população gera um aumento de R$ 5 bilhões na renda nacional por ano. Uma pessoa alfabetizada de condições sociais iguais a uma analfabeta tem uma renda 60% maior.

O sr. quis puxar alguns programas sociais, como o Fome Zero, para o seu ministério. Por quê?

Quando você junta os programas com a educação, eles resolvem mais de um problema ao mesmo tempo. Igual ao encontro de duas solidões, desde que alguém pague o sorvete, a cervejinha ou a Coca-Cola. Quando dois solitários se encontram, resolvem-se dois problemas ao mesmo tempo. Há uma série de problemas na educação em que o dinheiro não é apenas para a educação, mas para algo mais. Quando você dá uma bolsa-escola, você dá dinheiro e exige escola, o que ataca dois problemas, renda e educação. O vale-alimentação também é uma solução para resolver o problema da fome, mas é preciso deixar claro que o país precisa de dois tipos de programas: claramente assistenciais e claramente abolicionistas. Educar é abolição. Assistir é ética, é decência, mas não é abolição. O meu problema é achar que o Brasil se preocupa mais com assistência do que com a abolição, como se houvesse uma crença na incapacidade de as pessoas deixarem a pobreza. O gasto em educação tem outra vantagem, pelo fato de ele ser menor do que se imagina. O grande gasto com educação é com o salário do professor. E salário, quando o Estado paga R$ 100, R$ 30, volta sob a forma da carga fiscal que todos têm de pagar. Esse dinheiro circula, e é aí que está a grande novidade que o nosso governo pode oferecer: é a política que dinamize a economia por meio de gastos públicos e que, ao mesmo tempo, resolva problemas sociais. Anos atrás, eu chamava isso de keynesianismo social ou keynesianismo tropical. No keynesianismo, o Estado gasta para provocar demanda e a economia voltar a crescer. No nosso caso, o Estado deve gastar para criar demanda nas mãos de pessoas que produzem o que de concreto elas precisam para sair da pobreza.

Isso representaria um salto na ideologia econômica vigente.

A meu ver, o grande salto ideológico do nosso governo seria inventar essa economia ligada ao social e com uma dose boa de consciência em relação ao meio ambiente. Tudo isso - atenção - sem gerar inflação. Se fizermos isso, inventaremos o "lulismo", o que ainda não existe. O Lula representa uma enorme esperança, mas sem nome. Quando Mao representava essa esperança, ela tinha nome. Lênin, também. Quando Roosevelt representou isso, chamava-se New Deal.

Ministro, não consigo imaginar a equipe econômica propensa a aceitar um keynesianismo sociotropical, um lulismo, o que quer que seja.

Vamos ser realistas. Nós temos de ter no governo uma retaguarda de guarda-livros. Eu já dizia, no tempo do ministro Pedro Malan [governo FHC], e repito: na hora de escolher o ministro da Fazenda, tem de submeter os candidatos a um exame médico para saber se têm ou não glândulas lacrimais. Quem tem de chorar de noite é o ministro da Educação, da Saúde, o presidente da República. O papel do ministro da Fazenda, e ainda mais dos seus assessores, é o de ser duro, não deixar gastar. O papel dos ministros da área social é mostrar que é preciso gastar. O ruim é que a esquerda e até ministros do regime militar brasileiro sempre andaram na contramão. Os ministros da área econômica do regime militar foram os que mais gastaram, e havia o ministro da Educação que estava ali para não gastar. Aqueles ministros assumiam a Educação para dizer que, em vez de gastar no ensino, tinha de poupar para gastar em Itaipu. Eles eram os protetores do cofre, e os da Fazenda, os esbanjadores do dinheiro. Temos de ter ministros da Fazenda que poupem. Não é uma questão de austeridade, porque o ministro da Educação também deve ser austero. Posso até me irritar quando não consigo recursos, mas tenho de respeitar porque o papel deles é esse. O presidente da República é que é o árbitro disso tudo, dentro do realismo político. A abolição levou 70 anos entre o debate e a execução. A educação não deve esperar, julgo eu, nem uma década.

Onde mora o perigo da espera prolongada?
Uma parcela da população brasileira está se educando tão rapidamente e a outra ficando tão para trás, que elas, em breve, se desconhecerão. Deixará de haver uma solidariedade nacional - já está diminuindo -, deixará de haver um entendimento nacional porque elas falarão línguas diferentes. Em dez anos, os meninos ricos do Brasil estarão à beira de implantar chips na cabeça, enquanto o resto da população estudará em escolas degradadas e de péssima qualidade. Quem quiser ver o futuro de um país deve olhar as escolas públicas do presente. O Brasil não pode esperar mais dez anos para começar a construir o futuro, e a nova teoria econômica não deve surgir dos que controlam o dinheiro. Isso seria o mesmo que esperar que a estratégia de uma indústria saísse da cabeça do guarda-livros, do contador.

O governo Lula não lhe parece um deserto de idéias e formulação de políticas públicas?

Talvez o maior problema seja o fato de ter tantas que acaba não tendo uma. Nós chegamos ao governo no momento de uma crise ideológica no mundo inteiro, um momento de perplexidades gerais. Isso se reflete no Brasil com um agravante: a idéia ainda vigente de que o social é conseqüência do econômico. O maior problema não é quem está na Fazenda, o problema não é o ministro Palocci e seus assessores. Nós estamos no tempo em que a realidade mostra que o crescimento econômico não reduz a pobreza; e estamos, também, no tempo ideológico em que ainda vemos o mundo como se a redução da pobreza viesse do aumento da riqueza. O que acaba com a pobreza não é botar um pouquinho mais de dinheiro no bolso de alguém - isso só acontece se o pobre ganhar na loteria. O que tira da pobreza é mais escola, mais água potável, mais esgoto, mais saneamento, mais transporte público e dinheiro para que você possa andar nele, é poder comer, é ter mais atendimento básico de saúde. O que tira da pobreza são as políticas sociais, e para isso é preciso ter uma boa retaguarda econômica. A luta contra a pobreza está no Orçamento, não na política econômica, que tem pouco a ver com a redução da pobreza, mas muito a ver com o aumento da riqueza. O Brasil precisa aumentar a riqueza, mas que ninguém se iluda com o fato de que sem política social essa riqueza acabe com a pobreza.

Isso existe em algum lugar do mundo de hoje?

Fui visitar um Estado da Índia chamado Kerala, no extremo sul do país. A renda per capita é igual à da Índia, baixa, mas a mortalidade infantil é igual à da Europa, não há analfabetos, a criança termina o ensino médio. É o resultado de 30 anos de política social. O grande desafio é encarar essa perplexidade, acabar com todo o fingimento em que nós vivemos em relação a essa vinculação do social ao econômico. Estive na reunião do diretório nacional do partido, em São Paulo [12-13 de julho], e disse que me senti como se tivesse participado de um encontro de economistas. Só se falou de taxa de juros. Ninguém falou de taxa de analfabetismo. Alguém me disse que a taxa de analfabetismo decorre da alta taxa de juros, que impede o crescimento. Não concordo com isso. Afinal, as maiores taxas de crescimento econômico não diminuíram as taxas de analfabetismo.

Podemos esperar diferenças em relação a todas as convicções aqui expressas no Orçamento de 2004, o primeiro do governo Lula?

O Orçamento do ano que vem será o reflexo de duas forças: a vontade do governo e os limites das forças políticas. Quando sair o Orçamento de 2004, a gente vai fazer duas perguntas: o governo quis mudar? O governo teve força para mudar? Afinal, ele pode querer mudar e não ter força para fazê-lo. Como também pode ter força para mudar e não querer. E pode, ainda, ter força e vontade de mudar. O social não se faz em um ano ou um mandato. Educação dá resultados em 15, 20 anos. Eu trabalho com horizonte de 15 anos e fico planejando para 2022, me perguntando onde é que a gente vai estar no segundo centenário da independência do Brasil.

Levando-se em conta o que o sr. viu e ouviu na reunião do diretório nacional do PT, onde só se falou de taxas de juros e nada de taxa de analfabetismo, o sr. não acha o seu partido convertido à ortodoxia econômica?

Depende. Os sindicatos estão preocupados com salário, crescimento econômico e taxa de juros. Mas eu lhe garanto que o presidente Lula tem preocupação com o social. Percebo isso em toda conversa que tenho com ele. A questão é saber se está no momento de ter a força para fazer a inflexão, o que depende do jogo democrático. O lobby no Brasil usa gravata, calça sapato engraxado e tem a dentição completa. Não tem lobby de pé descalço e banguela. A discussão do Orçamento passa por aí: temos de ter superávit, pagar a dívida, cumprir os acordos, manter a estabilidade e atender os lobbies que se expressam no Parlamento.

Como é que isso se expressa no Ministério da Educação?

Não tenho o número exato, mas garanto que não menos de 80% do meu tempo é gasto com pessoas que vêm pedir por universidades. As pessoas pedem mais vagas para alunos que não passaram no vestibular do que mais verbas para os alunos que não terminam o ensino médio.

Em um país com um governo de ambições cada vez mais modestas, o sr. continua sendo um homem de ambições desvairadas.

Que país é este em que querer alfabetizar todo mundo é uma ambição desvairada? Somos um país ambicioso para construir e enviar lá para cima satélites, fazer excelentes aeroportos, ter as maiores hidrelétricas e até boas universidades, pois, se você olhar com atenção, universidades como a UnB, a Unicamp e a USP estão fora da realidade modesta do país. Nada disso é desvairado, não me incomoda a acusação de megalômano, mas me pergunto sempre sobre a origem da modéstia em relação a tudo o que tem a ver com a educação básica e a política social em geral. Eu acredito que Lula quer deixar a marca dele neste país e comunga do bom desvario.

Qual é o tamanho da tragédia da qualidade do ensino brasileiro?

Em primeiro lugar, é um fingimento dizer que estamos colocando todas as crianças na escola. Escola ruim não é escola; é um depósito de crianças por um certo período de tempo. Mesmo em relação à quantidade [97%], temos de ser absolutistas. Ou estão todos na escola ou nós praticamos uma imoralidade. Temos de garantir o ciclo de matrícula e permanência na escola a todos. Hoje existem cerca de 5,5 milhões de alunos na primeira série do primeiro grau do ensino fundamental, mas só há 1,8 milhão na terceira série do ensino médio. É claro que a quantidade nunca será a mesma nas duas séries, mas nós convivemos com um vergonhoso fosso. E temos o problema da qualidade, que nunca será superada enquanto tivermos professores ganhando R$ 530 em média. E vem o círculo vicioso: o governo finge que paga bem, o professor, mal formado e desmotivado, finge que ensina, e o aluno finge que aprende.

Que medida radical o sr. adotaria na educação para enfrentar esse círculo vicioso?
Se fosse obrigado a escolher uma única medida, eu daria um radical aumento de salário aos professores, mas vinculado à obrigação de esses mesmos professores estudarem e se aperfeiçoarem sistematicamente. Mas o Ministério da Educação tem limites nessa proposição porque os professores não são funcionários do governo federal.

A universidade pública e seu financiamento é um problema que o governo FHC não enfrentou. Por onde o sr. vai?

É absurdo que os filhos dos que podem pagar freqüentem a universidade pública apenas para subir na escala social. Mas, se eles estão lá porque o país precisa desses profissionais de nível superior, nada de errado com o fato de que o Estado financie isso. Porque o país precisa de engenheiros tanto quanto precisa de militares e diplomatas, o Estado sustenta o Instituto Rio Branco, a academia militar e a universidade pública. O problema é que a universidade exibe para a população uma imagem de que serve pouco ao país e à sociedade, mas serve bem à promoção social dos seus alunos. O problema maior, portanto, não é o fato de que o rico não pague, mas o fato de que a elite que entra nela aprende a servir a poucos, à mesma elite de onde vem. Paralelamente a esse problema estrutural, o que eu defendo é que se discutam cada vez mais formas alternativas de financiar a universidade pública. E eu defendi que se discutisse um projeto do ex-deputado Padre Roque [PT-PR], que propunha cobrar um taxa dos ex-alunos que ganhassem mais de R$ 30 mil/ano. A questão não é o governo diminuir suas responsabilidades para com a universidade pública, mas exigir mais da universidade e, claro, discutir as formas de sustentar financeiramente essas exigências. O Estado precisa dizer o que quer da universidade. Com medo de enfrentar a universidade, o Estado se alienou e não disse qual é, por exemplo, o papel das universidades brasileiras na alfabetização. O pior é que há universidades e unidades federais de ensino com funcionários analfabetos e sem preocupação em alfabetizar esses servidores, que não são terceirizados, são contratados do Estado. Como é que uma cidade como Alcântara [MA], de onde o país lança foguetes e onde constrói uma plataforma de alta tecnologia para desenvolver o projeto espacial brasileiro, tem 5 mil analfabetos, metade da população adulta do município? Como é que isso pode coexistir?