Friday, September 30, 2011

Totalitarismo Invertido

Resenha do livro de Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, escrita por Tom Angier. Schumpeter em seu clássico Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy explicou como o processo evolucionário do capitalismo terminaria em socialismo. Um socialismo "of a very sober type would almost automatically come into being". Aparentemente o conceito de totalitarismo invertido deveria beber na fonte Schumpeteriana, mas como sempre acontece com os marxistas e' apenas uma critica ao neoliberalismo...The system is one of ‘inverted totalitarianism’, and it works through what Wolin calls ‘managed democracy’. Although both terms raise problems, I want to put these on one side for the moment, and concentrate on how Wolin unpacks them conceptually, and spells out their social consequences. In elucidating ‘inverted totalitarianism’, Wolin uses ‘classical totalitarianism’ as a foil. Whereas German Nazism, Italian Fascism and Soviet Communism all attempted the mass political mobilisation of their respective citizenries, inverted totalitarianism thrives amid passive, politically demobilised citizens, who rarely move beyond their allotted role as ‘viewer-consumers’ (196). Whereas classical totalitarianism has aims that are largely in step with its propaganda, inverted totalitarianism trumpets its ‘democratic’ aims and credentials (60), though its priorities are overwhelmingly economic and expansionist. While classical totalitarian regimes are comparatively deliberate and overtly coercive in their mode of action, relying on the cult of a charismatic leader, inverted totalitarian regimes result from a largely unintended confluence of circumstances (46), and rely on leadership that resembles most closely that of a CEO (102). While classical totalitarianism has some socialistic aspects (sometimes systematically and obviously so, as in Communism), inverted totalitarianism is wedded to the corporations, which are profoundly indifferent to the welfare of the poor.

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