What would Lenin do?

Olavo de Carvalho
Época, 24 de agosto de 2002

If he were President of Brazil,
he would tranquilize the investors


Translated by Pedro Sette Câmara

Judging by the either alarming or tranquilizing diagnostics published in our press, the only things really threatened by an eventual rise of the radical left are foreign money invested here and Brazil’s credit in foreign banks. The whole discussion revolves around whether Mr. John Doe or Mr. John Dude, if elected, can or cannot put these supreme goods at risk. In the first hypothesis, he is a dangerous communist; in the second, a champion of democracy.

However, when Lenin destroyed Russian constitutional order in three weeks and established the reign of terror, the stock market in Moscow and Petrograde did not drop a single point, and in the following years foreign investors made a huge amount of money with the new regime. Therefore, according to Brazilian criteria, there is no way Lenin could be a communist.

The preponderance of this stupid criterion reveals only how Brazilian businessmen are blinded by the canons of that diffuse Marxism which induces them to perform in the theatre of reality the exact stereotypical role reserved to them by communist strategy: that of self-seeking immediatists who can be manipulated through their own interests.

That’s hegemony is: to frame the opponents’ speech, leading them to formulate their thoughts and wishes according a set of mental categories designed to tie them with their own rope.

Brazil’s left may be stupid and incompetent, but, when compared to our businessmen, is a stellar team of geniuses. To anyone versed in Antonio Gramsci’s strategies, to deceive Brazilian businessmen, making them work for their own destruction, is like spanking children. What can the gross pragmatism of those who measure the world by the money in the register do against the complex machiavelism of the ‘cultural revolution’? It’s so coward. I know only businessmen who like to give grand displays of tranquility before the advance of communism, and who, in the face of a leftist intellectual, prostrate themselves in servile adoration. It’s understandable: no matter how much money you possess, intellectual superiority, however small, exerts intrinsic authority and power. In revolutionary strategy, cultural hegemony is the equivalent of that which, in war, is the dominion of air space. Running to hide their treasures, the prey disclose themselves to the eagle who, from above, controls their movements.

That is why instead of losing oneself in vain economicist conjectures, none of them asks the following questions to the presidential candidates:

1. What is your geopolitical view of the world? Do you intend to use a speech against “unipolar power” to align Brazil with the Eastern and communist pole, which existence and growth hides behind that rethoric?

2. After years of dismantlement and constraint of the armed forces, do you intend to complete dialectically the application of the Leninist scheme, offering the humiliated officials some sort of late consolation in exchance for an anti-Western and pro-communist foreign policy which none of them would have accepted before?

3. How will you fight against drug traffic without confronting Cuba, the Farc and the world’s leftist media? Or, on the contrary, will you just stage a fake combat just to terminate the rival cartels – which dominate the state of Espírito Santo, for example – and hand to communist narcoguerilla the absolute control of the Brazilian market?

These are the only important questions. Lenin himself, should he be president of Brazil now, would not even consider the idea of socializing the economy. He would concentrate on the consolidation of capitalism and on tranquilizing the investors, in order to buy time to fight in these three fronts, which are vital to the communist world strategy. Tranquilized by the guarantees offered to their money, the bourgeois would be the first to lend a hand.