The debate between denialism and science alienates us from criticism – By Raphael Fagundes

Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello, in the book “The new spirit of capitalism”, attribute an important role to criticism. “It reveals the hypocrisy of moral pretensions that hides the reality of power relations, exploitation and domination.”

Capitalism uses strategies to contain criticism, or bends to some issues raised by critics, reformulating itself, enabling a certain degree of social justice. The other option is to weaken criticism, exhaust it, delegitimize it, in order to allow “capitalism to loosen its mechanisms of justice and modify its production processes with impunity”.[2]

The Bolsonaro government (which follows a process that had its origin in the 2016 coup) intends to establish this last option. And one of the instruments used to prevent a virulent criticism against capitalism from emerging was to flood the public sphere with denialism.

Denialism is a strategy so that the criticism does not come to light, allowing capitalism to brutalize its process of exploitation and profit maximization. Denialism is the ideological weapon used by conservatives to undertake the uberization of the workforce, the reduction of investments in the public sector, promote privatization and other perversities of the neoliberal package.

As the historian Reinhart Koselleck taught us, criticism is related to crisis, as this is nothing more than a critical state of a social formation. From there, we can think, together with Professor Antônio Cândido, “what is thought to be the human face of capitalism is what socialism took from it with sweat, tears and blood”. This human face was also torn from capitalism through socialist criticism. And the objective of denialism is precisely to prevent it from spreading through the public sphere.

Criticism arises with the birth of the public sphere. The bourgeoisie is its great inventor. She made use of reason in conversations in cafes to build a public opinion contrary to the social structure of the Ancien Régime.

Today, the same bourgeoisie seeks to contain the dissemination of criticism because it knows that such a discursive instrument can cause instability in the structure it created. It took advantage of technologies that dominated the public sphere, such as social networks, in which information or misinformation spreads in previously unimaginable ways.

The denialists penetrate this sphere. There is practically no punishment for the fake news they produce, as they are not harmful to the system. Even with the pandemic and with a supposed increase in rigor to monitor false information, little is effectively done in relation to impunity.

In this project of power, critics stop criticizing capital and its hardening, from criticizing the myth that public money has run out, thus requiring a spending ceiling (which Modern Monetary Theory can easily demystify) and start criticizing denialism . At this point, it ceases to be critical, transforming itself (without wishing to do injustice to Hegel and Marx) into a mere negation of negation.

exact sciences gain strength at the expense of social sciences. Scientists are called upon to combat denialism. Sociologists, historians, etc. end up following in the same direction, because, it is not new, that capitalism based on technological production already subordinates the human sciences to the exact sciences is not new. Even the rigidity of the academic production of humanities arbitrarily wants to compare the exact ones, in terms of deadlines, etc. A pity…

Scientists, many of whom are unaware of the dynamics of capital domination, are called upon to combat denialism. Reminds me of the recent Netflix movie, “Don’t Look Up”. Scientists who went to the press to fight denialism were unaware of how capitalism works in its relationship with the state. By the time they realize it, it’s already too late.

Astronomer Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society and Director of the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy , represents this aspect well in the real world. In a situation very similar to the one in the film, he shows his naive optimism. “Imagine astronomers had tracked an asteroid and calculated that it would hit Earth in 2100, not with certainty, but with (assumed) 10% probability. Would we relax…? I don’t think it would be like that. There would be a consensus on whether we should start right now and do our best to find ways to deflect it or mitigate its effects.”[3] Then the scientist praises the initiatives on climate issues by Obama, Bill Gates and Elon Musk.

*This article does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the Forum.