Antonio Gramsci

Abstract

Various important dates will be commemorated in 2017: the 80th anniversary of the death of Antonio Gramsci, the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the 50th anniversary of the assassination of Che Guevara and the 20th anniversary of the death of Paulo Freire. Considering this historic legacy, this issue of the prestigious Revista Katálysis presents content that confronts the "state of exception" that has been imposed on Brazil to once again bury the struggles to advance in the democratization and socialization of economic, political and cultural power. In fact, at the same time that they are inspired by the extraordinary thinking of the popular debates of the twentieth century, the authors of the articles in these pages do not lose sight of the incendiary contemporary problems, particularly the crisis that has shaken Brazil in recent years.As the results of studies by a considerable group of scholars, the reflections proposed here could not be more current and opportune, in one of the most crucial periods of Brazilian history, which perhaps presents the greatest test yet for our young and mutilated democracy. For this reason, the analyses of democracy and the concern for its future are clearly visible in various articles and in the background of others. Fernando Gaudereto Lamas and Ednéia Alves de Oliveira properly locate the issue of democracy today within the current metabolic social order of capital and the intensified class struggle. They show that the notion of democracy has become mere rhetorical discourse and bourgeois phraseology. It is being held hostage to a capitalism that is increasingly devastating and concentrated, and that manipulates political institutions and the collective imaginary to assure its hegemony and weaken any attempt to construct popular sovereignty. Using theoretical references from Gramsci and debates about democracy, Emilie Faedo Della Giustina and Danuta Estrufika Cantóia Luiz sketch a complex and critical framework of the Brazilian context, tracing the period since the redemocratization of Brazil until the mass demonstrations of 2013.In somber times such as these, Douglas Ribeiro Barboza and Jacqueline Aline Botelho Lima Barboza could not be more pertinent in their article Sociedade regulada e do radicalismo democrático [Regulated Society and Democratic Radicalism]. They reconstruct the theoretical field of Marxism established by Gramsci and show that the route towards resolving the grave crisis affecting Brazil and the world is the creation of a (self)-regulated society where the division between governments and the governed is overcome by the protagonism and political organization of the subaltern classes. In the same direction, the political radicality of the concepts of liberation, interdisciplinary conception, and political-pedagogical practice of the oppressedwhich even includes critical environmental education -is revived by César Augusto Costa and Carlos Frederico Loureiro in an article about Paulo Freire, the indispensable educator of the "viable unprecedented"...