BOLSONARO AND THE CUTS IN HIGHER EDUCATION

BOLSONARO’S GOVERNMENT AND CUTS IN BRAZILIAN HIGHER EDUCATION BUDGET Allan Kenji SEKI Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC) and Centre d’Economie de l’Université Paris Nord (CEPN). E-mail: allanknj@gmail.com In the wake of the attacks on national education, with Decree No. 9,741, from March 29, 2019, the Ministry of Education (MEC) determined new budgetary contingencies. The new contingencies require the federal administration to inform the areas that should be modified according to the accumulated primary deficit presented by the government of Jair Bolsonaro in the first quarter of 2019. Universities, that have been suffering similar attacks since 2014, face the most challenging budgetary circumstances in this round of neoliberal offensives and could cease all administrative operation in 90 days if the expenditure contingency is not repealed. It is not difficult to imagine the effects of the last five years of continuous contingencies will have on public educational institutions. In addition to the pressing dangers related to the budget cuts, we must take into consideration some background elements that permeated the public debate about the budget cuts to understand the political significance of the Bolsonaro's government advances to universities. On the previous week, the new Minister of Education, Abraham Weintraub, announced during a live video transmission along with the president, the Ministry's plan to decentralize funding for courses in humanities (such as philosophy and sociology). The decentralization of funding would be to direct public funds to the areas that would provide an immediate financial return to new university graduates. The proposal does not have an adequate legal framework that allows it to be implemented and flagrantly violates the administrative and pedagogical autonomy of Universities. Despite in opposition with the Universities, this was the new minister's first act of greater importance, who then declared that the contingencies determined in decree no. 9,741 / 19, would be concentrated in three institutions: the University of Brasília (UnB), the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA) and the Federal University of Fluminense (UFF). In an interview with Estado de S. Paulo, the minister explained that the budget cuts in these three institutions would be due to what he would call "messiness", "rowdiness" and promoting "ridiculous events", in addition to generally presenting low academic performance (O ESTADO DE S. PAULO, 2019). In response, the affected Universities and the National Association of Leaders of the Federal Institutions of Higher Education (Andies) promptly set out to defend pluralism of ideas and attempted to refute the minister by publishing various results of these institutions in national and foreign rankings. After much controversy regarding the minister's statement, MEC (Ministry of Education) withdrew the biased budget cuts. MEC stated that the contingency criteria was "technical" and that "if the welfare reform is passed and projections of improvement of the economy in the second half of the year are confirmed, as they may affect the Union's revenues and expenditures"(MARIZ, 2019). Familiar to Jair Bolsonaro's government philosophy of announcements and "retreats", maybe it could be seen as an act that confirms the general rule of a government "lost" in its own "megalomaniac" operation, "unprepared" and "paranoid". Nonetheless, a detailed analysis of the accounting factors and the significance of selective budget cuts in only 3 of the 63 Federal Universities can shed light on some elements of the way of governance we are facing. Biased budget cuts? If the budget cuts were limited to only three federal academic institutions (UnB, UFBA, and UFF), and in a worst-case scenario in which all expenses excluding salaries and costs were cut, the aggregated amount would be limited to approximately R$ 198 million. This would certainly have enormous consequences for academic institutions, virtually paralyzing all academic activities, but for the overall MEC budget, would be a value considered insignificant. Besides, that would be very far from the almost $ 8 billion that MEC needs to cut to comply with the determinations of the Ministry of Economy. To illustrate the extent of federal government expenditures, between January 1st and April 29th, the Bolsonaro Government paid R$ 949 million in parliamentary amendments [1] in the National Congress (BRASIL, 2019) , funds that were handled in order to buy the support of congressmen for the approval of the welfare reform in the Chamber of Deputies - this has been called "Bolsolão" (TEIXEIRA, 2019) , a clear reference to the PT's "mensalão" - while in the first half of 2019, and also to prevent the Government from being the subject of parliamentary inquiry. The support of the Chamber of Deputies is crucial for the government, given that: (1) this is the first time in the history of the Brazilian Republic in which the president and several members of his family are caught in such close relations with organized crime. Regarding the case of militias in Rio de Janeiro (RJ). (2) The president himself, as an operator, has hints of systematic corruption, as in the case of aliases of the PSL, of the millionaire values ​​moved by the former driver of his son, including the first lady. (3) Sufficient evidence of fictitious workers assigned to Jair Bolsonaro's offices while he was a federal deputy for the state of Rio de Janeiro. (4) The government is aware that the temporary cushioning of these scandals should be especially due to that large capitals (and therefore the big press) does not want to risk repeating the formula for moral and political wear and tear suffered by Temer (2016-2018). This government has suffered several allegations of corruption that have surfaced shortly after the 2016 coup and undermined the chances of approval of the welfare reform before the end of his term. However, the contingency of R$ 198 million would also be minimum when other current expenses of the Union are considered, as in the case of single daughters of the military pension. Only in 2019, it will account for R $ 1.6 billion of the current 23.7 thousand beneficiaries. Aggravating the issue, the amnesty of private debts of large landowners with the Fund for Assistance to the Rural Worker (Funrural), proposed in the Chamber of Deputies through PL 9.252 / 17 and endorsed by the Ministry of Agriculture. If approved, the law will represent the incorporation of private debts with values ​​over R$ 32 billion against the National Treasury [2]. Therefore, MEC´s most significant budgetary cuts being concentrated in only a few institutions to comply with the overall contingency of the federal budget is illogical, considering it has been accumulating primary deficits. We hypothesize that the minister never the intention to carry out the selective budget cuts. Indicators show, from the outset, its objective was to reach all Federal institutions, a circumstance in which it would be possible to reach the approximate amount of R$ 7 billion, and considering the expenditure freezes in foundations that support research and university hospitals. Would announcing the cut in those three institutions been just an act? Moreover, retreat is traditionally seen as a sign government weakness, what logic would there be of proposing a measure that, from the beginning, was known to have to be undone? The weakness of the government is its political strength. The Bolsonaro government was elected as a result of the global criticalness of the capitalist crisis and the lack of answers within current capitalism for the recovery of long-term growth. Currently, the only way presented by capitalism is "more neoliberalism," which means just trying to cure the infection with a little more poison. This new step must justify the unjustifiable: make workers pay for the crisis through a drastic reduction of wages, extraordinary increases in family expenses, the destruction of social security (retirement, unemployment insurance, pensions, and social benefits), the generalized privatization of all sectors of the economy that to this day have a relevant and strategic significance to the State; And by doing so while large domestic banking capitals register new profit records: Itaú Unibanco, for example, has just disclosed in its quarterly balance sheet that the profit was higher than the market projections, reaching R$ 6,8 billion in the first quarter of 2019 alone. Besides, the government knows, as well as Jair Bolsonaro (PSL) knows that he is an exotic figure in the inner circle of the elite of Brazilian capitalism, which is much more accustomed to a figure of austerity and mature enough in the webs of national policy, such as Geraldo Alckmin (PDSB). Bolsonaro is only tolerated by the majority and for this reason, the government is aware that to complete his term at the office, his governance must use its exotic characteristic as an advantage: the exercise of political power by methods that in other circumstances would not be enforced. All the instrumentality depends on the permanent propaganda of agitation of the government against groups of the working class that can no longer be included in the scope of the State. While the government produces new conflicts and delivers neoliberal adjustments that its competitors could not do, it will survive. But if the conflicted environment is lightened, the Bolsonaro administration will certainly have its social base dissipated in internal struggles among the various political factions of the right-wing. Therefore the government must reconcile its peculiarities with the political function that allows it to survive one day at a time. This explains, for example, that while a congressman, Jair Bolsonaro, opposed to the welfare reforms proposed by Dilma and Temer, changed his opinion during the electoral campaign. A very significant decline, because his proposal is even more yielded to the interests of large banking and financial capitals than their predecessors could even contemplate. While Bolsonaro remains useful by being subservient to those who constitute effective power in Brazilian society, it is possible that his peculiarities are equally useful and tolerable. It is the case in which parts of the ruling class, although proud of its anti-Bolivarianism, seem to tolerate that Bolsonaro uses methods that are frankly associated with the consolidation of Hugo Chávez as the most important figure in Venezuelan political history. After all, who would have imagined that Bolsonaro would be the one to copy Hugo Chávez in the broadcast of a weekly program to speak directly to the "people", distrustful of the great media monopolies, to defend the measures implemented by his government? Incidentally, over a decade ago, would the great Brazilian press have openly mocked Chavez's program "Alo Presidente" (which was regularly presented by the Venezuelan President from 1999 to 2012) and omitted almost completely in Brazil the similar television programs made by Evo Morales and Rafael Correa, respectively in Bolivia and Ecuador ? In the case of Bolsonaro, not even a word has been saind during the course of the welfare reform in the National Congress. However the adjustments that Bolsonaro will constantly have to make to get to the end of his presidential term (and survive it, unlike Michel Temer) will require him to overcome Homeric resistance by workers and broad sectors of society, especially regarding the State's inability to positively contribute to conciliatory policies without compromising the income of financial capital. This is where simultaneously lies the weakness and the strength of the government with all its authoritarian singularities, antipodal to liberal democracy and supported increasingly by the presence of the military at all levels of government. The ceasing of public universities In 2017, the World Bank published the document "A Fair Fit: Analysis of the Efficiency and Equity of Public Expenditures in Brazil" to support the regressive reforms articulated within the scope of the Brazilian State. The document produced by technicians from the World Bank and the Brazilian government sought to justify that the Brazilian crisis would be fiscal and, therefore, social demands for health, social security, pensions, and education would be the main reason for successive public deficits. Thus, it was sought to transform fallacies into technical truths. In the case of education, the document is categorical: "the costs of higher education are at the same time, inefficient and regressive" because the "cost per student in public universities are two to five times higher than that cost per student private universities". To address this situation, the World Bank recommended the abolition of public universities, the abolition of free education and the end of financing to the poorest students in private institutions. This proposal had already been integrated into a document published by the World Bank in conjunction with the National Confederation of Industry (CNI) in 2008 entitled "Knowledge and Innovation for Competitiveness" [3]. The argument, evidently fallacious, was rebuffed by several critics, and the document was rarely mentioned among the education sectors connected to the government at that time. Enlightened of the transformations that occurred in Brazilian higher education, today we are aware that since 2008 attacks from the private sectors against public universities were articulated and at least two conditions were necessary and were not ideal at the time: (1) the financialization of the private higher education market - with consequent inspection deregulation, regulation, and authorization of courses, enrollments, and teaching modalities; and, (2) the widening effects of the global crisis. It is thus that, rather than a logical argument or sign of a significant change in the strategy of the dominant classes, the "fair adjustment" can be better understood as a sign of conjuncture for the Brazilian ruling classes: the moment of the beginning of this new phase of the neoliberal offensive. The government cannot simply determine by decree that universities close their doors. Earlier attempts against universities indicate to the Bolsonaro government that attacking universities can be as important as it is dangerous for a government with its characteristics. To promptly attack these institutions can ensure a quick loss of popular support, mainly with the middle class. The Brazilian upper class is willing to pay for higher education, as long as everyone has to do so and their privileges in the unequal distribution of technical knowledge and professional qualifications remain untouched, by the rest of the society. Public universities represent the only logical and rational mean to justify certain social mobility. Moreover, in its previous configuration (with gratuitousness, quota policies and support for student permanence), public education may be considered the only plausible explanation for hopes of social mobility, considering only social mobility between the different income ranges. Without the ideological form of human capital, which has permeated all governments since the constituent (LEHER, 2018), all conditions are given to the awareness that the social position of individuals permanently returns to the fundamental antagonisms of capitalist society. This would short-circuit ideological coordinates because although the ruling class may have a multitude of other mechanisms for accommodating the conflicts inherent in the class struggle, this task would become more and more Herculean. In the end, the control of the working class contextualized by the deep social inequalities as experienced daily Brazilians, is permanently pressured by both the contradictions that the current period of capitalism creates (especially in periods of deep and prolonged crises such as the present one) as well as by the peculiarities of the capitalistic way of accumulation-by-proxy. To illustrate inequality in Brazil, let us remember that in 2017, while the minimum wage was R$ 937, the average household income in the state of Maranhão, the lowest in the country, was registered at R$ 605. In the same year, the highest pay in Brazil was R$ 4.87 million a month, the salary of the executives of Vale - mining company responsible for the tragedies in Mariana (2015) and Brumadinho (2019). Not far from the salary of a Kroton SA executive, that in the same year paid R$ 2.1 million to its executives. This means that excluding capital investments, represent a difference of over 5100 times between the highest pay and the minimum wage. Still, in 2017, 14.83 million Brazilians lived in extreme poverty (according to the IBGE methodology, people living with income equal to or less than the US $ 57 a month) and 18.2 million people lived in poverty ($ 165 monthly). Thus, the privatization of public higher education in Brazil would require a more refined and intelligent strategy than forcing or simply ceasing civil service examination and funding. This strategy has been used for years, mainly by the state governments, as in the cases of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, which do not even comply with the transfers that would be required by state tax legislation. The reduction of the institutions budget, the freezing of civil service examination, and media systematic attacks in the respective states failed to diminish either the prestige of these institutions or the critical thinking of their intellectuals to social contradictions and to the government itself. This is not to say that the Bolsonaro government will not use such measures. In addition to the budget cuts already announced in the investment and funding budget of IES, the government plans to prohibit the hiring of new employees. The Budget Guidelines Law (LDO) proposes the total freezing of the civil service examination for federal employees in 2020, including making it impossible to replace those who have retired. With this act, a plot that is already quite critical is aggravated. According to data from the Ministry of Planning, Development, and Management, in March 2019, there were 17,755 vacancies approved by law and not occupied in higher education. The most critical situation from the IES, are the Fluminense Federal University (UFF) with 571 vacancies; the Federal Institute of Ceará (IFC), 559; and the Federal University of Pernambuco (UFPE), 448 (BRASIL, 2019c). Besides, the welfare reform process may precipitate the retirement of the employees who complete the minimum time established in current legislation and those who are in bonus for continued services [4]. The ongoing actions indicate that the government will maintain the constringent strategy of higher education policy, but will add a planned demoralization campaign to its institutions. It is not just propaganda aimed at identifying students and university professors with all forms of "moral degradation". The Bolsonaro government is a political mechanism The announcement of the budget cuts for all federal higher education institutions occurred essentially in two acts. The first was the outrageous announcement that there would be selectivity, applying the cuts mainly in three institutions. This selectivity was not very convincing to an observer, as it is essentially lacking a unitary sense. Let's say Bolsonaro wanted to retaliate against the universities that opposed him, are not there other universities that house intellectuals critical of the government? And would there not be in the three chosen institutions some of the most vocal advocates of economic policy in motion? Are there no institutions outside this list with leaders, and even Deans, openly left-winged? Are there no other universities that perform even more provocative artistic, philosophical, and political activities? And, in the end, the measure would be flagrantly unconstitutional, as it violates not only the formal autonomy of the university as defined in the Federal Constitution, but also the principles of impersonality, isonomy, and probity in public administration. And then came the second act, which was the announcement of isonomy in contingency. This meant extending it to all federal higher education institutions (not just universities). On the same day, it was announced an expansion of 30% budget cut of the entire allocated money (30/4) [5], the Minister of Education published a video on social media. The video consisted of him not only comparing false allegations of expenses on public undergraduate students with public preschool students, but also speaking directly to the "tax paying citizen" justifying measures that were previously attempted to be implemented affirming they were in full agreement with the program that Bolsonaro presented during the elections and stated that "now there has been a huge controversy because we are presenting our government plan". For the Minister, discontinuing higher public education funding would not be an act without a cause, after all this would allow the opening of new vacancies in public daycare centers for "children usually humbler, poorer, and needier." At this moment, there is a subtle change in the tone of the Minister and the camera closes in a dramatic "zoom in" effect, to which a character asks, "What would you do in my place?” The language used in the minister's video is well- known to Brazilians because it is the same as that of a well-known Empiricus Research video on the Betina case [6]. Recall that Empiricus was fined R$ 40 thousand for misleading advertising and for misleading the consumer because there is no investment in the stock exchange with a return of 65,000% in three years. But Empirical had the merit of popularizing this visual editing style in which two shooting plans are alternated, producing a quick "zoom in" and "zoom out" effect to give intensity, coherence, and value to the character's lines. This type of narrative creates an atmosphere of dramatic intimacy, subjectively involving the viewer within the narrative. The speech that the government passes to the "good citizen", "taxpayer" is that this event was just a battle in the war against the "chaos" and favor of the "good citizen" faithful "Taxpayer", but above all, in this war the government would be losing as there would be a very deep rooting within the State of elements linked to the "left-wing", to "cultural Marxism", to "communists" ( as the minister of education has been used to saying in his announcements). The intelligence of Bolsonaro's government lies in the realization that producing fictional propaganda is not enough. An ideological war between "virtuous" good citizens against the "immoral" communists that assaulted the state is ineffective; to be effective, the government must not only act as if this war is real but at the same time act as if losing all battles, one by one. Thus, one by one, the attacked sectors rise and organize to resist the excruciating neoliberal onslaughts, the fictional narrative will work by its self-confirmation. This act of resistance would only confirm that the government was fighting very powerful enemies, and that is the reason they lost and retreated so often. The feeling of conflict takes over when R$ 7.96 billion budget cut in the Ministry of Education is announced by doing so while reinforcing the thesis on the need for paranoia and mistrust against the institutions of the Republic and of the institution of a regime of power of exception. Thus, Bolsonaro not only advances towards neoliberal reforms that he is committed to, but also prepares to solidify the bases of his government and the institution of a regime with particular historicity. The Bolsonaro government is not driven by the hatred of knowledge Bolsonarism does not attack universities solely because it would be contrary to philosophy, sociology or any other of the humanities. His assaults on universities are generally due to the idiosyncrasies of his government. A weak government, that depends almost exclusively on the approval of neoliberal adjustments and the permanent conception of public enemies to be fought. It is also due to the profound contradictions of the capitalist way of production that has no other answer for the world crisis. What is proposed, then, is more "capitalist clashes" [7]. Worldwide growth rates are low and unstable throughout the world market, the crisis of 2007/2008 is far from being resolved, and as the production world collapses, the entire national way of living has to be reorganized: it's the survival of the way of production versus the survival of individuals. Since 2015, when neoliberal adjustments gained new strength following the stress from the 2011 and 2014 crisis, the budget deficit of federal higher education institutions (IFES) was accumulated at R $ 10.7 billion - regarding the budget from the 2015 fiscal year. however it would reach R$ 23.5 billion if the budget trajectory maintained the 2011-2014 trend, considering the linear expansion of registrations and investments in the IFES (conservative projection, that does not even consider the establishment of new federal institutions, the progressive increase enrollment, the growth of demand for student residency policies nor the accumulated deficit in terms of physical infrastructure and teaching and administrative staff). It would be naive to assume that the cuts in funding could be analyzed only from the accounting point of view, no major significance in terms of readjustment that neoliberal adjustments as these products across the political structure of the institutions and their relations with other social structures. Any substantive change in higher education implies far-reaching repercussions on the Brazilian insertion in the international division of scientific production. Public universities account for nearly all national research - more than 95% of the research projects - and all the research signed jointly by Brazilian researchers and companies, both national and foreign, as evidenced by the report produced by Clarivate Analytics at the request of CAPES ( CLARIVATE ANALYTICS, 2018). These indicators show nothing to be celebrated, considering it ignores serious structural problems within the walls of public universities research. The ambiance is offered as virtual platforms for the production of scientific and technical knowledge with public funding and yet privately owned scientific and technical knowledge by large national capitals and, mainly, foreign. To illustrate ​​the problem, data produced by Clarivate Analytics can be recalled, that identifies the 20 companies with the highest number of research produced in partnership with universities in Brazil. Out of these, only one, Petrobras, has some national nature, while all the others are large multinational companies based in the United States and Europe. Notably, 15 of these are the pharmaceutical and biotechnology capitals: GlaxoSmithKline (UK), Novartis (Switzerland), Roche Holding (Switzerland), Pfizer (USA), Merck & Company (USA), Bayer AG Johnson (USA), Bristol Myers Squibb (USA), Amgen (USA), Johnson & Johnson USA (USA), Genentech (USA) and Bayer (USA), AstraZeneca (England), Sanofi-Aventis Healthcare Pharmaceuticals (Germany). The data is a revealing sample of the subordinate insertion of Brazilian scientific production in the international division of knowledge. In this context, Brazil's role in world scientific production is mainly that of cataloging its fauna and flora: collecting, cataloging, discovering new species and medicinal uses of traditional communities, sequencing, surveying possibilities for commercial application and transferring materials and expertise to the major foreign scientific centers that will process and transform these natural sources into biochemical inputs, pharmaceuticals and other biochemicals sold at high royalty rates on the world market. It is for no other reason that by 2015, 82% of all public and private investment in research and development (R&D) in the world was concentrated in North America, the European Union, Japan, China and South Korea (BREDA, 2018). And it is not by chance that these countries concentrate the largest number of patents in the world. In the same year, Latin America and the Caribbean accounted for only 3.5% of R&D expenditures, and the region continues to reduce its technology parks, increasing imports of capital goods (mainly machinery and equipment) and increasing its primary products. In 2015, Brazil invested the equivalent of 35.5 billion [8] with federal higher education, but in the same year spent US$ 20 billion in royalties and technical services payments due to the use of foreign-registered technologies (BREDA, 2018), approximately R$ 76.8 billion in current values. The payment of royalties is one of the means of transferring value from peripheral countries to the center of world capitalism and, together with interest, amortization, profits, and dividends, reveals a historical and structural characteristic of dependent societies: the indelible import of capital as a way of compensation, at a peripheral development level, of unequal exchange terms. This way of operation of Latin America dependent economy reiterates the tendency towards de-industrialization, both because the cost of credit and infrastructure investments are compressed by the increasing interest mass, and by the various mechanisms of value transfers in terms of the realization of commodities in the world market. Thus, Latin America not subordinately inserts itself in world value production matrix, such as reproducing in an amplified manner the very conditions of their dependence. Although there are counter-trends, the general rule is the specialization of domestic production for the export of primary products, the competition for trading labor for lower prices in the world market and the organization of complex platforms for valuing fictitious capital. It is not by chance that in Latin America the financialization of higher education reaches unprecedented dimensions, even for the parameters of the world education market of the central countries. In the case of Brazil, the legal conditions established at the end of the 1980s, and especially in the early 1990s, made it possible since 2001 for fictitious capitals to find a large extent of value appropriation in private educational institutions. Since 2007, with the entry of large groups such as Kroton, Estácio de Sá, Ânima and Ser Educacional on the stock exchange, this process has become more noticeable, because the participation of investment funds and other institutional investor modalities increased the acquisition of credit without banks and, consequently, established new competition levels, marked by bankruptcies, mergers, and acquisitions of educational institutions. These capitals are now true oligopolies in higher education, with a significant set of institutions and enrollments, and also an active participant in the state regulatory sector. More precisely, the ten largest educational groups alone accounted for 42.7% of the total enrollment in Brazilian higher education in 2016. The five largest institutions (Kroton, Unip, Estácio, Laureate and Ser Educational) held together more students than all public institutions added. Such growth would not be possible without active participation by the State in the appraisal of fictitious capital, as well as the deregulation of financial capital flow in frontiers that were once considered parts of a common social property sphere: education, health, housing, welfare. The three processes we have mentioned, of expanding technical and technological dependence, its composition with other ways of transferring value to the center of capitalism and the financialization of higher education combined. This is because the consequences of financialization are extremely deleterious for scientific production and, generally, its relation with knowledge. At the highest level, all educational systems, public and private, no longer have an autonomous existence concerning capitals that penetrate higher education. Both its direct domain (privatization) is extended to the other levels, and the whole logic of the organization of educational policy is subsumed to the logic of finance. These consequences are so diffuse and systemic that it establishes a kind of regime, with wide repercussions for private and public institutions. That is why the financialization of higher education can only reach the degree it presents, on the outskirts of the world market. What is present in the "lunatic" crisis of the Bolsonaro government against universities and the humanities is a result of the escalation of force in the process of adapting Brazilian education to its place in the international division of labor. Methods for mediating change when governments change, but especially when power relations change. Bolsonaro's government represent the assumption that the capitalistic crisis has provided an environment of favorable forces, enabling idiosyncrasies of its government to act as a propeller in a conservative war will have as a result the fulfilment of the trend that has developed since the 1960s. The Bolsonaro government has a broad and well-articulated neoliberal project Although at times the tendency to Brazil's subordinate insertion in the world scenario of education, science and technology may have been crossed by counter-tendencies, including a certain openness for some laboratories to work with relative autonomy, less budgetary tightening and even with some critical openness to the contradictions of capitalism; the coordinates posed by the deepening of the crisis stress the correlations of forces in the dispute of the public fund and in the forms of domination. The space and time of politics are redefined, reaffirming the general tendencies and seeking to eliminate the traces of opposition. In the next years Universities will be under more pressure and it cannot be lost from sight the ties that connect the maintenance of public education and other social struggles, such as those that oppose any welfare reform that converts the wealth spared by workers into funds for financial capital, that mitigate the solidarity that workers share between themselves and between the different generations and social security, however minimal it may be today after decades of ceaseless offensives. For higher education, it is clear that the welfare reform will have immediate consequences for the careers of employees, forcing the contingency of ever-larger portions of wages to finance private welfare funds, which in turn transfer risks from the financial capital market to the safety of the workers who may be forced to lose significant portions of their future security, according to the losses that these capital suffer, but also in the present, forced to capitalize the funds with the hijacking of their wages. Under these circumstances, the academic career will become much more unstable, which favors the export of Brazilian scientists to other countries, and has as a consequence the loss of scientific, artistic and philosophical knowledge. The blackmail method applied in the courts, according to which "if the welfare reform is approved, then the university contingencies can be revised", as the Minister of Education announced, sheds light on another aspect of the Bolsonaro government's welfare reform to the National Congress. This is because if the capitalization of social security is approved, this will mean the transfer of the saving of the individual accounts for banks, insurance companies and funds to invest in the market. The pressures for valorization spaces will be tremendous, internally forcing financial capital to expand the social spaces of capital placement. In other words, all economic fields will be pressured to capitalize on the volume of assets that can circulate in the monetary form and, as a consequence, the costs of capitalization will turn into the corrosion of the state's ability to operate with the public fund in social policies, it is not difficult to note that the general tendency will be to privatize all its scopes. Thus, it is not difficult to conjecture how sectors that are already highly committed such as welfare funds; health and education will be areas of intense dispute for their total deregulation. In this sense, the fight against social security reform is fundamental to guarantee a fair and solidary future for all Brazilian workers, but it also seems to be a fundamental issue for the survival of public universities. This is because financial capital could coexist with public and free universities only as long as there were no internal and external pressures that made it relevant to join the struggles of Government employee, students, and parts of society that advocate for public education. On the other hand, because public education collaborated to some extent with the expansion of the modality in private IES, as was the case with correspondence courses in which the expansion of the modality in the federal and state schools gradually bestowed the legitimacy needed by the private schools. But in the context of the course a crisis and the intensity of its subsequent waves, fictitious capitals are exerting ever more power to extend the frontiers of the commodification of social rights, corroborating for the seeming intolerable existence of public education. A picture of ​​what this conflict means, first it must be clear that in Brazil, although only 25% of enrollments are in public higher education institutions, the candidate/vacancy ratio is 17: 1, while in private courses this relation is approximately 1: 1 [11]. This data reveals the reason for student’s preference for public institutions, which is consistent with the impossibility of the vast majority of the population to bear a share of family income in the payment of tuition. In Brazil, wages are so limited that a family with a total income of R$ 2,500, with the high rental, transportation, and food costs, could hardly have an average "ticket" of R$800 a month for a single child to attend higher education in private IES, without this implicating on their social decline. The only way to compensate for this would be to restructure student financing programs by increasing the share of capital used to repay loans by households, interest subsidies, and risk securitization by the state. For this reason, private financial institutions compete twice with public universities: by students in search of enrollments and by securitized student loans and subsidized by state funds. When resources become limited, the competitive struggle between them is no longer abstract and becomes a concrete struggle, but the economic difference (and therefore, political) force is massive. While financial capital can move risk assessment agencies, rankings, investment funds in all departments of the national economy, fund campaigns, establish parliamentary fronts, act within and outside the National Education Council (CNE), among other tactics; public universities rely mostly on the remaining’s of critical capabilities to identify the problem and prepare the field for opposition, especially on the unions and student body campaigns. If social security fund capitalization is approved, allowing large resources saved by workers to be placed on the financial markets, or even if capitalization is postponed, but the social security legislation is unconstitutional - a measure that would allow the capitalization to be determined and regulated by ordinary law later - education, like other social areas, will face privatization in correlations of forces unthinkable even for the current parameters. What we have, then, is a government with very well defined and articulated projects for all spheres of social policies. The apparent "confusion" of Bolsonarism is not "misrule", but the method of conducting this new phase of the neoliberal offensive. The reaction of universities The institutional reaction of the universities and many of the first-hour critics was the worst possible. Immediately federal universities began issuing notes and public statements claiming their positions in the rankings, their role in the production of publications in the international scientific publishing market, the public-private partnerships for which they are responsible and to configure the paperless "no science". Nothing more dangerous than trying to fight against the effects of neoliberalism seeking to cling to its causes. Academic rankings are some of the main mechanisms by which academic institutions in Brazil and the world compete with each other in the market for tuition, investments, scholarships and public resources. They work, as well as the academic indices produced by "independent" and "external" agencies, through the same logic that risk assessment agencies operate as monetary and fiscal policies of national states: increasing the grades of those who religiously comply with the adjustments demanded by capital and demoted to punish those who deviate. The production of indexes is perhaps the main expression of the current process of financialization in public institutions. As in them, financialization does not reach property over the capital or liquidity of its assets, what matters is that management modality are increasingly similar, to the extent possible, to the logic of financial institutions. This is how universities respond to investments in research and teaching, returning a productivity rate measured by "products" (patents, publications, services provided, graduate students, etc.), modulating the university organization by models of "efficiency", "governance "And competition. It is in this sense that the Brazilian university laboratories compete with each other for private resources, providing students, teachers, and equipment funded by the State to produce knowledge that will not be more appropriate collectively, but privately by companies. Clinging to academic rankings and indexes will serve absolutely nothing to defend public education. Has anyone imagined that the Ministry of Education does not know the indexes that it has worked for at least two decades to force universities and the entire Brazilian educational system to submit? Or, that hearing the deans invoke these scholarly results, would the government fall into self-satisfaction? It would be naive to assume that the government does not have a project, it has no strategy, it does not dominate its tactics and it does not apply its methods to concretize the destiny that it has traced for the national education. But there is something worse than naiveté, because it was the symbolic dispute, what remains is the subjectivities of a logic that contrasts academic institutions, as if what is being affirmed is not the autonomy of universities before all governments and cuts in all its dimensions (technique, tactics and strategy), but that should be cut is those institutions that do not have a good position in the rankings and indexes. This logic implicitly accepts (1) the cuts, as if it were to indicate that they should not occur "in this or that institution", according to their "academic" results, (2) the legitimacy of these competitive metrics ( rankings and indices), some and (3) that the ranking of institutions has concrete and effective effects on inter-institutional competition by public and private funds, indicating which institutions should be more or less affected by the cuts or which should receive more private investments in their laboratories. It is serious nonsense that leaders of public institutions on behalf of the university autonomy claim strategies like these, end, what could be more incompatible than trying to save autonomy of universities appealing precisely the metrics external s, committed with the formation of a world market for higher education such as Times Higher Education? This is not the time to review all the legal and intralegal devices that have allowed public universities to become so vulnerable to capital harassment and governments? Perhaps no moment has been so propitious to analyze in depth the when the creation of entities such as the Coordination of Improvement of Higher Education Personnel (CAPES), the National Council of Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq), National Fund for Scientific and Technological Development (FNDCT), Funding of Studies and Projects (FINEP) and other research support foundations have made universities and training of upper-level personnel hostage to capital and government. After all, although they have played important roles in the financing of training, research and various projects, these entities and funds are today responsible for the very serious degree of vulnerability of Brazilian science. It would be enough for the government to freeze the resources of any of them, to paralyze the graduate and most national laboratories. Its funding has for many decades avoided a broader debate on linking the budget to universities as a means of securing the budget of these institutions independent of governments. Without this, university autonomy does not exist beyond the symbolic plane. It may be a government such as Jair Bolsonaro who now holds in his hands the powers that control the academic and university life only shed light on a problem that has always existed and persisted with the connivance of most academics. History will show if these same sectors will be willing to finally face the question of university autonomy, even if it means ultimately all the neoliberal advances that already destroy our institutions, or if their struggles do not exceed the desire to return to the previous illusion of that everything went very well with national higher education until the arrival of a supposed "crazy" to power . Anyhow, there is no time to waste. While most college leaders seem to believe that academic "good behavior" would be grounds for being spared; there can't be any illusions: the time of conciliation of interests has ended, finally the class struggle reaches universities. The Bolsonaro government has a very precise destiny for higher education and Brazil in the world, we cannot deceive ourselves with utilities, the government gives consistent signs of knowing what to do and, the main, how to do. It is then for us to direct our struggle by our own hands and by our armed with the best union and student experiences gathered in history. References Benites, A. (2019, May 03). Corrida por aposentadorias e falta de concurso ceifam um terço do funcionalismo federal. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JgnAa0 BRAZIL. Censo da Educação Superior. (2017b). Retrieved May 06, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JjnejY BRAZIL. Ministério do Planejamento, Desenvolvimento e Gestão. (2019c). Dados LDO. 2019c. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JiMaa9 BRAZIL. SENADO FEDERAL. (2017) PL 9252/2017. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JjE4hB BRAZIL. SENADO FEDERAL. (2019a). Portal do orçamento federal. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JhdFRt BRAZIL. Senado Federal. (2019b). Emendas ao Orçamento. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JhBqZR Breda, D. D. (2018, June 21). Ensayo sobre la ceguera: La industria 4.0 en América Latina. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from https://bit.ly/2H45Ltl CLARIVATE ANALYTICS. (2018, January 17). Research in Brazil. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2J3Y6xc Mariz, R. (2019, May 01). Ministro da Educação vai cortar 30% das verbas de todas as universidades federais. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from https://glo.bo/2JhWkrC O ESTADO DE S. PAULO. (2019, May 05). A balbúrdia do ministro - Opinião. Retrieved May 05, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JiFYiK Oliveira, R. (2019, May 08). Corte em universidade chega a 52% da verba. Retrieved May 10, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2J8grJx Teixeira, L. B. (2019, April 26). 'Bolsolão'? Emendas parlamentares estão previstas na lei, mas sem barganha. Retrieved April 26, 2019, from http://bit.ly/2JiJedY Notes: [1] "The amendments made to the General Budget of the Union, called the Annual Budgetary Law (LOA) - sent by the Executive to Congress annually - are proposed through which parliamentarians can express opinions or influence the allocation of public resources in function of political commitments they assumed during their tenure, both with states and municipalities and institutions. Such amendments may add, delete or modify certain items (items) of the budget bill sent by the Executive "(BRAZIL, 2019b). [2] The amnesty of debts of farmers was one of Jair Bolsonaro campaign promises as a candidate for president. [3], preceded by various articulations, this was the rhetoric for the higher education of dependent countries since at least the late 1980s. In the 1990s, it was possible to find several technical notes and multilateral conferences on the supposed necessity of the end of gratuitousness and, finally, of the end of the public university as such. [4] According to El País (2019), in 2017, during the course of the reform of the government pension plan Michel Temer (2016-2017), 22,458 were retired or left their positions. [5] "The cut made by the government in the budgetary allocations of the federal universities was different for each one, varying from 12.79% in the case of Amapá institution to 52.47% for the University of the South of Bahia" ( OLIVEIRA, 2019). [6] Betina is a character that represents a young Brazilian of only 22 years that affirmed to have begun to invest with only 1,520 Reals and three years later would have accumulated a patrimony superior to 1 million Reals applying in funds and that it offered reports on investments. The character was created by Empiricus Research , superimposed on the name of a real person, who works for the investment consulting firm in the furniture and miscellaneous funds market and seems to merge reality and fiction to create an advertising story for the middle class so they invest instead of putting some of their savings into a savings fund. [7] as defended by the Special Secretary for Productivity, Employment, and Competitiveness, Carlos Alexandre da Costa, endorsed by the Minister of Economy and repeated to exhaustion by the leading economists-ideologues of the moment [8] Corrected by IPCA. [9] It combines with the characteristics of the current phase of world capitalism, capital exports from central countries in the form of financial assets with the high rate of transpositions in international markets and high competition for their remunerations. This aspect has an important implication in the complexity of the development of the debt system in the dependent countries, giving a particular economic significance to both public debt and the securitization and credit market and therefore puts pressure on States for high-interest rates on securitized debt of national treasures. [10] The government stimulated the expansion of online public education and when the modality gained a significant rise, it got stuck during the expansion phase. Thus, private companies received the greatest offer of credibility for a modality of which society, in general, holds reasonable suspicions. Also, public universities have developed systems, teaching materials and teaching-learning theories for online education. [11] Data from the Higher Education Census of 2017 (BRAZIL, 2017 b ).