{"id":139170,"date":"2013-10-29T18:13:05","date_gmt":"2013-10-29T20:13:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/?p=139170"},"modified":"2013-10-31T18:45:35","modified_gmt":"2013-10-31T20:45:35","slug":"the-victory-of-a-vocation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/the-victory-of-a-vocation\/","title":{"rendered":"The victory of a vocation"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"M\u00e1rio

Ant\u00f4nio Gaud\u00e9rio \/ Folhapress<\/span>M\u00e1rio Alves (left), Sara Orenstein, and Gorender at the offices of the newspaper Estado da Bahia<\/em> in 1942Ant\u00f4nio Gaud\u00e9rio \/ Folhapress<\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

Prior to Jacob Gorender\u2019s imprisonment by the Brazilian dictatorship in 1970, his professional profile could be easily defined: communist leader. But after his release two years later, weary of 30 years of constant struggle within the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the Revolutionary Brazilian Communist Party (PCBR), Gorender definitively embraced his intellectual calling. Although he never finished his undergraduate studies, he became a blend of writer and historian. \u201cWe are paying tribute to an intellectual who trained and matured outside the walls of any academic institution. He was an extremely rare case of a successfully self-taught man, who is even worthier of our respect and admiration because he suffered so many reversals of fortune,\u201d said Prof. Alfredo Bosi on June 20, 2013, at a meeting of the faculty of the School of Philosophy, Language and Literature, and the Humanities of the University of S\u00e3o Paulo (FFLCH\/USP), in which the professor explored the trajectory of the Marxist thinker, who passed away in S\u00e3o Paulo on June 12 at the age of 90.<\/p>\n

Jacob Gorender (1923-2013) was born in Salvador, Bahia, the oldest of five children of poor Jewish immigrants. His father, Nathan, came from Ukraine and his mother, Anna, from Bessarabia. At the age of 17, he was already working as an archivist at O Imparcial<\/em>, a newspaper in Salvador, where he went on to serve as a reporter and then editor. This was the first of the many papers for which he wrote, a good number of which had ties to the PCB. In 1941 he began studying at the Salvador School of Law, and the following year his friend M\u00e1rio Alves recruited him to the communist party. At 20, he enlisted to fight in World War II and saw seven months of combat in the Apennines and Monte Castelo, Italy.<\/p>\n

When he returned to Brazil, he threw himself into the life of a militant. He dropped out of college, moved to Rio de Janeiro, and became a \u201cprofessional revolutionary,\u201d as he used to say, devoted to party activities. He was in Moscow from 1955 to 1957 to take a training course for party cadre. It was at the Congress of the Communist Party that was held during his stay in Russia that Stalin\u2019s crimes and the Soviet Union\u2019s violent repression of the Hungarian reform movement were first denounced. He met his future wife, Idealina, while he was taking the course.<\/p>\n

\"Gorender

Family Archives <\/span>Gorender at home in 1999. His work won acclaimFamily Archives <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

When Brazilian president J\u00e2nio Quadros stepped down and Jo\u00e3o Goulart was sworn in to replace him in 1961, the leadership of the PCB, headed by Lu\u00eds Carlos Prestes, adopted a conciliatory, collaborationist stance. The party\u2019s left wing \u2013 which included Gorender, Alves, Apol\u00f4nio de Carvalho, and Carlos Marighella, among others \u2013 criticized the leadership\u2019s \u201cright-wing deviations\u201d and advocated more intense social struggle and greater autonomy vis-\u00e0-vis the Goulart administration. The 1964 coup d\u2019\u00e9tat met with no resistance. Rifts within the communist movement widened and the left-leaning opposition lost its challenge to the Prestes group in 1966. One year later, during the sixth congress of the PCB, Gorender was expelled from the party, with no right to a defense.<\/p>\n

In 1968, Gorender founded the PCBR, together with Alves and Carvalho. In 1970, he was arrested and tortured at the Tiradentes Penitentiary in S\u00e3o Paulo. At 47, he was the oldest one in his jail cell and was surrounded by young men. He decided to give a course on the history of Brazil and to lecture on political issues.<\/p>\n

Books<\/strong>
\nWhile behind bars, Gorender also translated works from French and German; his wife smuggled these out of the penitentiary and took them to the former Abril Cultural publishing house, which released them on the market. \u201cShortly after leaving prison, he continued doing translations for the publisher, and my mother served as his \u2018front man\u2019,\u201d says their daughter Ethel, who is a pediatrician. In the 1970s and 1980s, Gorender played an important role in the publication of the series Os Pensadores<\/em> (The thinkers) and also coordinated Os Economistas<\/em> (The economists), both of which were successful collections sold at newsstands. \u201cIn addition to his translations, Gorender wrote two notable introductions to translations of Marx: one for Para a cr\u00edtica da economia pol\u00edtica e outros textos<\/em> (Towards a critique of political economy and other texts) and the other for O capital<\/em> (Capital), both from 1982,\u201d says Marcelo Ridenti, professor of sociology and researcher at the University of Campinas (Unicamp).<\/p>\n

\"M\u00e1rio

Family Archives <\/span>M\u00e1rio Alves serving in Italy during World War II (n.d.)Family Archives <\/span><\/p><\/div>\n

In 1978, Gorender published O escravismo colonial<\/em> (Colonial slavery) (\u00c1tica, 1978; Perseu Abramo, 2011), in which he analyzed Brazil\u2019s colonial development. \u201cThere was a traditional line within the PCB, defended by Nelson Werneck Sodr\u00e9, who believed that Brazil had a feudal past, represented by large landholders, and that its economy was focused inward,\u201d Bosi explains. According to this argument, the country was merely a supplier of natural products like sugar and coffee, a factor that delayed its industrialization. The other thesis, formulated by Caio Prado J\u00fanior \u2013 likewise a communist \u2013 posited that all production was meant to be sold on the foreign market; in other words, capitalism had been present in Brazil since the early sixteenth century.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn his book, Gorender introduces a third path, which he believed to be more appropriate to Brazil, the Caribbean, and even the southern United States,\u201d says Bosi. In Gorender\u2019s opinion, the system could not be labeled \u201cfeudal\u201d because it supplied and sold products. Nor could it be considered capitalist, because it was not sustained by free workers. \u201cHis thesis was that slavery presented its own unique mode of production within the colony, and this was a huge theoretical advance in terms of the question,\u201d says Bosi. What the slaves produced was sold but there was no social contract. Much to the author\u2019s and the publisher\u2019s surprise, the book fueled a major controversy and was a success among the academic audience. It was Bosi, then serving on the editorial board for the publishing house \u00c1tica, that recommended that they publish the book.<\/p>\n

His second important book was Combate nas trevas \u2013 A Esquerda Brasileira: das ilus\u00f5es perdidas \u00e0 luta armada<\/em> (Battle in darkness \u2013 The Brazilian left: from lost illusions to armed struggle) (\u00c1tica, 1987, out of print). Marcelo Ridenti, who believes that this book remains the most thoroughgoing work on the topic, says, \u201cHe brought his talents together, as a historian, a memoirist, and a journalist.\u201d According to the journalist Al\u00edpio Freire, who was one of the young men who attended Gorender\u2019s prison classes, the book led the way in the effort to understand the \u201csplintering of the left after 1964\u201d from a coherent perspective, especially the era of armed struggle.<\/p>\n

Gorender wrote six more books and received an honorary degree from the Federal University of Bahia (UFB) in 1994, at the age of 71. From 1994 through 1996, he was a visiting professor at USP\u2019s Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA) and at the FFLCH. The intellectual production of this Marxist thinker won acclaim both inside and outside the walls of academe.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Jacob Gorender contributed to scholarship on Brazil’s history","protected":false},"author":475,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_active":false,"_exactmetrics_sitenote_note":"","_exactmetrics_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[165],"tags":[241,214],"coauthors":[785],"class_list":["post-139170","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","tag-history","tag-political-science"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139170","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/475"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=139170"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/139170\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=139170"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=139170"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=139170"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/revistapesquisa.fapesp.br\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=139170"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}