CERTAIN MARXIST HERITAGE IN THE RECENT DEBATE IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION IN BRAZIL^*

Abstract

This paper analyzes aspects of the emergence and development of a Marxist approach in Brazilian Physical Education. For this purpose, it firstly reconstructs the course of the concept body culture from Europe to Brazil. Aligning with the Cold War debates and tensions, such an approach reaches the country in competition and correspondence with others, such as movement culture and movement body culture. This all makes up the Renewing Movement in Physical Education, whose main answer is the achievement of a critical Physical Education, in the context of redemocratization. In the following, the paper briefly comments on the theme of the body and its education by Marx and Gramsci, and examines some aspects of the concept of body culture in an internal view of Marxism itself. Finally, it points to a dialectical deficit and suggests, even in the framework of Marx, possibilities for interpretation and proposition of body education.

Keywords:
Physical Education; Criticism; Marxism; Brazil

Resumo

O artigo analisa aspectos do surgimento e desenvolvimento de uma abordagem marxista na Educação Física brasileira. Para tanto, procura em primeiro lugar, reconstruir o percurso do conceito cultura corporal da Europa para o Brasil. Alinhando-se aos debates e tensões da Guerra Fria, tal abordagem chega ao país em concorrência e correspondência com outros, como cultura de movimento e cultura corporal de movimento. Isso tudo compõe o Movimento Renovador em Educação Física, cuja resposta principal é a consecução de uma Educação Física crítica, no contexto de redemocratização. A seguir, o trabalho comenta brevemente o tema do corpo e sua educação em Marx e Gramsci, e examina alguns aspectos do conceito de cultura corporal em visada interna ao próprio marxismo. Finalmente, aponta-lhe um défice dialético e sugere, ainda nos marcos de Marx, possibilidades de interpretação e proposição da educação do corpo.

Palavras chave:
Educação Física; Crítica; Marxismo; Brasil

Resumen

El artículo analiza aspectos del surgimiento y desarrollo de un enfoque marxista en la educación física brasileña. Con este fin, busca, en primer lugar, reconstruir el curso del concepto de cultura corporal desde Europa hasta Brasil. En línea con los debates y tensiones de la Guerra Fría, este enfoque llega al país en competencia y correspondencia con otros, como la cultura de movimiento y la cultura corporal de movimiento. Todo esto constituye el Movimiento Renovador en Educación Física, cuya respuesta principal es el logro de una Educación Física crítica, en el contexto de la redemocratización. A continuación, el artículo comenta brevemente el tema del cuerpo y su educación en Marx y Gramsci, y examina algunos de los aspectos del concepto de cultura corporal en una visión interna del propio marxismo. Finalmente, le señala un déficit dialéctico y sugiere, incluso en el marco de Marx, posibilidades de interpretación y proposición de educación corporal.

Palabras clave:
Educación Física; Crítica; Marxismo; Brasil

1 MARXISM IN THE BATTLE OF IDEAS

The intertwining between politics and epistemology, or the perspective which knowledge is built not only by following a dynamic, would be internal to it, as of logical principles from one or another quadrant, but subjected to a set of social determinations, is something that only modern experience could bring us. As is well known, modernity is the first time that thinks of itself as historical transience and, therefore, that puts into question the form of constituting a discourse about itself.

Such capacity for self-reflection defeats the dialectical tradition and, with it, the critique of capitalism by Karl Marx and his heirs. This tradition intends to be, in this context, an immanent critique of its object, in other words, it only makes sense to the extent of the denial of the criticized object, which, on the other hand, it is its reason for existence.

The encounter of dialectical tradition with a contemporary phenomenon, the public school, and the idea of ​​revolution - in other words, a social transformation that takes place from the internal contradictions of a social situation - puts education at the center of competition for models of society. It is, therefore, in the movement of clash and conflagration between classes that different educational proposals enter the dispute for the formation of the new generations, for nation projects and even for the constitution of civilizing models.

If Michel Foucault is right to say that philosophize is to elaborate concepts, then, considering the foregoing, is possible to remember the question of whether concepts can be critical and, if so, how fruitful they are as analytical tools capable of at least exercise the determined denial of the present. The expectation of critical thinking is, however, broader, and it concerns the overcoming of the order of things, not only by the concept, of course, but also by what it can help, by exercising its role, to practice. The general orientation of the battered eleventh thesis on Feuerbach goes, where we read that “Philosophers to this day just, and in different ways, have interpreted the world. It must be transformed” (MARX, 1973a, p. 21). (Our translation).

Brazilian Physical Education also has its Marxism and it translates, in one of its most emblematic cases, into the concept of body culture. It is a ghost that has been around the field for almost thirty years. It is a spirit that haunts part of its academic debate, the fraction that, from a critical point of view, is concerned with a certain epistemology and a certain pedagogy, wondering what would be the object of knowledge of the area, but also of teaching, which, in the sense of overcoming the current order, would be concerned.

In this process, which is of academic and political dispute, body culture is a concept of combat, in other words, it emerges from the perspective of synthesizing a critical position that emphasizes the first term, offering an alternative to, for example, physical activity, restricted expression in its scope and linked to the Health Sciences. With body culture, Physical Education sought and seeks presence in the Humanities, especially in the Educational Sciences, trying to legitimize its practice in school as a discipline of knowledge, with specific content, and not as mere activity.

In the following pages, I reconstruct one of the ways in which the concept of body culture was constituted in Brazil. Therefore, I begin by mentioning three of the impulses of critical thinking in Brazilian Physical Education that emerged in the 1980s. One of them of a more orthodox Marxist approach, another that, still keeping in this tradition, incorporates aspects of psychoanalysis and the cultural and political critique of the New Left. Added to them a third, of phenomenological cut, composing great part of the spectrum that is conventionally called the Renewing Movement in Physical Education. Soon after, I try to expose, very briefly, some places that the body and its education occupy in Marx and Antonio Gramsci, one of the most influential Marxists in Education in Brazil. It is a section that can be read almost as an excursion, a deviation though necessary. Next, I review the concept of body culture as proposed by Soares et al. (1992) in some of its developments, trying, in the same engine that he intends to trigger, the dialectical tradition, to criticize him. In the end, I suggest some lines of reflection within Marxism.

2 POLICY, SOCIETY, RENEWAL MOVEMENT IN PHYSICAL EDUCATION

Beyond the socialist, anarchist, and syndicalist proposals of the late nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth, disputes for critical education have gained momentum over the following decades, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, when it draws, in the wake of developmentalism and social sensitivity rooted in a period of relative democracy (1945-1964), as well as the work of Álvaro Vieira Pinto, Paulo Freire’s literacy method in Pernambuco. Happy synthesis between humanist base, social sensibility and innovative genius, liberating education and awareness was outlawed by the civil-military dictatorship that began with the 1964 coup.

Fifteen years later, in 1979, the Amnesty Law allowed the return of Paulo Freire, opening the possibility of the resumption of a critical debate in education that could oppose the technocratic modernizing models of the dictatorship. At the same time, a more properly Marxist critical interpretation of the ideas and researches of Dermeval Saviani (1983, among others) was developed at the Postgraduate Program in Education of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, a center for intellectual resistance. to the regime of exception.

In the latter case, from a particular reading by Antonio Gramsci, the perspective was that social transformation would take place in complex societies through the dispute for hegemony, the ideology materialized in cultural and political practices, among them, and in most importantly, education. Prior to the break with the social order, it would be necessary for a set of changes in mindset and practice to be structured, as if positions on a battlefield were to be overcome as an intellectual and moral reform was constructed. For this reason Gramsci’s universalist perspective, his struggle against the dialects that keep peripheral populations excluded and isolated, the emphasis on the discipline of children as a body teasing so that children of the lower classes could access high culture. Therefore, the importance of the school in this project is not small. The dispute for education is, in such a record, the dispute for distinct social projects, and thus its history must be understood as an expression of the class struggle.

It is from this context that, in part, emerges the Renewing Movement in Physical Education, a process that combines, in the specificity of the phenomenon, criticism of traditional sports, hygienist ideas and practices, the militarization of classes in courtyards and school grounds, which was supposed be a suffocation of the body by the disciplinary order. Note, as an expression of its initial moment, the slogan of the National Meeting of Physical Education Students, held in 1984, at the Federal University of Santa Catarina (UFSC), in Florianópolis, which asked: “Physical Education, or the art of train human beings”? At the same time, it is within the framework of a certain counterculture, present throughout the 1970s in Brazil (perhaps as the last form of resistance to dictatorship, according to the interpretation of many, once the actual political opposition has been canceled), that the body gains protagonism, such as macrobiotic education, body “speech”, anti-gymnastics, somatherapy, among many other practices in which the body dimension, wherever it may be, appears as a protagonist.¹

The Renewing Movement of Physical Education, without necessarily taking better irrationalist positions as the ones mentioned above, responds with books such as João Batista Freire’s Full Body Education (1989), Physical Education takes care of the body and mind (1983) and The Brazilian and his body (1990), both by João Paulo Subirá Medina. And then, more elaborately, with the concepts of movement culture (KUNZ, 1989, 1991), body culture of movement (BRACHT, 1989, 1992), body culture (SOARES et al., 1992).

3 BODY CULTURE

The expression body culture seems to originate, at least in part, from reading books by left-wing Portuguese authors linked, directly or indirectly, to the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and present in the debates that followed the Carnation Revolution, the Lieutenants Revolution of April 25th, 1974, which overthrew Salazarism and boosted the independence movements of the Portuguese colonies in Africa.

April 25th opened the possibility of resolutely moving towards the democratization of the school, which must be understood as its opening to an ever-increasing number of individuals from the most disadvantaged social classes, the democratic transformation of its programs and the emancipation of its own operation. The democratization of the school cannot therefore be exclusively understood as an effort to provide wider access to those who need it most, even if this is a determining factor, but to which a significant change in the internal functioning of the school system must be added and a profound transformation of the content of your programs. (MELO DE CARVALHO, 1978, p. 108).

In Portugal, it was said of a physical culture. Authors such as Melo de Carvalho (1978) and Noronha Feio Cunha aligned themselves with the antifascist position. Some of the books published by them in the late 1970s and early 1980s slowly arrived in Brazil.

From physical culture, the issue has turned here into body culture, most likely because physics sounded as close to a physical activity perspective. On the other hand, the presence of the term culture was very important at that time², demarcating the difference of positions that would defend an unhistorical nature in relation to bodily practices. Culture was still a fundamental issue for the educational proposals aligned with Paulo Freire and Dermeval Saviani.

Given its proximity to the PCP, the influence of the now-defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), a country established in 1949, aligned with the Warsaw Pact, under the leadership of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), is notorious. In the GDR, the institutional expression for Physical Education was Körperkultur (body culture, culture of the body), translated in Portugal, as well as, symptomatically, in Cuba, by physical culture, a denomination that continues to this day in this country.

As was common in the days when the GDR survived, a country that shared with its Western counterpart the epicenter of the Cold War, it was necessary to oppose what was happening across the border, including physical education and sports. . In the case of the latter, it was common among the communists to adopt names for clubs that referred to the dynamics of work, such as Dynamo or Post (Mail), opposed to and viewed as bourgeois, such as Borussia (KLUGE, 2004)³. This difference should also be established in Physical Education as a pedagogical practice, in a way that while until the final 1960s and early 1970s the name Leibeserziehung (body education, body education) in the Federal Republic of Germany, also founded in 1949, continued in reaction to GDR, in this remained, as mentioned above, Körperkultur.

If both find such a similar translation, it is because in German the two ways of designating body are valid, Leib being the body under Romanticism, linked to nature, vitalism, life (Leben) and Körper given the scientific, anatomical, physiological imperative. In Jan Tamboer’s (1994) interpretation, the first would be the relational body, the second the substantial. From Leibeserziehung one arrives at Sportunterricht, a sports class, but generally understood as Physical Education, and then the name Deutsche Sporthochschule (German School of Sports) for the study and training center of Cologne - main center for studies and research of Physical Education in Federal Germany - as well as Deutsche Hochschule für Körperkultur in Leipzig, GDR, founded in 1950 and extinguished after 1990 with the German Reunification.

Two other concepts, however, came to compose the Renewing Movement of Physical Education in Brazil with similar force, both coming from Germanic traditions or at least filtered by Germany. They should be mentioned because they dialogued directly with the concept of body culture. Seeking a broader conceptualization not so marked by historical materialism, Valter Bracht sought to formulate the concept of body culture of movement. In culture would be, for Bracht (1992) and some of his colleagues, the statement that human movement would not only be the articulated dislocation of muscles and bones, but a historical expression “with meaning and sense”. There was, therefore, an intentionality in the body movement that was allowed to be seen as a cultural code and which, according to its social and historical roots, gained political meaning. It would be within the limits of leisure practices that the body culture of movement would find a raison d’être and characterization as knowledge to be worked in school Physical Education.

With strong support in the reflection on Brazil in transition to democracy, Bracht found in the New Left thought an important analytical support, especially in Bero Rigauer’s (1969) critique of sport. Daughter of the anti-authoritarian movement of the 1960s, the New Left incorporated elements of psychoanalysis into Marxism, as already noted, so that it found in the body an important territory of political realization. The body as protagonist of politics meant, in the context of the critique of capitalism and authoritarian socialism, the condemnation of conventional sport, the Olympic movement, and discipline. If in Germany this criticism was supported by the interpretation of the great authoritarian staging of the 1936 Olympic Games, this led to the fact that for the 1972 edition an Anti-Olympic Committee was even founded by the extra-parliamentary opposition.

Both East and West Germany have preserved two hallmarks of sports in Nazi Germany: (1) Sports training and physical education have continued to be authoritarian. In authoritative textbooks one reads, “The pupil must learn to accept the directions of the teacher without receiving extensive explanations and explications of their meaning. In the first place, a child cannot understand all the explanations and, in the second place, there is frequently too little time for explanations, especially in dangerous situations. Subordinations is therefore a necessity. (RIGAUER, 1981, p. 96).

In Brazil, meanwhile, the critics had opposed the civil-military dictatorship as their moment of accomplishment, finding conventional sport as a device for disciplining the body and as a blunter of spiritual capacities. Hence the brief text of Bracht (1986), made classic in the Renewal Movement, which in the title parodied a slogan of the federal organs regarding school sports: “Children who play sports, respect the rules of the game ... capitalist”!

In the same criticism of sport, Bracht found in Elenor Kunz (1989, 1991, 1994) an important interlocutor. Kunz’s project, which developed over a decade from the mid-1980s, was structured around a conception of movement, a perspective of education and teaching, and a critique of sport.

The first of the pillars says of the coincidence between perceiving and moving, so that the centrality of the moving subject (by action) would be placed, not the movement performed (passively). The inspiration comes from Merleau-Ponty, but also from a Dutch tradition of thinking philosophically about movement, whose central name for a more recent period is Jan Tamboer (1994), but which refers to studies by Frederic Jacobus Johannes Buytendijk (1956) on the posture and movement, among other topics.

This perspective of movement is linked to an educational one that, at least initially (KUNZ, 1991) is structured in Paulo Freire’s (1967; 1970) contributions to awareness and a liberating pedagogy, in connection with a problematizing teaching perspective. (TREBELS, 1985) that considers the movement in dialogic dimension (TAMBOER, 1979; TREBELS, 2003). In terms of Physical Education, this can be translated into the recognition that movement culture encompasses a much wider range of possibilities than sports monoculture would offer, while movements seen as more effective may be, among others, a point of arrival in learning, but not the starting point. If it is not or will not be, then there is or would be a very narrow limit on what would be learned, eliminating a series of possible movements that could autonomously be constructed as responses to a challenge in the face of a material arrangement (KUNZ, 1994).

Human movement would have three dimensions (TREBELS quoted by KUNZ, 1991), feel, think and act, and only the last, in traditional sports education, would take place. Then comes the third pillar of Kunz’s questions, the critique of sport. It would have inhuman dimensions linked to early initiation and doping (KUNZ, 1994) and its hegemonic presence in School Physical Education (KUNZ, 1989) would prevent the culture of movement from being fully respected. In addition, sport would obey three trends, instrumentalization, specialization, selection (TREBELS, cited by KUNZ, 1991). In other words, the movement would be pure mean and not a possible end in itself, would still be limited by the interests of the chosen modality and could be action of the few, since the focus on the results to be achieved (and not on who achieves them). makes few stand out and many are excluded.

This very synthetic path drawn here tells of some lines of the Renewing Movement in Physical Education. Apart from that popularized by Kunz, a non-conservative critic of the concept of body culture because all culture would have such a predicate and because they would not be bodies, but moving subjects (KUNZ, 1994), the other two find in marxism important inspiration. In the context of the New Left the body found a remarkable presence, to the point that Herbert Marcuse (1969, p. 106), the most eloquent name, affirm that “(...) it cannot understand his (Marx) concept of socialism by not observing that through revolution the human being must free himself even in his sensory-physiological constitution.” This movement in Brazilian Physical Education found in Bracht and his interpretation of the body culture of movement its most extensive and fruitful moment, but it did not see its possibilities exhausted, suggesting and inviting it to move forward⁴. The more orthodox Marxism, in turn, would find in Saviani’s inspiration a place in Physical Education, as far as proposing a perspective that was critical-overcoming (SOARES et al., 1992). In its centrality, as will be seen, will not be the body, but a reflection on the representations that have as its recipient.

We have, then, two broad lines linked to marxism, the last one coming more directly from the ideology of really existing socialism, which makes a critique of capitalist society and in its interior places body culture as an important moment of human formation, and the other which, inspired by anti-authoritarianism, criticizes sport and body discipline internally, observing devices of domination that affect the body.

In the next few pages I am concerned with aspects of the more orthodox version of Marxism in Physical Education, not without first briefly mentioning what Marx himself wrote about this school and extra-school discipline already present in Central Europe at the time of his years of studies on the origins and development of capitalism as a way of life. I mention this position and to it we add Gramsci’s, not exactly about Physical Education, but about the organization of free time and the place of the body within it, and even about the body in education.

4 THE BODY AND ITS EDUCATION IN KARL MARX AND ANTONIO GRAMSCI - BRIEF TOUR

In his gigantic work, Karl Marx wrote a few lines about education, and it was up to many of those who made up the Marxist tradition to devote themselves more strongly to the subject. For the German revolutionary, education played a secondary role in the process of social transformation, having to be linked to what it considered the delimiter of the human condition work, the capacity for nature to transform itself. Hence the perspective that the school should be near the factory, that territory in which work would be more organized, productive and, consequently, also workers, privileged agents of social transformation. It is from this context that work will emerge as an educational principle theme decanted by several generations of educators.

Paltry as the education clauses of the Act appear on the whole, yet they proclaim elementary education to be an indispensable condition to the employment of children. The success of those clauses proved for the first time the possibility of combining education and gymnastics with manual labour, and, consequently, of combining manual labour with education and gymnastics. The factory inspectors soon found out by questioning the schoolmasters, that the factory children, although receiving only one half the education of the regular day scholars, yet learnt quite as much and often more. (MARX, 2018, p. 9426)

If it was up to Marx’s successors to develop education as a theme, Antonio Gramsci emerges as one of the main forces of this thought. Aware of the questions of culture in complex societies, the Italian communist leader devotes an important weight to education in the process of building hegemony, an intellectual and moral reform capable of generating part of the necessary conditions for social transformation. Gramsci’s analyzes and assertions about education are in his Notebooks, but also, and most importantly, in his letters to his sister-in-law, taking his own children as recipients of the proposed ideas. Scientific and humanistic training, associated with that for work, should be the school’s motto, avoiding both technicalism and dilettantism.

In Marx the school education of the body arises in terms of organic fortification, whose model would be the barracks, in Gramsci, it has a presence in the pedagogical propositions, except as regards the body domain as a requirement for the disciplined study of school subjects. Gramsci says (1999, p. 284): “In reality each generation educates the new generation, i.e. forms it, and education is a struggle against instincts linked to the elementary biological functions, a struggle against nature, to dominate it and create the ‘contemporary’ man of the epoch.”

To this corresponds, in Gramsci, the few propositions for free time at work. For him, in a movement of recognition of the administrative organization of work in Taylor’s model and in search of its political overcoming, leisure should follow the disciplinary rules of the work, although not as external coercion, but superior qualitative incorporation of the rule, aiming at selfconstraint.

“Womanising” demands too much leisure. The new type of worker will be a repetition, in a different form, of peasants in the villages. The relative stability of sexual unions among the peasants is closely linked to the system of work in the country. The peasant who returns home in the evening after a long and hard day’s work wants the “venerem facilem parabilemque” of Horace. It is not his style. He loves his own woman, sure and unfailing, who is free from affectation and doesn’t play little games about being seduced or raped in order to be possessed. It might seem that in this way the sexual function has been mechanised, but in reality we are dealing with the growth of a new form of sexual union shorn of the bright and dazzling colour of the romantic tinsel typical of the petit bourgeois and the Bohemian layabout. It seems clear that the new industrialism wants monogamy: it wants the man as worker not to squander his nervous energies in the disorderly and stimulating pursuit of occasional sexual satisfaction. The employee who goes to work after a night of “excess” is no good for his work. The exaltation of passion cannot be reconciled with the timed movements of productive motions connected with the most perfected automatism. (GRAMSCI, 1999, p. 600-601).

It is not surprising, therefore, that in countries aligned with the Warsaw Pact, led by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), they found in sport such a contemporary way of disciplining and empowering the body as a reference for school physical education. This process is heightened by post-war geopolitical disputes in the 1950s, when sport took a leading role in the Cold War, especially in the Olympic movement. In this context, the countries of Eastern Europe, adding to them Cuba, adopted the aristocratic ideal of amateurism as a flag and pedagogy, valuing the education of the will that sport would bring. The new socialist new man and woman would form in this frame.

[...] the political-ideological education of the athletes in the sense of Marxism-Leninism for socialist personalities in thought and action, who are convinced of the corresponding victory of socialism worldwide, which clearly shows the immutable aggressiveness of imperialism and promotes the fraternal coexistence of the international community that is made up of countries under different social organizations (....) [Furthermore] Sports Training should be a fundamental part of political-ideological education. Coaches and officials have an obligation whenever necessary. clarify the sporting policy of the German sports and gymnastics federations. The offensive counterpoint is sports integration in the Federal Republic of Germany, in which the system of domination of monopoly capital and the violation of sport and the Olympic Games through German imperialism must be unmasked. (SCHMOLINSKY, 1977, p. 36-37). (Our translation).

5 CONSEQUENCES - A COMMENT

I mention two excerpts from the book Methodology of Physical Education Teaching (SOARES et al., 1992) in which the concept of body culture is delimited and then called the methodological operation. In the first excerpt we read that

From the perspective of reflection on body culture, the curricular dynamics, in the scope of Physical Education, [...] seeks to develop a pedagogical reflection on the collection of forms of representation of the world that man has produced throughout history, externalized by body expression: games, dances, fights, gymnastics exercises, sport, juggling, contortionism, mime and others, which can be identified as forms of symbolic representation of historically created and culturally developed realities lived by man. (p. 32)

If the body culture conceptualization movement is correct as a body of knowledge, it would be a case of knowing more clearly the place of representation in this process. Playful practices refer, in fact, to a mnemonic archive that social experience updates from practices and discourses that give form and meaning to games, sports, gymnastic exercises, etc. From these representations, moreover, a pedagogical reflection should be made. The problem is that the body finds no place in this process except as the destination of a reflexive movement. There is no privileged place for a knowledge of the body that, as the recipient - not as the composition - of a culture, is seen as passive. Although to the contrary, there is no place for the subject in this process, since the mobilization of social contradictions is absent, so that their dialectical potential is emptied. If there is no body, there is no desire either, so that in creating new possibilities knowledge that does not depend only on cognition cannot be taken into account. There is no place for the production of knowledge that recognizes a mimetic, non-rational yet non-irrational dimension of culture. A knowledge that may not only be thought of, but also expressed. This can be seen more clearly in the fragments below.

In this sense, knowledge is treated in such a way as to be retraced from its origin or genesis, in order to enable the student the vision of historicity, allowing him to understand himself as a historical subject, capable of interfering in the direction of his private life and his life systematized social activity.

The content of teaching is obviously shaped by institutionalized bodily activities. However, this view of historicity has one goal: the understanding that human production is historical, inexhaustible, and provisional. This understanding should prompt the student to assume the position of producer of other bodily activities that, throughout history, may be institutionalized. (SOARES et al., 1992, p. 40).

Education is for autonomy, as the tradition of the Aufklärung says, one among other bases on which Marxism is built. To retrace the history of a good of (bodily) culture would be the strategy for students to recognize themselves as subjects and thus to act. Graduating would make it possible to take history into one’s own hands and produce bodily activities that could be institutionalized.

The proposal has the right path, but the wrong direction. The starting point must be the most advanced stage of the process, the most contemporary, not the other way around. In his most radical critique of capitalism, Marx (1973b) starts from his major expression, the commodity, in order to deconstruct it and reconstruct the logic of the system. While the commodity conceals wisdom and suffering that made it possible, the contemporary form of a bodily practice accumulates the history of its transformations. It is from the present that we look at the past, so that the reconstruction of a cultural good means, first of all, to show how its history - with its wisdom and suffering - amalgamates itself in this contemporary result we call games, sports, juggling etc.

6 THE END

The Renewing Movement became an important intellectual force in Brazilian Physical Education, facing educational problems present in politics and tradition, but also in the practices in courts and courtyards of our schools. As possible, he articulated practical problems with theoretical analysis and pedagogical propositions. This has often been done by receiving theoretical input from the dialectical critique of different extracts, as well as from a certain phenomenology. The criticism of the conventional sport was a tonic, although with different emphases, opposing the models of containment of the body of the civil-military dictatorship. The point of intersection of the Movement will have been the appreciation of culture and the distancing of biologicist interpretations of body and movement.

It would make no sense for the Renewing Movement, even in its most orthodox Marxist version, to rely on what Marx and even Gramsci wrote about Physical Education and leisure. Political, intellectual and historical records distinct from those faced in Brazil in the last four decades have determined the considerations of these two great left thinkers. The ideal of each one of them appears in contemporary Brazilian Physical Education, when it is the case, much more as analytical and critical support of society and education. It is however to consider the legacy of both perspectives and observe how far they can go in order to affect their respective Works.

Perhaps the Marxism of the Renewing Movement in Physical Education could more effectively be devoted to the theme of the body, not only as a recipient of cultural representations, but as a producer of knowledge, as seen in the previous chapter. This would be possible by recourse to Marx himself, but in separate records from those chosen. It would be very productive if there were room for what is proposed in the Economic-philosophical Manuscripts, the education of the senses in view of the exchange that human beings materialize with nature, relationship that forms them. It is not humans and their sight, hearing, touch, taste, hearing, fruits of nature, but productions of culture. “Nature is man’s inorganic body-nature, that is, in so far as it is not itself the human body. Man lives on nature -means that nature is his body, with which he must remain in continuous intercourse if he is not to die. That man’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature means simply that nature is linked to itself, for man is a part of nature” (MARX, 2018, 2392p.). ⁵

Another orientation that can be sought in Marx is what he puts in a brief note from Capital, noting that self-recognition happens in the infinite possibilities opened by the encounter with the other. This recognition is given by the body: [...]

Perhaps in this direction we could consider, with Marx’s unmistakable contribution, the dialectic between cultural universality, bodily particularity and subjective uniqueness. Thus, among many other possibilities, it would be possible not only to observe the social contradictions that the body synthesizes - among them the issues of class, gender, ethnicity, disability, etc. - but put them in motion that could, finally, help Physical Education, through the teaching of body practices, overcome the many inequalities that contemporary experience imposes on us.

REFERÊNCIAS

• BUYTENDIJK, Frederic Jacobus Johannes. Allgemeine Theorie der menschlichen Haltung und Bewegung. Berlin: Göttingen: Heidelberg: Springer, 1956.
• BRACHT, Valter. “A criança que pratica esporte respeita as regras do jogo...capitalista!”. Revista Brasileira de Ciências do Esporte, v. 7, n. 2, p. 62-68, 1986.
• BRACHT, Valter. Educação Física e aprendizagem social. Porto Alegre: Magister, 1992.
• CODO, Wanderley; SENNE, Wilson. O que é corpolatria. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1987.
• FREIRE, João Batista. Educação de corpo inteiro: teoria e prática da Educação Física. São Paulo: Scipione, 1989.
• FREIRE, Paulo. Educação como prática de liberdade. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1967.
• FREIRE, Paulo. Pedagogia do oprimido. Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1970.
• KLUGE, Volker. Das Sportbuch DDR. Berlim: Eulenspiegel, 2004.
• GIANOTTI, José Arthur. Certa herança marxista. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2000.
• GRAMSCI, Antonio. Cadernos do Cárcere: Introdução ao Estudo da Filosofia. A filosofia de Benedetto Croce. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001a. v. 1, p. 239-282.
• GRAMSCI, Antonio. Cadernos do Cárcere: Temas da cultura. Católica. Americanismo e Fordismo. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2001b. v. 4.
• KUNZ, Elenor. O esporte como conteúdo hegemônico da Educação Física escolar. Ijuí: Contexto & Educação, 1989.
• KUNZ, Elenor. Educação Física: ensino e mudanças. Ijuí: Unijuí, 1991.
• KUNZ, Elenor. Transformação didático-pedagógica do esporte. Ijuí: Unijuí, 1994.
• MARCUSE, Herbert. “Revolution aus Ekel”. Spiegel Gespräch mit dem Philosophen Herbert Marcuse. Spiegel, n. 31, p. 103-106, 1969. (Entrevista a Georg Wolff e Dieter Brumm).
• MARX, Karl. Ad Feuerbach. In: MARX, Karl; ENGELS, Friederich. Werke (MEGA). Berlin: Ditz, 1973a. v. 4, p. 19-21.
• MARX, Karl. Der achtzehnte Brumaire des Louis Bonaparte. In: MARX, Karl; ENGELS, Friederich. Werke (MEGA). Berlin: Ditz, 1973b. v. 8.
• MARX, Karl. Vorschläge für das Programm der Internationalen Arbeiterassoziation (IAA). In: MARX, Karl; ENGELS, Friederich. Werke (MEGA). Berlin: Ditz, 1973c. v. 16.
• MARX, Karl. Manuscritos econômico e filosóficos. In: FROMM, Erich. Conceito marxista de homem. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1983.
• MEDINA, João Paulo Subirá. O brasileiro e seu corpo. Campinas: Papirus, 1990.
• MELO DE CARVALHO, Antônio. Cultura física e desenvolvimento. Lisboa: Compendium, 1978.
• RIGAUER, Bero. Sport und Arbeit. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969.
• SARAIVA, Maria do Carmo. Coeducação Física e esportes: quando a diferença é mito. Ijuí: Edunijuí, 2005.
• SAVIANI, Dermeval. Escola e democracia. Campinas: Cortez/Autores Associados, 1983.
• SOARES, Carmen Lúcia. Fundamentos da Educação Física Escolar. Revista Brasileira de Estudos Pedagógicos, v. 71, p. 51-68, 1990.
• SOARES, Carmen Lúcia et al. Metodologia do ensino de Educação Física. São Paulo: Cortez, 1992.
• TAMBOER, Jan. Sich-bewegen: ein Dialog zwischen Mensch und Welt. Sportpadagogik, n. 2, p. 8-13,1979.
• TAMBOER, Jan. Philosophie der Bewegungswissenschaft. Frankfurt am Main: Afra, 1994.
• TREBELS, Andreas Heinrich. Turnen Vermitteln. Sportpadagogik, n. 5, p. 10-19, 1985.
• TREBELS, Andreas Heinrich. Uma concepção dialógica e uma teoria do movimento humano. Perspectiva. v. 21, n. 1, p. 249-267, jan. /jun. 2003.
• VAZ, Alexandre Fernandez; Valter Bracht: admiração, amizade, crítica. In: ALMEIDA, Felipe Quintão; GOMES, Ivan Marcelo (Org.). Valter Bracht e a Educação Física: um pensamento em movimento. Vitória: EDUFES, 2015. p. 13-32.
• VAZ, Alexandre Fernandez. Uma Europa inventada pelo futebol. Movimento, v. 24, n. 4, p. 1395-1406, 2018.

• *
  I borrow the title of José Arthur Gianotti’s book (2000), not because my arguments are echoed in his painstaking analysis of the Marxist tradition, but because it is now and there the same phenomenon. The work is a partial result of the Critical Theory, Rationalities and Education Research Program (V), funded by CNPq and UFSC. Some of his ideas were presented and discussed with colleagues from UFSC and UNLP in Argentina.

• Research supported by the theNational CouncilforScientific and TechnologicalDevelopment (CNPq), Brazil - Projects 403624/2016-9, 310115/2017-5, 423773/2018-6.

• 1
  Wanderley Codo and Wilson Senne’s (1987) short book, What Is Corpolatry, makes a great synthesis of this body-worship movement in the 1970s and 1980s.
• 2
  Thanks to Valter Bracht for his support for reflection, in particular on this point.
• 3
  This paragraph takes up a point already present in Vaz (2018).
• 4
  An exception is Saraiva’s book (2005), which deals with gender issues under Marcuse’s proposal to ground co-educational classes in Physical Education.
• 5
  Carmen Soares (1990, p. 51) did not fail to note the contribution this concept could bring to Physical Education, as she epigraphed a fragment of Marx about art: “It was not only through thought, but through all the senses that man affirmed himself in the objective world.” (Our translation).

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  25 July 2022
• Date of issue
  2019

History

• Received
  28 Mar 2019
• Accepted
  04 Sept 2019
• Published
  16 Nov 2019