To The Winner Go The Potatoes

In the philosophy of Humanitism, what does it mean that "to the winner go the potatoes"?

Short answer: In Machado de Assis’s satirical “philosophy” of Humanitism (Portuguese Humanitismo), the slogan “Ao vencido, ódio ou compaixão; ao vencedor, as batatas” (“To the vanquished, hatred or pity; to the victor, the potatoes”) sums up Quincas Borba’s claim that in any struggle for scarce resources the side that prevails rightfully takes the means of survival—the potatoes—while the losers’ fate doesn’t matter because individual lives are insignificant next to the abstract totality “Humanitas.” It’s a darkly comic reduction of grand metaphysics to crude material spoils, used by Machado to parody Social-Darwinist and positivist justifications for violence, competition, and social inequality. (Wikisource, Scribd, Wikipedia)

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How the motto is introduced

Quincas Borba explains to Rubião: imagine a field with potatoes enough to nourish only one of two starving tribes; if they share, both die; if one destroys the other, the survivors gain strength to reach more food. Hence “peace is destruction; war is preservation… To the vanquished, hatred or compassion; to the victor, the potatoes.” (Wikisource, Scribd, TeX talk)

What it asserts within Humanitism

From this parable Borba infers that conflict which secures resources for the stronger side serves life and thus serves the universal substance Humanitas; individuals are mere “bubbles” in the boiling water—transient phenomena whose extinction is irrelevant to the underlying whole. The ethical upshot: material benefit to the winner trumps concern for the defeated. (Wikisource, Scribd, Wikipedia, biblioteca.pucrs.br)

Machado’s satirical target

Critics read Humanitism as Machado’s parody of nineteenth-century scientistic creeds—especially Social Darwinism and Comtean positivism—that dressed up the “law of the strongest” in lofty philosophical language. By pushing this logic to absurdity (“to the winner, the potatoes”), Machado exposes the inhuman, self-justifying moral calculus that can underwrite war, exploitation, or simple greed. (Wikipedia, TeX talk, lac.ox.ac.uk, Terra)

Later and idiomatic use

Because the scene is so memorable, “Ao vencedor, as batatas” has entered Brazilian Portuguese as an idiom roughly equivalent to “to the victor go the spoils,” invoked—often wryly—in contexts of competition, money, or power to mean that the winner walks away with the goods. (Wiktionary, Terra, VEJA, biblioteca.pucrs.br)

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In sum: Within Humanitism the phrase literalizes a brutal survival calculus (winner eats; loser disappears) and, by exaggeration, lets Machado de Assis mock any philosophy that rationalizes inequality or violence as serving some higher good. (Wikisource, Scribd, Wikipedia)