Brazil: Lula's Popular Front and the Left
Reprinted from Workers Vanguard No. 845, 1 April 2005.
The following article is translated from Le Bolchévik No. 170 (March 2005), published by the Ligue Trotskyste de France, section of the International Communist League.
Paris, February 8—Over 100,000 anti-globalization protesters gathered for the fifth World Social Forum (WSF) held in Porto Alegre, Brazil, in opposition to "neoliberalism" and against the occupation of Iraq, among other things. The WSF was directly financed by capitalist institutions and by the bourgeois politicians who are their water boys. (This was also the case for the European Social Forums in France and Britain.) Over 1.7 million euros (about $2.3 million) were donated by NGOs like the Ford Foundation. Brazil's federal government run by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT—Workers Party) of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva contributed 2 million euros. Bourgeois politicians of all kinds also participated in the WSF. A message from [French] president Chirac was read and the two big stars were the president of Brazil, Lula, and the president of Venezuela, Hugo Chávez. As Marxists we are opposed to these social forums because they are class-collaborationist formations including the direct involvement of bourgeois organizations and bourgeois state agencies.
The capitalists and their bourgeois politicians finance and appear in the social forums to polish up their anti-American, anti-Bush credentials, raising their credibility to better implement attacks against workers in their own countries. So, at Porto Alegre, Lula launched a "campaign against poverty." But let's talk about poverty in Brazil: favelas (slums) surround every major city; there is racism against blacks, murder of meninos de rua (street kids); there are millions of landless peasants; and there is imperialist pillage and domination. Empty, cynical words from capitalist rulers won't change that. Brazil has one of the biggest economies in Latin America. The powerful workers of the country produce all the wealth, from cars to petroleum to electricity. The workers are also the only force with the capacity to stop production and to lead struggles at the head of all the oppressed—from the landless peasants to the poor in the favelas—for a socialist revolution that would tear the factories out of the hands of the capitalists and establish a workers state. To serve the needs of the majority of the population it's necessary to have a centralized and collectivized economy based on workers councils.
There is no solution to economic backwardness confined to the "national" development of capitalism. A workers revolution in Brazil would also have to be extended elsewhere in Latin America and to the United States. In the U.S., black people are a very powerful component of the working class and, certainly, struggle by the largely black Brazilian proletariat would have an impact in the U.S. It is only with the participation of workers from imperialist states that capitalist imperialism will be destroyed and the enormous resources of those countries used in the service of all humanity.
Lula came to power in 2002 with the blessing of the Brazilian bourgeoisie because the capitalists thought that he had the authority necessary to convince workers to accept austerity measures. The balance sheet of those two years is: the dismantling of pensions, attacks on education that have led to protests on the campuses, no agrarian reform, and an enormous budgetary surplus that goes toward paying off the country's debt to satisfy the demands of the IMF. Lula's PT is a bourgeois workers party with a working-class base but a leadership with a pro-capitalist program. The coalition that brought Lula to power is an example of what is historically known as a "popular front," i.e., a coalition of one or more workers parties in alliance with bourgeois forces. Lula's PT even made an alliance with the Partido Liberal (Liberal Party) of the big capitalist José Alencar. We Marxists call that class collaboration—because the interests of the workers and of the capitalists are irreconcilable. Workers produce all the wealth of society and make the means of communication and transportation function. The profit from their labor power is appropriated by the capitalists who own the factories, the telecommunications companies, etc. It's not possible for workers to fight politically in their own interests when they are politically subordinated to the bourgeoisie.
However, Lula's coming to power was largely viewed as a victory or as a first step by organizations in France that claim to be Trotskyist. The Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire (LCR) wrote at the time: "The PT's electoral results constitute nonetheless a defeat for neoliberalism and mean a significant change in the relationship of forces in Brazilian society" (Inprecor, January-February 2003). The sister organization of the LCR in Brazil is in the Democracia Socialista (DS—Socialist Democracy) tendency and is actually part of the PT. In fact, Lula's minister of agrarian development, Miguel Rossetto, is a member of DS. Unlike the reformists of the United Secretariat (USec—the international organization to which the LCR is affiliated), revolutionaries are opposed in principle to participation in an executive organ of the bourgeois state—the bourgeoisie allows "socialists" or even "Trotskyists" in the government only on the condition that they defend the capitalist order, and that is exactly what Miguel Rossetto does.
The LCR's youth group, the Jeunesse Communiste Révolutionnaire (JCR), was a bit more reserved about having a comrade in Lula's government. In March 2004, Red [the JCR's newspaper] wrote: "The Lula government is a liberal government that fights against the social movement." But they also let it be understood that perhaps a capitalist government could act in the interest of workers and the poor if only it had enough good will. So, they defend their comrade minister Rossetto, saying, "Obviously, financing for the ministry of agrarian reform isn't Lula's priority and therefore, our comrade couldn't make all the changes that he wanted to" (Red, January 2004). Far from what the JCR says, there has been less distribution of land by the Lula/Rossetto government than during the previous right-wing government, and Rossetto has blood on his hands for each landless peasant killed by the big landlords for whom the Lula government works.
Gauche Révolutionnaire (GR), affiliated with the Committee for a Workers' International [CWI, whose U.S. affiliate is Socialist Alternative], at first also contributed to the illusions in Lula's election, hailing a "victory of the working class" (L'Egalité, November-December 2002). From 1998 until recently, the GR's comrades in Brazil built the PT, with some criticisms, from within the Socialismo Revolucionário (SR—Revolutionary Socialist) tendency. Therefore, however critical they are of the PT today, the truth is that their comrades in Brazil directly helped to put the current government in place.
Illusions in the Lula government have started to dissipate, and discontent is starting to grow among youth, workers and peasants. And obviously the opportunists in the DS, the SR, et al. have adapted to this change. A recent split in the PT reflects the level of discontent and anger with the government. The Party of Socialism and Liberty (P-SOL) was created as a result of the December 2003 expulsion of the parliament members Heloísa Helena, Babá, Luciano Genro and João Fontes, who had protested the federal government's attacks on pensions. The P-SOL was officially formed at a conference in June 2004, and its leadership includes quite a few groups that call themselves Trotskyist. Heloísa Helena was a member of DS inside the PT and a minority of members previously in the DS are now in the P-SOL. The SR tendency was expelled from the PT at the same time as some members of the DS, and now they are also part of the P-SOL, as are some people who left the Morenoite PSTU and individuals from other groups.
The P-SOL program of reforms takes a position against imperialism, for a reduction in the workweek, etc. It even mentions the oppression of blacks and gays. But if they take a more leftist posture, it's only to better channel the anger of youth and workers, not toward a struggle against the capitalist system and the building of a new revolutionary party, but toward the building of a reformist party to the left of the PT. The P-SOL's program, adopted on 5-6 June 2004 during its founding national conference, says that it is necessary to build a new party because "it's an objective necessity for those who, in the last twenty years, built a combative conception of the PT and offered the extraordinary possibility of opening the door to a Brazil without misery and exploitation, but who saw their struggles, dreams and aspirations betrayed." The P-SOL is based essentially on the idea that the PT's program was correct but that it went wrong once in power; thus the "struggles" and "dreams" of the founders of the P-SOL were "betrayed." The PT didn't betray its program at all because from the beginning it had a program of class collaboration. The PT has participated in coalitions with bourgeois parties since the 1989 presidential elections. In 2002, Lula came to power with the approval of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. But that is not in contradiction to its program because it always had the goal of running the bourgeois state.
The P-SOL says that its programmatic basis can be founded only on one principle: "The defense of the political independence of the workers and the excluded. The party that we are building will not have class collaboration as a goal." In fact, members of the USec are active in the leadership of the P-SOL, but most of their members remain in the DS tendency inside the PT, and a resolution of a DS national conference condemned the "sectarian party perspective" of what became the P-SOL (Inprecor, September 2004). Nonetheless, for Heloísa Helena, class independence is such an "important" principle that she remains in the same international with her comrades who have a minister in Lula's government. In the municipal elections of November 2004, the national P-SOL supported the PT/DS candidate, Luizianne Lins, on the second round in Fortaleza. Lins managed to win the city with support from several small bourgeois parties in the second round (which received executive posts in the municipal government in exchange for their support), such as the populist Partido Democratico dos Trabalhadores (Democratic Workers Party) and the Greens. The P-SOL also refused to oppose the PT in Porto Alegre, where the outgoing candidate, Raul Pont (also in the PT's DS tendency), was in a coalition with several bourgeois parties. The national leadership of the P-SOL supported a declaration "against the candidate Fogaça (PPS), without calling for a vote for Raul Pont" but defended either a vote for Pont or a blank ballot ("Statement of the P-SOL National Executive Assessing the Municipal Elections," not dated, www.psol.org.br). Most of the leading members of the P-SOL come from the PT, but they have never criticized their own past activities as PT members because they continue the same practices.
If a clearer example of class collaboration were necessary, in the P-SOL's program one can read: "It's fundamental to democratize the police forces and in particular the army, with the right of troops to free political organization and to elect their officers, with the right to promotion without limits for junior officers." That's a suicidal call for workers—more "democratic" rights for the cops means better conditions for them to break the next strike and better conditions for them to kill street kids in cold blood! That is the essence of reformism and class collaboration. The capitalists maintain themselves in power in part by their ideology and in part by force through their state: cops, prison guards, the army. All the bloody lessons of history show that it is not possible to "reform" the bourgeois state; it's necessary to overthrow it, and the workers should establish their own state—the dictatorship of the proletariat.
It's necessary to build a revolutionary party, but the French fake-Trotskyists look to Brazil as a model of how to build a reformist party. The LCR and the JCR mostly campaigned against the expulsion of Heloísa Helena from the PT, and now that their comrades have been expelled, most of the LCR's attention remains on DS. They are ecstatic with the recent victory of their PT comrade Luizianne Lins in Fortaleza, and they cry about losing the city of Porto Alegre that they long controlled. The GR/CWI "hailed the birth" of the P-SOL (L'Egalité, September-October 2004) because at bottom they see a big, non-revolutionary party not as an obstacle but, on the contrary, as a step toward the construction of a truly revolutionary party, and they take the P-SOL as their model. The GR says: "But one shouldn't adopt a sectarian position and mechanically demand as a prerequisite that the new party be revolutionary." However, in the next sentence they try to moderate their statement a little: "That doesn't mean that a workers party is a necessary step before the revolutionary party." For the CWI, the P-SOL program "presents the socialist perspective and strategy as a fundamental aspect of building the new party" (L'Egalité, January-February 2005).
We fight for an authentically Marxist party that will champion the rights of all the oppressed—blacks, women, gays, peasants—with a class-struggle program designed to bring the working class to power. That isn't possible by building a party like the P-SOL that has nice words about "feminism," blacks and gays in the program, but that does not even mention the most fundamental democratic question for women: the right to abortion. The P-SOL is certainly under pressure from the powerful Brazilian Catholic church, as the declaration by the main spokesperson of the P-SOL, Heloísa Helena, shows:
"I am Catholic. I always go to church. I have many friends in the interior who are priests. Over the last week I went to four masses in a single city, helping in the celebration. I rediscovered my faith some years ago, through pain, and am firmly resolved. My religious experience is with the comrade in the skies who has already given me much proof of love during the difficult times that I have had in life."
— Interview in the Jornal do Brasil, quoted in Inprecor, January-March 2004
We Trotskyists fight for free abortion on demand! Cops, priests out of the bedroom!
A revolutionary party must be able to counterpose the liberating ideals of communism to the prejudices of the dominant capitalist ideology in all aspects of social life: against the prevalent machismo, for the liberation of women through socialist revolution, against racism, upholding the banner of black liberation, and fighting to defend peasants and indigenous peoples. As we wrote in the article "Lula's Popular Front Turns Screws on Workers" (WV No. 818, 23 January 2004):
"[The revolutionary party] must put itself at the head of the struggles of all the oppressed as part of the fight to establish working-class rule, smashing the rule of the bosses and placing the immense resources and energies of the country in the service of the most urgent human needs. This perspective is necessarily internationalist and is part of the struggle to reforge the Fourth International to lead new October Revolutions. It is the perspective of the International Communist League."