The success of the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) in the elections of 2002 represented an important victory for the working class and raised enormous expectations, not only in Brazil itself and Latin America, but also amongst socialists throughout the world. But after one year in government, Lula and his ministers are actively implementing pro-capitalist policies, and the party is deeply split. Where is the PT going now? How should Marxists characterise the PT, and how far should they differentiate between government and party? Andrew Kennedy looks at the issues.

On 14 December 2003, the PT leadership decided by 55 votes to 27 to expel senator Heloisa Helena and three other parliamentary deputies from the party for their public opposition to the government’s pension reforms.(1) This decision marks a watershed in the evolution of the PT. On 19 January 2004, not long before this article went to press, the expelled parliamentarians, including Heloisa Helena, as well as prominent intellectuals and trade unionists, publicly called for a new left party to be formed.(2)

The foundation of the Workers’ Party was a significant step forward for the Brazilian working class. It seemed to be the model for a democratic, broad, multi-tendency party, which incorporated both reformists and revolutionaries. Marxists of the Fourth International in Brazil, organised as Democracia Socialista (DS - the tendency to which Heloisa Helena belongs), were involved in founding the PT and always saw it as a class-struggle party. That is, the party’s character as either revolutionary or reformist had not yet been determined, but it was going in the right direction insofar as it based itself on mass struggle. Its dynamic was therefore towards revolution or at least social confrontation rather than class collaboration. Moreover, with its combination of democracy and discipline, it seemed to have a mechanism both for reaching decisions based on the lessons of the struggle and for implementing those decisions.

However, the PT was to undergo major changes in the eighties and nineties. Founded by trade unionists, radical Christians and organisations of the Marxist left, it was seriously affected, like the rest of the Latin American left, by the defeat of the Sandinistas in 1989 and by the fall of the Soviet Union. Even before that, some would argue, the PT leadership had established a social democratic-style separation between industrial and electoral organisation by regarding the party as the “natural expression” of the trade unions, rather than intervening into the unions in a coherent way. Moreover, the neo-liberal measures of successive Brazilian governments in the nineties led to massive increases in unemployment and public sector cuts, which had a demoralising effect on the PT’s urban base among industrial workers and the poor. To this day, the rural landless movement, particularly the MST,(3) is significantly more active than these urban sectors. The decline in the participation of workers accentuated the pressures towards bureaucratisation of the party. James Petras estimates that 75 per cent of the delegates at the 2001 congress of the PT were ‘lawyers, professionals, functionaries, employers, etc.’ (my translation).(4)

From the late nineties, there seemed to be an upturn in the party’s fortunes. The PT was constructing important electoral bastions in the cities, under the banner of its much-vaunted ‘participatory budget’. This idea, first pushed forward by DS comrades in the province of Rio Grande do Sul and particularly Porto Alegre, was effective in terms of mobilising communities to decide on how the budget for their neighbourhood should be spent and thus gave them a real, if limited sense of empowerment.(5) However, there was always the possibility that the budget would be used as means of legitimising the existing local government financial allocation and the local state, and this was in fact how it was used by many PT and non-PT municipalities across Brazil. Moreover, existing levels of bureaucratisation increased as hundreds of PT activists became municipal functionaries.

For the 2002 election campaign, the PT leadership decided to ally themselves with a bourgeois party - the Liberal Party of Jose Alencar. They then ran a campaign akin to Blair’s in 1997, promising change but light on detail. In all these respects they ignored the decisions of the 2001 party congress. They have allowed the Central Bank to be independent and have appointed a former head of Bank Boston - Henrique Meirelles - as its director. He is overseen by a PT member, Antonio Palocci, but, if anything, Palocci is more economically orthodox than Meirelles. In this sense, the leadership are partly right to protest that the IMF is not policing their decisions directly – like Foucault’s prisoner, they are quite capable of policing themselves.(6)

These policies have led to the first year of the Lula government being described by a historic founder of the PT as ‘the ninth year of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government’.(7) Cardoso was the notoriously neo-liberal president supplanted by Lula. Since then, tight financial controls have led to incredibly high interest rates (26 per cent) which have meant that banking has been the only sector of the economy to prosper. An ambitious target of a 4.25 per cent budget surplus has been set. Even so, Brazil is still only paying one-third of the interest on its huge debt.

Not surprisingly, workers and the poor have born the brunt of these measures. Lula promised to create eight million jobs, but unemployment had increased by 500,000 by July last year.(8) Social programmes have fallen by the wayside. There were cuts of $3.9 billion in the government’s first budget. James Petras has estimated that 35.4 per cent of these cuts were in social spending.(9) Lula’s famed ‘Zero Hunger’ programme, in the absence of complementary social policies, will at best be a temporary sticking plaster over and at worst a cover for these austerity measures.

Public sector pension reform has been key to the Lula government’s neo-liberal programme. Presented demagogically as a measure to reduce the privileges of figures such as high court judges, the reform attacks the living standards of thousands of civil servants throughout Brazil. For example, it extends by seven years the amount of time that civil servants will have to pay into the funds in order to receive benefits. This particularly impacts upon women workers, who may have taken career breaks for family reasons. Moreover, the measure allows state pension funds to be administered by private firms and thus paves the way for privatisation of large chunks of public sector finances.(10) Regrettably, when faced with the choice between voting for the pension reform and being expelled from the party, the PT parliamentary left, including DS, split three ways, a majority voting for, some abstaining, a few voting against.

Early in 2003, leaders of DS could speak of ‘the two souls of the Lula government’,(11) but it seems clear now that this was unnecessarily generous: the government had and has one soul – bourgeois. I do not even mean bourgeois populism. It would be an insult to the Latin American populist governments of the 1930s, 1940s and after to compare the PT’s miserable record in government with theirs. These parties frequently achieved a real degree of national sovereignty via nationalisations and import substitution – in Mexico the Cardenas government, for example, nationalised the oil industry; in Brazil between 1935 and 1964, beginning with the Vargas government, successive administrations developed a domestic industrial base with state investment as the principal lever.(12) That is not to say that the national bourgeoisies of these countries were or could be effective defenders of the workers and oppressed of these nations: the interests of this sector conflict with the need for democratic, popular mobilisations against imperialism and workers’ control over the key sectors of the economy. But the contrast is instructive.

Brazil, which is Latin America’s biggest economy, and the world’s ninth largest, has been effectively held to ransom by the IMF and World Bank, and the PT leadership has accepted this logic. It is true that Brazil, along with other underdeveloped countries, was instrumental in blocking imperialist moves to further liberalise the global economy at the World Trade Organisation (WTO) talks at Cancun last year. Arguably the sheer weight of expectation across Latin America made it imperative that Lula and other leaders be seen to do something. Lula also opposed the Iraq war, albeit on the basis that war is bad in general, rather than from a clear anti-imperialist position.(13) Furthermore, the Brazilian government have challenged the US on several occasions during the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) negotiations, but the fact remains that they have not mobilised for a popular referendum to reject the FTAA altogether. Worryingly, the PT government was also involved in setting up the deeply dubious Friends of Venezuela project, which included the US government, as well as the conservative presidents of Spain and Mexico. As Fidel Castro is reported to have said to Hugo Chavez, the leftist Venezuelan president, ‘With friends like these, you don’t need enemies’.(14)

Lula’s failure to mount a convincing defence of national economic sovereignty explains why Leonel Brizola, leader of the populist PDT (Workers’ Democratic Party), representative of a section of manufacturing capital, has felt it necessary to distance himself from the Lula government’s present course.(15) So what part of the elite will Lula have increasingly to rely on? Logically, it will be the comprador bourgeoisie (16) and the owners of the big latifundia estates. The ministry of agriculture, for example, is linked to the latifundistas.

The results of this alliance have already been seen in the government’s relaxation of opposition to genetically modified crops. Expensive GM technology favours big landowners producing cash crops for export, not small peasant farmers. Lula’s desire to increase agricultural exports led him to declare in July last year that, ‘the Amazon is not untouchable’. In Mato Grosso province there has already been a huge increase in deforestation in 2002 and 2003 in order to clear land for soya bean cultivation, with no end in sight to the destruction.(17)

Given the Lula government’s current alliances and economic policies, it looks very unlikely that it will give serious backing to agrarian reform. Many on the PT left have high hopes that reform will somehow be won, against the grain of political developments. They point to the level of mobilisations of the landless and Lula’s occasional expressions of support for reform. Unless there is huge mass pressure, however, it would seem foolish to have expectations of any significant reform when there is very little money allocated for it and when Lula has warned leaders of the landless to wait till the end of his term. In this context in particular, the continuation in post of Miguel Rosseto, a member of DS, as minister of agrarian reform, is extremely problematic.(18) At times the comrade has appeared uneasily caught in the middle of the conflict between landowners and landless.(19) Moreover, his occupancy of this post can be and is used by the PT leadership as a way of putting pressure on the left to identify itself with the government.

The more intelligent US policy analysts have openly talked of the ‘Lula solution’ being applied elsewhere – in Bolivia for example.(20) Given the rise of (at least) left-talking leaders and resurgent mass movements across Latin America, it would perhaps make sense from a US point of view to cease to oppose openly the election of these leaders and instead to seek to move them to the right by more subtle means. Such a trajectory is, however, made much more difficult if a government relies on popular mobilisation, as the Chavez government has done in Venezuela. There, a dynamic interaction seems to have taken place between the radical measures of the administration and the initiatives of the movement on the ground, each side giving heart to the other.(21) As far as the Lula government was concerned, only the agrarian reform ministry offered the prospect of such a dialectic, and that faint hope, as I have argued, now looks untenable.

Assessing Lula’s first nine months, Joao Machado rightly argues that ‘the government does not suffocate the possibilities of the party’ and that there is considerable space for the left to ‘intervene’ in ‘the central conflicts underway’. However, there is some ambiguity in other formulations in the same article. It is stated that the character of the PT government after nine months is ‘contradictory’, the many negatives balanced by some significant positives. In spite of all the evidence to the contrary cited above, reference is made to the government’s ‘coherence with the historic programme of the PT in the areas of international relations, agrarian reform and other sectors’.(22) In response, I would argue that of course contradictions exist, but the decisive contradictions are those between the party base and the government, not within the government. Indeed, if any on the PT left still think of the Lula government as ‘our’ government, they are victims and disseminators of a cruel illusion.

What then is the character of the Lula government? As we have shown, it cannot be described as a workers’ government; on the contrary, it is a pro-capitalist bourgeois government. It is incumbent on socialists to withdraw from this government and base themselves on the active party membership and the mass movement. The fight must be for a real workers’ government and a socialist programme.

Marxists should therefore draw a clear distinction between the present government, which will not change its spots, and the party, where there is still conceivably much to play for in the coming months. What is at stake is the historic identity of the PT, and in this context it would seem correct to pose the issue as the fight to reclaim ‘our’ party. It is true that the cancer of bureaucratisation has eaten into the leadership and lower levels of the party and corrupted its democratic internal culture. However, much of this culture, which distinguished the PT from bourgeois populist parties, remains and is many respects superior to that of traditional social democratic parties.(23) So a fight in the party base looks feasible, as it was in the British Labour Party in the 1980s (not without success (24)). But the tempo of struggle is far higher in Brazil, even now, than it was in Britain in the eighties, especially after the miners’ strike. The test of reality will therefore be that much more exacting – successes may occur more quickly but things can also go wrong much more quickly. For example, bureaucratisation may become a significant factor affecting the consciousness of the left as the fear of losing office starts to take hold. On the other hand, a new surge in social conflicts could have a galvanising effect. At their recent conference, the DS therefore decided to remain loyal members of the party they have built over the years for as long as possible and to fight to win it back to a socialist perspective.

Lula may have a high popularity rating now (70-80 per cent) but that of his government, though still at around 50 per cent, is significantly lower and it will no doubt fall further in the coming months as austerity bites deeper. Already the more politicised workers and farmers are bitterly disappointed at Lula’s betrayal. That is why marxists will need to make sure that they do not simply focus on the internal debates of the PT - they have an opportunity to make their discourse legible to the wider social and political movement. Comrades of the FI in Brazil speak of the need to construct a ‘big’ DS, one that leads the fight internally but that also relates to sectors in struggle. And at some point they may part company with the PT, in the event that no more gains for the left and the working class can be made inside the party, or they are expelled. At the best of times (which these are not) to accomplish these tasks would require a very high degree of political coherence and disciplined unity in action. Prospects for marxists and the wider left inside and outside the PT are therefore extremely uncertain and fraught with danger. It would be a cliché, but undoubtedly true, to say that the next year will be crucial for the development of socialist forces in Brazil.

NOTES

Many of the sources referred to can be accessed at www.marxsite.com

1 See the Socialist Resistance petition, signed by e.g. Ken Loach and Noam Chomsky, at www.socialistresistance.net. See also the PT leadership’s open letter in reply to this petition, and the subsequent response to this by SR, in Socialist Resistance, January 2004.

2 The MES (Movement of the Socialist Left, ex-Morenist) has taken a leading role in this initiative. Luciana Genro, one of the expelled MPs, is a member of the MES.

3 Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (Landless Workers’ Movement).

4 Mario Hernandez, interview with James Petras, 24 July 2003, published e.g. on www.almamater.cu (in Spanish) and headed: ‘Lo que yo veo es el final del PT como proyecto popular’ (‘What I see.is the end of the PT as a project of the people’).

5 See (forthcoming) Iain Bruce, ed., Direct Democracy: the Porto Alegre Experience, IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no.35-36, with essays by Raul Pont, Joao Machado and others.

6 I refer to Foucault’s famous account of the panopticon, which allowed the warders to look at the prisoners at all times but to be unseen themselves. This led the prisoners to behave as though the warders were there, even when they weren’t.

7 Francisco de Oliveira, quoted in Larry Rohter, ‘Brazilian Workers’ Party Expulsions’, New York Times, December 15, 2003. Article available at www.marxsite.com.

8 Sue Branford, ‘The bankers think they’ve tamed Lula’, July 10, 2003. See Guardian Unlimited website.

9 Cited in Jorge Jorquera, ‘Lula’s government adopts neo-liberalism’, Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003.

10 A point made by Daniel Bensaid in Rouge, 2 October 2003. Article available in English at the US Socialist Action website and at www.marxsite.com.

11 See Joao Machado, ‘The two souls of the Lula government’, International Viewpoint, no.348, March 2003.

12 See Adolfo Gilly et al., Populism in Latin America, IIRE Notebook for Study and Research no.6. See also James Petras, ‘Brazil: Neo-Liberalism, crises and electoral politics’, 8 September 2002, http://www.rebelion.org/petras/english/petras080902.htm

13 See Brazilian government statement at www.brazzil.com/p106apr03.htm

14 Reported by James Petras, as quoted in ‘El viejo truco de tomar el poder’ (‘The old trick of taking power’), interview published 4 June 2003, available at www.rebelion.org/petras/030514petras.htm

15 See Jorge Jorquera, ‘Lula’s government adopts neo-liberalism’, Green Left Weekly, June 25, 2003.

16 But as a caution against making hard-and-fast distinctions between different sections of the bourgeoisie in dominated countries, see Leon Trotsky, Problems of the Chinese Revolution, 1927: ‘It would be… profound naivete to believe that an abyss lies between the so-called comprador bourgeoisie, that is, the economic and political agency of foreign capital in China, and the so-called national bourgeoisie’.

17 Larry Rohter, ‘The Amazon cleared for soya beans’, New York Times, September 18, 2003. Thanks to Lalu Hanuman for this reference.

18 This is a distinct department from the ministry of agriculture.

19 In March 2003, according to a report by Stan Lehmann of Associated Press, Rosseto criticised the MST’s resumption of protests in favour of land reform (thanks to Kunal Chattopadhyay for this). This is also referred to by Jorge Jorquera in his previously cited article.

20 See Phil Hearse, ‘Bolivian Insurrection’, October 2003, article available at www.marxsite.com

21 See Stuart Munkton, ‘Venezuela: Dynamics of a Revolution’, Frontline, Issue 11, November 2003.

22 Joao Machado, ‘Brazil: Nine Months of Lula’s government’, International Viewpoint no. 354, November 2003.

23 Although of course even the British Labour Party allowed its MPs to express public opposition to the war, whereas the PT expelled those publicly opposed to pension reforms.

24 For example, the growth of Militant within the Scottish Labour Party allowed it to form Scottish Militant Labour from a relatively strong base and thence, eventually, the Scottish Socialist Party. Of course, Militant did not restrict themselves to internal debates whilst in the Labour Party, but actively led the anti-poll tax campaign.

SO/02 - Winter 2003

Movements, Broad Parties and Revolutionary Parties What kind of party do the anti-capitalist and working class movements need?