Fri Mar 29, 2024
March 29, 2024

Left Front: An alternative for the workers

Heloisa Helena as a Left Front PSOL-PSTU-PCB candidate for presidency has managed the peak of 9% of the votes in declared ballot intentions. In some states, such as Alagoas, where HH comes from, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul, the figures are even higher. Should this percentage remain unmoved, it would mean the Front would get about ten million votes in the country.


The first conclusion is that the Front has broken the false polarisation between the two main candidates supported by the bourgeoisie and imperialism (Lula and Alckmin) and created a left-wing alternative for the workers. Even at a time when Lula seem to be the “vacuum cleaner”, sucking up all the votes of the toiling masses, the Left Front appears as being capable of disputing a fringe – a minority – but of masses of these sectors and that is what the polls on vote intention express when analysed by social sector.


This is a very important even. On the one hand, a good vote for the Left Front would create better conditions for future struggles against the forthcoming Lula administration. Some of it can already be envisaged: the support for Heloina Helena and the Left Front of the Volkswagen toughened their struggle and the same thing happened with the metallurgic workers of Volta Redonda who have just recovered their trade union.


On the other hand,, it will give a much more ample base for the construction of a workers’ and social alternative that Brazilian workers need. From this point of view, the Front has become a milestone for thousands of fighters that were quite demoralised after the “failure” of the PT and Lula administration as a tool for change.


That is why PSTU was the first one to encourage the formation of this Front and today is carrying out an active electoral campaign throughout the country posing this alternative.


 


The character of the Front now


And yet, some smaller trends of the left in Brazil and in other countries in Latin America criticise this policy stating that the electoral coalition is actually “an alternative popular Front”, sited just slightly to the left of Lula. In this article we wish to answer these pieces of criticism. In the first place, it is necessary to point out that the Left Front is an electoral coalition of parties of different characteristics. For example, PSOL defends the strategy of socialist revolution while PSOL declares the possibility “deepening democracy” and consequently concentrates on electoral and parliamentary activities.


The other central aspect is that PSTU defends the principle of the need for political independence of the working class while PCB and the majority trends inside PSOL are prepared to make agreements with bourgeois parties, that is to say, build a new popular front.


This battle has been fought even before the constitution of the Front. For example, HH’s initial proposal was to form an electoral coalition including the PDT, a bourgeois party that intends to site itself “to the left of Lula”. The demand that there should be no party and no figure of the bourgeoisie in the front was one of the conditions posed by the PSTU before joining the front and that is in black and white in the agreement of the constitution of the front. Also it is written in the joint electoral manifesto, “In this front there is room for workers, for the unemployed, for the millions of men and women who are in the informal economy, barely surviving on their labour, workers’ political and social organisation and independent activists.”


It is important here to highlight a fact: Joao Fontes, running for governor of Sergipe for the PDT, has tried several times to link his state candidacy to the figure of HH. This attitude was rejected in a joint manifesto of PSOL and PSTU of that state saying, “Joao Fonte’s PDT is one of the parties of the bourgeoisie. that is why, Left Front has decided that the PDT was not to be part of the span of the alliance in any part of the country.”  That is why it is totally false to say that Left Front is today a popular front.


 


Discussion inside the Front


Simultaneously we have to point out that the most visible figures of the Front, such as HH and the candidate to vice-presidency often express popular front positions or point of view contradicting the agreement on programme and its anti imperialist and “broadly socialist” character. That is why the battle against the transformation of the electoral coalition into a popular front – be it through its composition or its programme, is still underway.


Every time the main figures of the Front slipped out of what had been agreed PSTU countered from the pages of its paper or its web page or through the spoke word of its candidate. This was the case of the proposal of HH and Cesar Benjamin that the main measure to give an impulse to the development of Brazil was to lower the rate of interest. Using different means, PSTU discussed against that saying that the necessary measures for a real development must begin by putting an end to the imperialist domination over the country, by not paying the foreign debt and spitting away from the IMF.


Also on the issue of the land reform, when HH stated in her TV programme that it had to be limited to the unproductive land and be carried out “in keeping with the law”, In number 270 of Opinao Socialista, Mariucha Fontana, member of the national leadership of the PSTU, said that the real land reform could only be carried out if it began with the largest, riches and most productive land estates and using the method of struggle, such as occupation of land and expropriation, which contradict the bourgeois constitution.


Other important discussions took place of the issue of abortion, the discussion on the nationalisation of hydrocarbons in Bolivia, the suspension of state credit to Volkswagen in response to their threat to close down its plant in San Bernardo, etc.


In other words, within the framework of an active and loyal electoral militancy of the Front, the PSTU had maintained its total independence on political issues and issues of programme and is permanently battling against the constitution a “future popular Front”.


 


A difficult but necessary task


These debates are eagerly followed by the advance guard that participates of the Front and supports it and is drawing conclusions from the proposals of each one of the component parties. But for the sector of the masses that is prepared to vote for HH, the definition is simpler: they see her as a warring figure opposing Lula from the left. And the split of that minority fringe is – for reasons previously analysed – is highly progressive.

The participation in the Left Front has permitted PSTU to open a political dialogue with millions of workers and reach a sector that multiplied several times its historical electoral influence (0.5%)- This fact crates much greater chances to build the organisation and win over a fringe of the advance guard for revolutionary positions. Of course, the participation in the Front is a contradictory task and very contradictory and full of pressures. But it is a thousand times over preferable to build in the midst of this living dialogue with a fringe of the mass movement rather than to adopt a much easier, and often more sterile attitudes of reciting the principles and the programme for a small but faithful audience.

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