The bankruptcy of a project: ruling Brazil as a capitalist power with minor social reforms
This is the first article of the series “PT’s crisis and degeneration”, whose aim is to provide our readers with a background of the history and origins of the bankruptcy of the PT’s project.
The Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) will hold its 5th Congress next June amidst a deep crisis. On the 35th anniversary of its foundation, the PT sees Dilma Rousseff’s administration reach its lowest approval rating after applying a fiscal adjustment against the workers.
The government crisis and the involvement of party leaders on tremendous corruption cases at Petrobras affect the party harshly. Millions of workers feel cheated at PT, disappointed, betrayed and turn away from the organization. The right-wing grows confident and even sectors that advocate the return of the military go to the streets to take advantage on the dissatisfaction of people.
The current PT is not even a parody of the party which generated a great expectation in a whole generation of activists: that it was possible to build a genuine workers’ party, defender of the exploited and oppressed, which would combat corruption and would be capable of leading deep social changes in the country.
That hope is gone. It is not, therefore, a circumstantial, fleeting crisis. It is the crisis of a political project, of a strategy of government, of a program, of a popular front policy, of a broken model of party. Faced with a shock of such proportions, we must seek the deeper explanations for the degeneration of the PT.
The PT gradually adapted itself to bourgeois politics and ended up applying the same methods they said they would combat. That is a part of the truth. But why did they adapt? Why did they become corrupt? Why was there no resistance from its leading sectors? What were the political logic and the ideology which sustained this path?
The answer to these and other questions is crucial to the future of the working class in Brazil. The epoch opened with the founding of PT and CUT (United Workers’ Central) in the early 1980s is over. We have to find a new strategy and a new path to resume the historical struggle of the workers and oppressed people in this country.
The strategic project of the PT
The strategy that has guided the policies of PT-led governments in these 13 past years has not been born today, nor was it the result of treachery. It was the result of a project that began to be drafted much earlier.
It is true that at its founding and during the early years of its existence, the PT declared itself to be a party which defended the rights of workers and other exploited sectors, fought against the military dictatorship and against imperialism (it advocated, for example, for a break with the International Monetary Fund and for a moratorium on the foreign debt), and called itself socialist in a broad sense. The contradiction is that its leadership, spearheaded by Lula, sought from the outset to impose a notion of alliance with bourgeois parties to govern.
The fall of Stalinism
From 1989 on, after Lula’s defeat in the presidential election against Fernando Collor and with the new situation arising from the fall of the Stalinist regimes in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union (USSR), this strategic notion prevailed completely. In what did it consist?
For the PT leadership, the diagnosis of the global situation was clear. They claimed that the collapse of the USSR and of the other Stalinist regimes meant that socialism had failed. And that therefore capitalism had proven to be a strong, powerful, indisputable regime. In this framework, socialism was an unattainable utopia. Workers should relinquish the goal of taking power and forming their own government.
The only possible strategy would be to win elections allied with bourgeois “progressive” sectors to take office. This policy materialized in Lula’s alliance with José Alencar, the biggest textile businessman in the country, who was the vice-president candidate in the victorious election in 2002, and then in alliances with right-wing parties, such as PMDB, PTB and PP, to govern.
Such a strategy forced the party to defend the capitalist system and the anti-democratic political regime that exists in the country, that is, the current Constitution, the rule of law and its institutions like the judiciary, the legislature, and especially the armed forces, which defend clearly the exploiting classes.
These alliances were justified to allegedly allow the PT administration to carry out reforms that would improve the situation of workers and diminish the social inequality via a fairer income share, taking out a sector of the population from absolute poverty.
The myth of entrepreneurship
The PT and its administrations instilled among workers the notion that lasting social mobility would be possible by means of redistributive policies. Among them were compensatory social policies such as Bolsa Família [1]. On the other hand, there was access to credit in order to enhance consumption, subsidies to private higher education (Prouni, “University For All Program”), and encouragement of individual entrepreneurship of small businesses. Thus, it established the myth that a new emerging middle class was arising.
But one can’t rule within the capitalist system without favoring the owners of capital, i.e., multinationals, banks, big industries, agribusiness and construction companies. In office, the PT did this in different ways: by keeping the high interest rates which favored banks; by approving tax exemptions to business sectors such as the automakers; with privatizations disguised in the form of concessions etc. In addition, the BNDES (National Bank for Economic and Social Development) acted as a strengthening instrument of big national groups; construction companies were tremendously favored with infrastructure works and for Petrobras, and the private groups in the education sector were benefited with ProUni and other programs.
International Relations
Regarding the place of Brazil in the world, the PT leadership sowed illusions that the country could become a developed capitalist nation, a great power, a sovereign and independent country, without breaking with imperialism and its agencies and treaties. On the contrary, on good terms with the U.S. government and with its consent.
The Letter to the Brazilian People, published by Lula just before the 2002 elections, in which he committed himself to respect the agreements signed by the country (that is, pay the foreign and domestic debts to national and international bankers and respect capitalist property) was the clearest manifestation of the PT’s commitment to the domestic and international financial capital.
Cooptation of trade unions
To carry out this project it was essential for the PT not only to have the support of trade unions and social movements but also to control their activities to prevent potential protests. This was accomplished using a number of pre-emptive cooptation steps: winning the activists to prioritize the elections, to aim at the election of members of parliament; appointing union members to positions of trust and key government posts; pension funds at state owned enterprises, such as the Previ (employees at Banco do Brasil) or FUNCEF (employees at Caixa Econômica Federal), controlled by the trade unions; allocating part of the “union tax” [2] for trade union centers etc. Thus, the leading union centers and much of the social movements support the government and have become mere instruments of demobilization of workers.
Managers of the capitalist crisis
The reasoning of the PT leadership tries to make a blend of reformism (the possibility to reform the capitalist system) with the old bourgeois national development discourse. But why does this reasoning have no effect any longer and is dismissed as hypocritical by millions of workers?
Because reality says more than a thousand words. The PT administration’s practice is the opposite of its speech. The government has been the main agent of imperialism and the bourgeoisie to perform economic adjustments, which is nothing more than forcing workers to pay for the crisis. In order to do this, the Rousseff administration leads the assault on social rights such as unemployment insurance; increases fuel and power supply fares; and puts the Minister of Finance, the banker Joaquim Levy, to negotiate the Bill of outsourcing with the Congressmen.
Leading the government of a capitalist state, the PT can’t escape the logic of managing the capitalist business. When an economic crisis arrives, a reduction of national income inevitably takes place. The bourgeoisie seeks to increase exploitation and destroy the previous income redistribution policies. On an international level, imperialism increases the exploitation of dependent countries to try to overcome the global economic crisis. The manager complies with the commands of the bosses. The PT fulfills the requirements of the real owners of state power, defends capitalism and attacks workers. This is the heart of the current administration’s crisis.
Corruption
The involvement of the PT in the major corruption schemes and in the formation of cartels that control major construction works and services, besides the obvious corruption of its leaders, follows the same logic. Corruption is an instrument at the service of bourgeois capitalist accumulation based on the plundering of the State. In every capitalist country, in Brazil perhaps in an exacerbated way, corruption and theft are part of the democratic game. By placing itself at the helm of the capitalist bourgeois state, the PT leadership began to reproduce the bourgeois methods of public management.
An alternative to PT
The conclusion is obvious: the PT’s project went bankrupt and fell into crisis along with the party. It is necessary the emergence of a new political alternative, a party that represents the historical needs of the working class. The conditions under which this alternative can be developed are opened.
However, the emergence of new left wing parties which repeat and favor the same strategy as the Worker’s Party is not a way out at all. What kind of party, program and class organization do we need? Just to start this debate, we should say that building a strong socialist workers’ party is a task for thousands of activists in the workers and popular movement. This series of articles is our modest contribution to this discussion.
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Notes:
[1] – Further explanation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bolsa_Fam%C3%ADlia
[2] – It’s a compulsory tax paid by workers and equivalent to the value of one working day. Currently, 10% of the tax income goes to Union Centers.
Translation: Gabriel Tolstoy
