Brazil’s recent presidential election is being celebrated around the world as a victory for the left and a defeat for fascism. Yet as much as the return of Lula and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers Party) to power marks a repudiation of the right-wing Bolsonaro government, it is not an uncomplicated triumph for the working class- and socialists must organize independently of the PT to fight for a working class revolution.
To understand the significance of the most recent presidential election it is necessary to look back to 2003 when Lula, a union metalworker by trade, first became president of Brazil. Lula’s election marked the ascent of the PT, a working class party born out of opposition to the military dictatorship imposed on Brazil by US imperialism, to power. Once in office the PT enacted a swath of reforms that dramatically reduced poverty, illiteracy, and child labor. Programs like Bolsa Família and Fome Zero massively benefited the working class, lifting tens of millions of people out of poverty.
However, the PT did not fundamentally challenge capitalism, and its government sought to reconcile itself to the bourgeoisie and the church. To give a single example, the PT refused to legalized abortion for fear that it would lead to religious backlash. This one-sided reconciliation undermined the credibility of the PT with some sections of the working class leading to a series of major splits in the period from 2003 until 2007. The Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL) and other independent socialist organizations in Brazil grew out of this period as working class people understood the need to build their own parties and not rely on PT’s increasingly empty promises.
Increasing popular discontent and a series of corruption scandals, such as the Mensalão voting buying scandal, led Lula to step aside and cede PT leadership to his former chief of staff Dilma Rousseff in time for the 2010 presidential election. Rousseff stood on the moderate wing of the PT and her government was strongly identified with austerity measures intended to roll back reforms of previous years in accordance with the demands of the bourgeoisie in Brazil and the International Monetary Fund. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis the PT, even led by Lula, had swung sharply to the right and Rousseff’s government meant a rollback of social welfare programs.
This capitulation to the right and to imperialism was a logical result of the PT’s failure to challenge the capitalist system as a whole or to even begin the process of dismantling the capitalist state. Indeed the machinery of the Brazilian state remained exactly the same under the PT as under previous governments. The major difference between the PT’s government and previous governments was merely that the capitalists had to pay a little more in tax and extract a little less in profit. Yet they remained firmly in control and could call a halt to the PT’s reformism when it no longer served their interests.
It was the capitalist state machinery that would put an end to over a decade of PT governments. Through a process known in Brazil as the institutional coup, both Lula and Rousseff were undemocratically removed from the political scene. In 2017 Lula was imprisoned on charges of money laundering and stripped of the right to stand as a candidate in the 2018 elections. (Purely coincidentally the judge on his case was appointed to Bolsonaro’s cabinet.) Meanwhile Rousseff had been ‘rewarded’ for her service to the bourgeois with a 2016 impeachment proceeding that undemocratically handed power to Vice President Michel Temer. Temer promptly proclaimed a “government national salvation” to crush street protest, curb the power of the unions, slash public spending, and reduce pensions. This combination of judicial maneuvering, police repression, and austerity measures totally discredited the PT in the eyes of the vast majority of the working class and opened the door for Bolsonaro.
The rise of Bolsonaro was orchestrated by US imperialism. Seeing a right-wing government in Brazil as a weapon against the PSUV in Venezuela & the MAS in Bolivia and as a way to intensify the extraction of natural resources from Brazil by multinational corporations, US imperialism arranged funding and political support for Bolsonaro’s movement. The Catholic Church and other religious instructions lined up behind Bolsonaro, demonstrating the error inherent to the PT sidelining queer and women’s liberation in an attempt to appease religious sentiments. The bourgeoisie state machinery, particularly the army and the courts, quickly fell in line behind Bolsonaro as a function of the metabolic relationship between capital and its state. As we wrote previously, “the state is an instrument of the ruling class for the domination of other classes. This means that the existing state cannot be captured by winning elections or reformed to operate in the interest of the working class… …it is crucial to recognize that winning election doesn’t mean winning power. The working class can only come to power and establish socialism through a revolution that dismantles the existing state and replaces it with a workers state.”
The need to fundamentally challenge capitalism and dismantle the capitalist state is highlighted by a comparison of the rise of Bolsonaro in Brazi and the fall of the PT to contemporary socialist movements in South America. Lula’s rise to power coincided with the “pink tide” of reform or left governments coming to power across the continent. However it is necessary for socialists to move beyond the “pink tide” as a reference point and instead examine the class relations in various parties and movements. Venezuela’s PSUV and Bolivia’s MAS are working class parties explicitly seeking to dismantle capitalism and establish socialist societies. They both came to power by being elected to the helm of bourgeois states but they have also both attempted to identity and undermine the links between the state and capital. In Brazil the institutional coup was able to proceed legally through the courts, in Bolivia the right could only come to power through an open military coup. In Brazil the coup was solidified and Bolsonaro triumphed electorally, in Bolivia the coup was defeated when the labor and indigenous liberation movements threatened civil war if free elections (which the MAS easily won) were not held. Likewise the Venezuelan revolution has been able to endure economic crisis and pressure from imperialism precisely because its leadership has not become complicit with austerity and has successfully identified the capitalist class as the source of the problem. Neither Venezuela nor Bolivia today are socialists societies and neither of them has dismantled the capitalist state or overthrown the capitalist class in the manner of the glorious Cuban Revolution, yet the left governments in those countries has been able to overcome coup attempts by the right-wing and imperialism previously because they were willing to do what the PT was not and at least begin the process of dismantling the state and attacking capitalism directly.
Of course the triumph of Lula in the most recent elections might challenge this narrative. Surely the PT victory in removing Bolsonaro demonstrates that it retains significant working class support? In fact, Lula was only able to win the presidential election because US imperialism had turned against Bolsonaro and determined to remove him from power. Bolsonaro’s mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic and reckless environmental policies led imperialism to view him as more of a liability than an asset. As poverty and disease spread through working class neighborhoods, both US imperialists and Brazilian capitalists began to see the resorts toon of the PT to power as preferable to chaos and disconnect unleashed by the governance of the extreme right. The corruption charges against Lula were dropped and his political rights restored. In this context it is necessary to look critically at the PT election victory, imperialism did not withdraw support from Bolsonaro out of good intentions but in a cynical pursuit of their own agenda. Likewise the extremely close result shows that a section of the bourgeoisie still supports Bolsonaro and that imperialism is unprepared to discard him completely.
This mirrors the Trump and his allies on the right being preserved as a political force in the US even if the bourgeoisie was not prepared to support the January 6th coup. As we wrote at the time, “The capitalist state will never put down its fascist attack dog even if it gets its hand bitten from time to time. Only socialists, because we reject the capitalist system and all it implies, can really be anti-fascists. This also means that the socialist struggle for democracy and against fascism cannot be separated from the struggle against the capitalist system.” This perspective applies now in Brazil. It is necessary for socialists to organize the working class independently of and in revolutionary opposition to the PT government. Failure to do this will inevitably open the door for the right to come back into power. The building of parties like PSOL is the immediate task of the Brazilian left.
Nevertheless, it is reasonable and justified to support PT candidates in elections against the right when there is no left candidate. This is the strategy of the united front, of marching separately and striking together. Only a united front approach can convince the bulk of the working class that a revolutionary socialist approach is the only meaningful alternative to Bolsonaro. In adopting this approach it is also necessary for the left to center US imperialism as the main enemy and the main prop of the right. The socialist revolution and the anti-imperialist revolution are one and the same process of permanent revolution against all types of oppression and exploitation.
Cincinnati Socialist Workers Organization 