Brazil - September 5th, 2021
Between Bolsonaro's whip and the "siren chants" of the "opposition" bourgeoisie , Lula and union bureaucracy
The bourgeoisie and imperialism seek to prevent a revolutionary outbreak of the masses
The Brazilian working class, a colossus on the verge of awakening
About the political and economic conditions
1) The conditions hitting Mercosur are clearly marked by the imperialist capitalist crisis, added to the COVID-19 pandemic which has already claimed the lives of almost 600,000 exploited in Brazil. It is precisely here where all the currents of the "New Left" play a disastrous role: they are determined to hide under seven keys the monopolies that command this ferocious attack and plan of enslavement of the exploited, it is clear that Lula is under the command of imperialism that poses as "democratic", as direct spokesman of the big bosses of the FIESP and FIRJAN (bosses' Federations of Sao Paulo and Rio de Janeiro). These employers' federations are mostly linked to the monopolies that were installed in Brazil during the 13 years of the popular front government, such as Volkswagen, Renault, ArcelorMittal, Totalfina, Carrefour, Telefonica VIVO, among more than 250 European transnationals that exploit around 3 million workers in Brazil, and a similar number of Yankee transnationals like Ford (that comes from closing all its plants at the beginning of the year), GM, Johnson&Johnson, Exxon, Chevron, etc., which employ around 2 million workers in Brazil. Yankee imperialism in open crisis of domination no longer has a clear path in its "Backyard" and the pirates of the EU, Germany and France are also coming for everything and are disputing the domination of Latin America inch by inch.
2) Brazil no longer plays the role of BRIC today it is in open bankruptcy. GDP closed the third quarter down. The so-called "Brazil Cost" is skyrocketing in the midst of an obsolete infrastructure for the industrial reconversions which, for example, are taking place in the automotive industry, which explains the closing of Ford and the open blackmail of all the assembler plants to destroy the collective bargaining agreements, while the bureaucracy is very well in charge of imposing terror among the unionized workers. In the country there are already more than 30 million new unemployed. Entire families thrown into the street, as can be seen today in the Plaza de Sé, that has become an open-air "refugee camp" with hundreds of families living in tents. Tens of thousands of exploited people had to take refuge from the cold wave in the Metro stations, following an intervention by the Church. The workers' ranks are totally separated, while the bosses are hitting left and right. This happens in the midst of a fierce bourgeois rupture and at the moment of greatest weakness of the government and the institutions of the regime.
3) Wall Street doesn’t have a clear path in its "backyard". The inter-imperialist dispute is marked by making Brazil a maquiladora a thousand times worse than Mexico and Bangladesh. All imperialist powers are determined in this objective: to recolonize and define their spheres of influence with open conditions of slavery and for that they must succeed in imposing fierce regimes more and more Bonapartist. It’s in the times and the forms in which will be defined the regime most apt to bring the masses to their knees and make the working class surrender, that enormous gaps have opened in the heights.
4) If on the one hand a fraction of the monopolies is encouraging Bolsonaro and a sector of the officer caste of the Armed Forces, while enlisting sectors of the high command of the Military Police, on the other hand the FIESP and more than 200 business chambers and capitalist institutions want to stop Bolsonaro. As were some attempts to ultimately demand that he "Comply with the Constitution and respect the institutions and institutional powers of the Republic", with a clear attempt to prevent an anticipated class clash and that the plan ends up being a "shot in the foot".
These institutions of the Brazilian big bourgeoisie have highlighted in two proposed letters to the President - which later the president of the FIESP, Paulo Skaf, asked not to be sent so as not to deepen the gap in the heights - where they expressed in their second draft letter: "The moment demands from everyone serenity, dialogue, political pacification, institutional stability and, above all, a focus on urgent and necessary actions and measures for Brazil to overcome the pandemic, return to growth, generate jobs and thus reduce the social needs that reach large segments of the population." See the two letters annexed to the report dated August 30.
They call for action by the regime as a whole. Although, it isn’t superfluous to say that these federations of the bourgeoisie were the ones that organized with imperialism the Coup of 1964, then their letter is more of a "muzzle the dog" alert. You will see that the letters express, posing as "democratic, constitutionalist and republican" that it isn’t yet time to launch a clash with civil war methods against the exploited.
5) On the other hand, it is these bourgeois factions that, with the caste of judges, are advancing in the CPI (Parliamentary Commission of Investigation) of the COVID, which has already taken some bourgeois and politicians to prison and has opened investigations against the Bolsonaro gang that made fortunes with the pandemic, they have even decreed to break the secrecy of the accounts of Eduardo Bolsonaro, son of the president and Federal Deputy, who during the elections was the one who declared "that he was already mounted on the horse and with the saber in his hands, if it was necessary to claim power". This led to the development of frictions between justice and the Executive and also between the executive, the Ministers and the parliamentary chambers that carry out the "investigations". The executive countered with requests for Bolsonaro's Impeachment against two TSJ Judges (Superior Court of Justice). Sectors of the officer caste came out to say that they "watch over the institutions and the Constitution". Bolsonaro is supported by some sectors of the Army and mainly in the commands of the Military Police (PM), where he has his main political weight.
6) As we will see below, September 7 is Brazil's Independence Day. Bolsonaro called to win the streets, he made a particular call to the Armed Forces, some assured that they will participate, others, for the majority moment, decided not to intervene so as not to deepen the institutional crisis. But sectors of the PM said they would take to the streets.
The workers' organizations of Brazil and the central unions historically called for this day to pacifist actions in the streets under the nickname of "The day of the excluded". And they also called for actions on September 7 in the streets. Several unions joined in, the leaderships of reformism openly call "For the broadest unity against the coup attempt", that is, with the bourgeoisie. Everything is defined within the framework of the bourgeois regime. They are all conflagrated, each one playing his role, in defending the regime, they silence the fight for the general strike, they don’t raise organizations apt for the violent clash that the slavers are preparing, their policy, OF ALL, from the PSTU and the PSOL to the CUT and the PT, is "Impeachment against Bolsonaro". Pacifism abounds among their speeches and this shows a clear preannouncement that they are surrendered in advance.
7) The faction in power doesn’t stand idly by. It also claims to take refuge in the Constitution. A Constitution clearly made to the shape of imperialist interests, which serves as two ends of the same rope, to enslave the masses. That is why, in the name of the "fight for independence", Bolsonaro came out to respond and has made of his center the threat the call for offensive actions, several evangelical pastors who speak in the sanctuaries in the name of the armed defense of the government have also joined him. Bolsonaro doesn’t stop, he comes from threatening to block the 2020 electoral process alleging that the ballot boxes are fraudulent, due to the loss of benches in the 2020 parliamentary elections. In his speeches he doesn’t spare words to call for "people to buy rifles" and went so far as to make it clear "whoever doesn’t want to buy guns and wants to buy beans should go to hell, if they don’t have money they shouldn’t bother".
8) About Lula's role, it should be seen together with the open turn of the PSOL as a guarantee of deception. Lula has already declared without any concealment that he is open to alliances with the bosses' parties more openly than in the 13 years of government together with the PMDB. His plan doesn’t hide or disguise it, but expresses it clearly in various statements where he assures that he will not have any limits to represent the capitalists, while he always makes it clear that he will leave the way clear for Bolsonaro to finish his mandate and "confront" him in the elections. Because of this deception they guarantee that the vanguard and the working class don’t distinguish their enemies and submit them to the bourgeois fraction that poses as "oppositionist" and "democratic".
The majority wing of the PSOL is 100% determined to an alliance with PSOL, asking in good manners that Lula not ally himself to the "right wing and the bourgeoisie". This is no longer credible, the decline of Lula has long been a fact.
Therefore, for this poison to penetrate among the masses and the vanguard, PSOL is fundamental. A key fact is that in the year 2021 the PSOL has achieved more than 22 thousand affiliations and the PT a little more than 600. This fact is categorical, demonstrating that the time has come for the PSOL to openly play the role played by its bosses of PODEMOS, Syriza, etc. Although these affiliations are "legal affiliations" to maintain themselves as parties eligible for candidacy, it is a very important fact.
The situation of the working class and the exploited
1) The objective conditions are more than ripe for the revolutionary struggle of the working class to begin. The breaches in the heights have put under a total tension and crisis the domination institutions of the capitalists.
Bolsonaro clearly represents the sector of the monopolies, he isn’t at all a "madman", nor a "megalomaniac"; neither is he an "adventurer", nor does he act on his own. He is a clear spokesman for a fraction of the monopolies and the big bourgeoisie who consider that the masses and the working class are sufficiently asleep and that the leaderships are clearly ready to surrender at the first serious attack. The conditions for a decisive intervention of the proletariat are more than ripe, but the catastrophe that is being imposed is marked by an enormous centralization of the traitorous leaderships that keeps the working class of Brazil corseted and tied hand and foot. But the other bourgeois fraction warns it, puts a brake on it, "the working class is not defeated", they express, and call to maintain institutionalism and its here where they appeal to reformism as a fundamental agent in the defense of the regime of the 1988 Constitution.
2) The plan of the imperialist parasites is that, while this dispute develops, they advance by leaps and bounds in taking the masses to conditions of unheard of misery, famine, desperation of tens of millions in conditions of extreme poverty and chronic unemployment. These conditions where the offensive of the slavers takes precedence and the response of the working class is delayed, again is what defines the role of direct support of the regime both from the flatterer and from the New Left. In this context the struggle of the revolutionary vanguard to defeat them and also the tasks set for the Brazilian working class is redoubled. Here is clearly shown the terrible consequence of each defeat imposed on the revolutionary struggles of the last period, both in the Middle East, in Europe and in their inaction before the struggles in Colombia, Chile, etc.
3) The exploited of Brazil didn’t stop pushing to take center stage in countless actions in the streets. They fought with strikes and factory occupations against layoffs and flexibilization. Despite and against its leadership, it had the clear insight to begin to unite its struggle with the US working class, first in the face of the execution of Marielle, with Beto Silveira, a black worker killed by Carrefour security, it took to the streets "Black Lives Matter", at a time when its best allies within the imperialist beast were rising up. It was quickly sidetracked and buried by reformism as the U.S. upheld the electoral trap and the butcher Biden.
The exploiters know very well that their whole plan is imposed to the extent that they defeat and impose new shackles on the working class and the exploited of Brazil. They know that this isn’t imposed peacefully and that it is only achieved by civil war methods. Precisely to advance in this they must have imposed the betrayals of their leaderships, the demoralization of the vanguard and guarantee that the exploited surrender and open the road to their crushing. Precisely the main point of crisis in the heights is determined by the forms and with what times this plan will be imposed, although there is no difference in the objective.
4) Certain vanguard sectors of the working class are beginning to take shape, as is the case of the subway workers and the railroad workers who have been under attack by the government and have responded with the method of the strike and the assembly, voting for a plan of struggle and even with an enormous tendency towards unity between these two sectors. However, the industrial proletariat is still bound by the bureaucracy and reformism, although sectors of it can break away in the midst of the enormous cost of living that can no longer be borne.
Although the proletariat has not taken action, not everything has been said, so much so that the Senate itself had to veto a labor reform proposal that would put the working class under even worse conditions, without stable agreements, the bosses intended to impose production hours freely determined by the bosses, elimination of overtime, severance pay, etc. that is to say that they would impose with the weight of law the conditions of maquiladora and pieceworkers. But this law didn’t pass, since the bosses have to measure the relationship of forces and had to put a stop to this plan in the short term.
The positions of the New Left
1) The PSTU, is in its classic "neither nor" position, but with an increasingly open location in the program of the entire New Left. They are openly part of the campaign for an "Impeachment against Bolsonaro", although they decorate it with phraseologies of "get out the government and all its troops", "overthrow Bolsonaro", "win the streets", etc.
Like the entire reformist left they openly hide the role of imperialism. They put out a last note on September 7 "for a second independence", they talk sideways about imperialism and during all their statements they openly keep quiet about the struggle for the expropriation of the monopolies, their banks, etc.
Also posing as "non-pacifist", they highlight in a note a position before the possible clash that is expected for the actions of September 7. Obviously they doesn’t propose the workers and popular militia, or anything near to this, they only limits to defending the setting up of "a first line" as in Colombia and Chile, "of defense of the actions, in a unitary and democratically controlled way by the mobilizations themselves…"
https://www.pstu.org.br/contra-ameacas-autoritarias-de-bolsonaro-ir-as-ruas-dia-7-de-setembro/
https://www.pstu.org.br/contra-as-ameacas-da-ultradireita-construir-a-auto-defesa-das-mobilizacoes/
2) PSOL, in the case of the current of Pedro Fuentes, is openly calling for actions with class collaboration content, which they call, as is now customary, "broad unity". In their statement on the acts of September 7 they call to massify the acts and say: "The majority leaderships must change their policy of passivity and call with full force for street responses (...) Also the only way to defend democratic freedoms from coup provocations (...) mobilize to the maximum for this decisive day, acting together with the forces of the initiative People in the Street, Out Bolsonaro Campaign and all the sectors of the opposition that want to go to the streets, with unity, breadth and combativity."
https://movimentorevista.com.br/2021/08/as-ruas-no-7-de-setembro-golpistas-nao-passarao/
3) These organizations "People in the Street" (Povo na Rua) and the Out with Bolsonaro Campaign, are organizations that stood up during this last period and which are the ones that have been calling for actions in the streets for some months now, the "People in the Street" is made up of sectors and trade union currents and parties of the left, that of "Out with Bolsonaro" is more linked to currents of parties like the PT, PCdoB, bourgeois parties like PDT, etc. Although both are organized together with the firm purpose of preventing the entry on the scene of the working class in an independent way because thus, through its organizations of struggle, it could lead all the exploited masses of the countryside and the city.
4) These two variants can be found in all the currents of the New Left. Some more openly or more underhandedly, but all raise a policy of class collaboration. All are silent on the struggle against imperialism. All are silent on the fight to build the general strike. Regarding the organizations of struggle, nobody leaves the framework of the political structures controlled by the bureaucracy and reformism or by the bourgeoisie itself, such as "Povo na Rua" and "Campanha Fora Bolsonaro". The fight for workers' committees, unified commandos of struggle, armed self-defense committees, etc. is buried.
This is what the role of the fronts of class collaboration with the so-called "progressive" bourgeoisies is all about, which have long since demonstrated that they are incapable of carrying forward any serious struggle against imperialism and even to the end against Bonapartism and the fascistic attempts of big capital. The fact is that all of them come out of the same sewer which is the capitalist system.
The submission of the working class to the "democratic" bourgeoisie means submitting it to one of its executioners, whose objective is to throw water on the fire of the revolution and disorganize the mass offensives so that later the counterrevolution can hit them hard and impose strategic defeats on them in the streets. That is what their "mermaid songs" are all about.
This is the case of Brazil, where the whole of the reformist left allied with sectors of the big bourgeoisie of Sao Paulo and a sector of the transnationals and monopolies, seek at all costs that the great masses -with millions of hungry, desperate, unemployed and landless workers and peasants- don’t intervene in huge revolutionary actions capable of defeating in the streets the Bolsonaro government and the whole institutions of the infamous regime. It’s that they know that a revolutionary uprising of the masses would go for all those at the top, who have long since taken everything from those at the bottom.
According to Trotsky, the alliance with the "liberal" or "democratic" bourgeoisie is an alliance against the ruined middle classes and against the lower and desperate layers of the masses that seek a quick way out of their crisis and can be a breeding ground for fascism.
Beyond this question, the key is that if Bolsonaro is sustained it’s because Lula, the PT and the union bureaucracies have centered their policy on "getting him out in 2022 with the elections", while he calls the reactionary forces to the streets and even affirms that he will not recognize the electoral result.
Bolsonaro exists because Lula, the PT and the union bureaucracy are holding back a decisive mass action to sweep away him and his entire government. This is an infamous pact of governability. To tie the masses to him is to put a noose around their necks.
5) What is reflected in Brazil is the cynical policy of class collaboration of the New Left as stated in the Letter of the Collective for the Refoundation of the Fourth International to the 59th Anti-War International Assembly of Japan: "Reformism intends to fight fascism and bonapartist regimes by subjecting the proletariat to the fractions of the bourgeoisie that claim to be "democratic". This is a fallacy. The proletariat defends democratic freedoms with arms in hand and with the method of proletarian revolution.”
In the same way, here is posed the fight that in this declaration is defined: “The fight to set up bodies of armed dual power of the masses at the beginning of any pre-revolutionary or revolutionary situation is a key and decisive issue for the victory of the masses and to prevent their crushing at the hands of fascism.
The fight to conquer revolutionary leaderships in the unions, based on the most audacious workers' democracy is the way to collaborate decisively with the masses to get rid of the treacherous leaderships.
Imperialism centralizes its offensive and the treacherous leaderships. Uniting the international struggle of the proletariat is an urgent necessity."
The struggle for a revolutionary party is key for the struggles that are already in the making, to break the encirclement of reformism and the pacts of class collaboration that prevent the masses from overthrowing Bolsonaro with a fight in the streets today. It’s that all are trying to "defeat him in next year's elections".
The fight for a revolutionary party is decisive to conquer an independent regroupment of the working class.
With its opportunist politics, the reformist left has shown itself to be servile to the bourgeois regime. The masses can no longer stand it.
In Brazil one of the central focuses of the single party of Trotskyist renegades and Stalinist, under the command of the Cuban Communist Party, has been set up, as was the last forum where they sealed the unity continuing the policy of class collaboration of Stalinism and social democracy. A real tragedy at a time when hundreds of thousands of exploited people in Havana and in Latin America were rising up against hunger, and when the conditions for the revolutionary uprising of the masses of Brazil were deepening.
In PSOL are, as Lula said about Boulos, his "heirs". Pujals, the leader of its international commission, went to propose to Sanders, the leftist man of the Wall Street pirates, to make him his "international in Latin America". All the currents of the Trotskyist renegades of the continent and the world are within the PSOL and coexist in peace, just as a large part of them do in the French NPA, acting there as true "left" advisors of the colonial adventures of the Fifth French Republic.
Meanwhile, the PSTU and the LIT-CI, from the CSP-Conlutas, sustain a policy which has been openly tested in Latin America. They gave shameless support to the fraudulent and farcical Constituent Assembly in Chile, being part of a list of class collaboration with sectors of the bourgeoisie, which today exploded into a thousand pieces. In Peru, they called to vote for Castillo's bourgeois party in the last elections. Thus, the LIT-CI contributes in putting the working class at the feet of the "democratic" bourgeoisie. With this policy, the LIT-CI in Brazil is very far from disputing the working class with the traitorous trade union bureaucracy of the CUT.
The powerful Brazilian working class is destined to play a decisive historic role in the struggle of the masses of the American continent to get rid of the subjugation and plunder of imperialism.
History will be written by the class struggle, which will be stronger than any apparatus and will give a thousand opportunities to the Trotskyists and revolutionaries to regroup their forces.
Previous generations made a thousand attempts to set up a revolutionary party in Brazil. In past decades, Brazilian Trotskyism left threads of continuity. To set up a new internationalist regroupment of the Brazilian working class is the task of the moment and will only be possible under the banners of the Fourth International.
Correspondent
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