By LINCOLN SECCO*
With a simple casual comparison of left-wing statements with empirical data we can see that the analyses are not being calibrated by reality, but by subjective impressions.
The “left is losing support in the outskirts”; “the left has lost its dialogue with the outskirts”; “the left is withering away in the outskirts of the capitals”. These are some of the newspaper headlines collected at random in the last few days. Add to this the recipes offered: “we need to support entrepreneurship, dialogue with the neo-Pentecostals” etc.
Among the arguments used is that the outskirts no longer want CLT, the State, taxes, “gender ideology”, etc. For example, Data Favela recorded that 8 out of 10 favela residents intend to start a business.
Among the rare voices that demonstrated an understanding that the periphery is made up of a thousand heads thinking differently, as Mano Brown said, is Tiaraju Pablo D'andrea who gave an excellent interview to the portal UOL to remind us of the basics: there is no abstract periphery from those headlines cited, therefore there is no left that should address it. Like any place, the periphery is the meeting point for people with different political and religious positions and even from different social classes.
There are businesspeople, self-employed workers, informal workers, factory workers, teachers, waste pickers, singers, poets, fascists, socialists and everything else you could possibly want to find. There are poor people on the right and poor people on the left. Obviously, there is a predominance of class and race. Incidentally, the outskirts of the city are not necessarily favelas, obviously. But how many people in the country want to be entrepreneurs?
In Brazil, there are 16 million favela residents, or 7,5% of the country's population. It is not possible to state a general behavior regarding this number. It can be argued that 42% of Brazilians want to have their own business in 2023 according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. This percentage has varied considerably since 2012, when the series began.
The dream of “having one’s own business” is inversely proportional to family income. Among the population with a family income of up to 1 minimum wage, approximately 54% expressed that dream. In the group with an income of more than 6 minimum wages, this proportion is 12 percent lower. However, 42% of low-income people want to “make a career in a company” compared to only 24% among those with an income of more than six minimum wages.[I]
Lula recently said that the working class no longer wants the CLT.[ii] For the historian, this is ironic, since he was against it in the 1980s, although for other reasons. But the class to which Lula referred does not seem to agree with him. According to a survey by FGV-Ibre, 70% of self-employed workers want CLT and this percentage reaches 75,6% of informal workers with income of up to one minimum wage.[iii]
With this simple casual comparison of left-wing statements with empirical data, we can see that the analyses are not being calibrated by reality, but by subjective impressions. And it is these impressions that lead to incredible proposals such as that of candidate Guilherme Boulos to incorporate Tabata Amaral's “Young Entrepreneur” program: a credit system for young people between 18 and 29 years old who want to start their own businesses.
He could have said that it is not even true that the left has not been concerned about these entrepreneurs. The Microenterprise Law dates back to 2006 and the MEI from 2008. The Lula government has a Ministry of Entrepreneurship, Microenterprise and Small Business. In 2013, the Presidency of the Republic created a Secretariat for Micro and Small Business with the status of a ministry. Which only shows us that it is not the lack of dialogue with the desire to undertake that explains the declining line of the electoral left since 2016. They say that there were 20 years of daily criminalization of the PT in the mass media, there was Lava Jato, the 2016 coup and an attempted coup in 2023.
Informal and precarious work has existed on a large scale in Brazil since the colonial period. It is not necessary to be inspired by European models to verify this. In recent decades, the growth of “independent” occupations has also been the result of deindustrialization, as has the increase in crime. This is what reinforces the neo-fascist appeal.
And no one doubts that traditional independent services will continue to exist because they offer advantages in specific niches. This is the case of street vendors, street vendors, bag carriers, porters, delivery men, seamstresses, hairdressers, manicurists, domestic workers, small repairs, etc. But can we call these activities, sometimes carried out in degrading conditions, entrepreneurships? There is an ideological dispute over the nomination. It is not news that poor people do not feel part of a class: “A large proportion of the poor, especially the very poor, did not consider themselves proletarians or behaved as such, nor did they consider the organizations and ways of acting of the movement applicable or relevant to them,” wrote Eric Hobsbawm about the Belle Epoque.[iv]
There is certainly a desire for autonomy, to live without a boss. But autonomy cannot be exercised in poverty. Instead of adapting to the bourgeois ideology that has won over part of the working class, it is up to the left to explain to the manicurist that if there is no economic growth, formal employment and sufficient wages, she will not be able to “undertake” anything, because she will not have clients. It is during full employment that services become more expensive. It is also at these times that many “entrepreneurs” leave the “side job” they were doing and get a job with rights.
To the informal, uberized or whatever we call it, it is necessary to say that without progressive taxes and a State capable of investing when the economy is slowing down, there will be no effective demand for their “business”. And for both, there will be no free complex health treatments or retirement in old age.
The PT expanded its base to the inorganic sector of the population (Caio Prado Júnior); it was an electoral realignment that gave rise to what André Singer called “Lulism”. The State would be the source of services, monetary aid and public order for the poor segments. The PT’s commitment to income transfer and its abandonment of political radicalism would be the passport to the “loyalty” of that base. This was different from the classical social democracy that operated in countries without a popular mass of informal workers and extended its appeal to the middle class.
But the formation of electoral majorities in Brazil continued to depend on the middle classes, especially because in an urbanized and deindustrialized country, employment in the tertiary sector is the majority. Although poorly paid, it allows workers to cultivate values that differentiate them from the poorest.
In several cases, the PT has shown a lower voting intention in the income bracket of 2 to 5 minimum wages. These people assume expenses with health insurance and private schools and from that point on reject the State. But since life is always more complicated, I wonder why those who think the left should adapt to a liberal worldview do not see the 69% of Brazilians in favor of higher taxes on the “super-rich”?[v]
This partially explains the PT's electoral defeats in the capitals of the Northeast and the geography of Pablo Marçal's votes in São Paulo. A leftist from São Paulo that wants to win will have to go to Jardim Camargo Novo with stops in Tatuapé and downtown Penha. Incidentally, this is a neighborhood where the PT once had the headquarters of a Zonal Deliberative Council (CDZ).
It is also worth remembering that people are angry with the left for several reasons. One of them is that we have nothing to offer to middle-income formal workers, whom we disdainfully call the middle class. These are people who pay more taxes than the rich and spend their budget on health plans and private education. Serving them would mean inverting the entire Brazilian tax logic, from regressive to progressive.
To do this, it would be necessary to confront at some level the coalition of rentiers and industrial and agribusiness entrepreneurs who mobilize the resentment of middle-income wage earners. Breaking this alliance is the real dispute for hegemony. Bigger than the right-wing culture wars, the left-wing obituaries and the assumptions about “peripherals” and “entrepreneurs”.
* Lincoln Secco He is a professor in the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of History of the PT (Studio). [https://amzn.to/3RTS2dB]
Notes
[I] Global Entrepreneurship Monitor: entrepreneurship in Brazil 2023 / general coordination: Simara Maria de Souza Silveira Greco. ANEGEPE; SEBRAE, 2024.
[ii] Daniel Trevorda, “Workers no longer want CLT”, says Lula. CNN, Brasilia, 07/03/2024.
[iii] Wanderley Preite Sobrinho, “7 years after labor reform, 70% of informal workers want a signed employment contract”, UOL, in Sao Paulo, 26/08/2024.
[iv]Eric Hobsbawm. Age of Empires, trans. Maria C. Paoli. RJ, Paz e Terra, 1992, p. 202.
[v] https://www.poder360.com.br/economia/69-dos-brasileiros-apoiam-taxar-super-ricos-diz-pesquisa/)
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