By BARUC CARVALHO MARTINS*
Brief comments on the defeat of the left in the municipal elections
On October 5, we suffered a severe blow against the most basic values that the Enlightenment and socialist traditions bequeathed to us. We have unsuccessfully confronted the growth of the far right in the country and, as a result, we are rapidly losing ground in the hegemonic dispute in our society.
First, it is necessary to affirm the breadth and depth of this defeat in all its extent so that it is possible to develop coping strategies that are based on solid foundations.
We lost a lot. It wasn't the loss of the institutional left, it was the loss of the entire left. More radical parties, such as the PSTU and the PCB, are getting smaller and smaller and have no mobilizing power. The PSOL has shrunk in size, lost all its city halls and a good number of its city council seats, even though it grew in terms of absolute votes and won new seats in some regions. The PT, on the other hand, grew timidly, far from what it needed to.
Even though Guilherme Boulos made it to the second round, we feel this victory is a defeat, given that he did not even come in first place, and Bolsonarism in São Paulo was divided into two candidates who almost fought alone in this second round. Furthermore, in capitals where there is a second round, the “progressive” candidates are very poorly positioned, especially in the states of Rio Grande do Sul, Sergipe and Ceará.
It is true that class conciliation with the right is part of the answer to this defeat, but what explains why more radicalized camps are unable to recover, whether in electoral or organizational terms? Is it just the strategy of shifting rightwards by the left in discursive terms, as Vladimir Safatle points out, or of political capitulation to the structure of the State? At this point, defending this thesis as an argument sounds like looking at the problem from only one angle, trying to find an external element to atone for our responsibility in this defeat.
The fact is that this defeat is a generalized defeat of our ways of organizing, of not understanding the new class dynamics at play and of not being able to properly interpret the new moment in the process of capital accumulation that we are currently experiencing: more financialized, more informational, more entrenched in a neoliberal logic that places on the shoulders of the individual a responsibility that belongs to the State and transforms him into a “manager” of his own life.
As a result, we spend too much time discussing Jair Bolsonaro and Bolsonarism and little time discussing how we are going to deal with the fact that our youth is getting smaller and older, social movements are increasingly bureaucratized and smaller, and our union tools are not seen as important instruments of struggle for the class itself.
We are, finally, in the midst of an accelerated movement of entropy that only seems to be interrupted when something new emerges. And this new thing may not be something from the left, but rather a “Paes” of life, which mixes a Bolsonarism without Jair Bolsonaro and part of the “progressive crowd” without committing, in fact, to any leftist agenda. It is just not a troll abominable, as is the case with the root Bolsonaro candidates.
It is therefore worrying that throughout this time municipal elections have been treated as simply “local” elections, when the great architects of the chaos that we so want to combat (the right wing as a whole) have always treated them as strategic. Coalitions between left-wing parties such as União Brasil, PSD, Republicanos, PP and PL itself, for example, were seen as contingent with the aim of achieving a pragmatic end, which is to improve people’s lives through an election.
The socialist tradition is quite clear about the results this generates. Even if, superficially, they are, in fact, better governments from the point of view of guaranteeing some labor and social rights. There are many failed examples of this tactic, such as Marcos Xukuru, an important indigenous leader who ran for the Republicans in the state of Pernambuco and had his candidacy revoked, including by the TSE, due to a false accusation of arson. As can be seen, the result of this pragmatic shift is that the Justice system is asserting its class position.
How to deal with this, how to confront the right, then? Remembering the assumptions of the socialist struggle: (i) we live in a class society; (ii) this society exists due to a deeper social and economic inequality; (iii) this inequality is maintained by a hegemonic struggle; (iv) the hegemonic struggle does not have only one meaning, because we also have agency and can dispute it.
As we are living in a time of decline of the left, two symptoms of this have been asserting themselves through a frequent depoliticization among its members and a loss of capacity for more spontaneous mobilization, which is captured by institutional mechanisms of the State, such as the Party Fund (Slogans from previous campaigns such as “I’m on the street without receiving a single real, I’m on the street for an ideal”, however precarious they may be, they have stopped circulating).
The correct question would be: where are the activists? This prehistoric figure who took on tasks without charging for it, who accumulated political resources, etc. Maybe they are on some couch talking about the excess of tasks and working hours generated by the abuse of requests made by enlightened leaders, among other things. But this is a figure that is missed. Not so much for what he was, but rather for his potential to structure and contribute to the direction of social movements.
In short, we no longer have activists, we have lost the material conditions to mobilize and replaced them with a persuasion that is restricted to the rhetorical plane. To get out of this, it is not enough to invest in new forms of communication, especially through the applied use of the internet; because, if hegemony is dictated today by the extreme right, it means that any dispute over “slogans” and linguistic choices is insufficient, because there is a whole world “beyond language” that needs to be conquered. In individual dealings, in the dialogic relationship cultivated daily. Which implies the challenge of reconnecting with people in a physical, face-to-face, intense way, in long-term activities. And, to do this, we lack… activists.
As history always follows its course, there is still something in dispute. And the most essential thing in dispute today is precisely the nature of what we call the left. At the end of this dispute, will our field be made up mostly of a left in the terms of the Latin American tradition or will it be a left based in the United States (Democratic Party)? In other words, will it be a socialist left or a liberal left?
I disagree with those who see this dispute as something that is already over, in which the pendulum has closed its cycle, ending up electing the last pole as the victor. I believe, as shown by the occasional victories that sectors more or less to the left of the progressive camp have had, that this dispute is still open and that the key to defining the shape that we will give to the left lies in our ability to form new activists.
*Baruch Carvalho Martins is a postdoctoral fellow in education at UERJ.
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