By FLÁVIO MAGALHÃES PIOTTO SANTOS*
What the Workers' Party has sought throughout this time was to show itself as a competent manager of the Brazilian capitalist economic system.
“The attitude of a political party towards its mistakes is one of the most important and certain criteria for judging the seriousness of that party and the effective fulfillment of its duties towards its class and the working masses.”
Vladimir Lenin, Leftism: Childhood Disease of Communism
the counterrevolution
Although it is not the only moment, nor even the most important, the bourgeois elections are an opportunity to reflect on the political paths chosen, their successes or failures, in addition to mobilizing for certain agendas. The fundamental issue is not to analyze only the votes, but to understand the internal tendency of the political movement that the votes manifest on the surface. In this sense, the October 2024 elections are absolutely vital for making a theoretical reflection on the strategy and tactics of the Brazilian left.
Theory, long abandoned by most parties in this political camp, is not an intellectual dilettantism without relevance, but, on the contrary, it allows us to analyze reality and, from there, establish the path of a coherent political praxis. To reflect theoretically is to establish concrete practical paths. Thus, theory is a necessity that imposes itself on any left-wing political party. The last elections allow us to establish some fundamental points in this regard.
The results of the vote last October marked a huge advance for the right and the extreme right. Parties in this political spectrum won in 25 of the 26 Brazilian state capitals. The advance of the right-wing counter-revolution finds fertile ground in the population’s ability to mobilize, reinforcing a trend that had already been present in the last elections. There are, therefore, two possibilities for reflection. On the one hand, it is possible to ask: how do the right and the extreme right manage to defeat the left in such a landslide manner? On the other hand, it would also be plausible to ask: how does the left manage to lose so resoundingly?
The first question involves thinking less about what a left-wing party is, its strategy and tactics, and more about how to analyze the current situation. The right and the extreme right present themselves as anti-system, that is, against the existing bourgeois political system. But, after all, what system is this? It is the system that exploits workers, creates long lines at hospitals, increases fear and insecurity in the face of a variety of crimes committed, intensifies traffic and degrades public transportation, makes access to necessary consumer goods difficult, turns public education into something everyone wants to escape, pollutes and deforests nature, puts an end to free and diverse leisure activities, and leaves national art in complete oblivion and discredit.
Any Brazilian worker will easily recognize one, two or more of the characteristics mentioned above, as well as others, in their cities. Each of the millions of Brazilian workers knows what this situation is and what its practical effects are in the struggle of daily life.
The right-wing is thus capturing the dissatisfaction of the Brazilian people with the completely rotten political system, composed of a group of politicians at the service of fractions of capital (landowners, bankers, industrialists) and also with the economic and social system that exists in Brazil, that is, a dependent capitalism that generates underdevelopment. There is, therefore, a compatibility between the widespread dissatisfaction of the Brazilian population and what is propagated by the right-wing, not only during elections, but during practically all the rest of the time. It is this compatibility that allows the uninterrupted advance of the right-wing and the consolidation of its political mobilization force.
However, this idea that the right wing disseminates is only anti-system in appearance, because in reality, it is an ultra-system validation, that is, the right wing can only maintain and deepen all the ills that Brazilian workers feel in their daily lives. In appearance, as a critic of the system and a redeemer of workers; in practice, as an agent of intensification of the exploitation of workers. Herein lies the political vitality of the right wing.
In this scenario, what has been the role of the Brazilian left? What paths has it taken to combat such a cunning and powerful enemy? To do so, it is necessary to think about the strategy and tactics of this so-called left.
Strategy and tactics of the liberal left
To discuss the strategy and tactics of the liberal left, it is important to analyze the elections in the city of São Paulo. This city is significant not only because it is the largest Brazilian municipality, but also because it represented the nationalization of elections. On the one hand, Jair Bolsonaro, together with Tarcísio de Freitas, supported the candidate Ricardo Nunes of the MDB. On the other hand, Lula supported the candidate Guilherme Boulos of the PSOL. Thus, both candidacies represented a national political dispute.
The first element that caught our attention in the second round was the number of abstentions: 2,8 million people did not vote, a total of approximately 31% of the population of São Paulo. Together with the abstentions, the 665 thousand null or blank votes even surpassed the number of candidate Ricardo Nunes, who won with 3,3 million votes. This is a clear manifestation of the people's distrust of the political system, which reinforces the complete impossibility of this same system to regain its credibility and functionality. Candidate Guilherme Boulos received 2,3 million votes, one million votes below Ricardo Nunes.
Guilherme Boulos was the candidate supported by Lula and the PT, since the PT gave up its own candidacy to support the PSOL. Therefore, Guilherme Boulos was the representative of the liberal left in São Paulo, and his campaign practically imitated Lula's way of acting politically: dialoguing with everyone and lowering the level of critical awareness of the campaign. In his program, Guilherme Boulos made encouraging peripheral entrepreneurship an important point (!).
Nothing could be further from a left-wing program. In trying to garner more votes, the PSOL adopted right-wing agendas, which could only be a failure, since it is not possible to enter the dispute in the ideological field of the opponent. On the contrary, it is necessary to raise awareness and criticize without concessions what is ideological and reinforces concepts disseminated by the major media outlets.
However, Guilherme Boulos and the PSOL merely continued a political practice that the Workers' Party had paved the way for over two decades. It is necessary to re-analyze this party, its strategy and tactics.
In order to make a coherent critique of the PT, we will start from an assumption that has already been valid for the party, including at its congresses, which is the following: the party seeks to achieve socialism in Brazil. We will initially analyze it in this way so as not to interfere with conclusions about the proposed problem. Then, we will introduce concrete elements to help us get closer to reality.
Assuming that the PT seeks to achieve socialism in Brazil, the question follows: how? Over the last 20 years, the party has achieved significant electoral consistency, electing mayors in major capitals, governors in significant states, and over the last 22 years, it has governed the country for practically 15 years. This electoral consistency is not unrelated to its tactics, but rather organically articulated with them.
To achieve socialism, the PT seeks to gain political positions (including both those of an executive nature described above and those of a legislative nature, such as councilors, state and federal deputies and also senators) and, through the increase in the number of these positions, generate an accumulation of forces that could tip the political situation in its favor and, thus, generate a number of reforms that would transform Brazilian capitalist society into a Brazilian socialist society.
This transformation would have broad support from the population base and intense political agitation work, but it would fundamentally consist of the possibility of occupying the political system and, from within, progressively reforming it until reaching such a significant accumulation of political forces that it would be possible to change it radically. First of all, there is a problem, because it can be argued that there is not yet enough accumulation to change the economic and political system, that is, the “right moment” for such a transition can be postponed indefinitely.
Secondly, it is a tactic aimed at legitimizing the political system that one seeks to abolish. It is possible to use the bourgeois political system as a means of agitation and to fight for certain causes, as Lenin already pointed out. However, trying to transform reality based on a political system that aims to perpetuate the economic and social conditions of dependent capitalism is pure naivety, bad faith or theoretical incompetence to formulate a correct political praxis.
What can be seen is that this is a reformism that seeks to progressively accumulate forces to transform reality. (This perspective becomes clear when reading various PT documents and works by party thinkers, such as André Singer and his book The meanings of Lulismo: gradual reform and conservative pact).
Now, the failure of this perspective has already shown its historical results, such as, for example, Salvador Allende's Chile, which, despite the advancement of consciousness and forms of organization and mobilization of the working class, failed and ended with a coup and a long dictatorship. As Ruy Mauro Marini pointed out in his book Reformism and counterrevolution: studies on Chile, reformism is incapable of solving the problems of a capitalist country, much less of a dependent and underdeveloped capitalist country. This reformism is the very cause of the subsequent failure of this political tactic. Thus, even in imagined and hypothetical conditions, that is, that the PT would like to achieve socialism, its tactics and strategy constitute an error that can only lead to an electoral defeat, as well as – and this is more important – a political one.
However, in order to understand reality, it is now necessary to include the fundamental determinations that change it so that we can get closer to what actually occurs. Only then can the analysis move from a simple abstraction (as done in the previous paragraphs) to a complex abstraction, that is, one that incorporates the concrete determinations of reality. From the abstract to the concrete, as Karl Marx teaches us.
And, in reality, the Workers' Party stopped claiming any strategic or tactical idea to achieve socialism a long time ago. What this party has been doing for the last 20 years (the same period of its electoral success) is to give up any radical transformation, remaining as an administrator of Brazilian dependent capitalism and its underdevelopment. The political economy of the PT has maintained the same essence as that formulated by the Plano Real in 1994. PT and PSDB members are not polar opposites in this sense, nor does the current presidency of Lula, with Fernando Haddad as head of the Ministry of Economy, break with this paradigm. What the Workers' Party has sought throughout this time was to show itself as a competent manager of the Brazilian capitalist economic system, which would simultaneously legitimize it to govern the country.
The few measures, such as the Bolsa Família program, quotas and similar programs, although they may contribute to some extent, do not address the fundamentals. The fundamentals, in fact, are what the PT does not address. Therefore, what is the point of expanding the Bolsa Família program if the wealth production structure of Brazilian dependent capitalism is not even touched? What is the point of talking about new energy sources if Petrobras is focused on distributing its dividends instead of lowering fuel prices for the population and expelling all foreign interference here?
What is the point of creating a program like “Light for All” without reversing the criminal privatizations of Brazilian state-owned companies, such as Eletrobrás, for example? What is the point of creating quotas when the university system should do away with this nefarious test that is the entrance exam (something done in Argentina, by the way)? How can the country become independent if Science and Technology are not a priority? How, finally, can we manage something that perpetuates what it claims to combat?
The PT, and especially Lula, are the leaders of this liberal left and, as such, dictate what the path should be. For them, history has come to an end, because what we now have to do is manage this system that exploits and degrades workers on a daily basis. Lula renounces any type of mobilization other than electoral. There is no call for the population to mobilize, there is no program to raise the consciousness of the working class. From this administrative perspective, it is not necessary to do any of this, but only to try to spend less than what is received. What matters is the spending cap.
The only awareness that is being sought to be encouraged is electoral awareness, essentially against the right and the extreme right represented by Jair Bolsonaro. In 2022, Lula argued that his campaign was the only way to end Paulo Guedes' neoliberalism and the threat of fascism. In 2026, this propaganda, much more worn out and with much less effectiveness, will return. It was false in 2022 and will be again in 2026. There was not and there is not anything resembling fascism in Brazil. And even if there were, Lula and the PT are not the solution.
Fascism cannot be fought electorally, as Lula and the PT themselves want. Lula's election did not serve to stop Paulo Guedes's exacerbated liberalism, but, on the contrary, gave it a new shape only in rhetoric, because instead of calling it a "spending cap", it was called a "fiscal framework". The only difference is in the nomenclature, because in practice they are the same.
However, the liberal left is not only a problem, but an effective limitation that paralyzes the entire left, because it seeks to present itself as the only left that exists. And, as if by magic, there is no possibility of breaking not only with this left, but also with the political system. The horizon of the liberal left, that of administering the bourgeois order, is the final horizon of politics and of everything that is possible to do. It is, simultaneously, a passive resignation and a change of political field.
But, to the disappointment of Lula, the PT and the rest of the liberal left, Brazilian history is not over, nor is the political struggle and the radical transformation of reality that are present and necessary. This is the path of the Brazilian Revolution.
The Brazilian Revolution
Seven years ago, little was said about revolution. In fact, this word had been left in the distant past, long forgotten. It was with the creation of this political organization, the “Brazilian Revolution”, initially within the PSOL and now independent, that the word “revolution” has slowly but steadily returned to the political vocabulary of the left, even in sectors of the liberal left. The Brazilian Revolution had its highest theoretical-political formulations in the 7s and 1950s, but was abruptly interrupted by the coup of 1960. Far from suffering a theoretical defeat, the discussion around the Brazilian Revolution suffered a political defeat with a long dictatorship of 1964 years, and even the redemocratization did not revive this debate.
Many decades later, the Brazilian Revolution organization has made a militant effort to address the idea of the Brazilian revolution – something fundamental in itself for the creation of a new political and social horizon – but also the very possibility and necessity of this revolution. Despite the liberal left’s attempt to dominate this political field and present itself as the only left in existence, the Brazilian Revolution shows that a radical and socialist critique of Brazilian dependent capitalism is necessary and possible.
As a vanguard movement, the Brazilian Revolution acts as an organization that seeks to raise the consciousness of workers where their struggle already exists and also where it is emerging and progressively growing. In this sense, theory proves to be extremely vital, because, after all, how is it possible to act politically without theoretically understanding not only the economic bases, but also the political dispute of the class struggle?
Thus, the Brazilian Revolution is based on a critical tradition of Brazilian thought (which later spread to Latin America) which is the Marxist dependency theory (TMD). With three Brazilians as its exponents – Theotônio dos Santos, Vânia Bambirra and mainly Ruy Mauro Marini – the Marxist dependency theory was able to capture the specificity of Brazilian capitalism, opposing the idea of developmentalism, that is, that there could be a way out of the country's problems through an intensification and improvement of the capitalism structured here.
Contrary to this developmentalist ideology, Marxist dependency theory has shown that the capitalism that exists in Brazil has no traces of another mode of production, but is capitalism itself developed from specific conditions. Given its peripheral status, the country enters the international division of labor by producing and selling goods of lower value than central countries and with production that meets external needs – food and raw materials, for example – and not internal ones.
This inequality in exchange results in a transfer of value from the periphery to the center, causing peripheral countries to have to compensate, in some way, for this transfer of value. Hence, Brazilian capitalism produces the overexploitation of the labor force. Overexploitation means overusing the commodity labor force to extract an even greater surplus value, in order to compensate for this transfer of value.
Superexploitation, a fundamental category of Brazilian capitalism, can occur in three ways that act both separately and simultaneously: an increase in the working day, an increase in the intensity of work, and the consumption of part of workers' wages (i.e., the wages paid are lower than those needed to survive). The superexploitation of workers is an indispensable condition for the functioning of Brazilian capitalism and can never be separated from it. Thus, Brazilian capitalism is a capitalism dependent on the capitalist center precisely because it is conditioned by it, and its expansion or contraction is always a reflection of the expansion and contraction of that center.
The conclusion drawn from this economic process is that Brazilian workers are living in a true hell on Earth, because overexploitation not only produces brutal inequality, but also transforms the lives of almost the entire population into a real struggle for daily survival. The class struggle here is a constant class war. No developmental measure can put an end to this, but only mitigate some characteristics, and this only temporarily, when the world economy is in a phase of expansion.
The theoretical understanding of this economic situation through Marxist dependency theory allows the Brazilian Revolution to establish its strategy and tactics in a coherent manner, since the analysis is not based solely on an election, but on something much deeper and more structural. The theoretical analysis opens the doors to a coherent political praxis, which establishes the problems and the possibilities for confronting them and which does not hesitate to find easy solutions. It is necessary to fight within the order against the order. The Brazilian Revolution is, in short, the opposite of the liberal left.
This liberal left has already reached its historical limit and can no longer offer alternatives to the country's economic and political crisis. Utopia consists precisely in believing that social programs can redeem and save the working class. The well-defined theoretical path will not always be popular at first and often one may suffer a certain loneliness. But, just as dependence is a situation and therefore has an end, theoretical and political conviction will bear fruit in overcoming the condition of super-exploitation and dependence. The only thing we can counter the liberal left with are the words of Lenin in What to do?:
“A small, compact group, we are following a steep and difficult path, hand in hand. We are surrounded by enemies on all sides and we have to march almost always under their fire. We have come together by virtue of a freely taken decision, precisely to fight against the enemies and not to fall into the neighboring swamp, whose inhabitants, from the beginning, reproach us for having separated into a separate group and for having chosen the path of struggle rather than that of conciliation. And behold, some of us begin to shout: “Let us go to the swamp!” And when we try to shame them, they reply: “What backward people you are! How is it that you are not ashamed to deny us the freedom to invite you to follow a better path!” Oh, yes, gentlemen, you are free not only to invite us, but also to go wherever you see fit, even to the swamp; we even believe that your true place is precisely the swamp, and we are ready to help you, to the best of our ability, to move there. But in that case, let go of our hand, do not cling to us and do not tarnish the great word freedom, because we too are “free” to go wherever we see fit, free to fight not only the swamp but also those who stray into the swamp!”
*Flávio Magalhães Piotto Santos He has a master's degree in social history from the University of São Paulo (USP).
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