By LUIZ RENATO MARTINS*
From the false “Transição” of 1985, monopoly capital in Brazil began to sit down and negotiate with the workers, always with its gun in the drawer. With the new government, he returned once more, as in the twenty years after 1964, to menacingly display his gun on the table
To the memory of Chico de Oliveira
Brazil 2013: the dry forest starts to burn
The large and surprising demonstrations of June 2013,[I] in 22 state capitals and 400 cities in Brazil, with three million workers involved in strikes, were the largest in Brazil since the women's movement. Direct now (1984), the latter aborted in summary rite by the MDB who exchanged it for the false “Transition” via the Electoral College.
The 2013 protests decisively changed the domestic political landscape, as well as the global image of Brazil. Until then, Brazil was considered internationally as an example of consolidated and stable democracy, and, moreover, its economy, as fundamentally prosperous. two layers of The Economist, exemplify such a change in the image of Brazil abroad, observed from June 2013. Thus, in November 2009, the magazine published the following headline on its cover: “Brazil takes off (Brazil takes off)”. On the contrary, on the cover of September 2013 after the massive protests, a doubt pops up: “Is Brazil gone? (Has Brazil blown it?). "
However, well before such comments (after all, in tune with the search for profitable investment opportunities) a vehement warning was formulated, associated with a scathing criticism, by the sociologist and PT founder Francisco de Oliveira, former member of the teams that had prepared the PT's government plans in the campaigns of the 1980s and 1990s. Thus, in an essay published in June 2003,[ii] just six months after Lula took office as president, the author diagnosed the development in Brazil of a new pattern of capital accumulation, based on the appropriation of public funds, asset transfers, privatizations and other forms of “truncated accumulation”. In conclusion, he pointed out that such a process was conducted by a “new class”: trade unionists acting in concert with finance experts and pension fund advisers.
In this way, what Francisco de Oliveira observed, already underway in Lula's first administration, was nothing more than the articulation of PT leaders, and associated union leaders, with monopoly capital, for the shared management of pension funds, in which the government as a major employer played a decisive role. Such funds, many of which formed by savings of employees of large state-owned companies, moved gigantic sums, equivalent to those of the largest players of the São Paulo financial market.
It took ten years for the meaning of Oliveira's warning to reach the streets, but when it became tangible and evident, the crowd stormed the streets. What did the heterogeneous demonstrators of 2013 intend, amidst various complaints and expressions of widespread discontent?
The trigger for the demonstrations was the increase in bus fares in São Paulo and other state capitals.[iii] It is a fact that the convulsions of students and young workers due to high tariffs usually occurred every year, but always limited to small groups, the main one being the Movimento Passe Livre (MPL). But, in 2013, the demonstrations spread like an uncontrollable fire in a dry forest. What was the spark that, that June, changed history?
Aside from some initial incidents – which contributed in some way to heat up the mood –,[iv] what made the context of 2013 so explosive was the scandalous commitment (for most people) of the federal government, as well as several state governments and municipal administrations, with FIFA, to hold the 2014 World Cup, plus agreements similar, with a view to the 2016 Olympics in Rio.
Blind submission and greed
However, submissive to the sectors of monopoly capital directly interested in holding the games,[v] PT governments justified the increase in tariffs with debatable accounting arguments. In other words, politically, they did not realize that the demonstrations expanded precisely when they began to aim, in addition to raising tariffs, the association of governments and the PT with monopoly capital.
In the blink of an eye, the demonstrations began to stridently demand the improvement and universal gratuity of public services. Soon they expanded to an unlimited extent. In fact, especially in São Paulo, there was a historic demand for free public transport.[vi] But the spontaneous political invention, which produced a jump in the general demand, came from the explosive comparison in 2013 between the increase of tariffs and the abusive spending of the governments, for the World Cup of 2014. Once the spark lit, many of the posters and protest banners began to bring ironic but furious demands for more hospitals, schools and transport according to the “FIFA standard”, used for the luxurious stadiums and training centers under construction in several Brazilian cities.
From then on, public service deficiencies were all attributed to spending on major sporting events. In an instant, the PT was politically blamed for its suspicious association with monopoly luxury and tourism groups. Only the PT leadership and the local governments involved, all associated with the monopolies, did not realize the urgency of a decisive political gesture: canceling the two international mega-events and investing the money available in essential public services.
The situation got out of hand. In two weeks, state capitals and medium-sized cities in Brazil became battlegrounds. Government palaces were besieged by angry protesters. The main door of the São Paulo City Hall (then in the hands of Mayor Haddad, one of Lula's favorites) was attacked by a crowd with a battering ram. Medieval and contemporary aspects came together in the midst of economic crisis and widespread dissatisfaction. Live television news showed the scene from helicopters as their vehicles on the ground had been attacked and burned.
bourgeois discontent
It was then that sectors of the bourgeoisie and middle classes noticed that the Bonapartist role assigned to the PT, of containing and managing the masses (born from the discredit of FHC's second term [1999-2002]) had exhausted its effectiveness and validity. The age of conciliation had come to an end. The owning classes immediately took notice of this fact. I mean, much faster than party and union bureaucracies. Since then, some signs of bourgeois discontent began to appear openly in the mass media. Such discontent, of course, was very different from that of the streets, which demanded free public services of dignified quality. In fact, the middle and upper classes generally do not use public services in Brazil. Nevertheless, they had attributed to the PT, as a Party of Order enjoying popular credibility, the role of preventing strikes and mass demonstrations.
The upheaval spread through the streets. If there was something in common between the street protests and the different ones, conveyed by the mass media, in the midst of the social disparity of expressions related to different classes, it was the rejection of corruption. And since then, if not since 2005 (when the so-called “monthly allowance” burst)[vii] corruption had been typified as an inherent feature of the association between the PT and monopoly groups.
PT and government at the crossroads
Two semesters passed amid growing signs of discontent: on the one hand, popular demand for public services; on the other hand, the multiplication and repetition of criticisms from the propertied classes (until then on their honeymoon with the PT), in the face of the party's newly discovered political and administrative incapacity.
Then came the October 2014 general and presidential elections, under an unprecedented atmosphere of class polarization and widespread discontent. Contrasts between classes, even if superficially exposed, became exasperated: poor and rich clearly distinguished themselves in opposing positions and electoral discussions extended, with vehemence, to situations and spheres traditionally alien to politics.
In these terms, Rousseff received a straightforward message from popular forces, united against the policy of cuts in public and social spending, preached by the PSDB candidate. In correspondence, the incisive promise that crystallized in Rousseff's electoral campaign, driven by the popular electorate that supported her, was a strong rejection of the austerity measures proposed by the PSDB. In fact, Rousseff won by a narrow margin of around 3%, making proclamations against austerity.
election fraud
The political blindness that led the PT to insist on holding mega-events was then repeated. And for the same reasons: association of interests with monopoly capital. So, after a pause, and without any coherent explanation of her turnaround, Rousseff announced the appointment of Joaquim Levy as Minister of Finance. Not by chance, a true "chicago boy” and economist at the second largest financial conglomerate in Brazil, Levy became, under the current ultra-right government, the president of BNDES, the largest public investment bank.[viii]
In these terms, Rousseff directly contradicted what was written in the campaign's economic program, in addition to fully assuming the reasons and guidelines for the austerity measures, defended by the defeated opponent in the elections. She was digging her own grave. In an increasingly polarized Brazil, the measure was understood at the time for what it really was: nothing less than the result of backstage maneuvers and a direct betrayal of the promises made in exchange for the popular vote. The electoral memory was still fresh. In the course of a few weeks, the newly elected president, who had gained, as usual, some extra support with her electoral triumph, lost about three-quarters of her popularity: her approval rating dropped to around 15%.[ix]
government in demolition
Consistent with her strategy of betraying the popular vote in favor of association with monopoly capital, Rousseff presented to Congress a package of austerity measures recommended by her finance minister. But Rousseff's 180-degree turn was not as fortunate as Tsipras' in Greece seemed at first glance. In Brazil, on the other hand, the turnaround was doubly deficient, right away: first, it aroused the anger and protest of the unions and the PT electorate in general, reducing its support even more, which accelerated its political isolation, including among parliamentarians of the PT itself. broken; second, the bourgeois opposition parties, even when appreciating the measures, voted against them, to prevent their implementation, because they saw in Rousseff's fulminating political weakening an opportunity to regain control of the state.
The anti-Rousseff campaign took to the streets, with ever-increasing mass demonstrations, initially dominated by the center-right, but now with the visible presence of the ultra-right, and increasingly ostensible support from monopoly capital. He blamed the PT for not approving the austerity measures, said to be preliminary to the recovery of profit rates and the return on investments.
The class war strategy gained supporters and the vice-president of the republic, former ally Michel Temer (PMDB), changed sides. Certainly, the process took on the characteristics of a class coup, but afterwards, according to psychoanalytic terminology. Because the austerity program defended by the government and political erosion, aggravated by accusations of corruption against PT leaders discovered in suspicious relations with monopoly capital, eroded the government's social foundations and turned it into easy, cornered and isolated prey.
Divorce
As we have seen, monopoly capital, when it saw no other way out, quickly threw the PT overboard and declared class war. Consecutively, today, it leads a process of social war, in continuous escalation for more than three years, since the fall of Rousseff in April 2016.
The PT, in turn, participated in the 2016 municipal elections and the 2018 general elections, under the fierce and excruciating class offensive of the bourgeoisie, but always insisting on a conciliation project. Either because of the atavism of its organic connection with the false political system of the “Transition”, or because it still bet(s) on the recomposition of its organic association with monopoly capital, the fact is that the PT insisted on the project of conciliation with the monopolies, to resume economic growth. He preached in the desert, and if in any case he obtained around 45% of the votes in the second round, such momentary support can only be credited to the anti-fascist impulse of the electorate. Not an echo, trace or stone of its pale economic program remained.
In contrast, the class war strategy gained wide acceptance among strata of the bourgeoisie that were not directly linked to the monopolies. Why? The question is pertinent and urgent, but it does not lead to a quick answer. The question results from a synthesis of multiple determinations. Multiple forces now act in convergence, to create a fascist drift in Brazilian society, with general and irreversible damage for the next generations.
Total war
In summary, there is an ongoing program of social genocide directed by monopoly capital, but involving different strata of the owning classes. Certainly, among these, there are discordant economic interests. Nevertheless, such groups are now in coalition against the working class in general: workers, peasants, civil servants, the homeless, favelados and quilombolas, forest and indigenous peoples, the LGBTQ community and others. In fact, the coalition conducts an offensive, in various areas and spheres, against social rights in general.
From the point of view of monopoly capital, the objective in view of a new productive leap is to establish a new pattern of accumulation, given by an increase in the level of super-exploitation of labor – which is made possible by the new labor regime just approved –, combined with a reduction in social spending and multiple investments in the repressive system.
Is it to be concluded that, leaving the era of the Mediterranean reverie of the false “Transition”, Brazil's plutocracy has now entered a new stage, aiming at the Asian model of intensive production, without civil rights or social benefits? The fact is that along with the promised and reiterated alignment with Trump's foreign policy, the search for Chinese methods of mass control is already underway.[X] In any case, the statement by historian Caio Prado Júnior, in 1942, that Portuguese America had been formed not to generate social life, but according to exclusively productive objectives, proves again to be historically founded and current.[xi]
However, to what extent will other sectors of the property-owning classes benefit from the liquidation of labor rights and other social protections? Will the resulting vortex of income concentration, in turn, not drag a substantial part of private companies and the relative economic independence of other forms of property? Anyway, the question remains: would such sectors be unconsciously acting against their own interests?
Scapegoat
In short, if it is still not clear what the rest of the property-owning classes are looking to economically grab, in the broad deprivation of social rights and in the restructuring of Brazilian society, outlined by the dictatorship of money, there is, however, an extra-economic aspect. that draws attention. This possibly derives from a defensive reaction – in unison – from the ruling class. It consists of the flagrant aspect of class connivance, manifested in the broad consensus bringing together the judiciary, the big press, representative entities of the so-called liberal professions, in short, the property classes in general, that the siege against the PT must assume (as it actually assumed ) the institutional character of a total war, contrary to all constitutional safeguards.
But how to explain the scope and hysteria of such a class consensus, including in light of the PT's proposal, to launch a candidate that is more than moderate and in line with the standards of the PSDB?[xii] Indeed, as is known, the PT opened its program and sought rapprochement, promising to yield on all lines, but in vain. The propertied classes showed that they did not want an armistice or dialogue, openly prioritizing total war.
Such supra- and infra-legal collusion is likely to be a response to the revelation of the prevailing pattern of criminality in business. This served and was useful in imprisoning PT leaders, but, as an argument and a double-edged sword, it may also eventually serve against property in general in Brazil.
In fact, in view of what was revealed in the murky episodes, co-protagonized by monopoly capital and political parties, how many Daumiers, Grozs, Brechts and Heartfields do you need to describe the current standard of conduct of the CEO of a large company in Brazil in recent decades ?
In fact, the level of criminality among the propertied classes in Brazil became so high by any global standard, and so far beyond any individual and circumstantial framework, that it probably led to the intuitive understanding of the propertied classes that it was necessary to divert attention overview of suspicious aspects involving all accumulation of wealth in Brazil. In this sense, the insistence on the siege and the anti-PT campaign, and the numerous judicial maneuvers by magistrates and prosecutors, selectively mobilized against the party (including ignoring all criteria and procedures for exemption and impartiality of the judicial apparatus), may well derive from an intuitive self-defence impulse.
The insistence, if the thesis holds, probably seeks to avoid the imminent general conclusion, that all capital and all property, in Brazil today, result from the dispossession of social rights and environmental goods, as well as from the looting of State funds.
Dam
How long will such a tactic prevail, before the fury of the great social majorities returns to surface? Recent examples abound: in June 2013, against the increase in public transport fares and spending on the World Cup and the Olympics; in 2015-16, several massive protests against the PT; in the 2018 elections, anti-PT tsunami, then converted – in the aforementioned opportunistic operation –, into a unique emblem of the state of generalized corruption. When will the next tsunami come?
Until now, it must be recognized that the unitary strategy of the bourgeoisie, despite everything, worked and, consequently, managed to dissuade or divert the popular anger, preventing it, in short, from distinguishing between social abysses, monopoly capital and property in general. as immediately suspicious.
However, the outburst of anger and resentment that brought the ultra-right to state power last October probably did not constitute the “happy end” definitive fascistoid. Thus, it is very likely that other seismic movements of popular fury will occur, given the lack of legitimacy that today surrounds the entire political-party system and, possibly, social hierarchies in general.
cracks in the dike
In a series of surveys published by the journal Folha de S. Paul in the first and second week after the new government took office, that is, when political erosion was still minimal, signs of persistence of a lasting crisis and long-term instability in the political framework emerged. Thus, the survey data, curiously, go against the main directives of the new government, on various topics, namely: 60%, according to polls, reject privatizations, while 57% reject the withdrawal of labor rights (Folha de S. Paul, 05.01.2019, p. A15). Similarly, 54% of respondents are in favor of sex education in schools, and 71% are in favor of debating political issues in the classroom (Idem, 08.01.2019, p. B1). In addition, 61% of those consulted are against the liberalization of gun ownership (Idem, 09.01.2019, p. A2). Finally, 60% of those consulted disagree with the reduction of indigenous reserve areas (Idem, 13.01.2019). Those consulted agree with the new government in just one aspect: 67% support greater immigration control (Idem, 09.01.2019, p. A2).
What do these figures indicate? How is it possible that the new government, less than two weeks after taking office, already has some of its directives – among which are the most “market-friendly” ones – eroded and even rejected by the majority? Among the possible causes, it is worth considering that the vote last October did not result from a majority approval of the ultra-right's economic program, nor its genocidal social and cultural program. Rather, it will have resulted from the fact that the ultra-right represented, more effectively than all the other right-wing and center-right parties, such as the PSDB (once the main opponent of the PT), the anti-PT sentiment and the generalized and blind fury against fraudulent and corrupt aspects of the political system.
If the deduction is correct, the electoral approval of the ultra-right, verified last October, does not result from an effective fascist turn crystallized in the political preferences of the majority, although blind fury undoubtedly constitutes a symptom of latent fascistoid tendencies.
However, it was important for a large part of the population to underline their disappointment with the PT and punish it for obvious deviations and fraud. Hence the 86% drop in approval for Lula's government at the end of his second term in 2010, to the almost 45% who voted for Haddad-PT or No. 13, in the second round last October. If that is the case, and if the population, in general, continues to lack and desire free or cheap public services (according to unfulfilled guidelines, but once attributed to the PT program), what will happen when the ultra-liberal reforms, and those that are in line with the punitive positions of the evangelical churches, are implemented and begin to show consequences, leading to massive layoffs, wage reductions, the prohibition of strikes, the repression of protests, the extinction of public services linked to the free guidance of conduct, etc?
Without underestimating the destructive power of the repressive system and state machinery in the hands of a group willing to do anything to avoid being detained, the observation to be made is that the country has certainly entered a long and dramatic cycle of chronic instability, or “state of exception”. ” permanent. It should be noted, meanwhile, that only the ultra-right is ready and organized for an open confrontation scenario.[xiii]
Facing the dictatorship of money
What comes next? Is anything different possible than what we have now, that is, a government of social predators and mastiffs, which prepares the dictatorship of monopoly capital?
The answer to this question is fundamentally political and presupposes the construction of a new historical project of revolutionary transition, aiming at collective ownership and self-management of the means of production by the working class. This will probably take time, if not worse: it is possible that the current correlation of forces will be maintained long enough for it to develop and apply all the repressive and destructive potential it carries.
In any case, an adequate response to the current danger requires urgent and critical reflection that the strategy of conciliation and defense of capitalist growth, defended in recent decades by the PT, must be radically denied.
Sirens are ringing
One of the Blitzkrieg (lightning war) of class is ongoing. It is urgent to conclude that the bourgeoisie ostensibly abandoned the PT, as well as any strategy to manufacture political consensus. In fact, the bourgeoisie as a class, as well as its parties, are investing all their resources in equipping and modernizing the State's repressive apparatus and, to cover any gaps, in private armament. Class warfare is predicted on all fronts, and house to house. In this way, the relaxation of firearms ownership laws was one of the first priorities of the new government, whose leader, moreover, openly defends the prompt decriminalization of deaths by shooting to defend property.
Analogously, all rising politicians in bourgeois parties do not try to seduce majorities in favor of some consensus. Instead, they seek to provoke and challenge them to seek new and greater confrontations, in line with the ongoing social war.
Thus, with the massive support of sectors of the petty bourgeoisie and the evangelical churches, the bourgeoisie selected from the deck of politics, as its cards, those who wear masks of professional assassins, members of paramilitary militias and civil groups similar to “stormtroopers” (storm troopers) or the SA (paramilitary or brown shirts) Nazis and, last but not least, some media characters who present themselves as social predators, in Trump's wake.
In this sense, J. Dória (PSDB), the new governor of São Paulo and self-proclaimed candidate for presidential succession, within the ultra-right political bloc, is an emblematic case of meteoric rise and originated along the lines described above: by defeating Haddad (PT) in 2016, he became mayor of São Paulo, after emerging as presenter of the local version of The Apprentice, the television show that launched Trump into politics. Thus, in two years, Dória truculently chewed and spit out what was left of the former governor of São Paulo, G. Alckmin (PSDB), who had introduced him to the party and sponsored his candidacy for mayoralty. Dória abandoned Alckmin in the middle of the presidential campaign, ostensibly to support the ultra-right candidate, on the rise. Now, he already takes distance from the latter.
Indeed, it is possible that the current government will not last. The fight for his succession has already opened. Given the notorious intellectual, moral and political inconsistency of the Bolsonaro clan, the days of the “dynasty” are possibly numbered. But as the class war strategy is more solid and lasting, it can last beyond the current presidential period, which may be shortened due to financial and political scandals. Without forgetting the current vice-president (a general) and the current minister Moro (the mastiff who hunted and imprisoned Lula), and Dória (an organic member of the high bourgeoisie), they all present more attributes of rationality consistent with the ideology of the ultra-right. Any one of them could eventually become a favorite of the “consortium” and heir to the government's current military strategy, to carry out – without any reduction in belligerence – the constitution of the new pattern of accumulation.
tame the sphinx
The working class must urgently build its independent political self-organization and without any illusion of conciliation with the bourgeoisie. Peace is off the horizon. Thus, the path towards the political organization of the working class must go against the grain of what the PT's conciliatory optimism has preached for a long time, to develop defense and attack strategies in accordance with the awareness that the enemy remains precisely where it has always been: in the control of the entire economic and command system; in short, in all the decisive positions of what Gramsci called the “Integral State”.
How and when?
To conclude, from the false “Transition” of 1985, monopoly capital in Brazil began to sit down and negotiate with the workers, always with its gun in the drawer. With the new government, he returned once more, as in the twenty years after 1964, to threateningly display his gun on the table. It is up to the working class to self-organize in order to decide how and when to overthrow the table – otherwise all setbacks are possible.[xiv]
* Luiz Renato Martins is a teacher from ECA-USP. Author, among other books, of The Long Roots of Formalism in Brazil (Chicago, Haymarket/ HMBS, 2019).
Second part of the article started with The declared civil war
(Text originally published on the blog of the Argentine magazine Tools in August 2019.)
Notes
[I] See Carlos VAINER et. al., Rebel Cities: Free Pass and the Demonstrations that took over the streets of Brazil, pref. by Raquel Rolnik, São Paulo, Coleção Tinta Vermelha/Boitempo/Carta Maior, 2013. See also P. by A. SAMPAIO Jr. (org.), June Days, the Popular Revolt in Debate, Sao Paulo, ICP, 2014.
[ii] See Francisco de OLIVEIRA, 'The Duckbilled Platypus', in New Left Review, London, NLR, no. 24, Nov.-Dec., 2003, pp. 40-57.
[iii] See Michael Löwy, 'MOVIMENTO PASSE LIVRE Le mouvement pour le transport gratuit au Brésil', available athttps://blogs.mediapart.fr/michael-lowy/blog/241213/movimento-passe-livre-le-mouvement-pour-le-transport-gratuit-au-bresil>.
[iv] In fact, there were violent episodes – unfortunately ongoing -, perpetrated by the São Paulo Military Police, and negligent and derogatory responses from the mayor of São Paulo, F. Haddad (PT), and the governor of the state of São Paulo, G. Alckmin ( PSDB), both in Paris, for a promotional event of mutual interest, as reported below.
[v] For an illustration of the PT's degree of submission to monopoly capital and, specifically, the government's commitment to the logic of international mega-events, see the TV FOLHA video, Fernando & Geraldo, available inhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bF6sO76ha4>. The video shows the mayor of the PT and the governor of the PSDB together with the Brazilian singer Daniela Mercury, performing together and in a ridiculous way in a show in Paris, to promote São Paulo's candidacy for Expo 2020, an event announced precisely as the third major mega-event in Brazil, after the World Cup, FIFA, and the Olympics. In other scenes, Haddad and Alckmin appear flanked by Vice President M. Temer, then representing President Dilma Rousseff.
[vi] Moreover, this had been an official governmental proposal of the PT, in its first administration of the municipality of São Paulo (1989-92), soon blocked and impeded by the opposition councilors.
[vii] "monthly allowance” was a bribery scheme discovered in 2005, through which PT leaders bought votes from other parties in the National Congress to support government projects. Before the PT, the PSDB had used the same scheme. The documents on the case of "monthly allowance” are plentiful and easy to find on the Internet.
[viii] Wear and tear among the members of the current government have been so sharp and fast that the president of the BNDES and Rousseff's former minister was dismissed on 16.06.2019, with less than six months in office, before this text, originally written for a foreign magazine, could be published in Brazil, requiring the insertion of this adjustment and explanation note.
[ix] The visible decline in Dilma Rousseff's political strength was immediately identified as a window of opportunity by the parliamentary opposition. Thus, a few weeks later, the Chamber of Deputies, where Rousseff in principle held a majority, elected Eduardo Cunha (PMDB) as president, with a notoriously dubious past to say the least, and who fed an ostensive incompatibility with Rousseff. In the following December (2015), Cunha would support a parliamentary fraud, disguised as a political judgment.
[X] A delegation of 12 deputies and senators from the PSL, the party of the four Bolsonaros, visited China (16-24.01.2019) to learn about the Chinese technology of mass control through facial recognition, whose implementation is being considered for application in transport terminals and other places of intense circulation.
[xi] “If we go to the essence of our formation, we will see that in reality we were constituted to supply sugar, tobacco, some other genres; later gold and diamonds; then cotton, and then coffee, for the European trade. Nothing more than this”. Cf. Caio PRADO Jr., Formation of Contemporary Brazil / Colony, São Paulo, Brasiliense/ Publifolha, 2000, p. 20.
[xii] Haddad, an economist with a Ph. institute of ultraliberal academics and financially privileged students.
[xiii] In March 1935, in "Encore une fois, où va la France? ” (“Once more, where is France going?”; Truth, March 28, 1935), Trotsky noted: “A revolutionary situation develops out of the interplay of objective and subjective factors. If the party of the proletariat is unable to analyze the trends of a pre-revolutionary situation in time and actively intervene in its development, we will inevitably have a counter-revolutionary situation instead of a revolutionary one. The French proletariat now faces precisely this danger.” See Leon TROTSKY, Où Va la France ?/ Textes sur la Situation Française from 1934 to 1938, Pantin, collection Classiques/ Les Bons Caractères, 2007, p. 65. I leave the conclusion to the reader.
[xiv] The documents and bibliographic data used were collected by the researcher Rafael Padial (IFCH-UNICAMP). I also owe very important editing suggestions to Carmela Gross, Pedro Rocha de Oliveira, Ana Paula Pacheco and Plínio Sampaio Jr.
