By RUI COSTA SANTOS*
What Trump and Bolsonaro have in common is the fact that their political programs involve a brutal confrontation with institutions in the US and Brazil, but at the same time they are useful to a part of the current bourgeoisie.
Donald Trump is not the same as Javier Milei, just as he is not the same as Giorgia Meloni, just as he is different from Jair Bolsonaro. But what unites them is not only, or even mainly, that they are antidemocratic.
In fact, if what defined Donald Trump was being antidemocratic, he would not have been a presidential candidate three times in a row for one of the central parties of American liberal democracy.
If what defined Donald Trump was being anti-democratic, in opposition to the two parties that have alternated in power in the US since the end of the civil war, Trump would have been an independent candidate, as Ross Perot was in the 1990s.
What Donald Trump and Jair Bolsonaro have in common is the fact that their political programs involve a brutal confrontation with institutions in the US and Brazil, but at the same time they are useful in implementing a program that is equally desired by part of the current bourgeoisie: greater transfers of income from the middle and working classes to the upper classes, which in each country have specificities that make them unique.
In the case of the United States, given its leading role in the global capitalist system, in the case of Brazil, as a country with a subordinate economy that is undergoing a process of relative deindustrialization of its economy and that is deepening its dependence on the export of raw materials. For this reason, due to the difference in the positions of the United States and Brazil in the international division of labor, Jair Bolsonaro's fight against indigenous communities reached a peak during his term, which prevented him from proposing a program of greater economic protectionism and reindustrialization, such as the one proposed by Donald Trump.
However, the attacks on the institutions of American liberal democracy or Brazilian liberal democracy are instrumental and not an end in themselves. By not being an end in themselves, the judgment on which the liberal left's discourse is based fails: the need to unite all democrats in the fight against the authoritarianism of Donald Trump or Jair Bolsonaro.
It fails to the extent that, for a large part of the bourgeoisie of both countries, the work of both is useful: useful in the persecution of migrant workers because, when threatened with expulsion, they have to subject themselves to worse working conditions, useful in reducing taxes on profits and financial income, useful in attacking trade unions, useful in the class struggle favoring the capitalist class of both countries.
At a ceremony in the US Congress, some representatives of the Democratic Party decided to “boycott the ceremony”. How? By wearing pink.
Donald Trump will not be defeated by an alliance between those who dressed in pink to show that they are against Donald Trump and those who are actually affected by his policies: the working class, the students, the migrants who are also working class but who live in fear of expulsion.
If we wait four years to defeat Donald Trump, and if those who defeat him are those who cohabit in Congress with the Republican Party, Donald Trump's defeat will nevertheless be his victory, because in four years he will have left the United States in a situation that no Democratic Party will be able to reverse, because the leadership of that party is controlled by other factions of the bourgeoisie, who will fine-tune some details here and there, so as not to touch on the essential: the interests of their class. Donald Trump or the social class that supports him can only be defeated if there are other social groups that oppose him and defeat him. And this victory will have to have social mobilization as its central axis.
If we look at Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is ineligible, but the social class that benefited from him is partially in power, including ministers in Lula's government. As Margaret Thatcher said, my greatest victory was Tony Blair, the English Labour Party prime minister in the 1990s. Likewise, the greatest victory of the Brazilian bourgeoisie was to ensure that Lula's third government did not dismantle all the policies implemented between Michel Temer and Jair Bolsonaro, but rather accepted that privatizations and the precariousness of labor relations were a given. The same could be said about the PS government (the socialist party in Portugal) led by António Costa in the face of the legacy of Passos Coelho and the troika.
The effective defeat of Donald Trump will have to be the work of those who are directly affected by his policies, and of those who oppose him because they are on the opposite side of the class struggle, and not because they are part of a democratic bourgeoisie. And this is not because these democratic bourgeoisie do not exist. Of course they do. There may be democratic bourgeoisie, or even those who defend policies of large income distribution and frontal combat against poverty and exploitation.
There certainly are, but they are also certainly a very small minority within their class, and therefore an alliance could even be made with these individuals but not with the classes to which they belong. This defeat will therefore not have to be at the polls, or the polls will express the defeat consecrated in the streets. And for this, for this defeat, those who dressed in pink yesterday will not be allies, they will be adversaries.
*Rui Costa Santos is a lecturer in Portuguese at the University of Granada and a former professor at the University of Puerto Rico.
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