By MILTON PINHEIRO*
The political bloc of a proletarian and popular character must not be determined by the logic of formal bourgeois democracy
Wilson das Neves, with his song “the day the hill goes down and it's not carnival” presents us, based on popular wisdom, a fundamental motto. The proletarian and popular political bloc should not be determined by the logic of formal bourgeois democracy, restricted in its institutional conformation, objectively exclusive, which sees in elections the end of politics, that is, the resolution of issues that afflict society.
This political, proletarian and popular bloc cannot integrate the field of the broad front where the discourse of class conciliation has no concrete force to stop neo-fascism and face the form of government of the party of order. Especially because the sense of conciliation, in Brazil, placed under the banner of “changes” in governance a vague confrontation with neo-fascism and a capitulation to the market project. The election, in the terms posed by the person who leads the electoral process, when it comes to government, it will not be able to properly confront neo-fascism, it will not be able to contribute to the organization of the working class, just as little has been manifested about the deleterious set of counter-reforms that are destroying Brazil to increase the extraction of surplus value and encourage great fortunes.
We are on the eve of the election. It is an important moment to examine the serious socioeconomic situation that is deliberately destroying the Brazilian population and the political scene presents us with a situation that threatens the interests of the working class. Despite mistaken methodologies for accounting for employment, which do not account for the real situation, we have high structural unemployment and discouragement that jeopardize the survival of the population that depends on work to survive.
In addition to the violence of structural unemployment, a very significant contingent of people entered the situation of hunger in Brazil. There are more than 33 million Brazilians who are going through the breakdown of food insecurity in our country. The social structure submerged in the most degrading human condition. The minimum framework of public policies that, even with meager resources, tried to preserve the population from hunger, social misery, etc., was destroyed in the last six years of governments with a radical neoliberal stance.
Violence grew in the cities and in the countryside, with deaths in profusion; In some places, the State associated itself with organized crime (commonly called militias) and remained indistinct in its relationship with the black and proletarian population of the most diverse peripheries. The state police (civilian and mainly PM) are responsible for a huge number of murders of this population criminalized by the Brazilian State. The execution of the poor, black and peripheral is televised, with no effective measure by governments to contain these massacres. On the contrary, this is seen as a way to combat organized crime.
The labor protection policy and the social protection system were destroyed from the Michel Temer government, and this destruction was taken to the extreme in the government of the fascist agitator, Jair Bolsonaro. The Brazilian State took upon itself the role of combating the poor and proletarians as an action to contribute to the concentration of income and wealth in the country.
The health system has deepened its crisis, SUS is being persecuted and garroted by the lack of resources. Brazil is in the endless line of lack of medical care. Alongside this priority issue of social life; the federal government and state governments, like Rui Costa in Bahia, try to dismantle the entire public education system, while trying to privatize the Brazilian public university from within, thus consolidating a broad attack on science & technology, on research scientific, social extension and student permanence in our universities. It is the policy of severe budget cuts and criminal contingencies that put education at risk.
This project of social destruction is the perennial permanent counterrevolution of the ruling class (regardless of which fraction of the bourgeoisie commands the power bloc), having as its central axis the accumulation of capital, extraction of surplus value and the relentless attack on the public fund. The bourgeois State has at its command in Brazil, characters of the most varied types: politicians representing the neo-fascist hordes, neo-Pentecostals of the trade of faith, parliamentarians from the business desk, corporate media entrepreneurs, small business militiamen, and representatives of late social democracy , of a neoliberal nature, which operate in partnership integrated with the system of order.
In this dense conjuncture, the unprincipled partnership of the political groups that make up this bourgeois command, operated a set of counter-reforms and internal modifications to the State that has torn the social fabric in the country: spending ceiling law, tax (im)responsibility law, new laws for the destruction of work and social security, privatization of the Central Bank (making it the executive committee of the financial system), privatization of companies in the Brazilian strategic park, confiscation of education-health-social protection and environment resources for the so-called secret budget, which was configured in the most complete modus operandi of public corruption today.
The country is being devastated, predatory mining is advancing in preservation areas and indigenous lands; the Amazon is burning in flames to meet the land grabbing of landowners and land looters who support the fascist agitator, Jair Bolsonaro. Indigenous, quilombola and riverside populations are being hunted on their lands. Burning, predatory fishing, criminal mining, land grabbing and murders of native peoples and peasants have seriously attacked the Brazilian ecosystem.
Despite this societal framework and the social passiveness built during 13 years of bourgeois-PT governments; it's time to fight, it's time to face the order of capital, it's time to present our class project and assert People's Power. During this electoral process, we cannot and should not be trapped between Jair Bolsonaro's bourgeois-military project and the conflictual partnership project with the order of capital, which uses the fetishism of formal democracy to reinforce the depoliticized model of plebiscitary elections. It is a two-round election, the left that does not present its project in this historic period capitulates to the order.
There is a part of the revolutionary left that has a project, places tactical mediation subordinate to the strategic program and presents a candidacy. It is about the Brazilian communists (PCB) who launched this project to face the order of capital in Brazil and its variants in this historical moment, the candidacy of economist and professor Sofia Manzano embodies this project of popular power.
In general lines, this tactical mediation project proposes the renationalization of the park of strategic companies in Brazil; puts Petrobras at the service of social development, makes labor and social security counter-reforms ineffective; creates the social responsibility law; renders the spending ceiling law ineffective; advances in investments for the complete nationalization of health, education and public transport; presents the 30-hour working day as a great measure to stimulate employment; structural agrarian reform; investments in research, science & technology; social policies that contribute to facing sexism, racism, lgbtphobia; unified police with a citizen character, with the end of the Military Police; legalization of abortion as a public policy to protect women's decisions; legalization of marijuana; communal environmental management; a dense plan for the construction of affordable housing; creation of permanent work fronts; and the implementation of the principle of collective decisions based on the People's Power project and its direct democracy, with proposals for the socialization of production and socialization of political power.
Thus, communists understand the fundamental role of politicization in the electoral process, without succumbing to the opportunistic possibilism of alliances that help to destroy the future, when they give prominence to bourgeois fractions that seek a better position to control the bloc in power.
Therefore, voting for Sofia Manzano, the communists and their allies is a step forward in organizing the working class and defending people's power. Forward!
*Milton Pinheiro, PCB militant, political scientist and professor of history at the State University of Bahia (UNEB).
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