By VALERIO ARCARY*

The frontal opposition to the Lula government, at this moment, is not vanguard — it is shortsightedness. While the PSOL oscillates below 5% and Bolsonarism maintains 30% of the country's support, the anti-capitalist left cannot afford to be 'the most radical in the room'

“He who chases two hares will lose both.”
(Portuguese popular proverb).

1.

The left is divided in the face of the Lula government. A radical and highly fragmented minority, but combative and selfless militant camp, argues that, despite everything that has happened in the last ten years, it is necessary to be a left-wing opposition to the Lula government.

Even considering Lula's narrow electoral victory in 2022, the victory of the far right in the 2024 municipal elections, the election of Javier Milei and Donald Trump, and the continued mass support for Bolsonarism. In this “super-Bolshevik” vein, he fiercely polemicizes against revolutionary currents that insist that the best tactic should be independence, supporting progressive and just measures and criticizing reactionary and unpopular measures.

But it is not true that there are only two paths: unconditional support or unwavering opposition to the Lula government. There are other tactics in the Marxist left’s repertoire. Between constant retreat and permanent offensive, there are other moves to gain time without giving up positions. When we are not in a revolutionary situation, it is never “all or nothing.” There is a need for tactics that mediate.

There is room and time for maneuvers that allow us to accumulate strength. Unfortunately, the government has embraced the strategy of seeking governability “coldly”, whatever the cost, “zero risk”. This could be fatal in what is to come. The weakening of the Lula government leaves us facing the danger of the abyss of a crushing defeat in 2026, even worse than in 2018.

But there is still time, if the government makes a turn to the left. It does not depend on the militant left that this turn will be made, because we do not have enough strength. But pushing for a turn to the left is not the same as demanding that Lula “make the revolution”. That would be ultimatism. A turn to the left is the path indicated by the popular plebiscite. This is the tactic worth fighting for. It is not an original tactic, not even unusual. It is not a Brazilian “invention”.

Given the enormous differences in the analogy, it is a matter of making demands of the Lula government, just as Vladimir Lenin argued that Bolshevism should make of the provisional government led by the Esserists and Mensheviks in April 1917, in order to gain time. The difference is that everything in the Brazilian situation is more difficult and, above all, much slower. There is no pressure from war, our Kornilovs have already attempted a coup, and the outcome of the test of strength will be in the electoral arena. But the main thing is that we are not in a revolutionary situation.

2.

It is more difficult and slower because the open reactionary situation has not yet been reversed, due to various factors. Obviously, the Lula government is not innocent in this process; it has many responsibilities. The balance of power could have evolved more favorably if Lula and the majority of the PT leadership had been willing to take more risks.

There have been missed opportunities: after the defeat of the semi-coup insurrection of January 8, 2023, for example. We have recent examples in Colombia with the initiative of Gustavo Petro, who even supported a call for a general strike. But the vacillations and capitulations of the Lula government, however serious they may be, are not enough to legitimize a voluntarist strategy.

A political tactic cannot be an expression of desire. We are not on the eve of a new June 2013. There will be no social explosion by the left against the Lula government. The only thing on the horizon is the possibility of Lula's reelection or the return of the extreme right to power. The bet on occupying a space of revolutionary criticism of the limits of Lulaism is an unrealistic project that disregards the class compass. An adventurous tactic is not responsible.

Principles are not the same as a program. Principles are established by the lessons of the history of socialist struggle over generations. A program is not the same as a strategy. A program responds to an assessment of the necessary tasks based on an analysis of the situation in the country. A strategy is formulated based on a perspective of the struggle for power. Strategy is not limited to tactics.

Tactics change according to circumstances. Politics is not indifferent to the clock of the class struggle. Not everything is possible. Without a calculation of what is possible, everything is just will. Without revolutionary will, there is no political passion. But without lucid evaluation, all voluntarism is sterile.

Those who defend the need to build a frontal opposition use three central arguments: (a) the Lula government is a bourgeois government and, if we embrace a revolutionary strategy, the only consistent tactic is the relentless criticism of its capitulations to pressure from the ruling class, such as the recent budget cut of more than R$30 billion to achieve the zero deficit target of the fiscal framework, and the merciless denunciation of its surrenders, such as the next auction that Petrobras is preparing, including for oil prospecting on the equatorial margin on the eve of COP-30;

(b) The only way to contain support for the far-right opposition, which occupies the opposition space with a radical discourse against the government, is through radical anti-system agitation; (c) the role of the anti-capitalist left is to build mass mobilizations against the government, and we should not rely on progressive measures to go further.

These three arguments are wrong because they ignore objective conditions, that is, the force of a reality conditioned by factors that are independent of our will.

3.

It is true that the government is adrift, giving in to pressure from the ruling class: (i) Gabriel Galípolo raised the interest rate to reduce demand, reduce production costs under pressure from a situation of technical “full employment”, and backed down from raising the IOF in a few hours; (ii) the government is not taking on the political fight to end the 6x1 scale, the agitation in defense of a tax on the super-rich with incomes above R$50.000,00 per month, and it remained silent in the face of the campaign against the coup plotters’ amnesty. But the reality is cruel. Despite the likely conviction of Jair Bolsonaro and his accomplices, the neo-fascist opposition leads a hard core of something close to 15% and influences at least 30% of the country.

It doesn't take much to win a majority in the 2026 elections, depending on what happens in a year and a half. The main party to the left of the PT and Lulaism is the PSOL, and it has less than 5% influence. Furthermore, the level of trust and willingness to fight, even among the most advanced sectors of workers and youth, is low.

The tactic of independence in the face of the Lula government is a calculation that follows an assessment of the dangers that surround us. Independence should not be a mask either for shameful support or for disguised opposition. The definition of the tactic must respond to a judgment about what is at stake, an assessment of the situation and of the social and political relations of force.

The most important of all variables is that the working class and youth have not yet taken action. Unfortunately, so far, two and a half years after the 2022 electoral victory, the defensive situation of decline has not been reversed. There is no rise. Everything that is most serious is still up for grabs and is uncertain.

Just as there are various types of political regimes compatible with the preservation of capitalism – from dictatorships to different forms of electoral democracies, more or less authoritarian – there are also many different types of bourgeois governments. Political tactics cannot always be the same. The Lula government is a bourgeois government, but an “abnormal” one.

We are facing a bourgeois government because: (a) its program respects the institutional limits of the regime that sustains Brazilian peripheral capitalism; (b) the ruling class is represented within the government, through Geraldo Alckmin, Simone Tebet, and Gilberto Kassab's party; (c) the government accepts the conditions imposed by the centrist bloc; (d) the approval of the fiscal framework guaranteed relative stability in the relationship with the ruling class, including agribusiness.

4.

But it is an especially “abnormal” government, not only because it is led by the PT, the largest left-wing party in the country, and is led by Lula, the greatest popular leader in history. It is an anomaly because the capitalists, although divided between the reactionaries who want to dispute the direction of the government, and the right-wing extremists who want to displace it, cannot recognize the government as theirs.

At the same time, most workers and left-wing people identify with Lula’s leadership. The Brazilian ruling class is the most powerful in the southern hemisphere. In 2016, it did not hesitate to support an institutional coup to overthrow the Dilma Rousseff government, even after thirteen years of uninterrupted concertation. It has become clear in the “laboratory of history” that it has no unbreakable commitment to liberal democracy.

The support of a bourgeois faction for Lula in the 2022 second round was circumstantial, ephemeral, conditional, an “accident.” The far-right opposition led by the neo-fascist current, although on the defensive, is alive. The conviction of Jair Bolsonaro will not leave Bolsonarism “brainless”: they have Tarcísio de Freitas and the clan’s relatives. He can be replaced, because, in addition to millenarian messianism, there is political and ideological support for the far-right program in the country.

If revolutionary movements focus primarily on denouncing the government, the classic tactic of attrition, they contribute to its weakening in a situation in which the only real alternative in the fight for power is the extreme right. Jair Bolsonaro and his monsters do not miss the opportunity to reproduce publications against the Lula government coming from our camp: “even on the left there are people who say the same as us”.

The radical left cannot be a “useful idiot” in the return to power of Bolsonarism. Those who did not see the danger of the “Siberian winter” and the historic defeat in the recent past were mistaken. There is no revolutionary situation on the horizon for now. The fight for the demands of workers and youth is fair, and the entire left must promote them, but without losing its class compass.

It is not possible to fight against two political and social forces much larger than the radical left, at the same time, with the same intensity. The central enemy is neo-fascism, and it can only be defeated with the United Left Front, including the moderate left that leads the Lula government.

* Valerio Arcary is a retired professor of history at the IFSP. Author, among other books, of No one said it would be Easy (boitempo). [https://amzn.to/3OWSRAc].

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