By ANDRÉ BOF*

This struggle is the key to opening the doors to a new situation for the organization, consciousness, living conditions and struggle for profound transformations by the workers.

1.

The red alert is ringing in the dark backstage and in the business circles that decide the pace of national political life. Amid the intense debate and the, symptomatically, servile disposition of the Lula government regarding the cut in federal spending, supposedly necessary to honor the infamous “Fiscal Framework” (understood as “discipline in the payment of public debt to rentiers”), a ghost is beginning to emerge on Brazilian social networks.

In the face of consistent and increasingly popular agitation for the end of the “6x1” workday, the most characteristic struggle for what really matters in our class society returns to the center of the national scene: the dispute over the workday, that is, over the necessary working time and the surplus work (that which is taken by the boss and for which nothing is paid).

It won't be long before contemporary prophets of the old song about the end of history come to accuse the proposed reduction of anachronism and “cultural Marxism”, which, in the current project, is expected to not only prevent the immoral 6x1 scale, but also allow the establishment of the 4x3 scale.

For now, attempts to disqualify the agenda seem clumsy and damaging to the figures of a populist, physiological or Bolsonarist right, both recently strengthened electorally.

The anxious acidity against the project sounds bad for a population whose reality is that of almost 40% of precarious informal workers and who, when formal, have had their basic vitality sucked out daily by physical and mental comorbidities acquired in a work model that exhausts, sickens and kills.

While they shout against the banner of reduction, waving the scarecrow that the country will go bankrupt, companies will no longer produce, investors in the entity “the market” will leave the country and take their dollars, the populist right in general has demonstrated in public, right after a very favorable election result, that it is what it has always been: a front man and loyal and canine representative of businessmen and rentiers, that is, of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and its associated foreign interests.

And this is where the most important situation of recent years and, certainly, of recent decades for a left that is truly committed to workers and that seriously seeks to unite and give expression to its struggle arises.

2.

After poor municipal elections for the so-called progressive left, in which the pro-Bolsonaro and pro-physician right wing imposed serious defeats in most capitals and medium-sized cities, including in the crown jewel, São Paulo, the working class has demonstrated in an increasingly comprehensive and conscious way that it yearns and is willing to fight for the improvement of its living conditions and its interests continue to revolve around its historical class struggle.

It is a mortal blow that reality imposes on the stillborn theory of the “right-wing poor”, recently revived by Jessé de Souza, hand in hand with the repressed notion of a “fascist middle class”, as exposed, roughly, by Marilena Chauí.

Here, in this interesting historical context, the Brazilian laborer of the 21st century demonstrates that his consciousness does not float around abstractions and metaphysical promises, as if he were an idiot actively working against himself, a voluntary slave. It is superfluous to have to deny that this can happen. Of course, there are exceptions.

However, in general, workers have demonstrated and continue to demonstrate in the current wave of reduced working hours on social networks that they are fighting to reduce their exploitation, to improve their material conditions, to have more of their time at their disposal, and to have a greater share of social progress in their favor.

In doing so, perhaps a unique historical opportunity will be presented to socialists and revolutionaries, even if few, a window that allows the formation of a movement with transformative potential for decades to come.

The difficulties of right-wing populists, paradigmatic in themselves, demonstrate one of the enormous opportunities that open up with the advancement of this proposal: a broad alliance between almost the entire working class and broad layers of the urban middle classes and even sectors of the petite bourgeoisie. The increasingly explosive repercussion of the campaign on social media is a clear sign of this.

Typical ironies of history often present themselves in this way. It is typical of their dialectical and contradictory nature. After a blatant electoral defeat of the so-called left, the same workers who put the extreme right and the physiological ones in the city halls, show that they do not integrate with it, but defend their interests against the interests of their principals, caught naked in the public square as puppets of the business community.

3.

Even more important for future struggles is the possibility of enormous advances in consciousness and perception, in a revolutionary sense, that could reach entire generations of workers, from those exhausted by years of exploitation, to the young people of Generation Z, much more connected and who are beginning to come to terms with the cold and cruel reality of capitalist exploitation. It is from this struggle that new cadres, leaders and leaders of the working class can emerge.

The problem of the working day refers to the most fundamental struggle in a class society, namely, the struggle for surplus value, for surplus labor. In other words, by touching on the problem of the working day, workers, even unconsciously, are feeling their way into the sensitive terrain of the crown jewel of capitalism: the exploitation of labor and its use as a driving force for the accumulation of wealth, of Capital, in a minority segment of society. In this way, they are making their way through the jungle of ideology to understand the fundamental reason for the misery of their lives.

The fact that they live to work and work to live rings, for all generations of workers, as a natural and, to a certain extent, unquestionable truth.

As in the case of all profound transformations, changes begin when degeneration, discouragement and exhaustion become unbearable and cause the temperature of the workers to reach an explosive level. This is our case.

In the midst of the fight to reduce the 6x1 working day, workers may start to wonder why they are the ones who must make all the social sacrifices, while they only receive the minimum necessary to not die of hunger and see the opulence generated by their work accumulate in the hands, parties, vernissages and orgies of a few parasites.

You can begin to question the nature of things, the unquestionable nature of a type of exhausting and exploitative work, of low wages, of the decision-making dictatorship of bosses and employers, of the very existence of unemployment.

Hence, not only the reduction, but the imposition of a flexible working hours and wages, guaranteeing a minimum, depending on the availability of work and the price of products, so that all workers have a decent job and livelihood, become feasible, plausible ideas in line with their interests.

4.

The course of the class struggle is not linear.

There is simply no guarantee that all these achievements can be implemented. Above all, because a society without unemployment means a planned and socialist society, a superior stage to this capitalist reality of exploitation, which depends on mountains of miserable unemployed people to keep those who work and who must accept low wages and humiliation terrified and docile.

The course of events in this sense, however, offers socialists a unique opportunity to present their plans and visions for a new, socialist society that produces enough for everyone, distributes production equally, employs and welcomes all who work and that establishes a truly democratic and renewed political regime, overcoming this false bourgeois democracy based on the purchase and deception of votes with bullets and bibles and on government and parliamentary decisions bought with amendments and dinners.

There are several crossroads along the way. If, on the one hand, it is funny to see historical nonentities of the extreme right, such as Kim Kataguiri, Nicolas Ferreira or Eduardo Bolsonaro, increasingly dehydrating their bases by showing that they serve the putrid hands of capital, on the other hand, we should not expect the disarray to last long.

The coup-plotting right wing and its hesitant media allies have shown enough flexibility to adapt to the changing moods of the middle classes and workers. This operation of diversion and manipulation began in 2013 and continues between Lava Jato, Bolsonaro and Tarcísios to this day.

Keeping your eyes open and making progress in terms of program and practice, with street demonstrations, work stoppages, demanding and imposing a position on corrupt unions to join forces and the determination to demand immediate approval of the end of the 6x1 workday, are the guarantee to prevent lies, media terrorism, threats and probable attacks against leaders against the movement from gaining support.

On the other hand, the siren song of liberal democracy is also lurking, precisely the packaging of this package of excrement that is capitalist society, against which workers have already demonstrated their opposition, whether in the record abstention rate in the municipal elections, or in the explosive and growing stance taken in favor of the fight against 6x1.

This siren song, expressed in the positions of social liberal parliamentarians, that is, of the “good” capitalists, present in the current Lula government, in the PT and in a significant part of the PSOL, is a continuation of the dangerous absorption and integration that they suffer due to the rules of the game of class “conciliation”, that is, of the unequal, disguised and unfair “peace” agreement, through deception, between the poor and workers and the rich and exploiters, their real beneficiaries.

This absorption is expressed, in addition to the realities of these organizations, in this case, in statements by Érica Hilton about how the PL for reduction would be just a “provocation” to get businesspeople to sit down with them and with “representatives” of workers to agree on a new way of working.

The same goes for attempts to reconcile the proposal with a supposed technical bias based on the possibility of “improving the lives of workers” while “increasing and improving the productivity and competitiveness of companies”. The question remains: productivity for what? And for whom?

Equally outrageous are the examples of cowardice at the beginning of a historic struggle expressed by representatives of this type of left, trying to bargain with some fiction of enlightened business that the reduction be gradual, one year each year for about ten years, as a sign of good faith and kindness that slaves must show to the hand that whips them.

Workers excluded from social life, absorbed by the daily routine of wage labor, increasingly evident in its compulsory and socially enslaved nature, who live on rent for their entire lives, from paycheck to paycheck, without pleasure or savings, crowded into crowded buses and subways, in hospital queues, slaughtered like animals by the police or by occupational diseases, have what to gain from competitiveness? Why should they be concerned about profits or the employer's adjustments? Should these concerns be worth more than their immediate needs and interests?

These are the ways to empty the streets, minds and hearts and inflate liberal democracy in crisis (all over the planet), framing popular demands, dressing them in acceptable colors, softening, domesticating and dehydrating the desire for popular change, posing as a supposed way to solve social achievements, when they are, in reality, their grave.

5.

It turns out that, like the “old absurd agenda” of its time (the thirteenth salary; or the 8-hour workday; or women’s suffrage; or vacations; or the minimum wage; or agrarian reform; or the abolition of slavery), every great social (and political, organizational and ideological) achievement only comes as a byproduct of a revolutionary struggle, to the last consequences, supported by a determined and conscious action of workers who know what they are fighting for.

This action is key to a profound and sustained change in the correlation of forces, taking the ideas and practices of a class-based and working-class left off the defensive, while at the same time unmasking its historical enemies expressed in the infamous centrão, Bolsonarism and the entire gang of puppets of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and associated parties.

In the streets, in the workplaces, in every corner of the country, we must fight and say that the fight for a shorter working day is a fight for the lives of workers and for the transformation of a society of misery! A dignified, revolutionary, supportive, collective and socialist life is possible!

This struggle is the key to opening the doors to a new situation for the organization, consciousness, living conditions and struggle for profound transformations by workers.

* André Bof He holds a degree in social sciences from the University of São Paulo (USP).

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