By MÁRIO MAESTRI*
If Lula wins, the institutionalization of the status quo antipopular built in the last dérock
Voting for Lula is not the way to stop Jair Bolsonaro, the extreme right and, above all, the coup. It is not a conscious or desperate vote that justifies a coup candidate for vice, on the fringe of eggs, a mere detail. Voting for Lula, in the first or second round, means, on the one hand, reaffirming the path that led to the 2016 coup, and, on the other hand, institutionalizing its transformations. It constitutes a strategic surrender to big capital and imperialism and a renunciation, now and after the elections, of the struggle for autonomy in the world of work.
If Lula wins, the institutionalization of the status quo antipopularity built in recent decades, also by the PT, which experienced a leap in quality in 2016. With its victory, the essentials of what was devastated by the coup d'état and privatized will remain. The monstrous – so-called public – debt will be paid religiously. And the miserable minimum wage will continue, with tweaks. Something on the surface will be changed to follow the terrible destructive current, silent or noisy, in the depths.
Voting for Lula, the PT and its annexes means consolidating the displacement of workers from the center of political and social life, advanced for decades by lulopetismo, which led to the disaster of 2016. by replacing the world of work program with social-liberal guidelines. An extreme reality after 2002. José Dirceu proposed bank access in the country as the great PT structural transformation.
As of 2010, revealing its deep dark soul, the PT rhetorically decreed the end of the working class, announcing that, in Brazil, the vast majority of the population had become the “middle class”. All according to the crooked meter of the IBGE, surrendered to petismo, narrative supported by lulist ideologues such as sociologist Marcelo Neri, author of the new m classéday: the shiny side of the base of the pyramidmide, 2012, book nominated for the Jabuti Prize. The novelty went around the world as proof of the end of the “class struggle” and the wonders of social liberalism.
serving the lords
For decades, the PT had been taking the population and workers off the street, with betrayal after betrayal, as a way of proposing itself as a manager of the popular classes, according to the interests of big capital, in municipal, state and federal governments. In municipal governments, the siren song of the Participatory Budget proposed, with a music band and sound car, the division of crumbs from the public budget, according to the will of the population, while the banquet was available to contractors, bus companies, private hospitals, etc. In fourteen years of federal government, the PT has not granted even one of the greatest demands of Brazilian workers, not even 40 hours of work. And it took away important rights.
During this long period, the PT always set the minimum wage far below its real value, meaning that a working family could never survive with it, with a minimum of dignity, to the delight of micro, small, medium and large capitalists. He left the population in the hands of the bankers, who undertook the biggest looting ever known, in the history of Brazil, of the Brazilian population, through interest on cards, so-called preferential checks, etc.
The population was scorched incessantly, without any defense. Lulopetismo went further. It granted “consignment credit”, at very high rates, deducted directly from the payroll of retirees, pensioners, etc. That is, loans without any risk for banks. Rightly so, in 2009, in Istanbul, Lula declared: “If there is one thing that no Brazilian businessman can complain about in my six years in office, it is that so much money has never been earned as in my government”. (Folha de S. Paul, May 22, 2009.)
Following its social-liberal metamorphosis, PTism and its satellites practically prepared the 2016 coup, from a material point of view, by contributing to the deindustrialization of the country, and from a sociopolitical point of view, by disorganizing the working classes and their organizations. And they did it consciously. And, surprised by the injustice with which they were treated, when they were defenestrated, in 2016, by the coup of big capital and imperialism, they began to make an effort so that the egg of the serpent that they had helped to hatch. In the new inhospitable space, they had to re-establish the privileged ties they maintained, before 2016, with big capital.
The 2016 coup was a quality leap in the assault by international capital on Brazil. Through it, US imperialism in particular advanced strongly in controlling the central reins of the nation. The coup sought to overcome the process that had been taking shape in the bowels of Brazilian society since the end of the Military Regime, in 1985. A process that, let's be honest, was not opposed but supported by lulopetismo, as proposed. XNUMX was the political unfolding of the pluridecenal economic process of radical internationalization, denationalization, and deindustrialization of the national economy. The great political-economic instruments in this debacle were the appreciation of the real, the great privatizations, the bankarization of the country, the de facto control of the Central Bank by big capital, the abatement of customs barriers, the transfer of industries abroad, etc.
Deconstruction of the Brazilian nation
The international capital that landed in Brazil to buy national public and private companies was hailed as true national conquests, and not as bloodthirsty conquerors, by the great press engaged in this process, by parties in government and outside it, by economists and academics, soldiers or intoxicated by the myths of liberalism. The retreat and the strong disorganization of the Brazilian working class flowed through the bed of national deindustrialization. It was not just the result of the deleterious action of parties and unions that acted, and profited greatly, as obedient representatives of international liberalism.
In 2016, Brazil began its transit from status of a semi-colonial nation – with relative national political autonomy and with the main economic decisions being influenced-determined by big capital, for the status of a “globalized neocolonial nation”. “Situation in which the national dominant classes, no longer in charge of central economic decisions, also lose authority over fundamental political decisions, participating in them as subordinate associates. Structural metamorphosis required by senile world capitalism, in the struggle for the extension of its hegemony, to relaunch the lost dynamism, at the expense of the devastation of the subordinated nations.” (MAESTRI, 2019: 363.)
It was a flight into the future, throwing the country back to Colonial times, reborn in the 21st century. The coup destroyed and continues to destroy the little bit of state and national monopoly capital – large contractors, JBS, Petrobras, Eletobras, Banco do Brasil , etc. The area of action of large national companies (already semi-privatized before the coup – such as Petrobras, with share capital traded in New York) is occupied by globalized companies. The economic advance of the USA in the country is not greater due to its current relative weakness. New imperialisms, such as the Chinese, participate in the alienation of national autonomy.
Brazil, which was once an industrialized economy in expansion, has become a mere producer of low-tech manufactured goods with scarce added value – trinkets and semi-trinkets –, while its economy is based more and more on the production and export of primary products: grains, meat, ores, oil. Goods that began to play the role of sugar, gold, diamonds, coffee, cocoa in colonial and imperial times. One after another, several automakers – part of the scenario about the alleged national automobile industry – leave Brazil.
Mutatis mutandis, we return to the times of colonial slavery, when the external market was everything and the internal one, negligible. The primarization of the national economy gave rise to, and still gives rise to, a ruling class that is totally uninterested in the fate of the nation as a whole, since it produces its goods locally, in a decentralized manner, and exports them abroad, generally making use of scarce labor. The internal market, in lilliputization, interests him less and less. What leverages and allows minimum wages of hunger. It is the end of the Getulista Era, proposed and advanced by FHC.
Everything to recover the lost
In 2016, the PT lost the mandate granted by liberalism, which began to govern without mediation. As we have seen, the party did not fight against the coup promoted by big capital and imperialism, which it served and was willing to continue serving. The coup manipulation of the institutions did not put an end to the formal parliamentary game and the participation, even reduced, of collaborationism in the management of the State. The PT organized itself to recover lost representative positions. It was followed in this path by organizations claiming to be Marxist, interested in bourgeois parliamentary representation and already unconcerned with the world of work.
After the rhetorical turn to the left, to win the 2014 presidential election – it would not reduce social rights “Not even if the cow coughed” –, the day after the victory, Dilma Rousseff poured out buckets of evil on the perplexed population and workers, in most cases. electoral fraud operation never undertaken in Brazil. She and the PT, seeking to reverse the new orientation of big capital and imperialism regarding the outsourcing of government, signaled that they could continue tightening the tourniquet of anti-popular suffering. Which, in truth, the PT could not do beyond a certain point without risking disappearing as a party.
After becoming incompatible with the popular classes that, even confused and without direction, tried to resist her deposition, Dilma Rousseff went to defend herself in the Senate, as if the impeachment was an impeccable constitutional rite. Thus, he endorsed the coup. And he kept his political rights as a prize. Which led to another humiliation for her, when she ranked fourth as a candidate for the Senate, in Minas Gerais, in a contest with strong fumes of manipulation, especially with regard to that election.
After the coup, the PT and its followers remained immobilized, waiting for the “dust to settle”. The CUT never called for a political general strike, not wanting to be incompatible with big capital. He didn't want to start the workers, since he was also in their way. Afterwards, it and the other centrals and unions were reduced to a minimum, with the end of the obligatory discount on members' dues. The “king was naked” – for the most part, the centrals and union organizations were superstructural constructions, boxes for making money.
It wasn't a scam and it never existed
The PT began to criticize Michel Temer, and not the coup, a word that was even proposed as being too “strong” to describe what had happened. A good part of the left claiming to be Marxism went further. Practically until the 31st of August and the definitive removal of Dilma Rousseff, the PCB refused to defend the government, defining it as social-democratic. Jones Manuel, the PCB’s Losurist guru, wrote on April 2, 2016: “No, we do not provide any support to the PT Government and we do not enter into the hysteria of the coup.” On April 17, the Chamber approved Dilma's impeachment process. The PCB did not see that the coup was directed against the workers and the nation, not against the president. As in 1964, when the coup did not aim to depose João Goulart, the bourgeoisie landowner president, but to structurally strike the world of work.
The PSTU, the CST and similar groups practically supported the coup, proposing that it was a PT invention, regardless of the deposition of the president, since she or Temer would be flour from the same bag, all in the “Que se vayan todos” style. Luciana Genro, from MES, passionately defended the action of Sérgio Moro, imperialism's chief warrant. With open or embarrassed support for Lava Jato and the coup and the Rousseff government's lame defense of the PT, there was no fight against the coup. Abandoned and manipulated, the workers and the population saw the gates of hell open before them. What was already bad, became terrible.
A small part of the population tested active resistance. On September 7, 2016, protests against the Michel Temer government took place in the main cities of Brazil. On October 24, there were large demonstrations across the country against the Public Expenditure PEC, repeated, with success, on November 11 and 25. In a quality leap, on March 15, 2017, there was a general strike against the Social Security reform, announced by the first coup government.
On April 28, 2017, centrals and social movements promoted a general strike and demonstrations, always against the pension reform. With the paralysis of public transport, the streets of the capitals were deserted. Sixty thousand workers would have joined the strike in the ABC region of São Paulo. It was the resistance of the population that advanced, starting to involve the workers, without real support from the so-called opposition parties and the CUT. The popular reaction allowed the PT and annexes to propose and advance their traditional good services to the coup, to capital, to imperialism.
of the day of "Be afraid" to the "Bolsonaro government"
On August 26, 2017, a bucket of cold water was thrown over the growing popular mobilizations. In Salinas, Minas Gerais, land of good cachaça, Lula da Silva ordered the militancy to leave the streets, stop shouting “Fora Temer”, worry about the 2018 elections. ”! And, grateful, Temer stayed. The management and parliamentarians of the PT, CUT, and PSOL happily accepted the orientation. The priority was to prepare for the next general elections. “Resisting is not necessary; getting elected is necessary.”
On April 7, 2018, months before the elections, Lula da Silva, with an arrest warrant issued, entrenched himself in the Metalworkers union in São Bernardo, where more and more workers flocked. The thing was red for the scammers. This time the man was going to resist! Reaffirming his sane nature, Lula da Silva gave himself up, saying he believed in the coup's justice. He ordered the protesters to go home. He paid almost two years in prison, with the support of the coup-acting Justice, without the PT and the CUT really mobilizing for his freedom.
The 2018 campaign and election took place according to the PT and coup style. The candidate was Fernando Haddad, more toucan than PT. More cold than warm water, he carried out a campaign worthy of a chic university professor, those who go to class in a suit and tie, even in summer. He never uttered the word coup, which, on August 10, 2016, he said was “a little harsh” to describe what happened, since it “resembles (va) the military dictatorship”. A small caress to the military in power and government. Meanwhile, the workers were suffocating with the coup's knee on their necks.
There was no demand for an end to the coup, free elections, recovery of what the population and workers had lost. No substantial increase in the minimum wage was proposed. The only important thing was to defeat Bolsonaro, the surprise of the election, which reached the second round. To form an “Antifascist Front”, the hands and feet of coup supporters defined as “democratic rightists” were kissed. Deceiving the electorate, a close victory was proposed until the eve of the fake elections.
Each one won their
They were marked-card elections, in everything irregular. The so-called Electoral Justice, the generals, the mainstream media continued singing and dancing behind the sound car of the coup d'état and Bolsonaro. And, as was inscribed in the stars, Jair Bolsonaro and a tide of governors, senators, federal and state deputies of the same coat, all between the horrible and the appalling, were elected. Well-behaved middle-class politicians and intellectuals were horrified by what they saw, blaming the people and the poor for not knowing how to vote. If they wanted princes, why did they raise them as slaves? - would remind Nietzsche.
On January 1, 2019, the mob enthroned by the petism and pulls, indifferent, stayed at home and the electoral farce enthroned the second coup government. And then, Haddad and Boulos, on their knees, reaffirmed the legality of the election, illegal in everything. They showed themselves to be well behaved and with the best intentions in relation to big capital, the generals, coup-mongering Justice, imperialism. Haddad, always exaggerated when bowing, wished the Myth a good government! But the so-called opposition – PT, PCdoB, PSOL – also won its share, not as much as they wanted, but a lot. It elected governors, deputies, senators, who, at best, did nothing, and, at worst, supported coup measures and initiatives.
The Ogre in particular proved to be functional. The collaborationist opposition, with deep roots in civil servants, in the professional middle classes, in the intelligentsia, in the party and trade union bureaucracy, etc., pointed out the fascist danger, lurking around the corner. Again, the general guideline was to let the dust settle, “hold hands”. Courses were launched, lives, books, seminars on fascism and how to fight it. “Without provoking him,” of course. The struggle is one of positions, of persuasion, as Gramsci had taught. Some smart guys took refuge in the First World, saying they were threatened, from where they started to pontificate about Brazil!
The hordes of “black shirts” would soon descend on leftists, intellectuals, homosexuals, artists. The population disregarded the prognoses of the defeatists about the Bolso-fascist militias. In the 2019 street carnival, from one side of Brazil to the other, in unison, they sent Mito “to that place”. Bolsonaro's disjointed verbal response recorded that he did not have strong troops, with “manganello” at hand, to silence dissidents. Later, he even managed to form a party of his own. He would continue promising blows left and right, and riding his motorcycle.
From the anti-Bolsonaro Front to the "Stay Bolsonaro"
The need for a “National Salvation Front” was proclaimed against bolsofascism, and not against the coup, already overcome with the legal elections of 2018, it seems. The “Front” program should not frighten bankers, businessmen, property owners, generals and imperialism. It was accepted to maintain the coup achievements in essence, without Bolsonarist extravagances. A “democratic transition”, like that of 1945 and 1985, without the complete destruction of authoritarianism and the recovery of what was lost by the population.
On May 15 and August 13, 2019, across the country, the population returned to the streets, demonstrating in defense of Education. On September 7, he demanded Bolsonaro be out. On November 5, in the great capitals of Brazil, there were vanguard protests against the death of councilor Marielle Franco and authoritarianism. The mobilizations were dilated in time, so that they would not feed back with popular enthusiasm, and carefully poorly organized and convened by collaborationism. It was necessary to show that there were people, but that they were still in chains.
On November 8, 2019, Lula da Silva was released, by decision of the STF and, above all, permission from the generals, who certainly consulted imperialism. During his long imprisonment, the PT and the CUT never called for a national mobilization for his freedom. The legality of a conviction that was accused of being illegal was respected. Liberation was a major national political event. Then, in front of the workers and the national population, Lula da Silva shouted “Stay Bolsonaro”. Again, repeating Salinas, he told the disheartened populace to worry about the 2020 elections, not about overthrowing Bolsonaro.
The collaborationist opposition consolidated surrender as its political center of gravity, from which it would not stray an inch. He continued to propose a very broad “patriotic and democratic front” against Bolsonaro, and not against the coup. It should be able to welcome the “democratic coup supporters”, the “rational generals”, the “repentant Bolsonarists”. It should not overcome a slightly developmentalist program, which did not question the profound reforms of the new hegemonic bloc formed under the direction of imperialism and big capital, with the exception of cosmetic modifications. “Something must change, so that everything continues as before” – they proposed to the lords of power, as proposed by the great Italian philosopher… Burt Lancaster, Bolsonaro would say.
No “Bolsonaro out”, “down with the coup”, “generals back to the barracks”, “direct elections now”, the return of lost rights, the nationalization of the privatized, “coup plotters in prison”, etc. In 2002, after Fernandina's national destruction, Lula and the PT decided that the "lost, lost was" and advanced, along the road of the previous government, under the blessing of big capital, throwing some smoke in the eyes of the population. The ex-unionist showed those in power that he could impose a Social Security reform as bad as FHC's. From that historic betrayal, the PSOL was born, which today embraces Lula da Silva again, in a true return of the prodigal son to his father's house.
Covid, a gift from céus
The “Frente Ampla” defended respect for the Bolsonaro government and the Magna Carta, a veritable brothel in the hands of the STF, Congress, the generals. Bolsonaro as a candidate in 2022 became the PT trump card for the formation of the collaborationist bloc, which should have broad popular support. The multiclassist and collaborationist front aimed to guarantee the 2020 election, with the election of mayors and councilors and the return, at least partial, of the PT to the prominent position prior to 2016. The election would give rise to the rearticulation of well-behaved collaborationism towards October 2022, with the end of Bolsonarism, without questioning the institutionalization of the coup, as said.
The flight plan of the PT restoration demanded that the population stay at home, not scare away with claims, demonstrations, strikes, looting, occupations, the “democratic coup plotters”, the “repentant fascists”, the thousands of officials sucking on the teats of the State. Social peace would prove that the PT was capable, once again, of taming the population. It didn't matter that the coup d'état continued to rebuild and prostitute the nation's institutions, introducing true wage slavery, sucking out the marrow of the Brazilian population.
At the end of February 2020, Covid-19 landed in Brazil as a late Christmas present for collaborationism. There were, now, sanitary reasons to keep the population at home, at least those who were able to do so. The watchword was “saving lives”, regardless of the fact that “stay at home” could not be followed by the large working population and that that orientation facilitated the consolidation of the coup d’état. In addition to the hysterics of social media and empty political statements, the refusal to tough resistance, by leaving the fratricidal government with free hands, contributed to the sanitary hecatomb known to the country.
Collaborationism focused its rhetorical artillery on the denialism of the Bolsonaro government, which followed the instructions of big business, of Donald Trump, of the high command of the armed forces. New, innocuous and laughable forms of opposition were defined, while waiting for the electoral epiphany: pots, petitions, denunciations to the Senate, Parliament, STF, OAB, international bodies, political collusion, articles, books, poems, thousands, tens of thousands of lives. The collaborationist leadership entered a transitory crisis when left-wing young people, wearing the usual masks, took to the streets and easily put Bolsonarist and right-wing groups that were bouncing around in front of the media cameras. It was a small repetition of the “flight of the green shirts”, on October 7, 1934, at Sé, in São Paulo.
civilized rightists
On March 25, 2020, PT, PSOL, PCdoB, PCB and Rede published praise for right-wing administrations and leaders who supported anti-Covid measures – Doria and Witzel were applauded. “Broad convergence against Bolsonaro’s (sic) foolishness” was proposed. About the coup, there was no longer any talk. It was the “Broad Front” on the march. In early April, Lula and Doria exchanged caresses, but the chosen bride, anxiously awaiting the wedding night, would be another: Alkmin, who knew, the sorcerer who stole lunch from little children!
“Defending lives” and keeping the population off the streets, the 1st of May was celebrated virtually, with Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, Gleisi Hoffmann, Fernando Haddad, Flávio Dino, Manuela d'Ávila, etc., and a cup of coups and rightists – FHC, the “terminator of the future”; Rodrigo Maia; Marina Silva; Eduardo Leite, the “teacher killer”, and so on. Never has a brothel been so crowded. The initiative, without any repercussions, advanced the preparation of the population for anti-nature political alliances and the naturalization-institutionalization of the coup, in the construction of the new normal, through elections.
On May 21, 2020, PT, PCdoB, PSOL, PCB, PCO, PSTU, UP and dozens of social organizations handed Rodrigo Maia a request for impeachment of Jair Bolsonaro, without any mobilization, in the style “for the English to see”. If the request had progressed, General Mourão, a right-wing, privatist, country-sell general, proposed as civilized, would assume the presidency. Flávio Dino, governor of Maranhão – formerly in the PT, then in the PC do B, later in the PSB, and in the future it is unknown where –, had just defended the rise of the vice president.
On May 27, more than three hundred representatives of parties and movements signatories to the request scheduled a national demonstration in a virtual plenary… virtual. People should “stay at home”. Man proposes god disposes. On May 25, George Floyd, a black American citizen, was suffocated to death by police in Minneapolis, prompting massive anti-racist demonstrations in the USA, where the epidemic was raging. Incipient demonstrations of support in Brazil were stifled by the “stay at home” requirement.
On May 29, the “We Are Together!” manifesto, in “yellow” color, with enormous support from the mainstream media, proposed a supra-party confluence of the “left, center and right”, “united” to “defend law, order, politics” and all that. Nothing about the lost rights and the blows suffered by the population and the nation. All the guys signed – FHC, Haddad, Boulos, Dino, Freixo and several others. Except Lula and Gleise. The very broad proposal was leaving out the main representative of collaborationism: the well-behaved former metallurgist, now free. On June 26, a new yellow manifesto was launched, for “democracy”, with clear wishes for social improvements.
They signed Haddad, Boulos, Suplicy, Freixo, Dino, Tarso Genro, among others, granting a certificate of democrats to FHC, Weffort, Raul Jungmann, the enriched Neca Setúbal, Roberto Freire, Eduardo Leite, Cristóvão Buarque, Heloísa Helena, Tbata Amaral and all the right stick. Temer declined the invitation. Bolsonaro was not invited because he entered as a scapegoat for all evils since 2016. Lula da Silva and Gleise refused to join the “all fit” trio, cutting the wings of Haddad, Dino and others alike, who already accepted unconditional conciliation , burying PT and Lula da Silva.
The mayonnaise goes away
With the economic and social crisis precipitating, Bolsonaro, weakened, found himself in direct confrontation with Sérgio Moro, Congress, the STF, the Centrão-Direitão and the most powerful governors. The population already looked askance at the official lords ensconced in the government. The coup d'état continued to advance, leaning on the Centrão-Direitão and the Parliament, marginalizing the Myth, transformed into fuhrer slipper foot, no financiers, no militias, no party, no money to build one for themselves. Bolsonaro swayed, weakening the coup itself.
On June 12, 2020, the active generals, true supporters of the coup, representatives of imperialism and big capital, hit the table hard with their boots, vetoing the presidential “impeachment” and the impeachment of the Bolsonaro-Mourão ticket by the Superior Court Electoral. What was more serious. To protect the coup, they proposed distension, signaling that they would keep Bolsonaro and his lunatics under a short halter. And they fulfilled, in general, the promise and the agreement, accepted by collaborationism.
Very soon, respectable right-wing politicians were appointed ministers of Communications and Education, replacing extremist Bolsonarians. The Ogre's sons lowered their tone. Damaris went back to her orange-lime tree. Sara Winter began to shine on the dark face of the Moon. The reference guru-astrologer, abandoned under the weight of huge legal debts, met an inglorious death, after returning and fleeing Brazil, through Paraguay, a route for smugglers. The last ideological ministers were waiting for the inexorable beheading. It was the end of ideological Bolsonarism.
In the November 15, 2020 election, Bolsonarist candidates foundered, winning above all the traditional right-wing parties. In the election, collaborationism had its program enshrined. Right-wing majority candidates were voted “critically” by parties that claim to be Marxist, all to “combat” the “greater enemy”. PSOL celebrated the election of 33 councilors, the result of its identity reorientation – 17 women, 13 blacks, two trans councilors, five collective mandates. Workers, trade unionists, peasants were no longer in fashion. The PCB, PSTU, PCO, UP did not win even one councilor. They were waiting for the next harvest.
Towards the elections
As of 2021, lulopetismo overwhelmingly imposed its collaborationist orientation, aimed at disorganizing any action that was not aimed at the 2022 election and the election of Lula, now presented as the savior of the homeland of Bolsonarism, beyond any programmatic commitment to workers and the population. Paradoxically, the proposal for an interclass alliance to remove Bolsonaro, as it began to consolidate, was opposed by the PT, which conditioned it, left and right, to the unconditional acceptance of Lula da Silva's candidacy. The important thing was not to defeat Bolsonaro, but to elect the former metallurgist.
With the precipitation of the social crisis, the spread of unemployment and the hard return of inflation, popular demonstrations were rehearsed, as always scarcely convened and organized, temporally distant from each other. On May 29, 2021, in two hundred cities across the country, around 400 protesters claimed vaccination, greater emergency aid, education, etc. The same happened on June 19, with an increase in popular participation, especially on Av. Paulista, in Sao Paulo.
On July 3, crowning the proposal for a “National Union”, with the green light of the PT and annexes, an open demonstration was called for the leaders and militants of coup and right-wing parties, not just the PSDB and MDB. Movimento Brasil Livre and Vem Pra Rua supported the initiative, but justified their non-participation with the pandemic. PSDB and PCO militants would have cursed and slapped each other without any seriousness. On the 24th of July, a new national demonstration took place, with a relatively low turnout. Organized militants set fire to the monument to Borba Gato.
On September 7, Bolsonaro summoned his militancy, announcing a movement of disobedience to the STF with a clear coup bias. The right-wing business community put its hand in its pocket and did its best to organize the “march on Brasilia”, which would focus on Avenida Paulista, features of this country that was once called the Land of Parrots. Despite the efforts, the rightists would not have surpassed the XNUMX in Pauliceia Desvairada Paulista. In the rest of Brazil, the appointment Bolsonarists were often microscopic. Some embarrassing.
trembling with fear
Once again, collaborationism proposed the imminence of the assault by the “yellow-green shirts” on the Alvorada Palace. Popular demonstrations for that day were practically suspended, under the slogan of not “provoking” the enemy. On WhatsApp lists, PT militants, from the comfort of their homes, desperately cursed for Stédile to get their landless people off the streets. In São Paulo, in the Anhangabaú valley, not more than twenty thousand leftists appeared, saving the face of Bolsonarism.
With the scarce occurrence of militancy that expected a cathartic event, Bolsonaro went to hide under the wings of Michel Temer, who dictated a humiliating letter to him apologizing to the STF. A multitudinous response from the social movement would have dealt a very hard blow to Bolsonarism and the coup. However, it would have disorganized the electoral scenario. Five days later, on September 12, a proposal for a cross-party and cross-ideological demonstration against the coup, with the participation of leaders and militants from the PDT, PSDB, MDB, DEM, etc., failed.
This time, the MBL and the VPR were present, joining the anti-bolsonarios, registering very limited mobilization capacity. The presence of leftist and PT militancy was minimal, the first, not accepting the conflict with the right, the second, because the demonstration did not endorse the PT candidacy and beckoned to an eventual “third way”. We repeat, the important thing is not to defeat Bolsonaro, but to elect Lula and recast collaborationism.
On October 2, 2021, in more than two hundred cities, community demonstrations for democracy and against inflation, hunger, unemployment were held, called by the PT, PCdoB, PSOL, PDT, PSB, PV, Rede, Cidadania e Solidariedade, PSTU , PV, UP, DEM, MDB, PCB, PC do B, PCO, PDT, PL, Podemos, PSB, PSD, PSDB, PSL, etc. Right-wing speakers were booed or unable to speak. In São Paulo, no more than 10 protesters gathered. With them, the cycle of popular demonstrations was practically faced, always sabotaged – poorly prepared, organized and summoned.
The end of the demonstrations
The demonstration proposed for the 15th of November was suspended, partly because of the march on the 20th of the same month, the National Day of Black Consciousness, which took place with a small influx of militants and popular people. In 2022, the demonstrations on the social movement's reference dates were scheduled as mere salutes to the flag – March 8, May 1, etc. It was no longer necessary to ask the population to stay at home – they had already withdrawn, without confidence in their strength, waiting for the elections and anything after that. Collaborationism had triumphed.
In mid-2022, the long movement to engage the world of work and the population, in the electoral corral in October of that year, concluded with an indisputable victory. In a leap in quality, the proposed savior of the country chose as candidate Geraldo Alkmin, former governor of São Paulo from the PSDB, hated by the population, due to, among other misdeeds of his administration, the overpricing of school lunches and contracts between the state and city of São Paulo with Social Health Organizations (OSS).
During Alkmin's government in São Paulo, the PT group put forward 23 proposals for Parliamentary Commissions of Inquiry (CPI). In the PSB, alongside Lula da Silva, Alkmin sang the Communist International, in true mockery of the centenary of the founding of communism in Brazil. More than ensuring a few votes to the right, the choice of Alkmin was a monocratic decision by Lula da Silva, which registered his autonomy in relation to the PT itself, to other supporters, to the world of work, to the Brazilian population.
The success of PT collaborationism was consolidated with the co-option of virtually all center-left organizations that claim to be Marxist, such as the PCB, PSTU, UP, PCO, etc., or like the PSOL, already sunk in electoralism. As a result of bourgeois collaborationism, they reaffirmed, explicitly or implicitly, their vote for Lula-Alkmin. They only claimed, tearfully, the right to present a presidential candidate in the first round, to leverage their respective apparatuses.
Electoralism without principlepeeps
The defense of party apparatuses and their party bureaucracies now collides with the barrier clauses of the authoritarian electoral legislation, which pushes the electoral herd towards bipartisanship, forcing parties that want to continue suckling in the State to hire “party federations” for four years , so as not to lose public benefits. The Electoral Court has just approved the PSOL coalition with REDE, which split after voting for the coup and maintains umbilical links with the national banking system.
There was little defection of Psolist militants indignant with the anti-natura concubinage, remaining in the party militants and tendencies that formally claimed revolutionary Marxism for decades. They remained so as not to miss out on the possibility of electing and re-electing some parliamentarians and, who knows, maybe getting a little bite in the next government. In yet another media scenario, Luciana Genro took a picture with Alkmin making an ugly face. Always faithful to the “trick me that I like it”, his electorate applauded the grimace.
The PCdoB, the Green Party and the PT have already approved their “Brasil da Esperança” federation, which will mean the inexorable absorption of the first two by the latter, since the important thing is to be elected and re-elected. The PSDB was federated with Cidadania, a movement without political expression. The deadline for federations ended at the end of May.
The PSTU once again launched a proposal for a Socialist and Revolutionary Pole, hoping to capture militants who had broken with the PSOL. Due to its authoritarian structure, it is believable that it will repeat the failure of the same initiative launched when the PSOL was formed. The small MRT participates in the Polo, which sees in it a repetition of the Unity Workers' Left Front (FIT-U), an electoral alliance of long-lived Argentine Trotskyist organizations and not inconsiderable insertion in the combative labor movement. The Argentine mother party participates in the FIT-U, reference of the Trotskyist Fraction-Fourth International, in which the MRT participates.
How imperialism rules
The Polo-PSTU campaign will be guided by the declamatory agitation of the revolutionary program that, in the last half century of its existence, remained unknown by the world of work. It will serve as an electoral platform for pro-imperialist and pro-NATO agitation, as far as Ukraine is concerned, with its traditional episodic attacks on what remains of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Korea, Iran. Everything as required by imperialism. Which will possibly put an end to Polo.
In the October elections, if the PT wins, we will have nothing like the second Lula da Silva government, during the good times of the international economy. We will have, instead, the return of hard social-liberal collaborationism, in a situation of growing international economic crisis, with the control of the social movement under the justification that little and even very little is better than nothing.
Lula's victory will allow institutionalization soft of the coup d'état and will, possibly, in 2026, pave the way for the furious return of the right. We already know the results of the unprincipled alliance to defeat Macri in Argentina, and now we are beginning to glimpse the results of Boric's collaborationism in Chile. Two countries that have, however, an important and combative social and labor movement. This is not the case in Brazil, especially after the long campaign, accelerated since 2016, by the collaborationist opposition to disorganize popular resistance.
The losers of all time
If an eventual third way wins, with the now friendly face of Simone Tebet, we will have a conservative government, which, according to collaborationism, should be respected, for its alleged legality conquered at the polls. He will advance the coup initiatives, in a way that is only more civilized than Jair Bolsonaro. And, if the latter wins, collaborationism will only have to follow its traditional path, proposing, as in 2018, respect for the pronouncement of the ballot boxes, now sanctified, and bet the popular chips on the next elections of 2024 and 2026 and 2028… In both In the last cases, the PT effort to control the social movement will have to be greater. What will value it against big capital.
In all three options, we will have certain winners and losers. In the three variants, the authoritarian bourgeois order will prevail, strengthened and legitimized, which, in its diversities, has a structural identity. The Workers' Party will win gloriously, which will certainly become the first Brazilian party, always at the service of capital. He will elect a large number of governors, senators, deputies, to the delight of the multitudes of bureaucrats and militants, defenestrated since 2016.
In all three cases, the social movement will follow its absorption by the ideology of bourgeois collaborationism, which has penetrated and dominated it for decades. The autonomy of the world of work will continue to be an imperative need, indispensable to the exploited and to the emancipation of the Brazilian nation itself, a project to be built, in the context of the already irremediable decomposition of political organizations claiming Marxism and classism, but practicing electoralism and collaborationism. This, after one hundred years of the founding of the communist movement in Brazil. For all that, I don't vote in October, not even when the cows cough, in the first and second rounds, for the PT or its hangers-on, embarrassed or not![1]
* Mario Maestri is a historian. Author, among other books, of Awakening the Dragon: Birth and Consolidation of Chinese Imperialism (1949-2021).
References
DIRCEU, Joseph. Zé Dirceu. Memólaugh. São Paulo: Generations, 2018.
GORENDER, Jacob. Colonial slavery. 5. ed. São Paulo: Perseu Abramo Foundation, 2010.
MAESTRI, Mario. The Dragon's Awakening: birth and consolidation of Chinese imperialism. (1949-2021). The USA-China Conflict in the World and in Brazil. Porto Alegre: FCM Editora, 2021.
MAESTRI, Mario. revolutiontion and Counter-Revolution in Brazil: 1530-2019. 2nd ed. Enlarged. Porto Alegre: FCM Editora, 2019.
NERI, Marcelo. the new m classéday: The shiny side of the base of the pyramid. São Paulo:
Saraiva, 2011.
Note
[1] We appreciate the reading, comments and suggestions by Márcio Bárbio and Florence Carboni.