By LINCOLN SECCO*

Comments on the book by Celso Rocha Barros

PT is a party sui generis or a typical European-style social democratic association?

When the party emerged, the central countries were going through fundamental changes that affected their traditional social base of workers and middle-class workers: automation, new management techniques, incorporation of telematics, fragmentation of production chains, the fiscal crisis of the State, the fall in the average profit rate, globalization and neoliberalism.

Social democracy was at the end of its glory years, which began at the end of World War II. If before its hegemony imposed limits on its adversaries, from the 1980s onwards the opposite occurred. After all, those who implemented neoliberal economic policy were both the socialist left of François Mitterrand in France and Felipe González in Spain, and the “new” right of Margaret Thatcher in Great Britain and Ronald Reagan in the United States.

In Latin America, neoliberalism took hold in the following decade in more violent forms. When new Latin American members joined the club, they bore the burden of austerity without the bonus of welfare state. This resulted in a fragile and ephemeral consensus that soon gave way to the progressive wave of the early 21st century.

On the other hand, the experience of a party of trade unionists, Catholics and dissident Marxist groups distanced the PT in the 1980s from any connection with real socialism. Although the Soviet Union still existed and no one foresaw its imminent demise, it also no longer offered a model for society. In such a context, it was to be expected that the PT members would reject the endorsement of both communists and social democrats. The idea of ​​socialism in its successive resolutions was vague and indeterminate.

Celso Rocha Barros’ book covers the great internal debates of the 1980s and the passage through the desert of defeats in the 1990s. The author shows a PT that was not destined to “succeed”. At times he repeats: “the PT was very weak”; “the PT had everything to fail”. He observes the crises of the first municipal administrations due to internal division, ideological uncertainties and lack of experience. Celso Rocha Barros considered it a mistake for the PT not to have gone to the Electoral College in 1985 and shows that the PDT helped to indirectly elect Tancredo Neves and, even so, was competitive in 1989, almost making it to the second round.

For the author, the dispute between Lula and Leonel Brizola showed that the rise of the PT to become the main left-wing party in Brazil was not something that was given in advance, and if Brizola had won in 1989, he would have formed a national party from the state and from the top down, following the old labor tradition. At the same time, Leonel Brizola did not win precisely because he did not have that party: “Although the PT was far from being the well-ordered machine of the following decades, it was already capable of offering a minimum of structure to Lula” (p. 155).

Leonel Brizola would have to solve the squaring of the circle, that is: come to power to have a party, but first have the power to create a party. He forgot that Getúlio Vargas was the revolutionary of 1930 before creating the PTB and being the candidate of 1950. Brizola's vote was significant in Rio Grande do Sul and Rio de Janeiro, states that he had already governed, but he had 1,5% of the votes of São Paulo. The author concludes: “No one becomes president of Brazil with only 1% of the São Paulo electorate” (p. 156). For him, “an important part of the PT's growth in its origins had occurred due to the empty space that Getúlio Vargas had left in São Paulo” (p. 157).

The fact is that in 1989 the PT defeated the PDT in the first round, but was unable to defeat the right-wing candidate in the second round. The author questions the refusal of support from Ulysses Guimarães, who, in his opinion, would probably have guaranteed Lula's victory (p. 159), despite the meager vote obtained by the PMDB.

The book’s narrative reinforces the typical approach in political science that, initially, the PT was a progressive workers’ and middle-class party that spread out from the metalworkers’ strikes in the ABC region of São Paulo and its political environment. However, there was also the experience of a party that sprang up in various parts of the country from its own local movements. Even so, the importance of the progressive Catholic Church and its national reach were well assessed in Celso Rocha Barros’ book. As he said: the importance of Catholicism to the history of the PT “is immense” and Catholics, as a group, did not allow themselves to be absorbed by the PT or its tendencies. The author also records the first homosexual organizations and their internal dynamics, the black movement and the women’s movement.

The author’s main thesis is that “the history of the PT should be understood as part of the global movement of formation of workers’ parties, which (…) gave rise to major social democratic parties” (p. 54). He cites two Marxist historians in support of this idea: Perry Anderson and Eric Hobsbawm. For Celso Rocha Barros, in the early 1990s “the PT had begun its transformation into a mass party, similar to European parties based on unions, which would prioritize winning elections” (p. 181).

Celso develops, in dialogue with my book History of the PT, the thesis that the PT had much less time for its updating social democrat than the European parties and expanded its electoral base not to the middle class but to informal and low-income workers. This made all the difference in its history from the 1990st century onwards. But Celso Rocha Barros adds to that idea, restricted to social classes, the political dimension. He shows that “the center to which the European social democrats approached in the 183th century was much less hostile to the left than the center toward which the PT would try to move from the XNUMXs onwards” (p. XNUMX).

Social democracy dates back to the 19th century, but its decisive experience of government (with a few exceptions) dates back to after the Second World War and coincides with thirty years of world economic growth. This experience has in many cases been more indirect than direct. Outside of solidly social democratic Scandinavia, welfare state It was built by conservatives cornered by unions and reformist left-wing parties.

At some point in the 1950s the politicians in power in the main countries who represented the social democratic pact were conservatives: Harold MacMillan (Great Britain), De Gaulle (France), Adenauer (West Germany), Diefenbaker (Canada) and the Italian Christian Democratic prime ministers. None dared to dismantle social policies and the presence of a mass left opposition was the prerequisite. sine qua non for this.

In our case, Celso Rocha Barros says: “If the PSDB had won the 2002 election, it is likely that it would also have used at least part of the growth provided by the commodities to resume public investment (…). As much as PT and PSDB members complain about the conclusion, the investments made by PT governments and the adjustment of the 1990s form a natural and reasonably successful sequence” (p. 280).

Precisely for this reason, the author's view of Antonio Palocci's role is that he was "one of the greatest finance ministers in the history of Brazil" (p. 269) who, upon leaving the government, left the fiscal situation balanced, implemented microeconomic reforms (from social security to bankruptcy law), reduced interest rates and eliminated the debt linked to the exchange rate. José Dirceu was not so lucky because there was no "real plan for the political system".

The author has produced a remarkable summary. We have thus gone through the Plano Real and the mega privatizations that changed the patrimonial structure of capitalism in Brazil (for the author some of them were good, as in the case of the telephone industry; others were less advantageous, as in the case of Vale). We have seen the PSDB and the PT trying to “command the backwardness” of the PFL, PMDB and smaller groups; the electoral fraud of 1998, Lula’s victory in 2002 and, from then on, a history that is less about the party and more about the government and its political interlocutors. We have left the heated confrontations of the PT congresses and traveled to Brasília.

The author supports this option by saying that the “mensalão scandal” and the fall of Dirceu and Palocci left the party completely at the mercy of the Planalto Palace. There is an excellent discussion of the combination of the PSDB’s macroeconomic tripod (free exchange rate, primary surplus and inflation targets) with the fundamental social policies of the PT, the resumption of the State’s role as an inducer in the PT’s second term and Dilma Rousseff’s New Economic Matrix. All in language for mortals and not for economists.

The writing gains speed after the crisis of June 2013, which, for the author, did not find “significant institutional political expression” (p. 315). Here a controversial thesis arises. The appropriation of a large part of the aftermath of June by the right is a fact. The Movimento Brasil Livre (MBL) was the most characteristic example. However, the author says that “This 'new right' could have been a positive phenomenon. However crude its formulations were, it was an embryo of a political right formed outside the State, which was rare in Brazilian history[I]. If the country’s democracy had continued to consolidate, this right-wing radicalism could have been channeled into a consistent political project, as had occurred with the PT over the decades” (p. 324).

But something happened that changed everything: the failure of the fiscal austerity measures of the third PT government, the disappointment of part of its social base and the dispute with Congress opened a government crisis. According to the author (p. 328), in March 2016, the MBL noticed a movement on virtual networks in favor of demonstrations against Dilma Rousseff and deduced that it was an initiative of the PSOL. To anticipate and steal from that party the banner of an alternative opposition to the PT, the MBL called for the demonstrations of March 15, 2016, beginning the process that would lead to the 2016 coup. Celso recognizes that the impeachment was a “fraud, a spurious maneuver”, but not a coup. For him, this word should be preserved to designate the “type of thing” that Jair Bolsonaro tried to do in Brazil: “a violent intervention, whether by the Army, the police or private militias, to establish an unconstitutional government” (p. 345).

Structured in 16 chapters, the book does not have an explicit periodization. Despite its length (after all, it is almost 500 pages), we follow the trajectory of the PT from its foundation to the beginning of the 2022 campaign, led by an author who uses novelistic resources, flash back when introducing his characters, in the first person if necessary and in the second person to invoke complicity with those who read the most intricate parts of the PT's internal disputes. He used countless sources, theses, books, newspaper articles and, particularly, interviews with PT leaders, politicians from other parties, government technicians, academics and journalists.

In the end, there seems to be a longing for a political world that did not survive. The author is situated in a common zone of (mis)understanding between PSDB and PT members. Intellectually honest, Celso Rocha Barros presents his contributions without failing to recognize others. He wrote a book that is, above all, open to debate.

* Lincoln Secco He is a professor in the Department of History at USP. Author, among other books, of History of the PT (Studio). [https://amzn.to/3RTS2dB]

Originally published in Magazine Theory and Debate

Reference

Celso Rocha Barros. EN: a story. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2023, 486 pages. [https://amzn.to/3XoD8yd]

Note

[I] Celso Rocha Barros is not saying that an opportunity like that has never occurred, but rather that it is rare. Perhaps he was thinking of the case of Plinio Salgado. The Brazilian Integralist Action also emerged outside the State (leaving aside its close relationships with Army officers and members of the Vargas government) and later became the Popular Representation Party. Recently, Bolsonarism itself can be understood as a movement of extra-parliamentary origin that became institutionalized, thus taking advantage of the post-2013 crisis. Again, it would be necessary to disregard many historical elements, because alongside personalities from social media, the neo-Pentecostal milieu and organized crime, old professional politicians have appeared, starting with the leader himself and his sons. This new institutionalized Right has not strengthened democracy, but rather undermined it. The MBL itself was a factor in the mobilization for the 2016 coup.

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