Lessons of the Brazilian Workers Party
by Peter Johnson
The Spring 2000 issue of Labor Standard carried two articles on the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers Party) of Brazil: "Brazilian Workers Party Congress, 1999" by Fernanda Estima and Rosana Ramos and "The PT Experience in Rio Grande do Sul" by Carlos Henrique Arabe.1 (Earlier, the July-August 1999 issue of Labor Standard carried several reports on the "radical left" government formed with PT participation in Rio Grande do Sul. All these materials came from International Viewpoint, the magazine of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, a worldwide socialist organization of working-class orientation.)
Brazil is an important country, the largest in Latin America in land area, population, and economy. Like the U.S., it has abundant natural resources, large-scale agriculture and industry, extremes of wealth and poverty, and a sharp racial divide.
But Brazil is nowhere near as rich or powerful as the U.S. It is an economically underdeveloped country dominated and exploited by the advanced capitalist countries, above all the U.S. Wages and living standards are much lower in Brazil than in the U.S., and conditions are much harsher.
As a result, the Brazilian class struggle is more intense than the U.S. class struggle, and the political consciousness of Brazilian workers is higher than that of U.S. workers. Brazilian workers have no illusion of being "middle class."
In an explosion of struggle from the late 1970s through the 1980s, Brazilian workers confronted their bosses, built the United Workers Central (CUT), gathered the oppressed around them, launched the PT as a mass labor party, and toppled the military dictatorship.
The PT lost momentum and shifted to the right in the 1990s, but it is still the mass party of the Brazilian working class and its politically active vanguard. Closely tied to the Brazilian unions, it is a labor party, a real organization, rather than an electoral apparatus like the European social democratic parties.
Brazil and the U.S.
The U.S. hasn't seen class struggle as intense as Brazil's since the 1930s and the period immediately after World War II. But we'll see such struggle and more in the future.
Right now, the U.S. economy is nearing the end of the expansion phase of the business cycle. Wages are rising, and governments at all levels have surpluses and are talking about restoring previous cuts.
But a recession is coming. Each of the last three recessions set back the working class more than the previous recession. The coming recession is likely to be worse yet, as the bosses ratchet down wages and cut government programs to try to maintain their profits.
Workers are angry now and beginning to fight back. The economic downturn may intimidate them at first. But as they regain their confidence, they'll fight back with more determination than ever.
The next round of class struggle in the U.S. may or may not reach the level of the Brazilian struggle. But there'll be a round after that, and another after that, so long as capitalism continues to exist in this country.
In a general sense, Brazil shows us our future of escalating class struggle. It also shows us a likely scenario for the development of that struggle: an explosion of workplace confrontations, a resurgence of the unions, a gathering of all struggles around the working class, and the establishment of a mass workers' party.
Lessons of the PT Experience
The two articles in the Spring 2000 Labor Standard interpreted the Brazilian experience according to the views of Socialist Democracy (in Brazilian Portuguese, Democracia Socialista, or DS; which is the PT current associated with the Fourth International).
The DS sees the Rio Grande do Sul (RS) state government as a popular-democratic "dual power" confronting the capitalist power of the Brazilian federal government and showing the way to the socialist transformation of Brazil. They are miffed that the rest of the Brazilian left, inside and outside the PT, criticizes the RS government for "kissing the hand" of the capitalists and dismisses the DS strategy as "evolutionary socialism."
I think this criticism is largely correct. The RS government calls itself the Popular Front. As befits its name, it is a coalition of workers' and bosses' parties. It operates within the limits set by the neoliberal policies of the Brazilian federal government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the International Monetary Fund (IMF). To stay within these limits, it must sacrifice the workers' interests, as it did in spring 2000 when it broke the RS teachers' strike.
The RS Participatory Budget is a valuable experience in local self-government, but it cannot evolve into workers' power on a national scale. Socialism will come to Brazil through a different process: a mass upsurge that paralyzes the government and splits the military, allowing the working class to impose its rule throughout the country.
Most of the PT left, not just DS, accepts popular-front coalitions with capitalist parties as a necessary part of political life. The PT regularly forms such coalitions at the local, state, and federal level. As we'll see by looking more closely at the PT Congress and the RS Popular Front government, these coalitions - and their acceptance by the PT left - have helped tame the PT and dissipate the working-class energy with which it was launched.
A contemporary U.S. equivalent of the Brazilian popular fronts would be if a labor party backed by the AFL-CIO were to attempt a "fusion slate" with some "progressive" Democrats to try to win office. The PT experience has much to teach about any such attempt.
The November 1999 PT Congress
As the Estima-Ramos article explained, seven slates competed at the November 1999 PT Congress. Their relative strength was shown by the votes they received in the election for the National Directorate (DN). Listed in descending vote order, the five main slates were:
In previous PT congresses, the Left Articulation and DS had been together in a united left slate. In this Congress, DS broke away to promote its vision and strategy for socialism, as exemplified by the RS Popular Front government.
The Congress took up five key questions, as it moved through its agenda.
1. Socialism. Before the Congress, Radical Democracy provocatively proposed removing all references to socialism from the PT program. The references had become purely formal, similar to Clause IV of the Constitution of the British Labour Party, but their existence was symbolically significant to both the left and the right.
Our Time proposed an amendment based on its own view of socialism:
Our democratic and popular program must be guided by a conception of socialism that represents the control, by the organized masses, of society's economic and political management...
This means the creation of institutions that occupy the place taken by the capitalist market and the bourgeois state. Those institutions must be based on the free association of workers, on the autonomous, democratic and sovereign activity of the population...
Our experience in the last few years is extremely useful in making this program concrete. We have seen advances in popular participation in many city halls, specially in Porto Alegre, capital of Rio Grande do Sul state. It has been shown that this form of treating the state is democratic and efficient.
PT President Zé Dirceu rejected the amendment. As Carlos Henrique Arabe put it in another International Viewpoint article: "The [leadership] group claimed that reaffirming the party's previous resolutions was sufficient. They also argued that the amendment overestimated the strategic value of popular participation experiences, especially the Participatory Budget in Rio Grande do Sul."
The Left Articulation and the rest of the left agreed: "Other 'left' currents claimed that the [Our Time] amendment proposed a concept of attaining socialism through a continuous, evolutionary process, putting aside the fight for a revolutionary rupture."
The amendment was defeated, and the previous resolutions with their abstract references to socialism were affirmed.
The leadership's arguments were disingenuous, since their "Program of the Democratic Revolution," from which their slate took its name and which they pushed through the Congress, was a program of regulated capitalism, not socialism, achieved through a purely electoral strategy, including alliances with capitalist parties.
The PT left's criticism of the Our Time amendment was, in my view, correct. But their support for the leadership's maneuver to defeat the amendment by reaffirming past positions did nothing to slow the PT's shift to the right.
2. Neoliberalism. The Cardoso government has implemented a neoliberal policy of opening Brazil to unrestricted trade and investment by the U.S. and the other big capitalist powers, diverting export earnings to pay the foreign debt, privatizing government-owned enterprises and public services, reducing social spending, eliminating laws and regulations beneficial to workers, and imposing laws and regulations strengthening corporate power.
The PT left called for suspending payments on the national debt, renationalizing the privatized public enterprises and services, and generally resisting and rolling back the neoliberal policies. The PT leadership, assisted by the center and right, diverted this into a policy of "renegotiating" the debt and "auditing" the privatizations, neither of which clearly challenged the government policy.
The leadership scored in the debate by pointing out that the PT government of Olívio Dutra in Rio Grande do Sul, in which both DS and the Left Articulation participate, had decided not to suspend debt payments or to renationalize privatized enterprises and services. This despite the noisy declaration by Governor Itamar Franco of Minas Gerais, a member of Cardoso's party, of a 90-day moratorium on the state's debt to the federal government.
How could the left insist that the PT demand of the federal government what the left refused to do where they had power?
3. "Fora FHC e o FMI!" The period leading up to the Congress had seen mass protests by the Landless Movement (MST, the militant movement of poor peasants and agricultural workers), the CUT, and local and state PT organizations around the slogan "Fora FHC e o FMI!" - "Out with Cardoso and the International Monetary Fund!" Nearly all the PT state meetings in the pre-Congress period had endorsed the slogan and campaign..
The PT leadership, assisted by the center and right, prevented the Congress from endorsing the campaign. They argued that the PT had allies who didn't support the campaign and that the PT's enemies would accuse the party of violating democracy and inciting violence by trying to reverse the results of democratic elections through street action.
The leadership pointed out that DS and the Left Articulation participated in the RS Popular Front government with the most important of these allies, the Democratic Labor Party (PDT). The RS government refused to confront Cardoso and the IMF even as much as Franco and the Minas Gerais government had done. The DS strategy centered on generalizing the participatory democracy aspect of the RS government, not confronting the federal government and U.S. imperialism.
Again, how could the left demand at the national level what they declined to do at the state level?
4. Alliances. The Estima-Ramos article summarized the policy on alliances adopted by the Congress as: "The approved text defines the PT's 'arc of alliances' as the PDT, PSB, PCdoB, PC, and sectors of the PMDB opposed to the Cardoso government...As far as a possible alliance with the PPS is concerned, the document makes any alliance conditional on 'programmatic agreements and opposition to Cardoso and to neoliberalism.' The document also opens the door to other possible alliances, as long as these are endorsed by the PT's regional leadership bodies."
The PT left didn't object to the inclusion of the PDT or the smaller left parties: the Brazilian Socialist Party (PSB), the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), and the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). But they wanted to exclude the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) and the Socialist People's Party (PPS), since they are part of the Cardoso government.
The Estima-Ramos article described their failed attempt: "The Congress rejected an amendment restricting alliances to only those parties which nationally define themselves as being in opposition to Cardoso and to neoliberalism."
A key contradiction in the position of most of the PT left was its desire to include the PDT but to exclude the PMDB and the PPS. The Estima-Ramos article described the PDT as "the inheritor of the Brazilian left-populist tradition, led by Joăo Goulart, who was overthrown by the military coup of 1964."
The PDT is not the inheritor of the Brazilian left-populist tradition, but rather the inheritor of the Brazilian bourgeois-nationalist tradition. Its founding father in a political sense was Getúlio Vargas, the leader of the 1930 nationalist revolution. Vargas was Brazil's equivalent of Mexico's Lázaro Cárdenas and Argentina's Juan Domingo Perón.
The PDT presents its own history as a political continuity from Vargas to Goulart to its current leader Leonel Brizola. Vargas and Goulart were presidents of national capitalist governments. The PDT's program and policies today are reform capitalist, very much along the lines of Mexico's Democratic Revolutionary Party (PRD).
The only possibly confusing element in assessing the PDT's class character is that it is a member of the Socialist International, which includes reformist workers' parties. But the PRD is also a member of the Socialist International. The PDT is essentially what the PRD would be if a mass labor party deprived it of most of its working-class base.
Once the PT left had opened the door to the PDT, it could hardly close it on dissident members of the governing parties.
5. Structure and leadership. The PT is more democratic than most, perhaps all national/international unions in the U.S. and more democratic than the Labor Party in the U.S. Tendencies in the PT could campaign for their positions in the pre-Congress period and were elected as delegates to the Congress and to the National Directorate (DN) based on the proportions their slates won in votes.
The PT is much less democratic than it was, however, and the Congress furthered the process of its bureaucratization. The leadership got everything it wanted from the Congress, including the right to alter the party statutes.
As the Estima-Ramos article explained: "Squeezed by lack of time, mainly because a whole series of parallel meetings prevented the Congress sessions from starting on time, the discussion of new statutes for the PT ended up being referred back to the next meeting of the National Directorate, with two important caveats. (1) On the issue of finances, a National Conference should be held. (2) On all questions involving a change in statutes - including that of finances - at least 60 percent of the DN would have to vote in favor."."
A 60 percent majority should be no problem for the leadership, since the three center-right tendencies Democratic Revolution, PT Movement, and Radical Democracy have 65 percent of the votes. With the Congress behind them, they can set whatever policy they want.
One curious note was that Lula never spoke during the Congress. Not a word. This led to speculation that he was unhappy with some of the positions imposed by Dirceu and the PT apparatus or perhaps just with Dirceu's prominence. Lula's star faded after his defeat in the October 1998 presidential election, his third defeat in a decade.
The Role of Popular Front
The classic popular front was the Spanish Popular Front of the 1930s, the coalition of Stalinist, socialist, anarchist, and minor capitalist parties which played a key role in disorienting the workers and defeating the revolution. Analyzing the Spanish Popular Front, Leon Trotsky wrote:
Politically most striking is the fact that the Spanish Popular Front lacked in reality even a parallelogram of forces [workers' and capitalist parties pushing in different directions]. The bourgeoisie's place was occupied by its shadow. Through the medium of the Stalinists, Socialists, and Anarchists, the Spanish bourgeoisie subordinated the proletariat to itself without even bothering to participate in the Popular Front...
That is why only insignificant debris from the possessing classes remained in the republican camp: Messrs. Azańa, Companys, and the like - political attorneys of the bourgeoisie but not the bourgeoisie itself. Having staked everything on a military dictatorship, the possessing classes were able, at the same time, to make use of the political representatives of yesterday in order to paralyze, disorganize, and afterward strangle the socialist movement of the masses in "republican" territory.
Without in the slightest degree representing the Spanish bourgeoisie, the left republicans still less represented the workers and peasants. They represented no one but themselves. Thanks, however, to their allies - the Socialists, Stalinists, and Anarchists - these political phantoms played the decisive role in the revolution. How? Very simply. By incarnating the principles of the "democratic revolution," that is, the inviolability of private property. (Trotsky, "The Lessons of Spain: The Last Warning," 1937)
Brazil is not in a revolutionary situation, and the Brazilian capitalists relinquished their military dictatorship twenty years ago, although they may revert to it in the future. But the Brazilian capitalists make use of popular fronts at all levels to ensnare the PT and subordinate the working class to their interests.
In many of these popular fronts, the PDT, a political representative of yesterday, is their "shadow," acting as their political attorney, "incarnating the principles of the 'democratic revolution,' that is, the inviolability of private property," and paralyzing and disorganizing the workers' movement.
At the PT Congress, the leadership repeatedly rationalized their unwillingness to confront the Cardoso government by saying: "Our allies won't go along." They rationalized the reform-capitalist platform of the Popular Front of Brazil (FPdoB) in the 1998 elections with the same refrain. Their timidity cost the PT the presidential and most other top-office elections, as many workers, seeing little reason to vote, stayed home. The initiative in the Brazilian class struggle has passed to the more militant CUT and MST.
The RS Popular Front
In Rio Grande do Sul, the PT campaigned on a more militant basis. PT gubernatorial candidate Olívio Dutra and vice-gubernatorial candidate Miguel Rosseto - a DS leader - denounced the policies of the incumbent governor Antônio Britto privatizing the telephone and electricity companies, cutting health services, allowing unemployment to rise sharply, and offering extravagant concessions to attract investment. Their militant campaigning succeeded: RS is the only large Brazilian state in which the PT heads the government.
The Dutra-Rosseto campaign was a popular front in two senses. It called itself the Popular Front, signaling its desire for an alliance of "all democratic forces," including the liberal capitalists. And it reached an agreement with the national-capitalist PDT to support Dutra and Rosseto in the second (runoff) round of the elections and to join the government.
The election was very close. Dutra and Rosseto won with a tiny margin - 50.78 percent to 49.22 percent - and only because the PDT supported them. The Popular Front elected 13 deputies to the RS State Assembly and the PDT 7, far fewer than the 35 deputies elected by the "RS Winner" slate of Britto and Cardoso.
The RS Popular Front hasn't been able to implement much of its program. It accepts the capitalist framework that laws must be obeyed, private property safeguarded, contracts honored, and debts repaid. Accepting that framework, it hasn't been able to - in fact, hasnn't tried to - declare a debt moratorium, reverse the privatizations, significantly expand health, education and other public services, provide large-scale job relief through public works, raise workerss' wages, or take back the concessions made to the capitalists.
The Arabe article defended the limited achievements of the RS government by referring to "the difficulties facing the left government" and pleading, "It is one thing to assemble a wide social base at election time. It is more difficult to actually govern." It asserted, "Our 'globally positive' judgment on the Dutra administration contrasts sharply with the record of PT administrations elsewhere in Brazil." But the only achievement the article cited was the RS Participatory Budget, to which we will return below.
The RS Teachers Strike
The contradictions of the RS Popular Front government came to a head during the March-April 2000 RS teachers' strike. A January 2000 International Viewpoint article by Adam Novak called "One Year of 'Democratic and Popular' Government in Rio Grande do Sul State," for which the Arabe article was an introduction, explained the DS view of the impending confrontation between the Popular Front government and the teachers:
"Contradictions between the party, the movement, and the government are normal, given the conditions we find ourselves in," argues Ubiratan de Souza, a member of the DS current [and an official of the RS Budget and Finance Department]. "We have reduced the massive deficit. But this made it impossible to increase salaries. The government needs the firmness to say clearly to the trade unions, 'Yes, we will increase salaries, but we must first gain effective control over the state, and that means reducing the deficit to manageable levels.'"
On March 2, 2000 an assembly of 15,000 teachers and other education workers belonging to the RS State Union of Teachers (CPERS) voted to strike by a four-to-one margin. After a year's delay, the government had offered a 10 percent wage increase, tiny compared with the 190 percent increase needed to bring them up to the scale proposed by Secretary of Education Lúcia Camini, when he was president of the CPERS under the Britto government.
Leading DS members of the CPERS argued against striking, saying that the government had no money to pay the increase and that the strike would hurt the government. They were almost completely isolated in the union, since the Trade-Union Articulation, the union caucus associated with the PT Articulation tendency, strongly supported the strike. DS, the left Articulation, and the PT right maintained tighter control of the party, disciplining PT deputy Luciana Genro for opposing the government's strike-breaking in the State Assembly.
The strike lasted more than a month, as the Popular Front government refused to budge. The government's intransigence eventually persuaded the Trade-Union Articulation and most other left activists that the only way they could win would be to spread the strike and bring down the Popular Front government. Unwilling to do this, they decided to end the strike.
The last assembly of the strike drew 5,000 teachers, down from 15,000, a symptom of the demoralization of the ranks caused by "their" government's refusal to give what its leaders had demanded of the Britto government before they took office. The assembly was sharply divided. On a close voice vote, the presidium declared the strike ended. When they refused to take an actual count, hundreds of teachers stormed the stage. But the union was too divided to continue fighting. The strike had been defeated.
The RS Participatory Budget
DS sees the Participatory Budget as the crowning achievement of the RS Popular Front and justification for the compromises it has made, including breaking the RS teachers' strike. As the Novak article explained:
These policies are underpinned and reinforced by the expansion of the participatory budget from Porto Alegre [the RS capital, where the PT has headed the municipal government since 1989] and the other municipal PT strongholds to the state administration. The process has been surprisingly successful, and is already transforming the relationship between the state and society.
The participatory budget process is based on open public meetings at the local level. These establish local priorities for government spending, and elect delegates to a regional level, which discusses in greater detail. State officials provide assistance and information, but have no vote in the assembly, which approves and supervises implementation of the final budget...
But the most lasting contribution of the PT project in Rio Grande may prove to be its reappropriation of democracy as a fundamentally progressive concept. According to Ubiratan de Souza, "The participatory budget combines direct democracy with representative democracy - which is one of humanityy's greatest conquests, and which should be preserved and developed. As we strive to deepen the democracy of human society, representative democracy is necessary, but insufficient. It is more important than ever before that we combine it with a wide variety of forms of direct democracy, where the citizen can not only participate in public administration, but also control the state. The participatory budget in Porto Alegre and the process of implementing a participatory budget at the level of Rio Grande do Sul state are concrete examples of direct democracy."
The RS Participatory Budget is undoubtedly an important learning experience for the workers and others who participate in the process. It undoubtedly contributes to the participants' understanding of economic and political questions and their desire for more control over the decisions that affect their lives.
However, to say that the Participatory Budget "is already transforming the relationship between the state and society" or that it is a form of direct democracy "where the citizen can not only participate in public administration, but also control the state" exaggerates its role to the point of falsehood.
The Participatory Budget and Working-Class Power
The Participatory Budget affects only marginal decisions. Since the Popular Front government accepts - in its view, has to accept - the neoliberal framework, very little remains over which it has discretion. In the case of the RS teachers, the Participatory Budget delegates might be able to decide whether to cut teachers' real wages 25, 30, or 35 percent, with corresponding adjustments elsewhere. But they couldn't decide to give teachers a raise, since the overall budget didn't permit it.
From a Marxist theoretical standpoint, this is hardly surprising. In a capitalist democracy, "citizens" supposedly have equal rights and an equal voice in government decisions, whether they are rich or poor, white or Black, male or female. But real power is in the hands of the capitalist ruling class and its political, bureaucratic, and military representatives. In semicolonial countries like Brazil, real power is even further removed, since the national ruling class reports to the ruling classes of the major imperialist powers, first of all the U.S.
For "citizens" really to control the state, two things must happen. First, the "citizens" must differentiate themselves according to class. Specifically, the working class must organize itself independently of and against the capitalist class, and it must draw behind it the poor, the oppressed, and the lower strata of the middle class (small farmers, artisans, shopkeepers, students, professionals).
Second, the working class and its allies must overthrow the power of the capitalist ruling class and impose their own class rule. In Brazil, this would mean replacing the capitalist government at all levels - federal, state, and local - with a workersrs' government, expropriating the Brazilian and foreign capitalists, and working to spread the revolution to the rest of Latin America and the world.
The Brazilian workers' government might borrow from the experience of the RS Participatory Budget, but it would be separated from it by a crucial event: the Brazilian socialist revolution.
The RS Participatory Budget is not a working-class "dual power" challenging the capitalist power of the central government. It is not a worker's council or soviet. Rather, it is a participatory variant of capitalist democracy, much like existing New England town meetings or site-based school management in the U.S.
The DS view of the Participatory Budget is a classic "centrist" - hybrid revolutionary and reformist - attempt to combine the Marxist understanding of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" over capital, that is, workers' democracy, with the dictatorship of capital over the workers, that is, bourgeois democracy. Its peculiarity is the importance it attaches to direct, rather than representative democracy.
From this standpoint, the decisions of the RS Popular Front are much more problematic. Which is more important for raising workers' consciousness and organization to the point where the working class can take power: the Participatory Budget, whose conclusion is to break the RS teachers' strike, or the teachers' strike itself?
Lessons for the U.S.
For workers and youth in the U.S. today, the most important lesson of the Brazilian experience is that the working class, pressed hard enough, can fight back and rise to the level of consciousness and organization necessary to replace capitalism with socialism.
The Brazilian working class hasn't overthrown capitalism yet, but its explosive development from the late 1970s through the 1980s shows that it has the capacity to do so. And if the Brazilian working class has that capacity, so does the U.S. working class. Or more precisely, so does the international working class, since U.S. workers will need much more help to bring down our immensely rich and nuclear-armed capitalists than Brazilian workers will need to bring down their capitalists.
The next most important lesson is the form the Brazilian upsurge took: a CIO-type union upsurge drawing in all the struggles of the exploited and the oppressed and generalizing itself in the formation of a mass workers' party. That could well be the form a U.S. upsurge takes, when economic and political developments propel the working class into action.
This article has focused on another lesson of the Brazilian experience: the contradictions a working-class party creates for itself when it allies, or attempts to ally, with capitalist parties and accepts the framework of capitalist economics and politics. The PT Congress showed these contradictions at the national level, and the RS Popular Front shows them at the state level.
By ameliorating neoliberalism with the Participatory Budget, the RS Popular Front has done better than any other Brazilian state government. But the overall balance for the PT, in my view, is negative. PT participation, especially DS and Left Articulation participation, in the RS Popular Front has set back, rather than advanced, the struggle for a socialist Brazil.
Defenders of the RS Popular Front would argue that the PT could not have established the RS Participatory Budget without the governorship, it could not have won the governorship without PDT support, and it could not have gotten PDT support without promising to stay within the neoliberal framework.
All that is undoubtedly true, for the moment. But Marxists need to look beyond the moment. By rejecting the neoliberal framework and saying it would prioritize the demands of workers over the demands of Cardoso and the IMF, the PT might well have lost the RS gubernatorial election. But through strikes, occupations, and demonstrations, it could have fought for open books and workers' control - the goals of the Participatory Budget - and helped prepare the workers for the real struggle for power.
At some point, the workers' movement in the U.S. will face choices like this. Should the Labor Party form electoral coalitions with "progressive" Democrats? Should Labor Party governments enforce austerity budgets, even if that means breaking strikes? The answers may seem simple now. But they won't seem so simple when events pose the questions. We need to learn from those who are having to answer the questions now.