The first eighteen months of the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) government have been a real disappointment for workers and the poor. Now some on the Brazilian left have formed a new party, the Party of Socialism and Liberty (P-SOL). Andrew Kennedy examines recent developments and assesses the prospects for the left.
The Brazilian Workers' Party, led by Luis Ignacio da Silva (Lula) came to power in January 2003 amid high hopes. But the new government swiftly showed that its central priorities were to appease the bankers and maintain financial "stability" at the expense of workers, the poor and the landless, continuing the policies of the previous government of Fernando Henrique Cardoso. It has maintained high interest rates which have attracted foreign speculators but crippled domestic growth. Unemployment grew to 12 per cent by February this year and social spending has been cut.
Key to this neo-liberal programme was the government's public sector pension reform, which increased by seven years the amount of time that civil servants have to pay into their pension funds in order to receive benefits. Private firms have been allowed to administer these funds, paving the way for wholesale privatisation. This year, Lula pushed for a tiny increase in the minimum wage from 240 to 260 reales. Allowing for inflation, this represents an increase of 1.2 per cent. Even parties supposedly to his right were arguing for a level of 275 reales. The outcome is that millions of Brazilians and their families will have to exist on the equivalent of US $83 per month.
Lula's foreign policy has been no better. He has agreed to a slightly modified version of the US-supported Free Trade Area of the Americas, leaving Hugo Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel Castro isolated among Latin American leaders in their opposition. He has backed the US intervention in Haiti with Brazilian troops and has sent soldiers to Colombia to help stabilise the situation in favour of the right-wing Uribe government.
The much-vaunted agrarian reform programme has proceeded at a snail's pace and in part only because of the pressure from the organisations of the landless, including the MST. 21,000 families have been allocated land so far, as against a promise of 230,000 in the first sixteen months. In March the MST announced a return to its traditional tactic of occupying the big estates: now 200,000 families wait for these expropriations to be legally confirmed while the government drags its feet. Real agrarian reform conflicts fundamentally with the drive of the Lula government, in alliance with the big landowners, to increase exports of cash crops such as soya and meat to countries such as China and the US. 3.5 million hectares of rain forest have fallen victim to this agricultural export policy, despite Lula's protestations of ecological good faith.
The beginning of the PT's rightward evolution can be traced back to the defeat of the Sandinistas and other anti-imperialist movements in the continent from 1989 onwards. Moreover, the trade unions and the Christian base communities of the poor which had been the bedrock of the PT in the early eighties were weakened during the nineties by the effects of savage neo-liberal policies in the urban and industrial centres. With the decline in grassroots activity, bureaucratisation started to become a problem. It is true that the imaginative strategy of the participatory budget helped the PT, including its left, to regain the initiative at municipal level. The PT became associated through the World Social Forums in Porto Alegre with a new type of popular democracy. However, the participatory budget strategy could be - and was - used to encourage people to accept that their power to change the workings of capitalism was strictly limited. Moreover, it gave another impetus to the bureaucratisation of the party as hundreds of PT members became municipal functionaries. The PT congress of 2001 affirmed the party's left traditions, but the leadership defied this congress when it took the fateful decision to fight its 2002 election campaign in alliance with bourgeois parties and on vague, minimalist slogans. Once in power, Lula and his supporters let themselves be guided by the policies of finance minister Antonio Palocci (a PT member) and the new director of the Central Bank (ex-Bank Boston) Henrique Meirelles.
The determination of the PT leaders to go down the neo-liberal road was shown by their decision in December 2003 to expel senator Heloisa Helena and deputies Luciana Genro, Joao Baba and Joao Fontes from the party for opposing the pension reforms, in spite of a major campaign including an international petition signed by Noam Chomsky, among others. Heloisa Helena is a member of Democracia Socialista (DS), the Brazilian section of the Fourth International. Her expulsion was particularly significant, partly because the comrades of DS were instrumental in founding the PT and in developing the participatory budget in the south of Brazil, and partly because she is a nationally known and genuinely popular figure.
The four MPs, once expelled, put their names to a public statement calling for a new workers' party. Some historic figures in the PT, such as the sociologist Chico de Oliveira, also put their names to this statement. The new party took the name P-SOL (the Portuguese acronym incorporates "sol", which means "sun"). P-SOL has set itself the task of becoming the working-class, socialist alternative to the PT. Its first congress in June was attended by 800 comrades from 22 Brazilian states. Reportedly there was a mix of trade unionists, students, intellectuals and members of the landless movement, and women were well-represented. Admittedly the conference was not delegate-based, but the new party seems to have attracted an important section of the vanguard and has developed a certain momentum.
So will the sun of P-SOL rise and the star of the PT fade, as Luciana Genro put it at a recent meeting in London? The adherence of Heloisa Helena to P-SOL (along with her comrades from Red Liberty, a public faction of DS) may well prove key in giving the party an appeal beyond that of the existing revolutionary left. During her run-ins with the PT leadership last year the slogan "Lolo para presidente" ("Lolo for president") acquired some currency. Lolo is Heloisa's nickname and the slogan was a parody of "Lula para presidente", a slogan from the PT's election campaign in 2002.
But more important in the long term for building a mass base is 1) the new party's commitment to a democratic internal life where the rights of tendencies are respected and where individuals who are not part of any tendency can feel at home; 2) its commitment to fighting for clear anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist demands, whilst avoiding ultra-left purism. Many of these demands are transitional: in other words, they start from today's consciousness of what needs to be done, but would, if adopted by a mass movement, create a dynamic which would potentially be revolutionary. Demands include: no payment of the external debt - break with the IMF; redirection of public funds to health, education and infrastructure; nationalisation of big firms; reduction of the working week to 40 hours with no loss of pay; index-linking of salaries to inflation; support for occupations by the landless; imprisonment for landowners who employ armed thugs; solidarity with the people of Venezuela against US imperialism.
The new party thus represents a wish to return to the original character of the PT - a broad, democratic and militant anti-capitalist party, within which revolutionaries can organise - with a sharply clarified programme. Whether in practice the new formation can implant itself in the trade unions, the landless movement and the organisations of the poor remains to be seen. The strikes of public sector workers against the government's pension reforms last year represented the beginning of a rupture between the PT and part of its base which can perhaps be positively exploited. However, the immediate test for P-SOL is whether it can obtain the 440,000 signatures necessary to register as a legal party and stand in elections.
At the same time, many socialists have decided to stay in the PT. This includes the majority of Democracia Socialista, which decided at its November congress - that is, before the expulsions - to fight to win the party's rank and file, including trade unionists, to a left opposition to the government. However, the decision of DS and other socialists, such as Left Articulation, to maintain a presence in the Lula administration (the minister of agrarian reform, Miguel Rosseto, is a DS member), can only damage the prospects for building such an opposition and will not be understood by the working-class movement, either in Brazil or internationally. A positive exit strategy from the government is now needed, but it has to be said that the signs are not promising. Shamefully, only five left PT deputies voted against the government's minimum wage proposals (out of an initial 21 who promised to oppose it), and most of the PT parliamentary left backed the government in a recent corruption scandal by refusing to vote for an enquiry.
By June this year, according to James Petras, support for Lula's policies was down to one-third of the Brazilian population. But this will not automatically translate into support for the left, which must act quickly if it is to combat the spread of cynicism among the PT's supporters and ex-supporters. Whatever tactics are chosen, it will be important to maintain and build links between P-SOL and the remaining principled elements of the PT left, particularly when it comes to unity in action against future government offensives, such as Lula's plans to limit the right to strike. Inside or outside the PT, the priority must be to construct a fighting socialist alternative to Lula.
See also documents, articles and links available at www.alencontre.org (French-language site) and www.marxsite.com (mainly English-language). P-SOL's website, in Portuguese, is at www.psol.org.br On Lula's policies, see James Petras, "Year Two: Deepening and Extending Neo-Liberalism" at www.rebelion.org
Andrew Kennedy was one of the co-ordinators of the international petition against the expulsions of Heloisa Helena and her comrades from the PT last year.