Sue Branford and Bernardo Kuchinski with Hilary Wainwright, Politics Transformed: Lula and the Workers Party in Brazil, Latin America Bureau, London, 2003. ISBN | 899365 61 3 Price £6.99 Reviewed by Andrew Kennedy REMEMBER the election of Lula? Luis Inacio da Silva and his Brazilian Workers' Party (PT) government took office on January 1. Would the new administration go the route of the bankers or that of the toiling majority? Would they look to Davos or Porto Alegre?
Initial evidence suggests the former. Though alarmed at the prospect of Lula's election last year, the financial markets now appear to be extremely satisfied. Brazil is paying its debts. IMF spokesperson recently commented: "It is clear that this government will not default -ever". (1)
On the other hand, the government has made a modest start to its promised "Zero Hunger" campaign, distributing an electronic "food card" for basic items among the poor of the north-easter region. Millions of squatters have also been promised a formal title to their homes.
To mark Lula's election, Sue Branford, a respected journalist, and Bernardo Kuchinski, now PT minister for the media, have written a useful and affordable little book optimistically entitled Politics Transformed.
It is clear that they think Brazilian politics has already been transformed to some extent, through the PT's break with old-style clientelism in the municipalities it administers, through its experiments with participatory budgets and direct democracy, and now through the potent symbolism of a forAn mer metal worker as president. The authors hope, not for the "overthrow of the state" - since, following Eric Hobsbawm, they claim that this is "no longer possible"- but for "a social revolution to end the extraordinary inequality in Brazil". PT majority leaders like Jose Dirceu. How this "social revolution" in the new sense will be possible without a social revolution in the older sense is not a question to which they offer a convinc ing answer.
Lula's inaugural speech promised gradual transformation through "an authentic social pact" between "labour and productive capital" (2) to promote growth which would then allow wealth redistribution.
And in another move reminiscent of our own dear Labour Party, especially in its Blair/Brown incarnation, the PT leadership want to grant autonomy to the Central Bank.
To be fair to them, Branford and Kuchinski are only too well aware of the international and domestic obstacles confronting any government, especially that of a Third World country, which decides to adopt a progresHere they echo the leftist language of
coming these problems. Sound familiar? Paulo Freire's ideas. sive reformist programme.
Branford here suggests implementing capital controls, and Kuchinski was evidently unhappy with the fiscal caution of the PT when I quizzed him at the London book launch in March. There is, however, a tendency in the book to put too much faith in Lula's personal qualities as a means of overWhat of mass participation and mobilisation, then? Hilary Wainwright's section on the participatory budget in Porto Alegre highlights the importance of the educationalist Involvement of the masses in direct decision-making, even within the restrictions of a municipal budget, will, it is believed, allow them to develop as ety." (3) autonomous subjects, fully involved in the process of their own liberation. More on the role of the left in the PT in these developments, especially the role played by Socialist Democracy, the Brazilian section of the Fourth International, would have been welcome here.
Freire's ideas are frequently linked within the PT to Gramsci's theories on the need for socialists to achieve 'hegemony' [a leading role, or control] in civil society. However, any hegemonic space that has been carved out will come under immense pressure as Lula's govemment goes further down the neo-liberal road.
As a leader of the Landless Workers Movement commented, concerning the appointment of Fourth Intemationalist Miguel Rossetto as agranan minister: "we prefer not to make judgments on persons or decla rations. What will allow advance will be the correlation of forces inside sociThis is a book worth buying, however, for those who want to engage in an informed way with these debates. (1) See article on indystar.com website (2),(3) See article by Joao Machado in International Viewpoint, March 2003.
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