The current crisis in Brazil's Workers Party (PT) - with the threat of expulsion hanging over five of the party's most outspoken members of parliament (see box) - makes it all the more important for us to understand how Latin America's most important left party has developed. In our last issue STUART PIPER looked at how the PT emerged as a broad, anticapitalist party, several hundred thousand strong, with a vocal if imprecise commitment to socialism and an unusually democratic internal structure. Here he concludes his report. M any of the PT's most positive
features were achieved by the untiring and loyal efforts of organised revolutionary marxists within it, especially those in the Socialist Democracy tendency.
The last article started to examine how the PT's central leadership gradually loosened its ties with this political and organisational framework, operating increasingly as an autonomous layer, relating to its supporters and society at large through a variety of elected officers and through the media, with little regard for the structures or decisions of the party itself.
Two main factors help to explain this evolution. One has been the Brazilian bourgeoisie's considerable ability to hang onto control of the democratic process in the face of a series of challenges; the second is the reshaping of the Brazilian working class and its mass organisations.
Back in the early eighties, for example, the recently formed PT, with industrial trade unionists like Lula at its core, was a driving force in the struggle against Brazil's military dictatorship. It launched and initially led the massive campaign for direct elections in 1983. A change of image, and a big step to the right - Lula
But when the most far-sighted sections of the Brazilian ruling class, including the hugely influential Rede Globo TV network, swapped sides overnight, the PT lost its leadership of the movement. In the end the transition to democracy became a controlled, conservative affair. The PT was forced ever more to contest on the terrain of bourgeois democratic institutions.
Something similar happened in the early nineties, when the first Brazilian government committed to a full neo-liberal programme became mired in accusations of sleaze. The PT, together with its trade union allies in the CUT, led a massive street campaign for impeachment - which they won.
But again they were unable to prevent the smarter sections of the ruling class, backed by TV Globo, from stitching together a conservative succession. This in turn cleared the way for the full neo-liberal onslaught of the rest of the 1990s.
Last year's election of Lula to the presidency had some of the same characteristics. There was a last hour avalanche of support from broad swathes of the Brazilian bourgeoisie, again aided and abetted by TV Globo, as they realized their own preferred candidate had no chance of winning. Along with the World Bank, the IMF and the Treasury Department, they realised their most intelligent option was not to oppose the new PT government, but to hug it to death.
This has been a constant tension in the PT's history - between its own original class project, for working-class democracy and socialist transformation, and the framework of bourgeois democracy. In the end, the latter has always won. But throughout its first decade the PT, pushed by its left wing and the big social movements, developed several ways of ensuring that its own project continued to make its mark on the Brazilian political scene.
One - which ironically is now being used to justify the threats against Heloisa and the others - was to insist that the PT's elected representatives be under party discipline. Several of the PT's first members of congress were expelled or forced to resign after doing deals with the right or moving away from the PT's radical policies.
Another was to push for independent, massive and militant election campaigns. The high point was 1989. Lula, shirt sleeves rolled up and beard unkempt as he took part in huge rallies up and down the coun try, got 30 million votes and came within a whisper of winning the presidency.
t was a world away from the manicured, backlit, besuited images of Lula
I that dominated last year's campaign. Indeed in 1989, Lula's TV campaign was co-ordinated not by the expensive advertising agencies employed in 2002, but by an alternative production house serving the Sao Paulo trade unions - Workers' TV. It resulted in some of the funniest, most creative, and effective, alternative television ever seen.
But the most ambitious attempt to leave a working-class imprint on the bourgeois democratic process came with the Participatory Budget (PB) and other forms of participatory democracy implemented by PT local administrations
The participatory budget has meant very different things in different places. And these differences have reflected different strategic conceptions within the PT.
In some cities, PT moderates have turned it into little more than a process of public consultation. Geographically restricted, with only advisory powers over a small portion of the public purse, it's the kind of inoffensive de-centralisation that even the new wave of neoliberal "communitarians" like to promote.
But in the hands of left PT administrations like that in Porto Alegre, where DS has a decisive influence, and where the movement of neighbourhood committees has a long and combative history, the PB is very different.
It has built genuinely independent centres of popular power in the communities, which have sovereign decision-making powers over the city council's budget, and which therefore exercise genuine democratic control over an albeit limited part of the bourgeois state.
Imperfect and contradictory as it certainly is, this has a potentially transitional dynamic. It shows ordinary citizens the limitations of operating within the existing institutions, while illustrating more clearly than anything else we've seen for decades what a fully-fledged socialist democracy might look like.
The PB was the fullest expression of the "Pincer Strategy" developed by DS at the end of the 1980s. The idea was to work both inside the institutions of bourgeois democracy, through winning elected office and so forth, and outside, mobilising the mass movement. The two areas of activity would then converge to produce a "democratic rupture", and the beginnings of a transition to socialism.
fortunately, deep changes in cer looking increasingly lopsided The second half of the eighties saw the trade unions on the defensive. Rising unemployment and run-away inflation sapped confidence.
In the nineties full-scale neo-liberal restructuring reshaped the Brazilian working class. Bastions of industrial militancy, like the ring of big car plants around Sao Paulo, either closed or were relocated to greenfield, non-union sites. Workforces were slashed from around 30,000 to a tenth that size. The big state-owned industries were privatised.
The class struggle unions in the CUT lost much of their strength. Almost the only sig. nificant workplace struggles in recent years have come from public sector unions like civil servants and teachers.
At the same time, the other main pillar of the PT, the radicalised Christian community organisations, also went into sharp decline Poor urban neighbourhoods were increas• ingly pulverised by drugs, gang warfare and police brutality.
The only social movement still engaging in regular and militant mass action, the Landless Workers Movement (MST), has a very different relationship with the PT Although it broadly supports the party, and informally sponsors a handful of PT members of congress, its closely-knit core lead. ership has always maintained a clear organisational and political separation.
Il these changes have taken a A heavy toll on the PT itself
Formally, the party retained its radical socialist programme and its internal democracy. It has also hung onto the allegiance of large sections of the working class and urban poor, now joined by a growing proportion of rural workers and poor peasants.
But in much of the country the active life
of the party has been hollowed out. Branches have long since ceased to function. Many, perhaps most, party activists now base their activity around the offices of PT elected representatives, whether at local
or national government level. The majority
of the PT leadership has often encouragec this process, as a way of isolating the left.
The introduction in 2000 of direct elec tions for the PT's own leadership, with no collective discussion and the dubious
bussing in of large numbers of completely inactive "members", seemed to set the seal
on this process
And yet even so the far left - represented
by former Porto Alegre mayor, Raul Pont (of
DS), came second with 17% of the vote,
while the other main left candidate got
15%, against 55% for Lula's current chief of
staff, Jose Dirceu.
page 21 of the scan
Rance June 2003 21 International resistance