Socialist Resistance

An archive of socialistresistance.org, 2002–2022

Resistance grows in Brazil: "Now is struggle" (continued)

Socialist Resistance no8  |  page 22

This is scanned newsprint, not web text. The original PDFs carried no text layer at all, so every word here was read off the page by OCR. Expect dropped opening letters, run-together words and wrong characters. There was no contents page to cut the paper up by, so the articles were found from the size of their headlines: a headline may carry its kicker, and where an article ran beside a boxed panel a few lines of the neighbour can appear. The scanned issue is the authority; this text is here so the words can be found at all.

FE "Now is Lula's pension reforms Some of the 30,000 public sector workers who demonstrated in Brazilia at the beginning of June against

....

CSPB CON The campaigners' slogan 'Agora e Luta' (now is struggle) is a play on Lula's election slogan 'Agora e Lula' (now is Lula).

ERVIDORES sharp reduction in interest rates and the budget surplus, a big increase in social spending to stimulate growth and employment, and a refusal to adhere to secret agreements with the IMF

The manifesto was signed not only by the best-known economists on the left of the party (Plinio de Arruda Sampaio and Cesar Benjamin of the Popular Consultation, Joao Machado of DS), but also by some of those most centrally involved in drawing up the PT's economic programme at the beginning of Lula's election campaign (Luis Gonzaga Belluzo and Ricardo Carneiro). M ost importantly, the opposition

within the trade union movement began to crystallise. At the 8th Congress of the CUT in the first week of June, even the majority current, called Articulation and linked to the majority current of the same name in the PT, adopted a position that demands significant changes to the government's pension reform bill.

It didn't go as far as the main left position, put forward jointly by the delegates supporting DS, another left current in the PT called the Marxist Tendency and the Communist Party of Brazil (PcdoB - the old maoist party which supports the PT electorally and has a significant base of its own). But it was possible to get the CUT majority to back the demonstration called for the following week by the Teachers' Union, albeit in vacillating fashion.

Clearly there is an important debate on tactics going on. Some on the left, including the United Socialist Workers' Party (PSTUof Morenist origins - which left the PT many years ago and apparently the MES and CST (from the same tradition, but which for the time being are still inside the PT) favour allout confrontation.

Others, like DS, are concerned to win over as many as possible among those PT members and supporters who still see this as 'their government, but want it to do what it promised to do. The coming months will show which is most effective