Date: Thu, 7 Mar 1996 18:37:53 -0700 (MST)
From: Ryan Daum <rdaum-AT-gpu.srv.ualberta.ca>
Subject: FWD: (int.viewpoint) Brazil/Strategic Perspectives for the PT (fwd)



I'm just curious what people have to say about this brief analysis by a 
member of the left current of the Brazilian Worker's Party.  

In solidarity,
	Ryan
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Brazil
Strategic perspectives for the Workers Party (PT)
by Joaquim Soriano

Note about the author
Joaquim Soriano is one of the leaders of Socialist Democracy (DS), an tendency
within the Brazilian Workers' Party (PT). With 46% of delegate votes, he was
almost elected as General Secretary of the PT at a National Meeting in August
1995. The strength of the DS and the broader Left Slate which nominated Soriano
is one of the main issues in the ongoing debate within the PT, following its
defeat in the 1994 presidential elections. Up until just six months before the
elections, opinion polls had given PT candidate "Lula" a massive lead over all
other candidates, leading to a sense of misplaced triumphalism amongst many PT
members. But Lula was defeated at the polls by Marxist intellectual turned
governmental economic strategist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.


START
As we enter a new historic era the moving tides of this passage engulf Brazilian
society and redefine its place in the still incipient new world order. [1] As a
part of this re-organization we've seen an important shift within the Brazilian
bourgeoisie, not merely in response to the international recomposition, but the
result of a long-running political dispute - a crisis of leadership - which
lasted from the end of the military dictatorship through to the government of
Itamar Franco.[2] Now this situation has been overcome with the achievement of a
new hegemony within the ruling class. After several years of challenging for a
democratic and popular solution to the national crisis, we suffered an important
defeat in 1994. The bourgeoisie succeeded in creating more favourable
circumstances for imposing its project of capitalist reorganisation, of
destroying the nation and recolonising the country. We now face a right-wing
government which seeks to transform the electoral alliance of conservative
forces into an organic power block capable of pushing through a complete reform
of the Brazilian state. This conservative alliance around the PSDB [3] 
and the PFL [4] today unites almost the entire ruling class. 

The government led by Fernando Henrique Cardoso represents the re-articulation
of a strategic bourgeois nucleus much more in line with the imperialist
decision-making centres than the military dictatorship, and indicates an
unprecedented internationalisation of the ruling class. We have once again to
accumulate forces, gather allies, reorganise strategic references, mark out the
political and ideological terrain which will allow us to demonstrate to the
majority of the population the link between their falling living standards and
these neoliberal policies. All these are conditions for us to be able to take up
once again the struggle for power in Brazil.

Structural instability of neoliberalism
In many dependent countries the state played the part of a partial counterweight
to the logic of the world market, permitting some limited autonomy for national
decision-making centres and support for national development policies.
Globalisation, deregulation, and the strengthening of market mechanisms have
unleashed a renewed colonisation of the countries on the periphery  The dynamics
affecting Brazil and the world are not merely conjunctural; they suggest a
change in the very character of the period, both nationally and internationally.
It is not only political and social movements which are being reorganized, but
the whole of society. 
In Brazil, neoliberalism has replaced the "national-developmentalism" which
shaped the country from the 1930s through to the 1980s. 

Internationally, the world moulded under the impact of the 1917 Russian
revolution and rearranged at the end of the 2nd World War has ceased to exist,
whilst capitalism is undergoing a mutation comparable with that which marked its
passage from the competitive phase of the 19th century to the monopolist phase
of theme costs on the capitalists in order to maintain the political unity of
the nation, and build up and integrate the different sectors of the domestic
market. All this is called into question by globalisation and governmental
campaigns against labour costs and the costs of the public sector. The least
internationalised sectors of the ruling classes suffer, in many countries, a
process of destabilisation, but those most penalised are the workers.

In Brazil, this crisis has been nonviolent, though with acute contradictions.
The experience in countries like Argentina and Mexico, with much more
unfavourable conditions for the left, shows that the impoverishment and
marginalisation of whole sectors and regions can lead to rebellions, as in
Chiapas, or it can trigger spontaneous explosions of popular revolt, as in
Santiago del Estero in Argentina.

In Brazil, "adjustment" did not assume the brutally deindustrialising form it
did in Argentina, nor the degree of anti-national pillaging which occurred in
Mexico. But the opening of Brazilian markets is already provoking the collapse
of some sectors of agriculture and industry, and may impoverish whole regions.
What's more, neoliberal stabilisation is subject to crises caused by frequent
ups and downs in the world economy. In the case of Brazil, although there is
little likelihood of an exchange crisis is the short term, this cannot be ruled
out; the continuing large current-account deficits, the growing dependency on
short-term capital, and a fresh increase in the foreign debt, could all put this
back on the agenda, threatening to cast adrift the current economic policy and
undermine the government's legitimacy. ...

Thus the neo-liberal model's internal contradictions and structural instability
create potential spaces for the left to struggle and develop alternative
proposals.

The present challenges.

The complete subordination of the media, the considerable degree of unity within
the bourgeoisie around the neoliberal proposals, and its control of the
institutional terrain (Congress, state and municipal governments, judiciary and
the armed forces), mean that any efforts based on negotiating the "lesser evil"
or trying to exploit secondary contradictions within the enemy camp, simply end
up reinforcing government policies and undermining our own proposals.

To change the situation we need to revitalise social struggles and restore their
legitimacy in the eyes of the majority of the population. We need to develop
proposals for popular and democratic reforms which can galvanise popular
mobilisations and challenge the "official agenda", creating pressure outside of
the institutional domain which then changes the balance forces established
within it (as the MST [5] did in the struggle for land reform). One basic aspect
is denunciation of the whole process of neoliberal reorganization, trying to
break through the monolithic media blockade on this question. One of
neoliberalism's greatest victories is when it manages to eliminate all
alternatives, establishing itself, in spite of its economic and social failure
for the majority of the population, as the common point of reference for both
defenders and opponents of the status quo. The reaffirmation of a global
alternative, based on the interests of the workers, is a fundamental condition
for confronting neoliberalism in the economic, political and social fields.

New agenda

In other words, a new political agenda is needed for the PT and the Brazilian
left in general. This would involve:

* a reworking of the strategic project for this country, offering an alternative
perspective to the disintegration of the national perspectives produced by
unprotected incorporation into an ever more exclusionary international order;

* a new policy for accumulating social forces, one which will redefine the PT's
relations with its broad social base and bring us back closer to the majority
who are worst hit by the neoliberal policies;

* a deep-going organisational and programmatic restructuring which will reverse
the negative consequences of our presence in state institutions and redynamise
the potential of this democratic and popular participation in such institutions,
re-establishing the PT's ability to build itself independently, taking as its
basic point of reference the self-organization of the exploited and oppressed.

Strategic Problems.

Globalisation, deregulation, open markets, privatisation, the crisis of public
welfare and social security systems, the rapid introduction of new information
technologies and new management methods, structural unemployment, the rolling
back of state functions, everything that is associated with capitalist
restructuring and neoliberal adjustment, redefines the stage on which we project
our strategic action. The new problems we face fall into three broad categories.

Firstly, the changes in the relations between state and society in a situation
where the social formation itself is in mutation, and hence the reorganization
of bourgeois power structures. The power of the capitalist class is more
concentrated than ever on both a national and world scale, but it is exerted
through a redefinition of the tasks of the national state and through a
considerable strengthening of the private economic and political power of big
firms and the political-ideological power of the media.

This results in two kinds of problem: firstly, the fact that the state can no
longer be the all but exclusive focus of political struggle, as it has been to
date; the struggle for popular power has deal with the non-state structures of
private power with their increased relative weight. Secondly, the growing social
diversity within the popular camp. On the one hand the rural population is
thrown off the land into the cities, where most of them fail to gain access to
the formal labour market, whilst structural unemployment mounts, resulting in a
huge mass of the 'excluded', surviving by the most varied means alongside the
proletariat. On the other hand, there continues to be a numerical growth of the
proletariat, but with the weight of the industrial working class (ie.
wage-earners in industrial employment) considerably reduced; deregulation,
flexibility, contracting out and other initiatives to increase the rate of
exploitation, alongside the questioning of the 'social wage' represented by
state-supplied social services, are resulting in considerable differences
opening up between the social conditions of those who are within the formal
labour market.

Three further kinds of problem result from this. Firstly, it becomes much more
complicated to bring together the conditions needed for the proletariat to
become the central social and political subject of the revolution and the
building of a new society. Secondly, the ability of the industrial working
class, and even the proletariat, to bring together all the popular sectors and
polarise the immense majority of the 'excluded' is put into question; in the
popular imagination there is an erosion of the revolutionary role of the
proletariat (sometimes confused with the industrial working class), and this
failure of imagination itself helps to destructure the proletariat's own sense
of social and political identity.
Thirdly, there is the change in the place a country like Brazil occupies in the
world, a redefinition of its insertion into the new world capitalist system
where the perspective of national and social development is no longer present.
Transnational corporations, international communication networks, as well as
regional and international political and economic organisations, come to play an
ever more important role, to the detriment of national states.

These problems in turn have at least three kinds of implication: Firstly a
burning need for increased internationalism in all practical areas of
revolutionary struggle. Secondly, the difficulty of building a political project
whose development is posed solely within a national framework. Thirdly, the need
to rethink the revolution, so far understood as a seizure of power (essentially
state power) which begins within a national framework, and which now has to take
on board the qualitatively increased weight of international tasks (both
regional and world-wide).

These three kinds of problem demand a reworking of the Brazilian and
international left's strategic project.


In a future issue of International Viewpoint, we will publish Joaquim Soriano's
analysis of the evolution and present situation of the Workers Party (PT)
itself.

Notes
This article is based on discussions of strategic perspectives, the situation of
the PT and of the left in the PT, and the situation of the tendency itself, at
the Socialist Democracy congress, which took place on 9-10 December 1995.

1. See article by Daniel Bensaid, 'Points of Reference for Analysing the New
World Situation', in Em Tempo No. 282 June 1995

2. Brazil's twenty years of military dictatorship finally ended in 1984,
although the military's withdrawal from the forefront of politics had been in
preparation for several years before that. However the pact between different
pro-military and opposition fractions of the bourgeoisie which enabled a
controlled transfer to civilian rule quickly went into crisis, with mounting
internal divisions and plummeting credibility. Aggravated by the growing
strength of the Workers Party (PT), this instability of bourgeois rule continued
through the impeachment of Fernando Collor de Melo on corruption charges in 1992
to the elections at the end of 1994 which brought to an end the government his
successor Itamar Franco. government at the end of 1984. 

3. The PSDB, the party of the current president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, was
originally a left split from the main bourgeois opposition party which led the
opposition to military dictatorship, the PMDB. As the latter lost credibility in
government, the PSDB gained ground with its seemingly progressive "social
democratic" positions. When victory in the 1994 presidential elections seemed
very likely to go Lula of the Workers Party, the Brazilian bourgeoisie shifted
all its support to the former left-wing sociologist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

4. The PFL is the party of some of the most traditional sections of the
Brazilian ruling class, including many politicians tie 20th century. These
changes have been described in greater detail elsewhere, and we shan't repeat
them here.

5. The Movimento dos Sem Terra ('Movement of Those without Land'), or MST, is an
organisation of landless peasants which has carried out hundreds of active land
seizures and occupations in its struggle to promote land reform and justice for
Brazil's rural poor. As such it has become perhaps the most dynamic force in
Brazilian social struggles in recent years, with industrial and trade union
struggles at a relatively low ebb. The MST has traditionally been strongest in
the south of the country, but has now become significant force throughout the
country.




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