Brazil: For class independence and the United Front, we vote null in the 2nd round
The following is translated from our Brazilian comrades of the Grupo de Trabalhadores Revolucionários do Brasil (GTR-BR)
We vote null (ed. note “none of the above”) in the second round of the elections. At a time when the masses are still hopeful in the bourgeois elections, revolutionaries must participate in the election in order to denounce this system as something that does not serve to change the lives of workers. The bourgeois democratic regime serves the domination by the ruling class and to delude and divert the workers’ struggle. Revolutionaries must participate in the elections to defend and publicize the revolutionary program. We participated in the 1st round with a critical vote for the PSTU. The critical vote, as a united front, is a tactic to denounce the opportunistic leaders of the workers who defend a program of reforms achieved within the bourgeois state parliament and institutions. For reformers, this program would be able to improve capitalism or even lead to socialism. They oppose the revolutionary program of direct struggle, class organization and independence and workers’ democracy, with the aim of destroying capitalism and building socialism.
Boulos represents a reformist alternative. He does not denounce the bourgeois system of elections and parliament as the democracy of the rich and its role in the domination by the ruling class. We can say that Boulos is today the biggest supporter of illusions in the bourgeois elections. In fact, his program is the most minimal. Its more “progressive” proposals are not close to those that the reformist left has had in the past, such as nationalization and re-statization of strategic companies or agrarian and urban reform. As seen in the electoral debates, for Boulos, in today’s capitalism all that is needed is “good management”.
Boulos’s PSOL candidacy in São Paulo has a reformist program, but that would not prevent our call for a critical vote, alerting workers about his reformist program and that Boulos and the PSOL leadership are great defenders of alliances with the “democratic” bourgeoisie, especially now, at a time when fascism is growing all over the world. And calling on the PSOL militants and the workers’ base that supports it to fight for Boulos and the party not to enter a coalition government with the bourgeoisie.
However, after the 1st round, Guilherme Boulos and PSOL launched the “Frente Democrática por São Paulo”. A front composed of the parties of the left in alliance with several bourgeois parties, PDT, PSB and REDE. It is another advance of the popular front policy of the reformist leaderships that binds the workers to the bourgeoisie and diverts the struggle into the electoral system and the parliament.
Class independence is a principle for revolutionaries. For this reason, we call for the null vote in São Paulo. We cannot support those who are allying themselves with the bourgeoisie and are the biggest impetus for the Popular Front in Brazil today.
By the same token, in the face of candidacies of the PT and the PCdoB such as that of Manuela in Porto Alegre, our position is for the null vote. Manuela has already made an agreement with the PDT to guarantee support in the 2nd round. The PT ruled for 13 years with the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Today it is a party of institutionality and the bourgeois regime established by the 1988 constitution. It was its class conciliation and the reformist program, with an opportunistic method and without internal democracy, that led the PT to bourgeois institutionality and the betrayal of the socialist revolution. Boulos and PSOL follow the same path.
PSOL & PT
What about the origins of PSOL, as an alternative to PT’s betrayal? What is the balance of this? With his minimum program, Boulos does not rescue the banners of the left or even the program of the original PT (ed. note before its degeneration). With his narrative for (bourgeois) democracy, he claims the PT governments, from Erundina to Lula and Dilma as his own, and in fact, a continuity of the project interrupted by the “coup”. A minimally progressive leftist agenda is replaced by the defense of “democracy” to restore the previous project, which with “good management” could rescue the good times of the Lula era. As utopian as it is reactionary!
At the launch of the front, Boulos announced that if elected he will govern in coalition with these parties. The PCdoB representative spoke about “our” government. PT and PCdoB have no problem in associating with the ruling class. What happens today is that with the PT crisis, the party has had difficulty maintaining alliances and its hegemony on the broad front. Boulos today appears as the figure capable of leading this process. Without discussion at the base of the party, the path of class conciliation is being followed by PSOL. The PT’s betrayal was due to its alliances with the bourgeoisie and electoral strategy. This is the same path taken by PSOL.
GLOBAL CRISIS OF CAPITALISM, ASCENSION OF FASCISM
Since the burst of the global crisis of capitalism in 2008, political instability has hit the whole world. In Brazil, not only did the PT government fail to withstand the upheavals of the capitalist crisis, but also the reactionary regime established in 88. Bonapartism and fascism grew as an alternative for the bourgeoisie in the face of the need for a brutal attack on the working class, which resisted paying the price of the crisis.
One of Boulos’ characteristics is to ignore the internationalism of the class struggle. This is part of his reformism. The world crisis is deepening and the intensification of the inter-imperialist dispute between the U.S. and China is growing. Faced with uprisings of resistance by the working class worldwide, political and economic instability, Bonapartist and fascist regimes are advancing. Capitalism has reached its greatest crisis in history and, combined with climate change, is a terminal crisis. More than ever the working class needs a world party of the socialist revolution to prepare and organize the class for the fight against the crisis, the wars and misery that are deepening as capitalism destroys itself; before it destroys us along with it!
Brazil is a semi-colony, historically subordinated to American imperialism, and today suffers great influence from Chinese imperialism. The anti-imperialist sentiment of the Latin American masses led to the elections of several leftist governments that, despite the “anti-imperialist” rhetoric, never broke with American imperialism. These governments came closer to the Chinese and took the American anti-imperialist sentiment to support bourgeois governments that are called “progressive”, which includes everything from Chinese and Russian imperialisms, to bloodthirsty dictators like Syria’s Assad.
BALANCE OF ELECTIONS
These elections affirm the deterioration that the regime established with the 1988 constitution has suffered since the impeachment of Dilma. The parties of this regime are weakening. The PMDB, PSDB and PT were the ones that shrunk the most in these elections. The PMDB and PSDB are parties of the democratic bourgeoisie that emerged with the end of the dictatorship. And the PT, as a party that comes from the working class, also emerged from the fight against the dictatorship.
The parties that grew the most were those of the old regime, the heirs of the military dictatorship, such as DEM (ex Arena) and PP, a party based on the latifundium, which is the most backward in the Brazilian bourgeoisie. Equally reactionary parties, linked to the evangelical Church, like Republicans and Patriots, have also grown.
We think that these elections confirm the growing polarization in the country. Not that between Bolsonaro and Lula, but deepening between right and left. Bolsonaro is without a party and is under pressure to deviate from his ultra-rightist guidelines to agreements with the center in parliament. The Bolsonaro phenomenon did not repeat itself as in 2018; candidates that the president supported did not do well at the polls. But the ultra-right and the right continue to grow and the result of the elections does not mean the end of “Bolsonarism”. Lula also did not do well, the support of the ex-president in the electoral campaign no longer helps to elect candidates as in the past.
Boulos and the group on the left ignores the international situation and the effects of the crisis in Brazil. For them, the growing instability of the bourgeois democratic regime and the growth of Bonapartism and fascism could be defeated with an alliance with “democratic” sectors of the Brazilian bourgeoisie. They defend a program that needs to ignore the global crisis to say that it can improve capitalism. The workers must not defend democracy by joining the bourgeoisie and fighting for the reactionary regime that emerged with the 1988 constitution. To combat the rising fascism and threat of military coup the workers must fight with class independence and the true unity of the left, the United Front. At the global level, our alliance must be with the workers of the world, and not with supposedly “progressive” bourgeois governments. For this, it is necessary to break with the Popular Front (FP). The FP is what divides the class at a time when sectors of the workers are allied with the bourgeoisie.
POPULAR FRONT (Frente Amplio, FA) & United Front (FU)
Boulos, as a popular figure among the homeless, has earned his reputation and this makes him capable of diverting the struggles to parliament. Boulos seems to have overcome the party’s resistance to popular front politics. PSOL had not previously gone further with its alliances with the bourgeoisie because of its base. Freixo’s refusal to run for mayor of Rio de Janeiro was precisely because he met resistance to a broader alliance. Without Freixo, PSOL ran out of candidates for the 2nd round, and the pressure by the Frente Amplio against “bolsonarismo” and fascism in Rio de Janeiro, includes Eduardo Paes, ex mayor, ex PMDB, now DEM!
It is not a United Front of the left coalitions that has agreements with the PDT, PSB, as bourgeois parties. The front with so-called “democratic” sectors of the bourgeoisie is not capable of fighting fascism. This front breaks the unity of the working class, stops the struggle and independent organization and creates illusions in elections and capitalism. Thus, making the only force capable of combating fascism, the working class, weak, paving the way for reactionary forces. However, the more the crisis deepens, the more the reformist left strengthens the FA Broad Front, imprisons workers with parliament and in legal circles, demobilizing them against the building of independent class struggle against fascism.
Ultra-leftist currents like TS and PSTU (in their moments of deviation to the left), also think that the popular front fights fascism, the workers just can’t see it! In the opposite face of opportunism, the ultra-leftists seek to mask their support for the popular front against fascism, and end up denying the rise of fascism worldwide and the instability of the bourgeois democratic regime in Brazil. For this reason, like the opportunists, they create illusions in the bourgeois democratic regime. They are also unable to alert the class to fascism and to arm workers with a program of independent organization that defeats bureaucratic leadership and advances a revolutionary program, with strikes, pickets, occupations and self-defense, so as not to pay the price of the crisis. On the contrary, its program in the unions is reduced to economism and alliances with the union bureaucracy, compromising class independence and solidarity with other workers, the peasantry and social movements. Characteristic of its zig-zags, given the pressure of the bourgeois electoral process, the PSTU ends up capitulating by calling a vote for the popular front, as in 2002, 2018 and now in 2020 calling for a vote even for the PCdoB in Porto Alegre!
We do not deny the rise of Bonapartism and Fascism. But we also do not defend the Broad Front (FA popular front) with bourgeois sectors called “democratic”. The popular front and the diversion of struggles towards bullying and elections is not the “lesser evil”, it is the biggest reason for the betrayal and bureaucratization of workers’ organizations and it is the main element responsible for the regression in class consciousness. In the fight against fascism, we defend class independence, the United Front and a revolutionary program for workers to form factory committees, hold assemblies to combat the rise of fascism, the Bolsonaro government, the pandemic and the numerous attacks that the class has been suffering.
Ultra-leftism, while capitulating to the Popular Front as something necessary to fight fascism, acts against the United Front (FU). With sectarianism, it makes the FU unviable with parties like PT and even PSOL because they are “equal to the bourgeoisie,” or because “they do not have a revolutionary program.” In the unions, the PSTU replaces the FU with the Frente Amplio with the union bureaucracy as bureaucratic blocs of the Central Sindical Popular (CSP Conlutas) with the union centrals. For us the FU is a tactic, which serves to unmask bureaucratic leaders. We call for the FU with PSOL, PT, PSTU and even PCdoB, but it is necessary that they break with the bourgeoisie. Alliance with the bourgeoisie is the popular front. Unity of workers’ organizations and their bases is the United Front.
CLASS INDEPENDENCE AND OPERATING DEMOCRACY
It is necessary that the left militants and especially the base of the PSOL fight against the pretensions of the leadership for coalition governments with the bourgeoisie. These alliances prevent the advance of the organization and independence of the workers, dividing the class to align themselves with sectors of the enemy class.
The advance of Bonapartism and Fascism, the threats of a military coup, do not justify these alliances. On the contrary! The great challenge for our class and leftist militancy is to break with the reformism that decades ago, especially during PT governments led to demobilization and loss of independence of our unions and organizations.
However great the excitement and hope in Boulos, the social leader and the new “star of the left”, we have to tell the truth to the workers and the left’s militants: the path of the Frente Amplio of Boulos is that of defeat, that on this path we will pay the price of the terrible crisis that still has much in store for us.
With the division of the bourgeoisie, the growing polarization in the country and the hard battle we have in front of us facing the global crisis and decaying capitalism, we cannot advocate as a left “alternative” a broad left united with “democratic” bourgeois parties. The left alternative to “Bolsonarismo” cannot be the parties of the current regime in crisis. The alternative must be unity of sectors of the working class and independent of the bourgeoisie. Only a revolutionary way out of the capitalist system can meet the demands of the class, which suffers from wars, misery, climate change, authoritarian regimes, ineffectual pandemic response, refugee crises, racism, oppression and violence against women, etc.
It is utopian to hope that capitalism can be other than destruction and attacks on workers to pay the price of the crisis! The economic crisis, the pandemic and climate change are the proof that there is no way out under capitalism.
It is necessary to have class independence, a United Front of the working class currents, to advance the struggles, strikes and every resistance movement, from the peripheries, minorities to the youth. Let workers take unions and organizations from the hands of bureaucracy and opportunistic leaderships and advance working-class democracy, building committees that guide struggle and unity. Let these struggles be directed to the workers to occupy the factories, the streets, face the reaction with self-defense committees, for the seizure of power, expropriating the bourgeoisie and building socialism.
CLASS INDEPENDENCE!
BREAK WITH THE CAPITALIST CLASS!
FOR THE WORLD PARTY OF THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!
