The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century

Conflict and Conciliation in Peripheral Capitalism

Vladimir Puzone, Luis Felipe Miguel, Vladimir Puzone, Luis Felipe Miguel

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9783319986135
• eBook ISBN:
  9783030032883
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: American Government
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This book aims to reconstruct the role played by left movements and organizations in Brazilfrom their process of renewal in the 1980s as they fought against the civil-military dictatorship, going through the Workers' Party's governments in the 2000s, until the Party's dramatic defeat with a parliamentary coup in 2016. Henceforth, there have been attacks on social and political rights that severely affect the lower classes and reverted progressive policies on various issues. Through a historical reconstruction, this book analyzes how different left movements and organizations contributed to the democratization of Brazilian society, and how their contradictions contributed to the actual conservativeturn. The essays also focus the development of Brazilian Left in the light of socialist politics and especially Marxism, both in terms of political organizations and theory. In this sense, the essays in this collection represent an effort to rethink some aspects of the history of the Brazilian left and how it can reorganize itself after the conservative turn.

© The Author(s) 2019

V. Puzone, L. F. Miguel (eds.)The Brazilian Left in the 21st CenturyMarx, Engels, and Marxismshttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03288-3_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Vladimir Puzone¹ and Luis Felipe Miguel²

(1)

Sociology Department, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

(2)

Political Science Institute, University of Brasília, Brasília, Brazil

Vladimir Puzone (Corresponding author)

Luis Felipe Miguel

Keywords

Brazilian leftMarxismBrazilian Communist PartyWorkers’ Party

End Abstract

The history of the Brazilian left is one of small victories and great defeats. Right now, it is a time of defeat. The Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT), which was in power for more than ten years, was overthrown by a broad coalition of forces in a parliamentary coup in 2016. When in charge of the country, the party carried out a very prudential political behavior, limiting itself to carefully negotiated reformist measures, which in no way projected a postcapitalist society. However, those who became in charge of the government after the coup are implementing an accelerated agenda of setbacks in social policies and individual and collective rights. Among those primarily affected are wage earners in general, women, Black people, Native peoples, and sexual minorities.

This list is not by chance. Left, as we understand it throughout this book, is a mosaic of movements, whose common trait is the combat against structural patterns of exploitation, domination, and oppression. Class conflict is always present, but gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality establish other collective subjects and other axes of social struggle. Marxism, as the primary theoretical basis of the workers’ movement, needs to have a dialogue with diverse perspectives, and to remain an attractive political ideal, socialism must incorporate multiple demands for equality and emancipation. As Laclau and Mouffe (1985, p. 2) wrote, it is no longer possible to sustain “the illusory prospect of a perfectly unitary and homogenous collective will that will render pointless the moment of politics”. For the left, a central strategic concern is to articulate the workers’ class demands with other dominated and oppressed groups’ needs.

This book discusses different approaches of the contemporary Brazilian left and reviews its development between the end of the 20th century and the beginning of this century. The importance of this debate is related to the long trajectory of struggles that are reconstructed in this volume. These struggles begin with the movements for the democratization of Brazilian society in the 1980s and the end of the political and social repression that characterized the more than two decades of civil-military dictatorship (1964–1985). These movements, which included the founding of the PT itself and also the emergence of new social actors who fought for housing and public health, or respect of sexual diversity, contributed to the end of the civil-military dictatorship, as well as to the perspective of improving living conditions of the lower and working classes. However, the political struggle after the democratic transition was not easy, as the new regime emerged in a retraction phase of the global left (the collapse of the Soviet Union, the triumph of neoliberal ideology). At the same time, Brazilian elites searched for an association between formal democratic institutions and the permanence of the profound social inequalities that have always characterized the country. Indeed, Brazilian political history can be synthesized as the perennial conflict between impulses of democratization from below and the will of elites to keep social hierarchies untouched. Not by chance, Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery.

The Beginnings of the Brazilian Left: Anarchists and Communists

A contemporary left appeared in Brazil in the first years of the 20th century. Slavery was abolished only in 1888. To replace the slave workforce and implement the population-whitening policy desired by the social elites, Brazil opened to impoverished European immigrants. They worked in the crops as well as in the first Brazilian factories. Industrialization was a priority for the republican government installed in 1889, and although not as effective as imagined, public loans provided a modest start for the secondary sector.

Some of the immigrants were Italian or Spanish anarchist militants, who initiated movements of worker agitation in their new country, demanding better salaries and work conditions. Anarchist publications in Portuguese or Spanish were founded beginning in 1900, and in 1906, the first Brazilian Workers’ Congress was held in Rio de Janeiro, bringing together more than 40 delegates from various labor organizations. Afterward, there were other congresses and the formation of a workers’ confederation. The strength of the movement led by the anarchists was revealed in 1917, when a general strike stopped tens of thousands of workers, especially in the capital city, Rio de Janeiro, and in São Paulo, the then Brazil’s emergent industrial center.

The year of 1917 was also, obviously, the year of the Russian Revolution. In Brazil, as in many other countries, October marked the decline of anarchism and the rise of Bolshevism in the workers’ movement. The Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) was founded in 1922, mostly by former anarchists.¹ Named “Communist Party—Brazilian Section of the Communist International”, it obtained its affiliation to the International two years later. The party’s leader was a journalist, Astrojildo Pereira, but among its nine founders, who represented 73 militants in four cities, there was a majority of workers.

At this time, Brazil was governed by oligarchies that represented the interests of landowners. There was a simulacrum of electoral democracy, but it was a notoriously fraudulent system, in which the vote was not secret, and a special commission could overrule the election results. The answer to workers’ and poor people’s demands was repression; as President Washington Luís, who ruled from 1926 to 1930, said, “a social issue is a case for the police”. Placed in illegality three months after its founding, the Communist Party (CP) regained legal life in 1927, when it elected one congressman, and was banned once more, a few months later.

In its first years, the PCB was a small organization, facing police repression and also the shifts in its political positioning, determined by the International, but with a growing influence on the workers’ movement and among intellectuals and students. The fact that changed the future of the party, however, was the affiliation of a great political leader, Luís Carlos Prestes, a former army captain who had led a rebellion against the federal government in the name of liberal principles. For two and a half years, Prestes crossed the Brazilian hinterlands, with hundreds of soldiers (an epic journey known as the “Coluna Prestes”). In 1927, they exiled themselves in Bolivia, undefeated after a 25,000-kilometer march—and Prestes became a legend. He was called o cavaleiro da esperança (the knight of hope).

PCB emissaries gave him Marxist literature, and he adhered to communism, but his affiliation found internal resistances. Having moved to Moscow, he entered the party by decision of the International and remained its indisputable chief for several decades. Inside the PCB, he was the object of a small cult of personality, like other secretaries-general in CPs around the world. In this capacity, he led the main actions and political shifts of the PCB. The presence of Prestes attracted broader popular support and also a significant number of his former comrades, military officers that held many leading positions within the party. As one commentator explains, “the gain with the entry of a character of his stature was accompanied by a loss with a kind of growing militarism inside the party” (Oliveira 2018, p. 52). Prestes was secretary-general of the PCB until 1980. The two secretaries-general after him were also in the military, one as a corporal, the other as an officer in World War II.

Militarism marked the party’s strategy in the first half of the 20th century. In November 1935, a few months after the clandestine return of Prestes to Brazil, the PCB attempted to seize power, in a coup that started from the barracks, where the party had its most loyal bases (Pinheiro 1991). The coup failed and Prestes was imprisoned and barbarically tortured. Later, in 1945, he commanded the reconciliation with his tormentor, former dictator Getúlio Vargas, who had approached positions on the left during the Second World War. With Brazil entering a democratic period, Prestes was elected senator and led the CP caucus in the Constituent Assembly, in 1946. Besides Prestes in the Senate, the PCB elected 14 deputies, totaling 15 seats out of 328.

In the following year, when the party was again made illegal, Prestes led the turn for a far-left strategy. Some years later, he commanded another shift and the PCB engaged in a politics of class conciliation and supported reformist governments, even without legal existence. Despite these changes in political stance, the PCB interpretation of Brazilian reality was always basically the same. The country was characterized as “semi-feudal”, due to the labor relations in rural areas, and the main enemy was imperialism. Thus, the party engaged in a strategy of “national revolution”, whose primary objective was not socialism, but developed capitalism and national independence. Sometimes, the leadership of this revolution was ceded to the bourgeoisie; sometimes, it was assigned to the worker class, that is, to the PCB itself, but the framework remained.

Divisions Within and Outside the Communist Party

The PCB was the main trunk from where other Marxist organizations emerged in Brazil, beginning with small Trotskyite groups already in the 1930s. Trotskyism had some influence among intellectuals and students but, in general, little penetration among the workers’ movement. After Trotsky’s death in 1940, Brazilian Trotskyite organizations fragmented according to the Fourth International’s main lines of division. In the 1950s and 1960s, the larger part of these organizations was the Partido Operário Revolucionário (POR—Revolutionary Worker Party), aligned with the Argentinian theorist J. Posadas, an eccentric thinker who believed in extraterrestrial help with the socialist revolution (Demier 2015). This peculiarity was overcome in the 1970s, when Posadas’ influence declined and the most important Brazilian Trotskyite organizations aligned themselves with Nahuel Moreno, Pierre Lambert, or Ernest Mandel, the three main figures who were disputing Trotsky’s legacy. After re-democratization, all of those groups participated in the PT (Arcary 2014). Moreno’s followers were eventually expelled and formed their own party, with minimal electoral expression. The organization that aligned with Mandel dismissed its international ties and remains an important internal current of the PT.

Trotskyite dissidents were never numerically significant. However, in the wave of the 20th Congress of the CP of the Soviet Union (1956), in which Nikita Khrushchev pronounced his “secret speech”, the PCB split. Prestes remained loyal to the new USSR leadership, but many of his close advisors did not accept the “betrayal” of Stalinism. In 1960, the PCB changed its name—from Partido Comunista do Brasil (Brazil’s Communist Party) to Partido Comunista Brasileiro (Brazilian Communist Party)—as an attempt to regain legal register and the right to compete for elections. Two years later, Stalinist dissidents founded a new Partido Comunista do Brasil, with the abbreviation PCdoB and a pro-Chinese (later, pro-Albanese) political stance. Regarding the general appreciation of the tasks for the Brazilian left, the PCdoB kept the PCB’s stageism unchanged.

Other important divisions occurred after the 1964 coup. In the context of the Cold War, the coup overthrew a reformist government and installed a highly repressive national security regime. While the PCB decided for political contestation and mass struggle against the authoritarian government, in a broad front with liberal bourgeois politicians, many of its militants opted for armed struggle. Many small organizations left the party to implement outbreaks of urban guerrilla warfare, inspired by the writings of Carlos Marighella, a former PCB leader, to whom “the political situation in the country [must be] transformed into a military one” (Marighella 1969). Cuba, which was, at the time, engaged with the “Tricontinental” project to export the revolution to Africa, Asia, and Latin American countries, was the main inspiration and support for these organizations. Most of them, however, were unable to implement the fight against the government.

Indeed, urban guerrilla warfare was caught in a vicious circle. Preparatory actions aimed at financing operations, such as the “expropriation” of banks (and, at least in one case, of a notoriously corrupt right-wing politician), led to police repression. The funds obtained were then used for the protection of the militants (safe houses, preparation of false documents, escapes to foreign countries). Even so, many of them fell into the hands of the political police. In order to save them from imprisonment, torture, and maybe death, organizations had to prioritize other actions. In 1969 and 1970, four ambassadors (from the United States, Japan, Germany, and Switzerland) were kidnapped and exchanged for political prisoners. Instead of preparing for the overthrow of the authoritarian regime, guerrilla groups were fighting for survival (Gorender 1987; Reis 1990).

A different experience was conducted by the PCdoB: a rural guerrilla in the margins of the Araguaia River, in the north of the country. While other armed groups were fighting in the cities, the PCdoB was sending militants to acclimate, gain members, and prepare for guerrilla war. Although better planned than the urban initiatives, the “Araguaia guerrilla” was discovered by the Brazilian Army and savagely crushed, after seven years of preparation and before they initiated the military actions planned by the party (Portela 1979).

Small leftist organizatio...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• Part I. The Workers’ Party and Its Administrations
• Part II. Social Movements and Special Issues
• Back Matter