12.02.2004

Workers Party and its fragmented left wing

The Fourth International's Brazilian section is in disarray over its relationship to the government of president Lula. Mike Macnair looks at how Democracia Socialista ended up with comrades on both sides of the class divide

In December 2003 the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party or PT) leadership expelled a group of leftwing elected representatives - most prominently the senator, Heloïsa Helena, a supporter of Democracia Socialista (DS). Their crime was to oppose the Lula government’s attacks on public sector pensions - part of its commitment to the International Monetary Fund’s ‘structural adjustment’ policies. Those expelled have announced that they will form a new party. Meanwhile, DS supporter Miguel Rosseto continues to serve as minister of agrarian development, with responsibility for land reform.

The result is that the DS, the Brazilian affiliate of the ‘Fourth International’ (linked in Britain to the International Socialist Group/Resistance), is in the peculiar and embarrassing position that one of its comrades holds a ministerial portfolio in a government whose supporters in the PT leadership have expelled another leading comrade for opposing Lula’s pro-IMF policies. How have the Brazilian ‘Fourth Internationalists’ got themselves into this position?

Lula’s election

In October 2002 Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva - or ‘Lula’, the most prominent leader of the PT - won the Brazilian presidential elections. He replaced the ex-Marxist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, who had accepted the IMF’s structural adjustment requirements and governed with a centre-right coalition. The result was not a simple victory for the Workers Party: Lula’s running mate, Jose Alencar, is a capitalist and a member of the bourgeois centre-right Liberal Party. Moreover, the PT did not have and has not obtained a majority in the Brazilian congress: in fact it holds less than 20% of seats both in the Chamber of Deputies and in the Senate, and the whole governing coalition - various semi-left and populist parties, including the ex-communist Popular Socialist Party (PPS) and the post-Maoist Communist Party of Brazil (PCB), plus the Liberals - is in a clear minority in the Senate.

Lula had already given unambiguous commitments to cooperate with the IMF before the election, and these were repeated after his victory. Francisco de Oliveira, one of the founders of the PT, has commented: “This is not the first year of the Workers Party government: it’s the ninth year of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government” (quoted in the New York Times December 15 2003).

People’s Front?

The participation of Alencar and the Liberals, as well as the complex patterns of voting and of representation and the formation of coalitions in the legislature, make Lula’s presidency most unlike the People’s Front victories in Spain and France in the 1930s. These triggered mass class offensives of the working class, not so far visible in Brazil. Still less is it like the Communist and Socialist Parties’ use of small left of centre bourgeois parties to create formal ‘popular fronts’ in Europe immediately after 1945 or - to give a Latin American example - in Chile before the 1973 coup.

In these countries there was a pre-existing polarisation of electoral politics between rightist coalitions of the ‘party of order’ and bourgeois-liberal, bourgeois-radical and socialist coalitions of the ‘party of democracy’. This sort of political structure appears to be the normal pattern of capitalist electoral politics: it appeared first in the division between Whigs and Tories in late 17th century England, and has been replicated in a variety of forms in the USA. It appeared in explicit coalition forms in various European countries as electoral politics developed though the 19th and 20th centuries.

In contrast, in Brazil the ‘party of order’ proper, the Party of the Liberal Front, is regionally limited and holds only 16% of seats in the Chamber and 17% in the Senate. The other main parties who supported the outgoing government and Lula’s opponent in the run-off were the Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB) and the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB). The PMDB originated as a broad-front coalition against the military dictatorship which governed Brazil from 1964 to 1988. The PSDB originated as a left split from the PMDB. There are, in fact, a total of 16 parties represented in the Brazilian legislature, and the large majority of them have formally radical-populist origins and positions, or emerged from diluted attempts to create labour or socialist parties which gradually slid into generic populism. Through the 1990s these parties were characterised by relatively weak party discipline, and by a high frequency of individual deputies and senators changing from one party to another.

Behind this lies large-scale political clientelism. Individual bosses, bureaucrats and elected representatives command votes and other forms of political support by providing individual benefits to their supporters. Similar phenomena can be seen in the fluid British parliamentary party politics of the 1760s to 1780s (after British victories in the Seven Years War had undermined the basis of the existing Whig-Tory party alignments), and in those of the Spanish monarchy’s semi-parliaments between the late 19th century and 1920s. Brazil, in other words, has not (yet) acquired a stabilised form of capitalist electoral politics on a national scale. Nor has it acquired a national-scale class consciousness of the type that has supported the European mass workers’ parties, and which meant that People’s Front electoral victories ushered in large-scale class offensives on the ground.

In this context, the passage of Lula and the PT leadership into ‘business as usual’ coalitionism does not look like something new in Brazilian politics. It looks like a repeat of the normal passage of Brazilian left and populist projects, through lesser-evil coalitionism, into the morass of corruption and clientelism which is the normal mode of functioning of the Brazilian party system. But this result is radically different from what the left expected of the PT.

The PT as a new start

The PT was founded in 1979-80, by a combination of trade unionists led by Lula, various (mainly Trotskyist) groups of the far left, and radical catholic supporters of ‘liberation theology’. The social basis of the party was a forward movement of the class in the later 1970s which had led the Lula grouping in the trade unions to adopt a more militant stance, distancing the unions from the military regime. This development was part of a broader movement internationally, which also found expression in the rise of independent trade unions in South Korea and of the Cosatu trade union confederation in South Africa. In Brazil it naturally pointed towards the formation of a party to represent the distinct interests of the working class, in the same way that the rise of union militancy in Britain in the early 20th century pointed towards the formation of the Labour Party.

The left catholics were drawn in because the new party was one growing out of the grassroots struggle. The Trotskyist groups that participated were applying the ‘labour party policy’ developed out of some of Trotsky’s arguments in relation to the USA. The idea here was that if the trade union leaders were led to break with the capitalist parties and form a party to represent the independent interests of the workers, there would be no guarantee that it would be a reformist party like British Labour; rather it would be possible to fight to transform it or a large fraction of it into a revolutionary party.

The PT appeared to be a ‘new start’ in two ways. First, it was grounded in the trade union movement and asserted the independent interests of the working class. This had originally been true of the Brazilian Communist Party, but the political concept of the People’s Front adopted at the 7th Congress of the Comintern (1935) had led this party back into populism. The involvement of radical catholics and Trotskyists in the PT had the consequence that it overtly rejected the politics of Stalinism, leading to an initial resistance to populism. However, the radical christians and Mandelites asserted as an alternative to Stalinism an ethical democratism - not a class-based radical republicanism. This ethical democratism could itself form part of a route back to populism.

Second, both anti-Stalinism and the origin of the PT in a coalition of somewhat politically diverse elements, including a substantial Trotskyist component, led to a practical commitment of the party to pluralism in its internal affairs. This is not quite the same thing as being fully democratic. We may compare the tension which existed in the British Labour Party before Kinnockism between traditions of pluralism originating in the party’s roots and its close connection with the trade unions, the practical control of the party’s public policy and practice by the trade union tops and elected representatives, and the policy of bans and proscriptions starting in 1918. The PT was in this respect not unlike the Labour Party, before it attained stable status as a capitalist second party after 1945, only without the bans and proscriptions. There was open, democratic discussion, but the party centre round the trade union leaders retained effective control.

Growth and impasse of the PT

The PT leaped more or less immediately into being a mass party, with 245,000 members by 1982. But it did not immediately break through electorally. It obtained only 3.5% of the vote in the legislative elections of 1982, and 6% in 1986. This rose to 10% in 1990, 13% in 1994 and 1998, and 18.5% in 2002. In the presidential elections of 1989, however, Lula beat the ‘left’ alternatives in the first round and won 47% of the vote in the second round. In 1994 and 1998 Cardoso won outright on the first round, Lula coming second with 27% in 1994 and 31% in 1998.

Meanwhile, the PT had through the late 1980s and 1990s won control of a number of Brazil’s local governments - most famously Porto Alegre, site of the first World Social Forum. Here the party ran up against the underlying difficulty facing successful electoral campaigns by radical workers’ parties. Working class voters vote for such parties because they want to see concrete improvements in their conditions of life. But within the framework of the bourgeois constitution, substantial changes are simply not within the gift of local governments, since their budgets are constrained by national laws - as the Militant Tendency and other elements of the Labour left discovered in Britain in the 1980s.

Bourgeois constitutions are designed, by their ‘checks and balances’, to prevent radical changes at the expense of the property-owning classes. The property-owners secure the changes they want not primarily by electoral struggle but by forms of corruption: find the successful politicians and buy them, or buy a judicial decision. This in turn is replicated within bourgeois politics in the form of horse-trading and clientelist influence networks: thus, for example, Austin Mitchell MP has admitted selling the whips his vote on top-up fees in exchange for ministerial support for projects in his constituency.

The choices open to leftists who win a local majority are therefore (1) to engage in ‘gesture politics’ by defying the state; (2) to administer the system, but achieve nothing or only minimal changes for their constituency; or (3) to enter into the bourgeois political system of trading in influence in order to achieve concrete gains for constituents (what the Americans call ‘log-rolling’ and ‘pork-barrel politics’ - or ‘pork’ for short).

The PT’s ‘solution’ to this problem was to assert that it was creating, in some of the localities it controlled, “participatory budgets”, through various forms of mass meetings. This was to apply the rhetoric of “participatory democracy” to what were in substance no more than consultation exercises on a very large scale. It was an attempt by the elected representatives to escape from their responsibility for decision-making. Genuine workers’ democracy would involve the representatives not merely consulting with, but accepting recallability by, the bodies which elected them, and extending this principle not merely to the elected representatives but also to the various unelected officials and so on. It would thus be inconsistent with working within the constitution. The limits of the ‘participation’ policy can be seen in the fact that in the same 2002 elections in which Lula was elected, the PT lost the governorship of the state of Rio Grande del Sul - whose capital is Porto Alegre.

Coalitionism

It is the need to achieve something concrete which has ultimately driven the PT leadership’s entry into mainstream Brazilian bourgeois-clientelist politics. Cardoso’s IMF structural adjustment policies formed an iron cage round the PT’s local administrations; Cardoso’s - and through him the PMDB’s - possession of the presidency blocked the PT from effective log-rolling and from access to pork. Getting rid of Cardoso thus became not merely a personal goal of Lula’s, but an apparent key to the PT being able to ‘do something’ for its constituents, to - as John Rees puts it for Britain - ‘represent the unrepresented’. But getting rid of Cardoso meant that the PT - with less than 20% of the national vote - would have to construct a coalition with at least some element of the bourgeois parties. The heavy presence of the USA, breathing down Brazilian politicians’ necks meant that this would involve reassuring the USA that any changes would not threaten its interests: ie, would be marginal. Hence the coalition with Alencar and the Liberals - not a party of the left, but of the right. Hence Lula’s explicit commitment to continue Cardoso’s “fiscal virtue”.

But this choice merely replicates at the level of national government the iron cage which already enclosed the PT municipalities. The Lula government can be little more than “the ninth year of the Fernando Henrique Cardoso government” because the constraints of the bourgeois constitutional order apply almost as much to national governments as to local governments. A president needs a coalition in the legislature; in Brazil, also, an unusually high proportion of finance goes through the state governments, so that, while the central government can block the action of the states and municipalities, so too the states can block the action of the central government.

In addition, governments under bourgeois constitutions have depended for their finance on central banks backed by markets in government securities since the invention of this mechanism by the Dutch in the 17th century. (The first instance of direct coercion of government by the money markets in Britain was under queen Anne [1702-1714]; the most recent was against the Wilson-Callaghan Labour governments in the 1970s.) This dependence on the money markets is made more acute by the deregulation of exchange controls, etc, which the USA has been pushing since the 1970s. ‘Keeping the markets happy’ is in Latin America to some extent code for ‘keeping the USA happy’, but it is also a perfectly normal feature of European capitalist politics, where the dependency on the USA is less direct.

Neither the USA nor the Brazilian capitalist class is presently willing to make substantial concessions to the workers and the poor. The historical evidence is that they will not be willing to do so until the capitalist class as a whole is put in fear, as happened first with the early rise in Europe of the workers’ movement as a revolutionary force, and again in 1945-50. But the PT leadership has precisely decided to obtain office by not putting the capitalist class in fear.

We end, accordingly, with ‘reformism without reforms’. Under Lula unemployment has increased, and the average unskilled wage has fallen by 10%. The much-heralded proposals for land reform - the reason Miguel Rosseto continues to serve in the government - have been on a minimal scale and even these have not been implemented; the government has supported the landowners against land seizures and imprisoned peasant activists. The ‘pension reform’ has triggered the attack on leftist elected deputies and senators.

The left

The Brazilian Marxist left is, like the far left almost everywhere, divided into multiple, mutually opposed tendencies. Some are within and some outside the PT. The Argentinian Partido Obrero’s report of the June 2003 congress of the Brazilian CUT trade union confederation (http://www.po.org.ar/english/804art5.htm) gives some indication of the relation of forces. The leadership mainstream obtained about 53% of the vote; the PCB 14%; the DS 8%; a bloc including the French-centred ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ Lambertist tendency, O Trabalho, obtained 16%, the Lambertistes themselves having about 4%; the Morenista ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ PSTU (Unified Socialist Workers Party) had about 7%; a variety of other small tendencies shared the remaining 2%. The PCB and PSTU are outside the PT: the PCB received 2.2% of the vote in the 2002 elections and the PSTU 0.2%. To get onto the executive 20% of the vote was needed, which forced the PCB and DS to align with the leadership majority, and several of the other tendencies to bloc to form an opposition. It can thus be seen that Marxist tendencies (not including the DS) lead in aggregate above 25% of the CUT; but their disunity means that they have less effective weight.

At the time of the formation of the PT the fall of the USSR was yet to take place, and ‘official communism’ (PPS) and Maoism - both Beijing-line and Tirana-line (PCB) - still existed as such. Among the Trotskyists, the dominant tendency was the Morenista PSTU, part of an international tendency then centred in Argentina, though the Loristas (Bolivian-centred) and the Lambertistes also had some forces; they split from one another in 1979, leading to a short-lived unity of the Lambertistes and Morenistas. The Mandelites, who were later to form the DS, were marginal.

Most of the Trotskyists went into the PT, many with a short-term perspective of winning forces to their own organisation and then splitting - the type of entry policy applied by James P Cannon to the US Socialist Party in the 1930s. The Lambertistes have had a rather longer-term orientation, but one still governed by the fundamental goal of building their own tendency by denouncing the PT leadership as a scab grouping. As is reflected in the current multiplicity of Trot tendencies, they were unable to unite among themselves. The PSTU has recently indicated its unwillingness to participate in the proposed new party called for by the expelled PT deputies on the ground that it would ... allow permanent factions (http://brasil.indymedia.org/eo/blue/2004/01/272621.shtml).

The Mandelites

The Mandelites had a distinctive approach to the Lula leadership. This was given by the ‘replacement leadership strategy’ which the Trotskyists developed in the aftermath of World War II. This strategy argued that the Trot groups were too small to make any impact with their own policies. Hence, left breaks from the ascendancy of reformism and Stalinism would have confused centrist or left-reformist leaderships. The immediate task was to work alongside these lefts and build them as an alternative to the traditional leaderships; at some undetermined later stage the Trotskyists would come out in the open and fight for their own policy.

Transposed into the conditions of the PT, this meant that the Mandelites sought to build a left which would give critical support to the centre leadership of the PT round Lula. This has been a consistent thread in their policy, still reflected in last June’s CUT congress. It has allowed the DS to grow from marginality to a substantial presence in the PT. It is understandable that they should cling to this policy even while the leadership to which they give critical support is attacking their members. Nothing new here: the old Pablo-Mandel-Frank International Secretariat of the Fourth International followed the same approach when the Cuban Castro regime (admittedly a long way to the left of the Lula government!) suppressed the Cuban Trotskyists in the early 1960s.

The underlying problem with the policy is that if you engage in self-censorship, suppressing your own views for the sake of unity, after a while you lose all sense (other than gut morality) of what these views are. The DS has thus for quite some time ceased to be in any real sense a Marxist tendency which seeks socialism through the leading role of the proletariat, and become a left ethical-socialist one which seeks to ‘unite the dispossessed’. This evolution has been shared with, and perhaps led, the similar evolution of the ‘Fourth International’ as a whole. The tendency now seems likely to divide between those like Heloïsa Helena, who follow their gut class instincts to oppose the Lula government’s attacks, and those like Miguel Rossetto, who cling to the possibility of achieving a few crumbs for the poor through a government which is a ‘lesser evil’ to the right (just as Blair is a ‘lesser evil’ to the Tories).

The ortho-Trots

If the DS has evolved away from Marxism, its ‘orthodox Trotskyist’ opponents have not evolved at all. Their comments have a formulaic character: if only the Brazilian workers would accept the 1938 Transitional programme, all would be well. Their historic insistence that Stalinism was alien to the workers’ movement leaves them splintered by their own insistence on Stalinist internal bureaucratic centralism. They have insisted on the scab character of the Lula leadership, not merely now but from the beginning of the PT (when the trade union leaders’ prominence in the PT represented a sharp left turn on their part). As well as having a ‘boy who cried wolf’ effect, this insistence conveys the impression of tendencies unwilling to address the practical problems of the workers’ movement in conditions which are not, at present, conditions of revolutionary crisis.

Economism, nationalism

The ability of the PT to deliver anything for the workers is constrained partly by the structure of the Brazilian constitution, which is designed to prevent the working class making gains at the expense of the capitalists and landlords. It is constrained partly by US dominance of Latin America. And it is constrained partly by the simple fact that the PT has not won a majority, either in the electoral sense or - given Brazil’s class make-up - in the sense of majority support among the working class. It is therefore forced into coalitions and partial agreements if it wants to achieve anything.

The difficulty of the Trotskyist left in Brazil has three corresponding elements. The first is the underlying economism of the 1938 Transitional programme, which defines their current even when (as in the case of the Mandelites) the substance of the programme has been abandoned. The consequence of this underlying economism is that the Trotskyists are prepared to explain to the workers in abstract that the state is a capitalist state, but not to place at the centre of their active policy the actual constitutional mechanisms which make the state a capitalist state (presidentialism at national level, strong governors in the provinces and mayors in the municipalities, federalism, central bank finance, judicial review, etc). On the contrary, they place at the core of their agitation substantive economic improvements in the condition of life of the workers and poor peasants, which could only be achieved by the prior overthrow of the Brazilian state ... and of all the Latin American, and the north American, states. In taking this approach the Trotskyists are bound either to appear as ultra-left ultimatists (the ortho-Trots, like Workers Power in England) or to abandon bit by bit any demand which actually challenges the constitutional order and become simple reformists (the DS; the same evolution happened to Ken Coates in England and now seems to be happening to the Socialist Workers Party and ISG).

The second difficulty is nationalism. To put the point concretely, it is blindingly obvious that it is totally unrealistic for Brazil, acting alone, to repudiate the foreign debt, or even to take serious measures against capital flight. The US response would be swift and merciless. At the same time, to wait for US politics to move in the interests of the third world working class could well be to wait forever. On the other hand, collective action of the working class in the whole of Latin America would shake the foundations of the capitalist world order. Concrete class internationalism implies ‘continentalism’: that is, the practical collaboration of the workers’ movement, on a continental scale, prior to seizing state power.

This sort of practical internationalism was the foundation of the First International. It was a goal of the left wing of the Second International, and a goal of the Comintern. In the 1920s, however, the Stalin-Bukharin-Zinoviev-Kamenev leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union obliterated efforts towards regional and continental organisation of the CPs in the name of world centralism through the Moscow-based executive committee of the Comintern. ‘Internationalism’ was transmuted, for the ‘official communists’, into subservience to Moscow; for the Maoists into subservience to Beijing or Tirana.

The Trotskyists, meanwhile, transmuted the internationalist strategy of Marxism into an illusion of the repetition of the world effects of October 1917: ‘If we could just get someone to lead a revolution, we could get a new mass international ...’ In their internal organisation, they simply lifted the Stalinist model, which devalued continental relations in favour of relations through the international centre. The result is a multiplicity of little ‘Cominterns’ with the role of Moscow played by Paris (Lambertistes), London (currently the SWP’s International Socialist Tendency, the Socialist Party’s Committee for a Workers’ International, Workers Power’s League for the Fifth International, etc), New York (the Sparts) and so on. These pseudo-internationals exacerbate the divisions among the Marxist left.

If this ‘internationalism’ is singularly unattractive, what is publicly substituted for practical internationalism is sentimental ‘internationalism’ in the form of international conferences and gatherings which have no operative consequences. This style of ‘internationalism’ was pioneered by Willi Muenzenberg for the Comintern in the 1930s, and has continued a staple of the ‘official communist’ movement. Among the Trotskyists the Lambertistes have been long-time exponents. The World Social Forums, initiated by the PT, have carried it to new heights. But it remains ultimately decorative rather than practical. Without a real strategy for international action of the class, the Trotskyists in Brazil, as elsewhere, remain moral rather than strategic critics of left trade union and labour leaders.

Unity in action and coalitions

The third problem is that of forms of unity and coalitions. A political tendency - including one as large as the PT - which completely abjures blocs and coalitions will be unable to do anything except make propaganda. The classic example is the Socialist Party of Great Britain. The impasse of the PT municipalities in the face of Cardoso’s “fiscal responsibility” is merely a large-scale example of the problem.

But, on the other side of the coin, entering or staying in any and every coalition or ‘broad party’ which appears to be a ‘lesser evil’ - ie, to enable some very limited goal to be met - leads rather rapidly, as the example of the PT shows, to political collapse. It is this lesser-evilism which kept British trade unionists in the Liberal Party for many years, which to this day keeps US trade unionists in the Democratic Party, and which has led in Brazil to the collapse of every attempt at a left coalition into a group of populist influence-traders.

‘Official communists’ and Trotskyists alike have been unable to resolve this problem, over many years, and not just in Brazil. Either they have gone for policies of ‘critical support’ which end in supporting capitalist governments’ projects, like those of the DS in Brazil - and Lora in Bolivia, Moreno in Argentina, the LSSP in Sri Lanka, and so on and on. Or they have gone for denunciation and sterile independence, like the PSTU in Brazil (and more groups than it is worth mentioning). What is peculiar is that they have never tried the concrete advice of Marx and Engels to the German workers’ movement.

Leftists often quote Marx’s comment, that “Every step of real movement is more important than a dozen programmes.” John Rees did so at the January 25 Convention of the Left in London. But no-one seems to read the advice of which it is part - as a covering note for Marx’s Critique of the Gotha programme. Do not set up coalitions and broad parties on the basis of vague generalities about principles and values which mask underlying disagreements. Do enter into agreements and broad parties, but do so on the basis of concrete limited tasks on which there can be genuine, if limited, agreement. Retain and continue the open struggle between the differing political tendencies within the agreement on their points of disagreement. On this basis it is perfectly legitimate to have partial agreements, including electoral agreements, even with bourgeois parties.

At the same time, it is necessary to recognise that a party which genuinely represents the independent interests of the working class cannot take responsibility for running a capitalist government. To do so is - as the PT is in the process of demonstrating - to abandon the actual interests and struggle of the class wholesale, for the sake of marginal reforms which will be swept away when the disillusion of the electors results in the return of the traditional capitalist parties. The point is that Marxists should not accept responsibility for a government within the existing capitalist constitutional order. Electoral agreements therefore do not imply, for Marxists, agreements as to the formation of a government.

Brazilian lessons

The Brazilian PT has been the largest-scale test in many years of the policy of building a broad left workers’ party which does not define itself programmatically for or against the existing capitalist constitutional order. It has also tested the led variants, the ‘labour party policy’, the ‘replacement leadership strategy’ and the ‘critical support’ approach to non-Marxist left leaderships. It is already clear that these approaches have failed. There is no reason to attribute this failure, as the ortho-Trots do, to the Lula leadership acting from the outset in bad faith. The evolution of the PT towards populist lesser-evil coalitionism reflects the weakness of its political ideas and of the Marxist alternatives offered.

The question of constitutions, the question of practical internationalism, and the Marxist approach to coalitions turn out not to be abstract sectarian shibboleths, but practical choices in real politics. The left in Britain would do well to learn from this experience.