Workers Party (PT) in Brazil has been widely regarded as one of the most promising developments in the international working class movement over the last decade. It has been referred to, alongside such varied phenomena as COSATU in South Africa, Solidarnosc in Poland, the Greens in Germany, even the Labour left in Britain, as a centrai part of the recomposition of working-class politics.
The significance and lessons of the PT have been hotly debated, and not only in Latin America. Perhaps most importantly, in South Africa militants of the independent Black trade unions have looked with interest at the Brazilian experience in combining militant trade unionism with an independent political organisation.
The PT was formed out of the big wave of strikes that swept the industrial region of São International No 8 January/February 1987
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Demonstrating for Lula's release Which way for Marxists in... The Brazilian Workers Party (PT) emerged out of the huge São Paulo metalworkers' strikes in the early 1980s, and is one of the most novel left-wing developments in Latin America. STUART PIPER looks at the background. We also publish an interview with JOAO MACHADO a leader of the Em Tempo tendency in the PT. Paulo in 1978 and 1979 (a region which some claim now comprises the largest single concentration of industrial workers anywhere in
the world). Its core leaders remain the trade unionists who led those strikes, best symbolised in the figure of the metalworkers' leader Luís Inácio da Silva, widely known as 'Lula' However, from the beginning, three other sectors have taken part in developing the PT, alongside the militant trade unionists.
First, and numerically the most important, is the progressive wing of the church, those currents broadly identifying with the ideas of 'liberation theology'. With their extensive network of Christian based communities among the urban and rural poor, these currents have had a decisive influence in extending the PT's popular base beyond its initial roots amongst industrial workers. Indeed in last November's elections it was the PT's vote in the countryside which increased, while its urban vote remained stagnant. 35
Secondly, there is an array of intellectuals and independents with widely views. Many of the most right-wing among these, including a group of career politicians who dominated the PT's group in the early days, have now left party, or been kicked out for refusing abide by its policies especially its decision not to support the main bourgeois candidate in the 1985 transition to civilian rule. Another loose grouping calling themselves mists' have strongly anti-Leninist views and seem to be heading in the direction of social democratic politics.
Further to the left, a very influential group of Marxists, some of whose history goes back to the urban guerrilla movements of the 1960s, identify closely with the Cuban revolution. Thirdly, there are the organised currents of the revolutionary left.
Several factors have helped to strengthen the PT's political resolve over the last couple of years. The most important is the renewed combativity of the working class which has accompanied the transition to civilian rule. This has been clear in a fresh surge of industrial action, reaching out to new industries and new regions, and given expression in the founding and rapid growth of a militant trade union confederation, the CUr, closely allied to the PT itself. The CUT has rapidly outstripped its moderate rival, the CGT (where reformist 'communists' support fashioned union bureaucracies), last month forced the latter to back its own call for a one-day general strike against new price rises and the foreign debt.
The third factor in the PT's positive evolution, and by no means the least important, is the existence of organised revolutionary currents in its midst, consistently arguing for independent class politics and organising for militant action. Several of these have come together in a 'left bioc' which last June reccived nearly thirty per cent of delegates' votes at the PT's Fourth National Convention, electing a sunilar proportion of the party's incoming National Committee. 36
BRAZIL divergent parliamentary the … to 'autono- old- and only facing revolutionaries in Brazil, and in particular hore does their participation in the PT fit in? FoR us party-building means building the Workers Party (PT). The question here is how to strengthen the PT and help it advance towards becoming a mass revolutionary party. fit into this process, particularly in unity in order to contribute more to the party's development. And did the discussion leave any major debates unresolved? Of course we can't pretend to have solved every problem. In general we have achieved greater political clarity in the course of debating with the rest of the PT and CUT, exchanging experiences and trying to develop shared ideas based on the experience of the workers' movement both in Brazil and internationally. As for the questions which remain unresolved for us, I would pick out two main ones. Firstly, there are a series of debates over strategy for the Brazilian revolution. Brazil is today a dependent capitalist country, marked by profound degree of capitalist development. We
CONTRA A MICA NICA da CARE! E AUTONOMIA Si Interview with Joao Machado João Machado is a leader of the revolutionary Marxist current organised around the journal Em Tempo. In the earlier part of the interview, he described how the Em Tempo's recent congress had discussed the political situation facing Brazilian workers and the need to prevent any stabilizing of a conservative, anti- working class regime through the institutions of the civilian 'New Republic', as well as the political tasks facing the trade union movement. The interview continues... What do you see as the general strategic questions The issue is also how we as a revolutionary Marxist current relation to the other revolutionary currents with whom we are seeking greater political inequalities, but with a not inconsiderable
NDADE would call it a semi- industrialized, dependent country.
For that reason, the Brazilian revolution will be different from, for example, the Russian revolution: capitalism today is much more developed, we are not confronting a rudimentary state apparatus like that of Tzarism, and the bourgeoisie's ideological domination is today much more difficult to deal with. The weight of movements like those against the oppression of women or blacks will be especially great. On the other hand, the forms of struggle and of power, like soviets, insurrection and the general strike, will certainly have a prominent
The Brazilian revolution will also be different from the revolution in the imperialist countries, which do not have to confront the problem of imperialist domination, nor the tremendous inequality of a country like ours, with all the importance this lends to the land question and to the urban popular movement in the shanty towns and so on. But it will be even more different from experiences closer to us like those of Nicaragua or Cuba: here the development of capitalism, of the state, and of the bourgeoisie, is incomparably greater.
In other words, there is a whole range of international experience for us to assimilate, but which we cannot simply repeat. And this discussion has to be posed for us, in the second half of the 80s, in a much more concrete fashion than the
International No 8 January/February 1987
SASSI Brazilian metalworkers strike in 1980: 'the workers united will never be defeated'
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D NDIC debates we had, for example, in the 60s, over whether the revolution would be socialist or bourgeois- democratic. That debate has clearly been superceded.
A second unresolved question, which is related to the general problem of strategy for the Brazilian revolution, is that of how to apply, in the here and now, a united front policy. But what about the relationship between a Marxist organisation and the PT? Isn't there an inconsistency here? Doesn't this amount, as some people say: to having a party within a party? There's not the least inconsistency. Our position, when the process of building the PT began, was that there was no revolutionary workers party in the country, and that it was necessary to build one; we believed that a revolutionary party (and when we say party, we mean something with mass influence) could not be the result of simple growth by one or other of the existing revolutionary organisations, our own included. The general conception which we have for building revolutionary parties today is that various conditions have to be drawn together: processes of convergence and fusion amongst revolutionaries, the development of new, fighting, workers' vanguards, and the fusion of marxist cadre with the workers' International No 8 January/February 1987
B R vanguard, leading to a higher stage of unity.
We see the building of the PT as just such a process, developing a broad at the same time involving a convergence of revolutionaries from a variety of origins. If successful, it will result in a revolutionary party. Within this process, our current puts forward decisive programmatic questions which are essential to a revolutionary party; for example, on the critique of Stalinism and the idea of socialist democracy, on class independence, on internationalism. But many members of the PT, and others, think that having an organised current inside the PT is disloyal, and that it would be more correct for each current to have its own party. I think there's a big mistake here. Why accuse us of disloyalty? Right from the beginning, no one has done more to build the PT than us. We defend our point of view clearly within the PT, we have out the debate with all other currents, and we abide by the decisions the party takes. we were some secret group trying to manipulate the party. In fact we do form its own party is totally absurd. We
A Z I L working-class and popular vanguard, and early in 1987? Maybe we could be accused of disloyalty if And the idea that each current should
have to fight against fragmentation on the left; our aim should be to unite, not to divide. It is obvious that to be divided is to be weakened. What would become of the combative left if we launched our own separate party, the Castroites another, the Christians in the PT one or two more, the autonomists one of their own, and so on and so forth. This wouldn't lead to greater clarity. On the contrary, for the vast majority of people it would be just an enormous confusion, with the differences virtually unintelligible. It would be grotesque, and the left would look really What is your position on the new regulation governing tendencies within the PT, planned for Of course we think that regulation of this sort is positive and definitely needed. We are in favour, and we intend to operate in accordance with the norms adopted. On the other hand, certain conditions are necessary for such a regulation to be acceptable: it has really to guarantee the right to tendency, on a genuinely equal basis for all, with the right for each to express its point of view freely within the party; it cannot be used as a way of doing away with the existence of currents... D
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