The crisis of the Lula government: the end of an era in Brazil

In the early 1980s, with the withdrawal of the military after 20 years of dictatorship, a new cycle of bourgeois rule in Brazil began: sectors of the conservative and corrupt oligarchy of the North and Northeast of the country gained hegemony within the Brazilian state. Ex-allies of the military rulers, politicians like José Sarney, Collor de Melo, Antônio Carlos Magalhães and Inocêncio de Oliveira, became the senior partners in the administration of the Brazilian state. What was involved was a type of “comprador bourgeoisie” that served as an intermediary to big capital in the division of the spoils that passed through the state’s hands.

Then came the first government of the intellectual Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC). It appeared to be something new. It claimed it intended to break with the “archaic model” of running the state. It spoke of “modernizing” the Brazilian state and even of carrying out a “bourgeois revolution” in Brazil, as Francisco Weffort wrote. In an article written during that period, Weffort justified his desertion from the PT, announcing that FHC, with his cadres drawn from the principal Brazilian universities ,would carry out structural transformations in the country, would insert Brazil into the process of globalization, would overcome the archaic structures and would guarantee the country an honorable place at the international table.

In the end, during FHC’s entire first term, nothing promised was realized. He remained president only as the hostage of the PFL (the right-wing party), with which he allied himself to obtain a majority in the Congress. Antonio Carlos Magalhães, the conservative senator from the Northeast, for a certain period managed to control both the Senate and the Federal Chamber of Deputies. FHC did nothing new at all. Was this a temporary problem? Would the “modernizing” and “revolutionary” agenda be completed in the second term? Grand illusion! In the middle of the second term, when FHC finally succeeded in reducing the power of the old oligarchy of the North and Northeast, freeing himself from Magalhães and limiting the power of Sarney, the economic crisis took charge in blocking the implementation of any of the “modernizing” goals; the government ended without accomplishing anything, even more a prisoner of international capital and the IMF.

At the end of eight years of government, FHC and the university cadres of the PSDB revealed themselves to be almost as incompentent as the conservative Northeastern oligarchy and no more able or willing to carry out elementary reforms—the democratization of the state, the amelioration of poverty and social inequality, etc. Dr. FHC, the great sociologist and theorist of dependency, one of the supposed geniuses among the economists of CEPAL (Economic Council for Latin America), ended his era of power a cultured parody of the corrupt Menem of Argentina or Fujimori of Peru.

But the question is: How was it possible, after the fall of the dictatorship, with the disappearance of military repression, that all of these failed and incompetent governments (Sarney, Collor, Itamar Franco and FHC) did not face stronger opposition or any more dangerous and serious movement of the masses? How could all of these governments manage to so deepen poverty and unemployment, multiply the public debt (internal and external), exploit the workers with constantly declining wages, without there arising any mass revolutionary movement?

The role of the PT and the CUT

In the end, this was possible thanks solely to the PT and the CUT (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, the county’s largest union federation), which from the 1980s on succeeded in aborting the creation of a revolutionary party in Brazil. The various groups calling themselves Trotskyist maintained their illusions in the PT for year after year: Convergência Socialista (aligned with the Argentine tendency led by Nahuel Moreno), Organização Socialista Internacionalista (followers of Pierre Lambert’s group in France), Causa Operária (linked to the Argentine group of Jorge Altamira) and Democracia Socialista (the Brazilian followers of Michel Pablo and Ernest Mandel).

During all these years, from Sarney to FHC, big capital used the Brazilian state as an instrument for capitalist accumulation in the most devastating form, inflicting upon the population levels of misery similar to those in the poorest countries of Latin America. The immense Brazilian public debt is the highest expression of this process of utilizing the state. As Marx said in chapter 24 of Capital, the public debt is the only portion of the national wealth that is socialized; that is, it is paid by the entire population, and this is what occurred over these years in Brazil. But this impunity was possible only because of the role played by the PT and the CUT in diverting all attempts at opposition into parliamentary and electoral illusions. And, in fact, they enjoyed great success on this road, electing ever-greater numbers of council members, mayors, deputies, and governors, and finally, in 2002, winning the presidential elections and taking control of the federal government.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2005/sep2005/braz-s07.shtml