The definitive bankruptcy of centrism in Brazil

Finally, they said, Marxism would break free of the “authoritarian Leninist sects” and a democratic socialist party would arise—one which would be rich in its diversity, its respect for democracy, its transparent activity, and its creativity in finding new roads to the country’s socialist transformation.

In fact, since the end of the 1980s, the PT has totally distanced itself from the “sects” that assisted in its birth. It began to elect deputies, with ever-greater majorities in each election, to win control of city governments, then of state governments and finally, in 2002, it took control of the federal government with the victory of Lula as president of the republic.

But what was happening during this 26-year evolution? Arising within the party was a dominant tendency known as “Articulation,” concentrated in large part in the figure of José Dirceu, an ex-Stalinist and able man of the party machine, who assembled and organized a real party caste based, above all, on the union bureaucracy (particularly in the banking and metalworking sectors) and on the few intellectuals (ever diminishing in number) who still remained within the party.

Since 1980, the party’s trajectory towards its present catastrophe could be foreseen by any careful observer. Money from the union funds and city governments controlled by the PT began to flow into the party’s coffers, financing its campaigns, paying for its election workers and winning more and more votes, more and more elections. Besides this, a growing number of corporations and capitalists began to contribute to those who now appeared as the new owners of power.

Obviously, by the time Lula won the presidential elections in 2002, the bank accounts and the lifestyles of the leading layer of the PT had changed substantially, but the true dimensions of this change were still not known. I remember when Florestan Fernandes, one of the few intellectuals and deputies of the party who never betrayed his original convictions, once told me (still at the end of the 1980s) with clear indignation, “[José] Genoíno [then a federal deputy] only wears English tropical wool suits!”

But Florestan, who died as PT member, had the good fortune not to see what happened after Lula came to power: an advisor to Genoíno’s brother—also a deputy—being seized at an airport with $100,000 hidden in his underwear, suitcases full of money being paid to deputies and multimillion-dollar loans being taken out, without any guarantees, by Genoíno (by then national president of the PT) and Delúbio Soares (party treasurer); Marcelo Sereno and Sílvio Pereira (senior party leaders), as well as the communications minister, Luiz Gushiken, involved in the diversion of state contributions to pension funds; Finance Minister Antonio Palocci falling after revelations concerning scandals involving payoffs and prostitutes and for violating the confidentiality of the bank account of a humble caretaker; finally, Lula’s former chief of staff, José Dirceu, and virtually the entire PT leadership being formally charged last week with creating a “sophisticated criminal organization” for the purpose of staying in power.

But what does such a trajectory by this party represent from the Marxist standpoint? We think that it expresses a very precise evolution that was foreseeable from the beginning—that is, from 1980 onwards. In that period, the PT was presented by its ideologues as a centrist alternative, as a democratic and non-Leninist form of party organization. They openly rejected the formula of “the dictatorship of the proletariat” and proposed a popular-democratic path to socialism. The party’s “democratic” theoreticians (Álvaro Moisés, Weffort, Marilena Chauí, Marco Aurélio Garcia, among others) developed an ideology based upon the victory of the “citizenry” and the categorical emphasis on “democracy” as the wide road to “Brazilian socialism.”

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http://wsws.org/articles/2006/apr2006/braz-a20.shtml