05.04.2016 :: Latin America
Prologue: In 2004 I wrote Brazil and Lula: Year Zero
(Edifurb: Blumenau, Sao Paolo 2005), in which I presented my analysis of the
Lula-Workers Party (PT) regime in Brazil undergoing a Grand Transformation with
the first stage represented by the PT’s incorporation into a government
apparatus led by of bankers and exporters (the agro-mineral elite).
Two year earlier, my colleague, Henry Veltmeyer,
and I had published Cardoso’s Brazil: A Land for Sale (Rowman and Littlefield,
Lanham MD 2003) where we described how President Cardoso had sold off the major
public resources, banks, petroleum and iron resources to foreign capital for
rock bottom prices. The 2002 election of President Lula DaSilva of the Workers’
Party did not reverse Cardoso’s sell-out. Indeed, Lula accepted his
predecessor’s neo-liberal policies - embellished them - and set about forging
an alliance between the Workers’ Party and the economic elites, replacing
Cardoso’s Party! For the next few years, we were attacked by the Left academic
and pundit world for having dared to advance such a critique on their ‘worker
president’! The consequences of what we had described as the PT’s pact with the
Right are clear to everyone today: Brazil is enmeshed in swindles, scandals and
coups.
Introduction
“The nature of the multitude is to arrive
rapidly and depart swiftly”.
For more than a decade, left-wing parties,
accompanied by working class trade unions and landless rural social movements,
dominated Brazil, the largest country in Latin America. Their political leaders
were repeatedly elected; their trade union and rural social officials secured
concessions from the state; the political process followed legal procedures
adjudicating its agenda with the opposition business, banking and professional
parties.
We were told the days of coups and revolutions
were passed. Electoral processes, honest vote counts and mutual recognition of
political legitimacy precluded any violent, dismissal and ouster of the
established Left political leadership.
The Rise and Fall of the Political Left
The dominance of the Left is now only a memory!
Its parties are in full retreat. Its leaders are scorned, insulted and
prosecuted by their former political allies. The business allies of the past
are now at their throats. Those politicians, who secured government positions
in return for loyalty and votes, have fled clamoring for ‘impeachment’ and
claiming deceit…while seeking new sources of patronage and plunder.
The great left political leaders, who had once
bragged of 53 million voters, who were hailed in the international press for
their command of a huge mass base while accommodating the interest of modern
trade and business, are now condemned by the capitalist media as the cause of
the current economic calamity.
The popular heroes of yesterday, who shared
wealth and status with their rivals in the business elite, are now ostracized
and facing show-trials for corruption.
The Trade Union and Rural Workers’ Leaders
Veteran trade union and rural leaders came to
the Presidential Palace to celebrate the electoral successes of the ‘worker
president’.
Once blushing with flattery, these mass leaders
are now dismayed that the fiesta has ended and the music has stopped, while the
workers and peasants are ordered to pay for the broken dishes and start the
cleanup…
The mass popular organizations are now without
allies in Congress; their voices are shut out of the bourgeois media; the
domestic economy has been abandoned by the market; and the masses are in the
streets clamoring for retribution against the politicians betrayal. Now trade
union and peasant leaders appeal for resistance and a return to class struggle;
but their followers are in retreat!
Toward an Understanding of a Historical Defeat
The rise and fall of the Left is a historical
reversal, which requires a systematic analysis of a disastrous strategy. The
left’s defeat cannot simply be dismissed as a betrayal by treacherous allies,
corrupt party officials or plots concocted by billionaires and the US Embassy,
leading up to a coup via a clearly phony impeachment process. The real question
to ask is: Why did the Left allow such treachery and betrayal, culminating in a
legislative ‘coup d’état’, to develop unopposed leading to reversal and rout of
the Left? How could a huge multi-million-person voting machine, a vast and
experienced trade union apparatus and a militant rural social movement fall
defeated without even a struggle?
The Strategy of the Left
The Left parties deliberately adopted a
short-term strategy of accommodation with the right, in part to avoid
long-term, large-scale strategic confrontations with the defeated economic
elite. For their part, the parties of the Right and their US advisors patiently
chose to accept the Left’s compromises and offers of cooperation, in order to
prepare for a strategic offensive when the Left’s mass of support had declined.
The Left parties embraced poorly thought-out
’short-cuts’ to governance. They occupied government posts while cutting cozy
deals with all the major power brokers of the Right.
The Left signed ‘austerity’ agreements with the
IMF to restrain budgets and accept debt obligations. Members of notorious
rightwing and opportunistic political parties were brought into the cabinet,
assigned strategic congressional leadership positions and placed on senior
presidential advisory panels in exchange for their votes to approve loans,
credits and regional development projects.
The Left negotiated deals with business elites,
offering them generous subsidies and high profits, while restraining workers’
demands for structural changes. They viewed this accommodation as an exchange
for economic growth, wage increases and trade union recognition as a legitimate
power sharer.
The Left dismissed the grassroots demands for
social transformation and they opposed any popular campaign to prosecute the
financial elites for money laundering and white-collar crimes. Instead, they
favored incremental increases in wages, poverty funds, pensions and consumer
credit.
The Left ignored the reality that such
arrangements with the business elites were only a temporary truce rather than a
permanent, strategic alliance.
The trade unions followed the lead of the Left
political leadership. They directed their mass organizations to accept
negotiations based on periodic wage increases, more funds for trade union
education and subsidies for new union building complexes. The trade union
leaders discouraged strikes, repressed demands for public ownership and
prevented any investigation into mining, banking and agro-business corruption,
tax evasions and bribery. Even the well-documented wave of assassinations of
landless worker activists and the naked land grabs of ‘protected’ Indian
territories went unpunished.
The business elite realized they faced a
potential radical mass movement, which was under the control of an elected
‘Left’ government. They were ‘delighted’ that this Left government was so
willing to accommodate capitalist demands. They cautiously decided that
short-term rewards and well-placed bribes would help prepare the ground for
their restoration to power and reversal of the left’s concessions.
The Left rural social movements retained their
radical socialist rhetoric and mass membership, but their leadership followed
the Left parties in government.
In exchange for subsidies to set-up and expand
community-based rural organizations and training schools for farmworkers, the
social movements mobilized their mass activists to ‘turn-out the vote’ for the
Left parties’ President and Congress people.
The rural movement leaders justified their
accommodation with the Left- business alliance describing the Left regime as a
‘field of contention’, where they could press for radical changes. After more
than a dozen years of successful mass struggle, the radical rural movement
chose to ally with the Left party apparatus! Only when the ‘Left President’ was
impeached did the rural workers’ leader call for the return to class struggle!
The Left’s Short Term Gains and Long Term
Losses
The political leaders on the left, as well as
trade union and rural movement leaders, all believed they had a winning
strategy. They claimed their mostly superficial ‘gains’ were ‘evidence’ of
their success. These included:
(1) Their governance for over four
administrations where they increased or maintained the left’s voting majority.
(2) ‘Pragmatic’ political alliances with
parties across the spectrum - won through various forms of bribery - as a
formula for winning Congressional approval for major development contracts.
(3) Their funding of opposition allies, which
attracted ‘respectability’ and enriched both Left politicians and their
electoral campaigns.
(4) The decrease in social tension achieved by
recruiting business opponents and gaining support among sectors of the
capitalist class.
The Left political leaders’ strategy of
accommodation depended on the economic success of the mineral-oil-agriculture
export elites. This ignored the business sector’s fundamental policy of cutting
social and productive investments whenever markets, profits and economic
opportunities declined.
When the Left regime’s public subsidies for the
export industry declined following the collapse of the global commodity market,
the entire capitalist elite coalesced into a virulent Rightwing opposition.
When the previous political accommodation with
capital, held together by corruption and questionable subsidies became the
target, the Right launched their strategic offensive.
The fact that business, banking, media and
agro-mineral elites were able to join forces so quickly and launch their attack
on the Left shows how they had flourished for a decade during the commodity
boom.
The entire façade of a ‘broad progressive
coalition’ disappeared: The trade union and rural movement structures, linked
to the Left political leaders, were incapable of mobilizing their mass base and
countering the insurgent Right. For over ten years, the Left regime had cut all
its political deals in Congress, in the corridors of elite power, while
ignoring ‘class struggle’.
This was a ‘Left’ regime, wholly dependent on
market conditions and business allies. It was unable to defend any strategic
ground when the Right regained its power base.
The Left regime had retained an intact and
fully functioning right administrative and judicial apparatus, composed of
courts and judges, the prosecutors and investigators all aligned with the Right
opposition. They were ready to undermine the regime’s congressional majority by
opening ‘corruption’ investigations targeting the Left. Meanwhile, the business
elite managed to intensify the consequences of the economic recession and
insist that ‘recovery’ meant austerity against the poor.
The Right purchased its street crowds and
mobilized its party allies, including the center, the fascists, the
neo-militarists, the agro-business elite and the imperial and local financial
press. From Sao Paulo to New York to London they were poised to forcibly oust
the elected Left President from power and jail its leaders.
Conclusion
The Left believed in the myth of democratic
capitalism. They had faith that their negotiations with the business elites
would increase social welfare. They operated on a platform of gradual
accommodation of class interests leading to multi-class alliances and strategic
conciliation between business and labor.
The historical lesson has proven otherwise -
again. Business and the capitalist elite make clear, tactical short-term
agreements in order to prepare a strategic counter-offensive. Their patient
long-term strategy was to mobilize their class allies and overturn the
electoral process - at the ripe moment.
The Left parties depended on achieving a series
of ’strategic understandings with the capitalist class’ where both would
benefit at a time of peak global demand for Brazil’s commodities, instead of
expanding their popular mandate by transforming the economy and domestic
market.
The Left behaved as if favorable world market
conditions would last forever. They lost their chance to use their 53
million-voter strength and radically change the organization and ownership of
Brazil’s strategic economic sectors!
In this way, the Left imitated the Right,
choosing to share its power bases through accommodation with their
business-partners. These were amateurs at the bourgeois power game, who found
themselves entrapped in corruption and crisis! How shocking!
It was so much easier for the Left politicians
to get campaign funding through the usual practice of business payola than to
campaign from door to door, factory to factory, village to village, fighting
repression, elite media boycotts and armed vigilantes.
In the end, their ‘power base’ dissolved and
their capitalist ‘partners’ and political ‘allies’ abandoned them: the Left
President was impeached.
Victorious capital and empire neatly ended this
charade of ‘market democracy’. The retreating Left parties begged for a
reprieve via parliamentary vote and ended with a decisive defeat… bleating
their last whimper as the door slammed shut…
Capitalists have never and will never recognize
weak popular opposition. The capitalist political elite will always choose
power and wealth over social democracy. The Left, in retreat, isolated and
expelled from the corridors of power, now face retribution from the most corrupt
and treacherous of their ‘former allies’.
They usher in a lost generation.
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