Workers Party charts course for labor

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The biggest demonstration in the history of Latin America took place in Brazil last April as over one-and-a-half million people marched in Sao Paulo, shouting their demand for "direct presidential elections now!" In other Brazilian cities, similar mass mobilizations brought 15 to 20 million people into the streets in the period leading up to the April 25 vote in the congress on an opposition amendment which would have given most Brazilians the first chance in their lifetime to elect their Not surprisingly, the amendment to introduce direct elections was defeated. In a heavily gerrymandered congress, it fell 22 votes short of the required two-thirds majority. Yet the failure of the vote represents only a partial setback.

The momentum built up around this campaign has been so widespread, and the crisis of the dictatorship so acute, that it is only a matter of time before new mass explosions will occur. The dictatorship, in fact, seems on its last legs.

The explanation for these gigantic mobilizations is obvious. Throughout the 20 years the dictatorship has ruled the country, rage has been building up against government repression, the hopeless poverty facing an estimated 40 million people, and In the drought-stricken peasant areas of Brazil's northeast alone, it is estimated that 10 million people have starved to death in the last decade. Moreover, with a foreign debt of nearly $100 billion, the ruling junta has carried out an International Monetary Fund austerity policy which has cut real wages and thrown tens of millions of workers into the ranks of the unemployed or underemployed.

Aware that the mass discontent was beginning to build up to explosive proportions, the dictatorship decided in 1980 to implement a political "reform" program known as the "abertura. " It repealed martial law and censorship (the infamous Constitutional Decree No. 5) and decided to authorize the formation of opposition political parties. The junta's purpose was to defuse the political powderkeg, and to channel the discontent into the major bourgeois opposition parties.

What the junta did not expect, however, was that the Brazilian working class would take advantage of this political opening to develop its own independent strike movement; to create its own mass party independent of the parties of the bourgeoisie-the Workers Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores); and to form a new trade union confederation, the United Confederation of Workers (CUT).

Beginning with this issue, Socialist Action will be publishing a two-part series on Brazil's labor movement. The first article focuses on the emergence and development of the Workers Party (PT). Despite the differences between the situation in Brazil and the United States, the struggle to build a mass party based on the trade unions in Brazil is full of rich lessons for working people in this country. country's president. the continuous inflation rate of around 200 percent.

Beginning in 1978, a wave of wildcat strikes led by the Metalworkers Union of Sao Bernardo swept the entire industrial belt of Sao Paulo, Brazil's largest city. Demanding wage increases, job security, and an end to government intervention into the trade unions, hundreds of thousands of workers went out on strike against the multinational autoLuiz Inacio da Silva (Lula)

motive companies.

In March 1979, after holding massive assemblies where they elected new militant leaders in the government-controlled unions, 250,000 metalworkers in the ABC triangle of Sao Paulo (named after the industrial suburbs of Santo Andres, Sao Bernardo, and Sao Caetano) defied the laws of the generals and walked off their jobs. Soon the strike had spread to other unions across the country. Several unions, in fact, called strikes against the will of the established union leadership.

The government's response was not unexpected. Two strikers were killed. The militant strike leaders were expelled from the unions by military tribunals and jailed. They were accused of "inciting animosity between the Armed Forces and the people" and "inciting to collective disobedience of the law." Luiz Inacio da Silva, "Lula," the popular leader of the Sao Bernardo Metalworkers Union was sentenced to a threeand-a-half-year prison term.

Understanding that this was not a 6 SOCIALIST ACTION JULY 1984 fight against any one particular boss, but rather against the dictatorship, its courts, its press, and its agents within the trade union movement (the corrupt "pelegos"), the workers of the ABC triangle began to press for the formation of a political party that would fight for their interests.

A few months after the 20-day metalworkers' strike had ended with a partial retreat by the employers and the government, a series of local and national gatherings were held to discuss the formation of a new political party based on the reorganized trade union movement and independent of all the parties of the bourgeoisie.

On Feb. 10, 1980, a national congress of 400 delegates representing 20 unions from 17 states officially launched the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT). The congress brought together the most representative leaderships of the wave of strikes and elected a national executive commission headed by "Lula;" Olivio Dutra, leader of the bank workers of Porto Alegre; and Jaco Bittar, leader of the oil workers of Campinas.

The congress also adopted a manifesto which stated the following: "The Workers Party arises out of the need of millions of working people to intervene in the social and political life of the nation, in order to transform it in the interests of the toiling masses. The most important lesson the Brazilian workers have learned in the course of their recent struggles is that genuine democracy can only be won by the workers themselves, otherwise it will be lost."

PT confronts numerous obstacles The idea that the Brazilian working class should break with all the political parties of the ruling class and form its own political party had been advocated for many years by various currents in the workers' movement. The best example is the current grouped around the biweekly Marxist magazine, Em Tempo.

Founded in 1977, Em Tempo had organized a public debate on the need to form a workers' party. It also called for the formation of an independent and democratic trade union federation to replace the corporativist unions subordinated to the state apparatus; an end to the military dictatorship; and a free, sovereign constituent assembly. On international questions, Em Tempo regularly published documents of the Fourth International.

But most of the other Brazilian political formations—particularly the Stalinist Communist Party of Brazil (PCB)were violently opposed to the formation of the PT, and have done everything in their power since 1980 to prevent it from growing and gaining influence in the working class.

The PCB, which functions as the "left wing" inside the major bourgeois opposition party, the PMDB, attacked the PT for "dividing the opposition" to the junta and for "doing the dirty work of the CIA" in Brazil. In fact, it is the PCB which is doing the government's dirty work by urging the mobilized workers not to break with the parties and institutions of the capitalist class.

At the same time, a not insignificant layer of PT members and local PT leaders (many of them linked to the PCB) began to attack the class-struggle orientation of the PT, seeking at every stage to dissolve the PT and bring it back into the fold of bourgeois politics.

After opposing the PT's initial platform, this rightwing current began a concerted effort to oppose the campaign for the legalization of the PT. Soon after, it opposed the leadership's proposal for the PT to run its own candidates in the November 1982 gubernatorial and congressional elections, insisting that the PT should critically support PMDB candidates. In both cases, the right wing argued that the PT was too small and not "viable enough" to challenge the government's restrictions and carry out any public activity.

After the elections, this current pushed for the PT to participate in parliamentary coalitions and "opposition" state governments with the various liberal bourgeois parties.

PT responds to the challenge Against all the obstacles and pressures, the militant PT leadership, in collaboration with forces such as Em Tempo, set out to defend and implement the PT's class-struggle program. It began by organizing what was a successful mass campaign for the release of the imprisoned strike leaders. (One campaign rally on May 1, 1980, brought 80,000 workers to a soccer stadium in the ABC triangle.)

In 1981, after a year-long mobilization which saw the PT grow to over 300,000 members, the party won its legal status. In January 1982, the national executive commission presented a 12-point electoral program for a discussion and vote in the local party branches prior to the March 1982 PT national congress.

The proposal, which was approved by a large majority at the congress, called for running PT candidates for local, regional, and national office on the basis of a program of (1) "Jobs, Land, and Liberty;" (2) " An end to military rule;" and (3) "Socialism-the only system that can resolve our problems."

The congress, in a true spirit of international solidarity that has become the hallmark of the PT, also adopted resolutions in support of Polish Solidarnosc and the struggle for self-determination of the people of Central America. The congress pledged to organize a national campaign for the release of the Polish political prisoners and for an end to U.S. intervention in Central America and the Caribbean.

The elections and further pressures Despite the rigged character of the November elections, the PT obtained over 1.5 million votes, representing nearly 4 percent of the national vote. In the state of Sao Paulo, the PT vote was about 10 percent. Eight federal deputies, 13 state deputies, and dozens of municipal council members were elected on the PT slate. The party's membership grew to over 400,000.

The PT's major electoral success was in Diademe, a working-class city of 300,000 inhabitants, where the PT candidate, Gilson Luis Correia de Menezes, was elected mayor. After his election, Gilson pledged to organize a broad network of people's councils to support the new municipal council.

Yet, despite the fact that the PT had managed to organize spirited election rallies of over 100,000 people, the electoral results were not as large as many PT members had expected. The reasons for this—the lack of organization and solid roots on a national level-were fully detailed in a document adopted by the December 1982 meeting of the PT's national executive commission.

The lower-than-expected vote total, however, gave fuel to the right wing of the party who immediately issued their own public criticism of the leadership, decrying the campaign's "radical" and "divisionistic" character. In an interview in Em Tempo, "Lula" responded to these accusations, stating that "these party careerists might do better to find themselves another party. The objective of the campaign," he said, "was to organize and mobilize the working class, not just to seek votes."

Still, the campaign to paralyze the PT did not come to a halt. Nor, on the other hand, did the historic leadership of the PT stand still. In early June 1983, 113 PT personalities, including "Lula," issued a manifesto which reaffirmed the party's fidelity to its origins and program. The statement, despite a number of weaknesses, also confirmed the decision that the party is to be an activist party, a fighting party, and a class party.

The "Manifesto of the 113" soon gained the support of the large majority of the PT rank and file, thus enabling the party to play a decisive role in the founding and development of a national labor confederation (the CUT), as well as in the campaign for direct presidential elections. In next month's issue of Socialist Action, we will examine these two campaigns of the PT, and discuss the new problems confronting Brazil's labor movement.