Feature Page: Lula sacrifices the left of his party’s best fighters for his alliance with the bosses

By GERRY FOLEY

As expected, on Dec.14, the National Directory of the Brazilian Workers Party (PT) expelled the PT members of parliament who had voted against the neoliberal pension “reform” pushed by the Lula government. They had previously been suspended and party leaders proclaimed that they were as good as expelled. The final vote in the National Directory was 55 to 27 to expell them.

The “reform,” which in reality cut retirement benefits for public employees, was part of an international capitalist offensive. Similar bills provoked strong protests in Italy and France, among other countries. In Brazil, the proposal was most easily passed by parliament because the leadership of a party that is supposed to represent working people supported it and imposed a draconian discipline on its MPs to vote for it.

This measure sealed the determination of the PT leadership to continue the neoliberal policies of the classical bourgeois regime that preceded it.

The government of Luiz Ignacio da Silva (“Lula”), a former trade-union militant, was elected a year ago on a wave of rebellion against the capitalist/imperialist offensive that has brought ruin to working people and sections of the middle classes in many Latin American countries. Since Lula had come to prominence as a working-class fighter and been kept out of the presidency in the past by right-wing scare campaigns, his election was seen as a victory for the victims of neoliberal policies.

In fact, this wave of rebellion has put populist figures in office in a series of Latin American countries, including Ecuador, Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia. But all these populist alternatives are only pale reflections of past populist regimes in Latin America, which did offer significant concessions to working people in opposition to imperialism and those sectors of big business most closely associated with it.

In every case, the new populist regimes seek simply to offer a cover for the capitalist/ imperialist offensive, to offer themselves to imperialism and its allies as more effective defenders of their interests in stormy times than the classical agents. The Lula regime has done so most effectively because it came to power with the most prestige among working people.

However, Lula has the problem that he is formally the representative of a workers party that includes many working-class fighters and even organized left and revolutionary tendencies. Thus, he had to inaugurate his regime by smashing the left in his own party in order to demonstrate his truthworthiness to the Brazilian capitalist class and its imperialist masters.

In the expulsion of the four MPs who voted against the pension “reform,” Lula has shown his ruthlessness and his iron control of the PT apparatus.

Moreover, his control of the apparatus can only increase since the party, after gaining the government, is being flooded with opportunists.

Heloisa Helena, a PT senator and member of Democracia Socialista (DS), the Brazilian section of the Fourth International, was among the expelled. She noted that absurdity of the fact that she—who had been a long and effective fighter for the PT and its program—was being expelled from her party for continuing to defend its historic principles when Lula was climbing into bed with some of the worst swindlers and exploiters in Brazil.

Actually Helena’s expulsion was symptomatic. She is the most popular figure on the left of the PT.

Following Heloisa Helena’s expulsion, the DS issued a statement saying: “From the politico-moral point of view, Heloisa Helena continues to be a militant of the socialist and democratic PT that we have participated in building since its foundation. The DS, in line with the resolutions of its last conference, reaffirms the centrality of the fight within the PT to win it back to a socialist and democratic orientation.

In the wake of the expulsions, however, a series of DS members in Rio de Janeiro and Parana issued a letter announcing their resignation from the party: “We cannot stay a minute longer in a party after the expulsion of those who dared to dissent publicly from measures that took away rights from workers.”

DS is organized as a tendency within the PT and has only had minimal structures of its own, and thus was ill prepared politically and organizationally for the crackdown of a rightward moving PT leadership.

Its parliamentary representatives went three different ways on the pension “reform” vote, some abstaining, some voting for it with a statement that they were only doing so out of party discipline, and some voting against it.

In the final vote in the Senate, Heloisa Helena voted against the bill and the other DS senator voted for it.

In fact, the DS is getting the stick and the carrot from the PT leadership, being promised the nomination for some mayoralties of big cities at the same time as being threatened with expulsions. The reality is that if the DS bends to the pressure of the PT leadership, it can offer it some needed left cover; but if it opposes it too visibly it will face the same fate as Heloisa Helena.

Heloisa Helena herself has pledged to continue her fight, either inside the PT or outside it. “I am going to continue fighting with those who remain in the PT, many of whom are high-minded comrades, and with those who leave the PT, because there is a life after the PT.”

The other three expelled MPs, who are linked to small Trotskyist groups, have called for the formation of a new party to take up the fight that the PT has abandoned.