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Beware of the Bite of the Blue Fly
Hilary Wainwright
Red Pepper, August 2002
If anyone can take on global capital, it's Lula and the party he leads, the Brazilian Workers Party (the PT - Partitido Trabhalidores). He has a popular mandate for radical policies of redistribution, land reform, participatory forms of democracy, and expanded public investments. And this will not be just a formal electoral mandate: behind each of the demands are strong popular movements able to back their leader's stand at the negotiating table with direct action - the landless movement, the citizens involved in the participatory budgeting of PT governed cities, the left-wing and strategically minded trade union federation, CUT. Moreover, the PT has no illusions about going it alone: it has nurtured alliances on the left throughout Latin America; through hosting the World Social Forum it has promoted a vision of globalisation based on social justice.
And yet, and yet. The signs are not good, even assuming Lula wins which is not a foregone conclusion - the Brazilian elites are notoriously able to cobble something together to stop their archenemy. As Burbach reports, Lula has agreed to pay the international debt, in spite of party policy, and a statement in the country's post-dictatorship constitution, of no payment without an audit of the debt. (A good part of the debt was incurred during the dictatorship and doubled under the present government.) Also he is making conciliatory noises towards the IMF.
The problem is not Lula's commitment; it is one of strategy in what is effectively an economic and political war. Already the banks and the financial press are trying to blame Lula for Brazil's financial mess - when in fact Brazil will have to renegotiate its debt, or default on it, regardless of who wins. His advisers seem to be urging a strategy of placating international business (a task with no end) in case less committed voters are frightened away. Petistas (PT activists) are persuading Lula to divide the opposition by winning wide support for an economically, socially and morally irrefutable negotiating position to the IMF to enable the new PT government to lift the country out of its vicious spiral of debt repayment - repayment requires more loans, leading to more debt repayment. Debt service payments now consume over 90 per cent of the country's export earnings.
The present direction of Lula's strategy raises a more general issue, which runs through our articles on Ken Livingstone's plan for London and Manchester Council's faith in inward investment via the Commonwealth Games. Lula knows, Ken Livingstone knows, half of Manchester council's executive know that electoral office does not given them sufficient power to achieve the goals of social justice which all of them to differing degrees espouse. So the problem for those who have office or who are trying to win it, is how to manage the parts of the state they control in a principled, innovative way and at the same time use electoral office to reach out honestly to the people who elected them, and tell them the truth about the constraints they face. This way those with office avoid the trap of pretending that they can sort things for "their people" and build a coalition of different kinds of power - electoral, moral and economic - to challenge global corporations, national government - in the case of London and Manchester - and international bodies such as the IMF - in the case of Brazil.
It's worth remembering that the corporations have not been able to grab all the cards in the last twenty years of deregulation. They still need access to national markets, they need to persuade people to trust them and buy from them, they need to use or buy publicly owned land and infrastructure, they need workers, they need the big contracts that public bodies can give, and more. Why else do companies go to such expense to bribe, lobby and generally suck up to national and local politicians and senior officers, if they did not need them on their side?
When politicians actually get their hands on these bargaining levers, they all too often lose their strategic senses. In Brazil there is a blue fly whose sting alters its victim's sense of reality. It is as if when the left gets into office or near it, they get bitten by this fly and it mesmerises them to use office simply to manage rather than make it part of a wider strategy of transformation. You can inoculate against the bite. A strong independent party rooted in popular movements has worked as antidote for Governor Olivio Dutra in Southern Brazil who refused Ford's terms of inward investment. Encouraging high expectations and supporting campaigning groups is another. It worked with Ken in his GLC days. Hopefully the Petistas and the landless movement can inoculate Lula against the blue flies now buzzing noisily in his ears.
Copyright 2002 Red Pepper
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