Lula’s first term as President of Brazil was a disappointment, which saw economic “constraints” loom larger than the potential to remake the country’s institutions by harnessing popular power. Hilary Wainwright sees few signs that the new administration will achieve radical changes, but finds some cause for hope in the resurgence of grassroots organising among the country’s social movements.
No one talked about clothes pegs when they said they'd be voting for a second term of President Lula, but they very ostentatiously held their noses. It was the day before Sunday's election. A seminar of Latin American leftist economists held in Montevideo was coming to an end. The Brazilians were making sure that they got home in time to vote against Alkemin, Lula's rival whose election commitments included a promise - or rather a threat - of closer ties with the US.
In Lula's previous election campaigns in 1989, 1994, 1998, 2002, it would have been unimaginable that there could be any doubts on the left about whether or not to vote for Lula. Thousands had joined the Brazilian Workers Party (known as `the PT') and dedicated themselves to both building grass roots movements and campaigning for political office. The PT is the party which Lula founded and led, originally as part of the popular resistance to the dictatorship but which these days he hardly mentions. The activists who built this `movement party' believed that they were creating a new kind of radical political force in Brazilian politics. Their vision and to a significant extent the reality was of a force whose power came from outside the political class and which would therefore have the independent strength to challenge the elites and the gross inequalities in which they luxuriated.
Now, after four years of the Lula presidency, for which petistas (as PT militants were called in the days of party militants) had worked for over a decade, the cruel concentration of wealth is almost untouched. Incredibly, Lula's finance minister insists on paying back the country's debt (which includes the debt built up under the military dictatorship) at a faster rate than asked for by the IMF.
The `Bolsa Familia', a family grant of around £30 per child per month, has meant a real improvement in the lives of millions of desperately poor families. This grant, alongside cheaper rice and cheaper construction materials, has meant the difference between starvation and survival. It has created a bedrock of support for Lula, especially in the North East. But the unemployment that underlies the endemic poverty remains.
There has been no real redirection of the economy away from dependence upon the whims of multinational investment and the global market towards expanding domestic services and production to meet the demands of the huge internal market; no redistribution of wealth and no adequate programme of land reform. More fundamentally, the systematic corruption that oils the wheels of the Brazilian state not only remains untouched but has actually spread to the PT itself, at the highest levels (for more details see In the Eye of the Storm:
Left-wing activists discuss the political crisis in Brazil.
There is one front, however, on which the old power relations have been reversed and, as a result, change has occurred. The previous government nurtured a strong alliance with the US on every level, especially trade. By contrast, Lula's government, under pressure from Brazil's own radical social movements, most notably the landless workers, and their allies across Latin America, has been central in blocking the negotiation of a Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA). Lula's presidential rival vowed to restart it, which is why the Brazilians amongst those economists I'd been with in Montevideo had booked early flights to get home to vote.
A Venezualan participant in the Montevideo conference had been a member of the Venezuelan delegation during the trade negotiations with the US. He told me how, at a crucial moment, the Brazilians, who were under strong pressure over agricultural policy and land reform, broke the strict protocol of small secretive delegations and brought representatives of just about every agricultural interest, effectively opening the negotiations up to public pressure. There were corporate executives promoting the interests of Brazilian agribusiness and eager to do a deal with the US. And there were leaders of Brazil's landless movement (MST) and its allies among PT ministers. The latter grouping teamed up with the Venezuelans to put on the negotiating table positions that these movement representatives couldn't put themselves, but which pushed the Brazilian negotiators to take a stronger stand.
This kind of scenario, where a government responds to social movements as a means of achieving radical changes that are impossible through political institutions alone, was what many people, internationally as well as in Brazil, expected from the PT across the board. It meant seeing economics not simply in terms of `constraints', or treating markets and financial flows as forces of nature, but as being about power and counterpower, and the need for new democratic institutions to put human needs before making money.
After the last four years no one (besides Lula himself) is kidding themselves that, with Lula remaining in office, this `people's economics' is anywhere nearer to taking root. Nevertheless, Lula's second term is unlikely to be the same as the first. Key figures in the old leadership cannot easily come back after being implicated in corruption; bargaining and struggling to fill the vacuum is already underway. But the future of the party within which they struggle is unclear. Lula's electoral success was a product of Lulismo not Petismo (support for the PT). Lula cannot stand again. What then of the PT as a national electoral party without Lula?
Yet over the past ten years the PT nationally (with some important regional exceptions) has become little else but an electoral party. Activists, by and large, have left its ranks; many to go back to grass roots organising or to various kinds of NGOs, trade unions and social movements. Some have created or supported a new party, the P-SOL (Partido Socialismo e Liberdade). For some this is the PT reborn, for others it's just a necessary electoral holding operation while deeper configurations take place on the left and amongst popular movements. It is amongst the latter, I hear, that the most interesting developments are taking place, especially amongst the MST, which is in effect a movement of the precarious - those whose livelihoods and living conditions are insecure whether they live in the cities or the countryside. They are showing impressive successes in building a permanent, structured movement, not only of resistance but also of living alternatives, independent of electoral politics (though engaging pragmatically with government as the need arises).
There is now some space and time to build such independence. And to do so knowing from painful experience that charismatic leaders can never substitute for the democratic organisation and culture through which people build their own bargaining power for change.
Published by The Guardian blog
