Tropical Blair or Axis of Hope?

Back from four days in Sao Paulo,
Brazil.Time now to reflect on
President Lula's re-election for a
second term in office.

In the face of a hostile right wing
media, Lula's election seems like a notable
victory for the left. After an unexpected
failure to win an outright majority in the
first round, he campaigned strongly to win
the support of the poor.The result was
that over 60 million people, 59 per cent of
the voting population, voted for a
president who campaigned against
privatisation and for social justice, and
who stood with Evo Morales and Hugo
Chavez against a free trade alliance with
the US. Should Lula be considered part
of the Latin American 'axis of hope'
proposed recently by Tariq Ali, after all?

The 'all' includes Lula's first-term
acquiescence to everything demanded by
the IMF, going along with agribusiness at
the expense of land reform, and doing
almost nothing to address the country's
gross inequalities. A student at the
Catholic University of Sao Paulo laughed
as he told me: 'I voted for Lula, and then
went to church to confess.'

I was at the university to launch a book
based on interviews last summer with a
wide range of petistas (supporters of the
PT, the Brazilian Workers Party).The
interviews took place as the petistas reeled
in shock at revelations that the party's
leadership had financed Lula's election
campaign and was buying political
support in Congress in the same corrupt
way as all Brazilian parties (see In the Eye of the Storm: Left-wing activists discuss the political crisis in Brazil.

At the launch meeting everyone was
mightily relieved that Lula had won. In
other words, keeping out the right was
the left's first priority.'We voted for
maintaining living conditions, not for
Lula's political project,' said a post-election
statement of the Co-ordination of Social
Movements (CMS) - an influential body
that brings together the main landless
movement (the MST), perhaps the most
effective social movement in the country,
the more cautious trade union federation
(CUT), the World March of Women and
the radical student movement.

The second priority is to build up
pressure on the government for such
urgent needs as land reform, a significantly
higher minimum wage and support for
the social economy. But their efforts start
with a problem. Most social movements in
Brazil have been involved in some way in
building or supporting the PT specifically
as a means by which movements could
exert pressure on political institutions.
They now face the reality that this
custom-built instrument stands before
them bent and corroded. It's not a
complete write-off perhaps, but it's
certainly not the instrument they can use
as they had intended.

Here it is it is useful to make
distinctions and comparisons with our
own political wreckage, the Labour Party,
both in order to understand the specifics
of Brazilian politics and also because this
discussion of the Brazilian left in Lula's
second term could provide many insights
for our own strategic thinking in Europe.

Both parties were born to a significant
extent out of the trade union movement,
but there are several striking differences.
First, the Labour Party was the result of an
explicit division of responsibilities
between the political and industrial
'wings' of the labour movement.
Moreover, it was shaped by the socially
integrating experiences of war, especially
the second world war.

The PT, on the other hand, was born
out of a political struggle against the
military dictatorship, which ruled Brazil
from 1964 to 1985.The movements that
formed it always saw themselves as
political in the sense of a responsibility for
society as a whole.When the PT was
formed, this tradition of social movements
as political actors, taking the initiative on
every issue, remained strong. So too did a
belief in the necessity of conflict as a
precondition of social change. Indeed, the
party's founders saw the role of electoral
politics as being in part to strengthen and
legitimise social movements.

Additionally, whereas the Labour party
was first and foremost about representation,
more or less uncritically, in the existing
state, the circumstances of the birth of the
PT were those of struggling for a new,
democratic constitution for which they
had their own visions.

These origins gave birth to two lasting
and inter-related traditions in the culture
of the Brazilian left: that social movements
are political actors in themselves, and that
democracy has to be constructed through
popular participation. As the party's
leadership has focused increasingly
narrowly on electoral success within an
unreformed Brazilian state, these traditions
have been weakened within the party
itself, but they remain strong in most of
the movements (less so in the trade
unions).They have three lasting
manifestations of significance for the
renewal of the left internationally.

First, the social movements have always
had a broad vision of social change
beyond their particular focus; and they are
in the habit of working with other
movements, rather than primarily looking
to politicians for society-wide solutions.
They have always had a strong sense of
the importance of their autonomy and
their capacity to act independently even
of the PT.

Second, they possess a distinct and
resilient concept of democracy as having
two equally important dimensions.These
are: the principle of the universal vote by
which everyone, whether or not they are
active or engaged in politics, has an equal
say; and, as a condition for making the
vote more than a formality, a principle of
popular participation by which people
have both a right and a responsibility to
be active custodians of democracy and to
build participatory forms of democracy by
which they can organise themselves to
exert control over public institutions.

There are no pretensions to have
invented a particular model of
participatory institutions. But it is clear
that the struggle against the dictatorship
gave birth to a strong concept of 'active
citizenship', teaching a painful lesson that
liberal democracy is too weak to defend
itself against the intervention of the vested
interests that any genuine democracy
threatens, whether those interests are the
military rulers of the past or the
multinationals of the present.

The third tradition that is apparent in
many social movements in Brazil, and has
been a vital influence in the PT, is that of
popular education. Of course, conditions
of mass illiteracy made adult education an
important part of any project of social
change, but the influence of Paulo Freire
has produced a form of education that is
about people becoming conscious of their
latent power to change the world rather
than simply learning about it.

Formação is a common word on the left
in Brazil, literally translating as 'formation'
but in practice meaning 'developing
people's innate potential as part of a selfconscious
process of social change'. For
the millions of people who helped to
build the PT over the past 20 years, the
first term of Lula's presidency was a kind
of formação, weakening illusions that, in the
words of MST leader Gilmar Mauro, 'a
big leader would provide the solution'.

As I visited the MST school in the
countryside round Sao Paulo, listened to
the reflections of a shrewd activist in
CUT, heard the frustration and the elation
of people who campaigned for the P-SOL
(Partido Socialismo e Liberdade, whose
candidate won 7 per cent of the vote
against Lula in the first round) and
recorded the new hopes of a veteran
founder of the PT, it felt as if people were
renewing the core traditions that shaped
the PT but putting the issue of political
parties on hold.

Take the tradition of social movements
as political actors. A particularly impressive
example is the National Popular Assembly.
It is a process based on open assemblies in
over 200 towns and cities, which last year
worked to prepare proposals and ideas for
'O Brasil que queremos', the Brazil we want.
These culminated in a national assembly
and then a popular education document,
which not only sums up the agreed
proposals but also maps out the initiatives
to make them a reality.

Bodies such as the CMS are now
proposing that this work should become a
common basis for mobilisation.What is
impressive about it is that, by all accounts,
it is the product of a self-regulated process.
No one organisation leads or 'owns' it.A
variety of organisations facilitate the
process but all those involved have
accepted a transparent, shared procedure
for proposing and agreeing ideas.

This commitment to create a form of
self-regulating participatory democracy is
widespread. It's visible in the 'participatory
budget' processes pioneered by the left in
parts of local government in Brazil, where
delegates elected by neighbour-hood
assemblies negotiate priorities for new
investment through a set of transparent,
fine-tuned rules that are agreed annually.
But there's a paradox in all this.Why is
it that the country that has produced
some of the most developed forms of
democracy also places such reliance on an
individual leader?

'This reliance on leaders is the Achilles
heel of the Brazilian left,' says Geraldo
Campos, a young petista who left the PT
in sadness and anger.'There is a need for
people to accept more responsibility for
self-government.' He says the experience
of Lula's first term has begun to teach
people that 'proposals and pressure depend
on their effort. If they don't take
responsibility, nothing will happen.'

The early signs are that Brazil's social
movements are entering the second term
with an urgent sense of responsibility. But
will their initiatives gain popular support?

Lula speaks two languages.The day after
winning the election with a campaign
stressing social justice, he disclaimed the
declarations of his campaign manager that
his economic policies would change in
the second term.The millions who voted
for him won't be reading such statements.
They'll just hear his television addresses, in
which he expresses his commitment to
the needs of the poor.They see him as
one of them. And certainly he constantly
stresses his memories of poverty.

But they are just memories and the
danger is that, while his gestures and his
sentiments keep society calm, 'the
multinationals and banks will suck the
country dry', as Marcos Arruda, one of
the animators of the National Popular
Assembly, put it. Lula himself is not a
reliable link in an axis of hope. But the
movements that put him there, if they
can assert their autonomous strength,
certainly are.

Thanks to Melissa Pomeroy and Evelina Dagnino,
and also to the Transnational Institute for funding
my trip to Brazil