Building the PT SEVEN YEARS after its founding congress in 1980, no one can deny that the Workers' Party of Brazil (PT) has both greatly increased its influence in the main sections of the masses in the country and considerably sharpened its political profile. Nonetheless, it still suffers unquestionably from great weaknesses that impede the building of the party.
In a situation in which it confronts greater challenges and responsibilities than ever before, the PT is feeling the pressure of certain problems that have existed virtually since its formation. There are notable organizational difficulties. But there are also difficulties in defining program and strategy.
The following article, from the July issue of Em Tempo, is part of a larger contribution in which other themes are taken up. This contribution will be submitted by PT members in the Socialist Democracy current to the pre-congress discussion at both the state and national level. JOÃO MACHADO
HE PT's fundamental task, the one that historically justifies its existence, is to politically organize the active and conscious sectors of the working class independently from the bourgeoisie. The party has an indispensable role. It is to politicize workers' struggles, not by counterposing political struggle to immediate or sectoral demands, but by combining and radicalizing both types of demands.
This means making party-political work an integral part of the daily activity of the more conscious workers, to make the PT a forum in which comrades discuss politics and deepen and consolidate their class consciousness in order to go beyond the limits of defending their immediate interests. The PT is the place for them to organize as party activists and work out a political line for intervening in the various social movements.
The PT has an enormous influence among the activists in the social movements, the mass movement, the trade-union movement, among women, students, peasants and so on. It has many tens of thousands of sympathizers, who make up a not insignificant part of the politically active workers in the country. Nonetheless, the political activity of these comrades remains external to the party's work, very often being reduced to defending sectoral interests in immediate struggles.
### Lack of rank-and-file organization
While those who make up the vanguard of the social movements are usually PT sympathizers, they are very often not party members. But they should participate in the life and discussions of the party in order to advance toward consistent political activism and to develop a socialist class consciousness. This is why organizational weaknesses lead to wasting the party's potential.
There is a consensus that the lack of rank-and-file organization is at the root of a situation that we have to overcome urgently. As a consequence of this lack of organization — we could say, the lack of foundations for the party edifice — our organizational structure suffers from three grave weaknesses:
• Separation between political intervention at the institutional level
BRAZIL (activity by parliamentary groups) and intervention in the social movements (activity in the structures of the mass movement by PT members who are organized poorly, if at all).
• A growing gap between the PT and the CUT. Activists who get no response to their demands end up moving away from the party' structures. The CUT becomes the place where the political concerns created by the radicalization of trade-union struggles are expressed.
• A growing gap between the party leadership (precariously erected on the directorates) and the ranks, with the latter being called on for hardly more than voting at congresses or mobilizing for the party's activities, such as electoral campaigns.
Rich experience and practical training
We cannot put the blame for this situation on the vanguard activists in the social movements. Many of them will join the PT but end up moving away. The problem now is that the party is not very much involved in the discussions and intervention of these activists in the movements they are part of. This impoverishes the life of the PT because of the failure to incorporate fully the rich experience and practical training that is obtained in the social movements.
These three weaknesses can become worse. We can only change this situation if there is a determined reorientation of the process of building the PT. To accomplish this, the traditional appeals for activating the rank-and-file groups are insufficient. There are objective reasons for the failure of these groups to grow and function:
• The party's structure continues fundamentally to be based on the directorates, which concentrate decision-making power in their hands. The groups are only appendages of the structure laid down by the statute on political parties, which still governs the PT's organizational dynamic.
• In order for these groups to func tion, they have to have an active political life, systematic political debates on questions of the day, socialist political education and an orientation for work in the various fields in which their activists intervene.
None of this can be achieved on a significant scale without the support of the general structure of the rest of the PT. Discussions have to go through the press, educational activities and the orientations of the party's secretariats and commissions at the municipal, state and national levels. The PT cannot have 5,000, or 10,000 groups, each one with its paper, its own educational 19 program and its own orientation for the
October 12, 1987 • International Viewpoint
BRAZIL mass movement, the union movement, students, women, and so on. Such tasks have to get a collective response within the party.
To achieve the level of professionalism required by such tasks, it is necessary to take the question of financial resources much more seriously, to view it as a political activity of the organization. Today, the party's material resources depend fundamentally on the contributions of its members of parliament, which is a grave deformation.
Political commitment and financial support
The party needs to finance itself collectively. That depends above all on the political education of its members, the development of an organizational consciousness and tradition that make the connection between political commitment and financial support. Honoring this commitment should be a precondition for exercising the full rights of a PT member, of taking part in the party's deliberations and meetings.
• It will be decisive to take a position of independence with regard to the laws on parties, which serve the interests and objectives of the parties of the ruling classes. We must structure the PT in accordance with our needs, and find a way to meet the legal requirements without undermining the party's identity. In particular, the groups must be our rank-and-file structures, and not the directorates stipulated by the law.
In order to attack and overcome these problems, it will be necessary to correct erroneous conceptions and positions on building the party. One such notion sees the PT as an "expression of the social movements." According to this view, the PT is only a "reflection" of the struggles and demands of the social movements, without any concern and still less any structure for promoting, impelling and leading these struggles. The party takes no initiative, being drawn along by the spontaneity of the social struggles.
This position means programmatic sterility, since in the name of "rank-and-file discussions and decisions," it rejects any working out of programmatic definitions.
At first, such a position could be justified by the idea that we were building the Ter as ben wondery a party "from the bottom up." But with the years that have gone by, this 20 "virtue" has been transformed into a grave weakness. Our ability to attract International Viewpoint • October 12, 1987 the masses that have become depoliticized owing to a great uneveness of political experience will depend on our involvement in the struggles, on a clear defining of our program. It will depend on the consistency we show in struggles and on our ability to unite the exploited and oppressed into a powerful broad movement.
This depends fundamentally on the homogeneity and unity of the activists around strategic objectives. If we fail to make it clear to the public who we are and where we are going, we will not become a political reference point and we will not attract into our ranks the millions of people that we want to organize.
A simple and clear programmatic definition does not run counter to the practice of internal democracy or eliminate the need for it. On the contrary, it puts the needs of internal democracy on a higher level.
A false dichotomy is made implying a counterposition between a "cadre party," that is a small, narrow, sectarian party made up of "armor-plated" activists who decide everything and run everything; and a "mass party," with a loose structure, without members who regularly pay dues, where everyone does what he or she likes, a party that recruits supporters for the sake of numbers in congresses, like any bourgeois party.
That is not what is involved. A party is always the vanguard of a class or a section of a class. The reason for this is simple and obvious. The essential problem of organizing in a party structure is the development of class consciousness, which is an uneven process, because the levels of political experience and organization vary among the toiling classes. Nonetheless, a vanguard party cannot be a small party of "big chiefs," and "armor-plated"
militants, above all in a country of 140 million inhabitants.
We want to build a vanguard party made up of thousands, of millions of workers actively involved in political life and struggles, because this is the scale of the task facing us. Precisely for that reason, it is necessary to fight now for a party that will not be made up of members who vote every four years, or who are called upon from time to time to attend a congress to assent to the leadership's proposals.
We continue to maintain that there is a need for increasing centralization of the activity of PT members. Organizing the PT's activist base is a precondition for combining the activity of members confronted by different developments or working in different social movements. Genuine exercise of internal democracy
Building unity in action and coherent activity by PT members working in the mass fronts is indissolubly bound up with a genuine exercise of internal democracy in the PT and in the party's relations with the social movements. A deep-going respect for all positions and a guarantee of their representation are pillars of the party's unity in action. These principles cannot be left to the goodwill of any majority but must be adopted explicitly as basic principles of the party, valid at all times and for all bodies in the PT. Grave distortions that have already been overcome in Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro and Rio Grande do Sul still exist in São Paulo and at the national level.' In the latter cases, proportional representation of the various positions getting over 10% support in congresses is not assured. A position can be supported by 45% of the votes in a congress and in practice be completely marginalized in the party's leading bodies at the district, city, state and national level. This state of things not only stifles the energies mobilized to build the party, but transforms gatherings into confrontations and occasions for estimating relationships of forces, when they should be opportunities for working out political axes. The result is profoundly de-politicizing and favorable to sectarianism, and therefore 1. In São Paulo, where the PT has its biggest forces, there is no proportional representation for the various currents in the party.
PALE
is not educative.
The representation of positions, including in the executive leaderships -a principle we defend also for a democratic trade-union structure and for any workers' organization — has to be accompanied by a guarantee of a right to form tendencies, regulated by the statutes (or by internal rules, if we do not want to challenge the law on parties).
Political differences inevitably arise in the course of class struggles. Social classes themselves, including the working class, are politically heterogeneous, owing to different trajectories and experiences, and different levels of consciousness. Different political currents, which are not fundamentally antagonistic but offer different contributions to the process of social emancipation, reflect the diversity of experience and positions within the working class.
A guarantee of tendency rights in the PT does not exclude but rather assures a growing unity in the public activity of all PT members. If the bodies in which discussions and deliberations take place are democratic, it is imperative once decisions are reached that the party act in a united and cohesive way. Such unity is not imposed out of an arbitrary whim or in the spirit of achieving greater orthodoxy. It is imposed by the unity and power of our common enemy. Through the monopolies, the police, the armed forces and the media, the bourgeois state is applying more and more concerted repression and showing a greater and greater capacity for concerted action. Party is an instrument of the workers' struggle
Since the party is an instrument of the workers' struggle, it also needs unity, cohesiveness and power in order to be able to fightback and to go on the offensive.
Such unity does not mean just making decisions in congresses but also implementing them in practice. This extends from the application of organizational resolutions on the functioning of the groups, dues and newspaper sales to achieving the necessary unity in intervening in the mass fronts, community groups, unions, student organizations and so on.
It is in this work that we will put into practice the positions and proposals that we have discussed and test their viability.
Today, decisive class confrontations are taking shape and forging the class consciousness of broad masses of working people. They can and must give rise to a broad socialist political movement actively involving millions of Brazilians. *
BRAZIL