Workers' Party: Towards a
People's Democratic Government
MORE THAN 80 million Brazilians will go to the polls on
November15 to elect a president after 21 years of military dictatorship and five years of an indirectly elected civilian government. This is a particularly difficult situation for the
Faça o titulo - vote PT aos 16
November 13, 1989
BRAZIL politically for the great presidential contest. It confirmed the historic character of the PT in advancing its program in response to the concrete challenges posed by the class struggle.
Of the documents approved at the Sixth ruling class. In recent years, the country's economy has virtually stagnated, and an explosion of hyper-inflation now looms. In response to a deteriorating social situation, there have been cycles of explosive and generalized strikes. The high point of this process of trade-union radicalization was the general strike of March 14-15 against the wage squeeze.
According to the estimates of the Central Unica dos
Trabalhadores [CUT, United Confederation of Workers] this strike involved 35 million workers.
JUAREZ
W
ITH THE grave crisis of the two strongest bourgeois parties, the PMDB and the PFL, the ruling class is going into the first round of the
There are great weaknesses in the base organizations and a lack of centralization. (For example, the PT still does not have a national mass journal.) Above all, its internal currents are still evolving, and
Meeting, in general by a broad majority, the outstanding one is the "Guidelines for a Governmental Program." It is important for four reasons:
(I) It offers an assessment of the ongoing crisis and of the rapid change underwayin the relationship of forces in favor of the working people. (2) It declares, without any illusions, that a government dominated by the PT would inevitably come into conflict with big capital, imperialism and the existing state institutions. (3) It puts forward a clearly transitional method for working out a governmental program. (4) It establishes an unbreakable link between the struggle for democracy and building socialism.
This is a document of profound significance in the party's history, and it will certainly be of great interest for the international socialist movement.
elections in a profoundly fragmented state. On the other hand, the working class is represented by a political front dominated by the PT [Workers Party]. In it are
O MEU 1: VOTOÉ PRO participating the PC do B [CP of Brazil, an Albanian-line party that originated in a split in the Communist Party in the 1960s] and the PSB (a party with a bland social democratic policy). The Brazilian CP (PCB) opted for putting up a candidate of its own in the first round.
Still more important, the elections are coming at a time when the PT's influence is clearly on the rise. Formed ten years ago, in the November 1988 municipal elections, it elected 36 mayors and nearly a thousand councillors.
Today, the PT holds an overwhelming majority in the CUT, which is the main trade-union confederation, since the CGT, led by bureaucrats, has split into various wings and is losing strength. It has the majority in the National Union of Students, and is growing rapidly in the countryside (especially through the militant Movement of the Landless).
The Sixth National Meeting of the PT reflected this growth, bringing together 600 delegates (each one representing a thousand members). Of the 600,000 members, it is estimated that about 60,000 are active.
The growth of the PT's social influence has not been accompanied by significant advances in the construction of its organization. Grave imbalances persist between its activity in government bodies and its party work in the class struggle.
its leadership is still in the process of formation. The main value of the Sixth National Meeting was to prepare the party
Major excerpts are published in the following pages. *
15
• #173 International Viewpoint
Guidelines for the elaboration of a programme for government
International Viewpoint #173 • November 13, 1989
BRAZIL
F OR THE WHOLE postwar period,
Brazil has maintained a growth rate of 7% in Gross Domestic Product and 9% in industrial production, which has given the country the ninth biggest economy in the international capitalist system. In the last decade, however, the country's GDP has grown at a rate of about 2.5% per year, and per capita income has hardly grown at all.
The crisis of the Brazilian economy has been aggravated by the exhaustion of the economic development model imposed by the military dictatorship and which the "New Republic" was incapable of confronting. The whole pattern of financing the economy went into virtual collapse. On the one hand, every year the country has transferred 4.5% of the GDP abroad in the form of payments on the foreign debt. On the other, the extremely grave national debt has been blocking the resumption of public investment and paralyzing the fundamental instruments of economic policy.
The economic crisis is aggravating the social one, which is the heritage of capitalist development in Brazil, a development that has excluded sections of the population, concentrated money in a few hands and been predatory. In 1969, a third of the population consumed less than 2,240 calories a day, which is the threshold below which the UN Food and Agricultural Organization considers people undernourished
In 1988, two out of every three Brazilians eat less than their requirement. In education, 8.5 million children of compulsory school age are not in school, in a country where a quarter of the population is illiterate. Forty million Brazillans live In poverty
Half of homes do not have electricity, and 13 million persons suffer from pellagra. The official statistics reveal that 35% of families have a per capita income less than half the minimum wage, that is, more than 40 million people live in absolute poverty.
However powerful and dynamic it has proved in establishing a highly diverified industrial plant in the country and in developing an economy that ranks among the greatest in the capitalist world, the Brazilian bourgeoisie has not managed in recent 16 • years to solve the problems of capitalist development.
### Document:
Moreover, its political strategy for controlled transition from military dictatorship to an authoritarian civilian government under the late president Sarney has clearly failed. All the attempts of recent years to guarantee the political domination of the ruling classes through the PMDB and the "New Republic," through the successive economic plans and austerity drives, have been defeated mainly by trade-union and popular mobilization. These efforts have been frustrated mainly by the position of the PT and the CUT of intransigence toward the policy of cooptation and subordination that the PMDB and the elites have tried to impose on the country from the Electoral College.
Outstanding among these experiences has been the failure of the Social Pact. In the Constituent Assembly, in the trade- union struggles and today in the 1988 elec- NoW Rague an a hea
"New Republic" and to the conservative transition. It has been concretized today in Lula's candidacy and the political front of people's parties.
The crisis of the bourgeoisie and of capitalism in Brazil after years of open dictatorship and controlled transition is summed up in the fact that the ruling class risks losing the [direct] presidential election on the hundredth anniversary of the republic.
While this crisis is real and the signs of the crisis of the transition are manifest, there is no doubt either that today the domination of the Brazilian bourgeoisie is not hanging in the balance. Despite the fact that the government institutions have lost their credibility in the eyes of a large part of the population and despite the relative unification of the political and social struggles of the working people in recent years, the continuity of bourgeois domination has not been threatened.
This is shown by the power of the state, the role of the armed forces and the repressive apparatus and control over the mass media. At a time when the productive forces of the capitalist economy in Brazil are experiencing an extraordinary growth, most of the population has not yet developed an anticapitalist consciousness rejecting this system. We can and must take control of the executive
However, it is also clear that the present period is characterized by a resumption of social and political struggle by the working people, by the reconstruction of their class-struggle organizations and by the beginnings of a political project representing the working people themselves. This is what is meant when we talk about an accumulation of strength and a change in the relation of forces. Over the 21 years of dictatorship the ruling class got used to imposing its domination by repression and not through political contention.
A new period has opened of contending for the leadership of Brazilian society, in which the PT and CUT are playing a notable role.
We seem to have reached the end of the terrible dilemma that distressed a generation of trade-union, popular and workers' party leaders — to support the nationalist and/or reformist projects of the bourgeoisie or else get caught in isolation, in a political and cultural ghetto. The PT's project of trade-union, popular, student, peasant, environmentalist and women's liberation struggle, and of a fight by Blacks and youth over the past 15 years has marked out a road and opened up the historic opportunity for the PT to be the government, to contend for hegemony and to build a social and political force.
Chance to Initiate rapid and deepgoing process
Although a revolutionary crisis does not exist, nor even a prerevolutionary situation, we can and must win the executive branch, the presidency of the republic, and inaugurate a new period in which, with control of the government - that is, an important part of the state power - the contest for hegemony will be waged on another level. The PT and the democratic and popular forces will have a chance to initiate a rapid and deepgoing process of economic reforms and of political and social struggles. All this will create conditions for the conquest of political hegemony and for socialist transformations.
To this end, it is necessary to offer answers to the innumerable problems that the new situation raises for us. In the first place, it is not sufficient to run in elections with a platform of economic and political struggles by the working people and the middle strata of society. Nor is it possible to propose a socialist program, which would
November 13, 1989 • #73 International Viewpoint not be undertood and would isolate us.
We have, therefore, to put forward a Governmental Action Program that will reflect the main demands of the working people and economic and social reforms to get the country out of crisis, and combine this with political and ideological struggle, that is a struggle for hegemony in the society. By stimulating the growth and reinforcement of the social movements, by promoting the self-organization of the working people, by opening up channels for popular participation, by creating instruments of local powaiding the emergence of a real socialist movement, we will not only be giving viability to a democratic-people's government but be forging the political and social conditions for socialist transforma-
We intend therefore that both the government and the program will have a democratic-popular and revolutionary character, because they will be linked up with the action of the PT, both in the politicalideological, anticapitalist and socialist struggle and in intervention in social struggles, in the tasks of self-organization of the workers and in their decisive participation in the social and political struggle that has now opened for the center of state power, the
Who will a PT government
The constant objective of a democratic people's government is building an Alternative Power, based on a commitment to promote social equality and oriented toward a thoroughgoing quest for freedom.
This requires broadening and consolidating the democratic gains, eliminating military tutelage, perfecting the system of political representation and the electoral mechanisms, freedom and workers' rights, democratizing the judicial system, putting an end to the monopolization of the media, salvaging or redefining the concept of citizenship, based on raising the level of consciousness of the workers and on the political and ideological ripening of the social movements, giving impetus to the forms of self-organization of the workers and preparing the political conditions and accumulating strength for making the socialist revolution.
Moreover, a people's government will have to put itself at the service of the interests of the people, the workers, the small producers, the small owners and of the middie layers of society. It will thus have to be a government that redistributes income, that fights to eradicate poverty, to eliminate social and regional inequalities, that redefines the role of the state. Today, the state is under the control of private interests and their representatives, who manipulate the civilian and military bureaucracy. A people's government will have to be one that promotes economic growth, which is the precondition for assuring jobs, houses, food, access to education and the possibility for cultural expression for all the people.
A government like this will have necessarily to confront the dominant interests in Brazilian society, which are today bound up with the foreign debt, the monopoly of land, the role of the state and the domination of financial, industrial monopoly capital over
Therefore, our main adversaries are the international creditors, the latifundists, the bankers, the big oligopolies, besides the private groups associated with the civilian and military bureaucracy that control the Brazilian state. This is not a historic pronouncement or a sociological assessment; it is a political and economic reality in Brazil today. Thus, any policy aimed at solving the country's social and economic problems will have to confront the interests of these sectors of the ruling class.
It seems clear that there are objective limits, constitutional limits, to the PT presenting a program of social and democratic forms today. This being the case, the PT and the other parties and forces that will elect Lula president will have to organize a social mobilization in order also to amend and create the conditions for implementation of the Governmental Action Program.
Neither the constitutional limitations (the 1988 constitution, lack of a majority in the National Congress, a reactionary judicial branch), nor the non-constitutional limitations (military tutelage, the political hegemony of the bourgeoisie, the monopoly control of the media), can determine our party program and our historic objective of building a socialist society.
The meaning of the Lula candidacy The PT is supporting the Lula candidacy in the conviction that in the present Brazilhas to be waged aggressively and boldly, that any preconception that might still persist among us about electoral action, action through legal means, about a contest for hegemony even within a state controlled by the bourgeoisie has to be abandoned
The Lula government will represent an experiment unprecedented in our history and one with few parallels internationally. It will demand a great capacity for innovation to guide this original political process. In the absence of parallels offering a basis for comparisons, the rich experience of Chile under the Allende government (1970-1973) suggests itself as a historic example to be studied, in order to take advantage of the lessons that can be drawn, and in particular to prevent a similar defeat.
Even realizing that the government and power are not the same thing, and that therefore Lula's victory cannot be seen as a full conquest of political power, the PT understands that in Brazil the federal executive branch concentrates so many resources and so much constitutional power that controlling it will make it possible to start changes of such scope that they can alter
BRAZIL the entire conjunctural picture, initiating a going in the direction of socialist transforma-
As a starting point, it is necessary to realize that at the outset the new government will be seriously restricted by a constitution that prohibits agrarian reform, that absolutizes the role of private property and formally endorses the tutelage of the armed forces over the civilian authorities.
Obstacles and appear in the functioning of the bureaucratic machine of the state, which has been perverted by the contradictions of patronage, corruption, idleness and arrogance in dealing with the public.
But we will have extraordinary conditions for accelerating the advance of the social struggles and the growth of mass pressure. The Lula government will come into being conscious that all its chances for success depend on broadening the mobilization of the working people, on a gigantic scale, for the conquest of the objectives included in the People's Democratic Pro-
Socialism and democracy
This is why our tactic for competing for the presidency with Companheiro Lula's candidacy and with a people's democratic program is linked to our policy of accumulating strength and to our conception of contending for hegemony over the society. Any separation in this line can lead to the adventure of putting the conquest of power on the agenda today, or leading to the political retreat of falling into the deviation of trying to reform or administer capitalism.
In the political-ideological debate throughout the electoral campaign, we will make clear our option for socialism, socialism with democracy, with freedom of expression, with freedom of organization for the workers, a socialism that rejects the bureaucratic conception and vision of the single party.
Our political project goes beyond winning the presidential election. Its historic meaning is to transform the country, to carry through a political and social revolution. To win the presidential election and achieve a people's government, we need to change the relationship of forces. This challenge can be met only through the growth of the PT, of its organization and its capacity for struggle and for proposing policies both in
We know that the people's democratic program clashes with interests that will do anything to undermine our government, or even to demoralize the PT and the democratic and people's will during Lula's term of office. The answer to such attempts to destabilize our government is to break with constitutionalism, an instrument used historically by the ruling classes. The only answer to tand socials possible popular mobiiza: 17 tion and social struggle.