PUBLICAÇÃO DA TENDÊNCIA DEMOCRACIA SOCIALIST Em Tempo is the magazine of Democracia Socialista, Brazilian section of the Fourth International. - Rua Brigadeiro Galvão, 138 - Barra Funda, São Paulo/SP, Brazil. © (011) 665550, e-mail <jsoriano@ibase.br> negative consequences of our presence in state institutions and redynamise the potential of this democratic and popular participation in such institutions, re-establishing the PT's ability to build itself independently, taking as popular and democratic reforms [L FiSteN which can gal• Brazil: Stop peasant assassinations Declaration of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (27 April 1996) ON WEDNESDAY APRIL 19TH THE MILITARY Police assassinated 23 peasants in Eldorado de Carajás, in Pará state. Autopsies show that most of them were burned alive, handcuffed. Others were killed with their own farming tools.
This latest massacre under the neoliberal government of Fernado H. Cardoso is part of the repressive offensive against the Landless Movement (MST), which demands the distribution of land to some 5 million peasant farmers. In a similar attack last year, over 50 peasants were killed in Coriumbiará, in Rodonia state.
There are more than 500 current land conflicts in Brazil, involving 22,240 families. Some 20,520 families live by the side of the road, in 22 Brazilian states. These people have nothing to live on and no land to work. The paradox is that Brazil is a country where 370 million hectares of fertile land lie uncultivated.
The country's ruling class has unlea 14 International Viewpoint
• a deep-going organisational and programmatic restructuring which will reverse the shed a virtual civil war in the countryside, as their response to the demands and mobilisations of the Landless Movement. More than two thousand pea sants have been assassinated by members of the state's various repressive forces, or by the paid gun thugs of the latifundistas (big landowners).
The victims include farmers, peasant leaders, lawyers, and left-wing militants. Women and men committed to an agrarian reform which would be a synonym for social justice and dignity for the working people.
The Fourth International calls on all democratic, progressive and revolutionary organisations to unite in an international campaign denouncing this incredible situation. We must demand full respect for human rights in Brazil. Those responsible for these massacres must be tried and punished. There must also be a wide campaign of solidarity with Brazil's Landless Movement (MST).* its basic point of reference the self-organization of the exploited and oppressed. Strategic Problems.
Globalisation, deregulation, open markets, privatisation, the crisis of public welfare and social security systems, the rapid introduction of new information technologies and new management methods, structural unemployment, the rolling back of state functions, everything that is associated with capitalist restructuring and neoliberal adjustment, redefines the stage on which we project our strategic action. The new problems we face fall into three broad categories.
Firstly, the changes in the relations between state and society in a situation where the social formation itself is in mutation, and hence the reorganization of bourgeois power structures. The power of the capitalist class is more concentrated than ever on both a national and world scale, but it is exerted through a redefinition of the tasks of the national state and through a considerable strengthening of the private economic and political power of big firms and the politicalideological power of the media.
This results in two kinds of problem: firstly, the fact that the state can no longer be the all but exclusive focus of political struggle, as it has been to date; the struggle for
popular power has deal with the non-state structures of private power with their increased relative weight. Secondly, the growing social diversity within the popular camp. On the one hand the rural population is thrown off the land into the cities, where most of them fail to gain access to the formal labour market, whilst structural unemployment mounts, resulting in a huge mass of the "excluded", surviving by the most varied means alongside the proletariat. On the other hand, there continues to be a numerical growth of the proletariat, but with the weight of the industrial working class (ie. wage-earners in industrial employment) considerably reduced; deregulation, flexibility, contracting out and other initiatives to increase the rate of exploitation, alongside the questioning of the "social wage" represented by state-supplied social services, are resulting in considerable differences opening up between the social conditions of those who are within the formal labour market.
Three further kinds of problem result from this. Firstly, it becomes much more complicated to bring together the conditions needed for the proletariat to become the central social and political subject of the revolution and the building of a new society. Secondly, the ability of the industrial working class, and even the proletariat, to bring together all the popular sectors and polarise the immense majority of the "excluded" is put into question; in the popular imagination there is an erosion of the revolutionary role of the 1. See article by Daniel Bensaid, "Points of Reference for Analysing the New World Situation", in Em Tempo No. 282 June 1995 2. Brazil's twenty years of military dictatorship finally ended in 1984, although the military's withdrawal from the forefront of politics had been in preparation for several years before that. However the pact between different pro-military and opposition fractions of the bourgeoisie which enabled a controlled transfer to civilian rule quickly went into crisis, with mounting internal divisions and plummeting credibility. Aggravated by the growing strength of the Workers Party (PT), this instability of bourgeois rule continued through the impeachment of
Fernando Collor de Melo on corruption charges in 1992 to the elections at the end of 1994 which brought to an end the govemment his successor Itamar Franco.
government at the end of 1984.
3. The PSDB, the party of the current presdent Femando Henrique Cardoso, was originally a left split from the main bourgeois opposition party which led the oppproletariat (sometimes confused with the industrial working class), and this failure of imagination itself helps to destructure the proletariat's sense of social and political identity. Thirdly, there is the change in the place a country like Brazil occupies in the world, a redefinition of its insertion into the new world capitalist system where the perspective of national and social development is no longer present. Transnational corporations, international communication networks, as well as regional and international political and economic organisations, come to play an ever more important role, to the detriment of national
These problems in turn have at least three kinds of implication: Firstly a burning need for increased internationalism in all practical areas of revolutionary struggle. Secondly, the difficulty of building a political project whose development is posed solely within a national framework. Thirdly, the need to rethink the revolution, so far understood as a seizure of power (essentially state power) which begins within a national framework, and which now has to take on board the qualitatively increased weight of international tasks (both regional and world-wide).
These three kinds of problem demand a reworking of the Brazilian and international left's strategic project. * osition to military dictatorship, the PMDB. As the latter lost credibility in government, the PSDB gained ground with its seemingly progressive "social democratic" positions. When victory in the 1994 presidential elections seemed very likely to go Lula of the Workers Party, the Brazilian bourgeoisie shifted all its support to the former left-wing sociologist, Fernando Henrique Cardoso. 4. The PFL is the party of some of the most traditional sections of the Brazilian ruling class, including many politicians tie 20th 5. The Movimento dos Sem Terra ("Landless Movement', is an organisation of landless peasants which has carried out hundreds of active land seizures and occupations in its struggle to promote land reform and justice for Brazil's rural poor. As such it has become perhaps the most dynamic force in Brazilian social struggles in recent years, with industrial and trade union struggles at a relatively low ebb. The MST has traditionally been strongest in the south of the country, but has now become significant force throughout the country.