Building the Workers Party in Rio Grande do Sul
Mark Johnson looks at the party at the PT as offering an alternative the centre of the radical left government in Rio Grande do Sul state
The Workers Party (PT) has 48 mayors in Rio Grande do Sul state, including the three major towns, and over 350 municipal counsellors. In November 1998, the party extended its organised presence from 320 to over 400 of the state's 427 municipalities.
The PT is the leading force in the Popular Front, which also includes the left-nationalist PDT, the Socialist Party, and the (ex-pro-Albanian) Communist Party of Brazil (PCdB). The PT has 12 of the Popular Front's 20 seats in the 55-member State Assembly.
The party's membership is mainly working class and rural poor. The PT is also the preferred party of teachers, civil servants, the liberal professions and all the lower-middle class sectors which have been pauperised under the neo-liberal administrations.
Women make up half the PT membership, though they are under-represented in the party hierarchy.
The party cadre are largely from the 35+ generation that entered politics in their late teens in the student and labour struggles against the dictatorship. The average age of the PT membership and leadership increased sharply during the 1990s, partly because the student movement is fragmented, and no longer plays the same vanguard role as in the 70s and early 80s.
Although young people faced no future under Rio Grande's previous neo-liberal government, few saw programme relevant for them. This changed with the 1998 election campaign, in which the PT again spoke more clearly to young people.
The party as a whole has no statistics on youth membership, but the radical left Socialist Democracy current recruited some 150 young members during and after the November 1998 election campaign. This reflects not only the growing attraction of the PT among young people, but the migration of young people to the left of the party.
Rapid growth poses a major challenge to the party. According to the PT state Organisation Secretary Inacio Fritzen, "After 10 years of rapid growth, the party is struggling to integrate its newer members who do not share the experience of the founder generation. challenge is not only to integrate and consolidate. We also need to make the party more organic, and more integrated. All members must have a forum where they can genuinely participate. At the moment, those who do not have a specific function in the party can only participate in congresses and election campaign-though in Brazil we do have major elections every two years! So we face a major, new challenge in translating social resistance into organic forms of expression, in which each militant will intervene."
The Rio Grande PT has always been dominated by the left, which is a minority in the national party. This tradition of radicalism has played a major role in the party's success in Rio Grande. This was the first state where the party introduced proportional representation of tendencies in the election of party bodies. But the national PT has tried to build a coalition with centre-left and centre-right bourgeois parties, the Rio Grande party has only co-operated with anti-bourgeois parties.
According to Lúcio Costa, Secretary of Communication at the Rio Grande do Sul PT, the strength and confidence of the Rio Grande party makes it almost impossible for the national leadership of the PT to intervene against them. In any case, the local supporters of the PT's moderate national leaders are discredited because of their non-participation in local party campaigns.
The rapid consolidation of a PT base in Rio Grande do Sul state means that the local party could play a growing role within the national party. This influence is already present in the current protests against the government's economic policies, and is expected to increase in the run-up to the PT'S national congress in November.
The success of the PT in Rio Grande contrasts sharply with the party's decline in those states where the party leadership has imposed moderate policies and failed to mobilise the party base and social movements.* Lúcio Costa is Secretary of Communication for the PT in Rio Grande do Sul. Inácio Fritzen is Secretary for Organisation. For more information read the state PT newspaper Linha Direta, www.portoweb.com.br/ptrs. Tel/fax 051 224 2230. <ptrs@portoweb.com.br> Av. Farrapos 88, CEP 90220-000, Porto Allegre, Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil
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"For a number of years, the PT majority was hostile to the existence of tendencies within the party, and we lost both members and our identity became more blurred. We are now trying to reverse those trends. Shortly after the 1995 Fourth International world congress we reestablished a more systematic national training programme, with activities in all the states where we are active."
Although the participative budget process is 10 years old, and the PT in Rio Grande do Sul is strongly influenced by internationalist and Marxist currents, there are comparatively few contacts with the left in other countries. And those contacts are not always fruitful. In place of the "sometimes stratospheric" discussions of the far left, Mayor Raul Pont of Porto Alegre would like to see "more international discussion of the questions that preoccupy DS and PT members in the government-how to confront the state from local institutions, how to govern without accepting the neoliberal logic, how to develop 'can't pay, won't pay' and debt cancellation campaigns, direct democracy, and the relationship between social movements and political power." * Transformation and regroupment Regroupments of anti-capitalist and anti-Stalinist forces are developing in a number of countries. The organisations of the Fourth International are ready to be part of the re-groupment process. We consider this as an important step towards the recomposition of the anti-capitalist left on a world scale. At the international level, the Fourth International is an active participant in regroupment, bringing with it the advantages of a long tradition of combat against capitalism and Stalinism. * Price: E5/S10. International Viewpoint, PO Box 27410, London SW9 9WQ, Britain.
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