Michael Lebowitz:
My question, though, is what would it take to convince you
that, at this point (I stress this because I think the first round
was a different matter), it is appropriate to vote for Lula? If you
can dismiss Sader's judgement so easily (intellectuals are fair
game), would you also say that the Brazilian mass movements had
lost their way because they didn't understand what is to be done in
the struggle in Brazil?
Of course I think they have lost their way. The 20th century and now
the 21st century has been marked by such adaptation. The French left
backed Jospin against Le Pen. Tariq Ali backed John Kerry. The
American left backed LBJ in 1964. This is the norm actually, but I
don't mind being in a minority. I reread Lenin's "Ultraleftism"
yesterday. There is absolutely no reference to this kind of electoral
strategy. That's what happens when the revolutionary left endures 75
years of Stalinist and social democratic confusion. We lose
confidence in our ability to project a revolutionary message. I think
that another term for Lula will have the effect as a second term for
Bill Clinton did here. It will demobilize the left and eat away at
its fiber. A genuine mass workers party is necessary in Brazil. If it
comes into existence, it will be through resolute struggle against
the *neoliberal* policies of the bourgeois parties, including a
bourgeois workers party like the PT. If the new party that has sprung
up around Helena's campaign can't do it, some other party will.
In 1995, in reply to a question about what kind of revolutionary
party we need, I wrote a series of articles that included this
reference to Lula. I have since deleted it from the archived final result:
One of the first fresh, new formations to emerge in this generally
reactionary period was the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), or Workers
Party, of Brazil. Luis Inacio Lula da Silva, a worker and a trade
union activist, was part of number of workers, intellectuals,
Catholic Church priest-activists who saw the need for a new socialist
party in Brazil. They thought the CP and SP of Brazil were too ready
to compromise with whichever politician on the scene who best
represented the forces of the "progressive" wing of the capitalist
class. Another ingredient in the formation of the Workers Party was
the conscious leadership of ex-Trotskyists who gave the new group
badly needed organizational knowledge. This is the best role for
Trotskyists around the world today: to dissolve their parties and
help to form broader, non-sectarian formations like the Workers Party
of Brazil.
Lula was born in 1945 in the poor northeastern town of Garanhuns,
Pernambuco. He was the youngest of 8 children born to Aristides and
Euridice da Silva, subsistence farmers. In 1956, the family moved to
Sao Paulo, where they dwelled in one room at the back of a bar. They
shared the bathroom with bar customers.
At the age of thirteen Lula went to work in a factory that
manufactured nuts and bolts. There were 12-hour work shifts at the
plant and very little attention paid to the safety and health of the
workers. Consequently young Lula lost the little finger of his left hand.
Lula, whose older brother was a CP'er, became a union activist in the
early 1970's. In 1972, he won election to the Metalworker's Union
directory board of Sao Bernando. Three years later, he became
president of the union. He won with 92 percent of the vote from the
140,000 members.
In the late 1970's, a wave of labor militancy swept Brazil under the
impact of IMF-imposed austerity. Lula's union struck the Saab-Scania
truck company in May of 1978. It was the first large-scale strike in
a decade. Lula spoke to a strike assembly for the first time there.
On day one of the strike, workers showed up but refused to operate
their machines. The struggle spread to other multinational automobile
companies. At the end of the second week, some 80,000 workers were on
a sit-down strike. Their strength caught the government by surprise
and it could not mobilize the army in time. The strikers won a 24.5
pay increase.
This was the background of the formation of the Workers Party. A
founding convention on February 10, 1980 launched the party. Lula
addressed the 750 attendees, "It's time to finish with the
ideological rustiness of those who sit at home reading Marx and
Lenin. It's time to move from theory to practice. The Workers Party
is not the result of any theory but the result of twenty-four hours
of practice."
At the Seventh National Conference of the Workers Party in May 1990,
the party defended socialism without qualifications. The collapse of
bureaucratic socialism throughout the Soviet bloc inspired the
document appropriately called "Our Socialism". The party upheld
democratic socialism everywhere. The document said, "We denounce the
premeditated assassination of hundreds of rural workers in Brazil and
the crimes against humanity committed in Bucharest or in Tiananmen
Square with the same indignation. Socialism, for the PT, will either
be radically or it will not be socialism."
In section seven of the document, the Workers Party explained its
conception of how to build a revolutionary party. "We wanted to avoid
both ideological abstraction, the elitist offense of the traditional
Brazilian left, and the frazzled pragmatism of so many other parties.
A purely ideological profundity at the summit would serve no purpose
unless it corresponded to the real political culture of our party and
social rank-and-file. Besides, the leadership also lacked experience
that only the patient, continuous, democratic mass struggle could provide."
Compare this with James P. Cannon's declaration that his minuscule
Trotskyist faction was the "vanguard of the vanguard" in 1930. The
Workers Party leadership had already led mass strikes against the
bosses, broad struggles for democratic liberties and peasant
movements, including the one that took the life of Chico Mendoza, a
party member. Yet it says that it lacked experience. This type of
modesty coming from forces obviously so capable of leading millions
in struggle is truly inspiring.
