Coup D’état in Brazil
Leave a comment28/09/2016 by socialistfight
Organizing the resistance to prepare for a new rise of masses to defeat imperialism and its national agents!
By Humberto Rodrigues, Communist Workers Front (FCT) Brazil
The working class of Brazil is experiencing its worst moment since the military dictatorship (1964-1985). This time, the coup was executed by the combined action of the legislature, judiciary and the Vice-President of the Republic, Michel Temer (Pmdb), against class collaborating Workers’ Party (PT) government of collaboration. The political unification of the opposition with traitorous sections of the government of Dilma was possible only after the unification of the majority of the bourgeoisie, under the reorientation of imperialism to isolate the PT and expel It from the government.
Preparing the geopolitics of the coup d’état
The PT spent 13 years of governments (2003-2016) serving and profiting the bourgeoisie and imperialism. There was a containment of the class struggle after the wear and tear of the governments of the neo-Liberal decade of the 1990s. According to the Departamento Intersindical de Estatística e Estudos Socioeconômicos (DIEESE), the body of research and statistics on the CUT (Trade Union Federation) and the PT, the era of Lula and Dilma saw the lowest number of strike in the last 30 years.
http://www.sindbancarios.org.br/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/grafico_greves_1984_2013.jpg
It is true that the PT had a policy of raising the minimum wage http://www.e-farsas.com/wp-content/uploads/salario_minimo.jpg
The land occupations have decreased, and as a result, the expropriations of land for agrarian reform too.
However, the gains of the working class have been infinitely smaller than the profits of the capitalists. Actually, there was a relative impoverishment of the working class in relation to wealth that they created. With the retreat from the fight by the workers and the illusion that could improve their life continuously and quietly, the great capital accumulated profits.
The four PT governments have kept up the Agri-Export orientation of the country since the arrival of the Portuguese and also kept the high interest rates that discouraged national industrialization and encourage financial capital. The Brazilian bankers earned eight times more in the two terms of office of Lula than in the two mandates of Cardoso (Psdb).
In the first three years of Dilma, the profitability of the nine largest banks in the country were six times greater than in the eight the mandates of the neoliberal Psdb.
How do you explain so that the financial capital has supported the coup to overthrow the president of the PT? Financial suicide? Indeed no. National peculiarities represent in itself a combination of the fundamental characteristics of the world economy in that period. The main causes of the coup d’ état are not within the national economic policy, but in the world political economy and its expressions in the geopolitical changes after the 2008 crisis in the USA.
The economic crisis in the heart of imperialism changed the winds that for a decade and a half have to PT, has created an exceptional situation with a sharpening of inter-capitalist rivalries no seen since world War II. This has created a new cold war and the government of the PT had joined the opposite to imperialism. That marked the change of direction of imperialism in relation to the PT.
Resisting the wave of neo-liberalism of the 1990s, the PT and a series of left-wing populist governments were elected in the American continent. The popular uprising against neoliberalism overthrew the Argentine government in 2001, and brought to power Chavez in Argentina (1999), Lula in Brazil (2003), Tabaré in Uruguay (2005), Evo Morales in Bolivia (2006), Correa in Ecuador (2007) and Fernando Lugo in Paraguay (2008). They were all different versions of the remodelled bonapartism of the Latin American left in the first years of the twentieth century. Governments were established by the force of class struggle, so were not the governments dreamed of by imperialism, because they also contained elements of the rise of the fight against neoliberalism and imperialism itself.
During the global economic crisis of 2008 and 2010, these governments have been polarized by new emerging capitalist powers that have come to buy their commodities that could no longer find markets in the imperialist centres. So was founded the BRICS, directed by China and Russia, with exceptional assets of human resources, energy and increased military from their origins as bureaucratised workers’ states.
When the USA managed to get itself into great financial turmoil in 2008 they sought to recover lost ground by mobilising their political, judicial, economic, military and mass media agents under the command of the secretary of state Hillary Clinton. In Brazil, these agents are Serra, Temer, Moro, etc. Popular dissatisfaction against the economic crisis arose. It was revolutionary but diffuse and without direction and, as in the so-called “Arab spring”, it was manipulated as an instrument of this policy of re-colonialisation. In 2013, the extreme right has infiltrated “days of June” to prepare the ground for the coup, as pointed out the comrades of the Lenin Collective: http://coletivolenin.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/a-extrema-direita-toma-as-manifestacoes.html
Mercenaries sponsored by the CIA merged with the opposition wing of the bourgeois. In several countries, this offensive from the US and Europe has resulted in Civil War (Libya, Syria, Yemen, Ukraine). In other nations there were parliamentary coups (Honduras, Paraguay, Brazil). In South Africa, the coup attempt via Impeachment was defeated. In Turkey, the attempted military coup orchestrated by the USA was smothered and the government in Ankara was pushed even more to compose a political and military front with Russia, China, Iran and Syria to defend against the US intervention in the region of the Middle East.
In the nations in which it has resumed political control over the governments by these raids imperialism has increased its financial parasitism. In some, the raid is carried out in conjunction with the balkanisation of the states: Iraq, Sudan, Libya, Syria, Ukraine. Even so none of these economies today can dispense with trade relations with China. From Ukraine to Brazil, the new governments puppets are more unstable and he has resorted to more police and military repression to implement its programmes of recolonisation, feeding like that a strong and broad anti-imperialist. This offensive has caused hatred in the world semicolonial and including the American Colony of Puerto Rico. http://workerssocialistleague.blogspot.com.br/2016/07/porto-rico.html
Imperialism wants to impose a new cycle of capital accumulation and enslave all paid employment
The impeachment coup against Dilma was to ward off the Brazil from the political influence of Russia and China and deepen the dependence of Brazil in relation on the USA. They are the parasites who seek to increase the exploitation and oppression on the working class. This new programme seeks to fool the workers because they are not content to settle with the limited reforms of the PT: expansion of credit for the purchase of houses, cars and household appliances; expansion of access to education and health; basic income programs (basic income) which brought 36 million people of extreme poverty. The imperialism and the bourgeoisie want re-enslave the Brazilian workers, forcing them to work from 8 to 12 hours a week, removing all the main achievements of labour in the last century; freeze wages, eliminate all employment stability; privatise the health system, education and social welfare, public banks, post office and the great Brazilian state oil company, Petrobras; replace the regular and direct recruitment of workers by outsourcing, without labour rights and with lower wages.
In order to heighten the confusion and demoralise the workers, the coupists want to criminalise, demoralize, and destroy the PT and the CUT, arrest its leaders and all symbols that represents the degenerated PT even though the represented in a very distorted way the struggle of the workers. In spite of all the political degeneration and class collaboration the PT and CUT were the main policy tools built and supported by the masses since the fight against the military dictatorship. They were not able to get the physical lynching they wanted, but called instead for the mass media censorship of Lula. This was clever and less costly politically. The right con artist dreams of getting rid of Lula in the same way as other agents butcher mercenaries of imperialism got rid of Gaddafi. This visceral hatred to Lula proves the plagiarism that the Brazilian magazine ““Veja” (Look) has just made of the cover of Newsweek of the United States, published in 2011, after the bloodthirsty execution of the Libyan leader http://www.revistaforum.com.br/wp-content/uploads/2016/09/capa_veja_lula-gaddafi.jpg
Gaddafi only belatedly realized the scale of the threat that butchered him. Lula is still calling for a sense of gratitude from his tormentors. The anti-communist witchhunt will not stop at the PT, the entire Brazilian left will be targeted.
Why the coup triumphed?
Proletariat Brazilian is an immense force. Is the greatest in all Latin America. Workers built the strongest tools like the CUT, the MST (landless Workers’ Movement) and the MTST (the squatters’ movement). The Proletariat of Brazil was the only one in the whole planet to elect a former metallurgical leader as President of the country. The PT was elected four times in a row. And even with de-industrialisation and the layoffs, never before in the history was the proletariat as so large as it is now.
“even if we take into account only the factory proletariat, there’s a jump from 4.8 million in 1998 to 8.5 million workers in industry in 2010, a growth of almost 100 %. Comparing with what we could consider the year of the “peak of the workers’ movement”, 1989, today there are 2 million registered workers more than at that time. Already watching the graph 3, in which are numbered workers with and without record in wallet, we are faced with the jump from 11.2 million in 2002 to 17.2 million in 2010., the number of workers in Brazil, far from decreasing, on the contrary, has grown significantly, in fact, never was the working population of Brazil as great as it is today.” http://www.passapalavra.info/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/classe_operaria_daniel-1.pdf
But why, in spite of all that strength and strong political orientation of the working class, did the coup d’état not find sufficient popular resistance to defeat the attack? Why did it triumph by peaceful ways, through the parliament, such that it was not necessary for the military to intervene directly in the political arena as in 1964?
The coup has triumphed because the “other side”, orchestrated by imperialism, was stronger, it was centralised and decisive. There was not enough resistance to defeat the formal votes in Congress. That was because the “our side” was disappointed and confused by the PT’s policy of class collaboration. Right up until the adoption of impeachment by the Senate Lula believed that the centre bourgeois (Pmdb, Psb, PDT) would reverse the offensive of the right-wing duplicitous agents of the bourgeoisie and of imperialism.
Why it was not necessary to military intervention this time?
In 1964, imperialism was prepared even to face a stiff popular resistance, and deployed troops and tanks of the Brazilian armed forces in the streets, they organized a military invasion of Brazil through the displacement of the Caribbean Front to waters near the city of Rio de Janeiro. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U91gtFREBY0
The US feared the contagion of Brazil by the Cuban revolution and a coup attempt after the defeat of the attempted military invasion of Cuba by armed troops by the CIA in Bay of Pigs in 1961. In 2016, none of this was necessary, the coup was sustained by the illusions of masses in bourgeois democracy, and in the strength of the consolidated democratic institutions of their class enemies.
Brazil has a fraudulent democracy that murders 50, 000 poor people and workers a year by the weapons of the police, by vigilante police extermination squads by the capitalist barbarism; this overwhelms and terrifies everybody through the genocide against the black population.
The illusions of the masses fed by the propaganda of the state defending the democratic rights of the rich allowed the breakthrough of counterrevolutionaries and anti-communists ideological ideas in the middle classes to the point where the right could mount street demonstrations not since 1964.
The cohesion of the bourgeoisie against the left is also expressed in the electoral arena, when the most reactionary congress of the entire history of the country was elected in 2014, with a big increase in political representatives of the landowners, religions and of the repressive apparatus. With the complicity of the PT and Dilma that congress passed several pro-Imperialist and anti-working class measures: the extension of outsourcing, the reduction of the age of criminal majority, the end of the legal requirement of Petrobras have the participation of at least 30 % on the oil reserves of the co-called “Pre-Salt” http://www.viomundo.com.br/denuncias/senador-do-pt-se-diz-traido-por-dilma-governo-fecha-acordo-com-serra-e-concede-cabeca-de-ponte-para-petroliferas-estrangeiras-no-pre-sal.html
And the “Anti-terrorist law” http://blogdosakamoto.blogosfera.uol.com.br/2016/03/18/dilma-tambem-ataca-a-democracia-ao-sancionar-lei-antiterrorismo-diz-boulos/
The result was the approval of a spurious impeachment in the House and Senate.
Clarifying the class consciousness of the workers is a task of the first order so that they do not accept the coup nor its measures decided by his class enemies to enslave them in the forums that the plotters have under their hegemony; the legislature, the judiciary, the PF (Federal Police), MPF (Federal Public Ministry).
Since the end of 2014 there are a wave of mass rallies across country against the right, but this wave was not been enough to stop the advance of the right nor was there enough of the working masses who were still fighting coming onto the streets to stop the coup by means of a General Strike for example.
Centrism disarmed before the coup d’état
The collaboration of classes and the opportunism mistook, desmobilizaram disarmed and politically the workers. Another Ally of the offensive con artist was the political and ideological confusion of parties of the left claims ” Revolutionary “. Pcbs, sectors of the psol and pstu, ” more ” I don’t even recognize that there was a coup d ‘ état in Brazil. How so you can organize the fight against something that don’t even recognize the existence?
If the PT gives up the fight against the coup d’état feeding illusions that he will be saved and still triumphant return to the government in future elections, facing the left of the PT will still take some time to figure out what’s going on. Our young organization comes denouncing the escalation con man in the right wing in Brazil since June 2013 http://lcligacomunista.blogspot.com.br/2013/06/por-uma-frente-unica-antiimperialista.html and patiently explaining the causes of the coup and as combat him http://lcligacomunista.blogspot.com.br/2014/04/porum-primeiro-de-maio-de-luta-contra-o.html
http://lcligacomunista.blogspot.com.br/2014/04/50-anos-do-golpe-de-estado-no-brasil.html
So, even though it may be more fragile than the previous coup, that is more daring in threats of attacks against the historic rights of the proletariat because until now the offensive on the right didn’t find an opposing force to challenge or beat them.
And there are still sectors, especially disciples of the Argentine Nahuel Moreno , who openly supported the impeachment , took part in the coup manifestations of right and celebrated the coup d’etat . The PSTU, most from LIT, defended the pro- anarchist proposal of ” Down with them All! ” And “Down with Dilma.” Those are useful slogans to assist the coup.
The support of the PSTU for the coup in Brazil corresponds to equally to the outrageous support of LIT for the coup offensive of imperialism in Libya, Syria, Ukraine, etc. With this policy, the PSTU turned away from the working class base of the PT, confused their own base, split in two and lost more than 700 militants led to a confused group called ” MAIS”. This is the biggest crisis of the “current mother” of Morenism since the implosion of the Argentine MAS (and LIT), after supporting the end of the USSR.
We must learn from the experience of the past. Trotsky:
“The problem is consequently reduced to the relationship of forces. To come out into the streets with the slogan “Down with the Brüning-Braun government” at a time when, according to the relationship of forces, it can only be replaced by a government of Hitler-Hugenberg, is the sheerest adventurism. The same slogan, however, assumes an altogether different meaning if it becomes an introduction to the direct struggle of the proletariat itself for power. In the first instance, the Communists would appear in the eyes of the masses as the aids of reaction; but in the second instance, the question of how the fascists voted before they were crushed by the proletariat would have lost all political significance.”
Leon Trotsky, revolution and counter-Revolution in Germany – August 1931. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/germany/1931/310825.htm
Overcome illusions in the reconciliation of classes, electoral and parliamentary illusions to build a revolutionary way forward for the workers!
Unfortunately, during the growth of the struggle against the coup, much of the left was led by the PT and PCdoB and they south solutions on the territory of the bourgeoisie that was controlled by the putschists; “general election”, “direct elections now! “, “constituent assembly”. Defeating the blow by the ballot box and voting for Lula in 2018. We understand that at this time, these parliamentary and electoral illusions are more useful to putschist escalation than to the political organization of the victims of the coup.
The shrewdest sectors coup front, the large media organizations, are already preparing “Plan B” after the failure of the Temer government. Even left-wing coup leaders PSTU and its splits, the “MAIS”, also support the policy of “general election”. These slogans may help the bourgeoisie to replace a fragile coup government, every day more hated by the masses, by a strong government of the right. The big coup media, Globe, View, Leaf, ESP, as well as the ” Collor Out “! (1992) and “June days” (2013, the “Arab Spring ” in Brazil) wants to appropriate the discontent against Temer to pre-emptively ensure continuity of the coup by convening extraordinary elections, more fraudulently expressing the popular will, where the left and the PT could not participate or only participate debilitated by judicial and police coercion.
The legal and police hounding of Lula through the judicial operation called “Car Wash” (Lava Jet) and the ongoing campaign of criminalization of PT by the great and powerful media indicates that the coup leaders do not even remotely contemplate handing the government back to the PT in 2018, as more patient Lulistas dream.
In turn, the important thing for imperialism and its national agents is not preserving Temer, but to make progress some ways with the slave program which was imposed the coup, eliminate everything that does not need labour legislation, social security and social content contained in the constitution of 1988. As the Labor newspaper Folha warns since May 2016, “Temer is only a bridge to the absolute control of government of Brazil by the United States, passing over the PMDB itself and under the heel of the monopolies (Minister José Serra), bankers (Minister of Finance, Henrique Meirelles) and repression (Minister of Justice , Alexandre Moraes) ” . Temer is nothing more than “a pre- Bonapartist government, a host for the dictatorship of finance capital and the imperialist multinationals “.
Workers in Brazil must not allow the coup to mature and pass on to the parliamentary stage to its police – military phase, where the repression will be far more open. We cannot let this counterrevolutionary regime consolidate unde Temer or worse than him, a dictatorship that can impose on us the political, social and economic losses that they want. We have no time to lose and we must take advantage of its weakness and contradictions.
The right wants to “get rid of this race for the next 30 years” and the direction of the PT bet all their chips on the 2018 elections
Now there are elections for mayors and councillors in 5,500 cities in Brazil. Through these elections, the coup regime intends to legitimise its militarization in place. PT and PCdoB are immediate targets the coup, the fury of the right, the antipathy towards the PT and the criminalisation of their political activities. The right has already expressed openly that wishes to root left out the of political life, “get rid of this race for the next 30 years,” as stated by a former senator of DEM, main political successor of the ruling party during the military dictatorship.
Despite the threat becoming increasingly real, PT and PCdoB the election propaganda and applications as an instrument of denunciation of the coup, and much less of the organisation of workers against the historical attacks announced by the coup. And worse, PT and PCdoB support “the fight against corruption” operation “car wash” and its “witchhunt from the left. In hundreds of cities these parties are affiliated with the putschists parties in coalitions and that serve to confuse enemies with friends.
Unify the struggles of resistance, build new tools of organization of masses and vanguard
We need to unify the struggles, strikes, occupations, wage campaigns, union meetings, towards the construction of a general strike to defeat the coup. The time is the accumulation of forces and experience in defending our rights and for a revolutionary government of workers.
The tasks of this period for the Brazilian section of the Liaison Committee for the Fourth International (LCFI), the Communist Workers Front (FCT), should be to seek to establish solid roots in the working class and prepare for the new upsurge of the masses in the next years.
We must learn from the mistakes of the struggle against the military dictatorship in order not to repeat them now. The first expressions of that struggle were opportunistic, “Revenge of the polls” (vote for MDB, opposition party created and allowed by the dictatorship) and the main focus on sectarian, agrarian and urban issues. But it was only a new upsurge of the masses and the workers’ strikes of the late 70s that created a new vanguard, a fighting instruments, the PT, and mass organisations, the CUT and the MST to harass the dictatorship. There will be a new electoral cretinism (“Direct Elections now!”, “Vote for Lula in 2018”) nor a new adventurous localism can defeat this new era coup, much more threatening and remote than the last.
With the best fighters of the anti-imperialist resistance, the anti-coupists and anticapitalists, we need to build a new instrument of struggle, able to overcome opportunism of the PT, which disarmed the main mass organizations of the country against the coup, and the sectarianism of those who supported the coup with a leftist phraseology. It is essential to build united fronts in practice against the coup with the PT and all groups in all mobilizations, strikes, occupations, etc. At the same time, we must explain the masses from the experience of the PT governments, the class collaboration can only disarm us politically, create ideological confusion and again encourage our enemies to re-enslave us.
Workers need to believe only in their own strength and in the instruments of pasta and cutting edge that these forces build, the General Strike, a regroupment of association and the vanguard fighter derived from resistance struggles of the united front and of a new upsurge against the coup regime and slavery and in a revolutionary party of workers.
Socialist Fight 
