Brazil: 2021, the out of Bolsonaro and the construction of an independent alternative and of struggle
BySocialist Alternative/PSOL – LIS Brazil
Year 2021 was particular in many ways: the height of the pandemic crisis, run by a gang of deniers; the political isolation of the government; rising unemployment and hunger; the return of struggles in the streets against the attacks of the Bolsonaro/Centrão government. Despite the pandemic, the fights showed great strength, isolating and forcing the government to reposition itself to survive, but also limitations and betrayals, keeping Bolsonaro in the Planalto.
Unemployment, hunger and chronic crisis
Heartbreaking scenes of hungry people searching for leftover food in boxes or garbage trucks (the forecast for 2021 was up to 75 millions of people in extreme poverty), sale of bones in supermarkets and, for those who could, the increase in the consumption of processed and ultra-processed foods. Proteins disappeared from people's plates and what was left was reduced: the price of the basic food basket consumed between 44 and the 65% minimum wage. Brazilians tightened their belts as financial usurers made billions of profits: 23.000 million in the third quarter, a 32,3% more than in the same period of 2020 for major banks. The minimum wage was pulverized by inflation, pressing the cost of living. The setting for 2022, 1.210,44 real (10,04%), It doesn't even work for him 2021.
evidently, A part of the people has already realized that the ultraliberal project of labor reforms, from Temer, and social security and privatization in exchange for the improvement of life is nothing more than a big lie. Unemployment, that the bourgeoisie hides in a fanciful percentage between 12-14%, without counting the unemployed (6 millions) and the actual amount, visible in the streets, confirms every day how much worse life has gotten. There are no blank jobs and precarious jobs, in humiliating regimes, They have become the only way to survive.
In addition to the economic crisis, The political crisis was also the tone. The main reforms propagated by the Government after Lira's victory (PP) in the Chamber of Deputies, in an agreement marred by corruption, they did not advance. The promise of Administrative Reform, that eliminates the stability of officials and outsources State services, ended the year shelved due to the crisis and the campaign of public administration workers. Like the Administrative Reform, Tax Reform was delayed until 2022 without a calendar. The promise in 2019 of a victorious government with the attacks that Temer did not implement, ended in 2021 with Bolsonaro affiliated with the PL and a government blackmailed by the most venal sector of the regime, the political center.
The set of highlighted elements leads to the conclusion that the Bolsonaro government lives, As we had already highlighted in previous articles, a chronic crisis. Not from 2021, with the resumption of vanguard struggles in the streets, but since mid 2019, with the demonstrations against cuts in higher education and in defense of retirement. Part of the explanation for Bolsonaro's election in 2018, with a considerable social base, lies in the phenomenon of disillusionment of massive sectors with PT governments servile to capital. But this social base that supports Bolsonaro entered a dynamic of loss in the first months.
The chronic crisis of the Bolsonaro government is part of the process of deterioration of the regime since 2013 with the entry on the scene of the June Days. It is not possible to understand the 2021, for example, only from the perspective of the disastrous decisions of a single subject, Bolsonaro, although it has considerably deepened the friction between the institutions of the regime of 1988, but from the crisis of legitimacy with the dominant institutions and the dispute, breaking the pact, among them by the political leadership of the country. The agreement agreed upon 1984-88, marked by the bourgeois-military transition, was interrupted. The big question is whether it will be resumed or definitively forgotten.
The year of fights and betrayals
In the first semester, The Covid-19 pandemic reached its peak with thousands of deaths, more of 600.000 in the accumulated, and daily figures that exceeded 4.000 lives lost in the month of April. With the installation of the Covid-19 CPI in the Senate also in April, The country followed with astonishment the denunciations of the attempted unscientific application of herd immunity due to infection planned by the "parallel ministry", fraud in contracts for the purchase of vaccines, inhumane “early treatment” experiments carried out by the “medical assistance” company Prevent Senior and Bolsonaro accused of ten crimes, supported by the Penal Code, the Law of Responsibility and the Treaty of Rome – crimes against humanity, in extermination modalities, persecution and other inhuman acts. With a duration of six months, CPI day (parliamentary investigation committee) Covid showed the levels of corruption and crimes against human rights practiced by the Bolsonaro government, accusing, in addition to the President, a 76 people and 2 private companies.
Unlike what a part of the left has characterized, The ICC was not the main factor in changing the situation and the political isolation of the Bolsonaro government, but the demonstrations started on 29 of May (29M) by Fora Bolsonaro. Initially called by Povo Na Rua, but driven autonomously, the return of street demonstrations, even in one of the most critical moments of the pandemic, showed the will of the broad vanguard to defeat Bolsonaro once and for all. With a surprising presence and will, The 29M was also marked by a disproportionate repression by the PMs of the governments of the left of order, PSB/PCdoB in Pernambuco and PT/PDT in Ceará, for example, serving as Bolsonaro's fifth column. Even with the repression, The struggles grew with thousands of people in the main streets of the capitals of São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia, State, other capitals, medium cities, small towns and international demonstrations of solidarity – in total, more of 200 cities.
Taking stock of the demonstrations (29M, 19J, 3J, 13J 24J, 11A, 7S, 2O, 23O, 20N), from peak to ebb, the direct action of the PT/CUT/Campanha Fora Bolsonaro is noted in domesticating the acts, lengthening the period between one and the other, 19J to 24J is an example, and ignoring dates not called directly by CFB, el 13J guaranteed by Povo Na Rua. Nonetheless, There were moments when the avant-garde broke the barrier of bureaucratic hierarchies, he 3 of July (3J), that the CFB swallowed whole. From August-September, skeptics of the defeatist left celebrated their self-fulfilling “theory”. Despite the pressure exerted by Povo Na Rua, a necessary class space, the PT/CUT/CFB managed to demobilize on the one hand and, for another, the launch of Lula's candidacy, protagonist of political betrayal, for the elections 2022, with enormous possibilities of defeating Bolsonaro, It is part of the channeling through electoral means.
Regrettably, PSOL, led by the PSOL bloc of Todos las Lutas/PTL (Spring, Solidarity Revolution, Resistance, insurgency, Subverted, etc. ), has behaved like a faithful doormat of Lulo-Petism, not denouncing the seriousness of political betrayal, and thus prolonging the suffering of the working class at the hands of Bolsonaro/Centrão, not mobilizing for the reactivation of the struggles and ignoring important spaces of the classist left, like the Povo na Rua – built by the Left Opposition of the PSOL, including us as the Radical Left Movement- in exchange for the right to be the last link in the broad front that Lula is building with bourgeois sectors for the elections of 2022.
PSOL: regime firefighter or alternative?
There is no doubt that, in the face of attacks from a far-right government, today a spectrum of what was, The primary task is complete unity of action in defense of the minimum democratic rights; but this task cannot be subordinated to the defense of the bourgeois regime, considering the extreme right as one of the arms of the ruling class, but to the construction of an alternative to the crisis with the working class and the poor people in power. The extreme right can only be buried once and for all by the organized working class, not by broad-front shortcuts.
The PSOL has ignored all the signals and has preferred, under the direction of the PSOL block of Todos as Lutas/PTL, to be the left-wing advisor to Lula's candidacy in 2022, an attempt at an agreement from above to push the Fora Bolsonaro on the electoral calendar. In the most undemocratic National Congress of the PSOL (Read more), The Left Opposition bravely defended the name of comrade Glauber Braga for President of the Republic. PSOL, which was born as an attempt to be a left-wing alternative to the PT, It is losing itself in being the last wagon of the broad front, starring in ridiculous scenes, like Lula's shameful request without Geraldo Alckmin (ex-PSDB), with "a left-wing Vice", made by the Resistance; Juliano Medeiros, president of PSOL, stating that "the Alckmin element is an obstacle, but it will not necessarily make this construction impossible.. The PTL bloc has thrown away class independence.
The political alternative to the extreme right is the unity of social and political forces, on a front with class independence, anti-capitalist and socialist. It is not possible to build any minimally classist alternative (forehead, block or coalition) with the PT/Lula. Any composition with the PT/Lula, umbilical part of the regimen of 1988, will bring with it bourgeois sectors and parties. The PSOL must bet on a front with class and independent parties and movements.
The PSOL will not be better placed due to the apparently easier shortcut, being the last to arrive from the broad front in the elections, or firefighter of the regime in crisis, but for the construction of the class front, feminist and ecosocialist who demands and fights for the reactivation of the struggles for Fora Bolsonaro in the streets and denounces the betrayals of the PT/Lula/CUT. We, from Socialist Alternative, part of the Radical Left Movement and the Left Opposition of the PSOL, we fight for it. Join us!
