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Brazil

The coup d’état of 2016, the current stage and the tasks of the Left

Thursday 9 August 2018, by Insurgencia

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Thesis one. The Dilma government was overthrown by an institutional coup d’état, in the midst of an offensive by the reactionary and ultra-neoliberal right, thus creating a difficult situation for the left and for all popular struggles.

1.1. The dismissal of President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers ’ Party (PT), first in the House of Representatives on April 17, 2016, and then confirmed in the Senate on August 31, 2016, was an institutional coup, similar to what had happened before, in Latin America, Honduras and Paraguay. Michel Temer, of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), Roussef’s vice-president, took office after the formation of a bloc of conservative forces, supporters of “orthodox” economic policies (aimed at preserving the profits of financial capital and increasing the exploitation of labour), and the application of austerity measures in the fight against the country’s economic crisis (reduction of public social expenditure, dismantling of employment law, extension of the commodification of basic services, reform of pensions and so on). The hegemonic sectors of capital estimated that Dilma Roussef did not have the necessary political strength to implement these unpopular measures which they believed would be indispensable in the context of crisis.

On December 15, 2016, constitutional amendment 95 proposed by Michel Temer was approved, limiting public spending for 20 years; on March 22, 2017, a law was passed permitting the outsourcing of work in all commercial activities and in several state activities; finally, on July 11, 2017, the so-called labour reform was introduced, which de facto buried the foundations of what had been the employment code for 70 years (since the presidency of Vargas) – the new rules abolish workers’ rights such as the payment of supplementary amounts in cases of unsanitary conditions and risk to life, facilitate the non-payment of overtime and introduce the concept of “intermittent work” allowing employers to “employ” workers for one or two days a week. The social liberalism of the PT governments has been replaced by an ultra-neoliberal, clearly reactionary and anti-popular government.

1.2. The indictment of Dilma Roussef was an undemocratic institutional coup d’état, the position of president being in Brazil the only one elected by a democratic process, with a vote in which all votes have equal weight – as opposed to elections to the House of Deputies, an institution that distorts popular representation, and the federal Senate, which is a mere oligarchic masquerade. The Brazilian judiciary is an elitist bureaucracy embedded with the ruling classes, and impervious to any democratic control.

The replacement of Roussef by Temer overturned a democratically elected government, connected to certain popular sectors, turning it into a government of oligarchy without the legitimacy of the electoral process, set up in an opportunistic manner to implement policies in the context of an economic crisis. As the Brazilian political system is presidential, the “vote of confidence”, which allows governments to be toppled in parliamentary systems, is not foreseen in the Constitution. The arguments used for the departure of Dilma were strictly casuistic. The process catalysed all expressions of atavistic conservatism present in Brazilian society, which occupied the centre of the political scene.

1.3. The policy followed by the central government under the PT benefited, between 2003 and 2013, from the economic boom caused by the export of commodities. This led to a deepening of the deindustrialization of the country and also allowed the two governments of Luis Inácio Lula da Silva and the first government of Dilma Roussef to grant extraordinary profits to financial capital, to stimulate several national capitalist sectors and to strengthen distributive policies among the most marginalized sectors of the population, thanks to the adjustment of the minimum wage above inflation and compensatory policies. The redistributive policies have allowed the entry of large sectors of workers into a mass consumer market from which they were excluded before, which is why today Lula maintains a huge popularity among the poorest sectors of society.

1.4. The Brazilian economy has entered, over the last three years (2015-2017), into recession, the deepest since 1929, in line with the slowdown in the global economy (which had already hit the level of activity in 2009). It was aggravated by the political uncertainties opened by the mobilizations of 2013. The great conservative offensive that followed was made possible by the way in which PT governments had conducted their relations with the bourgeois classes (through pragmatic alliances with very conservative and even openly reactionary forces), and with the working class (essentially seeking to extend its insertion into the market through consumption, without advancing consciousness and political participation). The process has altered the relationships of forces to the detriment of exploited and oppressed, thus making the situation quite tense.

The composition of the Parliament elected in 2014 was the most conservative since the end of the military dictatorship, dominated by the coalition defending the interests of big national and international financial capital – between the lobby of big farmers (producing primary products mainly destined for export), the “Bible Lobby” (a coalition between representatives of the Evangelical and Catholic churches, with a great weight of “neo-Pentecostalist” evangelicals) and the “Bullet Lobby” (military police officers and civilian police delegates). This reactionary political coalition expressed the will of certain sectors of the bourgeoisie to break with the logic of openness of rights, solidarity and social justice, a characteristic that Temer did not hesitate to incorporate into his government. It is the assertion of a neoliberal society without limits, in which the market and the commercial logic of competition and predation exceed the scope of the economy to invade social and political life, as well as the field of subjectivity and relationship with nature.

1.5. The conservative offensive was also a response to the demonstrations of 2013 that defied the political system in general. In June of that year, 24 million people, mainly youth, went onto the streets of hundreds of Brazilian cities around progressive claims of better transport, education and health services and against the corrupt political system in place. These young people organised themselves in social networks. They were convinced that it was worth the effort to occupy the public space to say that things had to change – a local echo of the global wave of reactions to the crisis of 2008 (Arab Spring, Indignant movement, Occupy Wall Street and so on) – sharing their demands, methods of action and rejection of the established political system on-line. The demonstrations had as background the requirements not taken into account by the traditional programme of the PT: those of women and LGBT people against the conservative offensive triggered in Congress by evangelicals who supported Dilma; protests against work related to the 2014 Football World Cup (which was limited to the construction of pharaonic and overpriced stadiums); mobilizations against companies predating on nature and the defence of indigenous peoples (against the new forest code and the Belo Monte hydroelectric power station, in solidarity with the Guarani Kaiowa and so on); demonstrations for free public transport in several capitals of the country by autonomist groups.

If with Lula there was a shift of the social base of the PT from the organized sections of the working class and from the progressive middle classes to the poor and excluded masses, hitherto absent from the political scene, in 2013 we saw the mobilization of a large part of the urban population, including the beneficiaries of the policies of the governments of Lula and Dilma, which demanded more rights, public services and also the moralization of political life.

1.6. The mobilizations of 2013 were also supported by reactionary sectors, which saw it as a means of opposing the Dilma government by associating it with the corruption dominant throughout the Brazilian political system – a system terrified by the magnitude of the demonstrations. The PT saw in the protests a mobilization of the right and reacted only very slowly to dispute the streets. The CUT and STD never understood what had happened, and they tried to build “real” demonstrations led by the “organized working class” – which failed. This was the last time that the PT could have resumed the initiative by changing the direction of Brazilian institutional politics. But this would have meant subverting the rules of conservative governance and introducing the radicalisation of mass mobilizations against the law and the political system to which it was already attached. This was also the moment when the PSOL came out of its political isolation, becoming, in fact, the left party of opposition to the PT with a wider identification.

But in the opposition that followed, it was the right that succeeded most quickly in occupying the political vacuum left by the PT. The conservative and non-institutional ideological movements, inspired by the radical United States right, defended the centrality of the fight against corruption and directed it against the Dilma government. The ideological struggle was then hegemonized by the actions of the judiciary, triggering the “Lava Jato” operation, and by the dominant media, which echoed the judicial accusations, the initiatives of which were amplified by the right-wing mobilizations against the PT.

In response, the PT ideologically radicalised the campaign for the re-election of Dilma in October 2014, presenting her as a person with a coherent left trajectory against Aecio Neves (PSDB) and his program. The latter lost the election, but not by much. Yet Dilma Roussef began her second term in January 2015 applying a very strong austerity policy, trying to “appease the market”, exactly what she had said she would not do (and that was exactly the proposal of her defeated opponent). She has never been able to regain the political initiative.

1.7. The institutional coup expresses the crisis of the political regime established by the Constitution of 1988, after the military dictatorship, the so-called New Republic. Born in the midst of the crisis of Developmentalism, with the accession to neoliberalism, the New Republic was at first very unstable (the first elected president, Fernando Collor de Mello, was deposed by impeachment in 1992). It then stabilised during the governments of Fernando Henrique Cardoso (FHC) and Lula, thanks to the agreement between the new political forces of Brazilian society, the representatives of big global financial capital and certain popular sectors. FHC and Lula were able to deal with the representatives of the traditional oligarchies, who exert a secular control over the Brazilian state. It was this agreement that came into crisis after the popular demonstrations of 2013, when the oligarchic sectors tried to turn the change of government into a regime change. This manoeuvre was intended to establish an institutionality less vulnerable to popular pressures. If the New Republic is an oligarchic regime that has institutionalized the “authoritarian vestige” inherited from the military dictatorship (including the protection of the repressive apparatus, to this day militarized), the objective is to establish a system that is sealed from popular pressure, a permanent state of emergency.

1.8. This diagnosis of the political situation in Brazil is shared by the vast majority of the PSOL, but there are alternative visions of what is happening in the country, on the left in general and also within the PSOL. Because the new element to be taken into account after 2015 (and whose role was decisive in the parliamentary coup) is the emergence of a wave of massive reactionary mobilizations starting on March 15, with a social base made up of the urban middle classes. These mobilizations called for the resignation of the Dilma government, but they never defended any progressive claims. These were anti-socialist mobilizations, against the defence of popular rights, with certain sectors (albeit in the minority) openly advocating military intervention.

This is how a huge contradiction emerged, which is the basis of the relationship of forces unfavourable to the popular classes: the fall of the PT, of its social-liberal governments, is the result of pressure from the right through a mobilization in the streets, and not from an overtaking from the left. The coup d’état thus categorically changed the relationship of forces, and it opened a stage of ultra-neoliberal rearrangement of the Brazilian state. Although there has been social resistance in the country, such as the general strike of April 2017, this was not enough to reverse the vector of the balance of forces, nor block the main reforms approved until then, despite the strong crisis of legitimacy of the Temer government.

1.9. The logical consequence of our vision of the economic situation and the relationship of forces is that a new period has begun. In this period, the most important thing for Insurgência is to pursue a united front policy and a unity of action tactic to deal with the offensive of capital and the right.

In general, the vast majority of the PSOL and its forces share this view, starting with the party’s federal parliamentary group. But the coup d’état was a turning point in the left, because several sectors of the left did not share this view – symbolized by the PSTU, but also certain important groups within the PSOL. They do not recognize the existence of a coup, generally characterizing it as a change in the governance of political castes, and have even gone so far as to flirt with reactionary mobilizations. In the case of the CST, writing in 2015 that these were progressive. In the case of the PSTU, defending an “all politicians out!” slogan which, though radical in appearance, was assimilated by the right (“all politicians out!” meant in practice “PT out!”, the party that had led the country for 10 years).

Other groups have launched a policy for a third political camp in the country with the call for new elections (in our opinion a democratic variant of “all politicians out”), proposing an alliance of the PSOL with the “Rede Sustentabilidade”, the political party led by Marina Silva (who defended the dismissal of Dilma Roussef, although the party was divided at the national level), and the PPL (Partido Patria Livre, a nationalist party that originates from a sector of the Stalinist left, formerly known as MR-8), who openly defended the coup d’état and even took part in the reactionary mobilization.

These sectors have in common the rejection of a united front policy with the PT, as well as with the instruments of the PT in the social movements, to stop the coup and counter the reactionary mobilization. But there has never been a place for a third opposition camp in the country. On the contrary, in the current relationship of forces, a polarization has appeared: we were either for or against the coup, with all the tactical consequences that go with that. The main demonstration in favour of “all politicians out!” convened by the PSTU-dominated trade union federation, CSP Conlutas, in 2016, brought together 1,500 people in São Paulo. While the conflict in the streets was measured in hundreds of thousands or even millions, it was a marginal mobilization.

1.10. The demonstrations of 2013 brought new elements for left reorganization, including a strong generational renewal and the incorporation of new demands and new ways of doing politics. The changes in 2015 showed the depletion of the developmentalist production model of PT. They also paved the way and led to the massive victory of a right in the service of a brutal offensive of capital, which weighs on the process of reorganization of the left. Nothing progressive has emerged on the ground of this reorganization since 2015, apart from the policy of unity of action and united front. A large independent sector has emerged, led by the PSOL and the urban Homeless Workers ’ Movement (MTST) within the social movements. These two vectors concentrate their efforts on revealing and structuring a new social alternative, broad enough to attract both the new generations and important sectors influenced by the PT, breaking with their historical leadership.

1.11. The elections of October 2018 – electing the President, state governors, federal and state MPs and two-thirds of the Senate – are now the horizon of political conflicts in the country. A far-right candidate, the federal and reserve military member Jair Bolsonaro, is polling at 15% to 20%. Lula is leading all the polls with around 35% of the votes, being perceived as a representative of the left by the vast majority of the population. And no candidate from the political establishment has so far been able to enter the polarization – the best placed, Geraldo Alckmin, the PSDB governor of São Paulo, is polling only half of the vote of Bolsonaro.

At the same time, the process of indictment of the candidacy of Lula, already convicted at first instance by Judge Sergio Moro (on very questionable and openly partisan legal bases) continues. Although Lula can deal with the sectors that have toppled Dilma Roussef, conservative stabilization at the outcome of the political crisis presupposes the impossibility of Lula’s candidacy and the election of a leader of the system.

1.12. This is not the subject of this document, but we consider that it is obvious that the Brazilian situation is inserted into a general right-wing inflection in Latin America in the most recent period, after the exhaustion of the political cycle of so-called progresismo. Several factors can explain this change: the reorganization of the politics of the centres of power of imperialism in search of an outcome to the crisis opened in 2008 by the deepening of the neoliberal programme; the depletion and limitations of neo-development economic models anchored in extractivism; the emergence, with the emphasis on the limits of these models, of alternatives on the right to overcome the economic and social crisis on the continent; the absence of a clear break in the previous cycle, with dependency on the world market, even in the most advanced poles of Latin American progresismo, such as Venezuela.

Thesis 2. A process of recomposition of the socialist left has begun, which will involve the defeat of the ultra-neoliberal offensive of the right and the transcendence of the hegemony of the PT among the popular classes.

2.1. Our vision of the strategic reorganization of the left is that the “Lula model” and its tools have exhausted themselves as factors of transformation of Brazilian society – including the neo-developmentalist, neo-extractive and productivist paradigms which guided the governments of Lula and Dilma. A long historical cycle of the left has ended, and a new and complex process of reorganization has opened. This process has rhythms that cannot be defined in advance; it is still very fragmented because of the historical situation after the collapse of bureaucratic regimes; it is also marked by the slow agony of the PT project and its tools and by the incomprehension on the part of the revolutionary left of the changes in the social structures and their political consequences for reorganization (changes in the morphology of the world of work, the centrality of the fight against oppression, the accelerated environmental crisis and so on). Finally, as in previous cycles, the reorganization of the left and the movements will have a strategic, programmatic character and involve the renewal or formation of new instruments of struggle. That is what is at stake right now for the next few years.

2.2. The PSOL has occupied and occupies an indispensable and historic place for these tasks. Since its creation in 2004, it has striven to be a pole of regroupment and has become a left-wing opposition to the cycle of governments headed by the PT. Under unfavourable political conditions (given the weight and popularity of PT until the middle of this decade), in the face of the danger of fragmentation and dispersion, the PSOL kept its doors open to all progressive expressions who had had enough of Lulismo and who wanted to establish a dialogue with or join the PSOL.

2.3. The weight of Lulismo as hegemonic political and social leadership in the working class for decades, the little space left for a mass alternative to PT and the weight of the bourgeois opposition on the right has condemned the PSOL, until recently, to occupy a very minority space in Brazilian society. Only recently, in some states like Rio de Janeiro, has the PSOL become an election option for the masses. Since its foundation, the PSOL has been characterized more as a party-front, a gathering of currents/tendencies, being united in elections, with some electoral viability. In general, it does not act in an organic unitary way within the social movements. Nor does the party have a regular and democratic functioning of its bodies or well-defined strategic lines. There has been a constant tension between the weight of old strategies, which condemned the Brazilian left to institutional adaptation, and the search for new strategic thinking, new ways of doing politics, working and trying to prioritise our relationship with with social movements.

2.4. However, since the demonstrations of June 2013 new social actors, a new generation in political activity, the demands of the feminist, ecologist, anti-racist and LGBT struggles began to shift the party, which shows that the PSOL is a living party. It has occupied a significant part of this space and the representation of these demands since the elections of 2014. Playing a role in the fight against the coup d’état and the Temer government, the PSOL has gained legitimacy as a political tool capable, in the future, of presenting a new socialist project with a massive oppositional capacity.

2.5. After the elections of 2014, a process of expansion of the PSOL was opened to the political and social sectors previously linked to other parties, as well as to social movements, particularly to movements fighting against oppression, for the defence of democracy, and to the revolutionary Marxist left. For example, two of the six current federal MPs for the PSOL come from the Partido Socialista Brasileiro (PSB, a grouping running from the centrist left to the latifundial oligarchs of the northeast); a sector linked to the environmental struggle, dissidents from the Rede Sustentabilidade called Raíz, also joined the PSOL; also, a popular feminist group called Muitas, which elected two municipal councillors in Belo Horizonte, capital of the state of Minas Gerais. Traditional organizations of Brazilian revolutionary Marxism like Izquierda Marxista and the MAIS (Movement for an Independent and Socialist Alternative), the latter a recent and expressive split from the PSTU, also joined the party. The current process of alliance with the MTST and the potential influx of thousands of young, black, female, LGBT and indigenous activists are other examples to understand that the party is a visible factor in the reorganization of the Brazilian left. This is also seen in the good results of the PSOL in the municipal elections of 2016 and in the growth of affiliations in 2017: last year, it was the party in Brazil that grew the most, proportionately, in terms of new members.

2.6. Another aspect of the new phase of the reorganization is the growth of the Urban Homeless Workers’ Movement (MTST). This movement, after 2013, occupied the central space in the struggle for housing in large cities, starting from São Paulo, the largest metropolis in the country. But it has also had an important political role in proposing a front for popular reforms since the end of 2013, with a central weight in various mobilizations. The MTST launched this initiative based on an assessment that the June days showed the depletion of Lula’s model. Then, during the coup d’état, it launched and built a front of social movements and political parties, the FPSM (Front of Fearless People).

2.7. While also regrouping old organisations identifying with the PT’s bloc of support (CUT, UNE, sectors of the PCdoB are part of it), the FPSM has asserted itself as an alternative to the Popular Brazil Front (FPB) – an initiative really controlled by Lulismo (composed by the national leaderships of the MST, CUT, PT, PCdoB and Consulta Popular). The FPSM was created as an independent space with a predominance of the sectors linked to the PSOL, the MTST and the more combative Catholic left, which won the support of the feminist, black and LGBT movements. The governmentalist left entered the FPSM to challenge it and to empty the initiative. As this failed, she formed the FBP.

Over the last period, the FPSM has launched a policy of territorial and sectoral rooting based on the idea of territories: fearless neighbourhoods, fearless black people, fearless women, fearless LGBT and so on. During the second half of 2017, the FPSM also launched and promoted a cycle of debate that was materialized in the “Let’s go – without fear of changing Brazil” platform initiative. This initiative has been translated into a programmatic platform which, although not a transitional programme for the Brazilian Revolution, is a first synthesis of programmatic guidelines that form a basis for confrontation with Brazilian capitalism.

2.8. The PSOL took part in the discussions on the platform "Let’s go, without fear of changing Brazil" through its parliamentarians, most of its currents and its local elected representatives who have a common understanding of the meaning of the coup d’état 2016 and its consequences on the environment and the re-articulation of socialist forces. A new stage of reorganization has thus been opened in which the PSOL becomes a fundamental tool for the recomposition of the left. One of the consequences of this is that the previous alignments in the party have started to fall and have become relatively obsolete.

2.9. Thus, Insurg̻ncia was launched at the sixth Congress of the PSOL (in early December 2017), looking for political alignment from the common vision of the political situation in Brazil after the coup dՎtat of 2016 and with a programmatic platform for the new stage of the reorganization of the left In Brazil. Practically, it means we propose: the alliance of the PSOL with the MTST in the elections of 2018 around the candidacy of Guilherme Boulos for the presidency of the republic; that the PSOL deepen its relationship with the construction of the FPSM as the main tool for the reorganization of the left and social movements; the proposal for a programme and strategy for this new cycle, which goes beyond the old PT programme and its class conciliation strategy; that the PSOL bodies have a democratic and regular functioning, consolidating themselves as a living party and not just an electoral front, and that it is an open space for activists and sectors that are moving to the left in the movements among youth, ecology, and the struggles against oppression.

2.10. But the alignments of the party’s currents in relatively artificial blocks remained, at least in part, at the last Congress of the party: The majority composition, Socialist Unity, led by the grouping Acción Popular Socialiste-CC, on one side; and the left bloc, on the other (the sum of some fifteen organizations, which essentially share a critique of the bureaucratic conduct of the party by the majority bloc and combine to be better represented in the leadership of the PSOL). But there is no coherent political unity between the sectors that make up the left bloc in the face of the tasks of the conjuncture and recomposition. Suffice it to mention the opposing visions in this block about the coup d’état of 2016, the fact that inside there are supporters of the five pre-candidates for the presidency of the Republic that were launched within the party and which are divided in relation to participation in the FPSM – there are those who advocate the construction of an alternative front without sectors of the PT base.

On the other hand, although the majority leadership of the party has agreed on a political reading of the situation and tasks since April 2016, currents such as Insurgência, Rosa Zumbi (dissidents from the APS-CC), all federal parliamentarians and the independent regional sectors did not see the conditions to compose an alliance with Socialist Unity for the sixth Congress, given the political evaluation of the role played by the leadership of the party in the previous period and unresolved debates on the functioning and conception of the party. This is why during the preparation of the sixth Congress we fought against the artificial alignment in the party, and presented a platform, supported by 7.5% of the delegates, composed of Insurgência, some groups independent sectors of the party and parliamentarians like Marcelo Freixo, Chico Alsnacker and Jean Wyllys, among others.

2.11. The experience of the PSOL, with its contradictions and limitations, provides a fundamental lesson to revolutionaries, the importance of building, in the present historical phase, broad and pluralistic socialist parties as spaces of political convergence to advance the strategic recomposition of the Socialist Left. If there was no party that acts as a “shelter” or an “umbrella”" for the left critical of “Lulopetismo” (or what is called “progresismo”), we would today be in an even more difficult situation, with greater fragmentation, complete impotence and a lack of alternatives. It is the existence of the PSOL as a plural and relatively democratic party, built from 2004, which allows us to have the opportunity to fight for a Brazil after the PT or after Lula.

Thesis 3. The orientations and rhythms of the recomposition of the left will be decided in the process of confrontation of political projects for Brazil, which requires a strong intervention in the presidential election of 2018. In the current context, this is not possible without the candidacy of Guilherme Boulos, leader of the MTST.

3.1. We have entered a new and long cycle of recomposition of the Brazilian left and the mass movement, because the long political and social cycle hegemonized by the PT, its instruments and its strategy are in the process of finishing. The PT will not be a factor of transformative reorganization or rescue of socialist ideas, since it is a party of the bourgeois order and deeply rooted in the conflict internal to capital in the Brazilian oligarchic state – even if it is now in the opposition. This does not mean that it will not have electoral weight, as is the case with socialist parties in some countries of the world, but its innovative power is exhausted.

3.2. This new stage has already begun, and 2018 will be a decisive year with regard to the political instability of the country, but also social struggles against the Temer government reforms, as much as the October elections. The challenge for the PSOL is to appear as a useful political tool for the new historical stage of reorganization, not to be closed to new phenomena of reorganization, keeping the doors open to the possibility of adding new sectors, advancing in the alliance with the MTST and knowing how to establish strategic agreements with independent social movements.

3.3. Thus, for Insurgência, the main challenges for 2018 are as follows:

A) to present Guilherme Boulos, senior leader of the MTST, as a PSOL candidate for the presidency, and Sonia Guajajara, a prominent leader of the indigenous peoples, as a candidate for the vice-presidency. These nominations symbolize an alliance of the party with independent urban social movements and indigenous movements, an alliance of the city with the countryside and the conception of a new socio-environmental model for the country.

B) to contribute to this candidacy by proposing an anti-system, radical and popular profile and defending the demands of the working class, young people, homeless and landless people, black people, women, LGBT and indigenous peoples. From the alliance of the PSOL with all the movements referenced on the platform of Guilherme Boulos - Sonia Guajajara, we start in 2018 with a pole which is the main political tool of recomposition of the Brazilian left.

C) to contribute, on the basis of this profile and the synthesis of the platform “Let’s go – without fear of changing Brazil”, to a new programmatic construction for Brazil, highlighting some strategic elements such as:

 going beyond extractive neo-developmentism from an ecosocialist point of view,
 the need for a radical break with the oligarchy of the Brazilian state and
 internationalism.

D) to intervene with more weight in the FPSM in order to broaden its integration into the social struggles, in the territorial areas, in the social sectors of the working class and in the social movements that fight against oppression.

E) to participate in the elections with a leading role not only in the campaign of Boulos, but also in the two states where we have the most responsibility (Bahia and Rio de Janeiro) and in campaigns to conquer also parliamentary mandates for our current and for our allies within the party.

3.4. This policy for the elections of 2018 is structured around an unprecedented alliance between the PSOL and the social movements: the MTST and other movements (including cultural and communication movements) that will join this campaign. It is not, at this time, a membership of the PSOL, but a strategic alliance. None of the actors involved-the vast majority of the PSOL, the MTST and the movements concerned works around the idea of a purely electoral alliance which will end with the elections of October 7 (first round) and October 28 (second round). The aim is to develop this alliance and establish bases for new political and programmatic syntheses and the construction of common political instruments to compete in the new phase of reorganization of the left in Brazil.

3.5. What is at stake in Brazil in the coming years is, first of all, a wide range of social bases, activists and left-wing cadres historically hegemonized by Lulismo and the PT, but who are in crisis with the old strategy and the old leadership and who are starting to move. If not for the factor of contention that Lula’s candidacy still exercises at this stage, this movement would be more advanced, with the crisis of Petismo and the search for dialogue with the PSOL after the municipal elections of 2016. The candidacy of Boulos in the PSOL is a powerful expression of the potential for movement of large sectors such as social movements, young people, intellectuals, the Catholic left, sectors or regional dissidents of the PT.

3.6. These is also the issue of the new generation of young activists and anti-oppression movements that became important in June 2013. The key to this new phase of the reorganization will be to lead in the same direction these two sets of actors who have expressed themselves in recent years in a series of social struggles and who have shown a critical disenchantment towards the traditional leadership of the country’s mass movement.

3.7. Undoubtedly, these movements pose new challenges, opportunities and risks for the PSOL. We are at the beginning of a process that can be broad, but whose format is far from defined. Today, the FPSM is already a space of articulation between the social movements and the parties of the socialist left – with the PSOL and the PCB officially participating in the front. Will the PSOL have the capacity to be the political spokesperson of the alliance we are building, bringing together the frameworks and sectors of all this plurality? Will this experience consolidate a new movement-party around the PSOL?

There are now several currents and movements with intermediate positions between the PSOL and the PT. Political shifts in these sectors can express both strategic political redefinitions and tactical repositions. If the PSOL becomes the outlet for a strong displacement, it will open a debate on the limits and the political and programmatic criteria for the reformatting of this party.

This whole process of recomposing will have a programmatic dimension, including its strategic dimensions. We will have to promote new syntheses capable of guiding a new cycle along the Brazilian left, in dialogue with the Latin American and world left. It depends on fundamental experiences that are far from being given; The process that we are experiencing today in Brazil is very strong, but will it suffice to launch this momentum?

3.8. The place of Insurgência in this complex situation, defensive for the exploited and oppressed, but with a recomposition already underway in the left and in the movement, will be a militant protagonism to act in a vast reorganization. We will seek to be a coherent and organized sector engaged in the construction of the PSOL, in its insertion in the movements and in its search for new programmatic and strategic syntheses. The secret will be to work towards a vast reorganization of the movement and the left, but without diluting oneself within the new instruments, by maintaining and developing a strong revolutionary Marxist organization, which is not doctrinaire or sectarian in the face of the new phenomena and movements that have already started in Brazil

P.S.

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