SF #21 - BRAZIL: DEFEAT THE COUP D’ETAT ON THE STREETS!

Brazil: Defeat the coup d’etat against
the government of Dilma on the streets!

No confidence in the government of the PT, organise
the workers to defend their rights and historical interests!

Frente Comunista dos Trabalhadores / LCFI Brazil 12-12-2015

Reproduzimos abaixo a análise da conjuntura brasileira feita pela FCT, traduzida para o inglês e publicada na revista 21 do Socialist Fight, nosso irmão britânico, seção do Comitê de Ligação pela IV Internacional

In Congress the right-wing pro-coup opposition in Brazil comes closer to getting the 2/3 majority they need to approve the impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff. In a situation that seems like “nonsense” movies, the main corrupt and corrupting forces in the country, who are linked to the coup plotters and the pro-imperialist right, conspire to remove Dilma, accusing her of corruption. Obviously, as corruption is endemic to all capitalist governments, this issue is only used to justify the coup d’etat.

The right-wing and pro-imperialist opposition wants to overthrow the government of the PT because the US wants to recolonize the country by eliminating all the historical rights of the working population. They want to outsource and privatise absolutely everything that is profitable held by the PT government, like the giant oil company Petrobras, without any limits or graduation.  They seek to drastically reduce wages under the blackmail of more than 10% unemployment and crack down savagely on all strikes and manifestations of resistance. The seek to attack the working class even more.

To achieve this they use “anti-terrorism laws,” a requirement of imperialism that the PT helped to approve. In the end, the overthrow of Dilma by the right will result in a much greater defeat for the working class than to her and the PT.

Regardless of the fact that the process has been initiated as political revenge by Eduardo Cunha (PMDB), when the PT decided to support the impeachment of this corrupt mafia president of the Federal Chamber, the coup in Brazil has been underway for over a year and is an expression of the global competition for control over the Brazil government in the current inter-capitalist Cold War. On one side is US imperialism, NATO and Japan. On the other side is China, Russia, the Bolivarian government and Iran. The conflict already has two open civil wars in Ukraine and Syria and has caused various “regime change” or coups like Honduras, Ecuador, Libya, Paraguay, Egypt, Thailand, Ukraine, Guatemala and Romania.

Behind the impeachment Dilma is the US Embassy; George Soros (who also sponsored the coup in Ukraine); the richest capitalist in Brazil, Jorge Lemann, who owns one of the largest brewers in the world, Ambev; the Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement (PMDB) and the Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB), the big media employers; the fascist right; the old military dictatorship and the  evangelical fundamentalists.

Time is against the government that chose to ally themselves with the employers rather than with the workers. The PMDB, the principal party of the bourgeoisie, created during the military dictatorship (1964-1985), which is led by the Vice President to Dilma, Michel Temer, has moved to the opposition camp. The PT, who believed that class collaboration was a policy that guaranteed government stability, have seen allies turning into enemies who advocate the overthrow of their government.

The coup will triumph if the current PT’s cowardly, bourgeois tactic of passive adaptation is maintained. As long as they prioritise the game of institutional conciliation, where their mass organizations (CUT, MST, trade unions) have a mere supporting role of staging unpretentious demonstrations which are not up to the fight that must take place against the impending coup. Without actually resorting to the mass movement and its methods as the main weapon in the fight against the coup, impeachment is a “chronicle of a death foretold.”

Simply put, on the streets there are more or less similar number of right wing protesters and left. The bourgeois media will continue to play its role of greatly exaggerating the right numbers and saying that it is ‘the people’ who are putting forward the slogan “Out with Dilma!”. It takes more than mobilising thousands in every capital, we need a national strike in the main categories, unions and movements directed by the CUT, MST, UNE, MTST.

If we strike at Petrobras, the Post Office, the metallurgical industries, banks, then yes we will carry out an effective fight and crush the coup and sweep the reactionary right off the streets. But the question is, can the thousands of CUT unions rely on their bases to make a political strike against the parliamentary coup d’etat? After years of class collaboration, is not the CUT too demoralized for that? You have to try and get mobilizing workers to fight for themselves and not in defence of a government and a party that has betrayed them and whom they no longer trust.

Although there are huge differences between the current process and the coup against Chavez in 2002 in Venezuela, the left turn of the Bonapartist Bolivarian government came after the masses stepped in forcing the release of Chavez when he was held hostage by the military and the businessmen plotters. The only force capable of defeating the coup in Brazil 2015, as it was in Venezuela 2002, is the working and poor people. In Dilma’s favour is the fact that her party directs the country’s leading mass organizations, something that Chavez did not have back in 2002.

If the organized working class with its methods of struggle contains the coup then the government of Dilma will be forced to depend solely on workers to survive then she cannot again directly apply her anti working class policy of wage freeze and the gradual destruction of all labour and social gains as she has done up to now under pressure from the right and the big imperialist capitalists. Simultaneously by defeating the coup workers will feel strengthened and gain time to organise to defeat the whole neoliberal policy.

The defeats at the hands of imperialism suffered this year by the national-populist left and also the Bolivarian revolution in the presidential elections in Argentina and in the parliamentary elections in Venezuela, respectively, are a key element of international imperialist pressure on the Brazilian situation in favour of the right and impeachment.

The petty-bourgeois left, PSTU, PCB, current PSOL and satellites in this constellation as MES / PSOL, CST / PSOL, EM (IMT) MRT-LER (FT), programmatically collapsed before this crucial struggle for the fate of the Brazilian working class. They follow a line of functional sectarianism to the coup of pro-imperialist right, the same line that most of these groups had supported when the mercenary pro-imperialist opposition of “revolutionary” and “rebel” in Libya, Syria and Ukraine.

This petty bourgeois left is divided between those who openly advocate “Out with Dilma!” and those who want to wait fot the general election without interruption. Not coincidentally this is the same line as the right-wing opposition, of Aécio (PSDB), and Cunha (PMDB) and Paulinho of the union federation allied with the bosses, the “Força Sindical”; those who are opposing the fight against impeachment by advocating a supposed ideal third camp when the coup is in fact the real world.

They spent the turbulent year of the rise of the right claiming that the mounting coup threat did not exist, that it was a delusion or a mere political trick by the PT. Now, before the imminent coup danger, they say that regardless of whether it is real or not, that the working class should remain oblivious of a political dispute that will result in an even bigger attack on their living conditions.

Those who cannot fight against the right, fascism and imperialism are completely irrelevant to the workers; they do not care about the fate of our class. Defeat the impeachment, orchestrated by the worst enemies of the working population, the great capital and imperialism, which immediately has the Dilma and the PT as their target, but will in the end have the working population as the main victim. The only tactic that can work is one of struggle in defence of our labour and social achievements and to defend the historical interests of our class.

This is the tactic that facilitated the struggle for a revolutionary workers’ party, for a real workers’ government, won through social revolution, for socialism!