Lula of Brazil. Richard Bourne

Чтение книги онлайн.

      3 THE PT, THE WORKERS' PARTY

      In all the hubbub at the end of the 1970s, with an amnesty, major strikes, and a sense that the military dictatorship was in its final throes, a different note was sounded. Lula and a group of other more progressive union leaders were calling for a distinctive workers' party—the Partido dos Trabalhadores, the PT. This was a contentious idea and, for many in opposition circles, divisive.

      It was divisive because it overtly introduced class-based politics to Brazil. This put off many in the middle class and many traditional politicians and liberal professionals who had been struggling against the military through the tolerated opposition party—the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro, the MDB. For them it was essential to maintain a broad front if the dictatorship was to be banished and a full democracy—something Brazil had never had—was to be achieved. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, then a young sociology professor returning from exile, was among many who took that view.

      It was also divisive on the left. The old PCB had split, with the Maoist PCdoB winning credit for tying up tens of thousands of troops in its Araguaia guerrilla campaign, though the PCB retained support in the unions. Trotskyites were also active. Some Marxists were critical of the idea of a PT because it seemed unideological and too concerned with bread-and-butter issues. As one PCB supporter said, there was already one party that struggled for Brazil's working class, and it had been founded as long ago as 1922.¹ The PCB, which had pursued a strategy of infiltration of legal parties since before 1964, was also working for a negotiated transition out of the military regime. The smaller Trotskyite groups were more sympathetic to a PT.

      Lula had first brought up the PT question publicly at the conference of oil workers in Bahia in the middle of 1978,² but there had been informal discussion in unions in the main industrial centers earlier that year. What was the motivation? Undoubtedly there was a feeling that none of the existing politicians were truly representative of the workers. They had not spotted or campaigned against the erosion of the salàrio mínimo. Workers who had been standing up for their rights did not want to be mere vote banks for bourgeois and opportunist congressmen. Furthermore, the claims of the Marxist groups were bogus; they did not have much support among industrial workers, and atheism was anathema to those from a Catholic tradition.

      When Lula went to Brasilia to try to get support from MDB congressmen for the strikes and union demands, he found little sympathy. In September 1978 he had gone with a delegation of union leaders to persuade them to vote against a measure of the Geisel government designed to prohibit strikes in essential services including transportation, banking, and petrochemicals. But only two MDB deputies, each of whom had other underground allegiances, gave them a hearing.³ Lula concluded that the existing Congress was totally aligned with the interests of employers.

      At the same time, the union movement was gaining confidence. Between 1960 and 1980, the number of workers in the more advanced industries had almost quadrupled, from 2.9 million to 10.6 million.⁴ The strike wave had shown that they were prepared to use their muscle and take risks.

      In 1979 the momentum for a new party increased, stimulated by the knowledge that the military regime was preparing new legislation for the formation of parties. The regime was concerned that MDB was overtaking ARENA, the conservative party that supported the regime. The object of the legislation was to create a multiplication of parties, to muddy the waters, and to make it harder for a more democratic system to undo its economic and institutional changes or lead to revenge.

      The proposal for a PT was officially launched at a congress of the São Paulo metalworkers in Lins in January 1979. Lula was not the only union figure involved; among others were those who had been working together to coordinate the strikes—people such as Jacó Bittar of the oil workers and Paulo Skromov Matos of the leather workers. Nonetheless, the key movers took care to keep the party political planning separate from the organization of the strikes.⁵

      But progress that year was erratic, partly because an informal committee consisting of these enthusiasts circulated a charter of principles at May Day rallies throughout Brazil, which others thought was going too far too fast. Some felt that the metalworkers, or the workers from São Paulo more generally, were hustling the rest of the country. Even Lula, after talking with workers elsewhere, sometimes urged caution.

      There were discussions among unionists, intellectuals, and MDB politicians, and provisional PT committees were being set up in some states. These might be based on networks of friends, existing leftist or Catholic groups, or more structured union connections. But by 28 June, Lula was promising to distribute a draft program, suggesting that it would then be for the workers to decide whether to go ahead. Significantly, he widened the concept of “worker” beyond those who were unionized to include all wage earners and those involved in social movements such as the neighborhood associations.

      At a large meeting in São Paulo on 18 August organized by politicians on the left of the MDB, Lula argued strongly for an independent workers' party because the union structure, however modernized, could not deliver everything that workers needed. Such a party should welcome politicians from the MDB. The party should not be constructed by unions as institutions, as this could compromise their own work. Union leaders might or might not belong to the PT. Hence the PT was launched on a different trajectory from that of the British Labour Party—founded at the start of the twentieth century as an offshoot of trade unions—and comparable parties such as the German Social Democratic Party.

      The final pieces in the jigsaw were put together later in the year. At a meeting in a São Bernardo restaurant on 14 October, around a hundred people, including Lula, decided on a structure for the new party. Five days later, the government sent to Congress its party reform law, which abolished the two parties, ARENA and MDB, set up the year after the military takeover. The formal foundation of the PT took place in São Paulo in February 1980, at a meeting of three hundred people in an auditorium of the journalists' union named after the murdered Vladimir Herzog. The party adopted a red five-pointed star as its symbol, and Lula's wife, Marisa, sewed an example, using some Italian cloth she had kept by.

      The new rules gave parties a year to get organized and required them to hold conventions in at least one-fifth of the municipalities in at least nine states. They also gave advantages to parties that had at least 10 percent of the membership of the Chamber of Deputies and Senate, and that had an inherited structure; state funding was also to be made available, 90 percent on the basis of the number of congressional representatives a party had succeeded in electing.

      All this gave considerable assistance to the conservative PDS (Partido Democrático Social), the heir to ARENA, and to the PMDB (Partido do СКАЧАТЬ