Brazil: The struggle is for the abolition of the existing order

Both the internal and external debt of Brazil are skyrocketing. The internal debt has reached R$3.6trn and the external debt is now US$555bn. International capital is becoming worried about default.

Interest rates have gone up, the dollar has become much more expensive, and inflation has reached 9.5%. The government is implementing ever harsher fiscal measures to guarantee a primary fiscal surplus in order to pay the interest on the debt.

The so-called “country of education” is witnessing cuts throughout the budget which have led to the biggest strike movement in the universities for years. In Rio Grande do Sul, the governor decimates wages of civil servants. Layoffs have reached the 1 million mark and the policy of wage restraint continues in the public and private sector.

To this we have to add an increase in repression. Anti-terrorist laws are being sent by urgent proceedings to the Congress, etc. An anti-democratic political reform is being passed which is aimed at preventing the voice of the streets from reaching Congress.

The government and the bourgeois parties and institutions are preparing for civil war against the workers and youth and their organisations. The revolt of high school students which started in Sao Paulo shows it clearly.

The Dilma government is the most isolated politically since the overthrow of the Collor government by millions on the streets in 1992. In this situation, in which, in a genuinely democratic regime, the government would have already fallen and new elections would have been called, it is not ruled out that Dilma, faced with hatred from the people and inability to rule, could be forced to resign from the presidency.

The different bourgeois cliques are split regarding what to do with the government. Some talk of impeachment, others of a legal way out via the judiciary or a resignation. But they all fear that the collapse of the government could open up a situation which could escape their control.

Corruption seems like a blanket covering the whole country, its institutions, parties, and politicians. The Federal Court of Accounts hypocritically rejects Dilma’s accounts, considering she did what all previous governments had done. The person who wrote the statement of rejection is in turn accused of having received millions of Reals from a company which committed tax fraud. The president of the Congress, Cunha, has been caught with a secret dollar account in Switzerland.

What is clear is that “the rulers cannot rule like before and those from below no longer want to live like before.”

The increase in the number of strikes and strikers, their length and militancy, like the general strike of civil servants in Rio Grande do Sul, the civil servants strikes at all levels (34 federal universities, 64 Technical Institutes), workers’ strikes in different sectors, metal workers (GM, Mercedes, Volkswagen, Jurong Aracruz shipyard), oil workers, railway workers, bank workers, etc., as well as the university student strikes, and the record low level of support for Dilma (7%), show that “those from below no longer want to live like before.”  

Meanwhile, this militancy is wasted by the betrayal of the trade union leaders, who are signing agreements reducing wages to maintain bosses’ profits. This year already 11 sectors have signed collective bargaining agreements with below-inflation wage rises.

It is not surprising that the party of the majority of the people is now the “they should all go!” party. In this sense it is necessary to advance slogans which raise the perspective of “changing the whole status quo.” To raise, like the Communist Manifesto, the perspective of the abolition of all existing order. Struggling for democracy, for Marxists , only makes sense if it means to advance the struggle for social revolution.

Only the self-organisation of the working people, only its independent mobilisation is able to create a force that can brush aside the current rotten institutions and build new institutions which are genuinely popular and democratic, a National Constituent Peoples Assembly.

It is with this perspective that Esquerda Marxista is fighting for a United Left Front, able to build/rebuild an independent working class party.

For a National Peoples Constituent Assembly!

For a Workers’ Government!