Re: marxism-digest V1 #5075

["Carlos Eduardo Rebello" <crebello@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

 Subject: Labour Parties
>
> Juriaan :  > If, as happened in NZ,  you privatise the bulk of state
enterprises, sell
> off government assets,  fix the maximum inflation rate by law at a very
low
> level, operate a floating exchange rate, permit more or less free capital
> movements in and out of the country, remove most foreign trade
restrictions,
> sharply reduce or eliminate graduated taxes, reduce government subsidies
to
> business and individuals to a very low level or eliminate them, sharply
> reduce or eliminate basic trade union rights, cut or eliminate social
> security benefits etc. then you remove the very basis of the social
> democratic project.

Not very strangely, the above tells precisely of the farmework around which
the political debate in Brazil will proceed after Lula's more than probable
victory nest Sunday.

On one hand, you have the demise of the Cardoso government, with Brazil on
the brink of default on both internal and foreign debt, the
telecommunications systems at the hands of a bunch od rapacious monopolies,
the steelmill in Volta Redonda sold to the Anglo-Dutch consortium Corus,
production of electricity still largely on state hands after a serious
shortage engineered by lack of private investment in in (expensive and
dirty) thermoeletric production, the eroding of social rights, rampaging
unemployment, civil servants with their wage frozen for 7 years, the looming
specter of FTAA. On the other hand, you have Lula announcing, on yesterday's
electoral broadcast, the necessity of finding a way out by "negociating
exhautively". Hardly a way out, given that the bourgeois media, at the same
time it seems resignated with Lula's election, has entered already into an
anti-communist rampage unknown in the last 20 years. In this year's issue of
the weekly magazine _Veja_, there's the drawing of a three-headed Cerberus,
whose heads are Marx's, Trotsky's and Lenin's and a thereat launched to the
Workers' Party to keep its radicals in a tight leash.

Fact is, the global bourgeoisie will accept anything other short of total
ideological hegemony, something that renders the present situation the most
difficult for the Left forces in the last 20 years, as the demise of the
Welafare State allows no elbowroom for reformist debate as a starting stone.
At the same time, we of the rump of the revolutionary Left, have not been
able to break away from our sure, but neverthless restricted denizens.
Suggestions, anyone?

Carlos Rebello


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