Re:It's Lula (like duh...)

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

Dear friends: Well, it's over and I sense an entirely other athmosphere
here - mostly relief, I think, with the ultimate demise of a government
whose main trait was the undisguised contempt it had for its own people
(Cardoso, as you remember, used to call his critics "neofools",
"fracassomaniacs" and "hillbillies"). Nothing very politicized so far - the
usual dancing gatherings on the beach - but relief none the less.

Now, I couldn't have a better material to comment upon than Jose's. Let's
go.

> From: "Jose G. Perez" <jg_perez@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>

> As of 8:40 PM CNN en Español was reporting Lula with  61.5% of the votes
in
> the 94% of the precincts that have been counted.

Actually, Lula received, according to the Brazilian press, the second
greatest number of votes cast on a single person in the whole of human
history,52.4 million, losing only to Ronald Reagan's 54.4 in the 1984 US
presidentials. That is, in itself, a fact that gives him enormous leverage
power. In relative terms, Lula received less than the 66% expected, as Serra
staged a reaction during the last week by casting doubts on Lula's expertise
and by sheer red scare.

> We can expect, of course, the bourgeois press to stress Lula's
> respectability and so on and so forth. He's going to get pretty much the
> same treatment Chávez got in 1998: tons of "thumbsuckers" on how it isn't
> realy such a bad thing, he's been terribly moderate and anyways no one
else
> has enough support to impose the strong medicine the economy needs and all
> that other neoliberal crap.

A good forecast by José, as this is exactly what the Brazilian papers have
printed this very morning.
>
> And they'll stress how moderate this cabinet member is and how that one
> studied economics in Chicago.

Fortunately, the PT has not many Chicago graduates, and the few it has are
mostly low profile figures. Lula's main economic adviser, Guido Mantega,
graduated at the University of São Paulo with a thesis on the development of
Brazilian economic thinking . This book is not so good, considering his
misunderstandings about the notion of "Combined and Uneven Development". But
then, if  that were the only lithmus test, I would vote for Serra, who in
the 1960s wrote an article with Maria da Conceição Tavares stating that
economic development in Brazil was not an answer in itself, that it could
even deepen social iniquities - an understatement, as it turned to be.

Now, it's a good thing that after the last speculative attacks on the Real,
the expertise of the Cardoso team has been much doubted and the idea of
keeping George Soros' former employee Fraga as chairman of the Central Bank
has been quietly discarded. Yesterday night, we have on television the PT
economist Paul Singer, a former Trotskyst who has written many good
textboooks, advocating for something like a Left Social Democracy based on
somekind of extensive roundtable arrangements between Capital and Labour on
the traditional Scandinavian model.Now, that links to the idea of "organic
tradeunionism" favored by Lula's allies in the CUT, which consists of
centralized, nation-wide arrangements in wage and labor conditions
negotiating - something opposed by the more radical unions as weakening
grassroots union activism. Be as it is, that would mean a level of
acknowledgement of those "from below" in  a degree unknown in previous
Brazilian history.


 But before we conclude so-and-so is a
> dirty-dog reformist, remember Lenin's argument to the ultralefts in his
Left
> Wing Communism pamphlet: that it was *necessary* for the masses to go
> through the actual experience of having petty-bourgeois reformist forces
in
> power before the masses could turn decisively towards a revolutionary
> course.

Agree absolutely.
>
> The boruegois commentators will reassuringly point to, I'm sure, all the
> other "workers parties" like British Labour and so on that are perfectly
> respectable bourgeois parties. But there is a very great difference
between
> those long-established components of bourgeois 2- and 3-party systems and
> the Brazilian PT, which arose as the *political* expression and
> generalization of mass struggles by workers who through their own
experience
> found they needed to act politically as a *class.*

EXACTLY! And not only workers, but all kinds of political destitutes,
including rubber-tappers, feminists, Gay Lib, Afro-Brazilian, etc. One could
imagine the PT, in the US, thus: a Democratic Party with a general Red
ideological tinge, such Red going from light to darker hues and resulting in
a general (Left) Social Democratic coloring.

CR






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