Re: [Marxism] NYTimes.com: In Brazil, Former Ally May Spoil Race

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

INTERNATIONAL / AMERICAS | September 7, 2006
In Brazil, Former Ally May Spoil Race for the President
By LARRY ROHTER
Heloísa Helena Lima de Moraes has become the wild card in what was initially
expected to be a two-man race.

Sorry, but this is, again, another piece of disinformation by Mr. Rother,
and says a lot about the incoming slant behind Heloisa Helena's (afterwards
HH) candidacy.

There's, in principle, something entirely commenndable about HH's candidacy
from a Left viewpoint, in that it is an effort to create a Left conter-pole
in Brazilian politics able to dialetcally overcome and surpass (in the sense
of the German aufheben, that is) the role that was exerted by the PT in the
last twenty-five years - that of creating the rudiments of a political
consciousness of "those from below" (that's to say not only the working
class strictu sensu but also the huge mass of destitutes) - and at the same
time to create a counter-hegemonic alternative to what could be called
Lula's neoliberalism-with-a-human-face (as well as to the Tammany Hall
athmosphere surrounding the PT caucus, which is now little more than Lula's
personal oldtimers' caucus).

In the absence of any clear ideological commitment, however, what HH has so
far done is only to have set afoot a "one and a half" PT, as her party
suffers from the same intellectual poverty of its forerunner, thinly
disguised by HH's histerical moralizing outbursts against neoliberalism,
Finance capital, and Lula morals. Excluding that, what we have aroung HH are
the same elements that eventually fatally crippled the PT as a party: the
same refusal to think in ideological terms, to have a programme that
functions as something more than a notebook of grievances, as well as the
usual lack of nerve to take from the groung the fallen banner of socialism
as a counter-hegemony aimed towards the _totality_ of social life. HH's
party, by the way, the PSOL, expresses in its very name (Party of Socialism
with Liberty) a sharp denial of the very idea of Dictatorship of the
Proletariat.

Therefore the fact that said PSOL- as well as HH's candidacy - suffers the
risk of becoming a simple receiving-end for petty-bourgeois grievances and
social prejudices against Lula's all-too-real working-class background, such
being the obvious rationale behind Mr. Rother compliments. What Rother & the
NYT (and not only they) envisage is obviously using the HH card as a means
to reshape an strictly neoliberal alternative to Lula that could fill the
void left by the abhorrence in which Cardoso's "Social Democratic" party is
held, by having such a new party lining itself in "Leftist"
pharasemongering. Sorry, but that is that.

As a Brazilian elector, I must state that I'm voting partially for Ms.
Helena's ticket, in order to try granting his Trotskyst partners from PSTU
a seat in the Federal and/or State Legislature, but as for HH's presidential
candidacy, well... I would rather vote for the quasi-lunatic fringe
presidential candidate from Causa Operária Party ("hardcore" Trotskysts,that
is).

Carlos Rebello


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