The straying of the left.

Brazilian left-wing parties are experiencing a moment of disarray, of perdition, of inanition, which most likely has no comparable moment in history. It doesn't even equal the moment of defeat in the establishment of the military dictatorship in 1964, because at that time, various groups and movements engaged in the resistance against the force of arms. Now, they don't even confront the force of arms. Perhaps fear, cowardice, and parliamentary vice are the main enemies of the left. The parties entered a strategic defensive position at the beginning of 2015 and haven't been able to get out of it. They adopted defensive and reactive postures with which they have dug successive defeats.

These defeats were not merely political. They were also moral and psychological. They demoralized activism and generated disbelief among activists and social movements regarding the usefulness of the parties themselves. The young people who are active in these movements today do not place their hopes in the parties being able to lead and command a movement to confront and overcome the current situation of abandonment of the people, destruction of rights, and assassination of national dignity. 

Brazilian left-wing parties are experiencing such an unusual, pathetic situation that it is unique in the history of the world left: they are lagging behind football fan groups in the fight for democracy and in confronting the Bolsonaro government and its activists who had been dominating the streets. The perplexity caused by the inaction of the left is only matched by the perplexity caused by the reckless audacity of the Bolsonaro supporters. 

Left-wing parties have specialized in pointless clamor against this and that, and in no action whatsoever. They promote endless and useless discussions about fronts for this and fronts for that, manifestos for this and manifestos for that, whether or not to sign a petition, forgetting that history has always shown that unity is built through struggle and that formulas have never been useful in replacing combat. 

Since Bolsonaro's victory, left-wing parties have never been able to properly characterize his government or define consistent actions to confront it. In 2015-16, the left proclaimed "there will be no coup," and there was. Now, they proclaim "there will be a coup," and it is unlikely to happen. A statement from senators of left-wing parties called off the June 7th protests, not only because of the pandemic, but because it would sound like a provocation to the government. This was a clear exercise in the pedagogy of cowardice, waiting, defensiveness, and resignation in the face of a government that humiliates and mistreats the people and cruelly leads them to hunger and death. 

The flame of indignation, bravery, courage, and combat is dead in the souls of the leaders and parliamentarians of left-wing parties. They have become members of a bureaucratic class that lives off the high salaries of parliamentary and advisory positions and the party fund. Anyone who looks at the PT's website realizes that the party's main instrument of struggle is the issuing of statements. If, in the realm of popular struggles, left-wing parties are trailing behind fan groups, in the realm of institutional struggle they outsource the confrontation with the government's authoritarian excesses to the Supreme Court. Strictly speaking, Alcolumbre, in returning the provisional measure on intervention in public universities, showed himself to be more courageous than the left-wing parliamentarians. 

Left-wing parties are unable to provide direction, leadership, and meaning to political and social struggles, and this undermines their character as parties, since parties should lead. Current leadership has led left-wing parties to such irrelevance that the country's main political confrontation today is defined in terms of a clash between the far-right government and center-right governors and actors.

Those who look at the websites of left-wing parties don't see the people there. They don't see the people being humiliated in lines at the Federal Savings Bank; they don't see the people dying in hospital queues; they don't see the hunger of the people in the peripheries. They don't even see the movements of solidarity of the people towards those suffering brutal needs and deprivations. Those who look at the websites of left-wing parties find no criticism of the mayors and governors who, along with the criminal actions of the federal government, botched the fight against the pandemic, sometimes defending isolation, sometimes reopening, sometimes useless traffic restrictions, and belatedly implementing the mandatory use of masks. The public authorities, bankrupt like the left-wing parties, were never able to define a strong and enforceable isolation strategy for a relatively short period, which would have saved lives and mitigated the economic disaster. 

Those who keep up-to-date with the abundant news available daily find in the resolutions of left-wing parties only repetitive redundancies and generalities. The PSOL resolution (April 27, 2020) states that it is necessary to adopt "anti-systemic measures," but the reader, the interested party, finds no definition, example, or determination of what these measures are. The PT resolution (March 12-13, 2020) ends as follows: "The PT calls upon its leaders, leaders of popular movements, unions, governors, mayors, religious and community leaders, along with all parties committed to democracy, to remain permanently vigilant in the face of the threat against the institutions of the Democratic Rule of Law."

This is astonishing. First, it raises a mystery about who the PT is that is calling on its own leaders. Are the leaders being led by an abstraction instead of leading? Second, how and where will the vigil take place? On the empty altars of churches? In the tabernacles of the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies? In the secret hideouts of those frightened by the coup? With kerosene lamps in the sacrosanct homes of each one? It seems necessary to ask the leaders to have a sense of the ridiculous. 

If left-wing parties have abandoned strategic reflection, the elaboration of a diagnosis of what imprisons Brazil in a tragic cycle, and the proposition of a program and a movement capable of uniting the popular, progressive, and democratic field, then anyone reading their resolutions cannot even discover what the tactical focus of these parties is. Sometimes it seems to be impeachment as a mere wish, and other times it seems to be the annulment of elections by the courts, but all without a fight. 

The president of the PT (Workers' Party), Gleisi Hoffmann, in recent weeks, launched the slogan "Lula for president" in 2022. What is the meaning of this slogan at this moment? Meanwhile, PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) has defined as its priority the electoral defeat of Bolsonaro's supporters in the municipal elections. Note that Bolsonaro's party will not even be contesting the elections, and Bolsonaro's supporters will not be the main electoral adversaries of the left-wing parties in these elections. 

If the parties can't even clearly define their tactical priorities, it's because they are truly lost in the folly and recklessness of their leaders. Meanwhile, the people, humiliated, abandoned, sick, hungry and cold, have no voice, no political representation, no one to defend them. Bolsonaro is not an accident, not an outlier. He has several causes. And one of the causes is this bankrupt state of the left-wing parties, their apathy, their mistakes, their loss of energy, courage, and combativeness.