What remains of that party that was born to change Brazil, now that the double game continues?
Tomorrow, February 10th, the Workers' Party celebrates its 34th anniversary. This fact led me to ask whether this party has remained faithful to the ideological principles that determined its founding and whether, during so many years in government, it has fulfilled what it promised its voters.
Before attempting to answer these questions, I must warn the reader that I am well aware that things change and it is common for a political party to fail to deliver on its promises and deviate from the principles that gave rise to it. What interests me here is to examine what has changed, if anything, and why. To achieve this, it is essential to know the party's founding document.
In the case of the PT (Workers' Party), this document is the manifesto of October 21, 1980, in which the new party presents itself as the spokesperson for "the great majorities that build the nation's wealth" and who now want to "speak for themselves."
But they don't just talk; according to the document, they intend to create "a society that responds to the interests of workers and other sectors exploited by capitalism." Consequently, the PT (Workers' Party) "is born from the decision of the exploited to fight against an economic and political system that cannot solve their problems, as it only exists to benefit a privileged minority." This system would be replaced by "a new form of democracy," "where there are neither exploited nor exploiters."
Having made explicit what this manifesto says, the new party, which was then being born, aimed to create a society led by the exploited (that is, by the proletariat), and not by the capitalists, and thus constitute a new democracy, governed by a single party, whose objective would be a classless society.
This is, therefore, a disguised version of the Communist Manifesto of 1848. The new party was, therefore, incompatible with capitalism, so much so that, in 1988, when the new democratic constitution was promulgated, the PT refused to sign it, claiming that it did not correspond to its political objectives.
This anti-democratic bourgeois attitude prevailed in the PT's rhetoric until the 2002 elections, when, after successive electoral defeats, it toned down its rhetoric and allied itself with sectors of the bourgeoisie to win the presidential elections that elected Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva president of the Republic.
In government, Lula adopted the same double game he used in the elections, or rather, he deepened it: while providing Bolsa Família (a social welfare program) to the exploited, he used the BNDES (Brazilian Development Bank) to lend public money, at below-market interest rates, to capitalist exploiters.
But, unable to ignore the commitments made in favor of the "new democracy" nor the project, implicit in the manifesto, of never relinquishing power, he began to buy off the parties in the parliamentary base with public money, so as not to grant them ministries or the management of state-owned companies. This buying of parliamentarians became a scandal known as the mensalão (monthly allowance scandal). Lula, after admitting that it was true, stated that it was a case of undeclared campaign contributions, something all parties did. And so, in the words of its leader, the PT (Workers' Party) had become a party like any other. It had ceased to be revolutionary, becoming corrupt like many others.
But this didn't just remain the words of its leader, as it became reality through a decision by the country's Supreme Court of Justice, which convicted some of the PT's main figures for embezzlement, racketeering, and other crimes.
Remember the campaign waged by the PT (Workers' Party) against the privatization of Telefônica? Well, that was part of their anti-capitalist principles, and for that very reason, Lula and Dilma did everything they could to prevent the privatization of highways, ports, and airports. Now, faced with the crisis threatening the country's economy, Dilma was forced to bend to reality and violate the party's ideological principle.
And what about the alliance with bourgeois, rural, and evangelical parties? Is this the new democracy spoken of in the 1980 manifesto? The question, then, is what remains of that party that was born to change Brazil, since the double game continues: Dilma went to Davos to show loyalty to the principles that govern capitalism and then to Cuba to clear her name.
