"PT continues to be a party that understands the contradictions of the times."

Sergipe 247 - Professor and political activist Cássio Murilo Costa, from Sergipe, wrote an article about the 10 years of PT (Workers' Party) governments in Brazil and sent it to Sergipe 247. In the text, he states that "the Brazil that emerges from the last 10 years is the country that continues to combat its racial and social inequalities and has transformed them into state policy." According to him, "today, as in 2010, the dispute is polarized, there seems to be no room for a third way; any force that emerges and proposes a relativization between the programmatic differences of the two camps, the progressive and the conservative, will commit a strategic and tactical error of playing into the hands of the right."

Cássio Murilo also says that "the right doesn't exactly do politics." "From our perspective, we think the idea of ​​a single way of thinking is bad, very comfortable for dictatorships. Therefore, I believe they should reorganize and set a strategic agenda for the country, an aggiornamento without making a clean sweep of the last decade. There are many problems to be solved in the country, but they must be solved with the sensitivity and intelligence of its people. Thus, I am very skeptical about a right-wing alternative today," he assesses.

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The Tailor of Ulm and the Decade of the PT Government

There is a poem by Brecht, "The Tailor of Ulm," which refers to a certain 16th-century tailor and his obsessive idea of ​​flying. Believing he had created the perfect device, he climbed onto the church roof, launched himself into the air, and... crashed to the ground. I reproduce the last stanza here.

"Ring the bells"
That was made up.
Flying only for the birds
The bishop said to the boys
"Men will never fly."

In this poem, I find the answer to an age-old dilemma in political debates about Brazilian society and its inequalities. There was a tendency to believe that the concentration of wealth, poverty, and misery of millions of Brazilians would hardly end among us because they were part of our history. This discourse has always been very hegemonic among us, in short, a way of "naturalizing" and legitimizing our social ills.

I take advantage of the celebrations of the Workers' Party's tenth anniversary in the Federal Government to reiterate how the party and its historic bloc of allies were able to enable millions of Brazilians to break a historical taboo thanks to a logic of reversing the priorities of public policies in the country.

The Workers' Party (PT) was born under the sign of democratic struggles and the mobilization of workers, and it was not immune to the contradictions of the society from which it emerged. Once in government, former President Lula and President Dilma fulfilled a minimum program and a strategic agenda anchored in the principles of inclusion through rights and income, resulting in: the improvement of democracy; a policy of increasing the minimum wage, which at the beginning of 2003 was $76,92 (according to data from IPEA/IBGE/Central Bank) to just over $335 in 2013; a decrease in the country's social inequality, with more than 40 million people rising out of poverty to the so-called new middle class, which I prefer to call, in the manner of some sociologists, the new working class; Recognition of the Trade Union Federations and the transformation of social demands into public policies for workers, including the creation of 19.3 million jobs, a situation of near full employment, also taking into account that the unemployment rate was 5,7% in March 2013, according to IBGE; creation of a vibrant, strong domestic mass market that helps maintain our still solid economy, notwithstanding an international crisis that has lasted for years, and the current inflationary danger; added to this a sovereign foreign policy that catapulted us to inclusion in BRICS and made us one of the greatest references as a leader in Latin America.

The Brazil that has emerged in the last 10 years is a country that continues to combat its racial and social inequalities and has transformed them into state policy, as President Dilma Rousseff rightly stated in an article in Folha de São Paulo on December 30, 2012. In the last two years, deepening the real transformations that Brazil is undergoing, public policies on income transfer, education, and health have been guided by the logic of including millions of Brazilians living in extreme poverty. This chapter will likely be long, given the historical barriers imposed on people living in pockets reminiscent of 19th-century human conditions, whether in large urban centers or in the most remote corners of the country.

This transformation, this revolution without weapons, has created an unusual situation in Brazil. Today we have an apocalyptic right wing that, without envisioning a counterpoint project – the neoliberal theses of minimal state intervention and economic deregulation were responsible for the current global crisis and Brazil's negative social indicators in the last decade – now operates with the hypothesis of moralistic criticism, denunciation, and a fundamentalist puritanism bordering on a narrow line of reasoning. Today, as in 2010, the dispute is polarized, and there seems to be no room for a third way. Any force that emerges and proposes a relativization of the programmatic differences between the two camps, the progressive and the conservative, will commit a strategic and tactical error of playing into the hands of the right wing, a practice defended today by sectors that represent an alternative vision of the democratic-popular field and by a supposed legacy of the PT (Workers' Party) that focuses on the party's decharacterization.

The right doesn't exactly engage in politics. From our perspective, we believe the idea of ​​a single way of thinking is bad, very comfortable for dictatorships. Therefore, I believe they should reorganize and establish a strategic agenda for the country, an aggiornamento without completely erasing the last decade. There are many problems to be solved in the country, but they must be solved with the sensitivity and intelligence of its people. Thus, I am very skeptical about a right-wing alternative today.

On the other hand, the Workers' Party continues to be a party that understands the contradictions of its time. And if what allows us to evaluate the history of a party is the test of power, the party has played its role well. A role that restores the State as an inducer of public policies and serves as an instrument of transformation and change in the lives of millions of Brazilian men and women.