Crisis in Brazil
Perry Anderson
▻http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n08/perry-anderson/crisis-in-brazil
Popular mobilisation to stop the ouster of Dilma [...] is fettered by the legacy of PT rule. The party is in a weak position to call on its beneficiaries to defend it, for at least three reasons. The first is simply that, if corruption lost it the middle-class sympathy it once enjoyed, austerity has alienated the much larger lower-class base it acquired. The demonstrations it has so far been able to mount against impeachment have been much less imposing than those calling for it. Marchers have been mustered mainly from public sector workers and unions: the poor are conspicuous by their absence. The PT’s rural bailiwicks in the north-east are anyway socially dispersed, as the big cities of the centre-south that are the strongholds of the new right are not. Then there has been the inevitable demoralisation as successive scandals have engulfed the party, a diffuse sense of guilt, however suppressed, weakening any fighting spirit. Lastly, and fundamentally, by the time Lula won power the party had become essentially an electoral machine, financed overwhelmingly by corporate donations rather than – as at the beginning – by members’ dues, contenting itself with passive adhesion to the name of its leader, lacking any will to foster collective action among its voters. The active mobilisation that brought it into being in the manufacturing centres of Brazil became a distant memory as the party gained support in zones of the country and layers of the population untouched by industry, with deep-rooted traditions of submission to authority and fear of disorder. This was a political culture Lula understood, and did not seriously attempt to unsettle. In his vision of things, the potential cost was too high. To help the masses, he sought harmony with the elites, for whom any vigorous polarisation was taboo. In 2002 he finally won the presidency, at his fourth attempt, on a slogan of ‘peace and love’. In 2016, faced with political lynching, he was still uttering the same two words to crowds expecting something more combative.
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The Workers’ Party believed, after a time, that it could use the established order in Brazil to benefit the poor, without harm – indeed with help – to the rich. It did benefit the poor, as it set out to do. But once it accepted the price of entry into a diseased political system, the door closed behind it. The party itself withered, becoming an enclave in the state, without self-awareness or strategic direction, so blind that it ostracised André Singer, its best thinker, for a mess of spin-doctors and pollsters, so insensible it took lucre, wherever it came from, as the condition of power. Its achievements will remain. Whether the party will itself do so is an open question. In South America, a cycle is coming to an end. For a decade and a half, relieved of attention by the US, buoyed by the commodities boom, and drawing on deep reserves of popular tradition, the continent was the only part of the world where rebellious social movements coexisted with heterodox governments. In the wake of 2008, there are now plenty of the former elsewhere. But none so far of the latter. A global exception is closing, with no relay yet in sight.