Heloísa Helena
Following are two contributions to a discussion of the October 2006 Brazilian elections and the presidential campaign of Heloísa Helena.
Heloísa Helena
Here's a serious concern about PSOL and the process that led to the bloc (this is an issue aside from critical support to Helena, which I support). This is a question of democratic functioning beyond the real question of whether women's rights (which must include abortion, which is both illegal and unconstitutional in Brazil) are to be on the platform of the bloc.
All of the constituents of the bloc are left parties. These left parties have historically fought for women's rights including abortion and against the reactionary role of the Catholic Church in Brazilian society. So all of the constituent members of the bloc support abortion rights and yet one member, the leading member, is allowed to deny the majority position. Because of her Catholicism and opposition to abortion the entire bloc cannot have it in their program.
Is abortion not enough of an issue for women that it is such a secondary issue that it doesn't deserve to be on the program?
Is it not in the program so as to keep on board the star, the personality that is most identifiable to your project. Helena is that much of a profile (indeed her profile appears eight times on the opening page of the PSOL website alone) that the project of building a left alternative without her is impossible therefore we need to rewrite the program to keep her? If that is the case, then the left in Brazil is in a existential crisis.
Is it that in order to attract others, traditionally outside the far left, who may not be comfortable with abortion? But the PSOL is a self-described socialist and internationalist front that broke from the PT to underline the need for a radical, class-based and socialist electoral project. How can such a program, based on the need to reaffirm Brazil's radicalism, disaffirm its support for women's rights?
And finally what does one say about the democracy and functioning of an organization or movement in which the overwhelming majority of the movement defers to the leader (who doesn't share the interests of the movement) over issues important to it...so as not lose the leader? Do the relative weights of her opinion on matters mean that if abortion is part of the fight for socialism she will not fight for socialism? This is the leader of the radical opposition to neoliberalism?
Again, these should be things we think about when thinking about the Brazilian experience. As positive as the PSOL formation and the bloc with the PSTU and CPB, are there are clear signs to me that any future of this bloc would have to reaffirm a class mobilization basis (as opposed to an electoralist one) and reaffirm its democratic processes by making leaders accountable to the membership and not the other way around (which is, by the way, exactly what happened in the PT and how Helena was expelled). The PSOL should embrace was the PT has abandoned, an extraparliamentary approach and a thorough democratization.
In the first round of voting on October 2 Luiz Inácio da Silva (Lula) of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), allied with several bourgeois parties, got 48.61 percent of the vote. Geraldo Alckmin of the Partido da Social Democracia Brasileira (PSDB), a bourgeois party, got 41.64 percent. Cristovam Buarque of the Partido Democrático Trabalhista (PDT), a bourgeois party linked to the Second International, got 2.64 percent.
Heloísa Helena of the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (P-SOL) and the Frente de Esquerda got 6.85 percent. Helena's vote was impressive, although much less than the 10-12 percent some polls showed before the election.
P-SOL is an electoral front of two small Trotskyist groups, the Movimento de Esquerda Socialista (MES) and the Corrente Socialista dos Trabalhadores (CST), the ecumenical Liberdade e Revolução (LR), and others. LR includes the Coletivo Democracia Socialista - Quarta Internacional (CDS-QI), the minority of Democracia Socialista (DS), the Brazilian section of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International (USFI), that split from DS and the PT to join P-SOL. The CDS-QI remains affiliated to the USFI.
The Frente de Esquerda is a broader electoral front of P-SOL, the Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado (PSTU), which is the largest Trotskyist party in Brazil, and the Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB), a former Stalinist party.
Among other Frente de Esquerda candidates, Luciana Genro of P-SOL and the MES was reelected as a deputy, and Babá of P-SOL and the CST lost his seat as a deputy.
Lula and Alckmin will compete in a runoff election on October 29. I expect Lula to win, because of his loyal service to Brazilian and international capital, but we'll see. The PSTU and the Partido da Causa Operária (PCO), the Brazilian section of the Coordinating Committee for the Refoundation of the Fourth International (CRFI), call for a null vote in runoff. P-SOL takes a "neutral" position.
I want to address four questions around the Brazilian presidential election. The first three are, I think, relatively uncontroversial among us. The fourth may be controversial.
Question 1. Should revolutionary socialists have supported Lula in the first round of the presidential election? I'd say "no". Lula was running on a popular-front slate with a vice-presidential candidate from a bourgeois party, José Alencar, on the basis of a thoroughly neoliberal platform and record, including everything from strikebreaking to heading the military intervention in Haiti on behalf of US imperialism. Working-class votes for Lula would not have represented a break from capitalist politics. Moreover, there was a socialist candidate to Lula's left, Heloísa Helena.
Question 2. Should revolutionary socialists support Lula in the second round of the presidential election? I'd say "no". I agree with the PSTU and PCO position of a null vote. Again, Lula is running on a popular-front slate with a vice-presidential candidate from a bourgeois party on the basis of a thoroughly neoliberal platform and record. Working-class votes for him would not represent a break from capitalist politics.
Question 3. Should revolutionary socialists have supported Heloísa Helena in the first round of the presidential election? I'd say "yes". Hers was a left-reformist candidacy with support from several revolutionary socialist groups and a significant base in the working class. No revolutionary party ran a candidate.
Question 4. Should the revolutionary socialist parties in Brazil, the PSTU and the PCO, have run their own candidates in the first round of the presidential election? I'd say "yes". Specifically, I agree with Franco Grisolia of the Movimento Costitutivo per il Partito Comunista dei Lavoratori (MCPCL), the Italian section of the CRFI, that the PSTU and the PCO should have run a joint slate of Zé Maria of the PSTU for president and Anaí Caproni of the PCO for vice president.
Revolutionary socialists in the US in 2006 have little experience with elections. Into the 1980s the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) and the Workers World Party (WWP) often ran candidates. But now revolutionary socialists generally have to run on the Green Party ticket or not at all.
Brazil is far ahead of the US politically. It has a mass workers' party, the PT, which is now the governing party. It has a revolutionary party, the PSTU, larger than the SWP at it height, and another revolutionary party, the PCO, larger than the WWP at its height.
In this context the PSTU and the PCO had to decide whether to run their own candidates or to support Helena.
The PSTU tried to negotiate a slate of Helena for president and Zé Maria for vice president. Helena and P-SOL refused, since the PSTU is much bigger and more politically coherent than P-SOL and would have dominated the campaign. They offered the PSTU secondary, sure-to-lose candidacies and told them, "Take it or leave it." The PSTU at first balked at this and then decided that it would accept the ultimatum to associate itself with Helena.
The PCO tried to run its own candidate, Rui Costa Pimenta, and failed for technical reasons. It did not propose a joint slate with the PSTU and did not support Helena in the first round.
I think that revolutionary socialist organizations large enough to do so should take the following approach to elections.
Guideline 1. A revolutionary socialist party should run its own candidates, if it can, in order to popularize its program and build its influence.
Guideline 2. If a revolutionary socialist party cannot run its own candidate in an election, it should consider critically supporting the candidate of another revolutionary socialist party, a centrist party, or a reformist workers' party.
Critical support for a reformist workers' party might be excluded by particularly egregious actions of the party, for example, if it were running as part of a popular front or on a platform of imperialist war or neoliberal attacks on the working class, particularly if it had exposed itself while it was in government.
Guideline 3. A revolutionary socialist party should consider withdrawing its own candidate and supporting the candidate of reformist workers' party, if mass support for that party represented the break of a significant sector of the working class with capitalist politics.
The classic example of this in the US would be a non-revolutionary labor party based on the unions, but the same principle would apply to a non-revolutionary Black or Latino party with mass support independent of and running against the Democrats and Republicans.
Guideline 4. A revolutionary socialist party should consider withdrawing its own candidate and supporting the candidate of another revolutionary socialist party, a centrist party, or even a reformist workers' party, if it saw a regroupment reason to do so.
For example, if a revolutionary socialist party saw an opportunity to take a step toward building a larger revolutionary party by regrouping with another revolutionary socialist party or a leftward-moving centrist party, it might offer an electoral bloc or even unilaterally withdraw its candidate, openly explaining its regroupment goal. Or a revolutionary socialist organization, not yet a party, might enter a reformist workers' party and support its candidates as part of the process of acquiring a critical mass to build an independent party.
This approach leads immediately to the answers I gave to the first three questions posed above. But it doesn't immediately answer the fourth question: Should the PSTU and the PCO have run a joint slate in the first round of the presidential election?
A first problem is that the PSTU and the PCO are quite sectarian toward each other. Neither considered running a joint slate. This seems rather silly, since running together they would have created a clear political counterposition: neoliberal Lula vs. left-reformist Helena vs. revolutionary Zé Maria-Anaí Caproni. Running against each other, they would have created a more confusing political situation and gotten many fewer votes.
Setting that aside, should the PSTU and the PCO have deferred to Helena's candidacy either because a working-class vote for Helena would represent the break of a significant sector of the class with capitalist politics or because critical support for Helena would facilitate regroupment with P-SOL or with Helena's non-P-SOL supporters?
These questions are hard to evaluate from afar, but from what I can tell, most of those who voted for Helena had already broken with capitalist politics. Their votes for Helena were votes for the "original PT", that is, the PT of the 1980s, which called itself socialist and mobilized workers and peasants in struggle.
If this assessment is correct, a revolutionary socialist candidacy would not have reduced the left-of-Lula vote, and it would have made the crucial political point that the "original PT" led inevitably to Lula's PT, because it did not involve a delimitation between reform and revolution.
P-SOL is not a revolutionary party or really much of an organization at all. It is an electoral front built around its ex-PT deputies, most importantly Helena. The manifesto P-SOL imposed on the Frente de Esquerda is classic reformism (see http://www.internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article1129). There's not much in P-SOL to regroup with, and what's there is mostly quite sectarian toward developments to its left.
I agree with Charles's point that the Frente de Esquerda is an undemocratic grouping around prominent personalities. As he says, the fact that Helena, a devout Catholic, could veto abortion rights in the P-SOL and Frente de Esquerda platforms is telling.
The situation would have been quite different if Helena and the P-SOL deputies and component organizations had been willing to accept the PSTU on an equal basis, that is, if they had put the need to build a revolutionary party ahead of their individual and organizational ambitions.
I disagree with the PSTU's decision to subordinate itself to P-SOL, as well as its sectarianism toward the PCO. I disagree with the PCO's refusal to give critical support to Helena when it couldn't run its own candidate, as well as its sectarianism toward the PSTU.
I think that revolutionary socialists in Brazil, whatever organization they're in, should advocate a regroupment of the PSTU, the PCO, and the left wing of P-SOL into a new revolutionary party organized on the basis of democratic-centralism.