Thanks! I still had a lot to write about the current left parties landscape but I got a bit lazy. Maybe another day!
swiftessay
joined 2 years ago
I think a lot of people here are missing important information on how Brazil works to understand what OP is talking about.
I think looking from the outside, on what types of issues that Lula sides with in international politics, it may appear that he is a left reformist like Evo Morales or Hugo Chavez. That’s not true. Lula is safely to the right of Morales, Chavez and the Kirchners in Argentina. In the so called “pink-wave” of Latin America left governments in the early 2000s, Lula was easily the more right-leaning one. On the current so-called “second pink-wave” I think only Boric in Chile is more right wing than Lula.
You might also think that his party is some kind of umbrella left-party that congregates a diversity of leftists movements from communists to socdems. That used to be more or less true in the 90s, but it’s far from true today. And although it’s been the dominant party on the brazilian left since the late 90s, PT was never a hegemonic left party. There always were and still are significant left-leaning forces that are outside its sphere of influence. I’ll talk a little bit more about that. And it needs to be said: PT slowly and repeatedly purged itself from communists and even radical reformists.
Or even worse, it might appear to you that his party has more or less free rein to establish policies in his government. That’s waaaaay farther from reality than you might think. And to get to that I need to explain the Brazilian party system.
For an US audience accustomed to a two-party system, or even to Europeans accustomed to a few-parties systems, Brazil will seem crazy. Our party system is very fragmented. And I mean VERY fragmented. As of June 2023 we have 30 political parties with adequate registration in our electoral system. Out of those 20 have elected members in parliament and 26 have elected members in any level of our federative system.
Just so you could see how weird our party system is, for lack of one we have TWO explicitly Marxist-Leninist parties registered (PCB, the oldest party in our system, who used to be the dominant force in the left in the 50s and 60s, and UP). We have two trotskyist parties (PSTU and PCO), two socialist parties that are not revolutionary although there are a few (very few) revolutionary marxists in their ranks (PCdoB and PSOL), and a bunch of center-left parties (PT, PSB, PDT, REDE, and others I’m probably forgetting about).
Out of this circumstance there’s a very important result: no party can govern Brazil without wide ranging alliances. Period. I’m not saying typical alliances you have in parliamentary regimes in Europe, where you have one dominant force allying itself with two or maybe three smaller junior partners. No. The coalition that elected Lula in 2002 had 5 parties in the first round and 14 parties in the runoff round. Last year Lula was elected by a coalition of 10 parties in the first round and 16 parties officially supporting him in the runoff.
That may look like he had ample support, right? Yeah, maybe. This also means that it’s a lot of interests to balance. So although his party is the dominant force in the coalition, the others are not small junior partners. They are crucial. Some of them have almost the same number of members of congress than the main party. That dilutes a lot how dominant the main party is when implementing policies. That actually reduced a lot the power of Bolsonaro to make our lives even more miserable to be honest. But it also shackles any real attempt at reform.
But it is worse than even that. You have to understand also that electoral coalitions are not the same as government coalitions in Brazil. Even after winning an election you might have to negotiate and coax other parties to join forces with you in government. And that leads to all kinds of aberrations.
For example. There’s a party called União Brasil. It mainly stems, through a complex history that I’m not going to bore you with, from the main situationist party in our former ultra-right civic-military dictatorship (1964 - 1985). União Brasil is a decidedly neoliberal right-leaning party, which defends the interests of the bourgeoisie, agribusiness, banks, and so on. It was a merge of two parties, one of which was the one through which Bolsonaro was first elected in 2018 (the former PSL). So, you would imagine this would be naturally an opposition party, right? Fully against Lula, right? And you would be right. But you would also be surprised to know that Lula has nominated a couple ministers indicated by this party in order to get support in crucial laws it needed to pass.
You see? There’s a concept in Brazilian politics called the “Centrão” (something like “the big center”) which is basically right-leaning forces that dominate legislative politics. It’s a amorphous “non-ideological” force (translation: right-wing, corrupt, aligned with bourgeois interests) that keep the government from deviating to much from what’s good for business for our national bourgeoisie. It holds every government hostage, even Bolsonaro’s.
So, what you truly have in Lula’s government is not even a socdem reformist government. It’s a lefty-like coalition of neoliberal interests that dress itself in red and put star badges on their suits, that need to cater to a wide base of interests that include left parties but also very right-wing parties, who WILL NOT advance even the most basic reforms that are in the interest of the working classes. Don't expect land reforms, don't expect anything that will hurt bank's profits, don't expect him to side with traditional populations or indigenous interests against companies, don't expect him to fight against increasing the age of retirement, etc, etc.
What you may expect from him as a leftist:
- better policies on combating deforestation;
- policies that try to expand jobs and reduce cost of living for workers;
- policies to try to reduce the number of people that owe money to the banks (WITHOUT reducing banks profits);
- policies that try to reduce taxes for working class people.
That's mainly it. Those are good things and I'll definitely get behind them. But they are extremely limited. That's not even reformist. That's simply being a competent manager of the neoliberal order. That's it. That's Lula: a competent manager of the neoliberal order.
Let me be clear: it’s better than Bolsonaro. Of course it is.But that’s a very low bar. Hell, Boris Fucking Johnson is better than Bolsonaro. I would fucking take any Republican from the early 2000s over Bolsonaro. Give me fucking Mitt Romney, you get it? You have to dig really low to find something comparable to Bolsonaro.
I voted for Lula in the runoff rounds, so did any self-respecting marxist in Brazil. You know why? Because it’s better to live in a liberal bourgeois democracy and keep fighting than to live in a military dictatorship and risk being arrested and killed. Because it’s better to have left-leaning neoliberal minister steering our economy to a direction where people can at least eat than to see the country sink even lower into abject poverty. I’d rather have a somewhat farcical liberal in government that is sensitive enough to value that people can afford to eat and have a roof than a proto-fascist death-cult that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths in the pandemic, was leading an exponentially increasing number of Brazilians to food insecurity and openly intended to destroy even bourgeois electoral democracy.
So yeah. I voted for Lula, I celebrated his victory and I even have some sympathy for the man. But I wholeheartedly agree with OP. His government is not our ally, folks. You have to understand that. His government is the continuation of neoliberal policies, with the bare minimum concessions so that people can afford to eat. Is that better than neoliberal policies WITHOUT those concessions? OF COURSE!!! But that is not in our political field. It’s not even “oh, he is limited reformist socdem that is not going to go far enough”, you understand? It’s even less than that!!!
Brazilian Here.
I would say that on foreign policy Lula is safely to the left of Bernie, but on domestic economic policies he is probably a bit right of Bernie. His current economic policy is thoroughly neoliberal.
Brazilian here.
Of course a Lula or a Kirchner will never truly do something that should be done under a socialist revolution
I think it's important to point out that Lula's government is a coalition of forces that are overwhelmingly to the right of the Kirchner or even Alberto Fernández.
Of course he is. But that bar is incredibly ridiculously low.
If you're a Marxist championing for the actual interests of the working class Lula and his government is an incredibly limited perspective of true change.
It's hard to even call him left-reformist, because he isn't even presenting any reform policy. His government is an alliance of liberal forces in the center-left and right, pushing neoliberal agendas with a sprinkle of "social sensitivity". The best he can do is boosting a few timid redistributive programs. But it doesn't come even close to be a left-reformist government like Gustavo Petro on Colombia, for example.
I'm a Brazilian. If you're not Brazilian you can't even imagine how fucking relieving it was to vote Bolsonaro out last year. And yes, I voted for Lula, campaigned for him on the runoff, and was super happy when he won.
But I only did that because I'd rather be a left-wing militant on a liberal bourgeois democracy than in the fascist military dictatorship that Bolsonaro was planning to implement. It doesn't mean Lula has my support for his policies AT ALL.
Yes, I will support him against a literal fascist. I will vote for him and even blast his campaign song on my stereo for my neighbors to hear.
But don't expect me to not point at him and criticize when he implements policies that benefit the banks and media conglomerates. When he defends legislation that will entrench an austerity fiscal policy that is impoverishing our country and shackling the government's own hands, making it impossible to invest enough to get us out of the hole liberals dug for us.
Don't expect me to be satisfied and happy with Lula in power. I'm only happy with a true Brazilian workers government, by workers for workers, after our very own Brazilian Revolution.
I don't think anyone expect that. We expect that to happen in a workers revolution.
Nobody is pro-Putin. We are anti-NATO. That's a very different thing.
I took a look at the article and the authors. The senior author is a computer science guy focused on researching online harmful behavior.
It's quite telling that he has no humanities training whatsoever in his academic background. A CS guy doing humanities research without any training in humanities.
I myself fit the description of guy from a hard quantitative science background who delved into humanities and social sciences research. I'll honestly say to you: the only thing worse than a humanities researcher who eschew any type of quantitative research as "positivist reductionism" is a "hard science guy" who thinks he^[1]^ doesn't have to give a shit to the work that was done by humanities researchers because "numbers will tell me everything I need to know".
[1] Masculine referents 100% intended because it's usually a guy.
It's nice that neoclassical economics is now verifying with their methods what we know since... the 1830s maybe?
As one small and simple example, ask the people in Niger if it doesn't feel authoritarian that they can't enjoy the material wealth of their country because France steals 80% of their Uranium, paying peanuts for it. Go ask France's former colonies how democratic it is for a foreign central bank to control their currency, artificially keeping it favorable for France to steal Uranium for peanuts. How nice it is for them that the material wealth that should be making their country rich, is going to subsidize the electrical bill of someone's fancy apartment in Paris.
Go ask people who live near mines owned by Swedish mining companies how much those companies bribed the local governments to allow them to pollute the fuck out of their countries, deregulate the fuck out of their labor laws, etc. See if they consider this democracy.
Go ask someone in Libya how democratic it was when a government that provided them with the best standards of living in the whole continent was bombed and removed from power because some French and American folks decided that it was time for his counter-hegemonic ass to go. And left a fucking mess of warlords and civil war in his place. Super democratic I guess. Not authoritarian at all.
The EU can only maintain itself relatively open and prosperous by fucking over their former colonies in ways their population mostly ignore. If your democracy at home depends on autocracy and destruction elsewhere to be maintained, how is it real democracy?