#NOTTHEM ! The flood of 40 million non-votes showed that a large part of the population has already understood that the biggest problem is not one candidate or another: it’s the system!

There were 3 major phenomena in this election: 1) an avalanche of non-votes; 2) a mass vote for renewal; 3) a large Bolsonaro x PT polarization.

The largest number of non-votes in history in this voting system

The 2018 elections, more than the victory of some candidates or parties, had as a great phenomenon, again, the non-vote: with a record of abstentions in the last 20 years, the sum of those who refused to vote in any of the thousands of candidates and 35 parties was tens of millions of voters. Between abstentions, null votes and white votes, more than 40 million voters understood that they are all equal and did not vote anyone for president! This flood of non-votes, which hits the already impressive record of the past election, when 38 million and 780 thousand voters refused to vote on anyone, shows that a further 1.5 million voters have joined the non-voting majority of them by breaking with the illusions that the elections can change anything. It was only in 1998, the last year of the election, still by means of paper ballots, where it was much easier for someone to miss the vote, or to use the ballot as a protest and to cancel the vote even with political messages, there were more non-votes.

With the electronic urn, this number is increasing, and non-voting has already been “the 2nd place in this presidential election”, “the 2nd place in the majority of the gubernatorial elections” and the largest amount in the elections for regional and federal deputies. No party vote or coalition even came close to the total non-votes for proportional polls, where the flood of non-votes was even higher.

Large states such as Rio de Janeiro (with more than 30% non-voting), Minas Gerais (more than 30% non-voting), São Paulo and Bahia were the great pullers of non-voting, showing that in large centers it is where the electoral experience has gone deeper, and an immense part of the population has already realized that, whoever wins our  life will not change. In spite of the insistent electoral propaganda of the TSE (superior electoral court), government agencies, press, churches and the 35 parties and their tens of thousands of candidates, a rising and gigantic wave rejected the polls and turned its backs on the election farce.

What many militants who claim to be revolutionaries do not understand, in being not able to think or live without bourgeois elections, more than 40 million workers have taught again: elections are a marked card game, where you only choose the color of the whip that goes popping on the backs of the exploited.

Record renewal of politicians and more women in history will not be able to renew political practices. But the population tried …

In addition to the roughly 30 percent of voters who already refuse to try to change the rottenness of elections by the inside, the vast majority of those who attended the ballot voted for the change. The legislative assemblies of the whole country had a very high rate of renewal, with heavy weights of the policy not being reelected and the renewal in the national Congress passed of the 50%. In the gubernatorial elections, there were also countless surprises and first-round candidates, or at least younger or inexperienced executives, with the most votes.

Romeu Zema in MG (Minas Gerais) is the most striking example of this, but in almost every state there were votes in new people, whether they were non-politicians or politicians with only one mandate. On the other hand, in cases where there was not much newness in terms of the candidates, all more or less old know by the population, such as the presidential election, the majority of the votes was to the one who spoke the most about change and presented himself against everything; even if it was nothing more than rhetoric and empty speech. Bolsonaro himself, in a very distorted way, because he was an old bandit, of more than 20 years acting like enemy of the workers, also surfed in this wave of vote by the change. Which means that voting to change does not solve anything. But we must recognize that there was this phenomenon in mass and that those who have not yet broken the electoral illusion, at least voted wanting things to change.

As a practical expression of the non-re-election of hundreds of traditional politicians, Romero Jucá (minister in the PT government and former leader of the Temer government), Eunício Oliveira (president of the Chamber), Beto Richa (former governor of the PSDB of PR [Paraná], who beat teachers on strike), Requião (former governor of PR[Paraná]), Fernando Pimentel (governor of MG – one of the bosses of the PT squad), Dilma Roussef (the candidate who had more time on TV and money for campaign and failed in a 4th place for the Senate of MG), Roseana Sarney (MA[Maranhão]), Edson Lobão (ex-PT minister and Temer), Cássio Cunha Lima (PB [Paraíba]), Mendonça Filho (PE [Pernambuco] – former Education Minister of Temer), Eduardo Araujo (SP [São Paulo] – former Minister of Cities), Magno Malta (former PT base, one of Temer’s leaders and enthusiastic supporter of Bolsonaro), André Moura (SE [Sergipe] – leader of the Temer government), etc.

In addition to an infinity of corrupt oligarchs, big figures and politicians in general: Antonio Imbassahy (BA) [Bahia], Benito Gama (BA), José Carlos Aleluia (BA), Lucio Vieira Lima (of the Geddel clan, former minister of PT and Temer, whose apartment had more than R$ 50 million), Augusto Carvalho (DF), Roberto Freire (PE), Leonardo Quintão (MG), Paes Landim (PI), Luiz Carlos Hauly (PR), Osmar Serraglio Roberto Cabrera (RJ – of the Picciani clan, whose patriarch was the president of the Legislative Assembly and head of the Sérgio Cabral gang), Cristiane Brasil (daughter of Roberto Jeferson, who never managed to be appointed Minister of Labor) son of the former governor), Danielle Cunha (RJ – daughter of Eduardo Cunha prisoner) Beto Rosado (RN), Rogério Marinho (RN – father of the labor reform), Darcisio Perondi (RS – a post spokesman for Temer), Yeda Crusius (RS – former governor for the PSDB), Beto Mansur (SP), Cristovão Buarque (DF), PT Zeca (MS – former governor) Raimundo Colombo (SC- former governor), José Agripino (RN), Antonio Jacome (RN), Garibaldi Alves (RN), Robinson Faria (RN), Vanessa Grazitin (AM), Tião Viana (AC), Lindberg Farias ), Cesar Maia (RJ), Sarney Filho (MA), Marconi Perillo (former governor of GO) and hundreds of other politicians known that there is no sheet for both name rejected at the polls and put out by voters. In addition to politicians who never got to compete, as much rejection as the ministers of Temer, Carlos Marum, Eliseu Padilha and Moreira Franco, as well as Gilberto Kassab and others.

In the Senate, 54 vacancies were in dispute (since 27 will only be renewed in 2022). Of these 54 seats, there were 8 reelections and 46 new senators. A renewal of 85.18%! In the Chamber of Deputies, the renewal was 52%! At the São Paulo Assembly, 56%. And so on through the whole country. The PSDB was dismantled in SP, falling from 19 deputies to 8! The PMDB was detonated in RJ, dropped from 15 elected in 2014 to 5 now.

Nationally, the top 5 parties in the Chamber of Deputies lost a lot of weight. The PT fell from 69 to 56. The PMDB fell from 65 to just 34. The PSDB dropped from 54 to 29 and it ceased to be a great party. PP (from Maluf and Ciro Nogueira), PSD (from Kassab) and PR (from Lula’s ex-vice, José Alencar) also lost federal deputies and shrank in the states. The PTB (of Roberto Jéferson), then, turned small, falling from 25 for mere 10 deputies. On the other hand, inexpressive parties have grow as the PSL, or the Novo, which did not even existed so far. There was even greater electoral fragmentation and the vote was clearly against the big parties, identified as what exists today and needs to be fought.

There was never a sweep of this size in quantitative terms and the representation of the names put out by voters. Unfortunately, none of this will improve the situation of the country, because in their places will enter others as corrupt and bourgeois as they. But one can not ignore the explicit and blatant sentiment of change that came from the polls. Those who still believe in elections have, for the most part, done what they could to change electoral politics and vote for new names.

The population rejected the entire system and traditional politicians. Record of elected women and non-mass reelection of ruralist and bullet politicians.

The phenomenon of non-voting and voting in the “different”, in the “new”, also has its limits. Not voting but not fighting is also useless. As well as voting to “change” by putting new politicians with the same opinions of the old. However, if only the fight changes life and the polls are not able to change for the better, the voters’ intention was clear: the desire to end the terrible situation we live today and change in some way. Politicians, traditional parties and the system as a whole are in crisis and deeply criticized by the vast majority of the population.

In this sense, a series of conservative and even bizarre candidates entered the House and legislative assemblies. But that does not mean that there are not already hundreds of them, and that the voter has promoted as many renewals and non-reelection of recent times against this team. The Congress that was elected, for example, had a largely majority rate of electoral defeats of ruralists, military, and pastors. The so-called BBB (Bullet, Bible, bull/ox) bench saw nearly 70% of its candidates fail at the polls.

The ruralist group currently has 233 members, and according to their own association for parliamentary activity, only 54 of them were re-elected. According to news sites like the G1, the number would be higher, 79 deputies re-elected. In any case, 77% or 66% of the current ruralists were sent away by the voters. From the bullet stand, made up of police officers, military or politicians linked to the area of public security or forces of repression in general, of the current 299 members (some are also ruralists), only 82 were re-elected. That is, 73% of this group was removed from the national deputies chamber.

In the so-called bible sector, the great name, Eduardo Cunha, is not only revoked, but also imprisoned, and he was not able to elect his daughter. The new top leader of the group, Magno Malta, was unable to re-elect. Idem Missionary José Olímpio, Bishop Antônio Bulhões (leader of Universal), the well-known and fascistoid Valdir Raupp (RO), Brother Lázaro and the leader of the evangelical group, Takayama, both of the PSC, party that shrank in half and did not even reach the clause of barrier, towards extinction.

On the other hand, the women’s counter was never so big. The number of female deputies has jumped from more than 50% from one election to the next. In the legislative assemblies of the whole country, the increase was also significant, of 35% compared to 2014. Among the women elected, there are 3 candidates linked to the former councilor Marielle Franco, also by PSOL-RJ. But the electoral left does not talk about it, even though it is 3 black women, while it does not get tired of talking about the fascisto that was elected after breaking the plaque in honor of the murdered councilwoman. One of the women elected is also the 1st indigenous elected in the history of the Congress, by the REDE, and a speech in defense of human rights.

Again, we repeat: this does not necessarily change Congress for the better. Most women elected before and now, as well as men, are bourgeois. The working class and the victims of oppression will not advance through mandates, as they have not advanced in the mandate of Dilma, a woman who ruled for male chauvinism and the oppressors.

However, these numbers again show that voters’ intention is to give more voice to women. And they put another question mark on the claims of fascism. More than 70% of the most reactionary groups can not be re-elected, more women are elected … Where is the fascist parliamentary wave, if not only in particular examples (which exist in one sense and in another), which do not become hypotheses in collective numbers ?

Bolsonaro is the enemy of the oppressed. The PT too. Blacks and indigenous already suffer genocide. 1 LGBTQ person is killed every 19 hours and are assulted unceasingly.

In Brazil, every 23 minutes a young black man is murdered. The UN report of 2017 already treats the issue as a genocide. There are 63 young black men (between 15 and 29 years old) murdered every day! There are 23,100 per year, with 77% of all deaths in this age group. As a whole, Brazil has 59,000 murders a year, for the vast majority of blacks, be they young, adults, the elderly or children. This number increased from 48 thousand to 59 thousand a year during the period from 2005 to 2015, all of it from PT governments.

Black genocide already exists and only hypocrites do not see it. Worse still are those who see, who denounced him for so long, but now they are silent, campaigning for the PT in the second round, threatening that Bolsonaro’s victory can bring genocide to the black people. The genocide already existed with the PSDB! The PT has expanded this genocide brutally! And, whoever wins, whether Bolsonaro or Haddad, if not impeded by the streets and the mobilization of the oppressed and all the workers, this genocide will increase even more with either.

Another undeniable genocide is against indigenous peoples. The pre-Columbian peoples have been exterminated for five centuries, ruthlessly, by all regimes and governments. In the last decades, the main threat to the indigenous is the agricultural expansion, which knocks down forest to plant soy or raise cattle. Already the logging and the gold-digging, which still exist with force and expelling indigenous from their lands, poisoned their rivers and killed their leaders, who dare to face farmers, commonly linked to politicians of the PSDB, PT and PMDB, in the vast majority. But the soybeans and the cattle came to break with what was left of indigenous land and their communities.

Land conflicts in southern Pará, throughout the Amazon, Mato Grosso, Tocantis, Maranhão, Roraima and Rondônia are impressive. There are dozens of leaders shot dead, beaten and with machetes. Cases of indigenous with severed hands and whole villages set afire. Considering that they are already a small population, these hundreds of deaths represent a genocide, even more so than the killings, but the withdrawal of land, culture and existence as a common population.

After 11 years of PT governments, the Indigenous Missionary Council, linked to the CNBB and always close to the PT, recorded an average increase of 269% of the Indian murders in the PT governments in relation to the PSDB years of government, which was already enemy of the natives. With FHC, there were absurd 20.8 deaths a year. But with Lula, there were 56.5 deaths a year! Index maintained by Dilma, with 54 Indigenous killed per year. There are hundreds of dead and entire areas taken by force. The genocide is already there! And the PT never did anything to stop. Instead, he appointed Kátia Abreu, the “gold chainsaw,” the queen of the genocide in front of the CNA (National Confederation of Agriculture) to be minister of Agriculture. Kátia Abreu died hugging the Dilma and now has been candidate to vice of Ciro Gomes. They are all the same!

If FHC only ratified 148 indigenous areas in 8 years, Lula and Dilma, in 11 years, had only approved 84! At least with 3 more years in power. In the Dourados (MS) reserve, 13,000 Guarani-Kaiowa live on a tiny 3,500 hectares, a very high population density comparable to that of the worst favelas in Brazil. there was a time when we were all Guarani-Kaiowas. They were threatened with extermination and threatened to set fire to themselves in order to defend themselves and protest. Today, no one else speaks in the Guarani-Kaiowa. It seems that they do not exist and have never existed. It is a crime that descendants of indigenous people support Bolsonaro! But equally unacceptable that they support Haddad or Ciro / Kátia Abreu.

When it comes to defending freedom of sexual orientation and against LGBTQophobia, hell is already around us. Brazil is the country where LGBTQs of the world most get killed! Everyone remembers the attack with phosphorescent lamps to 3 young people on Avenida Paulista in 2010. Everyone remembers … although some want to forget. In full Lula’s government. There was the dead transvestite in Fortaleza, the trans seller killed in RJ … Barbarous and revolting crimes. Thousands of them … in the Lula, Dilma, Temer governments. And before them in the governments of FHC and beyond. But they are not individual cases that will prove us anything. These are the general statistics.

And the numbers show that every 19 hours a LGBTQ person dies murdered in Brazil! According to the Gay Group of Bahia, reference in this question, these murders rose from 130 in 2000 to 260 in 2010 and 445 in 2017! And this curve is continuous, with more murders every year! In the Lula government, the LGBTQfobia increased! With Dilma and Temer even more! Again, we do not need Bolsonaro or Haddad to live the hell out of intolerance and crimes against free sexual orientation. A Bolsonaro voter being indifferent to this massacre is disgusting, but a PT elector pretending he does not exist is an accomplice posture to each of these murders.

Bolsonaro verbalizes and speaks what the PSDB, the PT and the PMDB already do. They are all enemies of the oppressed and responsible for the mass murder of blacks, indigenous and LGBTQs. We will still address women in the next issue, but the reality is no different. Choosing which supporter of genocide and which racist and LGBTQphobic will govern us is not the workers’ role. Because Bolsonaro and Haddad are different in speech, but complicit and responsible for the same crimes in practice. Our role is to fight on the streets against both!

Male chauvinism barbarism: 60,000 rapes per year, prohibition of the right to abortion and violence against women.

Finishing the term for which Dilma / Temer was elected, the number of rapes has not stopped and has continued to grow. Every 10 minutes a woman is raped in Brazil! There are 164 of these barbarous crimes and that destroy the lives of women, every day. In all, there were more than 60,000 cases last year alone! And reality is still much worse than these statistics, since it is a consensus among experts that this is the most underreported crime, whether it is fear of reprisal (most rape is committed by someone known to the victim), shame or lack of confidence that the police will do something. Estimates suggest that the records are close to only 10% of the total cases, which would raise the rapes of the already frightening 60,000 to scandalous 600,000 cases a year! It is an epidemic of rapes on all sides, and a violence so present that it leaves no woman alive or having her activities without being permanently afraid.

This is terrible and hideous violence, where more than half the victims are minors, children and adolescents! And these numbers have been skyrocketing in recent years. In SP, it increased 10% in one year, in the DF[Federal District] the increase was 32%! Across Brazil, on average, in just 5 years, the cases reported between 2011 and 2016 have practically doubled! That is, during the PT government, and even more so in the Dilma government, a woman, the number of rapes has exploded! Another unquestionable example is that women already live in barbarism every day, and that Bolsonaro and Haddad will only aggravate this scenario, and it is up to the workers to impose the change of this sad and unacceptable situation.

As for other assaults on women, the data are equally impressive. the 12th Public Security Yearbook published in August of this year, when the electoral campaign began, shows that Brazil had 221,238 cases of domestic violence in 2017. More than 221 thousand cases! It’s 606 a day! This is more than twice as many as a few years ago. Even if it is claimed that part of this extraordinary increase is due to the increase in the number of complaints of aggression that already existed, the greater notification alone does not explain everything and even the bulk of this increase. The records are so outrageously larger because there really are more women assaulted nowadays. Sexual liberation, the struggle for more independence, and the economic crisis, on the other hand, place women in the line of aggression against sexists more and more often and ferociously. It does not take a new president on January 1, 2019 for hell to exist for women. A hell built by all parties, and that was aggravated absurdly during the governments Lula / Alencar and Dilma / Temer.

The non-legalization of abortion is another nameless violence. Forcing women to be mothers against the will, and who do not have the right to decide about their body and their reproduction, is a huge violence that, in addition to countless physical and psychological damages, also kills! There were 211 women killed by clandestine abortions in 2015 in Brazil, the last year of the Dilma government, and one of the years with the highest recorded number of deaths. It is the 4th largest cause of maternal death in Brazil, and it is estimated that there are 25 women who almost die for each one who dies. That is, more than 5,000 women were at risk of death, of which countless had sequelae for life, only in 2015. Again, the PT governments did absolutely nothing for that; on the contrary: they only aggravated the situation.

It is not hard to remember that it was the PT that signed a special agreement with the Vatican for Catholic religious teaching in public schools in Brazil. A punch in the stomach of a secular state that many PT voters think they are defending by voting for Haddad. Dilma’s commitment to evangelical churches in 2006, vowing never to vote or approve the legalization of abortion rights was another historical shame, which the PT will repeat if Haddad wins a 5th consecutive term.

Elections never changed workers’ lives, and women suffered aggressions in each of the years of the PSDB, PT and PMDB governments. There is no feminist candidate or even female ally in this second round. Haddad and Bolsonaro will further aggravate violence against women, which is what the governments they have always supported have already done so. Both will pay interest on the public debt, govern for bankers and kneel before male chauvinism and religious fanatics, throwing the crisis mainly for the poorest, black and indigenous, women.

Again, a false polarization. Bolsonaro and Haddad criticize themselves, but they are birds of a feather

For many, the election, from the first round, assumed a Manichean and falsely polarized tone, “PT x antiPT” or, like the other side of the same coin, “Bolsonaro x antiBolsonaro.” However, in addition to politically, this polarization is an illusion, since both are much more alike than most can understand, even electorally this polarization was absolute, although it did in fact exist. Of the more than 147 million voters, Bolsonaro made just over a third of the votes: 33.46%. Haddad made just over a fifth, or 21.26%. Together they passed very little of half the voters. That is to say that, in spite of all the excitement of Haddad and Bolsonaro voters, compared to the sum of the votes in both, there was an almost such large number of voters who said “not they!”

If for each elector of the Bolsonaro, there were other 2 who did not choose him, which leaves him far from having the most support; and for each Haddad voter, there were 4 others without voting for him; Ciro Gomes had 1 voter in 11 people, with only 9.06% of the vote. The once-powerful PSDB was shattered from the polls, with a number of half of deputies, having taken a beating in the elections for the Senate and state governments and despicable 3.46% in Alckmin to president. It means: there was one Toucan voter every 29 people! Meirelles of the MDB, Brazil’s “biggest party,” and Temer’s presidential apparatus, would need to gather 83 people to find a voter of his own, at 1.2 percent. A nanic nominee index, such as that of Marina Silva with 1% or Álvaro Dias, with 0.8%, both figures being well-known. Finally, Guilherme Boulos, in the candidacy with the lowest votes in the entire history of PSOL presidential elections, and his 0.4%, which required a small crowd of 250 people to be able to find a voter of his.

But what is the significance of these numbers? They serve to demonstrate that the absolute polarization that appears in the social networks and other environments of paid militants, fake profiles and a petty bourgeoisie activist of computer, is not necessarily the real distribution of opinions of the population as a whole. Virtual “activism” and the convenient exaggeration of petistas and bolsonaristas in seeing only themselves as the 2 possible options, falsifies the fact that together they were only half of the voters in the first round. Not that any other candidate has broken this polarization, since the votes of all were a resounding failure. But it is a false polarization to ignore that almost 30% of the population has refused to vote for anyone.

Instead of understanding this phenomenon of non-voting and trying to politicize it for a combative solution from the workers, against the 50 right wing tones presented in this campaign by all the candidates who had at least 100,000 votes to the president, the “left” prefers once again despise those who break with the bourgeois-democratic illusion. On the contrary, he prefers to blackmail, threaten, combat and try to paint the apocalypse as a way of convincing those who no longer believe in this farce that the elections are to believe again, to deceive again, to try to prove that the vote can do the difference and, more than that, will decide between life and death, and decide our future.

This electoral alarmism is as cynical as it is reactionary, and it contaminated the debate to a point of sinking much lower than the principle of class independence could admit. The situation went so far as to implore the support of FHC [Fernando Henrique Cardoso]! PT offers ministries to the PP, former Bolsonaro party, where he spent 20 years of his political life, and whose national president, Ciro Nogueira, is the PT’s electoral cable since the 1st round!

                PT and Bolsonaro are together in love with the PP of Maluf, Delfim Neto and hundreds of outlaws of the dictatorship (ARENA, later PDS and now PP) and involved in the largest number of corruption scandals among all parties. Bolsonaro and PT were smeared with the PP all the time. Bolsonaro received transfers of bribes in his campaigns, in addition to having only been elected most of the time thanks to the sum of his votes and the other criminals of the PP. The PT negotiated support and time on TV in exchange for positions in Petrobrás, Caixa and dozens of state and local autarkies to the PP gang. And now Haddad has just promised more positions and ministries in exchange for new support. Just the same PP who helped in the impeachment of Dilma is now courted again.

                Bolsonaro and the PT have no scruples, and both have already changed allies and enemies as convenience. Bolsonaro, even, has been the base and support of Lula throughout their mandates. Not only was Lula’s base, but Bolsonaro voted and called Lula’s vote in the second round of 2002, after supporting Ciro Gomes in the first round of the same election. Look how curious: Bolsonaro’s votes in 2002 (Ciro in the 1st round and PT in the 2nd) are the same as many activists in this 2018 election, who justify the vote in 2 bourgeois precisely to “defeat” Bolsonaro.

                The difference is that Lula’s vote in 2002 was not only acceptable but progressive, since the PT had not yet been a government and was not yet a bourgeois party. To vote in Lula in 2002 was still to vote in an opportunist and traitorous, but left-wing, labor party. Today, in order to vote against the deputy who was part of the Lula government, sectors of the “left” defend the joint candidacy of the PP, FHC and the PT of 16 years and 4 mandates after, totally right wing, neoliberal, corrupt and bourgeois. It’s the world circling …

                Bolsonaro had already campaigned for Lula in 1994. He called Lula a “companion” and “our dear Lula,” besides giving a note to a speech by the ex-president, now in prison, and having defended José Genoíno to be Defense Minister. Bolsonaro and the PT have already been government together, have campaigned on the same side in numerous elections and equally are bourgeois and neoliberal expressions for the country!

                With one or the other, the Caixa is threatened with privatization and having its capital opened. Dilma accused Aécio of wanting to sell the bank, at the same time saying that it would not cut rights “even if the cow cough”. Well, the cow coughed… Dilma announced the privatization of Caixa and the dismantling of the PIS credit, unemployment insurance and a Social Security mini-pension, especially targeting widows. Bolsonaro supported all these actions. The workers, when they fought against these attacks, had to face Bolsonaro, the PT and the other bourgeois parties, who fight for votes, but they are holding hands whenever there is a more serious attack.

                Bolsonaro and the PT will pay without disputing the interest on the public debt, which consumes more than 40% of the public budget. Bolsonaro and the PT will not retake the state oil monopoly in Brazil, nor will they return to a Petrobras or 100% public BB [Banco do Brasil / Brazil Bank]. On the contrary: both will sell even more shares of both companies, BB slices (cards, insurance, etc.) and will deliver even more oil and gas wells. This is what PT has applied in 14 years! That is what Bolsonaro has always supported. In the same way, both will propose new attacks on retirees with a Pension Reform. Like what Lula did in 2003 (when Bolsonaro voted against), and how FHC and Dilma also did.

                With Bolsonaro or the PT, health and education resources will continue to be cut, agrarian reform will not exist and agribusiness will continue to lead the country along with the bankers. Both the PT already had the same Henrique Meirelles of Temer commanding the economy, as Bolsonaro talks about keeping the president of the Central Bank of Temer, if elected. In other words, it is the same attacks, it is the same economic policy … PT and Bolsonaro have gone much closer together than imagined in these last decades and the recent exacerbated hostility between both is a calculated movement of the two sides: both grow much more than really would of supporters as being the “archrival” of each other.

                A false polarization and hiding all that they have been, are and will continue to be together in the defense of capitalism, the interests of the great bourgeois and against the living conditions of the majority of the population. A political polarization of araque and that still hides that, in the field of the vote neither is only these two “poles”: there was to be a sector almost as great as the one of the 1st place and bigger than the 2nd position that is of those that refuse to vote for anyone. They know that a worker can not vote on any of these enemies of our class!

                To whom it serves the speech of “fight” against “fascism”?

Whenever it is worn and demoralized, the PT creates an “external enemy” to unify the sectors that have hitherto criticized it, under the fear and risk of “greater evil.” In the 1990s, the PSDB was the biggest evil, and the PT would be the salvation. In real life, the PSDB withdrew rights, privatized and attacked retirees, being defeated in 2002 and giving way to the Lula government, which withdrew rights, privatized and attacked retirees.

But the PSDB was still the party of corruption and “deprivation.” Until the scandal of the mensalão, cuecão and petrolão broke out, and the banner of “ethics in politics” definitively left PT propaganda, which came to call the fight against corruption of “moralism”, “reactionary”, “udenista” “,” Coup “, etc. Increasingly, the PT was the mirror of the PSDB, and with each election juggled to continue to please the market and the bankers, contractors and agroindustrials, whom it always ruled, and from whom it always received the largest funds of campaign (more until the PSDB, since 2002). At the same time, the PT had to maintain the illusion on the part of its constituents that PSDB’s neoliberalism was “bad” and theirs was “good.”

 The deception worked out in 2006, 2010 and 2014. The tactic was always the same: to threaten the return of privatizations and neoliberal measures. Even if, as a government, I applied the same measures! October came and the ghost was always on the lookout: the return of the PSDB … By 2014, PT media terrorism over the end of times that would come from the return of the Toucans shouted that they would privatize the Caixa and would touch the rights of the workers. Did not help Aécio say 100 times that he would not do it, since everybody knew he would. So Dilma was elected to prevent him from taking these measures with the “critical vote” of thousands of “leftist activists” who said they did not even agree with the PT, but it was necessary to vote against the PSDB … And with the polls still hot, it was Dilma who announced exactly all the measures that said would prevent …

But the PSDB only became the target of the PT in the 2nd round of 2014. In the 1º round, the big target of fake news and a violent campaign was Marina Silva, who could go to the second round and win the election. The PT then spared the PSDB (whom they wanted in the second round because they knew that they could make the game of “good x bad” easier), and put advertisements in the air that said the food would disappear from the table in the case of Marina win … Again, the direction of the PT has achieved its purpose …

Dilma, re-elected and ahead of the worst-rated government of all time until then, and with the country sunk in the biggest recession in its history, among other things because food was missing at the population table and rights were being cut, saw the vast majority of the population wanting the end of her government. Has the PT made a self-criticism, or changed its course? No. He just reinvented his narrative and became the party that would resist the “coup.” A new ghost was created …

The “golpismo [coupism]”, by the way, happened to be the great motto Petista since then. The “left” already tired of all the PT’s betrayals and shamelessly deceived one time after another was led to choose between “democracy and the coup.” Like a cheap novel, with a terrible plot, horrible actors and in which everyone already knows the end of the story, for the hundredth time, many of those who had already sworn that “now, the PT has crossed the limits and I do not vote again” returned to their social networks and engaged in the new crusade: it was not for the PT; it was against the coup … But the repertoire never ends. If it is already stained, it changes the name of the personages and resumes everything again. Now, the ghost is fascism …

The most striking for those who, like us, observe without adhering to this opera-buff, this comedy pie, which is not funny at all, because it drags millions to paralysis without fighting, waiting for a salvation from those who attack them, always with fear of chaos, and one of an artificially fabricated end of the world, is that, like the worst scripts, the characters change sides without any explanation.

Globo was an enemy, but for 14 years it gained billions and was allied, but later it returned to be enemy and coupist, to now be allied again, because at least it is “democrat against fascism”. The PMDB was an enemy, became an ally, a vice for 6 years, and then it fell in disgrace as a coupist, but now he is a democrat and ally again, as is clear from PT’s support for the Barbalho family in Pará. FHC, who was a coupist until a few weeks ago, was an enemy for 20 years, but before that was allied, back in the early 80’s … Bolsonaro was the base of support and electoral cable in 1994 and 2002, but now it is the Incarnation of the devil … The “coiso [thing]”…

George Orwell, author of genius books such as “Animal Farm” and “1984,” more than a writer was an advocate of socialism, but a profound critic of Stalinism, and would be astounded with so much symmetry of his fictions with what we see today. In “1984,” the world is divided into three great blocks: Eurasia, Lestasia and Oceania that are always in wars and alliances, alternately. In Oceania, a Party-led bloc whose head is the omniscient and infallible “Big Brother”, the “Ministry of Truth” is the government sector charged with recounting the truth thousands of times a day, every time the political context changes. Oceania was at war with Eurasia and allied with Lestasia, but now things have been reversed, so the newspapers are rewritten and “there has never been a war against Eurasia.” “The war has always been with Lestásia.” Thus, the Party is never wrong or mistaken and citizens have no memory. Any resemblance to the present reality is not mere coincidence …

It is such a lack of coherence that it could be unbelievable that it always worked … But this tactic is brilliant and consists of the old logic of establishing a greater enemy and appealing to the “good sense of the choice of lesser evil.” It’s been applied for centuries and it’s been working. Stalinism was one of the champions of the application of this fallacy. “Bad with me, worse with them” … “Who criticizes our actions makes the game or is an agent of the enemy” … and so on. Generations of valuable militants have been won over to this narrow-minded and efficient reasoning, because it dialogues with common sense, with fear, inertia, and social accommodation that pressure the vast majority of people, including workers, who only adhere to the revolution in cases absolutely extreme, desperate, and who are almost always willing to find a magic solution and of less effort, a lesser evil comfortable and requiring less sweat.

The PT knows how to play with this delay and this fear like no one else. And the number fooled by the PT, again, is not small. The ghost, now dressed as a ghost of fascism, fooled a lot of people again, But this time, it seems like it will not be enough. Their betrayal went too far. Abandoned by the working class gradually between 2012 and 2016, through the uprising of 2013 and mass demonstrations against the World Cup in 2014, the PT was overthrown with the support of the masses, who vibrated by the fall of Dilma and no longer support the lies of the PT, to the point of being on the verge of electing a truculent candidate with disastrous statements and an enemy of the workers whose greatest “merit” in the eyes of the electorate is to be anti-PT.

The truth is that there is no fascism in the streets of Brazil, nor the Bolsonaro government will represent a change of political regime. There will be no dictatorship in the country, and bourgeois democracy, which has always been and will continue to be one of the facets of the bourgeois dictatorship against the workers, will continue to use democratic reaction and electoral illusion to keep the mass paralyzed. The main tactic of the world bourgeoisie today is to convince the masses that if life is bad, voting is the main weapon, and elections are the great moment to ensure progress or avoid setbacks. A lie that all candidates repeat, including Haddad, Bolsonaro, Guilherme Boulos, Ciro Gomes, etc.

Fascism is a product of an inexistence of alternatives for a bourgeoisie threatened with losing everything, which calls fascism as a historical phenomenon of brutal and widespread violence, including the physical liquidation of millions of workers, the destruction of their organizations and of the whole of traditional bourgeois institutions. To be implanted, it demands a destroyed proletariat and a correlation of forces amply favorable to the bourgeoisie. In any aspect analyzing reality and historical comparison with the real fascisms that tragically the class struggle has already witnessed, our present situation has absolutely nothing to do with it. Marx said that history happens as a tragedy and then repeats itself as a farce. The farce has rarely been so pathetic as now.

Even at the height of the “struggle against fascism” and “for civilization”, the PT continues to make declarations and build alliances more to the right spectre, without making a single call to fight on the streets or to a program to fight “fascism” with clear anti-capitalist measures, since fascism existed only in history to defend with arms and bloodshed a capitalism that was threatened to be overthrown by the workers. If there was even a concrete fascist movement, voting for Haddad to stop it would not be comical, nor would it be tragic. It would be just shameful …

Calling all of fascism is a way of exalting bourgeois democracy!

In Brazil, the PT and its most  and less exalted militants have already called countless politicians as fascists: FHC in repressing the 500th anniversary of the Portuguese invasion of Brazil in 2000, or in repressing strikes, such as that of oil workers in 1995 or Universities in 2001; called Beto Richa a fascist when repressing professors in the PR; Alckmin by sending a beating to demonstrators or for the simple fact of being of Opus Dei; etc. And so with several and several other bourgeois politicians, in general of the PSDB, whenever there was some violent action on the part of the State.

To denote fascism any action of repression against the workers or any phrase or oppressive ideology, such as male chauvinism, racism and LGBTQophobia is so wrong as reformist and opportunist. Exactly because the social-democrats and “leftist” capitalists believe that bourgeois democracy is a haven of civil liberties and social rights. If it has aggression, violence and repression, in the head of the reformist, this is no longer bourgeois democracy – it is fascism. No, dear Social-Democrats! The bourgeois democracy kills! Every regime under the bourgeois state is a class dictatorship, a war machine of the bourgeoisie against the proletariat.

The bourgeois democracy, before being a “democracy” for the few, is a dictatorship of the ruling class, based on the main institution of the bourgeois state that are its Armed Forces. It maintains itself through the electoral illusion (democratic reaction), the betrayal of the direction of the workers’ movement, but it always has the Armed Forces as its last shelter. No bourgeois-democratic government can dispense violence against workers. To a greater or lesser degree, all bourgeois governments are oppressors, It kills and repress workers.

To imagine that the Armed Forces are a separate entity, eternally conspiring against bourgeois-democracy, and facing the other powers, is a reactionary illusion. It is to concentrate on the institution that exists precisely to defend the interests of capitalists, and that works together with governments, congresses, judiciary and the press. A character external to all “democratic” institutions, as if there were good and democratic capitalism versus authoritarian capitalism, coup and aggressive, represented by the Armed Forces. This shows the historical, theoretical and logical ignorance about everything.

The bourgeois state is a class dictatorship, with the articulation of its institutions in the sense of crushing the proletariat, and the Armed Forces are a constant part of this repression, whatever the regime may be. The PT has already massacred strikers all over the country. Olivio Dutra had beaten landless and teachers in the RS when governor still in the 90s. Jaques Wagner beat demonstrators in BA. Tião Viana did this in Acre; Humberto Costa in PE; Pimentel in MG; and so on.

Lula and Dilma created the National Force, a detachment of pure elite  repression at the national level, whose function is solely to secure the capitalist order and to attack demonstrators. With this force, which should be called fascist by those who are intoxicated with bourgeois democracy, and the anti-terror law, which is equally fascist in this light, Dilma imposed a curfew, a state of exception and the greatest militarization of the country since the dictatorship. Army tanks and army platoons have been called to the streets countless times by the PT: since to suppress acts during the World Cup; to “ensure safety” in several states, over and over again; or maintain order in elections; and more dozens of times.

The PT put back the military in the streets and assigned them the role of urban security that no one had dared to do since the dictatorship. The “military intervention” in RJ is the continuation of Temer on all this. But nothing will overcome in terms of militaristic aggression and “fascism” the invasion of Haiti. Lula, at the behest of the United States, invaded Haiti and, for more than 10 years, maintained with Dilma a criminal occupation to massacre the continent’s poorest population. After this decade of military aggression at the service of imperialism, the PT and Brazilian occupation troops left Haiti even poorer, plagued by diseases, houses in rubble and general destruction. Fascism, fascism and fascism should be shouted by the Social Democrats.

Someone might then say: but Bolsonaro said it will no longer have any activism in his government. In the first place, wanting is not power. The current correlation of forces would not allow any government (from Bolsonaro or anyone else) to implant a dictatorship, much less a regime like that of fascism; and activism and struggles will continue. In second place, statements of threat to workers are not exclusive from Bolsonaro.

In the 2006 elections, PSOL candidate Heloísa Helena threatened Bolivia and Bolivian workers who paralyzed Petrobras’ activities in the country, saying that with it there would not be the Lula government’s leniency in dealing with the situation. She also said that there would be no occupation of land in her government. As obviously all land conflicts would not be resolved, we can imagine where there would come a guarantee that there would be no more occupation.

In these elections, the oligarch colonel Ciro Gomes, a bourgeois who has beaten and suppressed demonstrators of all kinds in Ceará, and who was already part of governments that repressed struggles from Itamar, FHC and Lula, gave an even more violent statement. He said that in a government of his, no truck would interrupt road. And he left no doubt of how he would repress the workers: he would call the army! The “fascist” Ciro Gomes, with his also vice fascist, Kátia Abreu, is yes a commander of genocide against the indigenous and peasant leaders; however, was enthusiastically and almost uncritically supported by much of the left … A complete “fascist” platform, by the bias of the reformists, if they had any coherence.

The curious thing is that all the “old fascists” accused of this for more than 20 years now have become “allies of democracy”! All the PSDB, the PMDB, Ciro Gomes and whoever else, are Democrats in the fight against the fascist Bolsonaro. Even Globo, Veja, Esto É, Infomoney and all other sources of the bourgeois press, accused until yesterday, are cited to prove that Bolsonaro is going to start fascism ..

Fascism is nothing like that! The PT is not fascist, Beto Richa is not fascist, Ciro Gomes and even Katia Abreu are not fascists, Alckmin and his Opus Dei are not fascists and a Bolsonaro government would not be fascist. As much as there is repression to the social movements and actions of oppression, capitalism does not survive without repression, without racism, without male chauvinism and without LGBTQfobia. Or even the most basic lessons of classism have people thrown into the trash? Violence is no exception, something external and incompatible with bourgeois democracy. On the contrary: it is a fundamental part of it. The bourgeois-democratic regime is, before it is democratic (for the bourgeois), a less harsh but still part version of the state terror of the bourgeois dictatorship against the workers.

Reformism believes in fascism and socialism by the ballot box

The key point that permeated the left’s discussion in the second half of this 2018 presidential campaign was whether there is fascism or not at the gates of Brazil. We say 2nd half of the elections because, curiously, in the first half of it, when the PT had to go to a 2nd round against Bolsonaro (imagined as a radical, from a small party and easier to be defeated), fascism was barely mentioned , and the main criticisms were against the PSDB or the campaign was simply to explain that “Haddad is Lula” ..

Leaving aside the phase in which Bolsonaro was the preferred opponent in a second round, we go to the second phase: when, conveniently to a demoralized party, traitor to the people and bourgeois, which is the PT, the specter of fascism came to prowl Brazil … What changed in Brazil in such a short time to get out of a General Strike in 2017, waves of student occupations in schools, millions of women struggling and strikes by truck drivers, teachers and dozens of other sectors; to a pre-fascist scenario? Is Fascism an Election Phenomenon? A fascist candidate goes there, is a candidate, and if he wins, does he implant fascism? If so, a Communist candidate, if win the election will you implement communism? By the vote?

Of course not! For the petty bourgeoisie and its political analysts, including many who understand themselves as Marxists, but whose elaborations are completely idealistic, phenomena are essentially decided in the superstructure. Therefore, if a woman is elected, this is the feminist triumph; a Negro is an anti-racist triumph and a worker is proof that “now the government is ours”. Exactly these phrases have already been heard in the elections of Dilma, Obama and Lula, among many others. Always illusions … This ideology, as a false conscience, is part of the pacifist and pacifist electoral conception, completely adapted to capitalism, that the state or the regime are neutral and acquire the content of the individuals who assume their leadership.

But in real life it is not so. Regardless of who manages the government, it is the expression of the interests of a class, and whatever party it may be, without a social revolution and without the destruction of the entire State, by one of its institutions, any government will be male chauvinist, racist and of the bourgeoisie, no matter the gender, color or origin of the individual class of who is elected. Because, much more than the apparent movements in the superstructure, it is the movements in the structure (between the classes) that determine the actual changes.

To have a change of state; so that power ceases to be a minority of bourgeoisie and passes into the hands of another class, a majority of workers, it will take a revolution, a great movement of classes and a struggle with the victory of the class now exploited. It will not be any election that will change the state. Similarly, on a much less scale, it will not be an election that will change the different types of regime within states. A dictatorship is not always fascist. But not even a dictatorship can be implemented merely by an electoral vote. Much less fascism, the most violent form of attack on workers.

Fascism is a way out that arises from banks and companies, not from quarters

Trotsky conceptualized that fascism, which Marx, Engels, and Lenin did not live to analyze, was the ultimate expression of bourgeois policy of crushing the proletariat. A bourgeoisie and an economy highly in crisis, with a mass agitation or real threat to capitalist interests on the part of the workers, could lead the bourgeoisie to almost complete militarization and repression on the working class.

Such a fascist regime should count on the radicalization and support of the petty bourgeoisie, and in general the manipulation of sectors of the lumpen proletariat, willing to do the dirty work, as paramilitary detachments of mercenaries against the workers. The proletariat would have to be defeated so that there would be the triumph of these forces and a bourgeoisie with no way out but to abdicate itself from part of its democratic freedoms and free exploitation, to concentrate the power in the hands of a truculent faction, often having to resort to the nationalization of a good part of the productive forces, and a financial and ideological mobilization of persecution against communists and “social agitators”, but with the inevitable repression and prejudice of some bourgeois sectors, for the benefit of some other major sectors.

Still according to Trotsky, fascism is a phenomenon of exacerbation of capitalism and, therefore, corresponds to the countries of developed capitalism, as were Germany or Italy. In semi-colonial countries like Brazil, the maximum that could exist is what he called semi-fascism. Not for being milder or less violent, but for socially expressing a phenomenon without the destructive capacity of this same regime within imperialist countries.

In this sense, who “shoots” fascism are the capitalists. The bourgeois as a class, or a sector of this class, as usually occurs. In any case, the main bourgeoisie must be determined to fascism. Its press, its banks, its great industries are the defenders of fascism or dictatorship, and the military are its instruments. The Armed Forces are the armed agents used by the bourgeoisie to implement, by extreme force, a regime of aggressive attacks on the working class, which would not be possible by the normal mechanisms of bourgeois-democracy.

The military is not a social class of its own! They have no interests as a class, nor a state project or political autonomy to do what they want. Fascism and dictatorships have class content and are capitalist! Whoever established Nazism was not Hitler. Nor was it Mussolini who created the fascism or Pinochet who gave the coup in Chile. Neither were “the military” who coup in 1964 alone in Brazil. They were all movements of the bourgeoisie as a class, and the individuals who took over the headquarters were employees of these bourgeois.

Germany was utterly destroyed in the 1920s by the defeat in World War I that had destroyed the country, its lands, factories, infrastructure and work force, with millions dead. More than that, the winning countries imposed fees to cover their war expenses to the defeated countries, and in addition to the country’s poverty and dismantling, the feeling was of general humiliation, having to rebuild the country and the resources being looted by the other European powers . In the midst of all this, the German Communists tried to seize power with popular revolutions in 1919 and 1923. They were violently defeated, with the murder of Rosa Luxemburg and thousands of militants by the German bourgeois-democratic government, which was no dictatorship … The economy was in tatters, with a record hyperinflation, which made families have to carry cash in grocery cars to buy some food (the film Ingmar Bergman’s Serpent Egg is a classic that portrays this pre-Nazi era). Hunger, unemployment, misery and humiliation, together with the attempt of the workers’ revolutions, were the triggers for the bourgeoisie to choose an extreme solution, and Nazism was fabricated. Hitler was the individual who assumed the position of head of this movement, but the real drivers of Nazism were others: Bayer, Siemens, Basf, Volkswagen, BMW, Krupp, Daimler-Benz, Dr. Oetker and countless companies including from other countries , who came to be adversaries of the Germans in the Second War, such as IBM (who organized the entire method of mass execution of the Jews), Coca-Cola, Ford, Esso, Texaco, etc., etc. All the banks, major corporations and mainstream media sectors more than supported Nazism: they set it up. The Nazis were not anti-liberal “statizers.” They nationalized the necessary sectors to have more firepower against the workers and the workers’ state in the former USSR, but kept all large enterprises intact. Siemens, Basf and Bayer came to set up factories within camps and concentration with Jewish slave labor … It was for them that Nazism was made. They created him. Hitler was only their manager.

The same in Mussolini’s Italy, Franco’s Spain and so on. It is the classes or expressive sectors of it that change regimes and states! Not individuals, not even elections. In Brazil in 1964, it was the companies that did the coup. Today it is already treated as a “civil-military coup” because it is clear that it was not the military who took power alone. They were primarily the instrument of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie. One of the main leaders of the coup was the banker and governor of Minas, Magalhães Pinto, owner of the National Bank, who, of course, later became richer in the dictatorship and became famous in the 1980s for stamping the ever-present head cap of the pilot Ayrton Senna.

The 1964 coup was funded by at least 95 companies and 125 entrepreneurs as “physical donors,” and had conspiratorial organs such as Ipes, which promoted massive anti-government propaganda through courses, lectures, magazine advertisements and mega televisive productions for the coup. Banco Mercantil [The Mercantile Bank] of São Paulo, Itaú, Scania, Pinheiros Produtos Farmacêuticos, Ultragaz, Ford, Volkswagen, Chrysler, Supergel and other companies funded the infrastructure of the coup itself, providing armored cars and trucks to pre-cooked meals, according to according to the Truth Commission. The Brazilian Telephone Directories, Light, Cruzeiro do Sul, Refinery and Exploration of Petroleum Union and Icomi were other companies that led the financing of the coup.

But it was not just the set of companies; it was the press. 13 TV vehicles (all that existed) and almost all the radios and newspapers supported the coup, including Globo and Folha de São Paulo. The bourgeois support was hegemonic and the coming of the dictatorship was aimed at stopping the growing social struggles, as well as a response to the Cuban revolution that occurred a few years earlier in 1959. Since Nazism was a violent way out to defend the interests of the capitalists against the movements communists who grew up in Europe.

Now we ask after this long explanation: what does this have to do with Brazil of 2018? Where are the big industrialists, banks and companies supporting the dictatorship? What do Globo, Folha de São Paulo and the main spokesmen of the Brazilian bourgeoisie talk about? Almost all of them are critics of Bolsonaro. But the PT was not the first choice of these sectors, and became since 2002, so it may also be that Bolsonaro will be supported by them, who have always preferred the PSDB. They adapt … But Bolsonaro will have to fulfill their program! How Lula and Dilma did it! It will not be the Bolsonaro program, which hardly has one.

Lula did not want to and could not face these groups within capitalism. Bolsonaro does not want, can not and will not face them, anyway. The Bolsonaro government will be a bourgeois and neoliberal government, of many attacks against the workers. Following the orders of the great bourgeoisie and maintaining all its normal functioning. As anyone would be: Haddad would be, Ciro would be. There may be a different rhythm in these attacks, as there were distinctions between Lula and Dilma, or between the two mandates of FHC; more by different economic situations and of correlation of forces, and not by the parties in the government.

But there will be no dictatorship in Brazil, much less a fascist government. Fascism is a measure of the bourgeoisie, which needs political conditions for this and economic interest in this option, which, despite the advantages it brings, generates immense costs and an international wear and internal political and social crisis totally undesirable today.

Just as the reformist left has lost the referential of the revolution and thinks that socialism can come from the polls, it has lost any notion of what true fascism is, which has turned it into an electoral caricature. This electoral version is even more serious because it not only serves to justify its capitulation and class collaboration to the bourgeois PT project, but also disarms the workers for the real armed struggle against a real armed fascism that may be in the future.

The Fascism is fought with armed committees for self-defense of the proletariat

Within the colossal error of considering that Brazil may be on the verge of joining a fascist regime, the reformist “left” commits an immense political crime, which can have serious consequences and cost workers in the face of a real threat of fascism that may come – to that is always possible, at least as a theoretical hypothesis, as long as capitalism is not destroyed and replaced by a workers’ state.

This political crime is to de-educate activists that fascism is fought with voting and pacifist speech. This is to prepare the camp for the massacre of the proletariat, which would be destroyed by a fascism that actually came into existence, because instead of resistance, it would encounter pacifists preaching vows, flowers and education as a form of democracy defense, under bursts of machine guns, bombs and tanks crushing whatever lay ahead.

Fascism or even a dictatorship that did not reach the point of fascism, but which imposed mass persecution of militants, civil liberties, censorship, closure of institutions of bourgeois democracy, etc., would be responsible for thousands of executions and tens of thousands of prisons and torture; at least.

What do PT, PSOL, PCdoB, PCB, part of the PSTU, countless anarchists say(the anarchists never voted as much as in this election … always in the bosses and bourgeois, like Haddad, Marina and Ciro / Katia Abreu)? They say that there is imminent fascism, and that “resistance” is to vote 13-Haddad. This is so opportunistic and out of the reality today, signifying an extreme surrender and capitulation to the bourgeois block of the PT gang; as it is a disservice to class consciousness and “teaches” that fascism is fought back with “peace and love.” It is the flooring for a future fascism, now non-existent and ghostly, but one day that may come, and will find cowards, virtual and useless militants, if this speech prevails.

It is also the same risk contained in Aesop’s fable called “The Boy who cried Wolf”, where the boy, from screaming “wolf” without being a one, when he needed to truly scream, was not taken seriously.

We have already shown that there is no minimum condition for us to enter a fascist regime or to enter a dictatorship in the next period, and that Bolsonaro’s election is incapable of changing the country’s political regime. We also prove that there is already a carnage against blacks, women, indigenous people and LGBTQs, and that this mass killing and aggression is intrinsic to capitalism, tragically increasing in all governments (including the PT) and will remain terrible with Haddad or Bolsonaro, without one of the options being less bourgeois, or more able to brake or raise these indicators.

But for a moment, despite the lack of basis in concrete facts, historical precedent and current material conditions for this, let’s imagine that we are about to fall into fascism or a dictatorship … We ask the frantic “antifascist fighters” who “give their lives to get some more votes”, let’s go to the armed committees for self-defense?

Yes, because there is no serious combat to military and paramilitary groups, who refuse to intervene through bourgeois democracy (which is already murderous, genocidal and truculent, but has legal limits), without a response as or even more violent as self- defense! Fascism exists to end any resistance to capitalist exploitation and to be able to wipe out any opposition from the workers – it is a total outbreak of violence against our class. The workers, therefore, have only one way of facing fascism: with their own armament, facing and physically defeating the fascists!

We could explain this infinitely, draw and spend hours dealing with what is evident. But it is better to let Trotsky, the great Russian revolutionary, explain. In “The Transitional Program,” he devotes an entire chapter to the tactic to confront fascism, which at the time was real.

Trotsky says: “Reformists systematically instill in the workers the idea that sacrosanct democracy is best ensured when the bourgeoisie is armed to the teeth and the workers disarmed.

The duty of the Fourth International is to end, once and for all, this servile policy. The petty-bourgeois democrats – including the Social-Democrats, the Stalinists, and the anarchists – are so loudly crying out about the struggle against fascism, the more cowardly they capitulate to it. The fascists groups can be successfully opposed by armed workers who feel the support of tens of millions of workers behind them. The struggle against fascism begins not in the writing of a liberal newspaper, but in the factory and ends on the street. Traitors and private guards in factories are the fundamental cells of the army of fascism. STRIKE PICKETS are the fundamental cells of the proletarian army. That’s where we need to initiate. At the time of each strike and every street demonstration, it is necessary to propagate the idea of ​​the need to create WORKERS SELF DEFENSE DETACHMENTS. It is necessary to put this watchword on the agenda of the revolutionary wing of the trade unions. It is necessary to form practically self-defense detachments wherever possible to start with youth organizations and to lead them to the handling of weapons.

The new wave of the mass movement must serve not only to increase the number of detachments, but also to unify them by neighborhoods, cities, regions. It is necessary to give an organized expression to the legitimate hatred of the workers for the gangs and bands of gangsters and fascists. It is necessary to launch the slogan of WORKERS MILITIA as the only serious guarantee for the inviolability of workers’ organizations, meetings and press.

It is only thanks to a systematic, constant, indefatigable and courageous work in agitation and propaganda, always in relation to the experience of the masses themselves that the traditions of docility and passivity can be excised from their consciousness; educate detachments of heroic combatants, capable of setting an example for all workers; to inflict a series of tactical defeats on the sides of the counterrevolution; increase the self-confidence of the exploited and oppressed; to discredit fascism in the eyes of the petty bourgeoisie and to open the way to the proletariat’s conquest of power.

Engels defined the state as “detachments of armed people”. The arming of the Proletariat is the indispensable constituent element of his emancipatory struggle. When the proletariat so desires, it will find the ways and means of arming itself. The direction, also in this domain, of course belongs to the sections of the Fourth International. ” The Negritos are ours.

Done. So, considering that all the Marxist analyzes we do are wrong, and that the specter of fascism is really the representation of a real fascism that in a few weeks will fall upon our class, we make a call: let us build our armed self-defense committees! Who else will be with us?

Pacifism as a social-democratic expression. Against the statute of disarmament!

One of the most misguided and right-wing arguments promoted by sectors that are part of Haddad’s bourgeois campaign are either defenders of the PT gang’s crimes, or those who are “critical supporters,” whose overwhelming majority gives 99 percent of votes and support, maximum 1% of criticism; is the defense of the disarmament Statute that exists today in Brazil and the general disarmament of the population.

This is the cumulus of adaptation to bourgeois democracy and kneeling to the bourgeois state! Repeating part of Trotsky’s earlier quotation in The Transition Program, because it is never too easy to repeat, to see if some reflect: “The reformists systematically instill in the workers the idea that sacrosanct democracy is best ensured when the bourgeoisie is armed until the teeth and the workers unarmed.” .

For Marx and all the revolucionary communists who followed him, the state is a machine of violence and war of the ruling class against the exploited. In this sense, it is a fundamental part of the domination of the ruling class, the bourgeoisie in our case, to focus violence on one or a few institutions, all of them on their command. It is absolutely dangerous and threatening to the bourgeoisie that there is any armament of the workers, considering that capitalism depends on a “monopoly of violence” on the part of the State, its institutions and the Armed Forces and the police.

Revolutionaries, on the contrary, know, or should know, that it is absolutely imperative that exists weapons and means of combat for workers to confront their class enemies. It is not just a relevant point; it is fundamental and priority, as the class struggle becomes radicalized. It is a matter of life or death that there is as much weaponry available to all workers, not just those who are militants, and that revolutionary organizations defend the right to armaments as a fundamental democratic right, even within capitalism. We advocate that the state guarantee the right to the widest school education for workers and their children, whether to teach how to read and write, mathematics, physics, geography, sociology, etc. We also advocate that the people have military education. We argue, regardless of whether the controversy over military service is mandatory, that at least it is available to all young men and women who want to enlist. More than that, we defend the free right to carry arms as a means of self-defense of families and to all women and men, attacked by mafias, gangs, and corrupt and criminal policemen. We want the end of the police, most of all the military police, but also the civil police, and that the workers, through self-defense committees and working-class militias, defend themselves, their neighborhoods and their cities.

Arms are freely bought even in bourgeois countries, when this right was due to processes that arose from anti-monarchy democratic revolutions or by the armed struggle of its citizens, generally in the period of bourgeois revolutions. Countries like Norway, Sweden and Finland, in addition to the excellent human development indexes, compared to other capitalist countries, are also heavily armed countries, with about 30% of their population having weapons! In the equally developed Switzerland, 29% of people have gun registration. In Canada, more than 23%. In the United States, there is no need to register the weapon, but the estimate is that 43% of people have guns. In all these countries, violence rates are very low, with the partial exception of the United States.

Even in the US, which seems to be a country of psychopaths and massacres, the reality is nothing of the sort. With a population of 325 million people, with almost half of them armed, there were 17,250 homicides in 2016. In Brazil, with 210 million inhabitants, almost all of them unarmed, there were 60,000 homicides a year. This means that Brazil’s unarmed and “peaceful” population is killed 5.4 times more than the US’s “aggressive” population. What’s the explanation? Simple! More than half of the deaths in Brazil are killed by the police or their agents in their “private” activities, as traffickers, security guards and gunmen in the service of bourgeois. There is an extermination of the poor, blacks and Indigenous in Brazil! And what they all have in common: they are unarmed!

We do not defend the armament to defend their lands and properties as the reactionaries preach. But the truth is that these sectors are already armed. The big businessmen and politicians already walk in armored cars, with security guards and every apparatus of repression at their disposal. For them, there has never been disarmament. Farmers have their jagunços [countryside mercenaries], bosses have their henchmen, and only the worker is beaten and dies without being able to react. We do not have the illusion that the freedom to arm itself would not be accessible to most of the workers, who would not have the resources to buy weapons. But gradually more and more workers were able to buy their cars, their televisions, their refrigerators, their cell phones-often expensive. It would not be different with guns, and it would only take a few years for millions of workers to have their weapons.

It is possible that it increased some banal and lamentable deaths, as in traffic discussions or between neighbors, as the frightened pacifists boast. But they also increased road traffic deaths when more workers bought their cars, and they did not advocate that they should be banned from having cars, which, after all, are “weapons” and could only be transported in collective vehicles. On the other hand, how many deaths of workers killed without the right of reaction by criminals or police would not cease to occur when it was known that the victim could be armed? In any case, it is not about everyday life that the armament of many of the workers’ families would have a reflex. It would be about the inevitable social and political shocks that occur and will occur more and more.

In Cuba, one of the advantages of the revolutionary process of 1959 was that a large number of armed families were willing to face capitalist repression. Of course, tanks and airplanes won’t be defeated with guns and pistols, but it is the revolvers and pistols that confront the snipers’ platoons against demonstrations, which can react to ambushes to execute activists, and it will be personal weapons, in the hands of thousands and millions, which will allow, with the correct dispute of the Armed Forces also inside, to take police stations, barracks, parades and weapons depots. Revolutions have always had these processes. But in all of them, it was necessary to have the armament of the workers.

That is why we are absolutely against the Brazilian Disarmament Statute. It is a great farce made by the bourgeois of the PSDB, with the enthusiastic support of the traitors and future bourgeois of the PT, both framed in the fear that an armed population could mean against themselves, their privileges and bourgeois institutions. We have already voted againts of a further tightening of the restrictions on the democratic right to buy and carry arms in the referendum on the disarmament referendum in 2005, when the PT tried to ensure that the arms were still under the exclusive possession of the bourgeoisie and of its Armed Forces and private security guards. At the time, PT, PCdoB and other opportunist and pacifist groups like PSOL were in favor, for the “yes”, more disarmament of the proletariat, but sectors such as the PSTU and small groups acted correctly in fighting for “no”.

Fortunately, the majority of the population rejected this reactionary measure, and it did not win by a wave of 63% of the votes. PT, PSDB, PP, PMDB, Rede Globo and the vast majority of the parties and bourgeois were defeated, but they kept the rest of the Statute, which from its creation prevented the workers from having their arms against the arms of those who always had them.

Today, the pacifist “left” is even more pacifist and less leftist, and makes a carnival against the possibility of ending the disarmament statute. They accuse Bolsonaro of wanting to allow the sale of arms and make this accusation one of the most shameful and ridiculous pretexts to call a vote in Haddad and to “prove” that Bolsonaro will install fascism. Holy ignorance, since fascism trembles at the possibility of having armed workers in mass. We, on the contrary, follow the historical tradition of the fighting, real, combative left, and we defend the most ample freedom of purchase and possession of arms. As well as state-owned and affordable production for all, and free military and weapons-handling instruction provided by governments. We know that part of this democratic program for the armament of the workers will not occur, and we doubt even Bolsonaro’s ability to actually guarantee the right to buy arms and to revoke the Statute. But this is a banner that we defend under all governments and must be wielded by us, without any hesitation: the end of the Disarmament Statute and the freedom of arms for the workers.

Behind this discussion of guns, there is a deep social adaptation of the pacifist pseudo-left, which, in practice, abandoned any revolutionary perspective. For them, revolution is impossible, or unwanted. The last thing a union bureaucrat, a cabinet worker or petty-bourgeois reformist wants is to imagine himself in a conflict over the seizure of power. For them, capitalism is eternal and class struggle must be summed up to dispute spaces and guidelines within this system. Little do they know, however, that even those who kneel before the bourgeois state and its rules, are also persecuted. As it showed the death of the councilor Mariele, of the PSOL, that stayed by this, and perhaps will never someone punished!

For reformists, democracy is a universal value. What a fallacy. Democracy, as well as justice, morality, ethics, violence, and so many other concepts or actions are derived from a specific social class, and the bourgeois democracy we live in is a democracy only for the bourgeois, different from the workers-democracy that we defend. Even this workers’ democracy, as the rule of most workers, is provisional, for it will exist only while the workers’ state, the workers’ party and the class struggle must still exist. With the end of world capitalism and the gradual extinction of all forms of state and classes, even in communism, democracy itself, as a concept in any way, will disappear, for all will live under a free and common, self- organized society.

To defend that people can not arm themselves, and that only the police and security guards do, is only one of the most reactionary and criminal sides in the defense of the bourgeois state by the reformists. They now say they are afraid of the weapons that Bolsonaro can release, but Bolsonaro’s cronies are already armed! The murderers of our class are the policemen, who are already armed. Against this, the reformists do not speak – on the contrary, they argue even more that only they can have weapons. We do not trust police or the bourgeois Armed Forces. We do not believe that the State is neutral and that we can live in peace within it. We live in a war, and disarming those who fight and need to fight even more is to be an accomplice of those who kill us.

Unique military front and not Popular Front or electoral support to bourgeois

Against the fascism, the exit of the working class passes, necessarily, by an armed answer; military, in the sense of the people in arms, with class strength being put into motion through direct action, with strikes, demonstrations and self-defense. The unity that is possible and even correct, against real fascism, is the anti-fascist military single front, with the armed engagement of all sectors willing to fight assassins and fascist terror, even if in common with bourgeois democratic sectors. It was the military unit in World War II, for example, that the Trotskyists were the impetus when Stalinism refused to face real Nazi-fascism, and still did the infamous Hitler-Stalin agreement, or Ribbentrop-Molotov .

So we are the ones who most know and apply unity when it is useful and suited to the interests of the working class. Punctual agreements and units of action to overthrow a corrupt and bourgeois government like Dilma’s, for example, will almost always not be restricted to working-class boundaries. The struggle for the Out FHC had bourgeois sectors together, such as the presence of the then Liberal Party in the march of the 100,000 by the Out FHC in 1999. In the same way, the struggle for Fora Collor, Fora Sarney and Fora Temer, when PT itself was already a bourgeois party.

We can and have been with bourgeois sectors in all these moments, and it was very correct; as was a unity of action among countless proletarian sectors, but even more bourgeois organizations the struggle for the Diretas Já [Direct Elections Now] early in the 80s, where the direction of the struggle was clearly bourgeois. Units of action have always been correct and remain, as long as we maintain our political independence and, together with the punctual unit in the field of direct struggle, on the streets, let us also keep the critics to those who will be on our own side, the so-called unity-coping, mandatory and even more important the more we are in the unit. In this same sense, we have been in acts of repudiation of the fascist statements of Bolsonaro, for example, the acts of #elenao [Not him], at the same time that we made even greater critics to the PT and add “#nemosotros [Not Them]”.

Punctual unity and in the field of direct struggle, however, is quite the opposite of making a united front with bourgeois sectors or, even if without bourgeois, in the name of a bourgeois program. We were in the joint military struggle against Gaddafi in Libya and we are standing by the barricades to overthrow Maduro’s dictatorship in Venezuela. We were in the fight of the streets to overthrow Dilma and equally to overthrow Temer. But under no circumstances could we be on a political front, with Caprilles in Venezuela, with the PSDB in an anti-PT election, or with the PT against Bolsonaro. This is a scandal!

That is, in relation to sectors that are of the bourgeoisie, our program is to destroy them! However, circumstantially, and since maintaining and even deepening our class independence and confrontation with them, the working class can and should have some units. What are they? In the field of political struggle, we can have agreements and units of action, punctual and in the field of direct action. In the field of anti-fascist struggle, which is essentially military, united military front! However, under no case, under no circumstances, the united political front with any bourgeois sector. Allying with bourgeois sectors politically is the way to the demoralization of the working class and the fastest route to the victory of even more right-wing bourgeois or even fascists.

The anti-Bolsonaro front that exists today fulfills this nefarious role, because it is not a front of fight, but a polyclassist front, opportunist and of conciliation of classes, political and electoral, subordinated to a bourgeois party, neoliberal and corrupt, that is the PT. Fascism is not placed in the current Brazilian reality, but if it develops, it will be derived from this type of betrayal by the left, which refrains from facing the different bourgeois blocks and decides to join, bag and baggage, with one of these blocks enemies of our class ..

Once again, let us read what Trotsky wrote in The Transitional Program: “There is no reason to see the cause of these defeats in the power of fascist ideology. Mussolini, in fact, never had the least ideology. Hitler’s ideology never seriously influenced the workers. The layers of the population that fascism, at one point gained, above all the middle classes, have had time to lose the illusions about him. If in spite of everything an opposition, however slight, is confined to the clerical, Protestant and Catholic circles, the cause is not found in the strength of the semi-delirious, semi-charlatan theories of “race” and “blood” , but the staggering bankruptcy of the ideologies of democracy, social democracy and the Communist International. (our note: the Communist International, despite its name, was an international Stalinist who had already been a traitor and had reconciled with Hitler before World War II).

After the crushing of the Paris Commune, a stifling reaction lasted about eight years. After the defeat of the Russian Revolution of 1905, the working masses remained stuck in stupor for almost the same period of time. However, in these two cases, it was only physical defeats, determined by the relation of forces. In Russia, moreover, it was an almost virgin proletariat. The fraction of the Bolsheviks was then only 3 years old. The situation was completely different from Germany, where the leadership belonged to powerful parties, one being 70 years old and the other about 15. These two parties, which had millions of voters, were morally paralyzed before the fight and they surrendered without fighting. There has never been such a catastrophe in history. The German proletariat was not defeated by the enemy in a combat: it was slaughtered by the cowardice, abjection and betrayal of its own parties. No wonder the workers lost faith in everything that they had been accustomed to believe for almost three generations. Hitler’s victory, in turn, reinforced Mussolini.

The real failure of revolutionary work in Italy and Germany is only the result of the criminal policy of Social Democracy and the CI …. Emigrant chiefs are mostly agents of the Kremlin and the GPU demoralized to the bone marrow or old social-democratic ministers of the bourgeoisie who hope, by some miracle, that the workers return their lost posts to them. Can these gentlemen be imagined for a moment as the leaders of the future “anti-fascist” revolution?

(…) From this point of view, as well as from others, Stalin is only an auxiliary of Goebbels!

(…) The “Popular Front” in emigration is one of the most nefarious and most treacherous varieties of all possible popular fronts. It means, basically, the impotent nostalgia of a coalition with a non-existent liberal bourgeoisie. If it had any success, it would only prepare a series of new defeats of the proletariat in the Spanish way. That is why the ruthless critique of the theory and practice of the “Popular Front” is the first condition of a revolutionary struggle against fascism.

This does not mean, of course, that the Fourth International rejects democratic slogans. On the contrary, they can at times have a huge role. But the formulas of democracy (freedom of assembly, association, press, etc.) are for us transient or episodic slogans in the independent movement of the proletariat, and not a democratic slant passing around the neck of the proletariat by the agents of the bourgeoisie (Spain). From the moment the movement takes on any character of masses, transient wachwords will blend into democratic slogans: factory committees will appear, and we must see this before the old traitor launch, from their offices, the building of unions; the councils will cover Germany before a new Constituent Assembly has convened in Weimar. The same will happen in Italy and in other totalitarian or semi-totalitarian countries.

Fascism has launched these countries in the field of political barbarism. But it did not change its social character. Fascism is an instrument of financial capital and not of feudal latifundial property. The revolutionary program must rely on the dialectic of the class struggle, which is valid also for the fascist countries and not for the psychology of the frightened bankrupt. The Fourth International rejects with disgust the political masquerade methods to which the Stalinists, the ancient heroes of the “third period,” to appear, sometimes with masks of Catholics, Protestants, Jews, German nationalists, liberals for the sole purpose of to hide his own unattractive face.

The Fourth International always appears everywhere under It’s own banner. It openly proposes its program to the proletariat of the fascist countries. From now on the advanced workers of the whole world are firmly convinced that the overthrow of Mussolini, Hitler, his agents and imitators will take place under the direction of the Fourth International. “

Trotsky’s words written in 1938 still echo, 80 years later! How many new Stalinists and social democrats today do not hide their program, their flags and their colors, don’t they become Catholics, evangelicals and liberals to win votes and hide their own unattractive face? We, on the contrary, do not stop fighting for the democratic flags, but we combine them with the transitory banners to socialism, the slogans of the workers’ revolution. Without any front or electoral capitulation to the bourgeoisie who have been at the forefront of the country in the last 20 years, between PSDB and PT, today together “for democracy”, with the support of FHC, Alberto Goldman and other Toucan leaders to Haddad’s campaign.

Stalin was an auxiliary of Goebbels and Haddad is an auxiliary of Bolsonaro, whose candidacy and possible election are due to the cowardice, abjection and betrayal of the parties that call themselves left-wing, including the PT, PCdoB and PSOL.

Adhering to Haddad’s campaign, as well as joining the campaigns of Ciro Gomes, both bourgeois, neoliberal and projects that massacred the working class they have gone through, is to play the bourgeoisie game, disarming the workers and in this position can open the path to a fascist risk in the future.

If Bolsonaro represents fascism, and it is worth voting for any candidate for “democracy,” one must also vote for Eduardo Paes, Anastasia, Barbalho and a dozen bourgeois

Some of those who voted for Fernando Haddad in this second round, and also voted for him, or Ciros, or Marina or Boulos in the first round, claim that voting for the PT is “defending democracy”, as Bolsonaro would establish a dictatorship in Brazil, at the very least, and a fascist regime at most. Well, no one is a fascist alone! And the same ones who spread the pro-PT bourgeois speech of the imminent fascist terror that can ravage Brazil, have to admit that Bolsonaro is together with the 52 deputies elected by the PSL, plus the bullet, bible and bull counterparts (military, pastors and ruralists deputies) as the parliamentary base that will impose fascism in the country. In all, there would be hundreds of fascist parliamentarians or inclined to support a dictatorship that Bolsonaro installed, and the fight against Bolsonaro must also express itself against all the others.

Well … following this anti-dialectical reasoning and with which we disagree strongly, we must be consistent and have the same logic in the second-round electoral disputes in the states! After all, the 1964 coup and dictatorship began by the governor of MG, Magalhaes Pinto, and Bolsonaro would need local leaders to impose fascism that will end life as we know it, according to the petistas, threatening to put themselves as salvation against all this disaster. And, in fact, in almost every state there are candidates directly attached to Bolsonaro. Military, people with pro-fascist speech and who are the mirror image of the “national fascist leader”.

So, to defend democracy, there could be no borders. Those who vote for Haddad against Bolsonaro must vote for those who face Bolsonaro’s candidates in the states who will be the chiefs of the military police who will massacre the workers. Of the two, one: a) or have to admit that they are voting in Haddad and the PT for the merits they see in them and for the sympathy and support they give them, and acknowledge that they are co-opted petistas; or (b) claim that they are opposition and critics of the PT, but that they vote on it with a stuffy nose, in the name of democracy, and that they would do so in the same way with all Democrats against a fascist.

Anyone who wishes to support this second hypothesis of the “critical vote against the supporters of fascism” is absolutely obliged to admit that he would also vote in Ciro / Kátia Abreu against Bolsonaro, in Alckmin against Bolsonaro, in Meirelles against Bolsonaro; and even in FHC against Bolsonaro and Renan Calheiros against Bolsonaro, if that were possible! They are all, after all, “democrats” who are in the field of Haddad, against fascism and the return of the dictatorship.

But in addition to admitting to vote in bandits and bourgeois of all parties, from the PT to the PSDB and MDB, the voter of Haddad, in order to be taken seriously, must also vote against the state mini-Bolsonaros, or “bolsominions”, as they say. Bolsonaro is represented by candidates who are his image and likeness.

1) Wilson Witzel is from PSC in RJ, a former Marine, who defends that good bandit is dead bandit and is a pup of Bolsonaro. 2) Wilson Lima is from PSC in AM, presenter of Record, Universal Church and Bishop Edir Macedo, a fascist of the Amazon, place in which his Military Police can exterminate Indigenous. 3) Colonel Marcos Rocha is from the PSL in RO, another place where ruralists already massacred Indigenous and rural workers. 4) Antonio Denarium belongs to Bolsonaro’s own party, the PSL, as well as a great businessman and ruralist – a mixture of owner of Havan stores, leader of the UDR and Bolsonaro – is a candidate in Roraima, where Venezuelans flee from hunger and of Maduro’s repression, and that Bolsonaro wants to criminalize. Finally, among the most explicit cases, 5) Commander Moisés, also of the “fascist PSL” of Bolsonaro, disputing the government of Santa Catarina, a truculent colonel.

At least in these 5 states, Bolsonaro’s candidates are as fascist as he is. If it is worth the “fight with anyone for democracy,” there can be no doubt in supporting and campaigning for those who face them: 1) Eduardo Paes (DEM), 2) Amazonino Mendes (PDT), 3) Expedito Junior PSDB), 4) Anchieta (PSDB) and 5) Gelson Merisio (PSD). All are bourgeois, all are right-wing parties, all are corrupt. Just like Haddad … But they are the “anyone” against the “fascist candidates”.

Eduardo Paes is a gangster, a thief in Pezão’s group, Sérgio Cabral, but also a great ally of Lula and Lindhberg Farias and a Democrat against a possible dictator. Amazonino is a corrupt former explorer, but a “Democrat from Ciro Gomes’ party.” Expedito is Toucan and neoliberal, whose mandate as senator has even been annulled for corruption, but is a teacher against a “fascist colonel of the PSL” and democracy is at risk … Anchieta is also a Toucan, also was ruled as governor for corruption, but is an engineer and democrat near the ruralist Denarium, the fascist PSL. And Gelson Merisio is from the PSD of Kassab, but what does it matter, it is not, after all, it is against Commander Moisés, another Fascist of Bolsonaro and the PSL, precisely in SC, where there have already been neo-Nazi groups detected.

Thus, if they want to have a minimum of consistency, the voters of Haddad who call themselves critics, and who claim that it is not a vote in the PT, but “against Bolsonaro”, “against the dictatorship” and so on, are obliged to vote in these 5 bourgeois criminals, “democrats” in the elections in RJ, AM, RO, RR and SC. At least.

If there is no doubt about the correlation between the struggle of “democracy and dictatorship” of the national dispute with those of these five states, we can not fail to note that Bolsonaro would have important allies, totally closed with him and would certainly support his dictatorship, other 6 states. And in our view, if Bolsonaro is going to establish a dictatorship that will end democracy, it is secondary that some candidates are not themselves Fascists or Bolsonaro party because they are part of the political field that will elect Bolsonaro, sustain their dictatorship in the states and apply their program of violence through the PMs [Military Polices], which will be controlled by them.

Thus, against bolsonarist Romeo Zema (MG), mega-entrepreneur, we should be forced to vote “critically” in Antônio Anastasia in Minas, even though he is from the PSDB and Aecio Neves’s godson. In Para, to vote against the Bolsonarist Marcio Miranda (DEM), campaigning for Helder Barbalho (MDB), of the oligarchy of colonels headed by Jader Barbalho, but that are against Bolsonaro. In this case, even the PT is already on the stage and fully engaged in the Barbalho campaign, which was also Minister of Dilma. Good part of PSOL too. Only PSTU is missing, which has already allied with PCdoB in the state …

Likewise, in Mato Grosso do Sul, against the ruralist Reinaldo Azambuja (from the bolsonarista and non-democratic wing of the PSDB), Odilon de Oliveira, another “good bourgeois” of Ciro’s PDT, should be campaigned. Same thing in SP, where João Dória is a bolsonarista toucan, who would be at the head of the largest and most armed PM of Brazil, supporting the dictatorship of Bolsonaro, against which it would have to support Márcio França, of the PSB, although he himself is the current governor, after being deputy of Alckmin. And also a situation similar to that of RS, where Eduardo Leite is also a fellow of the PSDB, king of antipetism, and would have to be defeated by the democrat Jose Ivo Sartori, who never paid salary to employees, is corrupt, threatens to sell state-owned companies all the time , but he is a “Democrat of the MDB” … Finally, the curious case of the RN, in which Carlos Eduardo Alves is a PDT companion of Ciro Gomes, but is a fierce bolsonarista, focusing his entire campaign on attacking the PT and his opponent Fatima Bezerra, the only one who can be elected by the PT of Haddad in the second round, teacher like Haddad.

How to vote Haddad against Bolsonaro, but not to vote in Fatima against a bolsonarista, even of the PDT of Ciro? How to justify campaigning for the national PT and not doing the same against the representatives of Bolsonaro in MS, SP, MG, PA; where the future dictatorship would have governors aligned with the mass repression that can reach us? Therefore, those who vote in the PT for president, at least, are forced to defend the vote in five regional bourgeoisie, but, taking literally, would have to vote in the “progressive bourgeois camp” in 11 states in all.

It is the sad end of those who joined the bourgeois PT block: having to support toucans, thieves, and political scum like Eduardo Paes, Barbalhos, Alckmin’s deputy, and Sartori; if they want to take their own speech seriously.

We repudiate this conception, which is nothing more than the reissue of the infamous Menshevik and Social Democrat politics, and then firmly assumed by Stalinism, to renounce class independence, and to be always willing to support or be part of a ” progressive bourgeois camp” against a supposed “regressive bourgeois camp “.

The so-called “field theory,” so called by Stalin and his minions, made him give up and abort revolutions in the name of “lesser evil.” A disastrous policy that led millions of workers to death, to prisons and to life under bourgeois exploitation and violence, renouncing the struggle for socialist revolution and lending itself to the auxiliary role of some bourgeois sector, now described as a nationalist against imperialism , Democrat against fascism, progressive against the reactionary, and so on. This farce assembled by the PT in Brazil is not new, and although it always wins many supporters, it can never confuse or capitulate coherent revolutionaries.

But the PT, even though it was never revolutionary, when it was still a left-wing and working-class party, showed the opposite of what it is all about today in the 1980s. Brazil was still living a dictatorship (!) And the military regime had a candidate in the indirect elections of 1985: Paulo Maluf, a government representative who killed thousands of workers, tortured women and committed endless atrocities. Maluf, who later became Lula’s and Haddad’s successor in his election as mayor of SP, at the time was the PDS, a name that the semi-fascist ARENA assumed in the 1980s, and faced Democrat Tancredo Neves.

According to today’s logic, there could be no doubt about voting for Tancredo! Maluf was not a nostalgist of the dictatorship, like Bolsonaro; he was much worse: he had been her leader! In fact, Brazil was still living in the dictatorship! But the PT did the opposite of what PSOL, PSTU and other left-wing opportunist parties are currently doing, which are campaigning for Haddad. The PT called null vote! Not only did he say that Maluf and Tancredo were bourgeois and bosses, and that none deserved the vote of the exploited, as expelled the 5 deputies who had that they decided to vote in Tancredo against the partisan decision. Cast them out as traitors of the class!

At that time, even reformist, the PT acted with class independence! His slogan was that “worker votes for a worker” and, long before the PSTU’s “counter-bourgeois vote 16” rhyme, the PT was the one who created this rhyme in the 1980s, saying “against bourgeois, vote 3”, the number with which it competed in the first elections. It even misses the reformism of the PT of the 80’s, much more combative, fighting and classist than the PSOL and the PSTU in this and most of the last elections.

The tragedy of democratic reaction

Capitalism, despite its colossal structural economic crisis, in which the productive forces have ceased to grow for decades, survives and often so apparently quietly, for a number of factors, but undoubtedly one of the major reasons for its strength is the illusion that awakens in great masses that life, however bad it may be, can always be changed by the vote.

This belief is completely false and unfounded, because nowhere on the planet, neither at the national, state, or municipal level, has any elected government put an end to exploitation of workers, discrimination against oppressed sectors, or any other great achievement. There are governments less worse than others, of course, but all are part of maintaining the current state of affairs. All parties and sectors of the bourgeois class have been in power on different occasions, as have almost all the parties that emerged as working-class parties, and nothing significant has been done by the workers. On the contrary, life in general only deteriorates, with fewer rights, more exploitation, more poverty, more environmental destruction …

Nationalists, privatists, social democrats, neo-liberals, interventionists, Popular Fronts; all different versions of the same thing: capitalist governments, where banks and big businessmen earn a lot, and the vast majority of the population always loses. And this is not by chance: the rules of the electoral game, within capitalism, were made to prevent the system from being changed. Thus, names and acronyms can be changed, but the exploitation system remains intact.

In Brazil, in order to run for some elective office, you must be affiliated with a legalized party with the TSE and be approved by the summit of this party as a candidate. Therefore, almost all those who are registered to compete are already committed to maintaining the current system, at the very least wanting to improve it from the inside. Among the candidates for executive positions, with some chance of being elected, even if remote, 100% are variants of the same exploitation and corruption that have long chastised the working class.

But hypothetically, if a revolutionary candidate won the elections for president or for governor in some state, which is absolutely impossible with the rules of the game made by the bourgeois themselves, this elected could not change almost anything. The parliament would follow bourgeois and would not approve laws that were against its own system; the Judiciary, if these laws were passed, would declare them illegal and persecute anyone acting “outlaw” themselves; and the Armed Forces, if everything went out of control, would come with direct violence, repressing, dismissing mandates and imposing capitalist domination.

So, there is no chance of really changing capitalism trought the inside. All those who said they would do so have ruled and done or could do nothing. Allende was overthrown by a military coup in 1973 in Chile. All the European “socialist” parties, the PT in Brazil, the “socialists” in the rest of Latin America and other continents have already ruled; and there were dozens of experiences, none of which has changed anything important.

Lech Valesa in Poland in the 1980s, Miterrand at the same time in France, Tony Blair in the United Kingdom in the 1990s, and Chavismo and his Latin American allies (Evo Morales, Rafael Correa, Daniel Ortega, etc.) in the 2000’s with examples of enormous crowds deluded by a popular change through the ballot box, which only became disappointment, attacking the workers and keeping the bourgeoisie in its place. Another common point in these cases was the betrayal of sectors that claimed to be revolutionary and supported all these failed and capitalist experiences, traversed by “Socialism, Third Way, Socialism of the 21st Century, etc.”

Right now, parties still “more radical and more left-wing” rule Greece – the Syriza – and regions of Spain – the Podemos. And they are thunderous failures! They have attacked workers, been unable to seriously defend immigrants, privatized countless companies, promoted neoliberal reforms in welfare and other areas, and systematically demobilized the struggles to channel popular energy to the polls. In Mexico, just assumed the government of the PRD, the “leftist” Lopez Obrador, and we can also assure that it will be another bourgeois government that will not change anything.

That is, elections are a game of cards marked in which, who wins, who wins, life will not change. There are 50 shades of capitalism, some even disguised as communism, but all end up being flours of the same bag. However, despite the fact that the elections have never led anywhere and increasingly to be discredited, as indicated by phenomena such as the “Indignados” in Spain, fighting groups in other places and the massive non-voting of tens of millions of people in Brazil, capitalism still stands on its feet because of this electoral illusion. Called a democratic reaction, it remains paralyzing crowds, who do not break with the system and are always re-feeding the fantasy of a new salvation, which never comes.

The majority of organizations in the left-wing, deeply opportunist and pro-capitalist organizations are part of the democratic reaction, always striving to get workers back on capitalist institutions, even when they are breaking with them. A revolutionary should use the elections to unmask the system and call the fight. The reformist does the opposite: he uses the struggles to promote his candidates and point out the electoral process as the way of change.

But the classes conciliation of reformist doesn’t end with fueling institutional illusions in themselves and their “socialist” candidates. In order to be more likely to be elected, they still try to convince the workers that it is necessary to ally or support bourgeois sectors. This is what the sectors that support Haddad do, or who supported Ciro Gomes / Kátia Abreu in the first round. They deceive, lie and betray the workers by saying that a bourgeois is the alternative to defend their rights or democracy. And this shame is not new.

In Brazil, this electoral and opportunist tactic of alternating the presentation of candidacies with a program of reforms within capitalism, with the support of “progressive” bourgeois sectors, was always characteristic of the Stalinist parties, notably the PCB. From 1937 to 1945, Getúlio Vargas ruled dictatorially, having arrested, tortured and killed communist militants in his government. In one of the most emblematic episodes, Vargas deported to Nazi Germany, the PCB militant Olga Benário, wife of Luís Carlos Prestes, the party’s main leader. Olga was of Jewish origin and was pregnant. Hitler arrested her in a concentration camp until she had her daughter, and murdered her soon after. After all this, the PCB and Prestes still defended the candidacy of Getúlio Vargas in 45. They did it again in the 1950s. Later, they supported Getulio’s successor as a “nationalist and progressive” bourgeois, Jango, who, as well , like Getúlio, not only deepened capitalist measures in Brazil but also paved the way for those who plotted against their governments. In Jango’s case, this led to the military coup of 1964.

In the dictatorship, the PCB was an auxiliary line, cowardly and opportunist, of the MDB, successor of part of the PTB of Vargas and Jango, but still more to the right and legitimating the dictatorship. Redemocratization came in the 1980s, but PCB and its dissent, PCdoB, remained within the PMDB until 1985, when they still supported Tancredo, while the only one with a classist stance was the PT, voting null. From then on, the PCs and the PT, who were born classists and to the left of both, went to the other side of the trench and made a thousand and one coalitions with all kinds of bourgeois, oligarchs, reactionary and corrupt … Always trying to deflect the struggles within the bourgeois-democracy.

Even when Collor was overthrown in 1992, the PT and its Stalinist satellites tried to stop the masses (who at first took to the streets by the “Out Collor” against their position, who criticized the overthrow of the government). The policy of the PT was “Happy 1994”, waiting for the election of Lula. But in the middle of the road, came the Real Plan, which the PT opposed, and then surrendered to it, and FHC’s PSDB would govern until 2002.

Then, this year, the famous “Letter to the Brazilian People” sealed the passage from the PT to the camp of the bourgeoisie, allied with the bourgeois Jose Alencar, and his PL, the party of the reactionary Universal Church. PCB, PCdoB and the sectors that later gave birth to PSOL were all together in this campaign from the outset, and all were part of Lula’s bourgeois government, at least at the beginning, when it approved the Social Security Reform, which was one of the biggest attacks already laid against the workers.

We have still seen 2006, with Lula still more to the right and the recent PSOL and PSTU with a candidacy of Popular Front of Heloísa Helena, bourgeois from head to toe for its content. 2010 and 2014 were repetitions of the same scenario, with small variations. At no point were the elections the starting points for the struggle. On the contrary, every fight that occurred, usually outside the traitorous parties, was dismantled to become a vote in the next election. Even the popular uprising of 2013, which opened the possibility of a revolutionary situation in Brazil, was demoralized by the reformist parties, which were taken by surprise and only joined in the acts, yet to try to domesticate them, in the second half of the demonstrations.

This constant choice of class conciliation is not an error or a naivety. Base militants end up making these mistakes and are naive; but the directions of these organizations consciously apply a counterrevolutionary policy of dismantling the insurrectionary process. Why? Because they are adapted to capitalism. Parliamentarians, union bureaucrats, and a multitude of others benefited by their capitalist share, have already adapted socially and fear revolution more than anything else. Contrary to what Marx said of the workers, who “have nothing to lose but their own chains” in fighting for revolution, reformists have much to lose and do not want to put their comfort, jobs and accommodation to waste.

Even when they make “opposition” to the front-populist governments that are always having their support explicitly or disguised “against the right wing”, it is a false opposition, that is not prepared to seriously threaten them. It’s the opposition on party days!

When the Popular Front governments, or directly bourgeois, goes well, specialy those with more leftist appearance, like the PT’s have become in Brazil, this furious opposition feels at ease to criticize. But it suffices that something threatens the stability of these governments, so that their reformist “critics” jump into the pocket of bourgeois governments on duty, and align themselves with the speech “against the right, against fascism, against the coup” …

It was enough that Dilma ran the risk of losing the election to Aécio in 2014, so that much of the left would give up their positions and join the PT. It was enough for crowds to take to the streets to overthrow Dilma in 2015, culminating in the controlled impeachment of 2016, for the same sectors to shout “coup” in defense of the bourgeois government on duty. So even if they want to argue that support for Haddad this time is different from all other times, the fact is that they change the excuses, but capitulation to the PT is a constant for the reformist left.

Bolsonaro is just the current scapegoat for capitulation. As Aecio was 4 years ago and Temer 2 … As Cazuza wrote, “I see the future repeating the past” and the betrayal of the reformists “is a museum of great news” …

PSOL consolidates as an external PT chain. And the terminal crisis of PCdoB

When it was born, in 2004, the PSOL presented itself as an alternative to the PT, of which most of its militants came. The so-called “movement for a new party”, initiated by the “radicals of the PT” who voted against Lula’s Social Security Reform, was initially driven by Senator Heloísa Helena and MPs Babá, João Fontes and Luciana Genro.

The 4 “radicals” had been part of the PT in more than 10 years of unacceptable betrayals of this party, which ruled states and municipalities attacking strikers and landless, squeezing wages, privatizing companies and ruling to the rich, as it happened in RS, ES , AC, Porto Alegre, São Paulo, Ribeirão Preto, etc. Corruption, political assassinations, physiological alliances with oligarchs and bandits of all kinds had already been made, and nothing of any rupture of the 4. Lula was elected after promising to govern for the bankers, as he confessed and made a point of propagating to the world via “Letter to the Brazilian People, “with José Alencar as his vice president, a bourgeois, owner of industry, and leader of the PL, the party taken by the religious fundamentalists of the Universal Church.

But in any case, after being part of all this, staying in the PT and even benefiting from the money from the banks and contractors, as their elections as MPs and senator were helped by the overall structure of the PT campaign, the “Radicals” acted correctly in voting against Lula’s reform. They should have broken immediately with a party that had become bourgeois explicitly, but they did not. The PT was the one who had to expel them, with them struggling to stay. But It didn’t stop being important that the four of them voted against the huge attack that the PT made, and carried this to the end, even though they were expelled. A dignified gesture that was not repeated by other MEPs, such as Chico Alencar, Ivan Valente, Lindbergh Farias and others, who cowardly abstained, allowing retirees and workers to suffer one of the most brutal attacks on their rights.

The 2003 Social Security Reform was a milestone and consisted in one of the worst attacks on historical rights, and signaling to all that the PT had changed its class nature, ceasing to be a bourgeois-working-class party (of the working class, although with a bourgeois program) to become a bourgeois-worker party (of the bourgeois class, albeit with a workers’ social base). There would still be a new PT conversion, which would lose its working base and become just another classic bourgeois party, altering the content of its governments as well. For some years, the PT governments, which were already bourgeois, still corresponded to Popular Front governments (bourgeois governments, but atypical, since the working class sees it as their own, and the bourgeoisie still distrusts him). But then they became openly bourgeois governments, with experience with PT governments and the loss of their supportive working-class base, without any significant difference from these governments to any other.

Analyzing the PT is indispensable when analyzing the PSOL, which left the PT and has always been its shadow. In the 2004 elections, for example, when it had just been created and had no registration yet to compete, the PSOL supported the PT candidates in Brazil massively. The same bourgeois party that had just expelled them, which promoted neoliberal reforms and had right-wing candidates and coalitions even worse. This was the case in Porto Alegre, where Luciana Genro and PSOL do RS supported Raul Pont from the PT to the mayor. A candidature not only bourgeois as situation, because the PT was already government for 16 years in the city. The PSOL left the PT but the PT never left the PSOL.

In 2005, there was a mass entry into PSOL. The PT opportunists, who had abstained in the Social Security Reform, washing their hands when millions of Brazilians had their rights massacred, joined the PSOL, supposedly only to “have a electoral register for the 2006 elections.” Ivan Valente, Chico Alencar, Geraldo Mesquita, Marcelo Freixo, Edmilson Rodrigues (former mayor of Belém for the PT and enemy of the workers) and other “celebrities” of the PSOL entered this period, and the expectation was to have a huge vote ” trought the left of the PT “in 2006.

It came 2006, when it would be the first election in which the PSOL would compete. Heloísa Helena was the presidential candidate announcing herself as a “Christian Troskist” and with declarations as being against abortion, demanding that Brazil use violence to defend the Petrobrás facilities paralyzed by Bolivian natives, to say that in her government there would be no occupations of the MST, which would pay the foreign debt, etc., etc. A fair candidature to win votes. Her slogan sang “a light that came to change Brazil”. In the first polls, Heloísa appeared with rates between 15% and 20%, in second place, shortly after Lula.

Her move to the second round was a real possibility, which even led the PSTU to support the PSOL, failing the internal voting made at an electoral conference, which conditioned the possible support for Heloísa to have a class program, the vice presidency being from the PSTU, to have the defense of non-payment of debt, women’s rights, denunciation of bourgeois democracy, and so on. None of this happened, Heloísa Helena’s candidacy had a bourgeois program and consisted of a Popular Front campaign, formed by PSOL, PSTU and PCB, but the PSTU tore the decision of its militants and joined this Front of bourgeois program. All because Heloísa could even elect, or at least make a historical vote, and elect a huge parliamentary number. Reformism was going to paradise …

Then came the vote and the harsh reality, which, in the end, was a resounding failure. Heloísa Helena still made 6.85% of the votes, which, in itself, was a very good vote, with 6,575,393 votes. But for anyone who dreamed about the election and was close to going to the second round, it was a bitter 3rd place, far from the main candidates. PSOL was not able to be a 3rd way, and its elected parliamentary group was also small, with miserable 3 deputies.

After the election, the party wing formed by the entry of the parliamentarians who helped to approve the Social Security Reform did not leave the party, and still became the majority direction of him. It was the end of the project to be an alternative to the PT, which was already precarious from the beginning, but at the moment it was buried in definitive. From then on, the PSOL was already involved in scandals such as Senator Geraldo Mesquita’s (AC) monthly scandal, which employed a dozen relatives as ghost-workers and charged up to 40% bribes of their real employees. Elias Vaz, a councilor and PSOL leader in GO, staged another scandal, being part of the list of corruption and payments of the criminal Carlinhos Cachoeira. Martiniano Cavalcante, president of PSOL de Goiás, was also part of the scheme, and received R$ 200 thousand from Carlinhos Cachoeira. At the time, he said that the national president of the PSOL, Ivan Valente, supported them and was calm.

Carlinhos Cachoeira, for those who do not remember, was the financial agent of corruption involving the construction company Delta, which multiplied its assets absurdly during the PT government, being the largest beneficiary of overpriced works and the PT’s national robbery, which also involved Odebrecht, OAS, Camargo Correia, Andrade Gutierrez, etc. Lula’s triplex, the site in Atibaia and Odebrecht’s 300 million for Dilma, which Palocci negotiated stemmed from the original investigation into Delta. One detail: Martiniano was already a owner of a  building company at this time … The PSOL allied with the PT also in corruption, not just in the elections. What is striking is that Martiniano was still pre-candidate for president in the 2010 elections by PSOL. And almost was chosen in the preliminary elections of PSOL, and was even supported by Heloísa Helena, when it ended up being chosen Plinio de Arruda Sampaio.

Plínio then competed against a PT without Lula, with Lula’s first “post,” as he himself described the candidates who had never competed before and were personally chosen by him. Dilma did not even have 1% of Lula’s charisma, and the 8-year wear and tear on PT governments gave him hope again of a strong PSOL vote. It was another candidacy with a bourgeois program, although a little more to the left than Heloisa Helena. Curiously, the PSTU returned to launch its own candidate, despite Plinio being a little more likely to go to a 2-round and not having more the electoral “fever” that led to the belief of electing a large parliamentary number in the track of Heloísa, even Plinio being further to the left of Heloísa.

In the end, the PSOL vote fell to about 1/8 of the vote 4 years earlier. Pliny made 886,800 votes, a complete failure for the pretensions of the party, and an impressive electoral shrinkage. Again, it was only 3 deputies elected, remaining between the nanic seats.

The disappointing votes and the mass entry of opportunists, owners of building companys, big businessmen, right-wing people of all kinds, PSOL eventually became a “bag of cats.” National leaders like Luciana Genro did everything to join the party the councilwoman Juliana Brizola of the PDT of RS, for example. Grand doughter of Brizola, a bourgeois who was and still is the idol of PSOL leaders like Pedro Ruas, Juliana was always part of the PDT student mafias that, among other things, controlled the PUC DCE [Central Diretory of Students] and other entities with gang methods, elections, widespread corruption and even assassinations imputed to its members. By the famous surname, everything left aside and had the doors open, which only did not happen to have refused, knowing the few votes of PSOL. Folk characters, with religious discourse and enemies of the workers: all entered and kept coming. In the 2014 election, one of the few elected by the PSOL was Corporal Daciolo, today humorously famous, for its staff of “Glory to God” and for being a fan of Jair Bolsonaro in the Chamber of Deputies and a candidate of the extreme theocratic right in the current elections.

The trajectory of the PSOL was all the time formed by the lack of principles, repeating in a short time the crimes and absurdities that the PT itself took a lot of time to do. In a few years, the PSOL was already supported by money from the bourgeoisie, with Luciano Genro receiving large resources from the multinational Gerdau (one of the symbols of the corrupt bourgeoisie, leech and exploitative of workers) and the supermarket chain Zaffari, one of the bourgeois families most important of RS.

In a few elections, PSOL has already joined PMDB, PP, PTB, PSB, PV and a multitude of bourgeois parties in different cities and states … With the PT and PCdoB, even with these parties attacked the working class, robbed them non-stop, sold state-owned companies, approved the destruction of the environment, assassinated militants, indigenous people and social leaders, the PSOL never dissociated. Among so many shameful coalitions, it is not possible to even mention them all, but, emblematically, one of the most scandalous was the one in Amapá, where the PSOL was directed by Randolfe Rodrigues.

The only party senator in the country, Randolfe came to be elected pre-candidate for president by the party in the 2014 elections, he wasn’t appointed as candidate because he didn’t want, resigning in the name of Luciana Genro, who ended up competing. For Randolfe did not run for president to lead the PSOL campaign in Amapá, where he set up a bourgeois coalition along with the far right. DEM (former Arena of the dictatorship, ACM party, José Agripino, Rodrigo Maia, etc.), PSB and PSOL competed together and PSOL took another step towards the bottom of the well.

But this opportunistic crime has not even been unheard of. The capital of Amapá, Macapá, two years earlier, had already elected the first mayor of the PSOL of a capital: Clécio Luís. Clécio and Randolfe formed a coalition with the PPS (one of the most corrupt and right-wing parties in Brazil), PV of Sarney Filho), PRTB (of Levy Fidelix, former Collor shock team, and whose candidacy for president in 2014 was even more grotesque than Bolsonaro’s, in an appealing anticommunist and homophobic tone, having spoken the famous phrase that couples homosexuals can not be considered a family, because “excretory apparatus does not reproduce”, PMN (rent party full of corrupt), PCB and PTC, an ultra-right Christian party. Not enough of this list of absurdities, in the second round came the support of DEM, PSDB and PTB, which remained the basis of the PSOL government after its election.

Shortly thereafter, Randolfe Rodrigues was reported as corrupt, being on Odebrecht’s well-known list of payments, having received R$ 450,000 from the contractor who also bought parliamentarians from the PT, PCdoB, PMDB, etc. A crowning of his trajectory and also of the path traced by PSOL. The party, in fact, did nothing about the scandal, and Randolfe continued to be the main PSOL politician until he decided to parade on his own, and to form the Rede, with the departure of PSOL Heloísa Helena. The rupture of PSOL’s main name with the former leader of the acronym and dozens of other names was the consequence of the confirmation that the PSOL was not and would not be a great electoral party and that its parliamentary project would not exceed the limits of a tiny party.

For those who left the PT in 2003 against the attacks on Social Security or in 2005 in the face of the mensalão scandal, building a party allied with the DEM, involved in scandals and even without votes, is a complete disappointment.

In 2014, PSOL had 1,609,982 votes with Luciana Genro, who held the 4th place in the presidential election of Plínio de Arruda 4 years earlier, but it was no more than an appendix to Dilma Roussef’s candidacy, being an auxiliary line of the PT of the from start to finish. In the role almost of the PT’s orange candidacy in 2014, Luciana Genro did even got irritated in a debate where she again helped Dilma’s candidacy, saying “PT’s helper line, Hell no”, but the reality is that it really has not passed of this. Following, the PSOL practically acted as part of the parliamentary bloc of the PT from 2015 to 2018.

The peak of this policy that makes PSOL an organization equivalent to a PT chain, but with its own electoral register, was the process of Fora Dilma [Out Dilma]. The PSOL had already passed the fringe of the popular uprising of 2013, which began against the increase of 20 cents in tickets, but ended up questioning everything and everyone, with the PSOL being part of those who started snubbing the fights and still considering them a right wing movement. Then, the PSOL also did not fight against the violence of the PT against the ones who protested against the corruption for the constructions of the World Cup. The PSOL always mediates its actions, in the logic of not destabilizing Dilma and supporting the PT in its dispute “against the right wing”, as if the PT itself was not also of the right wing.

Until 2015 came, with millions of workers taking to the streets again and leading to a process that forced parties that until then had maintained the mandate of Dilma to have to take a proposal of impeachment of Dilma, so that the government fell in a controlled way, maintaining the political rights of Dilma and letting assume her vice, instead of a process of the masses that could overthrow all. The PSOL, before, during and after the overthrow of Dilma was more PT than the PT itself. The party embarked on the wave of denouncing the “coup” and was the shock force of the bourgeois and neoliberal government of Dilma, assuming the role of appendix of the PT in an explicit and irreversible way. Thereafter, under Temer, they maintained full alignment with the PT, not coherently building the General Strike of 2017 and slandering the historic strike of the truckers in 2018. Thus, as a small PT, the 2018 election was only the sad end of this period yet more to the right of PSOL.

The role of PSOL as a PT satellite was completed with the candidacy of Guilherme Boulos. Boulos wasn’t even affiliated with PSOL, and had already declared his support to former President Lula countless times. At the head of the MTST, which has already served an admirable and extremely combative role, Boulos led the movement to become another governist group, used to defend a bourgeois government and supported by state funds. From this position, Boulos was invited to be a candidate for PSOL, as a “star”, a “new Lula”, a “crowd leader”, who could repeat Heloísa Helena and win millions of votes from ex-petistas, disbelivers of the mother-party and willing to embrace a “new PT”, more moderate than the beginning of the original, but without so many stains of corruption and without the wear and tear obtained in 13 years of neoliberal rule.

There was much internal resistance from the more leftist militants at PSOL, outraged at the filiation and lightning candidacy of someone who had never been in the party and was clearly a Lulist. But pragmatism and electoralism won, as it always does in PSOL, and Boulos was launched towards one of the largest polls ever seen in PSOL. Again, however, the expectation turned into disappointment, and Boulos had an unprecedented failure, with the worst vote of all PSOL elections. After being placed 3rd in 2006 and 4th in 2010 and 2014, PSOL ranked 10th in 2018. Behind inexpressive candidates and even its former affiliate, the caricature Corporal Daciolo, which had more than double the despicable 617,122 votes from Boulos.

Despite having elected 10 federal deputies (after mistakenly celebrating having elected 12), the PSOL leaves smaller of this election. 8 of the 10 deputies are from RJ and SP, where the PT is even more demoralized and the PSOL occupies a small part of this space. But in both these two states and the rest, where polls were frustrating, PSOL was no longer an alternative. The party lost the political influence it once had, and if it never had masses weight, it was no longer a reference for a good part of the vanguard, who supported Ciro Gomes or returned to the PT. Since both the auxiliary line and appendix of the PT, at the time the PT needed, its voters left the intermediary aside and went straight to the PT. The next legislature will have 3 more members of the PSOL, but the party has stopped having a Senate seat, no longer governs any capital and has shrunk politically, no longer appearing as independent.

In addition to all betrayals and repetition of physiological and corrupt practices, PSOL is not even a guarantee of democratic defense for the left. The party voted in favor of the barrier clause that imposed limits on the participation of parties that did not obtain a minimum number of votes and elected deputies, virtually eliminating the right of existence of parties such as PSTU, PCB and PCO, which supposedly should be among their allies of the left. On the contrary, the PSOL voted together with the right wing to restrict democracy.

Having received more than $ 20 million of public money just for its campaign in 2018, PSOL became one more system party, which plays a nefarious role and attack workers. It is still a leftist party, in the broad and generic sense of this concept, and has thousands of militants and honest supporters, but its program, its candidatures and its practices and methods are already completely bourgeois. A PT of the 90’s worsened, and no votes …

PCdoB doesn’t reach the barrier clause and pays dearly for its betrayals

The PCdoB, once a very influential party in the country, having inherited most of the militants and the political space of Stalinism and the left with illusions in the Soviet bureaucracy, had already suffered heavy losses in the 1990s. Despite continuing to direct the National Union of the Students (UNE), who do not mobilize or influence anything else, being a central fundraiser, and to follow the head of the trade union center CTB and a few dozen unions, PCdoB today is a shadow of what has already been.

Aldo Rebelo’s departure from the party last year was the symbol of a shattered party. Rebelo was the main leader of PCdoB, where he was for 40 years. He was president of UNE, Lula’s minister, Dilma minister and president of the Chamber of Deputies. No other PCdoB affiliate has ever come so far. And Rebelo left the party to enter the PSB, a bourgeois party, whose seats only two years earlier voted in favor of Dilma’s impeachment, called a coup by himself and the PCdoB. But what was already a disaster, became even worse: rebelo spent only a few months in the bourgeois PSB and went to Solidaridade, a party still far to the right, and controlled by the mafia union Paulinho da Força. The Solidaridade supported Geraldo Alckmin for president , in the first election of Rebelo in the party.

Rebelo is the synthesis of what happened to PCdoB, as these positions were already similar to those he took when he was the leader of the party. At the head of the PT defense ministry, he maintained the structure of the Armed Forces intact, and was praised by Bolsonaro. As a parliamentarian, he drafted and proposed the new Forest Code, which amnestied criminal farmers and liberated the destruction of the Amazon. PCdoB is responsible for these measures, as well as being responsible in a complementary way for all the attacks, corruption and dismantling of national sovereignty promoted by the PT in 13 years in which they have been together in 4 governments.

PCdoB has just had such a low turnout, with only 9 elected MPs, that even their voter registration is threatened. After resigning her own presidential candidacy, which would have Manuela Dávila, PCdoB accepted to have her as a vice ghost of Haddad, who spent 80% of the campaign pretending to be itself the vice of an imaginary candidacy of Lula, who is imprisoned and ineligible. In the end, PCdoB disappeared and its 9 deputies were below the minimum required by the barrier clause, which Itself and the PSOL voted in favor. From now on, the party will no longer have access to the public resources of the party fund and to the electoral campaigns, which guaranteed them tens of millions of Reais. Nor will you have access to time in the radio or TV. In Brazilian politics, a party with no money and no campaign time serves neither as an ally nor attracts politicians who want to elect or re-elect, which makes it very likely that there are others Aldo Rebelos leaving of the party.

As bad as the historic electoral defeat of the PCdoB was the party’s only victory, the re-election of Flávio Dino as governor of the MA. It was the so-called “Pyrrhus victory”, where the winner comes off as a loser. PCdoB was elected in 2014 with a PSDB vice, and again is with the toucans and part of what is worse in the MA political banditry. The state continues being one of the poorest and violent of the country and the oligarchies do as they like.

PCdoB’s “communism” only resists in name, and it is more of a right-wing, bourgeois party like the PT, which manages capitalism and, like the PSOL, survives in the PT’s orbit. These parties need to be surpassed by the workers so that a leftist, socialist and combative party can truly emerge in Brazil.

The electoral end of PCB, PSTU and PCO

With the very low voting they had in 2018 and without electing a single parliamentarian in any state, neither for legislative assemblies nor for Congress, PCB, PSTU and PCO will no longer have access to radio and TV electoral propaganda and to the party fund and budget for the campaigns, which, even without these parties having elected nobody in the other elections, was more than R $ 1 million for each one. However, the electoral invisibility that will further strike these parties from now on is just one aspect of an invisibility that already exists that was as blatant as ever in these elections.

The PSTU lost 78% of their votes from one election to another!

The PSTU emerged as a revolutionary party in 1994, but was once a revolutionary current with origins since the late 1970s in Brazil and for decades in Latin America, bearing the legacy of Marx, Lenin, Trotsky and Nahuel Moreno, founder of LIT, of which the PSTU is a part of. Unfortunately, the PSTU has abandoned its program and its revolutionary conception over time.

Notably in 2006, under an electoral pressure from the newly emerged PSOL, increasing social accommodation and union bureaucratization, and the effects of the opportunistic gale that swept left-wing and revolutionary organizations since the 1990s, the PSTU changes policy , and takes a reformist stance, which prioritizes opportunist electoral coalitions, lowers its program, strips a significant part of internal democracy and converts the party into a transmission line of PSOL policy.

nstead, to obtain the expected results, to guarantee more votes, mandates and growth, the balance of this new theory and practice of the PSTU was the disappearance of its votes, zero elected in all spheres, from councilmen, and the rupture of almost half of its militants in 2016, who later have gone mostly to the PSOL.

In recent years, the PSTU has formed trade union platforms with all kinds of union gangsters, joined with bourgeois parties in election, such as the PCdoB in 2012 in Belém, persecuted trade union leaders of whom they disagreed, returned to CUT forums in some categories of workers and had lamentable positions in many decisive situations of the country. They attended the watched from the outside the demonstrations in 2013, then participated in it hands tied with the bourgeois governors of the PT and PCdoB, as well as cowering in the face of police repression and criminalizing some of the persecuted, such as the Black Blocs. Likewise, they refused to participate and dispute the mass demonstrations by Fora Dilma in 2015, being accomplices of the kidnapping of the final part of these demonstrations by the right. And they also declared “abstention” in the face of Dilma’s impeachment, throwing in the garbage the exemplary posture of Collor’s impeachment, when Deputy Ernesto Gradela, of the chain that led to the PSTU, voted “yes” for the overthrow of the bourgeois government, even if formally limited and institutional via Congress.

But the radicalization of the class struggle and the rupture of the more opportunist half of the PSTU allowed the party to return to a position closer to its former program in the last one or two years. They took almost all the flags raised by the revolutionaries and by our organization, and which they systematically confronted until then. They joined the call to the General Strike, the Fora Dilma, the Fora Todos [Out Everyone], the agitation by popular committees, that the elections do not change anything, that they are all the same and that Brazil needs a revolution. A turn to the left that, even so, did not change part of its practical policies, which continued to have coalitions with right-wing parties, such as even the Podemos, in Minas Gerais. Anyway, it was a progressive lefty, even if partial and more rhetorical, but that was not able to resume the political work that the party ever had. The 2018 election result was the worst in the history of the PSTU

If the PSOL was never as badly voted as now, with the 0.4% of Guilherme Boulos, who had to fill an audience of 250 people to find a voter; the PSTU, with Vera’s candidacy, had 0.03% of votes among the total registered voters, having to gather a small crowd of 3000 people to find a voter of his. It is the image of the inexpressiveness of a party that, with the candidacies of Zé Maria, already had more than 200 thousand votes in 1998 and more than 400,000 votes to president in 2002.

The 2002 election, by the way, was an example of how revolutionaries can take part in an election, denouncing it on the inside, when, in addition to a percentage equivalent to that of Guilherme Boulos in the current election of nearly half a million voters, the PSTU drew the country’s attention to Bush’s and FHC’s proposal to implement the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA), which would represent the transformation of Brazil into a colony.

Regrettably, this campaign never repeated itself, the PSTU composed the Popular Front with Heloísa Helena’s PSOL in 2006 and returned to compete in 2010 and 2014, when it made 84 thousand and 91 thousand votes, tiny votes that have already corresponded to the deep political crisis that the party has lived since its change of course in 2005/2006. Now in 2018, there were only 55,000 votes, less than a good number of elected councilors in many cities two years ago and than countless deputies in their states now.

But perhaps even worse than the vote for president was the PSTU deputy candidate voting, which measures even more sharply the grassroots work of the party and its weight in the categories of workers in which it operates. In the 2014 election, the PSTU candidates had 188,473 votes, more than double the vote they had for president. In 2018, it was the other way around. Even with a tiny vote for president, the sum of votes for deputies was even lower: 41,296. This represents a drop of 78%! That is, electorally, the PSTU disappeared.

This terrible electoral outcome is part of the general political shrinkage of the PSTU, which may either sink in a direction that will lead to the practical demise of the party, or may serve to break deeply with the course the party has taken over the last decade, revising Marxism and adopting a reformist position. There are still hundreds of revolutionaries in the PSTU and it is the only party with electoral registration that can still take a combative role, to impel the direct action and the struggle on the streets of the workers. The crossroad they are going through will require them to decide on the direction that they will have from now on.

The PCB disappeared

The PCB, which was a mass party for decades, and then was extinguished in the early 1990s, when it was transformed into PPS in the wave of class betrayal that occurred after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Soviet Union, be refounded by a handful of old militants dissatisfied with the end of the party. Since then, it has always been a tiny party electorally and with little expressiveness also in the struggles and unions. In addition to being a nanic, the “new PCB” has retained much of the opportunism and reformism that characterized the history of the old “party”. The most serious thing was to have supported and made part of the bourgeois government of Lula in 2003.

In this trajectory of capitulations, the PCB still gave an ideological sigh in 2014, when it launched Mauro Iasi as president. He made only 47,000 votes, but managed to be heard and to make an ideological campaign, that defended the socialism and the fight, having obtained a good space in the electoral debate of the last elections. In 2018, the PCB returned to the orbit of PSOL, party that inherited the PT’s role as reformism to stick to. Result: Boulos had the worst vote in PSOL history, the PCB politically disappeared from the map, and none of his proposals were heard. More than that, the PCB lowered its vote to deputies from about 67,000 votes to 61,341.

The PCO ended!

Unlike the PSTU, which has already had a revolutionary role and is still a left-wing and combative party, nonetheless; and the PCB, which is a party still in the field of opposition to the main bourgeois blocs of the country until this election, led by the PT and PSDB; the PCO is a party that has never been serious. The PCO is a party that survived for decades through the union tax and the party fund. At the head of unions led by electoral frauds, aggressions against the opposition and class conciliation with the bourgeoisie, the PCO, which never left the CUT, lately joined the PT, and was a fanatical defender of the bourgeois government of Dilma and joined from the beginning to Haddad’s campaign.

It was already a cartorial party, whose registration serves to raise funds and whose legend has been rented countless times, including for reactionary candidates, businessmen and corrupt of all types. But this election was the PCO’s spade of chalk, which, in addition to losing radio and TV time and the public money it received, saw its derisory 12,969 votes in its deputies in 2014 drop to an unbelievable 2,785 votes. For a party with almost 30 years of existence, rivers of public money for the campaign and time on the radio and TV, having 2,000 votes is pathetic. The PCO is over and will not be missed.

Bolsonaro Elected! It’s Time to Fight! Neither laugh nor cry. Understand and fight!

Bolsonaro was elected with 55% of the valid votes. There are 57 million people, mostly workers, who voted for a male chauvinist, racist, homophobic and neo-liberal mandatet. But they have done this not by supporting these ideas, but by thinking of voting against corruption and violence, which afflict the working class and are reflected in the deaths of young people, the insecurity of women and the lack of funds for health and education. Elections are a good place to lie because paper and the microphone accept everything. Unfortunately, once again, the workers have been deceived and we will have an enemy government of the workers on January 1st.

However, these workers who elected Bolsonaro in mass are not our enemies. Enemies are Bolsonaro, his vice, Mourão, and the political and business leaders of his campaign. As enemies are the leaders of the candidacies of Haddad, Ciro Gomes, Alckmin, etc. To the overwhelming majority of Bolsonaro voters, we have to propose to fight together with us, since society is divided into classes and not into two party blocs and submissive to capitalism, as the leaders of the PT want to believe. As of now, the war is not PT and voters of Haddad x Bolsonaro and their constituents. The war is of classes: workers x bankers, contractors, landowners and great businessmen.

Almost all Bolsonaro voters were victims of neoliberalism and corruption of the PSDB and PT governments, and voted for it by exclusion. We disagree with this electoral choice, but they are also exploited and will again suffer at the hands of Bolsonaro. It is no use to act with arrogance or aggression against others exploited like us, who voted in a class enemy like so many other times and so many other parties have already been elected by who now will be opposition.

The struggle is of classes! We, the 99%, against them, the 1% that has governed Brazil since always and that ordered in absolutely all the governments that existed, of all the parties. It’s the teachers, the bricklayers, the little farmers, the banking workers, the steellworkers, the commerce workers, the poor youth and all the exploited and oppressed, who voted for Haddad, Bolsonaro or were part of the crowd of non-votes (who beat record again, with 42.5 million people), who must together fight against all bourgeoisie: the Bolsonaro government in 1st place, but also the opposition that helped create Bolsonaro when It was in power.

The moment is to unite the workers against all of them; against Bolsonaro, the PSL, the MDB, the PSDB, the PT, the PDT and all those who have been assaulting the public coffers for decades, withdraw our rights, sell our assets and impoverish our country more and more. We must be together against the Social Security Reform, the privatizations, the tax crunch and the civil rights attacks that will be proposed!

The philosopher Espinoza said “neither laugh nor cry, but understand.” So many times the revolutionaries and combative workers have been put to this test: do not succumb to discouragement and paralysis, so misguided and useless for those who want to change life and the world, and the false sense of joy and enthusiasm that many others are feeling .

The hope of change and an honest government with Bolsonaro will dissipate very soon, before a government that, from the first day, will be full of corrupt and that will attack the rights of 99% of Brazilians (including Bolsonaro voters). Likewise, those who are disillusioned and frustrated should come with us to the fight! Only the struggle changes life and weren’t, nor have never been, the elections the moment of change.

We are together with all those who fear an escalation of prejudice and violence from the oppressors, and that is why they voted for Haddad. Unfortunately, this is already the reality and violence against women, blacks and LGBTQs has only increased in the governments FHC, Lula, Dilma and Temer. Neither candidate would be on our side in this matter. But Bolsonaro has made statements that demand our confrontation right away, and we especially call on the oppressed to be on the front line against this neoliberal government. We are in solidarity and we are part of this resistance, but it is not in elections of marked cards, but in direct action and with our self defense we can end this massacre that already strikes us and only tends to worsen within capitalism, be whatever government it is.

The PT and the PSDB also ruled for bankers and contractors, and deeply attacked the workers; Bolsonaro will try to maintain and deepen this path. But the workers reacted and defeated initiatives that attacked them in the governments FHC, Lula, Dilma and Temer. Together, we are very strong, and the struggles have been increasingly frequent in the country. It is possible to defeat Bolsonaro and the Congress!

Neither Bolsonaro nor the PT! Unite the workers to fight against all the attacks!

We are opposed to this government right now, but neither do we trust or stand on any front with those who have also killed, robbed and attacked workers’ rights. PSL, PT, PSDB, PMDB and etc. are, in spite of all their differences, parties of the bosses, the bankers and enemies of the workers. We will be in the streets in unity of action with whoever It is, as we were on the streets with whoever was against the dictatorship, against Sarney, against Collor, against FHC, against Itamar, against Lula, against Dilma and against Temer!

But one thing is the unity of action in the street, where there must be all who want to fight for a common point: to defeat the attacks of Bolsonaro, at the moment. Another thing would be to submit our class independence and our program to emancipate the working class and liberate the oppressed from oppression to any bourgeois program or electoral project.

This is not our fight. Our struggle is not to choose who will manage the business of the bourgeoisie against the people; is to overthrow this whole system, where they are all the same, and to be the exploited to govern by themselves. A revolution is what we need! No more than four years change the color of the whip, because the back is always the same to be beaten: ours.

Workers must be united! Peace between us and war against the lords! The world will not end after January 1, but neither will it improve. Neither laugh nor cry. We must understand correctly and learn from the mistakes already made. The solution comes only from the workers themselves, and we must fight! Because only the struggle changes life!

 

MOVIMENTO REVOLUCIONÁRIO SOCIALISTA

REVOLUTIONARY SOCIALIST MOVEMENT