WHAT SORT OF SOCIALISM FOR THE BRAZILIAN WORKERS?
Luis Inacio Da Silva: "Lula, " chairman of the PT, steelworkers leader:
When we reject the Social Democratic perspective, this is because we think that Social Democracy is nothing more than the most developed answer to socialism that capitalism has been able to come up with.
Social Democracy was possible in the form it has taken in Germany, in Sweden, or in Great Britain, only insofar as there were other peoples who were exploited, as in Brazil, Latin America, Asia, and Africa....
I have also criticized bureaucratic socialism, the sort of socialism in which the state apparatus accepts no criticism and sets the rules of the game without the participation of
During a television broadcast, some bosses wanted to know your position (or to provoke you) on the question of the dictatorship of the proletariat. What's the story?
Da Silva. I have no trouble in answering that question. It doesn't matter whether they were trying to provoke me or not. The fact is that we were discussing the question of power and what the workers would do when they take power. I said that we would do this and we would do that. I talked about the demands of the workers that the government and the bosses are refusing to meet today. At that moment, one of the bosses said: "But that would be a dictatorship of the proletariat!" Then, I answered that it would be the will of the majority made a reality, it would be a government of the majority answering to the needs of the majority. Now, if the workers are the majority -- since we are for democracy--the government and the state power should go to them. And their interests should be served. Isn't democracy the will of the majority?
If the minority--the bosses--want to call that the dictatorship of the proletariat, that's their problem. Maybe that's the way they see democracy for the majority.
Em Tempo. In defining itself as socialist, the PT is also defining its international relations. On what criteria will they be based?
Luis Eduardo Greenlalgh: secretary for foreign relations: The PT is trying to establish relations with all Socialist and Communist parties in the world. At the same time, it is maintaining its independence. It is most interested in the revolutionary liberation movements in the so-
18 called third world countries.
We have relations with the Sandino National Liberation Front in Nicaragua (FSLN), with the Liberation Front of Mozambique, with the Palestinian Liberation Organization, In Europe, naturally we have contacts with the CPs and the SPs. But the PT is maintaining absolute independence from any international party or cur-
Em Tempo.
Does the PT have relations with the Polish union Solidarity?
Greenlalgh. That question has not arisen yet. Solidarity is a union, and the PT is a party. Thus, the room for relations is quite limited. But the PT trade unionists are trying to develop fraternal relations with Solidarity, although the meeting between Lula and Lech Walesa raised some problems.
Lech Walesa drew Lula's attention to the fact that it was difficult for a trade unionist such as himself to get involved in building a party. Lula didn't like that very much. You know the kind of people here in Brazil who use this kind of argument. Lula talked to him about the situation in our country, pointing out that here trade-union struggle is insufficient to impell a process of transformation in the interests of the workers. He explained to Walesa that we had exhausted the possibilities of purely trade-union action before making the leap to the PT. At the same time, he explained that while it was a party the PT had not yet succeeded in ousting a single minister, while Solidarity, which is only a union, had already toppled several ministers and was openly defying the government....
Em Tempo.
What sort of activity is the PT carrying out in line with its international policy?
Greenlalgh. It supports all the forces that are fighting against the dictatorships in Latin America. It defends at all costs the right of peoples to self-determination. And it condemns any political or military intervention by a great power in another country, such as, for example, Ronald Reagan's threats in Central America. The PT has publicly condemned the preparations for inva-• sions of Cuba, Nicaragua, and El Salvador. We would do the same, for example, if Russia moved to invade Poland.
Em Tempo.
What does the socialism of the PT mean to you?
Apolonio De Carvalho, vice president of the PT. The PT is a new party. It has tactics and the elements of a strategy, which are laid down in its basic documents. But it has no fully worked out strategy. It has a vision of a new society, without exploited or exploiters....
The PT has clearly defined its present objectives. The first is to unite and organize the workers in the towns and in the countryside, both manual and intellectual workers. Our objective is to force out the dictatorship and lay the foundations for a democratic government that will serve the interests of the workers monitored by the popular forces and with a growing participation by them in it.
Franciso Weffort, secretary of the National Executive of the PT.
You ask me to what extent the PT could accept the general reformist principle that the end is nothing but the movement is everything. I think that the PT does not accept it. It wants to transform society in accordance with the perspective of socialism.....
There is nothing to say that a party with a revolutionary conception cannot make alliances even on the governmental level. Its main activihas to be in social organizations, trade unions, social and cultural
I would avoid the expression "destruction of the state apparatus." It doesn't correspond to political reality in the modern world. What you can do is transform the state apparatus, put it under the supervision of the social organizations and the people. Everywhere that an attempt to destroy the state apparatus has taken place, it has ended in an enormous bureaucratization. What has happened in reality is the reconstitution of a state apparatus as powerful as the one that existed before.
In my opinion, it is difficult to say what the PT's experience is similar to, but it is easy to say what it is not like. The PT was born in Brazil in the context of the historic failure of labourism in conditions in which the working class was not attracted to Stalinism.
The Social Democratic experience has nothing in common with the experience of the PT. What you find among a great many PT activists is an affinity with the thought of Antonin Gramsci, which looks to the struggle for hegemony, the cultural struggle, the idea that power is diffused in bourgeois society and not concentrated solely in the state apparatus. This affinity is most of all theoretical, and you know it is a very long step between theory and practice.
The current given impetus by Solidarity in Poland is pointed in the same direction. The resemblance is owing to the fact that both movements arose from the workers and seek political independence. The differences are also great. Solidarity doesn't yet define itself as a party and is fighting against a state with a very different social and economic basis from the one we live under.
Olivio Dutra: vice chairman of the PT, leader of the bank workers union in Porto Alegre, suspended by the government authorities:
The experience of the USSR in its first phase of building a new society, the mobilization and participation of the masses, remains unforgetable. Now, for the most diverse historical reasons, this experiment has led to the development of extreme centralism, of bureaucratization, and therefore the usurpation of the administrative tasks by the state to the detriment of society.
This second phase is an experience that we must not repeat. Maintaining the freedom and autonomy of the mass movements is a precondition for assuring that socialism will be a stage on the road to building a genuinely egalitarian society.
The Chinese experience, since the historical and socio-economic features of that country have led it to try to jump over stages more rapidly even than the USSR, offers us a great many lessons....
A rich experience has been left. But a whole system of social control has diverted the course of development and blocked the growth of the popular forces, preventing a leap forward toward an egalitarian society. The social and political forces that hold the privileges of leadership, that is the bureaucracy, succeeded finally in making China what it is today. There is a terrible political confusion that is reflected in the country's foreign policy and which leads it to support the worst kind of dictatorship in Latin America, in Africa, and in Asia....
In the USSR, we have to consider the question of Stalinism and the experience of the creation of the first socialist state under siege from all directions. We are not yet in a situation where we can build socialism without having to contend with external pressures, but we still have to avoid falling into bureaucratism.
The experience of Poland today is a very important one for the PT. There, socialism came from above, in the special circumstances of the second world war, where the Communist Party came to power as a result of the weight of the Red Army, as the CPs did in Czechoslovakia and Hungary.
Today a living workers movement is something intolerable for the bureaucrats holed up in their fortresses. They are trying to prevent the emergence of a genuine socialism resting on the masses.
You see, the position of trade unions in Brazil and in the USSR is very similar. However, over there there was a socialist revolution that ended private property. Nonetheless, the unions are a mere transmission belt for the government, organizers of ceremonial occasions such as
Here in Brazil, the unions are also a mere tool in the hands of the government and the military regime. All of a sudden, we who are fighting for a new society find similar realities for the trade unions in totally different conditions. That is why Poland is a source of such acute interest for us in the PT, since it seems to represent the workers movement resuming its role in building socialism...
Helena Grecco, member of the PT's National Executive Commission former chairperson of the Women's Movement for Amnesty:
We cannot judge the problem of human rights in the so-called socialist countries only on the basis of the big press, which publishes only what it finds interesting from the bourgeois standpoint.
For example, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn is a great writer, but his analysis is wrong. As a dissident, he opposes Stalinism and has succeeded in showing the situation as it is. He has written pages and pages about the Red terror, but he has not said a word about the White terror. That is why what he says could be used in the cynical "human rights" policy of expresident Jimmy Carter.
In reality, the dissident workers movement has put the question back in its correct context, the necessity of democracy in socialism. As an activist in the amnesty campaign, I have always defended personal dignity and rights and individual freedoms. I cannot accept socialism without liberty. This may be utopian, but the socialism ef the USSR is not the one
Lisaneas Maciel, member of the World Council of Churches and probable candidate of the PT for governor of Rio de Janeiro:
I see Nicaragua as an illustration of what I believe in. There, they are building socialism on different levels, firmly and without pretentious proclamations or any imitation of existing models. They are doing this on the basis of tested principles and with great realism, taking account of the possibilities. The Sandinista leadership is moving ahead slowly, sticking close to reality. It is carrying out a revolutionary experiment to which we should pay the greatest attention. Especially because of the great similarity between the conditions in our two countries.
Some in the PT want a socialism grafted directly from other models. My answer to them is that flexibility is very important in order for us to get where we want to. The Cubans that I have met in Nicaragua told me themselves that they had come there to learn from the Sandinista process. They have felt the need for modesty. Shouldn't we all the more?
Plinio Sampaio, well-known Catholic leader and member of the Sao Paulo Executive Committee of the
The concept of socialism is already quite clear and doesn't need to be reinvented. On the economic level, socialism differs from capitalism on three fundamental points. Under capitalism, the capital and the means of production belong to one class, the bourgeoisie. Under the socialist system, the means of production belong to the collectivity. The capitalist system produces commodities that bring profits to the holders of capital. Under socialism, the economy is organized to produce use values corresponding to the needs of the population.
Under capitalism, the holder of capital is free to invest or not to invest. He is the judge of the quality and quantity that is to be produced at every moment in the process. In the socialist system that we will build in Brazil, there were be no free enterprise by individuals but collective decisions expressed through planning. How we are going to plan is a question for the future...
Em Tempo.
As a Catholic, how do you see the problem of violence?
In history, there has never been any deepgoing social and political transformation without disruption including certain forms of violence. So, we must understand that in the transition from one system to another social upset accompanied by some violence can be expected. That doesn't mean that it is inevitable....
On the other hand, it would be wrong to think that Christian thought does not accept violence or that it is absolutely pacifist. Saint Thomas Aquinas, for example, accepts the right of revolution or rebellion. He argues that citizens have the right to rebel and to use the necessary means to overthrow tyranny when it leaves no other way open to end slavery.
However, what is most important to stress is that socialism is not violent. It is capitalism that is violent, and it is the bourgeoisie that inevitably responds by using force
against those who want to end its privileges. In the last analysis, violence depends on the bourgeoisie, not on those who aspire to socialism.
Raul Pont, vice chairman of the Rio Grande do Sul PT, member of he National Directorate, and a writer for the journal "Em Tempo":
The PT is not formally in the world communist movement. It exhibits a lot of ambiguities and gaps. It is not a revolutionary party in the full sense of the term. we can say that the perspective opened by the definition of socialism that we make is a great hope and represents a considerable contribution to resolving the crisis that the Communist movement has been going through since the failure of the Third International and the establishment of Stalinist domination over the workers movements. Since that time, the socialist perspective (which is neither Social Democrat nor Stalinist) has been confined to small circles and revolutionary organizations without major links with the masses....
The socio-economic superiority of socialism is ever more irrefutable and the only point that the bour-geois ideologues can make against it is the one of democracy. In fact, making a reality of socialist democracy, of the dictatorship of the proletariat as Marx, Lenin, and Trotsky understood it, as it existed at the beginning of the Russian Revolution, is a central question.
Concretely understood, the dictatorship of the proletariat is the very essence of revolutionary socialism. It presupposes the nationalization of the means of production, a revolutionary break with the old society and the destruction of the class dictator ship of the bourgeoisie. It involves the economic and political control of society by the workers democracy of workers councils exercising the real power.
Bruno Maranhao, member of the National Leadership of the PT and the Regional Executive Commission of the State of Pernambuco.
The PT is detaching itself more and more from the crisis of the Third International and from the Stalinist tradition. This crisis developed after two totally alien elements were introduced into Marxism--the policy of alliances and authoritarianism. It is important to study today the policy of Stalinism during the second world war, which sacrificed several possible revolutions for the sake of alliances with the bourgeoisie.
By taking its distance from these two errors at the start, the PT can make an important contribution to the search for an alternative aimed toward achieving a socialism that restores the meaning of workers democthemselves in the form of the direct | racy.