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From International Socialism, No.55, February 1973, pp.18-20.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
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In April 1964 an army coup overthrew the elected Brazilian President, Joao Goulart. The army’s offensive against the Left and the labour movement which followed was almost immediately successful. The army imposed a three-year long deflation and wages freeze; workers’ wages fell, unemployment shot up and many bankrupt Brazilian businesses passed into foreign hands. The end of the deflation in 1967 coincided with the delicate period of succession from one military dictator to another. Mass opposition to the Government started to express itself, and grew into large demonstrations and strikes. Revolutionary groups decided that the time was ripe for armed struggle, to overthrow the dictatorship. The absence of a unified mass political challenge enabled the military to crush the centres of opposition one by one. In the ensuing atmosphere of severe working-class demoralization, the dictatorship launched the present economic boom, based on continuing the wage freeze and the attractions of its repressive stability for foreign capital. The article below is an extract from the revolutionary journal Unidade e Luta (July/August 1972), published in Chile. Brazil’s size, its increasing interference in other countries’ internal affairs and its example to other would-be repressive regimes make it important to analyse the situation in Brazil. The article’s emphasis is different from IS’s. But in common with IS, it sees the working class as the revolutionary class. The article is anonymous in the original version. |
The task of building a revolutionary party of the working class cannot be divorced from the intimate involvement of such a party in the struggle of the working class. No organisation can aspire to the title of ‘party of the revolution’ without deep roots in factories, in trade unions, in working-class districts, and without the daily experience of the problems, spontaneous forms of resistance and of the mood of the masses; nor can the revolution be successful without these. This is a fact that the recent experience of the armed revolutionary organisations has most bitterly confirmed. In the present period, the building of the revolutionary worker’s party is intimately tied to fostering the independent trade union organizations and struggles of the working class. The immediate task of all real communists is to plant roots among the masses.
Capitalist development in Brazil has created a huge, permanent reserve army of industrial labour; the system has failed to create enough jobs in manufacturing and service industries to absorb the increased urban labour force (inflated by massive migration from the countryside). Underemployment and unemployment are a constant threat to the working class, despite the rapid growth of industrial employment. There were 2,100,645 new industrial jobs created between 1960 and 1970, as compared with 616,294 between 1950 and 1960; but unemployment has almost doubled.
The continual turnover of a large proportion of the workforce benefits capitalist enterprises in several ways, so they encourage it. In 1969, 38.6 per cent of workers in the State of Sao Paulo had been with their employers for less than a year, and 58.2 per cent for less than two years. Not only did the employers avoid paying yearly statutory wage increases to newcomers, but the ‘length of service’ bonus clause enable them to pay small increases to most workers. The turnover affects the unskilled worst of all.
Other advantages for the capitalist are the great difficulty of organizing workers constantly moving between different jobs and even different industries, also, like slave owners before them, Brazilian capitalists are able to choose to keep that most useful commodity: young workers. In 1969 36.6 per cent of workers in the State of Sao Paulo were under 24, and 54.4 per cent under 30 years of age. The situation of workers over 45 is so desperate that even the bourgeois politicians were recently considering legislation to protect their employment.
As a result of the military dictatorship’s wage freeze (while price inflation continued), the real minimum wage fell by 19.6 per cent between 1964 and 1969. According to the 1970 Census, 42 per cent of Brazilian urban workers’ earnings were equal to the minimum wage, or less. Legislation relating to workers’ pensions (by ‘length of service’) was introduced in 1966; in practice, this abolished an old conquest of the working class: job security after 10 years with the same employer. Sackings in the Sao Paulo textile industry increased by 112.6 per cent between 1966 and 1970, in part as a result on the Pensions Fund legislation.
To make its wage freeze and other anti-working class measures effective, the dictatorship had to repress any independent struggles or organization. An anti-strike law (No.4330) was brought in on 1 June 1964, together with strict control of the unions, frequent interference in union affairs, and a persistent and vicious repression against the most advanced sections of the class. Employers helped increase this repression through industrial espionage and cooperation with the police and other repressive bodies. Severe harassment of union members has become common practice. Repression laid the foundations of the present economic boom.
The present trade union structure was set up during Getulio Vargas’ Estado Novo (Vargas’ corporate dictatorship, 1937-45, preceded by his relatively constitutional presidency, 1930-37), with the declared objective of subordinating the working class to State tutelage. The unions were totally undemocratic, bureaucratic apparatuses whose main function was to distribute meagre benefits among their members. They were tied to the Ministry of Labour and Social Security by many links, and depended for their survival more on the large revenues from the trade union tax than from the active support of the working class.
However, the main weakness of the Brazilian trade union movement does not stem from its legal structure, but from the mistaken and opportunistic policy of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), which controlled the main unions from the early 1950s through to 1964. The party decided to operate in the legal union structure around 1950 after an attempt to create parallel (dual) unions. The most advanced sections of the class had remained in the legal trade unions. The PCB entered these unions to fight against their subordination to the Ministry of Labour, and establish the full autonomy of working class organizations and workplace organization. The PCB also had two objectives forbidden by the labour code: the setting up of inter-union organisations that would bridge different unions, and a ‘unified centre’ of command for afll unions.
The PCB’s trade union activists were an advanced, militant leadership, compared with the corrupt pelegos who were in the Ministry of Labour’s pocket. To a large extent, they led the main working class struggles during the second Vargas period of government (1950-54), including the 1953 general strike in Sao Paulo. They gained respect and authority among the organised sections of workers and gradually managed to capture the leadership of the most important unions. Having achieved this, they ceased to pursue their avowed policy.
The PCB’s line of collaboration with the bourgeois parties led it to tail-end the so-called nationalist and democratic sectors supporting the Government of Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-61). Kubitschek’s Plan of Targets was the initial driving force behind the large-scale penetration of imperialist monopolies in Brazil. The social costs of economic growth were borne by the workers and the poor masses through galloping inflation while increased prosperity softened the conflicts between the different sections of the bourgeoisie. The PCB did not challenge its partners, because it had the perspective of promoting a government that would introduce ‘structural reforms’, which were seen as the indispensable first measur for an illusory peaceful transition to socialism. The PCB progressively lost its political independence and became increasingly unable to impose any kind of hegemony within this united front. It drifted into defending not only the nationalist sections behind Kubitschek, but the record of the Government as a whole.
This enabled populist politicians such as Janio Quadros (State Governor of Sao Paulo and Kubitschek’s successor as president) to seize on mass discontent. They waged a frenetic demagogic campaign against inflation in the main proletarian centres, particularly Sao Paulo. At the same time large sections of workers, notably those recently arrived from the; countryside, were falling under the sway of reformist leaders. The political backwardness of the working class could not be overcome, partly because of the lack of independent class, politics.
But there was no strong socialist propaganda, even among the most advanced sections of workers. All agitation and propaganda revolved around exclusively nationalistic and democratic slogans. In the unions, this lack of political independence led in most cases to a virtual merger between the Communist activists and the main Labour Party caucus, the group around Joao Goulart (then vice-president and Vargas’ successor as leader of the Labour Party), which also had bureaucratic control over the Ministry of Labour.
Instead of changing the unions, the PCB accommodated itself to a structure that could survive without a solid mass base. The number of trade unionists increased, but rarely to more, than 20 per cent of workers in any particular industry. Badly led, the organizations of the working class were not in a fit state to resist a hostile Government on the eve of April 1964 army coup. While it is true that strikes grew in number and in size, the trade union structure continued to rely on a narrow base of organized workers. Its main source of strength lay in the arrangement it had reached with Goulart’s Government (Sept. 1961 -March 1964). When the military coup took place, the labour movement was unable to put up any resistance.
The dictatorship was able to paralyse the unions, in a double attack by using the labour legislation in force since Vargas. The Ministry of Labour disenfranchised the union leaderships; the inter-union structures, which Vargas’ code forbade, were disbanded, and the June 1964 strike law was brought in, followed by decree No.229 in 1967, the ‘ideological test’. But these measures were incomparably milder than the terror unleased against the revolutionary groups after 1968. Because the unions lacked firm roots in the working class this was enough to ensure their defeat.
However, in spite of the impotence of the trade union structure, the most militant sections of the working class retained their union loyalties. They formed the basis of the trade union opposition to the pelego leaders, starting as early as 1965. Towards the end of 1967, the mass movement started to raise its head again, reaching a peak in the first half of 1968. The strikes in the districts of Contagem (State of Minas Gerais) in April and September 1968 and of Osasco (Greater Sao Paulo) in July 1968 were the first major working-class struggles under the dictatorship.
After the short experience of the Interunion Anti-Wage Freeze Movement (MIA), the Osasco union was becoming the focus for all the union oppositions to the pelego leaderships in Sao Paulo. There was a real opportunity to bring into being a strong current which might impose itself as the alternative to the corrupt leaders. It might also have been possible to extend the experience of rank and file organization (factory commissions) until then limited to Osasco – to wider layers of the working class in Sao Paulo.
However, the launching of the strike with factory occupations (!) isolated the movement, as it was unable to spread into the rest of industry in Sao Paulo. The strike was too weak to resist the inevitable repression that followed, and the consequent defeat the demoralisation. The subordination of the factory commissions to the trade union led to their disintegration, once the Government laid hands on the trade union. The radicalism of the comrades in the Osasco union was killed in the embryo. This was one of the most important attempts since the 1964 coup, to set up new forms of union organisation, capable of pursuing the working class’ fight for its specific demands.
In both Osasco and Contagem, the deficiences of the present trade union organizations became obvious, revealing the need for a leadership that can give expression to the working class’ tremendous fighting spirit, and crystallize it in organizational forms that permit the fight to be taken further. Both experiences show that organisation within the workplace is indispensable for any major action under a military dictatorship to succeed. In Contagem factory organisations arose in preparing the strike movement; in Osasco they were created beforehand by the local trade union leadership, in both cases, factory commissions were an indispensable weapon, and this experience will of necessity be incorporated in workers’ future struggles.
However, the workers’ fighting spirit and their workplace organization were not sufficient by themselves to achieve even a partial victory. The experience of Osasco, in particular, shows that defeat is inevitable in the absence of a leadership able to assess the correlation of forces. And on the basis of this to set out the objectives for the struggle and the forms it is to take. The defeats of this period plunged the labour movement into its deepest trough since 1964, persisting to the present time. It was not only the mistakes made in Osasco which ushered in the post-1968 period of reaction. The whole movement of opposition to the regime in 1968 ran out of steam and ebbed away for lack of a clear political direction with firm and farsighted objectives; in particular, the armed organisations could not transform themselves into the vanguard of that virgorous mass movement. But the defeat of the working-class movement weighed most heavily in these events.
Police control increased over unions already paralysed by their pelego leaderships. Police repression against the most militant fighters in the class struggle took on an unprecedented degree of violence. The armed groups that emerged in 1968 had total contempt for activities in the working class, so making the job of repression much easier. The labour movement thus became completely atomised.
Since 1969, discontent has been expressed through isolated and extremely limited actions. Protests, partial stoppages in particular plants and strikes in isolated factories against delays in the payment of wages have occurred, but rarely wider; movements. A small section of experienced workers forms the present base of trade union oppositions providing a fair proportion of what life persists in the unions, at least in Sao Paulo.
Independent groups of workers have multiplied, bringing; together workers in one or more factories or in a certain area. Some are in touch with the union oppositions, others remain isolated. Their existence is a symptom of class discontent and, at the same time, of the absence of union organisations that are both powerful and representative enough. The weight of the mass movement’s defeat in 1968 and the degree of repressive violence are such as to make it most unlikely that the immense, simmering discontent of the working class will lead to major struggles in the near future. But it is only in the process of struggle that the working class will be able to erect new trade union structures that are both militant and independent.
Thus the whole of our work must be directed towards preparing the upturn of workers’ struggles and towards our intervention in it. Initially, our work will to a large extent be confined to agitation. In terms of organisation, our immediate objective must be the setting up of factory commissions, at least in the largest plants.
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