By Verónica O’Kelly
The public complaint filed by Federal Representative Erika Hilton regarding the distribution of electoral fund resources sparked a debate that, for many PSOL members, seems new, but it is not.
This is not merely a disagreement over financial criteria. It is the manifestation of a party structure that has developed over the years, in which strategic decisions, resources, and the political direction have come to be controlled by party apparatuses that are increasingly distant from the rank-and-file members who founded and built the PSOL.
There is no doubt that the leadership—now controlled by Primavera Socialista, which holds the party presidency and is responsible for its day-to-day management—exercises a profoundly undemocratic control over the party’s finances and major political decisions. The concentration of power in the hands of a few leaders and the absence of effective mechanisms for oversight by the rank and file are part of the reality within the party.
But it would be a serious political mistake to turn this debate into a dispute between “democrats” and “bureaucrats.” Erika Hilton belongs to Revolução Solidária, a faction led by Guilherme Boulos, one of the main figures responsible for the PSOL’s current alignment with the Lula-Alckmin administration and the logic of the ruling PT. That same faction has, since joining the PSOL, been part of the majority bloc that pushed the party into its current situation. Erika cannot, therefore, present herself as someone uninvolved in a process in which she is a key player.
The situation gets worse when, following the complaint, Juliano Medeiros, former president of the PSOL, responds to Erika’s complaint by stating that she will receive the highest amount among the candidates: R$ 2.3 million. This figure further exposes the absurdity of a Brazil where the working class cannot make ends meet on their own wages, forcing them down the path of debt and exorbitant interest rates. It shows just how much the PSOL is driven by the need for parliamentary survival. Not only because of the “need” for parliamentary representation at a time of attacks by the far right in both chambers, but also because of the struggle to retain the material conditions and privileges of Parliament. Obviously, this problem extends to the party as a whole.
The problem didn’t just start now, nor is it limited to the election fund.
We have long argued that the project now supported by the majority within the PSOL is one aimed at dismantling the party. It is a project that is gradually abandoning the goal of building a militant, democratic, and class-independent party, transforming it instead into an electoral machine focused primarily on institutional competition.
When a party stops organizing its members to focus instead on organizing its congressional caucuses and elected officials, when programmatic debates are replaced by negotiations between factions, and when day-to-day operations revolve around the distribution of resources and the drawing up of candidate lists, the inevitable consequence is that the party apparatus takes the place of politics. That is precisely what the current controversy reveals.
The dispute over the electoral fund is not the cause of the PSOL crisis. It is one of its most obvious symptoms.
The abandonment of class independence, the growing alignment with the federal government, the ongoing policy of forming electoral alliances without programmatic criteria, the replacement of participation in class struggle with parliamentary action, and the weakening of internal democracy are all part of the same process. They are not separate problems.
Therefore, limiting the debate to the distribution of resources means discussing only the surface of the issue. The underlying problem is another: the PSOL has gradually transformed itself into a tool of electoral apparatuses that vie for institutional spaces while opportunistically abandoning a consistent anti-capitalist program and subordinating the party’s strategy to the needs of the next election.
That was not the reason why thousands of activists broke away from the PT to found the PSOL.
The party was founded to represent a socialist and class-independent alternative to the betrayal perpetrated by PT governments. It was founded to be a democratic instrument for organizing the struggles of youth, women, the Black movement, Indigenous peoples, and rural and urban workers. Not to reproduce, under a different name, the very same bureaucratic and electoralist methods that we criticized.
As Revolução Socialista, we have been voicing this criticism for many years. None of the factions currently at the center of this conflict can present itself as an alternative as long as it continues to pursue the same agenda of institutional adaptation that led the party to this point.
The solution will not come from one faction triumphing over another. It lies in returning the party’s political decisions to the rank-and-file, effectively democratizing its operations, ensuring complete transparency regarding its resources, and reclaiming a program of class independence that breaks with accommodation to the government and the political regime.
The current crisis can have a positive outcome if it helps thousands of activists understand that the problem is not just who controls the election fund, but which political project is being financed by it.
The task of anti-capitalist activists is to defend the PSOL as an instrument of struggle for workers and oppressed sectors, reclaiming the principles that led to its founding. This battle requires confronting the majority leadership’s plan to dismantle the party and rebuilding a militant, democratic, socialist, and revolutionary party.
