By Alternativa Socialista/PSOL
After the municipal elections, we want to advance in a debate with the group of comrades with whom we are betting on the construction of an independent and socialist political tool.
The Right Lines Up to Maintain Governance
To avoid the fall of Bolsonaro’s government, the right wing closed a governance agreement that placed the “centrão”, with Maia and Alcolumbre presiding over the parliamentary chambers, guaranteeing government stability and the holding of bourgeois elections as a guarantee of institutional order. This sector, in the face of the electoral defeat of Bolsonarism, is postulated as a bourgeois political alternative and is strengthened by occupying the government in many cities of the country and advancing in municipal parliamentary representation.
Even with the impossibility of a reelection of Maia and Alcolumbre to the Chamber of Deputies and Senators, the probability is that, even with the friction between Bolsonaro and the parliament over the future presidential dispute, the attempt to maintain a minimum of stability, the “agreement,” will remain with the bourgeoisie to avoid the deepening of the crisis.
Faced with this scenario, a debate is opening on the left and the vanguard on how to defeat Bolsonaro’s government and all the variants of the right to advance towards a solution with a class, anti-capitalist and socialist perspective.
The left of capital or false progressives
In our country, the progressive arch has had a project for a long time: the conciliation of classes and the management of governments at the service of capital. As were the 12 years of national Petista government, and as are the current provincial and municipal governments of the entire governmental arc of the so-called progressivism or the “left of the regime” (PT, PDT, PCdoB, PSB, etc).
These elections were a blow to this project. They are experiences that were shown to be false promises, since no matter how nice their speeches were, they did not work (nor do they work) to improve the life of the working class as a whole, they just offer more austerity and policies to maintain capitalist profit at the cost of more poverty, environmental destruction and repression. That is why they are rejected by a large part of the population, they represent what did not work and that they have nothing new or good to offer.
Allying with bourgeois or false progressive parties that govern for capital to confront Bolsonism and the extreme right is the best way to give space to Bolsonaro’s government, to allow it to arrive in 2022 and until it recomposes itself to run again for 4 more years. This leads to only one path, a new disillusionment among the masses that, tired of austerity, are looking for a political alternative, but quickly find themselves with governments that are not willing to confront those interests and are dedicated to managing and guaranteeing the 1% profits.
The strengthened PSOL faces a crossroads
The PSOL today emerges as a new political alternative on the left for millions, precisely because it is not part of the set of progressive and class conciliation parties that generated great frustration. That is why we say that we are at a crossroads and we must say which road to take.
In the 2018 presidential elections, many of us saw, with concern, the assimilation of the speech of Boulos (then candidate for president for the PSOL) to the policy of the PT and Lula. The debate continued in the pre-congress period and was expressed in the thesis presented by the majority leadership that proposed as a policy the formation of Broad Fronts against Bolsonaro.
Today, this path chosen by the leadership is deepened with the candidacy of Boulos-Erundina in São Paulo, accompanied by the formation of a “Broad Democratic Front” with PT, PDT, REDE, PCdoB and PSB, the triumphant alliance in Belém de Pará with PT, PCdoB, PDT, REDE and UP. This placed Edmilson Rodrigues (PSOL) as mayor under a program that includes class conciliation and abandons fundamental demands of our struggles. This path is also expressed in the uncritical support in Fortaleza to Sarto and Manuela in Porto Alegre, and the complete surrender with the electoral alliance in Recife with the PT and the candidacy of Marília Arraes.
The other road, the one chosen by the sectors and currents of the socialist left of the PSOL, is the only one possible to end the future of war against the working and poor people, towards class independence with an anti-capitalist and socialist perspective. Those of us who really want to defeat Bolsonaro and the entire traditional right have no alternative but to warn against this false expectation of the Broad Front and to reaffirm our commitment to the construction of an independent and socialist political alternative. And of course, to strengthen the struggle in the streets that we, the workers and all the oppressed sectors, are taking part in, because that is our only weapon to make effective the out with Bolsonaro, with his entire government and to defeat any change that comes from the right.
It is necessary to unite our forces to confront the course of the majority leadership; this is a priority. We call on the comrades of the MES, who represent an important sector with parliamentary representation and national extension, and with whom we coincide in many of these critical proposals towards the leadership, to wage this fight together.
The currents that make up the Bloc of the Radical Left were correct in forming the Bloc that elaborated the thesis “For radical a PSOL of struggle and of the bases,” but this success was not accompanied by a unified policy in these elections. To have done so would have strengthened us in the different cities when it came to giving the debates that we expressed in the thesis and in different documents, as well as in the strategic debate in the national direction of the whole PSOL .
There is no solution without socialism
It is not by governing with capital but against it that we can conquer rights and a better standard of living for those of us who live from our work. Our permanent struggle is to transform the current order and to advance towards a government of those who never govern, a government of the workers. Without socialism there is no solution, it is not an designed phrase, nor words for the holidays, it is an urgency and a necessity. The pandemic showed the cruelty that the 1% is willing to deal with in order to avoid the loss of capitalist profits. The catastrophic level of environmental destruction. The constant precarization of labor and unemployment. The unstoppable rise in the indices of poverty, destitution and hunger. The patriarchal and racist oppression towards increasing human exploitation. All signs that we are living a constant war that we cannot face without the necessary tool, a party of workers that confronts capital with a feminist, ecosocialist, anti-racist and socialist perspective on a global scale.
That is why we are militant and organized, join us and fight with us.