By Verónica O’Kelly (AS-PSOL) and Nancy Galvão (LS-PSOL)– ISL, Brasil
Last Saturday, July 30, the PSOL-SP held its Electoral Conference and reaffirmed the course that the current majority leadership of the party has been taking at national level: to give up building and strengthening a left political alternative with class independence in order to join the class conciliation path and the broad front of the Lula-Alckmin campaign at national level with the Haddad-França agreement in the state of São Paulo.
Walking backwards
With 25 votes in favor of supporting Haddad for governor and 17 in favor of the party’s own candidacy, the regrettable policy of the current majority leadership, formed by the Socialist Spring and Solidarity Revolution currents, which have the invaluable support of the Campo Semente (Insurgence, Subvert and Resistance), which is leading our party to a dead end, is reaffirmed. The PSOL emerged as a political tool of those from the radical left who refused to give up an independent, class-conscious, anti-capitalist and socialist project. Denouncing and fighting the evils of the capitalist system and never kneeling to the demands of capital and the old politics. The founding of the PSOL was a demonstration of political overcoming for thousands of workers, who felt the betrayal of Lula and the leadership of the PT, which after so much conciliation with the bourgeois parties and governing for the rich, became another party of the regime.
Thousands of fighters from all over the country joined the PSOL in the search for a political tool to mobilize and strengthen their struggles and with a solid democratic regime. But today the party is being captured by the old policy of class conciliation of a bureaucratic leadership that empties its democratic organs and turns its back on the militant base. Electoral pragmatism (and opportunism) has become the center of its guidelines and orientation, leaving aside the political dispute and the processes of class struggle as a priority, provoking a sad programmatic retreat, flirting with old politics and submitting the party to the electoral agenda. The liquidation of the PSOL from its origins is going ahead by leaps and bounds.
Haddad and Márcio França: an agreement with the rich, not with the workers and the poor sectors of the peripheries.
The state of São Paulo has been governed by the tucanato for 25 years, with Geraldo Alckmin as governor in 12 of them. The current ally of the PT, and vice-president of Lula, is responsible for the neoliberal and anti-worker policies in the State, together with the ferocious dismantling of the State in favor of privatizations, outsourcing and “Public-Private Partnerships”. Undoubtedly, it is urgent and necessary to put an end to the tucanato, but we will not defeat them in alliance with sectors of the right. Fernando Haddad and the PT have sealed a national agreement and also in the state of São Paulo with old Tucanos and their allies with the sole objective of reaching the government. The capitulation and adaptation of the PT to the neoliberal project is nothing new; it was present during 12 years of federal government and in several states and municipalities. What is new is the direction that the majority leadership of the PSOL is taking. Today, due to the responsibility of this leadership, the PSOL will not have its own candidacy for governor and supports, without a single comma of criticism, Haddad and França are the new candidates.
The PSOL not only will not have its own candidacy for governor, but also gave up the possibility of having a Senate candidacy capable of expressing a program that responds to the demands of the workers and the poor people. The Electoral Conference approved the support to the candidacy of Márcio França for the Senate, 22 votes in favor against 21 in favor of the party’s own candidacy.
It is not due to blindness of the PSOL-SP that leaders forget who Márcio França is but electoral opportunism. Recently, the former governor said that “it is not right to film the police all the time”, declaring a clear sympathy for impunity in the face of the abuse of power and the lethality of the security forces that repress and kill in the peripheries of the state, mainly black workers and youth. No wonder. He materializes the ideologue of the militarization policy of the youth from the “Military Civil Guard” (GCM). França attacked the public administration during his government. He was vice-president of the Tucano Alckmin, with whom he promoted a deep dismantling of public services such as health, education and social assistance, favoring privatizations. In the midst of the pandemic, a moment of great desperation and suffering of the popular sectors, França defended an emergency aid in exchange for face-to-face work, breaking the necessary policy of isolation and social distancing to avoid the increase of contagion and deaths by covid19, besides deepening the exploitation and labor precariousness. Just remember some measures and policies of the psbista that today will be supported by the majority leadership of the PSOL.
So we reaffirm, Marcio França is the candidate of the rich and powerful, not of the working class and the poor people, to support his candidacy for senator is to ignore and abandon our struggles. The Haddad-França agreement is a compromise with the rich who hold the economic power of the State and against the basic needs of the youth, of women, of black men and women, of the peripheries and of the working class as a whole. The majority leadership of the PSOL-SP, in exchange for support in the next elections, chose its side, but the militancy of the PSOL will continue in the trenches of the working class.
Fight for rights and a dignified life, on the road of anti-capitalist and socialist struggle.
The Liaison Committee: Socialist Struggle and Socialist Alternative, declares itself absolutely against the resolutions of the PSOL-SP Electoral Conference and calls on the militant militancy of the PSOL to defend the founding program of the party, together with the strategic project of class independence, socialism and to reaffirm the PSOL as left opposition to all the governments of class conciliation that eliminate rights. It is necessary to build a political tool of the working class, revolutionary, socialist and internationalist, to truly transform everything!