By the National Direction of Socialist Revolution – LIS

The possibility of the PSOL entering into a federation with the PT – currently federated with the PCdoB and the PV – represents a strategic turn of enormous gravity. It is not a circumstantial tactical-electoral agreement, but a decision that may compromise the very reason for the party’s existence.

The PSOL was born as a left alternative to the adaptation of the PT to the Brazilian political regime and its policy of conciliation with sectors of the bourgeoisie. It was built as an independent instrument of the workers, with an anti-capitalist and socialist program, in opposition to the alliances with the bosses’ parties and to the logic of governability subordinated to the interests of capital.

Entering into a federation with the PT would mean subordinating the PSOL to a political project hegemonized by a strategy of class collaboration and administration of Brazilian capitalism. A federation is not a punctual coalition: it imposes common action for four years, unifies parliamentary functioning, conditions candidacies and profoundly restricts party autonomy in the states and municipalities.

In practice, this may mean renouncing the freedom to present one’s own candidacies at the federal, state and municipal levels. It may mean having to form campaign events and alliances with bourgeois parties which today integrate or sustain the governmental base, such as the MDB, the PSD or Unione Brasil, assuming commitments incompatible with an anti-capitalist program. It implies, above all, carrying forward the administrative reform being implemented in the State of Para, for example, where the MDB, which Lula pointed out as a possible vice-president, destroyed the statute of the state workers of Belem, cut acquired rights and is privatizing all health care, with attacks on the state workers, privatizations and a development model based on environmental exploitation – including the privatization of the Tapajós, Madeira and Tocantins rivers in the Amazon of COP30 and other projects at the mouth of the Amazon.

In Rio de Janeiro, for example, the PT is an ally of Eduardo Paes, with broad alliances with business and conservative sectors. A federation could force the PSOL to integrate or sustain arrangements of this type in different states and municipalities, subordinating its actions to agreements that express the logic of class conciliation.

A party that claims to be anti-capitalist cannot be structurally tied to a bourgeois project.

Political independence is not an organizational detail: it is a strategic condition for the working class to have its own tools of struggle and not be permanently subordinated to conciliation projects.

This path has already begun to be traveled by Guilherme Boulos when he entered the federal government and assumed responsibilities within the governmental structure. Now, the federation proposal seeks to institutionalize this movement, dragging the whole party into the same strategy of adaptation and turning the PSOL into an organic appendix of the PT project.

In defense of the anti-capitalist and independent PSOL

The extreme right must be fought firmly, in the streets and at the ballot box. But this fight cannot serve as a justification to dissolve the PSOL in an arrangement that compromises its strategy. Recent experience shows that class conciliation does not structurally defeat bolsonarismo; on the contrary, it preserves the social conditions that feed the frustration exploited by the extreme right.

By defending the federation, the majority bloc of the party puts at risk not only the political independence of the PSOL, but also its own electoral autonomy. The federation could mean the end of the freedom to define its own candidacies and state strategies during the whole period of its validity.

Revolucion Socialista is totally opposed to this federation. Immediately, we call and we will be in unity with all the internal currents that are in the same trench against the federation. At the same time, we call on the left of the PSOL, the militant militancy, the youth and the social fighters to close ranks in defense of political independence, the socialist program and a consistent anti-capitalist strategy. It is necessary to fight for the PSOL to return to being a tool of organization and combat of the working class, and not an auxiliary force of the conciliation project.