Abstract
This chapter tries to understand the transformations of the Workers’ Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores—PT), from its beginnings in the 1980s to its present crisis. To do so, I analyze some of the party’s documents, such as resolutions produced at meetings and congresses, and testimonies of members of the party that were already published as a means to reconstruct its history in the last four decades. In elucidating the PT’s history in Brazil, I consider how capitalist sociability has imposed itself as a political horizon, having settled the conditions for transformations in Brazilian society and the notions of social conflict within a conformist and compliant perception of social change. As the principal political organization of lower and working classes in the last 40 years, the PT gradually accepted the conditions of capitalist reproduction, which resulted in the softening of its original claims. Lastly, my analysis attempts to understand how the actual political crisis in Brazil should be reflected on in tandem with the contradictions of the PT.
I especially thank Júlia Braga Neves for the invaluable work of revision and the suggestions, without which this chapter would not have reached its final version.
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- 1.
Since the beginning, the PT comprised different political groups called tendências (tendencies). Despite the importance of the controversies among them, as they indicate that the party is not a monolithic organization, I consider it as unity. In fact, there is one tendency that prevails over the others. In the present day, it is called Construindo um Novo Brasil (Building a New Brazil), but it is another name for the group that was based on the activities of union leaders in the 1970s and 1980s and whose name was Articulação (Articulation). Because of its prevalence, most of the party’s documents and practices express this most influential tendency. Nevertheless, there have been some moments in which the left-leaning tendencies gained prominence. As I argue later in this chapter, the problems and contradictions of the PT encompass moderate as well as more radical left-wing tendencies, since they experience difficulties that pervade the Brazilian left.
- 2.
See, for instance, Henos Amorina’s opinion in Harnecker (1994, p. 199): “We believed we must have our people inside the parliament to carry on with working-class demands. How were we going to do this? It could not be through intellectuals, the bourgeoisie, employers, or landowners. It must be an achievement of the working class. We believed that there was only one way: to create a workers’ party”. Amorina was one of the leaders of the metalworkers strike in Osasco, an industrial city near São Paulo, and participated in the foundation of the PT .
- 3.
Some union leaders (Jacó Bittar, Paulo Skromov, Henos Amorina, Wagner Benevides, and Robson Camargo) wrote the final version of the document and discussed its content with Convergência Socialista. However, the union leaders rejected the Trotskyist version, since it gave the impression that the PT would be only the result of the efforts of “Convergência Socialista” (see Berbel 1991, p. 87). According to Skromov, the final version discarded the Trotskyist version but included many of its sections (Harnecker 1994, p. 213).
- 4.
Oliveira also suggests that the capitalist development challenged the centrality of the state to left-wing parties in the 20th century. Once the process of capital accumulation relied increasingly on the state, it is no longer enough to relate an anti-capitalist position with the defense of economic nationalization. In this sense, statism would also constitute a dilemma for the PT .
- 5.
See, for instance, the use of such expressions in the last party’s congress in 2017: “the 2008 collapse is the most serious crisis of capitalism”, “conflicts between imperialism and dependent countries”, “the global capitalist tendency of concentrating and exporting capitals” (Partido dos Trabalhadores 2017, p. 3, 4 and 11).
- 6.
Martinez (2007) made a similar analysis from a Gramscian point of view. He argues that the PT could be understood as taking the Gramscian formula on the conquest of the state as a starting point, meaning that working-class consciousness and their will to change political and economic reality became institutionalized.
- 7.
In the chart of principles, for example, the workers appear as “the real productive classes of Brazil” (Partido dos Trabalhadores 1998, p. 50).
- 8.
It is important to note that the use of “hegemony” by the PT certainly has its peculiarities and does not correspond necessarily to the intentions of the Italian Marxist. While the Gramscian concept meant political struggles that encompass civil society, the use of the term by the PT tends to restrict it to state institutions.
- 9.
Fundação Perseu Abramo (Perseu Abramo Foundation), a think tank of the PT , researched the values and perceptions of the residents in the periphery of São Paulo (Fundação Perseu Abramo 2017). Its primary objective consisted in understanding why many urban workers voted against the party in the municipal elections of 2016. The interviewers concluded from the testimonies that an entrepreneurial ideology pervades the inhabitants of the periphery of São Paulo, namely, that it constitutes a “lower class liberalism”. The most noticeable aspect of this research is the suggestion that the notions associated with entrepreneurship are ambivalent. For a considerable amount of the testimonies, the desire of becoming a businessman is associated with the promise of freedom from traditional employment structure, characterized by informality and precarity. Thus, urban workers tend to see entrepreneurship as a form of escape from miserable living conditions, that is, they embody an individual solution to their problems.
- 10.
During those protests, the mayor of São Paulo was Fernando Haddad, member of the PT .
- 11.
Marcelo Mattos (apud Demier 2003, p. 14) stressed this possibility after Lula da Silva’s election in 2002.
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Puzone, V. (2019). The Development of the Workers’ Party: The Rise and Fall of a Star. In: Puzone, V., Miguel, L. (eds) The Brazilian Left in the 21st Century. Marx, Engels, and Marxisms. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03288-3_2
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