BRASIL WIRE
Why did the US left media bash a successful democratic socialist party during a right wing coup?
On November 29, 2018, the socialist magazine and news site Jacobin co-sponsored a public interview with Fernando Haddad, the 2018 presidential candidate of Brazil’s Workers’ Party (PT). The former São Paulo mayor and federal education minister was introduced at Manhattan’s People’s Forum by Jacobin’s founding editor, Bhaskar Sunkara. To a packed house, Sunkara praised Haddad and the governments he was part of for designing programs that lifted “millions of people out of poverty… [and gave] millions the chance to have basic access to education and access to higher education. […] The impact of these governments,” he noted, “should not be understated.” Sunkara left no doubt about the significance of the PT governments that held Brazil’s presidency from 2003 to 2016. Despite the parliamentary coup that unceremoniously removed the party from power and Brazil’s subsequent lurch to the far right, he argued that the achievements of the PT in power allow us to “take comfort in the fact that left politics can achieve change and this change can impact millions of people.”
For its over 13 years in the presidency, the PT was successful at “uplifting millions of Brazilians out poverty, seriously expanding social citizenship, and making Brazil a significant international actor,” as was noted in Jacobin in 2018–recognizing the PT’s success at massive reform in one of the world’s most brutally unequal countries. Over the last year, Jacobin and other major outlets of the US left have been clear about the dangers of Brazil’s now president-elect, neo-fascist Jair Bolsonaro, and in their admiration for the PT’s historic accomplishments. Shortly after Haddad’s electoral loss, Jacobin even published some of his political writings from “1998 — the peak of neoliberalism,” Haddad noted.
After an electoral defeat to Bolsonaro fueled largely by fake news and blatantly partisan judicial measures against the PT, Brazil’s largest leftist party is now often extolled on the US left for its democratic socialist successes. Yet it is easy to forget what a transformation this was for North American leftist outlets. Reading critiques of the PT in major US left outlets when the party was in power might have led one to believe that 2014, not 1998, was Brazil’s “peak of neoliberalism.” It might have created the impression that the compromises of democratic socialism that frequently win support from those publications when proposed for the Global North are unacceptable capitulations to capital when successfully implemented in the Global South.
During much of the PT’s time in power, most major publications of the US left were presenting a different narrative about the party than the positive one finally embraced in 2018. In this telling, the PT was ineffectual, hopelessly neoliberal, and had demobilized and co-opted the unions and movements of a bitterly divided left. There was some truth in each of those critiques, but they were applied with such wild caricature that the praise the PT is now receiving from those same publications in the wake of its defeat by an ominous neo-fascism is stupefying.
We focus mostly on Jacobin in this essay because it is the publication perhaps most associated with the rise of electorally competitive democratic socialism in the United States and because it so clearly exemplifies the broader trend we identify. Astoundingly, of 38 articles published on Brazilian politics we were able to find in Jacobin from 2014-2017, all 38 presented a negative view of the PT. We write this essay in the hope that the next time powerful sectors of the Global North left are offered the opportunity to show solidarity with democratic socialist success and struggles in the Global South, they will not fail so tragically.
The Myth of the Neoliberal PT
Critique of the PT as neoliberal was particularly hyperbolic during the period from 2014 (as right-wing mobilization gained force in Brazil) through 2017 (well after the parliamentary coup against PT president Dilma Rousseff). For example, in his widely read 2014 book on the politics of Brazil’s World Cup and Olympics, Dave Zirin, sports editor of The Nation, lamented a “popular impression that Lula genuinely cared about the poor—even as he was turning Brazil into a neoliberal paradise.” As impeachment proceedings raged in 2016, a frequent Jacobin author argued that the right was kicking “wide open the doors of neoliberalism opened by the PT itself over the last decade,” while, an article by another frequent contributor stated that “the PT, after all, guided Brazil through Neoliberalization.”
To be sure, the PT engaged in numerous compromises and questionable alliances during its time in power, most significantly the maintenance of the so-called macroeconomic policy, “tripod” of inflation targeting, floating exchange rates, and meeting yearly primary fiscal surplus targets. However, the “tripod” was originally instituted not by the PT, but, in 1999, under the indubitably neoliberal govern(Continue Reading)ment of PSDB president Fernando Henrique Cardoso. One can find other elements of neoliberal policy during the PT governments—all valid targets of left critique. However, the idea that the PT was straightforwardly neoliberal or, more jarringly, that the party “guided Brazil through neoliberalization” long after neoliberalism’s “peak” in 1998, is a smear that beggars belief. Despite its numerous compromises with neoliberalism, during the PT’s time in power the party pursued policies of wage and benefit increases that helped lift some 40 million people out of poverty, vastly expanded university access for working class and Afro-Brazilian students, extended labor rights to Brazil’s miserably exploited domestic servants and stimulated internal production and consumption of nationally manufactured goods. All this after a prolonged period of neoliberalism and austerity that preceded Lula’s election in 2002.
A Fetish for the Vanguard
These critiques of the PT put foreign left journalists in a bind. If the party that nearly eliminated hunger, lifted up to 40 million people from poverty, and dramatically expanded higher education for the poor and Afro-Brazilians was made up of neoliberal posers, what happened to the real left?
Fortunately for those who prefer ideological purity to winning elections, Brazil has no shortage of far-left parties with a dizzying array of acronyms – PCB, PSTU, PCO, MAIS, MRT, and more. All of them are very small parties, mostly Trotskyist, and, to a significant degree, middle-class. Alongside their commitment to extreme factionalism, the main characteristic that unites these parties is electoral inviability. In 2018 they managed to elect not one candidate to any office. The only presidential candidate between them, the PSTU’s Vera Lucia, received 55,762 votes (0.05%), or 11th out of 13 candidates.
To read foreign left media, one would never know how irrelevant these parties are. As Jacobin authors were writing off PT as it was besieged from the right, they also extolled these parties for critiquing “the PT’s transformation into a party of order and neoliberal policies” and ascribed them a leading role in an imagined “mass student movement in solidarity with workers [that] could catalyze a wider radicalization and mobilization against […] [PT-led] austerity.”
Still, despite their enthusiasm for these parties, Anglophone left media writers are aware that they are electorally irrelevant. But there is one party to the PT’s left with a moderately successful record – the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), which broke from the PT in 2004. In 2018, PSOL elected 10 federal deputies, its best showing ever, leaving it tied for the 14th-largest party in Congress. It is home to some of Brazil’s best-known leftists, including the country’s only openly gay congressperson, Jean Wyllys; Marcelo Freixo, a Rio de Janeiro state deputy who was nearly elected Rio mayor in 2016; and the globally-revered Rio city councillor, Marielle Franco, assassinated in 2018. Still, outside Rio, where the historic weakness of the PT left an electoral vacuum, the PSOL amounts to a party that performs what Gramsci called a moralist or educational role, with no viable plan to take power. The party is strong among the student movement and academics but is rife with divisions over issues like support for Palestine and Venezuela. Yet it is to the comparatively bourgeois PSOL that Anglophone writers look for the Brazilian left’s salvation. As one writer for Jacobin, a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), matter-of-factly explained in 2017, the party was “the most electorally significant left party in Brazil,” a laughable claim, but par for the course.
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