The Left of the 21st Century | Opinion

From Rio de Janeiro

Today we are fighting in Brazil on two levels. In the first of them, for the defeat of Jair Bolsonaro, in a democratic struggle to which all those who are today against Bolsonaro belong, whatever their positions in the past, or the degree of responsibility they had for the arrival of Bolsonaro in government.

Together

You don’t need to make any formal chord, you just have to walk apart and hit Bolsonaro together. Any position which makes others depend on the past, which excludes – including the use of the physical gallows – those of the PSDB (Social Democrats), for example, is a sectarian position. This does not relieve them of their responsibilities in the blow against Dilma Rousseff, except for Lula da silva of the 2018 elections, to the election of Bolsonaro.

Military

But it takes everyone who is against Bolsonaro to defeat him and everyone who is still with him, including part of the business world and the military. It’s not an easy fight, you have to isolate them and build a very broad front which expresses the desire and interests of the vast majority of Brazilians.

He is fighting against an authoritarian regime, armed with military armor, which must be defeated, so that full democracy can take hold in Brazil. The military withdrew from the political scene when the dictatorship they had installed was exhausted, but they have not suffered an obvious political defeat. This happened in Argentina, after the military attempt to use the Malvinas to regain prestige. It happened in Chile, when Pinochet was defeated in the 1988 referendum, when he wanted to be able to run for re-election. This happened in Uruguay, when two consultations carried out by the military dictatorship to privatize state-owned enterprises were rejected. So far, this has not happened in Brazil.

Overcome

The rescue of democracy is the first plan of struggle. Defeat Bolsonaro, by impeachment or in elections. The seizure of power of a democratic government in Brazil is a condition of the second level of the struggle.

It is the defeat and overcoming of the neoliberal model. In the current historical stage, capitalism has adhered to this model, since the exhaustion of the previous model, developmentalist or as we want to call it, in force from the end of the Second World War until the end of the 1970s. and in the early 1970s. 1980s.

It is a deeply regressive model, concentrating income, promoting social inequalities, a model whose conception is that society as a whole must be commercialized, according to the idea that everything has a price, everything sells, everything is purchased. It is the undisputed kingdom of money, of monetary wealth, it is the absolute domain of private banks, financial capital and financial speculation.

Adjustment

This is why the left of the 21st century is frontally anti-neoliberal. Fight for the defeat of this worldview and its politics of centrality of fiscal adjustment instead of the priority of social policies. Due to the defeat of the weakening of state policies, with the privatization of public goods, with the reduction of resources for social policies and the reduction of civil servants.

The fight against neoliberalism is the means today to fight against capitalism, in its current historical stage, centrally neoliberal. This is the fundamental struggle that she is waging today, to defeat the neoliberal model, the axis of all the setbacks suffered in the 1990s and suffered again in the last five years, the fundamental reason for the coup against Dilma and the arrest of Lula. The right elected Bolsonaro because he had the most votes in the polls, to mount the operation that led him to the presidency, to preserve the neoliberal model, re-established by the Temer government and radicalized with the policy of Paulo Guedes.

The two fights

Brazil will only be able to resume the path chosen by the majority of Brazilians in four consecutive democratic elections, with the rescue of democracy, with the election again of the President of Brazil by the free suffrage of all Brazilians. So that, from democracy, the neoliberal model can be replaced by another, centered on productive investments, income distribution policies and the creation of formal jobs, reduce social inequalities in the most inegalitarian country of the most inegalitarian continent in the world.

The tactic is the fight against Bolsonaro, the strategic fight is against the neoliberal model.