Justice for George Floyd! Justice for all victims of racist police terror!

U.S. Preparing A Military Crack Down On What’s Left Of Democratic Rights

Workers and oppressed fightback must prepare and organize against the rise of fascism!

(Image: liampayne/Instagram)

The public lynching of George Floyd, coming when it did, functions as an inadvertent  yet clear incitement by  the MAGA crowd to exploit the resulting  inter-racial “red/black’ youth revolt. The  ruling class, never missing an opportunity to spin the story from racist police murder to what it terms “illegitimate forms of protest”, in turn uses this characterization to justify Trump’s opportunistic imposition of emergency powers–sending in the National Guard. Trump personally  wants these powers because he can’t get elected without a crack down or lock up that keeps the masses from voting.

Chauvin, is a product of instituionalized racism; this known killer with MAGA and Klan connections,executed a public lynching provoking a nation-wide protest as if it were a plan from Trump’s playbook. The local “red/black” police squads followed as per handbook, putting provocateurs like Pederson into action. He was caught on video smashing store windows as the protests began, dressed in black with his wife’s respirator and an umbrella, protesters exposed him as he tried to retreat to his getaway vehicle. Pedersen and his cohorts’ job was to incite full-on riots to justify Trump calling in the National Guard, throwing red meat to his racist Confederate flag waving base. Always ready to sow confusion with a mixed message, Trump laughably claimed MAGAs love Black people. Because Trump cannot risk a military war with China yet, he needs a domestic anti-black, anti-immigrant class war to prepare the ground for possible suspension of the November elections. Why is this happening right now, and what must we do to fight it?

Why is this happening right now?

The suddenness and extremity of the current crisis compounding the pandemic, climate disruption and inevitable economic crash has created a situation where the ruling class is in a panic and without the normal solutions. The working class is divided, lacking leadership and facing mass unemployment (25%), while the ‘middle class’ of better paid workers and self employed are sliding rapidly into bankruptcy. Facing a crisis many times worse than the 1930s, global capitalism has reached its terminal crisis.

The contradiction between nature and capitalism is clear in the combination of the revolt of nature, signified by the zoonotic pandemic and meteorological cataclysms (fire, warming, mega monsoons, hurricanes, floods,  tornadoes), the spontaneous uprisings of workers and oppressed against the moves of the ruling class towards populist Bonapartism and the capitalist class preparing the ground for fascism, the only way out for capital against the threat of socialist revolution. A new generation of multi-racial working class fighters need organization and theoretical armament to resolve the contradiction, stepping off the reformist ineffectual treadmill of electoral duality and the protest-only culture of the petty bourgeoisie! 

How is this contradiction expressed in the U.S.A.?  In the U.S., the contradiction is between the world hegemon and an economically advanced but politically backward working class benefitting from the imperialist extraction of super-profits from oil and other key resources and debt service. They have been shearing off the workers’ living standards since the 1970s and now the Law of the Tendency of the Rate of Profit to Fall has caught up with the U.S. capitalists as a class. Seventy years into the post-WW2 era, U.S. economic decline leaves the ruling class with few options other than the fascist road. One of these options is outright Bonapartist dictatorship. Since Trump’s election in 2016 he has sought to expand the presidential powers to become a Bonapartist ruler. The current compounded crisis leading up to the election pushes him faster in that direction, to take executive control of the other branches of government, asserting new powers and now attacking states’ rights.

The Bonapartist mobilizes right wing populism against the more timid and liberal wings of the  bourgeoisie that are not otherwise willing to go along with the requirements of the biggest capitalists for authoritarian control and militarized solutions. Bonapartism and fascism share characteristics but are not the same. The Bonaparist leader will point to himself as the only force capable of solving the crisis and who does not hesitate to put the military on the streets for his own gain. The Bonapartist maintains a semblance of popular democracy, allowing the unions to exist and the voices of opposition to publish. The fascist follows when the Bonapartist cannot resolve the crisis in favor of capitalism,  and when the workers movement challenges for  power the fascist step in to crush the organizations of the workers and oppressed, crush civil liberties and round up, imprison or disappear opponents.

“From fascism the bourgeoisie demands a thorough job; once it has resorted to methods of civil war, it insists on having peace for a period of years. And the fascist agency, by utilizing the petty bourgeoisie as a battering ram, by overwhelming all obstacles in its path, does a thorough job. After fascism is victorious, finance capital directly and immediately gathers into its hands, as in a vise of steel, all the organs and institutions of sovereignty, the executive administrative, and educational powers of the state: the entire state apparatus together with the army, the municipalities, the universities, the schools, the press, the trade unions, and the co-operatives. When a state turns fascist, it does not mean only that the forms and methods of government are changed in accordance the patterns set by Mussolini — the changes in this sphere ultimately play a minor role — but it means first of all for the most part that the workers’ organizations are annihilated; that the proletariat is reduced to an amorphous state; and that a system of administration is created which penetrates deeply into the masses and which serves to frustrate the independent crystallization of the proletariat. Therein precisely is the gist of fascism….” 

– Leon Trotsky, “Fascism: What it is and How to Fight It”

The COVID pandemic has compressed this contradiction explosively. The COVID threat to life forced a belated move to lockdowns, closing down the economy, creating millions of unemployed. The failure to control the virus has impacted the most exposed sections of society, impoverished workers, People of Color and immigrants. Trump, doing the bidding of the Chambers of Commerce, has constantly rejected workers’ right to life by demanding a ‘re-opening of the economy’ at the expense of their lives. The result was predictable and workers have resisted with over 200 strikes since early March. The threat of a mass movement against him has caused Trump to lose ground with his base over COVID; even Twitter is challenging him with fact checks; and he is threatening  governors and mayors who stand up to him. Etc.,  etc.

Trump needs something to justify a state of emergency to force a re-opening of the economy and blame Blacks for resisting it. The imperialist playbook is to make other countries pay for your crisis, but in the end it’s workers and oppressed everywhere that pay. And so far he hasn’t broken the working masses. He knows that by targeting Black and migrant communities he divides the working class, gets the wavering elements of the ruling class fearful of mass anarchy behind him, and can use his power to impose martial rule and settle the question of who retains presidential power. At the same time he avoids the need for an external war with China which is a risk too far in the present global situation. The ‘red’ scare tactic is useful in winding up his white supremacist base as a fascist movement to attack the threat of workers revolution, but as yet there is no need to push this to the limit and risk a global war. With the executive power and support of Congress he has the room to retain power and prepare for the future fascist regime. The critical question is: can workers’ and oppressed mobilise and organise against that power and resolve the class war by taking power with a Workers’ Government and Workers’ State?

How to fight it!

Trapped between elections and protest the working class has no political self organization nor party that acts in its interests. Without an independent voice of the working class and oppressed the discussion dominated on the mainstream media ranges from Fox with its hypocritical stance of: “…yes you have something to be angry about but your going about it all wrong…” to the worthless Democrats looking for a way to channel all the righteous indignation off of the streets and into an “Anyone but Trump” Biden moment.  The problem for the Democrats, and they know it, is that in many of the urban centers where daily police terror in the Black and Brown community is the norm, these cities are being gentrified by Democratic political machine politicians in league with billionaire developers. And the enforcement actions in response  to this wave of protests triggered by the murder of George Floyd are also guided by Democratic administrations calling in the National Guard so they don’t look weak in face of Trump’s taunts and threat to send in the military police. Their big reason to show little opposition to Trump is their desperate need for budget bailout monies. They won’t get these if he doesn’t sign the bill granting them!

So the multi-racial working class and oppressed youth who filled the streets for the last week have no legitimate reason to support the Democrats other than the pragmatism that comes with fear, moral defeat and short sightedness. The fake socialists like Bernie Sanders and his followers in and around the fringes of the Democratic Party want your energy to put Biden in office because they do not believe the working class can take power into its own hands and are unwilling to chart a course to that end. They fear the youth uprising they wish to manipulate for their “new normal!”  

It is significant that these demonstrations are racially integrated.  Historically in America, major working class and social gains have been won for all when white workers have united with Black people and taken up the fight for Black rights.  And the ruling class knows this! This prompts the sector of capital represented by Trump and Barr to consider a rapid turn to fascism, hoping to have adequate ‘Boogaloo’ (civil war) support for a ‘Fatto Compli.’ They are capable of self-delusion about their chances too, particularly because Trump surrounds himself with yes men. So we need to advance the historic program and organizational forms of the working class to disabuse the far right of their chances of carrying the coup off! We need to make the AFL-CIO organize “Federal” Locals of the unemployed open to all the unemployed! This would at a stroke signify a great unifying of the class as a militant labor movement. Demand living wages for all, employed and unemployed! 

Revolutionary Marxism sees the youthful vigor expressed in the streets as incipient rebellion, as the voice of the voiceless manifests in desperate direct action.  Desperate because all “legitimate” means of redress are like talking to the hand.  All roads of reform are blocked by the economic desperation of a capitalist class facing its own demise due to the  tendency of the rate of profit to fall. Their largesse, their noblesse oblige, allows only  incremental changes made one day and taken back the next.  Even the most peaceful leaders of the oppressed and workers are shot down and jailed while self serving opportunist leaders get way too chummy with the class enemy after convincing the masses they can ‘work it’ from the inside; only to turn on their base when the real master tells them to enforce austerity by force of arms. Reform and electoralism has failed to end exploitation of workers and the environment, has failed to end racism, bigotry, and misogyny and has resulted in one imperialist enforcer after another doing the capitalist class’s bidding overseas.

During the Obama years we saw the escalation of police murder of Black and Brown lives in cities under Democratic Party control. For the fake left, the political initiative is always in the hands of liberalism. This means the social revolt of the moment is of little importance and the principle of class political independence is either inapplicable or just another concept to fob off or put into historical storage! The solution offered by the liberals and fakers like the DSA, the Progressive International, the Working Families Party, et. al. is to get out the vote for Democrats without even putting a warning label on that deadly option.

A warning, would be in order, that it was Obama who shut down Occupy, uniting the FBI with local Democratic mayors and providing their police with military grade equipment and federal “intelligence” assistance to crush a movement which shut down the ports of Oakland, Portland and Longview,  threatening the billionaires of Goldman Sachs where it hurts. It was Obama who assisted the coup leaders in Honduras to crush the mass movement,  making it the murder capital of the world as union activists were hunted down in their homes and in the streets. It was Obama who funded the Zionist  operation known as “Cast Lead”  devastating Gaza. It was Obama who extended the wars in Afghanistan, Iraq and kept Gitmo open.  It requires a level of national chauvinism  on the part of self-proclaimed revolutionaries (from Anarchist to pseudo-Marxist) to ignore the actual role of the Chief executive of U.S. imperialism and advocate election of his henchman Biden!

We also learned that spontaneous and sustained  protests, even when they result in general strikes from below (as in Oakland when 40,000 shut down the port winning support from the most militant workers of the ILWU) are not enough to win.  The Occupy was smashed by the Democrats who guided the masses back to the electoral arena. But even the reelection of Obama was not enough to keep the people off the streets.  The racist institutionalized terror the capitalists need to keep Black, Brown and oppressed working class families down and powerless could not be dismantled by all the weary speechifying of Obama and the parading of AG Holder.  And so Occupy was shut down but the movement morphed quickly, with the cell phone camera and social media exposing multiple racist cop and vigilante murders, into #BlackLivesMatter.

Ferguson erupted and national attention was transfixed on its racist legacy of slavery-the modern lynching by cops and neo-fascists. Youth, many of whom got their activist start in Occupy, enraged by the lack of progress, attacked symbols of the confederacy and the battles in the streets became national debates which exposed the rightists’ love of the heroes of the confederacy and the stars and bars as OVERT RACISM.   When the fires of  the  Rodney King, Oscar Grant, Trayvon Martin, Tamir Rice, Eric Garner, Sandra Bland,  Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and George Floyd protests fade and the lawsuits commence, the liberal politicians always come out with endless proposals for police reform and citizens review boards that have not and cannot  reform institutions of racist terror which the capitalist class relies upon to keep poor folk down.

There is a rapid shift today in the U.S. as racism becomes morphed into a fascist movement in support of Bonapartism. But already the compounded crisis has sparked an uprising that changes the objective situation, so that Bonapartism of the centre cannot hold. Witness how fascists protesting the lockdown and touting automatic weapons caused the Michigan state government to suspend its sessions for a week. This interference with government then escalates to the Governor of Minnesota sabotaging public order by calling out the National Guard, deploying them against the workers’ right to protest for the first time since  Missouri deployed the Guard in Ferguson (2014). The fear of revolution expressed by Trump and the Democrats as “anarchy” could force Trump to move to fascism quickly, as his Bonapartism is a balancing act where neither class has the ascendancy. Bonapartism is a transitional form of class rule that cannot hold when the class war escalates, facing the compounded terminal crisis where we face the question of socialism or barbarism.

Trotsky saw fascism as on the agenda in the 1930’s, and even wondered out loud whether the U.S. could continue to afford bourgeois democracy.  The outbreak of WW2 war substituted for it by finally stimulating full employment. Since then unions have been further incorporated into the state machine, the working class has become even more amorphous without a mass workers party, let alone a mass revolutionary workers party. The new left has retreated to part of the way with their latest LBJ. So the uprising today is an expression of class spontaneity without any independent working class voice. What little benefit it has from social media can be closed down with the flick of a switch. Even so this resistance makes the prospect of a Bonapartist class balance difficult, and demands a more reactionary solution. If we are right and Trump cannot risk a major war with China yet, how does he resolve the internal class war? Trump is capable of exploiting the crisis and making a turn to fascism if he is convinced this is the only or the preferred way to hold onto power. He has the backing of a sector of the ruling class to do so, and it is an open question how much of the military would support suspension of the Constitution, in whole or part.

Workers and oppressed need our own party with a program that answers today’s immediate needs with answers which only working class power can implement. Such a workers party will organize the entire working class united with the oppressed. The party will build class-political consciousness for the overthrow of the exploiters and their state. The workers’ own party will coordinate all the partial and democratic rights battles to achieve the goal of the conquest of political power by the workers and oppressed.  We call this a transitional program. It is built in every struggle addressing each single need of the people with steps through self organization to the establishment of workers control of the means of production by democratic planning in the interest of all, not for profit.

How do we get from here to there? We begin this way:

We fight for justice for ALL!  Remember all victims of racist terror!  George Floyd, Breonna Taylor and Ahmed Arbery Presente!! 

Mobilize the social power of the working class for political labor strikes demanding justice for George Floyd! Defund the cops! Not one penny for the forces of state repression!! 

Cops are racist terrorists and strikebreakers! Kick the cops and prison guards out of our unions and labor federations! 

Struggle against racism in our unions: build anti-racist class struggle caucuses that fight for political independence and a transitional program. 

Build racially integrated, armed, trained and disciplined  Labor/Black/Brown self-defense guards out of our union halls and community centers to defend Black and Brown people against racist cop, fascist and vigilante terror!  

For mass labor-centered mobilizations to drive the racist terrorists and the fascist militias  from the streets! Convene workers tribunals for justice for all victims of cop violence!

Charging Derek Chauvin with only third degree murder and manslaughter is a mockery of justice! Workers and oppressed will never find justice through the capitalist courts!

Cops, National Guard and Military off the streets!  Hands off the demonstrators! 

For Workers Political Strike Actions to Oppose State Repression and to Defend the Protests! Shut the Whole Country Down!

Free all arrested anti-racist protesters!  Defend Samantha Shader! Drop all charges and release her now! An Injury to One is an Injury to All!

‘Antifa’ are not terrorists!  Government hands off ‘Antifa’!

No to stop and frisk and racial profiling! Cops out of the schools and off of transit!

Racist police terror and violence will never end until American capitalism is abolished. For revolutionary integrationism! End discrimination in housing, jobs, edcuation and healthcare! For Black liberation through Socialist Revolution!

Build a fighting Workers/Labor Party and a Workers International a tribune of the workers and oppressed, to fight for a Workers Government! For workers rule and World Socialism!

Class Struggle 132, Autumn (March-May) 2020

   CS 132 Autumn 2020 by Dave Bedggood on Scribd

Brazil: Break with the PT and the Popular Front!

The national education strike or more than 1 million on May 15 was the biggest mobilisation against President Bolsonaro's regime since his election. 

The following is translated from our Brazilian comrades of the Grupo de Trabalhadores Revolucionários do Brasil (GTR-BR)

In order to defeat Bolsonaro and fascism, the workers must break with the PT and the Popular Front and defeat the trade union bureaucracy: the example of education and public pensions

It is not possible to combat Bolsonaro, fascism and imperialism, supporting the PT (Workers Party) and the Popular Front. After the workers said NO to the neoliberalism of the FHC (Fernando Henrique Cardoso) government in the 1990s, they elected Lula and the PT in hopes of a better life. The PT spent more than 13 years in power ruling with the bourgeoisie and applying the neoliberal policies of imperialism. Bolsonaro’s victory and the threat of fascism show that the Popular Front is incapable of defending workers’ rights and fighting fascism, on the contrary, it demobilizes and demoralizes the struggle and paves the way for attacks against the working class!

While the commodity sales boom, especially for China, brought a flood of money, and as Lula said: “never before in that country did the bankers make so much money,” the PT was advancing in privatizations, in the dismantling of public services, of forestry, built the notorious Belo Monte hydroelectric plant, implemented education reform, auctioned pre-salt oil, etc., etc.

The financial market crash in 2008 marked the beginning of the biggest capitalist crisis in history. Capitalist crisis means that the bourgeoisie can not maintain its rates of profit and needs to attack the working class hard. These attacks have generated resistance on the part of the workers not to pay the price of the crisis, the Arab spring being the largest to date. However, there is no country in the world today that is not experiencing economic, social and political crises. On the other hand, fascism grows throughout the world as the only way for the bourgeoisie to crush the working class and make it pay the price of the crisis.

In Brazil it was no different, while Lula said that the crisis was a “marolinha”, he made appropriations of billions of reais to save the big companies like JBS (Brazilian meat-processing corporation) and GM. When Dilma assumed the presidency in the second term, the country already suffered with the end of the economic boom of commodities sale and the country went into recession; her government did not resist the crisis. Of the alms and credit that the PT gave to the working class, only the debts remained. The opposition bourgeoisie also did not speak of the global crisis of capitalism and its campaign to overthrow the government declared that the PT was the cause of the crisis.

Now the far right has come to power with their anti-PT discourse, but obviously the economic crisis is not over. On the contrary, the country has a high rate of unemployment and the public accounts do not balance, causing a risk of a crash. Bolsonaro’s populist government, which is rapidly advancing its Bonapartism, is a necessity for the bourgeoisie to crush the working class and ensure that it pays the price of the capitalist crisis. For the workers there is no other way forward than to end illusions in the bourgeois elections and capitalist state, no other way but to step up the independent struggle of the class to destroy capitalism and the construct the workers’ and socialist state.

The Bolsonaro versus Popular Front polarization is a trap for the working class because it puts before it two bourgeois options and eliminates a class independent alternative for the workers.

The neo-liberal reform of education: from FHC to the PT and the current government

In education, the subservience of the PT governments and their bourgeois allies to the plans of the World Bank and imperialism were no different. For decades education has suffered neoliberal attacks with small reforms that have been condensed and legalized in the National Education Plan (NEP). The National Education Plan, which represents imperialism’s plans to transform education into a commodity, was approved in 2014 under the Dilma government. Bolsonaro’s offensive against education and public universities can only be fought if workers are aware that it is necessary to combat all the neoliberal measures of the last years, including those of the PT, which have paved the way for the current attacks.

No doubt education workers have been among the most attacked in recent decades. The scrapping of schools and the precariousness of the teachers is felt by all. Every year education suffers from budget cuts. The education cuts carried out by the current government are the same as the left government made to comply with the Fiscal Responsibility Law or the “fiscal adjustment” Rousseff made in 2015.

It was in the PT governments that pushed the ‘Educational Reform’ the most. The private education college has grown exponentially, possible only with the billion in public money intended for entrepreneurs of the education sector, known as the “school of sharks.” Government programs that finance jobs in private institutions created the world’s largest education company in the world! Lula has created several new federal universities and institutes, which is the biggest rhetorical claim of his government. However, existing public universities continued in the process of scrapping and “reform”, while the new Universidades and Federal Institutes created by PT governments were born into the new system, where the curriculae and funding are geared to meet the private sector’s needs: low cost for school maintenance and the preparation of cheap and qualified labor to supply the markets. The fact is that universities remain an elite space that few have access to and the new universities created by Lula were part of the implementation of educational reforms dictated by the IMF and World Bank established in the NEP.

Bolsonaro has announced the cut of funds of 30% for the public universities. One of the arguments against government attacks is that public universities generate the most research and technology in the country. This is true, but it is important to remember that in recent years these researches are increasingly dependent on external funds, that is, on the foreign companies and multinationals that control and define what will be researched, according to their interests.

Another argument used by the PT government’s naysayers against the current government is the lack of democracy and autonomy in universities, when the chosen elector of the Triple List is not the one that received the most votes in the elections. However, it is worth remembering that before the PT came to power, one of the great promises was to end the Triple List, which includes the three names most referred by the university community, and from which the government chooses one name. During his thirteen years in power, the PT never ended this undemocratic method of choosing the rectors; what it did was to choose the one with the most votes, while the system remained the same!

High school reform is another example of the educational reform demanded by imperialism from semi-colonies like Brazil. It transforms secondary education into vocational education, with the justification that young people leave ready for the job market. This reform removes training and broad knowledge of secondary education and channels the training of young people to specific areas as a way to generate cheap and specialized labor for the market. On the other hand, it benefits private educational institutions, which lower their costs and increase the demand, since the young person who does not get space in the labor market needs to go back to school and retrain. The PT spoke against the reform of high school when this was approved by Temer, but were silent when this same reform of the NEP was approved by their government or when it was implanted in the states by PT governors, as happened in Rio Grande do Sul during the Tarso Genro government.

In universities, the same privatization logic and training of skilled and inexpensive labor for the market is observed. The old, long and comprehensive courses of entire areas of knowledge have been dismembered in several degree programs. Thus, the basic cycle was created, lasting 2 years, where students matriculate in these various courses. After completing the basic cycle, the student has to do two more years of the course he has chosen. For the student who in the old model leaves college with broad training, she or he now comes out enabled to work only in one branch of the area of knowledge chosen. For private initiative, it means that you no longer need to fund a long and comprehensive course, but only the basic cycle, or the specific modules of each course. It also means a greater demand, because every module that the student wants or needs to do, requires them to go back to the educational institution for it, and obviously to pay for it!

Before the arrival of the PT, the trade unions and the National Union of Students (UNE) fought hard against this reform that had already been demanded by the World Bank since the 1990s! In 1998 the federal universities engaged in a 90-day strike against the University Autonomy of FHC, which was nothing more than autonomy to seek financing in the private sector! This practice began with the foundations of private initiative within the universities, which not only has not been reversed, but made great strides with the PT governments.

What about basic education that suffers from the scrapping and immense precariousness of schools!? One of the main focuses is the attack on education workers, which serves both the interest of private Capital and the end of public servants. The “National Education Floor” was the great tool to end the careers of the teaching profession. While the government was promising a salary floor, which was actually the CEILING, the same floor law established the end of teachers’ career plans. The state of São Paulo is one of the most advanced in the privatizing reform of education. There, the teachers already “won” the floor so much defended by the PT and its syndicalists, but they lost their career plans and other benefits. The state is known for the precariousness of teachers, who worked on a temporary contract, with no ties to the government and earn by the hour, true day laborers! With different stages of implementation, this is the reform applied in ALL states and municipalities of the country. In this sector, the presence of the private initiative dates back to the FHC governments and has remained in the Lula and Dilma government. Private-initiative foundations, such as the AirtonSenna Foundation, Bradesco Foundation, etc., elaborate, apply and control pedagogical projects in public schools, taking away the autonomy of teachers in the classroom.

In Rio Grande do Sul, education has suffered the same dismantling for decades. The hardworking servants of education like doormen, lunch servers, etc., were almost all replaced by private initiative workers through outsourcing; there are only the few waiting for retirement. In recent years, the number of teachers hired under the new scheme equals the number of veteran teachers, whose indefinite period contracts are now the government’s target. The government attack advances to the privatization model already implanted in São Paulo. And during all these years of dismantling, the union policy directed by the CUT (Unified Workers’ Central) / PT is to deceive the masses claiming that the Law of the Floor and the NEP were the solution to all problems of education!

The example of Public Pensions

Today, the media, business people and the government are engaged in a massive campaign for the approval of the Pension Reform. They say it’s the only way out of the crisis. Social security is the largest income distribution in the country, which is one of the most unequal in the world! Reform is a requirement of the financial market, as it is from pensions that the country can draw more money to pay its debts to the bankers. Dilma in 2016, during her “fiscal adjustment” spoke of the need for reform. Temer’s “A bridge to the future” program identified pension reform as its main objective. The “democratic” bourgeoisie and its regime of the 1988 constitution were never able to meet the demands of the workers properly at any time. The different governments that operated under the constitution of 1988 have slowly withdrawn all the rights conquered in 1988. Like education reform, pensions have undergone several reforms since the Collor administration, with further reforms under Lula and Dilma.

The reform presented by the Bolsonaro government to Congress foresees the end of the current policy of public pensions replaced with a private capitalization scheme; the new scheme increases the time of service required, the amount of the contributions and includes a reduction of benefits. Several populist measures of the PT governments were instrumental in reaching the proposed reform of today. In the boom period of the international economy and sales of commodities and credit during the Lula government, the campaign of “valorization of the minimum wage” was launched. The untying of the increase for retirees earning more than one minimum wage led to a flattening of wages paid by social security. The pension ceiling had already led many workers to turn to private pension plans to try to keep their salary level in retirement. In practice, the private sector workers retain very little of the rights of the current pension system. The civil servants were targeted by Lula’s pension reform in 2003, but they are the ones who have managed to maintain most of their rights and are now the most threatened by the current reform, which foresees the end of public servants’ pensions for a single pension scheme. It is worth remembering that the public servants, while they were able to maintain their rights, unfortunately lacked solidarity with the workers of the private sector and the defense of their social security system. This balance is fundamental so that public servants can receive support from other workers in the face of the attacks they are suffering from the bourgeoisie and the Bolsonaro government that wants to end public service and advance privatizations.

The media and government say the country will collapse if the reform is not approved. To deceive the population, they compare the expenses of social security with those of health and education, showing that for the latter the expense is much lower. But they do not show that spending on debt repayment for bankers is astronomical. The workers should have no illusions, the money the government intends to take out of pensions will not go to health and education, but to the bankers!

It is not possible to defeat Bolsonaro’s final coup against public services and pensions by defending the PT and the Popular Front as “lesser evil”

Undoubtedly, the reforms of the last decades in education, health and social security follow the logic of privatization: increasingly scrapped, these services will remain public only for the very poor who can not afford to pay, the others will have to look for these services in the capitalist toilet. It is worth remembering that private does not mean quality, because in Brazil we know the poor quality of private schools, universities and health care and that we pay dearly for them!

After Lula’s first election, all workers’ struggle and awareness against the privatization of education project suffered a great setback. The unions and militants began to be integrated into the state institutions and defend this project, giving a “democratic” face through the “National Conference of Education,” a tripartite sphere with businessmen, government and workers, where this project was endorsed. Educational reform was implemented through the co-optation of trade unions and workers’ organizations by the Popular Front.

The capitulation of the Left to the Popular Front is general, as can be seen during the bourgeois elections, when most currents called for voting for the PT against Bolsonaro and Fascism. Even organizations that had stood in opposition to PT governments, such as PSOL (Socialism and Liberty Party) and PSTU (Unified Workers’ Socialist Party) took this position.

PSOL, PSTU and combative unions such as ANDES (National Association of Teachers of Higher Education), who in the past were against the NEP, all denounced the maneuvering of the ‘Law of the Floor’ and tried to unite the struggle of teachers demanding the full rights of contracted teachers who have been in the public service for more than 3 years. Now they have NO policy different from that of the PT and the Popular Front. Instead, they are part of the National Conference on Education and are agents in the application of these neoliberal attacks.

The global crisis of capitalism and the resistance of the working class

The deepening of the crisis shows that the impeachment of Dilma was only the beginning of a great instability of the institutions of the Brazilian bourgeois state. After the fall of the PT and the unpopular Temer government, we went through a stark and growing crisis of the State institutions, with disputes between the powers and within the Bolsonaro government itself, which show that not only the executive power, but the bourgeois democratic regime is not able to carry forward the interests of the bourgeoisie and imperialism. Bolsonaro needs to deepen his bonapartism more and more, putting himself above institutions, with populist and authoritarian measures. Unlike the PT and the reformist left, we say that the fascist methods and military blows of the bourgeoisie remain the same that the impeachment of Dilma was a maneuver of the bourgeoisie to overthrow her government, and that Brazil suffers with a threat of a real coup. The PT narrative helps demobilize, misinform and disarm the working class for this fight.

The global crisis of capitalism demonstrates the destructive character of this system. The decadence of American hegemony and the intensification of the dispute with the imperialist bloc of China/Russia lead the great world powers to another imperialist war. Obviously Bolsonaro has no sovereignty allegiance and has already shown himself to be the doormat of Trump and American imperialism, even willing to go to war to defend imperialist interests, as in the case of neighboring Venezuela. But the PT governments were never “anti-imperialist.” What the PT and the popular front did was to bring the country closer to Chinese and Russian imperialism through the BRICS. For workers, there is no difference in being exploited and paying debt to the IMF or the BRICS bank.

The PT, PCdoB (Communist Party of Brazil) and its allies are traitors to the working class. Contrary to what they claim, the workers and the youth have staged a great resistance. Youth in 2013 in the fight against rising public transport fares mobilized millions who went to the streets asking for health and education, andtoday the PT accuses them of having been a fascist movement! Teachers have for years held strikes in every state and municipality in the country. The need to unify these strikes forced the CUT / CNTE (Teachers Union) to carry out 3-day general strikes in 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016. All of them serving the trade union bureaucracy to destroy the movement from the inside, controlling and diverting it into illusions in the elections and programs of the PT government. In 2019, in the face of all the Bolsonaro government attacks, the CUT / CNTE was forced to call another general education strike for May 15. The question is: why do the trade union centrals that have been talking about “building the general strike” for years not unify all workers, taking advantage of this moment of the struggle of the education workers? They will certainly answer us: because the general strike against the Pension Reform will be June 16.

We do not sing the chorus with the ultra-leftists and centrists who criticize the trade union centrals over how much “time is needed to build a general strike. For the working class that has listened to the Bureaucratic Block of Trade Union Centers (of which Conlutas is a part) that it is necessary to “build” the General Strike for 30 days, this is not the question. Our critique is the role of bureaucratic misdirections in intervening in the movement to bar it, bureaucratize it, and divert it to the interests of its opportunist parties and its strategies of Popular Front and bourgeois elections. We warn workers that this example shows how opportunist mis-leaderships try to divide the working class. Why can’t other workers make a general strike in defense of education and the specific demands of each sector? Why can’t the General Strike against Social Security Reform unify with the other branches of the movement? We have come to answer those questions: because the PT, CUT and its allies do not want to bar the pension reform, as exposed by their governors and parliamentarians; they want a “better” reform. They want to exhaust the government before the upcoming elections and they fear that the strike movement will get out of their control. These are the reasons why the workers’ reformist leadership does not advocate an INDEFINITE General Strike.

We support and will be part of the general strikes of education and against pension reform. But we warn workers that the strike and movement is in the hands of a union bureaucracy and reformist parties who want to divert our struggles to their interests in elections and in Parliament. We say that a united front (UF) is required among workers and left-wing organizations, including opportunistic ones. We do not ignore the fact that the CUT/PT are the majority leaders of the Brazilian working class. But UF means that they are a part, and not the only leaders; that also the rank and file has its leadership role. That is why we call the Central bloc a bureaucratic front, in which only the leaders decide between four walls the direction of the movement. We regret the fact that CONLUTAS are part of and sustain this bureaucratic bloc and we call on it to break with the union bureaucracy. Only the indefinite general strike, organized and controlled by the rank and file committees and self-defense organs of workers is able to defeat the government, imperialism and put in check the bourgeoisie and capitalism in Brazil!

The strategy of dividing the movement of the working class is also carried out in the international field of class struggle. It is no wonder that social democrats, Stalinists, “RT socialists” and faux Trotskyists when faced with the biggest economic, social and political crisis worldwide, with mass upheavals and openly revolutionary processes such as the Arab Spring and the Syrian revolution, with support for bourgeois regimes, ultimately abandoning the struggle for socialism.. They have not advanced an independent struggle to support and provide class solidarity. The only way out for them is the Popular Front, that is, alliance with “progressive” sectors of the bourgeoisie, supporting dictatorships such as Assad in Syria or Maduro in Venezuela. These opportunistic and reformist directions are said to be “anti-imperialist”, but only when imperialism is American. They are allies of Chinese and Russian imperialism, in a large popular front, taking sides in the inter-imperialist dispute.

Faced with the deep capitalist crisis in which the bourgeoisie needs fascist methods to crush the working class to “solve” its crisis, the growth of fascism in the world shows that only the struggle of the workers and the socialist revolution is capable of defeating fascism. Socialist revolution is required to prevent the recurrence of inter-imperialist wars and to save mankind in the face of the destruction of the environment caused by the capitalist mode of production. For this it is necessary that the workers, leftist currents, militants and activists break with the opportunist leaderships and the Popular Front and advance in the direct struggle of the working class and in the construction of the World Party of the Revolution.