To the workers of Brazil ---- To the poor youth of the periphery ---- To
the indigenous and peasant peoples ---- To the Black people of thefavelas and peripheries ---- To the women fighters and LGBTT groups ----
To the workers, the unemployed, informal workers, students, and teachers
---- Bakuninism interprets bourgeois politics through class warfare,
analyzing the economic and political situation, the interstate system,
as well as the structural aspects of bourgeois elections, their role in
reproducing systems of exploitation and oppression, and the actions of
each of the actors involved (parties, interest groups, class entities,
and factions of the bourgeoisie), their programs in appearance and
substance.
The Bakuninist approach requires: 1) a materialist analysis, that is,
understanding class war by analyzing the concrete actions of political
subjects, organizations and class fractions in the processes of
capitalist exploitation and oppression; and 2) a dialectical analysis,
which we resort to the authority-freedom antinomy, that is, the
contradictions between the forces of the bourgeois order, or the system
of authority, and between the popular and revolutionary forces, or the
system of freedom.
In the current moment of class war in Brazil, we do not have a democracy
to defend, but a tyranny and fiscal adjustment to combat. The recent
conflicts within the bourgeois state and parliament express conflicts
within these structures, with no group within the power bloc able to
hegemonize politics and impose its policies on power, generating a
crisis of power. In this sense, popular and revolutionary forces must
act to combat tyranny or any measure that protects power and the groups
in power.
The Crisis of the Power Bloc: the paths and wrong paths of Tyranny
The position of the dominant political groups in Brazilian working-class
organizations tends to strengthen the system of authority, and therefore
the State, as it seeks to save the 1988 Republic. This limits and
hinders the actions of revolutionaries who seek the destruction of the
State and capitalism and the construction of socialism, since by
strengthening and legitimizing state powers, it strengthens the reaction
and weakens the revolution. However, the actions of the groups and class
factions acting in this direction directly clash with the physiological
and far-right clerical-military-bourgeois groups organized in the
National Congress and strengthened by the international situation, both
by the organization of the far right and by the systemic economic,
political, ecological, cultural, and social crisis, and in global social
democracy, which is the hegemonic force, with different national and
regional nuances, in working-class organizations and their ways of
acting and thinking. In light of this, we have a Power Bloc that is
unable to articulate and direct other forces to transform itself into
the Power Bloc , since the counterinsurgency since 2013 has attacked not
only the autonomous and revolutionary strands, but also the class
conciliation organizations at the base of Lulopetismo.
This situation demonstrates an attempt by a portion of the Supreme
Federal Court (STF), the Workers' Party (PT), some allies, and sectors
of the bourgeoisie to save the 1988 Republic. However, the
clerical-military-bourgeoisie and political bloc in Congress will not
back down, seeking to ensure its self-protection and maintain its
political, economic, and judicial privileges within an international
coalition led by the far-right sectors of this bloc. The conviction of
retired Army Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro (PL) and the Generals set
off alarm bells for the clerical-military and political bloc, known in
the mainstream media as the "centrão," which led them to act to save
their position, embodied in the attempt to pass the "Protection of the
Blindage" (PEC), popularly nicknamed the "Protection of Banditry." On
the other hand, degenerate reformism (Frente Brasil Popular e Povo Sem
Medo, CUT, UNE, MST, MTST, PT, PCdoB), renewed reformism (PSOL, PCB,
PCBR, UP-PCR) and sectors of multicultural liberalism are holding on to
the action of the majority of the STF and seek to keep the streets
immobilized or controlled by their policy of saving the bourgeois State.
However, the ultra-authoritarian reactionary bloc's attempt to create
self-protection for parliamentarians via the Banditry Amendment Proposal
(PEC da Bandidagem) and to secure amnesty for the captain and the
generals following the Supreme Court's conviction prompted liberal,
social, and social-democratic forces to issue a call to the streets,
clearly within their repertoire of action and mobilization: an
ultra-festive and peaceful one. The success of the mobilizations, albeit
limited by their peaceful nature, resulted in the Shielding Amendment
being buried in the Federal Senate, still in the Constitution and
Justice Committee, by a unanimous 26-vote vote. Thus, the victory of
street pressure on senators opens an opening for revolutionary political
and popular forces and direct action by the working class.
The irony of this process is that the generals and the army captain were
convicted by a law sanctioned by Bolsonaro in 2021 based on a proposal
by Deputy Hélio Bicudo/PT back in 1991. As we had already stated, the
Bolsonaro-Mourão government confirmed itself as a government of
clerical-military-bourgeois reaction, a return to the dictatorship, but
of the backroom wing that failed to assert itself at the end of the
dictatorship within the armed forces and no longer had the full support
of the high command of the armed forces that directed the
redemocratization process.
The ruling classes broke the pact of class conciliation that sustained
the Workers' Party governments (2003-2016). This represented the advance
of proto-fascism, strengthening the system of authority, militarism,
theologism, and ultraliberalism within the Federal Government's power
structure. This was yet another counterinsurgency reaction, a reaction
to the 2013 popular insurgency and the escalating cycle of strikes and
occupations that followed (2013-2017). And even their defeat by the
federal government did not demobilize their base in the National
Congress, especially since during the Bolsonaro years they managed to
raid the federal budget by increasing parliamentary amendments, a
crucial point for analyzing the actions of parliamentarians and the
National Congress.
At this moment, we have, on one side, reformists and social-liberal
political forces attempting to strengthen the Democratic Rule of Law,
increasing its authority. A large portion of the Supreme Federal Court
(STF) and the Workers' Party (PT) and its allies are primarily
responsible for this policy, which is expressed in the Broad Front and
the immobilization and/or control of the masses. On the other hand, we
have the far right and the right-wing political elite seeking to double
down on amnesty and the defense of parliament and increase their powers
in the Senate as a way to gain greater control over the judiciary,
especially the Supreme Federal Court (STF). The vote in the first
session of the first panel of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) revealed
an internal divergence that still maintains the presence of the
far-right sector in the Supreme Court and has a real chance of a
majority in the short term, while the entire judgment and the Attorney
General's thesis leave the armed forces protected.
On the other hand, there is no contradiction regarding the economic
perspective between the Supreme Court and the physiological and
clerical-military forces; on the contrary, the ultraliberal agenda
unites these sectors. However, the strengthening of the agribusiness and
financial bourgeoisie has dismantled other sectors of the bourgeoisie
itself, which have lost power in the National Congress due to the
strengthening of the agricultural sector through the policies of the
Brazilian state since the second FHC administration.
The Colonial Policy of the Clerical-Military-Bourgeois Bloc and the
Physiologism of the National Congress
This political bloc in the National Congress, known as the Centrão
(centrão), of which Bolsonaro and his family are a representative,
represents the sewer of the dominant class's infrapolitics, of the
militias' strategies for ascension to political and economic power. It
has an intrinsically colonial and mafia-like character of private
property itself, that is, a self-defense system designed to guarantee
the process of plunder, exploitation, and domination, which also entails
total surrender and its association with international capital for its
own benefit.
The class and political configuration of the Bolsonarist bloc presents
an essential ideological aspect in the legitimization of its project: it
abandons the "universalism" of declining neo-imperialism and adopts the
openly unilateral, subservient, and pragmatic bias of its class
objectives. This is what leads Bolsonarism to detach itself from certain
myths and illusions of the traditional liberal bourgeoisie, such as
democracy in the abstract, violence in general, corruption in general,
humanity in general, and even scientific universalism.
Giving up this neo-imperialist "universalism" is what explains the
apparent contradiction in Bolsonaro's discourse, which denounces a
"left-wing globalism," including entities like the UN and transnational
corporations. These liberal/capitalist entities, at a given moment, in
fact absorbed and subverted the social demands of the poor, women, Black
people, environmentalists, and democratic groups, etc., to better
govern: addressing absolute poverty with policies focused on income
rather than class, integrating race and gender demands into the logic of
consumption and the occupation of spaces of corporate and government
power, the environmental agenda being embraced by selective criticism of
carbon emissions and encouraging alternative energy sources without
questioning the model of production and accumulation, the absence of
social policies being "solved" by private and direct funding of
grassroots groups through foundations and NGOs in a cynical, supposedly
disinterested "corporate anti-statism," etc.; The issue is that
Bolsonaro's discourse is ultra-liberal and conservative and does not
admit such absorptions, labeling these forms of domination through the
co-optation and subversion of social demands applied for decades by
traditional international organizations and capitalist companies as
"leftist"/"communist."
Thus, the meaning of the development of the reactionary program,
expressed by Bolsonarism, means the legal-institutional recognition of
the relations of power and property instituted through theft and
colonial violence by these sectors, exposing the power of the State and
operating with a permanent logic of capital accumulation, state
centralization and epistemological centralism/racism that means: direct
attack on rural and urban workers, permanent plunder, exploitation,
environmental destruction, male domination and Christian domination.
Faced with the economic, political, ecological, cultural and social
crisis, it is necessary to order the world according to the system of
authority: militarism, patriarchalism, theologism and ultra-liberalism.
Paralyzed Lulopetism
The strategy of Lulopetismo and its organizations is to save the
Democratic Rule of Law, the Republic of 1988, through a Broad Class
Front, whose only point is the abstract defense of democracy, against
the extreme right and its most immediate expression, Bolsonarism,
without, however, challenging neoliberal hegemony in the economic and
public policy aspects.
In this sense, we have the main organizations of Lulaism, such as the
CUT and MST, more or less paralyzed by the Broad Front agreement, at the
same time that the centralization of state power advances and the
actions of workers are reduced to state demands and the production of
public policies, thus helping to domesticate the popular masses and
their adherence to the bourgeois order.
Contradictorily, the advance of neoliberalism and class conciliation
during the first Workers' Party governments, developing Brazilian
dependent capitalism with an increase in the primary export agenda and
the increased power of the agribusiness sector, with Brazil's
subordinate insertion into the new international division of labor in
the face of technological changes and the organization of value
production chains, provoked a substantial change in the composition of
the Brazilian working class, including impacting the main unions and the
CUT, the main trade union federation. Its main constituents, such as
bank workers and metalworkers, lost collective strength. On the other
hand, the years of Workers' Party government strengthened the union and
workers' know-how of conciliation and negotiation, leaving even
unionists unsure of how to act other than through conciliation rather
than conflict.
This has led to a paralysis of social movements, youth, and unions that
participate in electoral situations under the leadership of the Workers'
Party, especially in the face of the rise of conservatism and
reactionism at the grassroots level and the electoral confrontation with
the far right. This global rise and the attack suffered by the Workers'
Party and Lula before the 2018 elections clearly reflected political
persecution coordinated by the global far right and imperialist state
forces, such as the United States.
In our March 2018 press release No. 57, we assessed four possible
scenarios for the unfolding of the dispute over the Brazilian state
within the context of the election of the first Trump administration and
the height of Operation Car Wash. The scenarios outlined at that time were:
1) Lula reverses the decision and runs for office;
2) Lula out of the elections, but the PT launching an alternative candidate;
3) Lula out of the elections with the PT declared illegal as a criminal
organization;
4) Lula out of the elections, with all Left-wing Parties having their
candidacies made unviable by a strategy of judicialization and
criminalization.
Scenario two, which we defined as the most likely at the time,
consolidated, leading to the candor of Fernando Haddad (Workers' Party),
former mayor of São Paulo at the time of the June protests and a leading
figure in the party's social-liberal leadership. After losing the
election, we saw the continuation of the clerical-military-bourgeois
reaction that took over the federal executive branch and began to
strengthen the system of authority, as well as militarism, theologism,
and ultraliberalism with the privatizations of BR Distribuidora and
Eletrobras, for example.
In this way, counterinsurgency and the attack on workers' rights
advanced, since in relation to economic matters the STF is in agreement
with the proto-fascist groups and the Brazilian ruling class, already
paved by the Temer Government (MDB) that created the necessary bridge
for this rise.
However, the emergence of "Vaza Jato", the Pandemic and the
Election of Biden allowed sectors of the Judiciary, in particular the
STF, to react in the name of its salvation and for more noble reasons,
the Democratic Rule of Law, at the same time that Lula's defense was
able to prove the political persecution and setup that the prosecutors
and judges of the operation carried out in collusion with the US State
Department.
The attempted coup at the Capitol in 2021 and its aftermath
enabled the Biden administration to react, thus preventing the coup
d'état of January 8, 2023, from taking place. Without external support,
the leadership of the Brazilian Armed Forces took a step back, leaving
everything to the generals, the captain, and the mobilized social base.
Expanding the Domestication of Popular Struggles
The relative novelty in the strategy of domesticating the popular masses
and their adherence to the bourgeois order is found in the ministerial
formation, such as the incorporation of the false discourse of
"representation" and "identitarianism" with political figures that would
meet the demands of black, indigenous and LGBT movements.
From the perspective of the ruling classes, Bolsonaro's electoral
defeat and Lula's return to the presidency did not pose a threat to
capitalist exploitation and domination in Brazil. The immediate
interests of certain ruling factions may be affected, but by no means in
ways that would suggest the possibility of liquidating their power or
investments.
The conviction of Bolsonaro and the generals who orchestrated a coup
attempt saves the Armed Forces and its top brass under the protection of
Defense Minister Múcio. For now, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the
more legalistic and republican forces led by the Workers' Party (PT) are
seeking to preserve the legitimacy and legality of the 1988 Constitution
by neutralizing the high command of the Armed Forces, the Supreme
Federal Court (STF), and the current executive branch from advancing
far-right judicial policies.
On the other hand, Bolsonarism has further exposed the Brazilian
National Congress, which was supplied with substantial parliamentary
amendments under the leadership of Artur Lira (PP of Alagoas), who
oversaw the budget plunder, giving parliamentarians relative autonomy
over executive resources. This new configuration alters the power play
in Brasília and the negotiation of votes according to the ministries in
the Esplanade.
In any case, no structural change in the Armed Forces' policy will alter
their doctrinal stance of maintaining bourgeois order by persecuting and
combating popular forces recognized as class enemies. Furthermore, state
military forces operate with the same logic, now intertwined with
organized crime or the ramifications of its control.
In this sense, the scenario we predicted in our previous statements was
confirmed: that the base of Lula's PT would maintain the cowardly
political option of defending the "democratic rule of law," calling for
actions by repressive forces to legitimize the decisions of Supreme
Court Justice Alexandre de Morais.
In this situation of forming a conciliatory government, the tendency
toward systemic integration increases. We are facing a scenario of
strengthening reformism and the disintegration of combative or
revolutionary sectors that have difficulty operating in a less explosive
and revolutionary situation, such as 2013. This conciliation should
further expand the Lula-PT's systemic integration, including increasing
control over its youth , given the reactionary and elitist
interpretation these forces have of the Popular Uprising of June 2013.
The PT-CUT know-how of conciliation between the union, popular and
student movements, the policy of degenerate reformism (Frente Brasil
Popular e Povo Sem Medo, CUT, UNE, UBES, MST, MTST, PT, PCdoB) further
increases integration with the State and interpenetration between
classes, which is quite explicit in the positions of the PCdoB and its
main leaders and intellectuals.
The Workers' Party government's dilemma and the restructuring of the
ruling bloc are related to the crisis of power in Brazil, and therefore,
not only to disputes within parliamentary politics and ideology, but
also to economic and social class disputes and the appropriation of
capital within the new wave of national and international colonialism.
This is where the importance of understanding the "(open) assault on
power" by militias and theological elites comes in. Obviously, all these
sectors were already integrated in varying forms and degrees into the
state and even into the Workers' Party governments. However, the
discursive structure (participationist, multiculturalist,
environmentalist) that materialized in concrete forms of exercising and
negotiating power, such as the tripartite forums, proved limiting to the
class interests of these sectors.
What the Lula administration is doing is attempting a new conciliation,
but at this point its social foundations are weakened and lacking roots
among the new groups of workers emerging from the extremely precarious
labor market that characterizes Brazil's flexible dependent capitalism.
Dilma's administration had already fallen because the ruling classes,
especially its two main factions today: the agrarian and financial
classes, which grew stronger under Lula (2003-2010), no longer needed a
grand compromise, leaving President Dilma with the stigma that she
wouldn't know how to negotiate conciliation like Lula.
The domesticated movement and the guideline for maintaining the Broad
Front based on a neoliberal economic agenda with social actions
underneath, maintains the power crisis, since at the moment the
bourgeoisie and its allied sectors do not yet have the possibility of
sidelining the PT and its allies.
In turn, the rising "renewed" reformism, recently articulated by the
UP/PCR, PCB, and PSOL factions, also suffered from internal processes,
as in the case of the PCB and the split that gave rise to the PCBR under
the leadership of Jones Manoel, and the internal disputes within the
PSOL that led to the party's greater integration under the leadership of
Guilherme Boulos into the Lula-PT bloc. Meanwhile, the neo-Stalinism of
the UP-PCR managed to gain ground within the student movement, becoming
a leading political force, given its character freer from the degenerate
reformism of the PT and PCdoB.
The reversal of the Supreme Federal Court's authority and its attempt to
safeguard the republic also signifies the legitimacy of the anti-worker,
neoliberal measures the Supreme Court has ruled on. Furthermore, the
Broad Front has continued its policy of advancing privatizations,
dismantling public services, and destroying social and labor rights. In
practice, the strengthening of the State and the 1988 Republic involves
increasing guardianship and control over popular movements as a way to
safeguard "democracy."
It's no coincidence that Lula returned to the spheres of
class conciliation: the so-called national conferences, tripartite
forums that bring together government, business leaders, and the union,
student, and grassroots bureaucracies. Chief among them, the Council for
Sustainable Economic and Social Development (CDESS), was reinstated.
However, unlike the first Lula administrations, we are
experiencing a post-pandemic moment of deepening class struggle, where
reactionary far-right forces have advanced in the face of the paralysis
of neoliberal policies implemented by social democratic or liberal
governments.
As positions become more radicalized in society, the social democratic
strategy has been to further integrate the working class into the
bourgeois democratic system, especially through elections and
parliamentary pressure. The social democratic camp has abandoned the
strategy of force and popular power for its reformist and
petty-bourgeois illusions.
In early 2021, we asserted that the defense of a military coup in Brazil
as a strategy of the national and international bourgeoisie was losing
momentum. Thus, bourgeois factions pointed to two likely trends: 1) the
construction of a more pragmatic and neoliberal electoral alternative
without Bolsonaro and 2) a new pact of class conciliation with the
left-wing union-party bureaucracies, now weakened and with a smaller
social base. This second trend gained momentum through a series of
decisive combinations, including the change in the US administration,
the opening of the Parliamentary Parliamentary Inquiry into the
Pandemic, and a bourgeoisie of national and international origins from
so-called "green capitalism" that aligned itself with Geraldo Alckmin's
position as vice president.
During the ultra-monopolistic phase of capital, the "developmentalist"
model of the Workers' Party governments in the first decades of the 21st
century guaranteed and reinforced the Brazilian economy's subordinate
position in a regime of concentrated capital accumulation, with the
so-called macroeconomic tripod (floating exchange rate, inflation
target, and fiscal target), and the export dependence of agro-extractive
activities. This increased the power of the "bankocracy," rentierism,
and agribusiness itself, while also favoring a portion of the formal
"CLTtista" (CLT-compliant) salaried working class, whose official unions
were linked to the CUT, and public servants. This was the basis for the
class conciliation of the 2003-2015 period.
Growing competition for mineral resources, such as rare earth minerals
essential for the semiconductor industry, and infra-energy resources, is
impacting the expropriation of common goods to convert nature into a
commodity. Resources such as water and forest conservation are becoming
commodities to be traded, a key focus of global climate conferences.
Furthermore, demand for water and energy is increasing due to the
development of AI and its data centers, which are major thieves of
natural resources essential to life, such as water. In this context,
Brazil is portrayed as a neocolony of data centers.
Furthermore, Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo
are already negotiating a sort of "OPEC of forests," given that they
have the largest tropical forests on the planet, with the aim of
transforming tropical forests into commodities to be traded on the
carbon market. Thus, the Lula-PT policy is not about mass popular
confrontation, but rather about ensuring the stability of the republic
and promoting the rise of certain segments of the ruling class through
some very specific distribution of resources to the masses as a whole.
The know-how of the Workers' Party (PT), the Workers' Party (CUT), and
their allies and organizations has been developed and reinforced in
recent decades to ensure and promote the interpenetration and
conciliation of class interests, not their conflict and division. While
the counterinsurgency advances within the bourgeois state, equipped with
every possible digital and political technology, popular forces are
unable to, at the very least, prevent this process of surveillance and
militarization of society. Quite the contrary. Sectors of the mass
movement disregard surveillance and militarization of society as an
element to be combated, or have already assimilated surveillance as part
of state policy and, irresponsibly, idealistically believe that they
will not be affected by this same surveillance/control.
Break with Lulism, unleash the collective forces of the proletariat
The Bakuninist perspective of the Anarchist Popular Union invites us to
view counterinsurgency not as an anomaly, but as the state's standard
response to any real threat to its order. The period from June 2013 to
the 2016 coup was a complete cycle of this strategy: from popular
outburst to violent repression, passing through media co-optation, and
culminating in institutional reorganization. The result was the
strengthening of a more authoritarian state, more aligned with capital
and more efficient in neutralizing popular insurgency, all under the
aegis of the "Democratic Rule of Law." Recognizing this dynamic is
essential so that future popular struggles avoid falling into the same
institutional traps and can, in fact, build popular power outside and
against the state.
Building this anti-state popular power requires multiple factors, but
among them is the need to break with the idea of the State as a
regulatory body for social life, as well as a break with State Trade
Unionism, which is expressed in the State's attack on popular
representation bodies such as unions, student organizations, and
community organizations. It is necessary to build unified struggles
against the 6x1 scale, in defense of a 4x3 scale that can guarantee
employment for the people and accentuate the strategic offensive our
class has embarked on. Pointing to the General Strike as a horizon is
fundamental to building insurrectionary conditions that can bring down
capitalism and statism in Brazil.
We harbor no illusions that these conditions will fall from the sky, but
rather will be shaped by the very dynamics of the class struggle. To
achieve this, we must emphasize the denunciation of the Congress as an
enemy of the people. Such a denunciation alone will not point to an
organizational horizon. Such a horizon must be presented by
revolutionaries, and for us Bakuninists, it is the People's Congress, a
body of dual power that must polarize the regulation of social life with
the bourgeois state.
While parties and organizations of the reformist left, at best, call for
a constituent assembly to "democratize the State," or those of the
bourgeois left that accept anti-people measures from the Workers' Party
governments as a "lesser evil," Unipa understands that crises are
cyclical and should not involve any popular sacrifice to save the
system. Likewise, it understands that the State is an instrument of
oppression, and no attempt to seize this bourgeois power should count on
popular support. Thus, beginning the construction of a People's Congress
is an urgent task, both current and historical. Its construction may be
rushed or may take longer, but it is the only way to pave the way for
People's Power in Brazil and defend the freedom and well-being of the
people against capitalism, the State, and their crises.
END OF THE 6 X 1 SCHEDULE WITH A 30-HOUR WORK WEEK WITHOUT WAGE REDUCTION!
REPEAL OF LABOR AND SOCIAL SECURITY REFORMS!
NO TO ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM!
REPEAL OF THE NEW SPENDING CAP!
LAND AND FREEDOM (AGRARIAN REFORM)!
END OF TAX EXEMPTIONS FOR AGRIBUSINESS AND LARGE CORPORATIONS!
TAXATION OF PROFITS AND DIVIDENDS AND GREAT FORTUNES!
uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com = unipa@protonmail.com
https://uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/o-avanco-da-contrainsurgencia-a-agonia-do-estado-democratico-dedireito-e-a-brecha-para-revolta-popular/
_________________________________________
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