Brazil

Latin America, violence, and capitalism

Marielle Franco, the Brazilian socialist feminist and LGBT activist, was brutally gunned down in Rio de Janeiro in March this year. Franco was a member of the Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL), a revolutionary split from the Workers’ Party (PT). She was an outspoken critic of police brutality and the Brazilian president’s use of the army to intervene in the favelas of the city. Franco’s death has been attributed to gangs, but many suspect it was an extra-judicial killing by militias closely linked to the state. Some 17 of the world’s 50 most violent cities are in Brazil, while Rio has 10...

Brazil: the snare of short-cuts

Brazilian socialist Andressa Alegre spoke to Solidarity about the experience with the governments led by the Brazilian Workers’ Party (PT) between 2003 and 2016 The PT, was founded during the military dictatorship, in the conflict against the dictatorship of 1964-85. It came out of the union movement, mostly in Sao Paolo, and the steelworkers’ union. Lula, the first PT Federal President, came fro the steelworkers’ union.. It was a very radical party. In 1988 it said that the way to end Brazil’s external debt was to nationalise the banks and Brazil’s mineral wealth. It promised to do a big land...

Far right grows in Brazil’s impasse

On 8 April Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil from 2003 to 2011 and until recently the leader in opinion polls for Brazil’s next presidential election in October this year, surrendered to police to begin a 12-year jail sentence for corruption. Brazilian politics has been swamped for the last four years by corruption scandals. They got Lula’s successor as president, Dilma Rousseff, removed from office in May 2016. Since Lula is already 72 years old, this jail sentence may take him out of politics for good. Under Brazilian law he is now disbarred from the presidential election. That...

Prosperity for the few, stagnation for the many

Right-wingers are trumpeting the claimed prosperity of the US economy since Trump’s election, and of the British economy after Brexit. A closer look shows the prosperity as very partial. Stock market prices in the USA have risen strongly since November 2016, though no more than their general rising trend since they hit bottom in March 2009. The slice of corporate profits in total US income is as high as it was at its pre-2008 peak, which in turn was the highest since 1965. Unemployment in the USA continues to fall towards 4% from its 10% peak in 2009.Its workforce participation has also been...

Brazil’s crisis of hegemony

Brazil seems stuck in a permanent political crisis. After three years of agony, President Dilma Rousseff of the Workers’ Party (PT) was impeached last August. Now her traitorous vice president Michel Temer’s administration is disintegrating under a cloud of scandal, not to mention its mind-boggling incompetence. Four common illusions prevent us from clearly understanding why this political instability has only intensified under Temer: that Brazil has a unified right wing; that capital acts together; that the bourgeoisie controls the state and the political process; and that social conflicts...

Temer versus the workers

On 22 March, Brazil’s coup government of Michel Temer brought forward a law, previously shelved, to legalise the expansion of outsourcing. Businesses will now be able to outsource workers for their primary activity (for example, teachers in a school). Government owned institutions can now use sub-contractors, opening the door for private sector interference in nationalised sectors. Outsourced workers in Brazil earn on average 24.7% less than directly-employed workers, work three more hours per week, and have a total employment time of less than half of non-outsourced workers. Expansion of...

Brazil: behind the Olympics

On the day of the Olympic opening ceremony, 5 August, a demonstration against interim president Michael Temer closed off a main street in Rio de Janeiro. With banners from the CUT union federation, the Workers' Party (PT, which governed Brazil from 2002 until the "impeachment" of president Dilma Rousseff on 12 May 2016), the left parties PSOL and PSTU, and from Brazil's two Communist Parties, PCB and PCdoB, the 15,000 demonstrators demanded "Temer Out" and condemned Temer, installed after the "impeachment", as a "putschist". The Olympic organisers set the background music and sound effects to...

Brazil: the plans of the right

On 10 May the acting speaker of the lower house of Brazil's parliament, appointed after the previous speaker was forced out on charges of corruption and money-laundering, declared the 17 April impeachment of President Dilma Rousseff invalid. The chief of the upper house, the Senate, however, declared that a Senate vote to confirm the impeachment and force out Rousseff would go ahead. On 4 May, Alfredo Saad Filho, a Brazilian Marxist economist working in London, spoke to Solidarity about the political turmoil in Brazil. At the level of the institutions of the state, and from the point of view...

A coup in Brazil?

Every so often, the bourgeois political system runs into crisis. The machinery of the state jams; the veils of consent are torn asunder; and the tools of power appear disturbingly naked. Brazil is living through one of those moments — it is dreamland for social scientists; a nightmare for everyone else. Dilma Rousseff was elected president in 2010, with a 56-44 per cent majority against the right-wing, neoliberal Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) opposition candidate. She was reelected four years later with a diminished yet convincing majority of 52-48 per cent, or a difference of 3.5...

Rousseff wins first round in Brazilian elections

In the first round of the Brazilian presidential elections, the incumbent Dilma Rousseff (Workers Party) took 41.1% of the vote ahead of Aecio Neves (pro-business social-democratic party) on 34.2%. They will now face each other in a second round of voting on 26 October. Socialist Party candidate Marina Silva got only 21.3%. This is surprising, as Silva had been favourite to win at one point. However it is unusual for a candidate to come close to challenging the two main parties. Protests in June and July expressed growing disillusionment with the main two parties. Many talked about not voting...

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