SPREADING STRUGGLES AGAINST SPURTING LIVING COSTS in the cost of living keeps the fires of struggle burning in Brazil. Whereas in mınimum wages increased only 25 to 30%, living costs (even according to minimizing official statistics) shot up 30% just between 31 December and 15 March. poorer "states," the disproportion was even more severe.
Though the government and its press try to cover up the situation, reports sifting through show that the peasants of the Northeast continue to attack towns and food warehouses. In Ceará and Piauí the forces of repression have had to be mobilized against "cangaços," the famed peasant-bandit cangaceiros, who symptomatically are rising up again, this time with more developed social sense. And with the refugees from the drought areas, geoisie has created a veritable slave-trade, "selling" these starving Northeasterners to work for next to nothing on estates in Minas Gerais, Bahía, Goias, and even farther.
In the smaller cities isolated but significant struggles occur in uninterrupted succession. Typical was Uberlandia in Minas Gerais, where the population seized and held control of the town for 24 hours, taking measures against hoarders, before being severely repressed by the police.
After a pause, menacing with muffled minor actions in various cities, the return of the students started another wave of struggles. There were widespread strikes of secondary-school students against an increase in school costs. Bloody repression in Goiâna provoked a popular outburst that drove the police from the streets and forced the government to reduce school costs. There then exploded a strike of teachers in the private schools.
At Recife, in Pernambuco, a main centre of this strike wave, a hike in bus fares produced. an explosion in which the populace attacked the buses and drove them from the streets; they themselves occupied the streets all night. At Salvador, in Bahía, for similar causes and on the lay, the people took to the streets and set up barricades. The government had to conciliate.
It is noteworthy that everywhere students with teachers, and the people as a whole with both. The outstanding characteristic of this stage of the struggle is rapid generalization and amplification to new sectors, plus a tendency of the masses — though devoid of any policy -to unify. It should also be noted how the struggle moves from the countryside and small towns to larger cities like
I São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro were, exceptionally, redoubts of "bourgeois order,' it was not that the masses did not feel impelled to struggle - though to a lesser degree than in the poorer states — but because their spontaneity is still throttled by a whole conciliationist trade-union and political bureaucracy.
government was gravely alarmed. Kubitschek, his characteristic style, launched a new "operation," a series of ostentatious but anodyne measures. He nervously affirmed in a speech that "the high costs of living have already reached a level beyond which they will rise no further." The government's real measures are not against the high cost of living but against those who are fighting it; and an important one . is its effort to win over or buy the trade-union
This new wave of struggles coincided with a slight shift in the CP, which went over to the attack against Kubitschek — without abandoning its policy of "alliance with the national bourgeoisie." Since the CP has real influence in the trade-union bureaucracy, ganize a "Hunger March" from So Paulo to Rio, in which 900 union leaders were to take part. It was strictly a bureaucratic pressure manoeuvre on the government, and the Stalinists carefully excluded the masses, who might have hotted it up. But the government could not risk even this form of agitation.
Suddenly Ultima Hora, the big-circulation daily of the "national" bourgeoisie), denounced the march as a "golpista" manoeuvre. For this it profited from the fact that in its opportunism, had insisted on the participation of the fazendeiros of the FARESP. days before the announced march, FARESP had headed
"march" to Rio, of the producers of milk, demanding an increase in its price.
It is easy to imagine the confusion, which the government used to force a turn on the So Paulo union leader-
Between 13 and 16 March there was a trial of strength between the CP and the government to line up the union bureaucracy. The government won, forcing the Stalinists to abandon the march and capitulate completely. The corrupt union bureaucrats ignobly granted the government "a waiting period and congratulations for the concern with which the government is the question." Hypocritically, for fear of the masses, the bureaucrats tried to justify themselves by "the need to gain time in order to organize the struggle throughout the entire country" — as if the workers in Recife and Salvador were unaware that the cost of living is rising.
Discouraged by always being restrained by their union leaders, the São Paulo workers, in the still favorable conditions of employment there, tend to seek personal solutions for their problems, rather than to mobilize and bring pressure on the trade-union leadership — which can thus get away with such actions as this recent one.
the government has fired off all its ammunition in promises, leaving it wide open in face of an inevitable new wave of price increases. leadership or policy, the masses will engage in new spon-
Recife and Salvador the path is open to Belo Horizonte and Porto Alegre, and finally to
In the Northeast, the situation continues to grow worse, aggravated by the inevitable failure
"Operation Northeast" and of efforts of the nationalist "state" government of Cid Campaio in Pernambuco, brought to power by a broad movement of poor nasses. Dynamic worker-student or worker-student-peasant united fronts in the North and Northeast easily escape from any bureaucratic or governmental control. In those areas even the CP is more sensitive to the popular
In bourgeois circles the government's increasing prostrawithdrawl somed. It was no accident that Lott, who had trip to the US A, suddenly reappeared and gave his opi-
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FOURTH INTERNATIONAL nion on the high cost of living and demanded control of the imperialist companies' transfer of profits abroad. It seems that Lott's reappearance, more than a manoeuvre toward preparing a replacement government, "stronger" than Kubitschek's, is rather an effort to keep up with the coup d'état plans of other bourgeois sectors, inclined to profit from the general disorder to their own benefit.
Even if the masses, for lack of leadership and a workers arty with its own class policy, cannot intervene inde pendently, the fact remains that the political crisis is
If popular actions continue at their present level or become more violent, but remain dispersed, inevitably bourgeois current, prepared to liquidate the democratic liberties granted by the Kubitschek government, will temporarily impose itself. This does not mean that the Brazilian revolutior will be strangled; it will take a more bitter and violent course. But it will cost enormous and unnecessary sacrifices. The "nationalist" Lott, who enjoys the support of all the petty-bourgeois and bourgeois theoreticians of the "national revolution," including the Stalin-
73 ists, might be the card played by the bourgeoisie against the masses.
The other possibility - and on this all the Brazilian revolutionary Marxist forces must base themselves — that, through the unprecedented wave of popular struggles, a broad left tendency can define itself in the milieux of vanguard, especially Communist, in such a way as raise the level of the masses' actions and give them a programme and centre of leadership, even if it be for the moment only partial.
The bourgeois crisis is deep but not imminent. The magnitude of the struggles postpones an immediate way out by force - even though it brings it nearer in a more general sense. If the wave of popular struggles grows sufficiently great, it is not excluded that the bourgeoisie will have to retreat and continue playing the "democratic"
The struggle for a revolutionary communist tendency that interprets and leads the actions of the masses fits in perfectly with the need to defend democratic liberties in
Belgium