ampaign to Defend the Popular Will The following statement was issued April 5 by the Liga Operdria (Workers League) and the Partido Operário Comunista (Communist Workers party), two revolutionary Marxist organizations in Brazil. The English text appeared in the May 10 issue of Intercontinental Press. After making a detailed analysis of the national situafion and the events leading up to the expulsion from parliament of Nadir Rosseti, Amauri Muller, and Lisâneas Maciel, three deputies from the Grupo Autentico wing of the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (MDB -Brazilian Democratic Movement, the only permitted opposition party), the Liga Operária and the Partido Operário Comunista, the Fourth International organizations in Brazil, decided to issue a joint statement to the workers, students, and other sectors of the masses in this country, and to international democratic public opinion. 30
1. The recent expulsions from parliament of three deputies from the "Aufentico" wing of the MDB fit into the context of a clear shift to the right by the bonapartist Geisel government. This turn began in the first three months of 1975, with the repression against workers, students, trade-union leaders, and members and leaders of the Brazilian Communist party. These actions once again reflect the vacillations, zigzags, and indecisiveness of the ruling classes, the imperialists, the industrial and landowning big bourgeoisie and their defenders, the military, over how best to repress the workers and the Brazilian people, how to keep the present dictatorial regime intact and overcome the economic crisis. The manifestations of the economic crisis hitting the country are a fabulous external debt, continual deficits in the balance of payments and the trade balance, the resurgence of inflation, falling investments, unemployment, and a decline in the buying power of broad strata of the population. These expulsions from parliament affect the mass movement as a whole, and in parficular representative sectors of the petty bourgeoisie, which in the November 15, 1974, elections saw the MDB as the only alternative to the military dictatorship and the only channel for expressing their discontent. These impeachments represent a counteroffensive by the most ultrarightist sectors of the government, which were momentarily neutralized after the mobilizations that followed the murder of the journalist Vladimir Herzog and the death of the worker Manuel Fiel Filho in the dungeons of the dictatorship. These sectors see repressing any organized form of opposition and smashing the mobilizations of the mass movement as the only way to maintain the present system. So, in the eyes of the civilian and military ultra-right, any liberalization, even the "relaxation" plans of Geisel and his team, is synonymous with social chaos, with unrest, and with a threat to their domination. 2. However, the rightist turn the government began in February and March 1975 and made official in August - when the dictator himself took on the job of making it clear to those sectors that had illusions abouf the "relaxation" what distinct limits any political liberalization would have - also ran up against limitations imposed by the situation. Unable to solve the most immediate problems of the broad masses, to make any concessions even to the purely economic demands of the masses, incapable of allowing the workers and the petty bourgeoisie the least room for representation in government or the right to organize and demonstrate; unable to let parliament and the bourgeois parties function as anything but window dressing; unable even to come up with effective and coherent solutions that could meet the demands of the ruling classes themselves, which are in the grip
of the economic crisis - the military government stands more and more isolated, with scarcely any significant support among the exploited sectors of society, in particular among the urban petty bourgeoisie and the workers. Any attempt to deepen the repression and to develop the regime in a fascist direction will run up against this isolation and lack of support. It will run up against the Impossibility of mitigating the social contradictions and of preventing the masses from more and more expressing their discontent. So, besides the economic crisis, the possibility in the near future of popular explosions and mass demonstrations sparked by dissatisfac -fion with and opposition to the dictatorial regime will become another specter haunting the dictatorship, the imperialists, and the big bourgeoisie. 3. The present economic and political impasse the ruling classes have gotten themselves into has an eminently political solution. This will depend entirely on the capacity of the masses, the workers and their allies, to wage a militant and organized struggle against the dictatorship, to provide a focus for the popular discontent, and to mobilize to black any plan for economic recovery that the technocrats and capitalists may dream up based on Increasing the rate of exploitation of the workers and applying a "wage freeze. " The solution will depend on the masses winning the right to organize independently of state tutelage and on them winning democratic freedoms to demonstrate and express themselves. 4. The country is still in the counterrevolutionary stage that opened in 1964 and deepened in 1969. This stage has been marked by severe repression against workers, peasants, students, and progressive intellectuals under Institutional Act No.5 and Decree-Law No. 477, by the imposition of the death penalty, and by the cancerous growth of military and police repressive bodies. This phase has also gone hand in hand with relative economic growth and cohesion on the part of the ruling However, the trend has begun to turn in favor of the exploited classes. Although still scattered and isolated, the struggles of the working class have begun to multiply. The most common actions have been strikes and slowdowns, and sabotage of factories and trains in protest against starvation wages and miserable living and working conditions. In the struggle against the bosses and union bureaucrats, important trade-union opposition movements are starting to develop in the country's key centers. On the other hand, the discontent of the middle layers has been finding more and more outlets. One form of expression was a massive antigovernment vote in the parliamentary elections. Another is the reactivation of the student movement. The struggles of this sector against the dictatorship are achieving a greater national Impact today. Another way discontent has been expressed is in actions by professional groups, as when the journalists mobilized to protest the murder of Vladimir Herzog and the Imprisonment of a large number of their colleagues. Moreover, the small and middle business sectors that for years fed to their fill on the crumbs of the "economic miracle" are now hard pressed by the recession and find their survival threatened by the imperialists and the big bourgeoisie. Although timidly, they are beginning to experiment with protests through their associations and institutions as well as through the MDB. 5. In this situation, the task of revolutionists, especially those who adhere to the Fourth International, is to build, organize, encourage, and offer political orientation to the embryonic struggles of the mass movement. By helping the workers, students, and peasants create their own independent bodies, by helping to strengthen and consolidate militant leaderships in ail the mass organizations, revolutionists will be fulfilling their vanguard role. At the same time, they will be laying the bases for building the revolutionary party of the working class in Brazil. It is particularly important in this process for the revolutionary vanguard to be able to give a focus to all the popular discontent by combining even the most purely economic struggles of the masses with the fight for democratic freedoms. This means mobilizing the workers, students, peasants, and intellectuals in struggle to wrest from the dictatorship the freedom to organize, freedom of expression, and freedom to demonstrate, freedom to set up their own polifical parties and independent trade unions. These struggles for democratic freedoms must not, however, be conducted or seen as reformist or liberal sentimental appeals for humanizing the regime of generals and bosses. They must be indissolubly bound up with overthrowing the military dictatorship, with the struggle to create embryonic orgars of workers and people's power and to install a workers and peasants government in Brazil. Revolutionists must Tink the democratic demands of the exploited masses with slogans that can mobilize them in a process leading uninterruptedly toward socialism. 6. However, all revolutionary action starts from the concrete demands of the class struggle. And the concrete demand at the moment is, starting from a clear analysis of what the MDB represents, to wage o notional struggle in defense of popular sovereignty. The new expulsions of deputies from parliament - five in the last three months alone - once again mark the failure of the official opposition party to constitute an alternative to the military regime. This has alas helped to destroy the illusions of all those who sow the MDB as a channel through which a people's party could be built, those who believed that it would be possible to reform it from the inside, to put pressure on and push out its bourgeois leaders. In the last parliamentary elections, the MDS attracted fifteen million votes. At first le loomed up as the only
31
BRAZIL apparent alternative. It was a party through which the discontent of broad layers of the population would be expressed. However, Following the precedents set even before the November 15 elections, the MDB's course was marked by continual betrayals of the masses who had placed their hopes in it. Ar no time was the MDB able or willing to uphold consistently the banners of struggle that it raised in the electoral campaign. Its course consisted of constant and continual capitulations to the government, to "moderation, " to conciliationism, to collaboration with the military government, as well as of suppression of the more militant voices that spoke out inside the party. In these five recent cases in which deputies have been deprived of their seats, the bourgeois leadership of the MDB showed by its inertia, its false prudence, and its accommodationism how determined it is to get the military government's seal of approval as an accepfable party, one that does not challenge the "revolution, that is, in fact, a party of the "revolution, " as it leaders never tire of proclaiming. Since the MDB leadership wants to isolate its rodicals, that is, the most active members in its workers and women's sections, in the Juventude Democrática (Democratic Youth, the MDB youth organization), and in the parliament itself, these leaders were relieved at seeing some of their most combative deputies removed by impeachment. 7. In view of this, the Partido Operário Comunista and the Liga Operdria issue an appeal to the militant forces working today in the MDB, to the party youth, its workers, women, and intellectuals, to make a clean break from this bourgeois party. We call on them to withdrow the support on which this conciliationist and traitor leadership bases itself. We call on them to unite with all those forces on the side of the people that are 32 committed to an independent struggle by the workers and their allies, to winning a revolutionary struggle for democratie freedoms. Confronted with the farce of the bourgeois parliament and the caricature of elections the bourgeoisie allows, we must be clear about the need to overthrow the dictatorship and all its repressive legislation. Likewise, we have to have a clear understanding of the importance of a revolutionary struggle for a constituent assembly to which the Brazilian people, the workers, pesants, students, and intellectuals could freely elect their political representatives in a vote where they would have all the conditions for a free choice and where their real parties could participate. 8. So, since we see these impeachments as part of a broader process of the regime moving to the right and of deepening exploitation and repression of the working masses, and since we understand the need to link up struggles in defense of living standards and working conditions with the more general struggles of society, the Liga Operária and the Partido Operário Comunisto call on the other organizations that speak in the name of the workers and on the militant forces in the MDB to organize a national campaign to defend popular sovereignty. We call on them to organize a campaign for the repeal of Institutional Act No.5, for the legalization of all workers and people's parties, and for free and direct elections. 9. Finally, the Liga Operária and the Partido Operário Comunista call on our sister parties in the Fourth International, particularly the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire in France and the International Marxist Group in England, as well as the other warking class parties, unions, and union federations there, to show active solidarity with the Brazilian workers and people during the upcoming visit of the dictator Ernesto Geisel to these countries. By denouncing the superexploitation of the Brazilian workers, the lack of the most elementary democratic Freedoms for the broad masses, the torture and murder of hundreds of revolutionists and democrats in the jails of the dictatorship, by making France and England too hot for the dictator, the workers in these countries can make a decisive contribution to wearing out and isolating the dictatorship, along with showing real proletarian internationalism. Down with the impeachments, Institutional Act No.5, and all the repressive legislation! Independent organization and freedom to demonstrate for the workers, students, peasants, and intellectuals! Overthrow of the military dictatorship, legalization of all the workers and people's parties, genuinely free, direct elections! For the calling of a Revolutionary Constituent Assembly! International solidarity with the Brazilian workers and people! Editeur responsable: René Groslambert, 34 roe Nothomb, 1040 Bruxelles