Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Second thoughts on the left in the Brazilian election

Coverage from various tendencies: the ISO (USA), SWP (Britain), the (USec) Fourth International, the CWI, and UITci/Revista Movimiento (some of these deal with some of the issues I raise here). A document I wrote in 2004 on the formation of P-SoL, which is still dated but does offer some useful background, is available here.

Lee Sustar of the ISO (USA) told me some time before the election about attending a very enthusiastic speech given by Ernest Mandel about the PT, probably in the '80s. Lee made an intervention to the effect that the PT was doomed to reformism, and speaking to me years letter expressed some surprise that he had actually been right.

A note on names in Brazil: most public figures in Brazil are universally referred to by their first names or by nicknames which sometimes seem ridiculous to American observers: for example Brazil's current president is almost invariable referred to as Lula ("Squid"). This even extends to many official contexts, such as ballots and election records. Heloísa Helena's full name is Heloísa Helena Lima de Moraes Carvalho.
The strong performance of Heloísa Helena in the recent Brazilian presidential election has been a cause for a fair amount of celebration on the part of the Trotskyist movement worldwide, both among those who are trying to salvage something from their (perhaps now embarrassing) enthusiasm for the Workers' Party and those who "saw it coming all along".

With 6.8 million votes (just under 7%), Comrade Heloísa in fact did quite well. Her party's other candidates did not. If her slate, the Left Front, had done as well in congressional elections then under Brazil's system of proportional representation her P-SoL party would have gone from 7 seats in the house of deputies to about 35, and its partners, the PSTU and the (refounded) PCB might have picked up a seat or two in their own rights for the first time in their history. Instead the Left Front got about 1.3 million votes (about 1.5%) in the House of Deputies, and P-SoL dropped from 6 seats to 3, on top of losing Heloísa Helena's seat in the senate. Their vote in other areas were even worse; just under a million for state legislatures (again winning only three seats) and about 600,000 for the senate.

This was not a small matter. P-SoL was established as a fairly loose agglomeration of modest-sized groups (tendencies), and hasn't been too successful at finding anything other than election campaigns to hold it together; as far as I know they haven't even been able to launch a common newsletter. It's been able to operate in the way it has largely because of the organizational resources that parliamentary office gives. A Congressmember in Brazil gets a salary of 17,000 Reals a month (by way of comparison, the monthly minimum wage is 350 Reals and a skilled blue-collar worker is lucky to get 1,500), and can hire a sizeable staff at public expense besides. If he or she forgoes the politician's usual practice of lining their pockets and hiring their relatives that gives a big boost to the war chest, a set of free full-time organizers, and various other goodies (when I visited the PSTU's headquarters in 2003, all of the notepads still had the letterhead of Lindberg Farias, a congressman who had jumped ship and joined the PT two years earlier). Winning more of these seats was a big enough deal to get P-SoL and PSTU to bury the hatchet in order to have a better shot at them, as the P-SoL's national executive made clear (see the section Metas eleitorais in this document).

So why the discrepancy in the votes?

First it's worth saying a few things about Heloísa and how she got that many votes. Although she's been a far-left activist basically her whole adult life, she has a very old-fashioned catholic way of looking at a lot of things. She's anti-abortion and had a tantrum and broke out in tears on the senate floor when a satirical website posted a cartoon depicting her on the front page of of Playboy. I don't mean this to take a potshot at her (if I wanted to do that I'd make fun of her voice); I just think it's important to understand how this fits into her image. One part of that is the way it adds to her just-folks charm, as does her habit of dressing in jeans and a t-shirt even in the Senate, but there are other effects as well.

Some of this shows up when you look closely at who supported Heloísa. Garotinho claimed that his not-quite-endorsement was reponsible for Heloísa's strong showing in Rio.

The relevant surveys are Datafolha, April 7 2006 and Vox Populi, July 11 2006.
Anthony Garotinho, the populist former governor of Rio de Janeiro who has lead a campaign to bring creationism into public schools in Brazil and one of the main figures in the centrist PMDB announced he would vote for her. In surveys early in the election season, most of the people who intended to vote for her were urban, educated, fairly well off (at least by Brazilian standards), and were at least as likely to vote for center or center-right candidates as for Lula.

This is because Heloísa was able to project herself as an honest, tough-on-crime candidate, something that the other candidates had a hard time with (Lula because of the PT's corruption troubles, Serra because of his perceived inability to deal with a massive outbreak of gang violence in São Paulo). One also wonders whether her statement on national television that socialism was something for 30 or 40 years down the road might have been meant to solidify that image.

Heloísa's running mate, Cesar Benjamin, went even further, effectively disowning the Left Front's program in favor of a straightforwardly social-democratic "program for government".

Besides the P-SoL members elected to the lower house, José Nery Azevedo, had been elected as an alternate (suplente) for Ana Júlia Carepa in 2002, while still a member of the PT, and so became a Senator when she stepped down to become governor of Pará.

Babá was one of the "four radicals" who founded the P-SoL, of whom now only Luciana Genro is still both in Parliament and in the party.
So Heloísa Helena's appeal was rather different from that of the rest of the P-SoL. On top of this is one of the party's most distinctive features, its lack of organizational and political coherence. Two of the three candidates successfully elected had strong organizations in their area to fall back on (Luciana Genro's Movement of the Socialist Left in Porto Alegre and Ivan Valente's Socialist Popular Action in São Paulo). Heloísa Helena's coattails were very short, and candidates without much else to rely on did very poorly. Babá for example left Pará, where he had a support base, for Rio de Janeiro, where Heloísa was expected to get the largest number of votes, and failed to get back into congress as a result. Even Heloísa's Enlace faction was unable to get its two congressmembers, Maninha and João Alfredo, reelected.

In the aftermath Cesar Benjamin left the P-SoL, describing its leadership as "a rare combination of ignorance, truculence, and arrogance". This was by no means the first high profile defection the party has suffered in its short existence. P-SoL is no closer than it was at its foundation to a unified perspective or any meaningful common actions.

The overarching lesson if there is one, is that there is no substitute for the left for the hard work of building a powerful organization with a coherent worldview and capable of common action. Not only is electoral success not a substitute for it, but without a strong organization it's extremely difficult to even take advantage of it,

In a different way, Venezuela is an example of this. Chavez's elections dealt was a blow Venezuela's bourgeois political parties haven't even started to recover from, but real social change has only come slowly as genuine popular organizations have grown in strength. I think this dynamic, and its possible outcomes, are still very important there and I intend to return to them later.

Monday, January 29, 2007

Cluster bombs: will Olmert even get a slap on the wrist?

I see that in the last few days the Israeli use of cluster bombs in South Lebanon has started to get some attention (there is a fairly comprehensive piece in the Guardian). This was one of the best examples of what nonsense it is to talk about the IDF's "humanitarianism". As horrible as a suicide bomber in a bus or a cafe is, it's at least intelligible as an act of desperation, but the decision to scatter cluster munitions around civilian areas, when the Israeli leadership already knew that they had lost the war, had no sensible motivation except for spite.

Of course this was illegal; the US government doesn't like to admit what gets done with the weapons it hands out, so there are treaties supposedly restricting how they can be used, and occasionally there might be some token enforcement after the fact (like in 1982). But when it matters (anyone remember Halabja?) things can stay in the dark for a long time. The debacle in Lebanon is already so embarrassing that some folks are going to work hard to keep anything that could make it worse quiet.

On top of everything else, Jack Barnes is boring

I'm afraid I'm writing this without consulting my notes on the event, so there are probably going to be a few slips here and there, but I'm confident about the basics. Yesterday I went to a big meeting with Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters of the Socialist Workers Party. As a mentioned a few posts back I decided to go partly out of morbid interest, and I got about what I expected.

There were about 300 people there, and I suspect that I was the only one there who wasn't an SWP member or fellow traveler, I certainly got that vibe in all of the conversations I had and from how Barnes was talking. It was pretty nearly a national mobilization; most of the people I talked to had come from the Midwest. CPUSA = Communist Party USA; ISO = International Socialist Organization; YS = Young Socialists, the youth of the SWP. The mean age was probably about 40 (in between what it would have been for the CPUSA and for the ISO); that is, mostly it would have been people who joined the SWP in the time since Barnes was solidly running the party. For that, it was a surprisingly subdued audience. The chair seemed to think that it was worth mentioning from the podium that one person had joined the YS at the march in Washington.

Incidentally, Waters is entirely unable to pronounce Hugo Chavez' name correctly; she pronounces it CHAY-vez. Does anyone have any idea where she could have picked that up? Mary-Alice Waters was mostly talking about a book launch - a new edition of the first two declarations of Havana - and really didn't say anything interesting besides an anecdote which, as far as I could tell, seemed to be implying that there is no cult of personality around Fidel in Cuba, but sounded to me like a Cuban version of Anthony offering a crown to Caesar.

Barnes was not nearly as engaging a speaker as I would have expected, but perhaps part of that was that he didn't have very good material to work with. Even so - say what you will about Ahmed Shawki (and I've said plenty), but at least he knows how to get people fired up.

The speech was in a fairly conventional form, with a first part about global perspectives, and a second part about a reorientation the SWP is making. Most of the global perspectives part was fairly commonplace, but he did not disappoint entirely in the inflatedness department. Apparently the appointment of General Petraeus is a big step towards Bonapartism in the US, he and the Democrats are taking Bush out of the loop, and Bonapartism is on the march around the world.

He did not say a single thing during his speech proper about the antiwar movement, and only mentioned the immigrants' rights movement tangentially. This probably has something to do with the perspective he was talking about in the second part.

The short version is that the SWP is making a big turn towards "study", centered around what he called an "unprecedented" effort to - wait for it - add indices and introductions to all of Pathfinder's back catalog. In passing he mentioned that no one should so much as reschedule a study group without permission from the Political Committee, and that people could be expelled for missing study groups.

In the discussion he did come around to the antiwar movement, and I can absolutely confirm that the SWP has not gotten even slightly less sectarian about the antiwar movement. Among other things he accused UFPJ of blatantly lying about the size of the protest over the weekend. He then followed that up with an almost incoherent rant about Noam Chomsky. The thought that Hugo Chavez complemented Chomsky when he could have quoted from the minutes of the Tricontinental Congress or god knows what seems to send Barnes into a rage.

It's always fun having one's prejudices confirmed, and I guess like everyone else there that's the main thing I got out of the event.

Saturday, January 27, 2007

The big march

I went to the big antiwar march in DC today. It was great, and it really got me psyched about the next few months, The student contingent was a little bit of a mess, perhaps owing to a culture clash between the Campus Antiwar Network and Students for a Democratic Society, and it was pretty hard to get chants against congress going, but it was still exciting. We got a lot of folks from Rutgers and from the other schools around here, and a lot of them are psyched to do something with us.

I won't try to say anything else serious about the protest (I'm sure you'll find that in all the usual places). I was very excited to find two groups there that I've never seen before. One, the Workers' Party USA, seemed pretty nondescript. The other was the Communist league, a faux-clandestine group which apparently operates mostly over the internet (obviously real security conscious). One guy I was talking to was ridiculously eager to brag about the supposedly underground work they're doing. They're connected to the Worker-Communist Party of Iraq and they've set up a US branch of the Iraqi Freedom Congress (a WCPIraq front group); one of them was carrying a sign which was supposed to say I'm kicking myself for not taking a picture, but as best I can remember it said نحو عر العرق نموقرطلي و غير قومي, but I think I'm leaving something out. "for a democratic, secular, non-sectarian Iraq" but with every other word misspelled or bizarrely chosen.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Antiwar panel at Rutgers

On Tuesday night the Central Jersey Coalition Againt Endless War and Rutgers Againt the War In the interest of disclosure, I should mention that I worked on organizing this event. held what I thought was a quite interesting panel about withdrawal from Iraq, with about 120 people in attendance by my count. The Daily Targum did a decent piece on it.

The first speaker, Charlotte Bunch, really hit the nail on the head when she said that the United States needs to take responsibility without taking control. The US armed both sides during the Iran-Iraq war and spent years destroying the country's infrastructure with years of bombing and sanctions even before Bush Jr. came on the scene. I think this is a very good point - we owe the Iraqis a lot for all the damage we've done to their country over the last 25 years or so, but as long as the US ruling class uses that as an excuse to try and run Iraq we will keep making it worse. Dennis O'Neill, one of the other speakers, made a similar point about the "Pottery barn rule" (you break it, you buy it) argument; we're talking about a bull in a china shop Dennis was there as a representative of Bring Them Home Now. - you worry about getting the bull out first, because as long as it's there it's going to keep breaking things.

Patrick Resta, an army medic who was called up from the reserves and sent to Iraq, gave some good examples of what that all means; rather than try to reproduce it from my notes, I'll refer you to an interview with him.

The weak point of the panel, unsurprisingly for me, was Professor Stephen Eric Bronner. It was at least better than the last time I heard him speak on the subject (I think he was the first person I heard the "pottery barn theory" from, and he called the audience bad Marxists to boot). He now says that US troops should get out now, and that the prospects for democracy in Iraq are worse than before the war; but he kept saying that the problem is that "we" are losing influence in the middle east, that "we" need to use soft power, that this, that, and the other thing is "our fault", or even "your fault" - the last being one of a string of verbal tricks he invariable pulls in an attempt to remind everyone in the audience how much smarter he is than them.

Ellen Whitt, one of the main organizers of the event, made what I thought was an excellent response to that from the floor, the gist being that just because the US government has gotten itself into trouble, that's not necessarily trouble for us. You would think a self-styled Marxist intellectual like Bronner would have had a greater appreciation of that.

Someone who most definitely does is Dennis O'Neill. He said, I think quite correctly, that the ruling class can't afford to stay in Iraq and it can't afford to leave, which makes this a crucial moment for the rest of us to make up their minds for them. That's why I hope (as I'm sure Dennis does) to see you all in Washington tomorrow, where we can take the next step towards making that happen

Saturday, January 20, 2007

New statewide peace coalition?

I started writing this at a "People's Peace Conference" hosted by the The People's Organization for Progress (POP) is a North Jersey based civil rights/black power group. Larry Hamm is it's chairman and spokesperson. People's Organization for Progress in Newark today. The conference activities themselves were not terribly impressive, but it was a good crowd, about 150-200 people, and I made some contacts and got a chance to catch up with a lot of folks. Half of it at the very least was the usual suspects, of course, although as often it's very pleasant to see how many people that is, and there were some groups that wouldn't necessarily have been in the same room. There were quite a lot of folks from the NAACP (although it seems like part of the price for that was having to sit through their interminable speeches at the plenaries; There was a really astonishing amount of flattery of Larry Hamm, although I do have to admit that he's a fantastic speaker).

I - and a lot of other folks - found out by carefully examining the conference packets that the conference was intended to launch a statewide peace coalition. This wasn't mentioned until about 5 hours into the program, and I still don't know how it's going to work. New Jersey being what it is, there is only so much for a statewide antiwar organization to do, but it is potentially quite useful, especially if it can attract people who haven't been involved (and clearly POP would like to do this, in particular with Black folks from Newark and the surroundings).

In order to do this, though, the group is going to need to find things to do, and it's not terribly clear what that's going to be, or how that's going to be figured out. In particular we'll have to see what role the various There were a couple of state legislators present, including Sharpe James, the mayor of Newark until a few months ago, with whom POP had a relationship I don't know too much about. small-time democratic politicians and hangers-on at the conference are going to play. There was an enormous list of resolutions passed, but it's not too clear which of them are going to be acted on, let alone how.

The kernel of the problem with this is that with all of the speeches from the from the platform there was hardly any time to discuss anything, even in the workshops. Some people also privately expressed reservations about how committed POP actually is to antiwar work. I can only hope this improves in the continuations committee; we'll see.

I also had a chance to introduce a friend of mine who joined the The Young Socialists (YS) is the youth wing of the Socialist Workers' Party, sometimes called the "Barnes Cult". Young Socialists not too long ago to Tom Bias from Labor Standard, who quit the SWP in 1978 and has quite a lot of (very compelling) things to say about how right he was to do that, and how the SWP has been MIA in the anti-war movement. My YS friend was encouraging me to come to an event with Jack Barnes and Mary-Alice Waters in NYC on the 28th, which I may do out of pure morbid interest. It still surprises me a bit just how many ex-SWP members are around and still seriously involved in the movement; there were at least six here today, and that's just the ones I've met. Most of them were pushed out in the seventies and eighties when Barnes was consolidating his position; when you think about that, and about what they were back in the day it's a real shame what he did to that group.