Marcelo Arruda Presente! Fascist Bolsonarista assassination aims at workers and oppressed!
The following is translated from our Brazilian comrades of the Grupo de Trabalhadores Revolucionários do Brasil (GTR-BR)
FOR WORKERS SELF DEFENCE! NO ILLUSIONS IN THE CAPITALIST STATE!
Bolsonaro’s fascist thugs acted on their leader’s violent rhetoric again. Marcelo Arruda, a treasurer for the Workers Party (PT) in Foz do Iguacu, who worked as a municipal guard, was assassinated by an off duty federal prison guard shouting support for right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro.The murder occured at a birthday party in front of family, friends and comrades. The assailant who describes himself as a conservative and a Christian was also shot and injured by Arruda who was armed and heroically defended his family and friends.. We know the violence committed upon the most outspoken militant worker leaders, socialists, communists and Trade Unionists serves to terrorize the entire working class and all oppressed people.
We know the daily violence of the strike breakers, the military police, the landlords and the bosses against the masses mostly goes unreported. The daily violence only makes the news in rare cases when committed out in the open and captured on video as was the case on January 24, 2022 when Moise Kabagambe a Congoleses immigrant worker beaten to death by his bosses enforcers at a highly visible popular beachside kiosk in Rio de Janeiro.
The murder of the worker militant Marcelo Arruda, reminds us of the assassination of PSOL comrade Marielle Franco and her driver Anderson Pedro Gomes in Rio de Janiero in March of 2018. We accuse the ruling class of Brazil for unleashing their thugs in both these cases because they are incapable of resolving the economic crisis of capitalism which perpetuates poverty and oppression of the workers, landless farm workers and poor. The capitalist class knows that they are sitting on a powder keg, the mass rallies for the PT over the past few weeks show the masses are fed up and demand change.
Yet the change the masses want, real socialism, democratic control of the workplace, sharing of the work by implementing a 30 hour work week, a sliding scale of wages and worker control of prices, social housing, quality education and healthcare and freedom from fear of the violence of the capitalist enforcers.
The illusion that there is a path to workers power in Brazil, or elsewhere, via elections has been served another violent blow with the assasination of Marcelo Arruda. Workers must take the lesson of this brutal murder to call for all workers organizations and parties including the PT to break from the popular front with capitalist parties, to break all illusions in the reformability of the capitalist state and to organize the workers and oppressed into local, regional and nation workers and farmers councils to prepare the indefinite general strike to take power.
All workers organizations must unite to form workers self defence for all our activists immediately. We must arm ourselves to protect our organizers, meetings, street actions and communities. The fascists know they are preparing the capitalist and middle class for civil war against the workers regardless if we take the route of electoral reformism or the revolutionary path. We need to prepare the masses to defeat the capitalists and their fascist thugs.
The first step is to educate the masses that the reformist road of social democracy, the road taken by Lula and the PT opens the road to the fascists because when the workers party administers capitalism the crisis cannot be resolved which leads to a break of the middle class allies of the workers movement to the capitalists. We need to unite all workers organizations in a workers united front that attracts the masses because the solutions only a workers state can implement will expropriate the foreign imperialist capital and the national capitalist class as well and put the forces of production to work under a central plan that eliminates the profit motive and elevates human need.
The working class needs to build its own revolutionary party and internationally dedicated to class independence and self defense based on the program and method of the 1938 Transitional Program.
For the working class to survive, capitalism must die.
