ILTT Statement on Brazil
Unite the working class in a united front against the Coup!
Only the working class is capable of defeating the fascists!
Since the end of the elections, the fascist hordes have organized themselves in camps in front of the Armed Forces barracks in several cities across the country. Lula and the popular front said that Lula’s inauguration would end fascism. After taking office, the government chose the governors, most of them “bolsonaristas” to fight the coup plotters. Predictably, and we predicted it, the popular front cleared the path for the fascist insurrection. NO ILLUSIONS IN THE POPULAR FRONT!
In times of global crisis like the one we are experiencing today, fascism and the coup is a weapon of the bourgeoisie against the workers. The bourgeoisie knows that the economic situation will not improve. Lula and the Workers Party (PT) are allied with the bourgeoisie and deceive the workers that everything can improve with the Popular Front government. Nurturing this illusion, they demobilize the working class, paving the way for the fascists.
Today we could see the police, commanded by PT allies, escorting the coup leaders to the square of the three powers, watching the invasions of the Presidential Palace, Congress and the Supreme Federal Court (STF), without any intervention by the security forces. Hours later, Lula used the Executive’s emergency action powers to gently remove the coup plotters with a reported 100 arrests.
Bolsonaro’s former justice minister is now the security secretary in the government of Ibanes, responsible for commanding the police to which Lula delegated the task of fighting coup plotters! The Brazilian fascist police fraternize with the coup leaders while their boss is in the USA!
The use of federal intervention to do what the local Bolsonarist-allied police refused to do, does not guarantee democracy. The federal intervention guaranteed the social peace deal Lula built with his coalition center-right partners. This is how Lula proves to the employers the Popular Front can control the situation without bringing the military into power, bringing in the tanks. Only revolutionary workers can guarantee democracy. This government will not take any action to organize and mobilize the workers. Meanwhile they prevent the working class from taking to the streets.
What should the workers’ response to the treachery of the Popular Front be?
The centrist left told us deals can be made taking a step to a parliamentary path to socialism by electing Lula. If the fascist coup makers were allowed to stay much longer, chances are that Lula’s ‘peaceful compromise’ with the right and especially the labor leaders who sold this fiction would BE EXPOSED! Exposed in the minds of the union memberships and the broader wage earner masses. Workers having been disabused of any illusions would express their rage on the street to confront the coup makers. This feather duster response by Lula is only a temporary measure to prevent any immediate working class responses taking the struggle to the streets.
The coup is the work of the big profiteers stripping the rainforest who financed the buses to the insurrectionary rehearsal. Lula used his personal charisma to keep the workers subordinated to the state power, to the employers’ coalition government. Cameras focused on him, the temporary escape of the Popular Front from its crisis passes unnoticed. However, Lula’s deal was not unnoticed by the most advanced workers. The bureaucracy and center right will want to turn Lula into a Bonapartist figure to express the balance of class forces by the authority of his personality. Workers beware! A Bonapartist Lula will be the last desperate act of the Popular Front before it must give way to fascism.
The workers movements must take to the streets and organize councils and self defense guards. We need mass worker-led anti-fascist assemblies, an anti-fascist national conference of trade unions and a workers’ struggle party that rejects blocs with capitalist partners. Workers desperately need a United Front now to turn street mobilizations into sit-down strikes, factory occupations, regional and nation-wide general strikes! The unity of the whole working class and the oppressed is crucial to defeat fascism and capitalist reaction.
Workers Break with the Popular Front government! No illusions in bourgeois justice and the reactionary Minister Moraes! There is no parliamentary road to socialism!
We call for the workers, unions, centrals, parties and organizations of the left to build a United Front against the coup movement.
We call on soldiers not to comply with any coup orders from their officers!
Organize workers’ committees and self-defense committees against the coup!
For a workers’ and peasants’ government based on workers and peasants councils!
To win, workers need a Revolutionary Workers Party and a new Workers International to fight for the World Socialist Revolution.
International Leninist Trotskyist Tendency (ILTT), January 8, 2023
