Talking about Resistance – inside Bolsonaro’s Brazil

Photo by gaby_bra

From 3 to 10 December, I visited Sao Paulo/Brazil for several lectures and also had the opportunity to speak to representatives of the local metalworkers’ trade union as well as the Florestan Fernandes National School (ENFF) of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), outside the city. In this blog post, I will reflect on comrades’ perceptions about how the rise of the right in Brazil around Bolsonaro can be contested and what the future may hold for radical social movements. 

Car manufacturing and trade union power

Sao Bernardo do Campo in the neighbourhood just south of Sao Paulo is the location of Brazil’s important car manufacturing industry. About 70.000 skilled workers on good salaries work in the factories of Volkswagen, Scania and Mercedes amongst others. Clustered around these factories is a host of smaller companies supplying the large car factories with parts.

This area is also the powerbase of Brazil’s former President Lula da Silva. It was here that he made his name leading the strike of metalworkers during the military dictatorship in the late 1970s. It was here that he came in April 2018, before being imprisoned as part of the political coup against the Workers’ Party (PT), and it was here that he came first after having been released from prison in November 2019. The central courtyard of the union’s office building is draped in large banners with Lula’s image. He is omnipresent. 

Fernando (not his real name) makes clear that if we want to understand the current situation of Bolsonaro, we need to go back to 2013, when capital started to attack Lula and Rousseff’s compromise project around higher profits for capital combined with more wealth re-distribution. The coup against Rousseff followed in 2016 paving the way for Bolsonaro’s election victory two years later. Unsurprisingly the problem is bigger than Bolsonaro, the rise of fascist sentiment much broader. Especially the strong military presence in the current government is a cause of concern for Brazil’s fragile democracy, Fernando explains.

In response, the union organized street demonstrations and devised a campaign through its own newspapers. Broader alliances, Fernando asserts, which had characterized the union’s activities already during the 1980s and 1990s, would now be more important than ever. In order to remain relevant, the union also has to deal with concerns outside the workplace such as human rights issues. Fernando’s office is full of flags of other social movements. ‘They remind me of who are our allies in the struggle’, he tells me. Support for cooperatives and workers’ run factories strengthen the links between union and wider civil society. Unfortunately, while the years of Lula’s and Roussef’s Presidencies had resulted in material improvements for an increasing middle class, this went hand in hand with a rather individualist understanding of the situation. People forgot that the improvements in their personal situation are the result of collective struggles and not due to their own individual merits.

And yet, changes in the global political economy are also underlying the union’s difficult position in the current environment. Due to a crisis of overproduction in the global and regional car manufacturing industry intensified competition puts downward pressure on wages and working conditions. Unions from different production sites meet in global works councils, but they are often in competition with each other, when it comes to decisions on where the company should invest. Additional uncertainty is caused by technological change with a switch to electric cars and the wider discussions of climate change and whether economies based on cars are really a path to the future. While there is still new investment into the sector by Asian companies and Fiat, this happens in other regions of the country, where trade unions are weaker and workers less organized. Considering the chock-a-block streets of Sao Paulo, it is also clear that local domestic consumption cannot be a way out of the crisis of overproduction.

With its industrial sector under pressure, the metalworkers’ union’s focus on alliances with social movements may become even more important than it already is today.

Studying to organize and raise class consciousness

In Guararema outside Sao Paulo, I meet with Carlos (not his real name) in the national school ENFF of the MST, Brazil’s movement of landless workers. The MST organises families of landless workers and occupies unused agricultural land to establish camps. Over time, the organization attempts to work with local, regional and national authorities to turn these camps into legal settlements. Formally established in 1984, the MST currently comprises 90.000 families in camps and 400.000 families in settlements. It is Brazil’s biggest social movement.

Library of the ENFF - photo by Friends of the MST

‘We are a real problem for the country’s agribusiness’, explains Carlos. ‘Lula allowed the industry to expand to some extent, but also protected natural reserves in the Amazon and secured our settlements.’ Agribusiness, having reached the permitted expansion by Lula, has been unsurprisingly one of the strongest backers of the coup against Rousseff, driving towards a policy of further destruction of the Amazon rainforest. Moreover, in order to expand further agribusiness also needs to take over the land of MST settlements. ‘We are one of the biggest enemies of Bolsonaro’, declares Carlos.

Having just established a new party, heavily based on the military, Bolsonaro is currently presiding over a move from consensus to coercion including also attacks on MST camps as well as increasing attacks on black youth in favelas. Unfortunately, the left in Brazil is weak and fragmented. While it is united in resistance to Bolsonaro, there is no common, alternative project. Part of the problem is that the PT has forgotten how to organize during its long time in power. It had given people the right to consumption, but provided little space for participation in policy-making, Carlos explains. Re-distribution of wealth did not go hand in hand with a transformation of people.

ENFF Ars and Crafts building

The MST is a national organization, which is based on many diverse, local experiences. During the 1990s it was realized that the movement needed a national education centre to organize unity in diversity and provide a location for the analysis of concrete struggles. ‘We cannot rely on analyses by academics, or others’, says Carlos. ‘We need to develop our own capacity to interpret reality and develop strategies for the struggle. Of course, we listen to others, but we need to form our own understanding based on our own experiences. Political praxis is key.’

Between 1997 and 2000 an international campaign raised the necessary money to buy the land for the School. Between 2000 and 2005, MST brigades build it. In many respects, constructing the School by the working class for the working class, understanding the School as a permanent movement, was the first political education course. 5000 students are educated at ENFF per year in courses, which last from a couple of weeks to several months.

ENFF - large lecture theatre

Training its members and working class people from around the world, the emphasis is always on exploring ways of how we can act to transform reality. Popular education, inspired by the teaching of Paolo Freire and liberation theology, focuses on supporting emancipation. There are always different ways of learning and a pedagogy is required, which can ‘provoke’ these different dimensions. In the ENFF’s method, it is asked what ‘is’ in a materialist sense, how has it become historically, and how can we transform it through struggle, emphasizing the dialectical nature of enquiry.

Education is based on six elements: study, work, organizing, mystica, arts and culture, as well as socialist and humanist values. Four hours per day are reserved for traditional study, reading, presentations and group work in seminars. Then everybody has to work for 1.5 hours per day to maintain the school with tasks including cooking, cleaning as well as constructing new buildings. Organising skills are key for struggle and students are, therefore, put in charge of planning various aspects of the daily programme. In mystica, past struggles and comrades are remembered to engender a collective spirit. Art and culture provide a different way of learning, while socialist and humanist values refer to the society the MST as a movement collectively wants to create. Ultimately people would only defend a project, they feel to be a part of.

ENFF - remembering the first MST national congress

Autonomist projects, which focus on establishing a different reality for its participants without challenging existing power structures, are often contrasted with revolutionary strategies to overthrow the existing order. What impressed me when visiting the School was that they do both. On the one hand, they want to bring about change now. For example, to overcome gendered roles, men are often allocated traditional female tasks as their daily work duties, while women pursue traditional male roles. Some complain, but there is an understanding that transformation also includes changing ourselves and this has to start with overcoming the sexual division of labour. On the other, there is a clear focus on how to change society and existing power structures towards a better collective future. Importantly, Carlos asserts, these struggles always have to be international, as there cannot be socialism in one country.

Often under pressure from the authorities and police violence, the ENFF has a crucial role to play in the years ahead to keep this hope of change alive and organize for a better future in Brazil and beyond!

When leaving the School, I was reflecting on how much education at the ENFF differs from my own experience as an academic in the UK. Based on high levels of tuition fees in a ‘free student market’, higher education has become commodified in the UK. Education has been reduced to a good available to those, who can afford to pay for it. Studying is not about how to transform collectively our society and ourselves towards a fairer future. Rather, its purpose is to equip the individual with marketable skills, allowing her/him to secure a better paid job. The ENFF experience clearly demonstrates the ‘poverty’ of education in so-called advanced, developed countries.

Andreas Bieler

Professor of Political Economy
University of Nottingham/UK

Andreas.Bieler@nottingham.ac.uk

Personal website: http://andreasbieler.net

22 December 2019