2023-06-12 13:37:06
In nature, tectonic plates are the huge rocky portions on which continents and oceans sit and whose movements and shocks are responsible for earthquakes, volcanoes, and tsunamis. In the History of Brazil, they serve as an appropriate metaphor to understand one of the most outstanding processes of the class struggle in recent years: the June 2013 days.
07/06/2023
By: Writing Socialist OpinionPSTU Brazil
June 2013 erupted like a volcano, releasing forces and contradictions that had been dammed up for a long time and shaking the structures of the country. The biggest social and political explosion since redemocratization, at the beginning of the 1980s, the “day” not only shook governments in all spheres, but also imploded the so-called New Republic, shaking the post-dictatorship political regime.
The eruption was preceded by tremors, such as the worker strikes in the works of the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC) created by the PT, or Public Education, the previous year. Signs of a growing malaise that was fermenting from below and turning the country into a veritable pressure cooker.
bridle
June began with demonstrations organized by the Movimento Passe-Livre (MPL) against the increase in public transport fares in São Paulo, from R$3 to R$3.20. Initially convened by social media, the protests began with a few thousand people, grew in size, and invariably faced violent police repression.
From Paris, then Governor Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB), together with Mayor Fernando Haddad (PT), accompanied by then Vice President Michel Temer (PMDB), attacked the demonstrations and demanded more repression. Editorials of the main newspapers, such as Folha de S. Paulo y The Estadão, echoed this request and instigated the police against the protesters. Even so, the protests were gaining increasing popular support.
The survey of the presenter of “Brasil Urgente”, José Luiz Datena, became a “meme”, when questioning, in a biased way: “Are you in favor of the riot protest?” . The “yes” vote won by a landslide and the presenter was forced, on air, to change his speech criminalizing the acts.
Burst
June 13 marked a turning point through a massive reaction to the repression. In response to requests from the press and governments [federal, estadual, municipal]the São Paulo Military Police freely and savagely attacked the peaceful demonstration that was heading to Avenida Paulista.
For hours, the protesters were literally hunted down, attacked and detained by the center of the city, including the press professionals themselves. The police brutality unleashed a huge wave of outrage, fueling protests against the fare increase that were also taking place in other capitals, such as Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte.
The rejection of the repression was incorporated into an agenda, which was expanding more and more as the demonstrations gained strength and became nationalized. The posters against the rate increase began to share spaces with others who demanded public education and health, and against politicians and institutions. The massiveness of the protests was the explosion of a pressure cooker that revealed the discontent and dissatisfaction that was seething below.
Profile of the protesters: contradictions of an unequal country
The profile of the protesters who took to the streets highlights the contradiction experienced by the country in previous years: mostly young, employed, but with low income and relatively high education.
Expressions of a youth that, with great difficulty, achieved an educational level higher than that of their parents, but could not find a compatible job in the labor market. A litter of young people subjected to underemployment, precariousness and low wages.
Complaints that followed the rate reduction showed enormous dissatisfaction with public services. It reflected a country that, after years of economic growth, which had further enriched agribusiness, bankers and billionaires, during the boom of “commodities” (raw materials and natural, agricultural or mineral resources) under the PT governments, maintained an overwhelming social inequality and increasingly worse public services.
X-ray of the protesters
Age
From 14 to 24 years: 43%
From 25 to 39 years: 38%
Over 40: 19%
Source: Ibope Research, in eight capitals, 06/20/2013.
family income
Up to 2 minimum wages: 15%
From 2 to 5 minimum wages: 30%
From 5 to 10 minimum wages: 26%
More than 10 minimum wages: 23%
Source: Ibope Research, in eight capitals, 06/20/2013.
Scholarship
Incomplete secondary education: 8%
Complete secondary education and incomplete higher education: 49%
Complete higher education: 43%
Source: Ibope Research, in eight capitals, 06/20/2013.
They are in the job market
– Eight capitals: 76%
– Rio de Janeiro: 70%
– Belo Horizonte: 71%
Fuente: Ibope, Plus Marketing and Innovating
Demands that the protesters took to the streets
– Defense of public transport: 37.6%
– Against corruption/deviations, dissatisfaction with rulers and changes: 29.9%
– Health: 12.1%
– Against the PEC 37
: 5,5%
– Education: 5.3%
– Spending with the World Cup: 4.5%
– Against police violence: 1.3%
– For Justice/Public Safety: 1.3%
The Constitutional Amendment Proposal opened up impunity by defending that the power of criminal investigation be exclusive to the federal and civil police, withdrawing this attribution from some agencies and, above all, from the Public Ministry (MP).
Source: National survey released by Ibope on 06/23/2013.
political identification
Left: 22%
Center left: 14%
Center: 31%
Center right: 11%
Right: 10%
Source: Datafolha, 06/20/2013.
Echoes of the world crisis and the surrender of the country
2013 showed us another country. The world capitalist crisis that erupted in 2007 thus revealed another Brazil, masked by this “boom” of the previous period: a country that was more reprimarized (focused on the export of “commodities”), privatized, and much more deindustrialized, as a reflection of the almost 30 years of the New Republic and neoliberalism.
A country totally subjected to imperialism and degraded in the world division of labor, in a clear process of recolonization, which altered all social classes.
At the same time, it was the period when even this growth was slowing and the country was plunged into a new crisis, with food inflation putting even more pressure on incomes.
June 2013 opened, mainly, the rejection of the institutions of this bourgeois democracy, expressed in public buildings, targets of the fury of the protesters, from the mayors of small cities to the Planalto, passing through any building that symbolized the power”.
advances and limits
This process of conflagration and social explosion was only possible because it took place outside the traditional organizations, both student and union, such as the UNE, the CUT and other centrals that, at the time, were the transmission belts of the Dilma government. A process so violent that it prevented these organizations from doing what was, and always is, their greatest specialty: contain the struggles and “institutionalize” them. Important articulation initiatives were developed, such as the “Bloque de Luchas” in Porto Alegre or the “Foro de Luchas” in Rio de Janeiro. But the absence of a national organization and, more than that, the aversion to any type of organization on the part of broad sectors (a conception inherited from processes such as that of “Indignados” in Spain) left all that powerful rise without a strategy, much less a direction that could point a way to confront the regime and the system. The very small leftist opposition organizations to the government failed to fulfill that role.Article published in
www.pstu.org.br
taken from Opinião Socialista n.° 655Translation: Natalia Estrada.
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