2024-03-11 17:54:18
By: Redacción PSTU Brasil
This year, thousands of public school students arriving for their first day of school were met with utter chaos. Subjects without teachers, teachers without classrooms and others that have to be unfolded to account for various groups. In the country, the majority of public school teachers are already hired precariously, without rights or guarantee of employment, and, this year, they have not even been able to take hours.
In the press, however, we read news about how “education advanced in the first year of the Lula government” . The difference between what the working class and the majority of the population experience daily and what appears in the National NewspaperHowever, it does not end there. In early March, the government celebrated what would have been huge economic growth in 2023.
Did you feel that your living conditions had a big change? Well, a few certainly do: The agribusiness group saw 15% growth in early 2023, driven by soybeans. And why do they say that the economy has improved? Agriculture, mainly, boosted the Gross Domestic Product (GDP), the account whose result refers to everything that is produced in the country during a year.
Economic growth for whom? “Lula’s kid”
According to figures released by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), the country would have grown 2.9%, which, for the government, is a demonstration that we are on the right path. But this growth is restricted to some areas, such as agriculture and its production of soybeans, which are destined for export or converted into livestock feed.
But that’s good, right? No. The countryside is not like the soap opera “Renascer”. They are large monocultures, whose ownership is in the hands of large banks and financial funds and whose production serves a handful of oligopolies. They employ fewer and fewer and become richer and richer. They promote environmental destruction and indigenous and quilombola genocide, often with the help of the police, as in Bahia.
For the government project to be successful, the people have to lose
Not to mention that this “growth” is small, even by capitalist standards, and that the investment rate, a kind of compass for the dynamics of the economy in the future, has receded.
But without mentioning, above all, that the income of the average worker has remained stagnant for at least 10 years. And that, in 2024, 50 million Brazilians will not even have basic sanitation. Let electricity bills continue to increase, and will increase even more this year, making the people pay the profits of the companies that line their pockets with the privatization of this essential service.
Does this mean that the government, the press and research institutes are lying? Not necessarily. The point is that, in the capitalist project that Lula’s government intends to follow, growth means more accumulation, more inequality and more dependence on the country.
Children without classes do not matter, what matters are the profits of the large private groups that dominate Education. Income and wages don’t matter, but agribusiness is booming. For the government project to be successful, the people have to lose.
One expression of this is the regulation of app workers, a trap that sets a precedent for widespread casualization. Or the Fiscal Framework, which will take billions from public services to bankers, even this year.
The events called by the PT do not confront the extreme right
The government, the PT and the sectors of the left that are part of the government call for demonstrations that, in principle, would be for Bolsonaro’s arrest, but which became acts “for democracy.” These are acts that, in reality, will not confront the extreme right, but will defend this democracy of the rich in which we live, which promotes indigenous genocide, police massacres, as in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Bahia. Acts that, truth be told, are to defend the government and its project.
If it had really wanted to face the coup, Lula’s government would not have José Múcio at the head of the Ministry of Defense and would have already cleaned up the high command of the Armed Forces. Lula would not be saying, now, that we forget the times of the military dictatorship; But, on the contrary, he would defend the punishment of torturers, the opening of archives and reparation to the victims. And no amnesty for the coup plotters.
Furthermore, if it truly wanted to confront the extreme right, the Lula government would not be imposing a neoliberal economic policy, even in conjunction with extreme right governments, such as that of Tarcísio de Freitas (Republicans-SP), financing the privatization of public services and implementing a regime of fiscal austerity at the service of the bankers.
Policies that, in the end, will make people’s lives worse and will serve as ferment for the growth of that extreme right. The only way to defeat the far right is to take on billionaires and capitalists.
Workers need an independent alternative to the government and the bourgeoisie
The government and the left that supports the government want to put the class in a dilemma: either we defend our government and its capitalist project of privatization, austerity, public-private partnerships (PPP), rebates for public employees, or the extreme right and the coup plotters will return. It is a false dilemma, because one feeds back to the other. And meanwhile, the life of the working class continues as it is: precarious, in debt, with their children without teachers and without prospects for improvement.
To really change this, it is necessary to convince the working class that they have the power, with their own forces, to fight for rights, against this capitalist project that is leading us to barbarism, and bury the extreme right once and for all. . March 8, International Working Women’s Day, is a special time for us to move forward in this regard. We must also fight against the Palestinian genocide, which killed more than 30,000 people, most of them women and children, demanding that Lula’s government immediately break with the State of Israel.
To fight for the demands of the workers, confront the capitalists and defeat the extreme right, we need an alternative from the workers themselves, regardless of class. In other words, not to be left behind by the bourgeoisie.
It is necessary to build a left-wing and socialist opposition to the government, truly anti-system, that offers a true alternative in life to the poor class and people, to women, to black men and women, to LGBTI+ people. An alternative that truly represents a change in this hellish life to which capitalism relegates us.
Article published in www.opiniaosocialista.com.br6/3/2024.-
Translation: Natalia Estrada.
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