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Fourth International, April 1946

 

The Political Situation in Brazil

 

From Fourth International, April 1946, Vol.7 No.4, pp.110-115.
Transcribed, edited & formatted by Ted Crawford & David Walters in 2008 for ETOL.

 

(Published in the August 12, 1945 issue of Diario Carioca at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)

The absolute dictatorship wielded by Vargas for 11 years in Brazil came to the end of its tether in the first part of 1945. In this situation the Brazilian Trotskyists – the Revolutionary Socialist Party – advanced as the central slogan the convocation of the National Constituent Assembly. The reasons for this, along with the analysis of the Brazilian political scene, are contained in the document which appears below.

We have in addition received a Manifesto of the RSP Central Committee, adopted November 4, 1945 and published in Novemher 12, 1945 issue of Folha da Noite, Sao Paulo, Brazil. This Manifesto briefly reviews the conditions under which the PSR first launched the slogan for the Constituent Assembly. “This demand,” states the Manifesto, “was needed under the circumstances then in force in Brazil. Formulated with precision, it influenced all the popular programs published at the time.”

There was one noteworthy exception – the Brazilian Stalinists, who under the leadership of Luiz Carlos Prestes strove might and main to prop up the Vargas dictatorship. Incarcerated for years by Vargas, and while still in prison, Prestes sent a telegram to his jailor, hailing the “democratic tendencies” in the latter’s regime. As the Manifesto correctly points out: “Liberated immediately after this disorienting declaration, he (Prestes) confirmed his previous position in successive interviews with the press. The New State in his surprising interpretation ‘was marching toward democracy.’ A ‘suitable solution’ of the crisis confronting the fascist regime in Brazil must be ‘unity and peace; that is, there should be a ‘national coalition government; embracing in first place the totalitarian rabble, headed by Getulio (Vargas).”

The support of the Stalinists provided Vargas with a breathing spell. “Without their support Getulio Vargas would not have long survived the post-war crisis.” On the very eve of the deposition of Vargas, the general secretary of Stalinist party in Brazil, issued a statement declaring, “We are ready to defend the government against any aggressors, from whatever quarter they may come.”

While the Stalinists did not succeed in saving Vargas, they did nevertheless succeed in disorienting the struggle for the democratization of the regime. As the Manifesto states: “Now it is not only the revolution which the so-called Communist Party betrays. It betrays the democratic liberties which the mass of the people are striving to implant in the country upon the fumigated ruins of the New State.”

In conclusion the Manifesto declares:

“The Revolutionary Socialist Party demands that all the remnants of the New State be eliminated immediately. Among these are: the fascist law that destroyed free unions and the right to strike; the National Security Tribunal; the DIP, now disguised with the pseudonym DNI; Article 177, the special and political police; the mediators and prefects named by the dictator as the passive effluvium of his choice; the legal statute in force against the press. And above all, we demand freedom for the circulation of the workers’ papers with no restriction other than the civil law.

“The Revolutionary Socialist Party calls upon the proletariat and the popular masses in general to defend tenaciously the democratic conquests of the recent months, at which blows are already being directed by the new gentlemen of the Government, and to fight for the enlargement of these conquests. It also warns all the workers that while the fall of the tyrant represents a beginning of liberty, it is far from being, however, all the liberty that is implied in the suppression of the bourgeoisie as a dominant class.

“Without idealizing bourgeois parliamentarianism, because in its opinion a Soviet State, a state of the historic type of the Paris Commune, is superior as a democratic expression, the Revolutionary Socialist Party publicly reaffirms its conviction that a National Constituent Assembly in Brazil should be able to prepare the city and rural proletariat and the related layers of the population for much greater historic tasks. Long live, therefore, the National Constituent Assembly!

The Brazilian people are just beginning to emerge from the long night of the New State.

Compelled by internal factors and above all by international developments, the dictatorship has apparently capitulated. Presidential and Congressional elections are scheduled for December 2 of this year.

In a slow but progressive reawakening, the popular masses are beginning to mobilize for the electoral battle, although there remains a certain disinterestedness and skepticism. The totalitarian virus implanted by the pre-fascist camarilla of Getulio Vargas still did not succeed, however, in destroying the political consciousness of the popular masses of Brazil. From day to day new sections begin active participation in political life.

The Brazilian proletariat, which has such a glorious tradition of struggle, was the target for the heaviest blows of the totalitarian fury of Getulioism. The workers were bled by the increasing misery and paralyzed by terrorist means and social demagogy. Though still confused about the exact road it should take, the Brazilian proletariat is demonstrating its decision to resume its historic course interrupted by the coup d’etat of November 10.
 

The Political Forces in the Field

Political groupings of various ideological colorations, representing the most diverse economic interests, are growing throughout the country. Among these groupings are three principal currents which, by their quantitative value, occupy the Brazilian scene; two of the three contend for the presidency of the Republic and for parliamentary representation; the third current stands, above all, for the convocation of a National Constituent Assembly.

The apparent and the sincere followers of General Gaspar Dutra, Minister of War, who is considered the favored candidate for the presidency of the Republic, are grouping around the title of Social Democratic Party (PSD). Despite their heterogeneity, given the character of our economy and the historic immaturity of the Brazilian bourgeois class, the Dutra forces represent the most clearly reactionary among the possessors of the means of production in Brazil. Gathered under the banner of the PSD are the industrialists and the big national commercial interests in their most complete expression (Roberto Simonsen, Matarazzo, Euvaldo Lodi, Gastao Vidigal, Brasilio Machado Neto, etc.) – the industrialist group who represent the most openly protectionist tendencies and who are likewise most firmly linked with British imperialism.

Apparently the entire state apparatus is on the side of General Gaspar Dutra.

Even more heterogeneous in its social-economic content than the first faction, the “National Democratic Union” constitutes a mixture of the agrarian bourgeoisie (PRPPRM, with Joao Sampaio, Julio Prestes, Alberto Whately, Artur Bernardes, etc.) the middle class remnants of “tenantism” (like Juraci Megalhaes, Jose Americo, Manuel Rabelo Virgilio de Melo Franco, Miguel Costa, Eliezer Megalhaes, etc.) the middle commercial interests and sections of the urban petty bourgeoisie of radical tendencies in the social-reformist camp (Social Democratic Union, Liberation Movement, intellectual sharp-shooters, etc.) – the so-called “democratic left” inclined toward socialism. In spite of the “circumstantial” presence of a strong nucleus of big land owners, the social-economic content of the grouping is determined and revealed by a dominant liberal tendency in its programmatic expression – in the economic field, state non-interventionism and free trade; on the political plane, the concession of civil liberties and workers’ democracy (free unions and the right to strike.) In the international sphere they maintain closer ties with North American imperialism, the principal consumer of our agricultural and livestock products and raw materials, which furnish Brazil in return dollar exchange and manufactured products.

Extremely more complex than the two preceding currents are the elements which may be called the “prestista-queremista.” Although they are far from possessing “absolute organic unity,” these elements are composed of tendencies which, with “their own objectives,” have the central aim of circumventing the presidential elections. The principal leaders are Luiz Carlos Prestes, Stalinist chief in Brazil, and the dictator Getulio Vargas. If the position of Prestes is motivated more by international than by national factors (Stalin’s diplomatic maneuvers to secure “friendly” governments, trade relations, etc.) the “appeasers” position of the leaders of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), their striving for “’order” and a “peaceful and united” solution of the Brazilian crisis, with their hand extended to an imaginary “progressive bourgeoisie” has stronger roots than appear on the surface. It is the same bonapartist basis on which Getulio Vargas based his pre-fascist dictatorship. Just as the dictatorship until recently placed itself “above” the belligerent political groups, pretending to play the role of arbiter in maintaining “order” and protecting property, so now Prestes and his ex-communist followers have completely abandoned the class struggle camp in search of a “peaceful development” which they idealize. And they have likewise abandoned internationalism as useless in view of the “increasing cooperation of the great powers.” With his position of equal distance from the candidates and of semi-alienation from the presidential struggle, demanding in first place the convocation of the National Constituent Assembly “with Vargas and his following still in power,” Prestes reveals the bonapartist character of his politics and effects “in practice” a bloc of the PCB with the remnants of the New State.

Vargas

It is not by mere chance that the position of Prestes today fuses almost completely with the pre-fascist bonapartism of Getulio Vargas. The Thermidorian ideology of Stalin, which promoted the degeneration of the Russian workers’ state, is projected in all the former sections of the defunct Third International. Therein lies the source of Prestes’ action in leading the ex-communists of Brazil, with some exceptions, to that position of bonapartist national reformism contained in the program read at Sao Januario and repeated at Pacaembu with an accentuated demagogic note, for “all the people” of Sao Paulo. The bonapartism of Prestes, with its “anti-coup d’etat” and “appeasement” obsession, resorts to the same arsenal of social demogogy which Getulio seized upon to justify the coup d’etat of 1937, aiming to defend the class domination of the bourgeoisie against the electoral agitations of its own political parties. If with that position of bringing grist to the dictator’s mill, Prestes is helping the state apparatus to survive, it is also true that he has his own nationalist-reformist objectives, which he seeks to attain with the participation of his tendency “in a government of national confidence.” In the foreign field such a government would serve the aspirations for survival of the bureaucratic caste dominating Russia, which today suffers from the accentuated nationalist regression promoted by the gentlemen in the Kremlin.

The reasons why the PCB, notwithstanding its political crime of class collaboration is winning a certain prestige among the masses are twofold: on the one hand, the profound political backwardness of certain sections of the Brazilian proletariat, impeded in its ideological development during the past 15 years by the fatal line of the defunct Third International and by the totalitarian demagogy of the New State; and on the other hand, because the petty-bourgeois layers and broad “plebian” sections see in Prestes the democratic radicalism of the Prestesism of Coluna, which they confuse with his limited aspirations of today.

The mass base of “queremism” is little different from that of Prestes. Except for a section which follows Prestes because they believe he symbolizes communism, the workers and intellectuals who followed Getulio Vargas before Prestes was freed from jail together with the Stalinists who today give disguised support to “queremism,” integrate practically into a single “Prestista-queremista” current which could move toward a “white coup d’etat,” taking the form of a “government of national confidence.”
 

The Speeches of Prestes

Even to the most inexperienced Marxists, those whose knowledge of the doctrines of Marx and Engels does not go beyond the “ABC of Communism,” the theses defended by Prestes in his speeches should have sounded like the theories of the alchemist Paracelsus to a disciple of Saddy or Ashton.

It would be insulting to the “humanitarian socialist” characteristics of the eighteenth century to draw an analogy between its ideas and those of the “national leader.”

The false petty-bourgeois radicalism of the leader of the PCB does not succeed in masking the total abandonment of Marxism by the former captain of the “Prestes Column.” The origins of his general line are clear. The “strategic-tactical” orientation of the PCB issues from Stalin’s declaration that “the period of war has ended and the period of peaceful development(!) has begun.” This pronouncement by the Kremlin magician was enough for all his satellites throughout the world to hastily cast aside even the pseudo-revolutionary phraseology.

For Prestes, the Brazilian crisis can really be solved only through a National Union with the “sincere (!) and loyal (!) collaboration of all the true (!) patriots, regardless of social category, political ideology or religious creed.” As “theoretical” justification Prestes bases himself on the nature of the Brazilian problems which “are problems of the bourgeois-democratic revolution”: the solution of these problems “indubitably interests the proletariat which in countries like ours suffers much less from capitalist exploitation than from the insufficiency of capitalist development.” The extension of these class collaborationist ideas into the international domain leads the orator of Pacaembu to divide finance capital, that is, imperialism, into colonizer and benefactor. It becomes evident then, that with such ideas, which did not find favor even in the most servile reformists of the Second International, Luis Carlos Prestes sinks into the swamp of collaboration with the dictatorship to which he gives “frank, open and resolute support” in its “march to democracy and while thus proceeding” because the “true (!) and sincere (!) practice of democracy is the thing most necessary in our land.”

From the rapturous lyrics of Prestes over National Union, true democracy, beneficent foreign capital, an all-inclusive communist party (agnostics, atheists, Catholics, etc.) the conscious proletariat, grounded in the Marxist school, can reach only one conclusion: the leader of the PCB is more than a revisionist of the revolutionary theories of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Trotsky, he is a renegade from socialism. It is not necessary to justify here with the texts of the masters the scientific socialism which we affirm. It is enough simply to read the Communist Manifesto of 1848, or Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism and State and Revolution by Lenin.

The idolator of “order” and of an “effective solution, without greater shocks and friction, of the grave social and economic problems of the hour” feigns ignorance of the fact that in a capitalist society “order” always signifies the submission of the proletariat to the ruling class and that a solution “without greater shocks and friction” can be nothing but a solution imposed by the owners of the factories and the land upon their wage slaves. His mystical declarations about democracy have nothing in common with the Marxist characterization of a regime in which “wage slavery is the lot of the people.”

Prestes is ignorant, or feigns ignorance of the fact that Leninists always fight for the democratic republic as the preferable form of government under the capitalist system without losing sight of the fact that such a regime affords better means for the proletariat to attain socialism, and that the fight for the democratic republic never constituted an end in itself.

The National Union “of all true (!) patriots, regardless of social category, political ideology or religious creed,” praised by the “leader,” is the collaborationist hypertrophy of the Popular Front tactic which had such tragic consequences for the Spanish and French proletariat. Even more so than. The Popular Front, the National Union blots out class lines in the bourgeois state, completely subordinating the proletariat to the bureaucratic-police rule of the capitalists. National Union implies abandonment of the class struggle, the surrender of the workers’ weapons of struggle and binds them to the masters of the factories and the land.

The appeal to the “true patriots” made by the Stalinists’ “guide” cannot be addressed to the urban and rural worker masses. Only when the workers seize state power will they have a country to defend. Then they have sentiments of revolutionary patriotism which should not be confused with the chauvinistic nationalism of the Soviet bureaucracy. For the present, the “true patriots” of Brazil are the ruling classes.

The Communist Party appears today as the party of “everybody.” In this also, Prestes’ thinking does not rise one millimeter above a vulgar “populism,” aggravated by the character of the epoch in which it reappears. Equally valueless to the leader of the PCB in this respect are Lenin’s teachings on the nature of the “proletarian party” – rigorous organization of the working class, founded on a materialist and atheist ideology. The petty-bourgeois and collaborationist mentality of the leader is reflected on the organizational plane, modeling a counterfeit of a communist party which will crumble to dust in the decisive conflict to come with the bourgeoisie.

Prestes’ economic ideas in “practical politics” are of no different tenor. He does not discuss the questions most pressing to the workers, such as the high cost of living, pauperism, and working conditions; instead he indicates generic “solutions” which cannot be understood by the worker masses, or he resorts to unbridled demagogy, harmful to the working class, or he reverts to formulas already singled out as harmless by the bourgeois economists.

Forgetting or feigning to forget the law of the uneven development of capitalism in the national and international sphere, in order to caress his idealized “progressive” industrial bourgeoisie, Prestes spares this greedy devourer of “super profits,” venting the fury of his criticism upon the big landowners without doubt, the question of land distribution is among the first of the radical transformations through which Brazil must pass. But not in the form indicated by the “national leader.” If revolutionary experience shows that in given conditions the agrarian problem can and should be viewed on the level of “bourgeois legality,” this does not signify that the final objectives of the “agrarian revolution” should be disfigured by contingencies of adaptation to the capitalist state. If Prestes does not seek to sow confusion in the minds of the rural worker masses, he ought to raise, within the framework of the bourgeois regime, a demand for the confiscation of landed property, which may to a certain extent be put through, varying according to the regions.

Moreover, expropriation without indemnification of the large estates cannot be demanded separate and apart from the measures of pre-revolutionary character, such as workers control of production.

Demands of that order are not, however, raised arbitrarily. They are imposed and conditioned according to the political-economic conjuncture, when the relation of social forces begins to appear favorable to the proletariat.

Nevertheless, the obsessive national-reformist Menshevism of Prestes reduces the Brazilian agrarian question to the problem of creating “internal markets” for the development of his idealized “progressive” bourgeoisie. Disregarding the rich experiences of the historic peasant struggles, and impelled by his deeply rooted opportunism, the legendary captain presents for one of the most vital Brazilian problems, a reactionary and utopian solution.
 

Prestes’ Cries Against “Trotskyism”

Prestes’ doctrine has nothing in common with Marxism-Leninism. His renunciation of Marxism-Leninism would do very little harm if the famous captain would confess it publicly. But he does not do that. And thus he becomes a mystifier of the proletariat.

Prestes

To mask his capitulation to the bourgeoisie and his ties with the dictatorship, the Stalinist leader heaps insults on all who denounce his opportunism. Thus he attacks the revolutionary Marxists, who correctly describe the political collaboration of the PCB as treachery, and he attacks the left intellectuals and “liberal” opposition, who censure the PCB for supporting the dictator Getulio Vargas and the New State.

The orator of the “festival” of Pacaembu, with the impudence of a conscious liar, lumps together under the label Trotskyist, the revolutionary socialists – disciples of Lenin and Trotsky – and the petty-bourgeois left, who have nothing in common with Marxism. And the “leader” brands as “provocations in the service of fascism” the criticisms of his slogan “for order and security,” which gave new vigor to the dictatorship. The “Trotskyist rabble,” to this semi-colonial “fuehrer,” include not only the Marxists of the school of Lenin and Trotsky, who, true to the theory of the Bolshevik leaders, do not seek to cheat the proletariat with class collaboration and blatant petty-bourgeois patriotism; who point out to the popular masses the road of struggle without quarter against the Vargas dictatorship and all forms of despotism; who do not see in the Brazilian bourgeoisie a “democratic-progressive” fraction; who do not conceal that their final objective is communism, through the dictatorship of the proletariat, supported by the rural semi-proletariat and the poor peasants; and who declare openly that only in the road of class struggle and internationalism will the proletariat be able to diminish its present misery and, when social-political-economic conditions permit it, free themselves definitively from the fetters of capitalist slavery. To Prestes, the “Trotskyist rabble” likewise includes the radical petty-bourgeois intellectuals who, although anti-Trotskyist, struggle honestly against the dictator Vargas and his lackeys, and for formal democracy.

Lumping together the revolutionary Marxists – who are proud to have had in their ranks a proletarian militant of the ability of Leon Trotsky, whose historic role and Marxist teachings the slanderous vociferations can never destroy – and petty-bourgeois radicals or liberal oppositionists, who are determined to dismantle the dictatorship of the usurper in the Catete, the leader of the PCB aims at alarming the former, forcing them to cease their criticism of his disastrous opportunism. In that also, Prestes utilizes the methods of his “ally” of today, who, until yesterday, branded as communists all who dared to oppose the totalitarianization of Brazil.

Let Luiz Carlos Prestes bellow, then, against the “Trotskyist,” whom the dictatorship and the bourgeoisie in unison are assailing.

The revolutionary Marxists reject as false, and as deliberately treacherous, the perspective of the “peaceful development” of society initiated by Prestes and his master following the military defeat of fascism.

It fell to the lot of the ex-communists of the defunct Third International, with their Stalin, Togliatti, Browder, Gallagher and consorts, to discover, this time at the end of the second imperialist slaughter the process for the “adaptation of capitalism” which Bernstein, Briand, Millerand and Company announced before the blood-bath of 1914-18.

The reformists of our day are rushing headlong into their voluptuous “pacifism.” The destruction of the Nazi-fascist bandits does not even remotely affect the antagonisms between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie, nor does it reduce in any way the conflicting interests among the various imperialist groups.

They seek to trick the working class with the victory of the British workers, or with the participation of the Communist “fronts” in the bourgeois coalition governments. The bourgeoisie knows how to defend itself. It makes concessions with the left hand, only to take away twice as much with the right. The participation of the counterfeit leftists in power is the “consolation” capitalism gives to the proletariat and the popular masses, who emerge more miserable than ever from this war. It is also the recourse of the ruling class for the purpose of avoiding revolutionary “explosions.”

The reformists of the defunct Third International, in their conservative anxiety for “peaceful and united solutions,” anticipate with their thesis of “peaceful development” the highly improbable relative stabilization of the capitalist system. Even more, with their shameless and cynical opportunism, they cooperate to make it a fact.” They preach “social peace.” They smother strike movements and insurrections. They promote or endorse new imperialist agreements.

These valets of capitalism, represented in Brazil by Prestes, are able to fulfil temporarily, as they already succeeded in doing in other historical situations, the role of witch-doctor for the dying. However, the results of their therapy are precarious. Because the patient in his death-agony cannot be saved.

The world bourgeoisie did not solve a single one of its problems through this war; on the contrary its problems have been extremely aggravated. The impoverished, starved European popular masses face the coming winter under conditions of a mortally disorganized Old World economy. The anti-capitalist reactions of the working class, at present unstable and confused, can assume such proportions under the direction of the new vanguard now crystallizing – the Fourth International – that a new cycle of proletarian revolutions for the establishment of socialism will be initiated.

However, if there are firm perspectives in this direction, the working people and their legitimate vanguard – the revolutionary Marxists – still have considerable distance to travel.

In Brazil, it is still the hour of rear-guard defensive battles “against increasing misery and for workers’ democracy.”

In the course of the class skirmishes for the “recovery and strengthening of the unions,” now under the control of a corrupt bureaucracy in the service of the Minister of Labor and the police; in the struggles for an increase in minimum wages and for a sliding scale of wages; for improved working conditions; for the establishment and legalization of “factory, farm and barracks committees”; for the organization and maintenance of “workers’ parties” and “workers’ newspapers” – in these skirmishes the working class will regain strength and confidence in its own forces, will develop its class consciousness, and will separate with severity and precision its own camp from the camp of its enemies.

That level of partial struggles, as carried out, will reconstitute the worker forces, will unify their ranks, and will forge the workers’ army for the “decisive battles of the vanguard” against capitalism and for socialism.

The proletariat should not succumb to electoral intoxication. The ballot, which for the reformists and opportunists of all colorations constitutes a panacea for all social evils, serves the working class only as a secondary instrument of political struggle. It can and “should” be used as an auxiliary recourse, particularly in the political-economic conjuncture in which Brazil finds itself. But it should be exercised as another “affirmation” of class consciousness.

The electioneering siren-songs of all the groupings turn now, with redoubled hypocrisy and new and seductive promises to the popular masses, requesting their votes.

We have described the political, economic and social content of the three most powerful currents which “legally” appear on the ballot:

This political scene is still subject to change. However, it represents in its general lines the dominant tendencies in the Brazilian situation.

None of the candidates for the presidency of the Republic should, because of their class origin or because of the social forces they represent, merit the support of the urban and rural proletariat, or the agricultural semi-proletariat, or the poor. Moreover, even though the presidential election “can” constitute a stage, what is of interest to the Brazilian people, “in their unity,” is a National Constituent Assembly, elected through direct and secret universal suffrage.

We nourish no superstitious faith in the “virtues” of bourgeois elections, for the proletariat can expect almost nothing from constitutional parliamentarism within the framework of the capitalist state.

However, so long as the relation of “social forces is unfavorable to the worker masses, preventing them from taking the power from the historically bankrupt bourgeoisie, the workers should seize all possible democratic liberties in order to organize themselves and advance their revolutionary education. It is only in this sense that we fight for free elections and for a National Constituent Assembly in which the proletarian vanguard could make itself heard.

In its struggle for “workers democracy” (freedom of association in trade unions and political parties, freedom of the press for the workers, etc.) the Revolutionary Socialist Party (PSR) declares itself ready to march in a united front with all the socialist and democratic forces of the petty-bourgeois camp, as well as “through concrete actions” with the liberal opposition “at present” opposed to the New State, which in the present stage stands as the principal enemy of workers’ democracy for which the revolutionary Marxists struggle under the bourgeois regime.

This united front “dynamic of action” does not imply that the revolutionary socialists would compromise their organizational autonomy or renounce ideological criticism of their “circumstantial” allies and the united front should be formed immediately in concrete actions to realize the aspirations most strongly felt by the popular masses. It can be attained on the electoral level in the form of a technical agreement for the union of the socialist and radical forces under a common slogan.

The revolutionary socialists declare themselves ready to fight shoulder to shoulder with all who will fight “effectively” against the dictatorial maneuvers to impede the elections, which “in fact” would contribute greatly to the restoration of the terrorist form of government with which the New State ruled us up to the beginning of 1945.
 

Immediate Demands

We consider the following tasks foremost among the “immediate objectives” of the proletariat and the popular masses:

  1. Overthrow of the New State and the consequent abolition of the 1937 “Constitution” with all its appendages. Convocation of a National Constituent Assembly, elected by direct and secret universal suffrage, extending to 18 year olds, soldiers and the illiterate.
     
  2. Freedom of association in political parties, trade unions and cultural organizations. Freedom of the press. Legal recognition of the workers’ local organizations (committees, trade union groups, party sections, etc.).
     
  3. The unrestricted right to strike.
     
  4. An increase of 50 percent in minimum wages. A sliding scale of wages to provide relief from increased prices of consumer goods. Wages, with a strictly guaranteed minimum to follow thus the movement of prices.
     
  5. Suppression of the Security Tribunal and the dissolution of the political and special police.
     
  6. A sliding scale of hours, “with no reduction in the eight hour wage” to meet impending unemployment. Unemployment insurance.
     
  7. Improved labor legislation and the consequent revocation of all the fascist labor laws. Extension of labor legislation to cover the agricultural workers.
     
  8. Improved pensions and lodgments, adjusted according to the sliding scale in order to guarantee full benefits to the pensioners.
     
  9. Abolition of indirect taxes and the confiscation of super profits as one form of “effective” struggle against the high cost of living.

The strategic task of the revolutionary socialists is not to reform capitalism but to overthrow it. It is evident then that the demands set forth above do not constitute our “transitional program,” which we have already published, and even less our maximum program. These demands represent a body of immediate and “minimum” aspirations of the proletariat and the popular masses. The PSR calls upon the working class to fight for all or part of these demands, and it calls upon the socialist and popular organizations to form a “united front of action” for this fight.

Every action in support of these demands will constitute a blow against the dictatorship.

The more solidly the proletariat and the popular masses mobilize in concrete actions against the New State, the more assured will be the elections and the fulfillment of their most pressing needs.

The Central Committee of the Revolutionary Socialist Party (Brazilian section of the Fourth International)
Rio de Janeiro, July 1945

 
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