AND Weekly Editorial: The two tactics of the popular movement in the current situation
We publish this unofficial translation of the weekly editorial of the newspaper A Nova Democracia found here.
In the Negotiations Notebook nº 66, from June 2023, Dieese preliminarily reveals that there were more than 68 strikes by state public servants in the first half of 2023. Of these strikes, 79.4% demanded salary readjustments, indicating that the accumulated rise in inflation of recent years is the driving force behind the mobilization of these sectors. More than 76.5% of the strikes were led by workers in Education (57.4%) and Health (19.1%). This is extremely partial data, but in general it is notable that we are facing new days of strikes, more and more combative, in countless sectors of the working masses and the proletariat.
Reality confirms what was announced from this tribune, already during the 2022 elections: the return of opportunism to the central governance of the old State, while carried out through demagoguery and endless promises to improve living conditions, it is unmasking itself in practice in the face of the wave of strikes which seek to regain the losses of the previous period.
This situation makes the margin of opportunism narrower: having to govern for the ruling classes, with whom he sealed agreements and ceded key government posts, Luiz Inácio can make demagoguery, partially meeting one or another strike demand to ensure his popularity and without affecting the essence of his pacts with the establishment of the semi-colonial/semi-feudal system of exploitation and oppression; but the pelegão [translator’s note: referring here to Lula, a trade union leader who is in the service of the bosses and the State] could not keep up his game if such strikes reached a certain degree of breadth and depth. In this case, he would either clash head-on with the establishment in order to maintain his “social-democrat” mask (which is not even one) or he would completely unmask himself in front of the moving masses.
This is the razor’s edge on which Luiz Inácio walks and seeks to balance himself, as if he were between both hills. In fact, he can be crushed. That is why, at the opening of the 26th São Paulo Forum, Luiz Inácio, the Swindler, asked the false opportunist left present there for understanding, appealing: “The same people who applaud us during the campaign are often the same people who boo us, because we did not do what we promised in the election campaign. (…) We don’t make public criticisms because criticism interests the extreme right (…) It’s better to have a colleague of ours making mistakes that we can criticize than someone from the right who doesn’t even allow us to have space to criticize”, he stated. It is the well-known blackmail that, in the end, is signing a blank cheque for opportunism, and always – as history teaches us – strengthens the reaction.
In this sense, at the present time, two paths – or two tactics – are categorically distinct and opposed. The first is the opportunist tactic, the tactic of curbing the struggles of the masses with calls to settle for what is possible within the framework of the current opportunist agreement in government with the ruling classes, to demand less and to nurture as much hope as possible in the decrees and decisions of the government and reactionary institutions; the tactic that summons the masses to do nothing, instilling in them the fear of opportunism itself, that reaction will respond with fury and that, in the end, abject submission is better than struggle. The tactic of those who fear that, by mobilizing, the masses will trample over the limitations of opportunism, its commitments to the old order; the tactic of someone who wants to prevent the masses from knowing the revolutionary path.
Lenin, on the threshold of the great events of 1917, had already warned the opportunists of their tendency towards conciliation: “If even the experience of the Kornilov revolt [referring to the counterrevolutionary offensive headed by the tsarist general Kornilov] has taught the “democrats” nothing, and they continue the destructive policy of vacillation and compromise, we say that nothing is more ruinous to the proletarian revolution than these vacillations.”
The second path, or the opposite tactic to the first, is the revolutionary one: decisively call for the mobilization of the masses tending to the explosion of revolts, join them, apply the tactics and forms of struggle of the revolutionary proletariat in such a way that such mobilizations are able to arrange maximum pressure and radicalism to its demands and, in addition, allow the masses to clearly see the disastrous role of each reactionary institution of the old State in the course of the struggle, as well as of opportunism, inside and outside the government, increasing its politicization and organization, strengthening the revolutionary forces.
The situation calls for applying the only just revolutionary tactic. In this sense, Bolsonaro’s ineligibility brings favorable changes: if before the true fighters of the people were deliriously accused by opportunism of playing into the hands of the extreme right with the ghost of “Bolsonaro’s return”, what will the miserable opportunist bosses accuse them of now? Luiz Inácio and his opportunist hounds decided to join the reaction to govern and perfect our system of slavery of our people; they deserve, therefore, to be mercilessly bombarded by the strikes and struggles of the masses. Those who choose the path of conciliation will be his accomplices.
