By 6 PM on the night of Tuesday 11 April, the plenaries of Brazil’s house and senate were empty. A long-promised political holocaust had arrived. Supreme Court Justice Edson Fachin had just authorised corruption investigations into nearly a third of interim president Temer’s cabinet, and a similar proportion of senators. The list to be investigated totals 108 leading politicians.
A question I’ve long pondered is whether the Lava Jato investigations will actual fulfil their ‘promise’ of taking down the bulk of the political class, or stop short for the sake of order (and partisan gain. Hiya toucans!).
My article published yesterday in Jacobin explores this in depth, looking at what ‘anti-corruption’ means today and examining the parallels offered by Italy in the early 90s.
The really preoccupying thing, though, is the absence of a credible democratic pole in the country today. As I suggest in the essay, Lula remains democracy and the Left’s best hope for 2018. That’s quite damning.
By coincidence, the excellent Gilberto Maringoni, PSOL member and IR Professor, posted some very useful reflections on this question on Facebook yesterday. I’ve translated them into English here below.
The List and the Chaos
Fachin’s list is devastating for one central reason: it’s ample and ecumenical enough to not be accused of being partial or unidirectional. At the same time, its destructive potential might put the kibosh on the whole political system. The list smacks us in the face, screaming, ‘Après moi, le déluge! Après moi, le déluge!’
And after the flood? Who will administer the waters?
The roll call of names contained in the list reaffirms something that was perceptible after the 2014 elections, when Dilma decided to dispense with the credibility of the popular vote that was invested in her: there is no vector in society with enough credibility to reorganise the system. The electoral fraud brought dismay, exacerbated anti-political sentiment, and unmasked the social fascism which had not dared speak its name.
In the 1980s, during the collapse of the dictatorship, the MDB (and afterwards the PMDB) trained itself through long years of democratic struggle to carry on through the rubble of the regime, holding up the Constituent Assembly as it’s North Star. That party became an important vector or political ballast. Around it, all political movements unveiled themselves.
The PMDB’s delegitimisation, at the end of the decade, together with the Sarney government, created four years of interregnum – the Collor and Itamar governments – until the PSDB solidly anchored itself in finance capital to impose a feasible political and economic project in an era of the reorganisation of the international division of labour. The PSDB became the second vector of redemocratisation.
The third parameter to guarantee continuity in the democratic contest was the PT, from the point at which the FHC government broke the country three times, onwards [a reference to IMF bailouts]. Without breaking totally with the administrations, the party showed extreme competence in its first years to piggyback on an external dynamism (China), raise real wages, with moderately redistributive taxes, and GDP growth. Life got noticeably better for the masses during the period.
Lula invested in the expansion of the internal market and had notable success in doing so. He did not take the next step, though, of using the public surplus to leverage state investment and reduce the impact of the external crisis. That would have implied a intensification of redistribution, which he opted against.
The PT’s collapse opened the doors to chaos. Neither the PMDB nor the PSDB has popular legitimacy, and the project they propose, of subordinate insertion [in the global division of labour] does not galvanise significant forces beyond those of finance capital. The coup project only works through the drastic reduction of real wages and the exponential increase of the base interest rate, which results, inter alia, in an overvalued exchange rate.
That is to say, if on one side the directive is to reduce the costs of production to attract capital, on the other, the discrepancy in the exchange rate objectively raises those very same internal costs. The accounts don’t square up – especially not in a depressed economy.
It is in this context that Fachin’s list comes to us. It’s good that it exists, but it is not a solution for anything. In the race against time, there is no serious competitor for the 2018 elections, with the exception of Lula.
But a Lula bereft of a national project (as during 2003-2010, despite the favourable winds from overseas) – even if it might be an important tonic in the fight against the reforms – will not reorganise the post-coup disorder. It may even reaffirm it.
Lula is decisive in this conjuncture – yes, in 2017! – for being the only glimmer of a future directions. He retains electoral density and an identifiability amongst the poor electorate that is unequaled by any other candidate.
But Lula – or any other Left force – needs a consistent macroeconomic development project. Whether he would want this or not, his positioning would represent a definite acceleration of class struggle. He has become unpalatable to those above, hence the effort to remove him from the contest altogether.
The road is difficult and complex. But it will not become clear without the accentuation of divisions in the dominant block, and without contestation from below.
Can there be a kind of conciliation? Yes, but it does not seem to be the dominant tendency in the political scene right now.
Fachin’s list seems to have the power to blow up all the ships.
Featured image is Comerre’s Le Déluge (1911)
Basically, it’s the following: you can’t ‘end corruption’, because it’s a feature of bourgeois politics. Purely judicial initiatives don’t even remove corruption in its own terms, because it is rooted in the how the representative system functions; only democratising this will improve matters. Instead anti-corruption politics always conceal another aim. In this case, a transition to neoliberalism and reduced democratic accountability. By exploding the existing political class, however, you only further anti-political sentiment, and clear the way for authoritarian demagogues.