Brazil: It’s not just Bolsonaro, it’s capitalism

BRAZIL—In 206 cities, hundreds of thousands of students and teachers took to the streets in protests, outraged by President Jair Bolsonaro’s announcement to cut 30 percent of funding to public universities and high schools. Racist and sexist Bolsonaro is now under attack and rightly so. But voting so-called leftists back into power is not the answer. It’s not just Bolsonaro. It’s the whole damn capitalist system.  Various socialists or “leftists” today – from Bernie Sanders in the U.S. to Brazil’s Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva- just want to fix capitalism. That’s not possible.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of workers are striking, demonstrating and fighting the cops, demanding no cuts to their pensions and other safety net programs. This is working class power. It should not be wasted on an effort to replace Bolsonaro with some socialist hack. Let this be a school for communist revolution. We need workers and students in Brazil to join the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and organize for an egalitarian society totally run by the working class. Bolsonaro won big because the fake leftist governments - led by the Worker’s Party (PT) which was in power for twenty years - dished out a few crumbs to the working class and then screwed them royally.
By the time of his October 2018 election victory, Brazil was in the deepest recession in its history, corruption was rampant among politicians, and homicides were at record levels (nytimes.com, Oct 28, 2018). It was Lula and his fake “leftist” Workers Party– in power for almost 20 years– that put Brazil in this crisis.
 The current cuts come on top of years of budget cuts by the previous governments led by the Workers Party. They are part of a policy of austerity measures aimed at shrinking government spending and privatizing the country’s resources. They target the humanities and social sciences as part of Bolsonaro’s far-right nationalist party’s ideological attack on the “left”, which he claims has turned the universities into “hotbeds of Marxist indoctrination” (Aljazeera).
Bolsonaro also aims to privatize 100 state-run companies in areas such as energy, ports, highways, and airports, a process that began over 20 years ago when the government began privatizing Petrobras, the state-owned oil company, and South America’s largest. Now, under Bolsonaro, that plan is being intensified with a vengeance. Some capitalists aligned with Bolsonaro will control businesses that were previously controlled by capitalists aligned with Lula.
This is also a defeat for Chinese imperialists who have made huge investments in Brazil – and especially in Petrobas - while the Workers Party was in power.  Bolsonaro’s fascist program is a full-fledged attack on the working class.  Since taking office, he has lowered the minimum wage, eliminated labor legislation protections, announced the dismantling of social security and the slashing of pension benefits, and attacked public education.  He is promoting racism to divide and weaken the working class.  He campaigned on the promise of seizing resource-rich indigenous lands that “are an obstacle to agri-business” (Campo Grande News, 4/22/15).
Bolsonaro promotes vicious racism against the indigenous tribes to divide the working class and justify this land grab.The massive demonstrations show students and workers acting in their own class interests.  Now, they need to reject the socialism of the Workers Party, which has produced little for the working class. Join the PLP and transform this anti-government movement into an armed revolution for a classless society-- communism. 
 Workers and students in Brazil have seen first-hand, over the last 20 years, how socialist reforms within a capitalist economy fail the working class.  Join the Progressive Labor Party and help us build a new international communist movement for real workers’ power.