AND Special Editorial – Elections, no! Revolution, yes!

Editorial Staff of AND

01 October 2022

Special Editorial – Elections, no! Revolution, yes!

Agitation denounces the electoral farce and receives compliments from a worker, September 2022, RJ. Photo: AND Database

One day before the first round of the electoral farce, the contest for the presidency may end without a second round. Bolsonaro planted wind and is now reaping a storm. He opened the public coffers and established the welfare crumbs, in a demagogic act, hoping to grow in the polls: he failed. The masses do not forget and do not disregard the 700,000 dead in the pandemic, besides his other crimes. The distance between him and Luiz Inácio already reaches 13 percentage points in the average of the polls.

The petista leader may triumph in the first round, not because he has genuine popular support, but quite the contrary, for two reasons. First because Bolsonaro, as the other most likely candidate, has reached the head of the old state because of the failure of the PT’s opportunist reformism that frustrated the majority of the people. Frustrated, he threw down the mask of defender of the workers to ally himself with bankers and factory owners. Unable to deceive, speaking of class struggle, it centred on identity and behavioural issues to make itself leftist, thus giving a platform for the extreme right to leap onto the political scene with Bolsonaro, who represents the most rotten, reactionary, anti-people and obscurantist thing in the politics of our country, making him worse than Luiz Inácio in everything. Second, because the rejection of both candidates most likely to win is much higher than their approval, which makes the still disorganised and lost masses vote for one so that the other does not win. And this is the main factor, since it expresses the farce that these elections are.

Luiz Inácio, with each passing second, reveals more and more his class conciliation nature. We understand conciliation here as the final activity of manipulating the feelings of the masses, which for 40 years he learned like no other servant of the ruling classes. He continues with his promise to guarantee “steak and beer”, provided that the people silently accept the worsening of maximum exploitation and oppression. He is wrong, because even the “steak” and the “beer” – as figures of speech to refer to the elevation of the material living conditions of the people – will be impossible for him to guarantee.

The economic crisis is very serious and, as a result of it, the division in the power groups of the factions of the dominant classes is worsening, the institutional shake-ups are greater, and reactionary violence is gradually growing as the only language of politics. What will Luiz Inácio do, having promised a lucrative little place in his government for all sectors – in dispute – of the dominant classes, on the one hand, and promised something impossible to fulfill to the masses, on the other? It is certain that it would be one of the most fragile governments in the history of this bureaucratic republic. It would be a government full of inconsistencies and paradoxes, which would devour it from within. Increasingly without support, it could only obtain it under the tutelage of the coup generals, who, in the end, would make this, once again, their government, no matter how the elected representative or Alckmin wants to look at it.

A step in this direction has already been taken. Luiz Inácio, who suddenly started using the motto of the god “market” (“credibility, predictability and stability”, imposed by the coupist generals as “legitimacy, legality, stability”), has now also divulged his Defense project. It includes: first, the creation of the National Guard, to act in security crises (one more step forward in the militarization of the country) and the modernization (read: adulation) of the Armed Forces (more spending of funds and increase of its repressive power).

At its launch, as Lula’s spokesman, Celso Amorim added, almost apologizing for the existence of the Commission of half-Truth : “We lived through a moment of the National Truth Commission, which was necessary. This moment is over. We are not going to touch it anymore” (read: amen to the generals). Tacitly, he also promised not to touch the system of promotions and training in military academies, whose by-products are obtuse officers like Hamilton Mourão and Luiz Eduardo Ramos, in addition to the obligatory visceral anti-communist condition and guaranteed coup vocation for certain circumstances.

Bolsonaro, on the other hand, feeling defeated and with divisions within his own campaign, advances blackmail and suspicious accusations that the elections are not “clean and safe”. His party, Valdemar Costa Neto’s PL (well, the same as the mensalão!), denounced “24 irregularities” in the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), whose conclusion is: “the source code [of the electoral ballot box] is controlled by a very restricted group of servers of the TSE” and that, therefore, they have “absolute power to manipulate the result of the elections without leaving any trace”.

As can be seen, Bolsonaro is following his own pattern of creating disturbances. Since it is evident that he will not have the strength to triumph through an armed uprising in the barracks and in the streets – perhaps, today, even to raise an armed movement worthy of the name -, his plan is to sell the solution to the same disturbance, the price of which is: amnesty for himself and his associates.

It is not even worth talking about the other candidates, because they are already defeated. Ciro Gomes, who claims to be an “anti-financial oligarchy” man, hardly realizes that his “national development project” is closer to the Geisel government – in the middle of the military regime – than to anything national-democratic.

It is time, resolutely, to take with all energy the boycott of the electoral farce and to merge, with the subtle state of mind of the masses, the clear, strategic perspective that they lack. Unite to their sensitive knowledge of the rottenness of this old order the living propaganda of the Democratic, Agrarian and Anti-imperialist Revolution, so that they do not fall into illusions and, if they do, they can come out of it with more clarity about the nature of this old order. The slogan is simple: Don’t vote, fight for the Revolution!