"We have not lost. On the contrary, we will win if we have not forgotten how to learn" — Rosa Luxembourg
Representative democracy, born out of the class struggle and ending up as the paradigm of the Western capitalist countries, is in terminal crisis. It has lost all substance and today those who see in this system a political form capable of representing in effective manner the true interests of the people are few. This crisis is aggravated further with the ideological triumph of neoliberalism and the total capitulation of social democracy parallel to the crisis of all forms of welfare state. In fact, representative democracy is increasingly transformed into pure ritual, with a growing tendency to abstention among citisens in relation to politics in general.
On the other hand the collapse of the bureaucratic regimes in eastern Europe — it is abusive and incorrect to call these regimes "actually existing socialism"— has contributed, in another way, to undermining the credibility of socialism.
The collapse of Stalinism, however, has provided proof of the theses of Marxist critiques on the incompatibility of the authoritarian single party system with socialism. The catastrophe of the bureaucratic regimes has liquidated the last big mass CPs, like the Italian and the French. Thus, if the working classes were some years anaesthetised by their traditional "social-democratic" and "Communist" leaderships they have remained for some years entirely demobilised and inactive, no longer constituting a real opposition to a triumphant neoliberalism on the ideological level. The contestatory struggles were to be found in movements around women’s, ethnic, ecological or sexual orientation issues. It is only now, after the defeat, that the working class has begun to move again, as shown by the historic strike movements in 1995 in France and the recent demonstrations in Seattle and Washington. This rebirth of the working class’s will for struggle has the indisputable advantage of being freed from the tutelage of the old leaderships, and it can only be the indication of a new period of conscious class struggle — because if neoliberalism has triumphed ideologically, from the economic and social point of view it has become a nightmare for the broad masses and the excluded.
Moreover, the struggle has continued. In South Korea, Mexico with the Zapatistas and Brazil with the Movement of Landless Workers (MST) and the Workers’ Party (PT). It is in relation to this latter that I will write, focusing particularly on the experience of the municipality of Porto Alegre from 1989 to this day, and the government of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, one of the most important of the country, where the PT won the elections of 1998, bringing Olívio Dutra into office as governor. The PT was born in the industrial region of São Paulo, known as ABC, in the course of the historic workers’ struggles against the military dictatorship during the second half of the 1970s. These struggles led to the foundation of the Workers’ Party in 1980. As the mayor of Porto Alegre, Raul Pont, says:
We were born in a conjuncture of decline and crisis of the military regime of 1964. The authoritarianism of the dictatorship and its bipartite political system was no longer compatible with rapid industrial development and the numerous social actors that the industrial miracle had engendered. The immense urban agglomerations, the big concentrations of factories and universities revealed the ripening of Brazilian capitalism and the clear stratification which flowed from it. The PT was the political expression of this new conjuncture. It was involved in the big strikes at the end of the 1970s and its principal cadres led the trade union struggles of this period.
Thus, the PT was born through the critical experience of the history of the Brazilian and international left, but also through a direct link with the practice of the class struggle. It appeared as a secular party, towards which ideologically distinct tendencies converged, like various Marxist tendencies, syndicalist currents and Christian socialist forces founded on liberation theology. It amounted then to a "party of a new type", without precedent in the history of the political organisations of the working class.
The PT was then determined to present a different vision of power, in a time of revolutionary ebb. The unifying political-ideological principle of the party, as contemporary as it was, was nonetheless found in the program of the First International and in the tradition of the critical Marxists like Rosa, Trotsky and Gramsci: "the emancipation of the working class will be the act of the workers themselves" or it will not be, and the concept of socialism is inseparable from the broadest political democracy.
Thus, in their own internal practice, the PT applied in their everyday militant practice these two inseparable and fundamental criteria for the creation of a new society. More: it had the certainty that this would only be possible through a permanent dialogue with society and that it could only become viable with the creation of a "popular public sphere". Thus, in 1989, came the idea of the participatory budget for the management of the first democratic-popular municipality of Porto Alegre. Today, eleven years later, the population sees the participatory budget as a gain, despite the heated opposition of bourgeois and populist politicians. Now these latter no longer have the means to oppose the new reality, but they wish to empty the participatory budget of content by proposing the most diverse forms of "institutionalisation’, intended to straitjacket Brazil’s first popular autonomous assembly. They know that the participatory budget eliminates all the bases of their traditional clientelist policy that fragments and atomises the masses, reproducing the political submission characteristic of capitalist societies.
Beyond the material realisations of the three popular administrations in Porto Alegre, it is certain that it is the participatory budget which has guaranteed the victories of the PT and its left allies at successive elections in the capital of Rio Grande, victories which have now been extended to the whole state. With the participatory budget the masses felt they were in charge of their destiny, deciding on which works to undertake and the allocation of budgetary resources.
It amounts in truth to a new stage of Brazilian political and social history. A beginning with an obviously revolutionary content, for it modifies substantially the relationship between the masses with the state. The budget ceases to be the work of specialists and technicians alone, becoming instead a collective and popular decision. According to Ubiratan de Souza:
The main strength of the Participatory Budget is the democratisation of the relation of the state with the society. This experience breaks with the traditional vision of politics, where the citisens limit their political participation to the act of voting, and the elected governments can do what they want, through technocratic, populist and clientelist policies. The citisen ceases to be a simple adjunct of traditional politics to become an active protagonist of public management.
We find ourselves then faced to a new centre of decision, constituted by the deepest layers of society. It is a "popular public sphere", where the decisions reverse the priorities, giving another direction to the public policies of the municipality.
According to Cristovão Veil, who has studied it, the participatory budget , as it is practiced every year in Porto Alegre is a tool for the creation of a strategic project of democracy, capable of projecting utopia. More: it is an institutional instrument of the masses for the enlarged formulation of the socialisation of politics, the socialisation of power (the sharing of state authority) and the advent of a progressive construction of micro- and macro-structures leading to a strategy of hegemony towards a post-capitalist self-managed society. The participatory budget deprivatises and renders public the budget of the state, the simple existence of an autonomous popular council with an internal democracy, a priori, guarantees the public character of state resources. Such is the most significant content of the participatory budget . It amounts in reality to a radical rupture with the institutional, bourgeois policy. The masses determine themselves the destination of budgetary resources. In other words, the budget ceases to be a mystery, an area for specialists and becomes a public subject in the full sense of the term. Beyond this, it introduces ethics into everyday politics: as the mayor of Porto Alegre, Raul Pont, says:
This experience of participatory democracy has shown that the transparent management of resources is the best fashion of avoiding corruption and the bad use of public money. The popular participation has rendered possible an efficient public expenditure with results in works and actions. In Porto Alegre, today, citisens know and decide on public affairs public and thus transform themselves increasingly into subjects of their own future.
Rosa Luxembourg said that the masses learn to govern by governing. Such was also the idea at the centre of the soviets during the October Revolution: in Porto Alegre many cooks take decisions on the budget and Lenin’s classical phrase takes a concrete content without the least suspicion of demagogy. Nonetheless, it is necessary to be clear and the participatory budget is only a beginning. The transformation/reconstruction of a new state should extend itself through all the spheres of administration. Moreover this is happening, as for example in education in Porto Alegre where teachers, employees, pupils and parents of pupils decide on the allocation of resources. The example is gratifying for often enough numerous schools forget their particularities and unite themselves around a unique project. The other unquestionable advance is the city’s congress, where all citisens can discuss, debate and project the content of Porto Alegre.
This 3rd such congress, held this year, has a particular importance because it must plan the town’s priorities for the beginning of the third millennium, furnishing the materials and propositions for the elaboration, next year, of a plan of government. Democratic practice in Porto Alegre consolidates itself thus, by incorporating the active citisens who assume directly a part of the public municipal power.
Yet, we must be fully conscious that this revolutionary process takes place in a context of heated class struggle. The bourgeois politicians know perfectly well that giving a real content to democracy puts an end to the privileges, to clientelism and, in the last analysis, to the power of capital over the whole of society. It amounts then to a class struggle and, consequently, to a political struggle which unfolds over a long period.
It is in this context that the Gramscian concept of hegemony takes on an impressive concrete dimension. We in the south of Brazil, counter-current of neoliberalism, are in the process of showing in everyday life that history is not over and that another road is possible and viable. In this struggle for hegemony, we have no illusion: we know that the institutional dispute for hegemony combines with the struggle of social movements social, the struggle of the MST, the trade unions, the movements of unemployed, the struggle for human rights and with the ecological, women’s, ethnic and cultural movements.
At the base of all this is the clear and assumed consciousness that we struggle, here in Brazil, for the renovation and refoundation of a radically democratic socialism, according to its own original discourse, that of the League of the Just, the League of Communists, the First International, the Paris Commune, the soviets of the Russian revolutions of 1905 and 1917; the socialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin, Rosa, Trotsky, Mariátegui, Che Guevara. Finally, the only socialism possible, that where the masses exercise self-determination. We know that we are only beginning. We know also that, beyond the flows and counterflows of the class struggle, we also confront the "professional dangers of power".
And, at the end of account, Porto Alegre and Rio Grande do Sul are not lost islands in an immense neoliberal ocean. Our victory will influence, and at the same time will depend on the other struggles in Latin America and in the rest of the world. Struggles which, happily, have resumed and begun to take on strength. From our side, we have the advantage of having buried definitively determinism and fatalism. We know that the future is not given and that only the struggle, "in other words subjectivity and will", can change the course of history. Never has the challenge thrown down by Rosa Luxembourg — "Socialism or barbarism!" — been so current. The world has never been so close to the last clause of that alternative. But our political experience, allied to others, shows that another road for humanity is possible.
