Lula's Brazil: Neoliberalism and the 'Third Way

This article was downloaded by: [University of Arizona]
On: 01 December 2013, At: 14:32
Publisher: Routledge
Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number:
1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street,
London W1T 3JH, UK

The Journal of Peasant
Studies
Publication details, including instructions for
authors and subscription information:
http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/fjps20

Whither Lula's Brazil?
Neoliberalism and ‘Third
Way’ Ideology
a

James Petras Professor Emeritus in Sociology
& Henry Veltmeyer Professor of Sociology and
International Development
a

b

Binghamton University , New York, USA

b

St Mary's University , Halifax, Nova Scotia,
Canada
Published online: 05 Aug 2006.
To cite this article: James Petras Professor Emeritus in Sociology & Henry
Veltmeyer Professor of Sociology and International Development (2003) Whither
Lula's Brazil? Neoliberalism and ‘Third Way’ Ideology, The Journal of Peasant
Studies, 31:1, 1-44, DOI: 10.1080/0306615031000169116
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0306615031000169116

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all
the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our
platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors
make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy,
completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions
and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of
the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis.

The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be
independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and
Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings,
demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever
or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in
relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

Downloaded by [University of Arizona] at 14:32 01 December 2013

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study
purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution,
reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any
form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access
and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-andconditions

Whither Lula’s Brazil? Neoliberalism
and ‘Third Way’ Ideology


JA ME S PE T R A S a nd H E N RY VE LT ME YE R

This article critically examines the strategy and policies of
President Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’ da Silva’s regime in Brazil. A
combination
of
economic
liberalization,
political
‘redemocratization’, and ‘Third Way’ ideology, his theoretical
framework serves to justify a market-led and imperial-centred
model of capital accumulation. Lula’s embrace of the free marketIMF structural adjustment policies has led to the evisceration of
agrarian reform policies, a decline in employment and real wages,
the slashing of pension benefits and negative per capita economic
growth – the worst socio-economic performance of any civilian
regime since the military dictatorship. Agrarian policy at the
centre of this model consists for the most part of the jailing (or
worse) of rural activists, and the promotion of the agribusiness
sector as part of the export strategy.
‘We need US leadership for many things we need to do in this world’ –
Brazilian Foreign Minister Celso Amorin, 16 March 2003.
‘We are going to war’ – US President George W. Bush, 17 March 2003.
INT R ODUC T ION

Those engaged in the study of progressive political transformation in Latin
America, its possibilities and obstacles, are confronted by two striking and
contrasting images of leftist politicians in power. The first is of the Chilean
president, Salvador Allende, in Santiago on 11 September 1973,
surrounded by armed bodyguards and looking defiantly skywards, as the

James Petras is Professor Emeritus in Sociology, Binghamton University, New York, USA, and
Henry Veltmeyer is Professor of Sociology and International Development, St Mary’s University,
Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada.
The Journal of Peasant Studies, Vol.31, No.1, October 2003, pp.1–44
ISSN 0306-6150
DOI: 10.1080/0306615031000169116 © 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd.


2

T HE JOUR NAL OF PE ASANT ST UDIE S

US-aided/instigated military coup unfolded.1 The second is of another
embattled Latin American president some 30 years later, Luiz Inacio ‘Lula’
da Silva, sitting down with other besuited (and centre-right) politicians in
very comfortable surroundings at a conference held in London during July
2003 to celebrate the ‘Third Way’.2 In an important sense, these two very
different images symbolize and accurately encapsulate the dilemma of
leftist politics in the new millennium: whether or not a left-in-power
actually is ‘in power’, and – if not – what then is the point of a left being
‘in power’.3
The lesson – about the capture and retention of political power – is both
inescapable and salutary. Throughout the latter part of the twentieth century,
much of the debate on the left concerned the different routes to political
power, and their respective efficacy. On the one hand, advocates of a nonparliamentary road to Latin American socialism argued for the necessity of
armed struggle (either in the countryside or in the city) with the object of
capturing state power.4 Advocates of a parliamentary road to Latin American
socialism, by contrast, eschewed armed struggle, and emphasized instead
the necessity of complying with the existing formal electoral/constitutional
procedures of bourgeois democracy.5 In retrospect, it is clear that the more
important political distinction is not that between a non-parliamentary and
a parliamentary road to socialism, as is frequently claimed in debates on the
left, but rather a willingness both to uphold socialist beliefs and – if
necessary – defend democratic socialism, in whatever manner state power
has been achieved.
The election of Lula in 2002 raised great expectations among those on
the centre-left.6 For most of the latter, his election heralded a new epoch of
progressive changes which, while not revolutionary, defined the ‘end of
neo-liberalism’.7 Noted progressive religious figures, like Leonardo Boff,
had earlier announced that any future election of Lula would signal
imminent ‘change’ that would challenge US hegemony and lead to greater
popular participation.8 Frei Betto, a close associate of Lula, launched a
vitriolic attack on critics who questioned some of Lula’s appointments,
citing his popular roots as a former metalworker and union leader a quarter
of a century earlier.9 Olivo Dutra and Tarso Genero, left-wing members of
the Workers Party (Partido Trabalhista, or PT) appointed to minor
ministerial positions in Lula’s cabinet, called for the ‘disciplining’ (=
expulsion or silencing) of dissident PT Senator Heloisa who objected to the
PT’s support for right-wing Senator Jose Sarney as President of the Senate.
European, US and Latin American progressives and leftists, together with
their movements, NGOs, parties and journals, all joined the celebration of
the Lula Presidency, his ‘progressive agenda’, and his ‘leadership in the
fight against neoliberalism and globalization’.10 While over 100,000 at the


NE OL IB E R AL IS M AND T HE ‘ T HI R D WAY’

3

World Social Forum in January 2003 at Porto Alegre cheered Lula as a hero
of the Left and precursor of a new wave of leftist regimes (along with
President Lucio Gutierrez of Ecuador and President Hugo Chavez of
Venezuela), some of Lula’s intellectual supporters (for example, Emir
Sader) attempted to dissuade Lula from going to Davos to plead his case for
foreign investment by the world’s most rapacious speculators and richest
investors.
Ominously, other voices – much less progressive, and with a radically
different political and economic agenda – were lining up to hail Lula as
‘their man’. In addition to the great majority of the left intellectuals, NGOs
and politicians who aggressively and unquestioningly support Lula as a new
progressive force, therefore, the Brazilian and foreign financial media,
international financial institutions (IMF, World Bank, Wall Street, City of
London) and prominent right-wing political leaders (the British Prime
Minister Tony Blair and US President Bush) also praised Lula as a
statesman and ‘pragmatic leader’.11 In other words, big business, bankers
and right-wing political leaders see Lula as an ally in defence of their
interests against the left and the mass popular movements. The central
question thus becomes: now that Lula is president of Brazil, whose political
and economic interests does he actually represent, and why? Accordingly,
this article will attempt to answer this question, by analyzing and evaluating
the expectations of the left and capitalist perceptions in light of political and
economic realities.
The object of the analysis which follows is to show how what is and
what is not happening in the agrarian sector of Brazil, is consistent with
(and, indeed, part of) a much broader socio-economic project, one whereby
Lula is extending and consolidating the neoliberal agenda of his predecessor
– Fernando Henrique Cardoso.12 The first section investigates the political
transformation of Lula, and outlines why the celebration by him of the
‘Third Way’ is not anomalous, either theoretically or politically, but much
rather accurately reflects his current approach. The second part of the article
examines the changed nature of the party which supported Lula’s rise to
power, in terms of the contrast between its historical dynamic/membership
and grassroots control, and the current – very different – leadership control
and party democracy. The third section looks at the policies inaugurated by
Lula once in power, with particular reference to his agrarian reform
programme. Also considered is the way he has managed to silence or co-opt
grassroots opposition to these policies. The conclusion considers the
prospects for a regenerated leftwing opposition to Lula’s project of
economic liberalization.

4



L UL A AND T HE ‘T HIR D WAY’

The degree to which policy initiatives adhering to – and, indeed, framed in
– unambiguously neoliberal language has generated unthinking support on
the part of those who these days pass for opponents of global capitalism is
evident from, for example, the uncritical endorsement of Lula and the PT by
Naomi Klein.13 At the time of the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre,
therefore, she endorsed the participatory budget scheme put forward by the
PT simply because it amounted to a process of decentralization that in her
view was the ‘other’ of globalization. Her enthusiasm, and also her naivety,
is evident from the following:
much of the appeal of the [World Social Forum] is that its host city,
Porto Alegre, has come to represent a challenge to [globalization]. The
city is part of a growing political movement in Brazil that is
systematically delegating power back to people at the municipal level
rather than hoarding it at the national and international levels. The
party that has been the architect of this decentralization in Brazil is the
Workers Party (the PT)… Many PT cities have adopted the
‘participatory budget’, a system that allows direct citizen
participation in the allocation of scarce resources. …. In Porto
Alegre, this devolution of power has brought results that are the
mirror opposite of global economic trends. (emphasis added)
This, she continues in much the same vein, underlines the fact that under the
PT ‘democratic participation increases every year’. Her conclusion is
symptomatic:
[the participatory budget] is part of a pattern of a rejection of what
Portuguese political scientist Boaventura dos Santos calls ‘low-intensity
democracy’ in favour of higher-impact democracies, from independent
media activists creating new models of participatory media to landless
farmers occupying and planting unused land all over Brazil… Maybe
change isn’t really about what is said and done in the centres, it’s about
the seams, the in-between spaces with their hidden strength.
About this suggested ‘democratic participation’ involving self-help by those
at the rural grassroots, two rather obvious shortcomings can be mentioned.
First, ‘higher-impact democracies’ at the grassroots face serious
difficulties where, as in Klein’s schema, no attempt is made to address the
class instrumentality of the state. By fetishizing ‘redemocratization’ in this
manner, therefore, Klein – like so many other populists – fails to problematize
either class or state power, in effect leaving the state and the capitalist class
intact, which is precisely what neoliberals advocate.14 What Klein (and others)



5

forget, therefore, is that neoliberals too are in favour of decentralization, not
least because it disperses mass opposition to their policies and thus
organizationally and politically disempowers poor peasants and workers.15
And second, operating within the capitalist system also has economic effects.
Hence there is no attempt by Klein (and others) to challenge the concept
‘scarce resources’ – itself a central theoretical emplacement of marginalist
economic analysis. In contrast, Marxists would draw attention to the fact that
resources are only scarce in the first place because members of a capitalist
class own them. Unless this latter fact is itself confronted, any solution
proposed (no matter how well-intentioned) is bound to fail. Without
expropriation of existing property, therefore, all that poor peasants and
landless workers actually participate in is their own continuing poverty.16 By
itself, grassroots ‘redemocratization’ is not – and cannot be – a solution to
current impoverishment and underdevelopment in Brazil.
The main problem lies with the seemingly progressive – but in reality
ambiguous, not to say theoretically slippery – concept, ‘redemocratization’.17
The latter is central to many recent and current attempts by liberal (and
neoliberal) theorists to reinvent/reassert the validity of a ‘kinder/caring’
capitalism in the aftermath both of the military regimes that plagued Latin
America throughout the 1970s and 1980s, and of the ending of socialism in
the USSR and Eastern Europe in 1989.18 One influential reincarnation – of
which Lula himself is an adherent – takes the form of what is termed the
‘Third Way’, an approach claimed by its exponents to transcend both leftist
and rightist politics.19 An advocate of ‘Third Way’ politics in Brazil [BresserPereira, 2001] not only categorizes this analytical framework – incorrectly –
as a ‘new left’ and a form of ‘modern social democracy’ but also reveals
(inadvertently, one suspects) the extent of its complicity with the neoliberal
project. Accordingly, he endorses both its pro-market, pro-choice, proindividual approach, plus its acceptability to ‘progressive capitalists’ in
Brazil, and also the opposition of the ‘Third Way’ to Marxist politics (= ‘the
old left’), further taxation, the state, and bureaucratization.20 In short, a
political discourse/programme that is indistinguishable from neoliberalism.21
Unger Marches along the Third Way
Despite, or rather because of, its profoundly disempowering implications
for the rural (and, indeed, urban) grassroots, in Brazil and elsewhere, the
‘Third Way’ is clothed in the language of plebeian advantage: specifically,
the claim that its programme corresponds to a process of
‘redemocratization’.22 Hence the stated intention of ‘democratizing
democracy’, a political objective that involves neither transforming existing
property relations nor the redistribution of income/power, but rather the
offer of palliatives to offset the continuing effects of capitalism.23


6


Another variant of the ‘Third Way’ is ‘communitarianism’, one of whose
most influential exponents is Roberto Mangabeira Unger [1987a; 1996;
1998], a Brazilian academic based in the United States.24 His ‘marketfriendly’ alternative to socialism is encapsulated in the slogan ‘democratize
the market, deepen democracy’, and – like the ‘Third Way’ approach –
transformation is limited to institutional change within actually-existing
capitalism. In essence, this amounts to no more than the political
incorporation (= equality-as-inclusion) of peasants and workers in an
otherwise unequal system, or the exercise of hegemony-from-above.25
Consequently, the economic and class structures, or those elements that
reproduce the systemic inequalities/oppression/vulnerabilities to which he
objects, remain intact.26 Like exponents of the ‘Third Way’, Unger
privileges what might be termed the politics of voluntarism, in his case
recycling earlier theory about the durability of demographically determined
models of subsistence-oriented peasant economy.27 As is clear from Unger’s
[1987b] analysis of ‘the plasticity of social relationships’ he claims informs
the historical dynamic of peasant economy (= the ‘reversion cycle’), he
maintains that in the past those at the rural grassroots were in effect able to
change social relationships how and when they wanted.28 The corollary is
obvious: if this has been done before, why not now?
It comes as no surprise, therefore, to learn that in 2002 Unger declared
his strong support for the presidential candidacy of Lula.29 Because both the
‘Third Way’ and ‘communitarianism’ are pro-market and anti-Marxist/antistate, each offers nothing more radical than a programme of
‘redemocratization’. In essence, this amounts to palliatives that, it is
claimed, will offset the negative economic impact on those at the rural
grassroots of neoliberalism. Given that in the latter context even this modest
attempt at amelioration will be opposed by capitalists, theoreticians such as
Unger maintain that such obstacles will dissolve in the face of the
willingness/ability of ‘those below’ to adapt to change, thereby establishing
political ‘community’.30 Simply put, for the ‘Third Way’ and
‘communitarianism’ the process of ‘redemocratization’ means a capacity of
those at the rural grassroots – workers and peasants, in other words – to seek
and be satisfied with political and ideological empowerment inside not just
capitalism but its neoliberal form.31 This seemingly contradictory objective
is to be effected without systemic transformation, let alone a ‘destabilizing’
transcendence involving revolution.
‘Redemocratization’ as Political Incorporation
Why the conceptually empty term ‘redemocratization’ is so acceptable to
conservatives is not difficult to discern. Although it implies a process of
‘from below’ empowerment, in reality it involves much rather the opposite:



7

a process of ‘from above’ empowerment, albeit projected in terms of and
dressed up in the language of grassroots political interests and/or advantage.
Political control passed to the urban and rural working classes and peasants
is in reality negated by those such as Lula, populists who campaign and are
elected to power on the basis of an ideology promising radical
transformation. Not the least problematic outcome is that, ideologically, the
disempowerment that ‘redemocratization’ ultimately turns out to be
necessarily generates among erstwhile grassroots supporters a
disillusion/frustration with all democratic politics. This view, that the
ruler/ruled distinction is innate and permanent, has two interrelated
consequences.
First, it seemingly confirms the veracity of pessimistic claims made by
conservative theoreticians such as Mosca [1939], Lippmann [1922; 1937;
1955] and Burnham [1941], that elites are ‘natural’, an outcome being that
the existing socio-economic structure cannot be transformed. Perhaps the
most influential variant of this argument is that advanced by Mosca. In
contrast to Marx, for whom historically specific classes engaged in struggle
and either occupied or departed from the political stage – Mosca insisted
that a ruling class (= political class) perpetuated its dominance by a dual
process of renewal: expulsion from combined with induction into its
membership (= exosmosis/endomosis).32 On the one hand, therefore,
expelling those elements that – for whatever reason (loss of material
resources, ideologically expendable/redundant) – are no longer necessary to
its reproduction. On the other, constantly replenishing itself through the
recruitment of what might be termed ‘plebeian talent’, or the incorporation
of potentially dangerous grassroots leaders.33 Although the actual
composition of a ruling class changed, therefore, its rule and power
continued. Lippmann, who in an important sense provided conservatives
with the reason as to why elites are ‘natural’, neatly complemented this
view. His objection to democracy was based on the argument that the
masses were too ill-informed to govern (= ‘a sovereign but incompetent
people’), a claim that seemingly justifies the exercise of power by a ruling
class, particularly where the latter periodically incorporates grassroots (=
plebeian) leaders.34
And second, the grassroots depoliticization that follows this process of
disempowerment is itself fertile ground for the growth of the political right.
The emergence of the latter takes the form of a strong leader who, because
he claims to be ‘a-political’/’above politics’, is able to persuade a politically
disillusioned grassroots (including workers and peasants) that he represents
the ‘small man’, on whose behalf he undertakes to rein in the power of the
existing elite. Since this cannot be either accomplished or sustained by
democratic means, the anti-democratic utterances of the political right are


8


imbued with ideological acceptability, and – in the eyes of those at the
grassroots alienated by the incapacity of (bourgeois) democracy to change
anything – its strategy becomes therefore not just compelling but necessary.
Significantly, the term used by Mosca – ‘the political class’ – is now once
again much in vogue amongst journalists and academics, the inference
being that historically and contemporaneously there is a category of people
who rule ‘naturally’.35 The latter claim fuses with that of Burnham, who in
the early 1940s maintained similarly that the capitalist system, large
enterprises and the state would henceforth all be ‘managed’ by
experts/technicians, thereby conceptually updating Mosca’s ‘political class’
as a ‘natural’ ruling class. These ‘managers’ would, like new members of the
existing ruling class, be recruited from below, thereby harnessing plebeian
talent to the survival of capitalism in the manner identified by Mosca.36
Masquerading behind the term ‘redemocratization’, therefore, is just such a
process of neutralization, since the element of ‘from below’ political control
implied in the election of Lula is in effect negated by his continuation of the
existing neoliberal project. Although this is obviously not the first time that
such a betrayal has occurred, it is for leftist opinion in Brazil and Latin
America (and elsewhere) a particular bitter experience, not least because of
the heightened expectations generated by Lula’s election to the presidency.
T HE W OR KE R S ’ PART Y

Most contemporary observers refer to the Workers’ Party as a party
composed of and thus reflecting the interest of the Brazilian working class,
both rural and urban. This perceived correspondence between party,
grassroots social composition and political programme derives in turn both
from the historical link between on the one hand the PT and social
movements, and on the other its deep involvement in class and social
struggles. This was certainly the case when the PT was founded, over two
decades ago. The most significant fact about the PT, however, is its
qualitative transformation over the past quarter of a century. Several
essential changes have taken place in the party: these are its relation to the
social movements and their struggles; the internal structure of the party and
the composition of the delegates to its Party Congress; and its programme
and political alliances.
Lula and the Workers’ Party
When it was founded, the PT was a party with a strong component of what
are nowadays described as social movements: that is, an heterogeneous
membership that included landless workers, urban favelados (slum
dwellers), ecologists, feminists, cultural and artistic groups, progressive



9

religious and human rights activists, plus the major new trade unions
(metalworkers, teachers, banking and public sector employees).37 The
growth in its membership and influence stemmed from its direct
involvement in the struggles conducted by social movements, and in the
beginning the electoral campaigns it undertook largely complemented such
extra-parliamentary struggles. Over time, and with increased electoral
successes, however, those within the PT who favoured a parliamentary road
gained control of the party, and slowly redefined its role as basically an
electoral apparatus, giving lip service to the social struggle while
concentrating its efforts inside the apparatus and institutions of the state,
and forming de facto alliances with bourgeois organizations. A left-wing
minority within what was increasingly an ‘electoral party’ continued to
support the grassroots movements, albeit from within official institutions,
providing them with legal defence, denouncing state repression, and
providing help and encouragement at mass gatherings. What is clear,
however, is that all tendencies of the electoral party – left, centre and right
– were no longer engaged in day-to-day mass organizing, except prior to
and in connection with election campaigns.
The second important change was in the composition of the party, the
party congresses, and the relationship between party and leader. By the mid1990s, therefore, the great majority of the party apparatus was made up of
full-time functionaries, professionals, lawyers, public employees, university
professors and other middle and lower middle class employees. The
‘voluntary activists’ from the rural and urban grassroots disappeared and/or
were marginalized, as the PT turned from mass struggles to office-seeking
and wheeling and dealing with business groups and a diverse array of
centre-left to centre-right parties. The last Congress of the PT prior to Lula’s
election was overwhelmingly (75%) middle class, mostly functionaries,
with a sprinkling of trade union, MST and human rights leaders.
Clearly the PT was no longer a ‘workers’ party’, either in its
composition, in its delegate Congress, in its relation to grassroots social
movements (election time apart), or in its style of leadership. Moreover,
many of the elected officials of the PT at the municipal and state level were
engaged in the same kind of cross-class alliances with business groups and
bourgeois parties, a path that the PT itself would follow in the presidential
campaign of 2002. In other words, the right turn of the PT at the national
level was preceded by a similar pattern at the state and municipal level
during the decade of the 1990s. Significantly, many of the key party leaders
and subsequent advisers to Lula were office holders already implementing
economic liberalization, even while the national party programme still
spoke of socialism, anti-imperialism and repudiation of the foreign debt. As
the 2002 elections approached, the national leadership of the PT, with Lula

10



leading the way, eliminated all the programmatic references to socialism
and anti-imperialism, in line with the practices of the neoliberal
officeholders in the party and with the majority support of the now
numerically dominant middle class party delegates.
(Electoral) Politics and the Conquest of (Presidential) Power
The third fundamental change in the PT concerns the evolution of its
programme, a transformation that took place in four stages. During the
1980s, the PT stood for a socialist society based on assembly-style
democracy, linked to the social movements.38 The party called for a
repudiation of the foreign debt, the socialization of banking, foreign trade
and national industrialization (with some sectors calling for the
expropriation of large industries and others for worker co-management).
Most crucially, its programme included sweeping land redistribution,
backed up with state financial, technical and marketing support. These
radical positions were debated openly and freely by all the tendencies (from
Marxists to social democrats), dissent and/or agreement frequently being
published in their own newspapers. Beginning in the late 1980s, however,
the PT moved to the right, and by the late 1990s the axis of power had
shifted toward a ‘social-democratic position’ (support for a welfare state)
while the Marxist-left continued as a strong minority tendency. The social
democrats controlled the increasingly middle class party apparatus, while
the Marxists organized their opposition from within the same apparatus: few
– if any – of the latter turned to mass organization so as to counter a growing
weakness in the party machinery.39
Although at a formal level the programme of the PT still retained its
earlier radical demands, in practice most of the newly elected governors
and mayors did not challenge existing property relations. The radical wing
of the elected officials in Porto Alegre introduced the notion of a
‘participatory budget’, involving neighbourhood committees, but failed to
municipalize any essential services, including transport. Crucially, no
attempt was made by them to stimulate land occupations or
encourage/support the demands made by landless workers for an agrarian
reform programme. The fact that the participatory budget was based on the
funds allocated by state and municipal regimes, which established the
overall budget priorities, meant that politically even the radical elements
within the ranks of the PT soon learned to co-exist and cooperate with the
established banking, industrial and real estate elites. Debate between the
minority Marxist and dominant social democratic wings of the PT was
confined to programmatic language, the differences of practice between
them being in fact quite narrow.40
The third phase of the PT, roughly between the end of the 1990s and the



11

run-up to the elections, saw a further shift to the right in programmatic
terms.41 In the course of this period, therefore, even the rhetorical references
to Marxism, socialism and foreign debt repudiation disappeared. It was a
conjuncture at which the party leadership was in full transition to social
liberalism – combining anti-poverty populist rhetoric with the pursuit of
alliances with neoliberal business, banking and agro-export elites. During
the election campaign, Lula repudiated the referendum on free trade policies
(ALCA) organized by the MST, sectors of the progressive church and other
leftist groups.42 Instead, the PT called for ‘negotiations’ to improve ACLA.
The PT embraced a pact (June 2002) with the IMF and acceded to its
dictates on fiscal austerity, a budget surplus to pay bondholders, reductions
in public spending and respect for all privatized enterprises. The social
dimension of this economic liberalization programme was the declaration in
favour of a gradual agrarian reform (of unspecified dimensions), a ‘zero
poverty’ agenda, providing family food subsidies, and land titles for urban
squatters.43
The final phase in the evolution of the PT’s programme begins in 2003,
when it becomes in effect a presidential party, and its government embraces
an orthodox neoliberal project.44 Despite promises of increased social
spending, the Lula regime has slashed budgets, imposed fiscal austerity,
raised interest rates to attract speculative capital and is negotiating with the
United States to lower Brazilian trade barriers. In other words, for the Lula
regime its differences with the United States centre on whether or not
Washington adheres to its free-market economic philosophy. Most of the
leftists around the world who see the victory of the PT and Lula as the
advent of basic – or at least important – social changes benefiting the urban
and rural poor by redistributing wealth and land, base their views on longoutdated images of political reality. Over the past few years the militants
who built the party through grassroots movements have been replaced by
‘neo-Lulistas’, upwardly mobile functionaries, professionals with no history
of class politics, who have joined the party to secure the perks of office and
to facilitate business liaisons.45 A small inner circle of campaign advisers,
long known for their neoliberal credentials, has played the major role in
shaping Lula’s presidential campaign. Of these the most influential were
Antonio Palocci, Jose Dirceu, and Marcos Lisboa.46 What remains of the
older reform social democrats have been shunted to marginal ministries; if
they dare to question the neo-Lulista hegemony, they are subject to punitive
measures for ‘violating party discipline’.47
The PT’s programme was a clear continuation of the outgoing President
Cardoso’s disastrous neoliberal policies and in some cases even an
extension and/or intensification of his economic liberalization agenda.48 In
order to demonstrate their liberal orthodoxy to the bankers and


12


industrialists, Lula’s team signed a pact with the IMF only a few weeks after
his electoral victory. In exchange for securing a US$30 billion loan over a
four-year period, Lula agreed to a strict adherence to all the typical
retrograde conditions set forth by the IMF.49 Once in office Lula went
beyond even these harsh measures.50 The IMF agreement included the
typical recessionary measures maintaining inflationary control by
withholding large injections of fresh capital to stimulate growth,
acquiescence in the privatization programme unleashed by outgoing
President Cardoso and a budget surplus target (beyond what is paid in
interest payments) of 3.75 per cent of gross domestic product, thus
guaranteeing in advance that little or no funds would be available for any of
the promises Lula made about ‘zero poverty’, let alone financing
comprehensive agrarian reform.
Lula’s inner team of Palocci, Dirceu and their economic advisers also
moved quickly to demonstrate their allegiance to US imperialism.51 To this
end, Lula also publicly criticized Presidents Chavez of Venezuela and Fidel
Castro of Cuba prior to his inaugural address. His inauguration speech was
a masterpiece of duplicity – a double discourse to set his working class
supporters dancing in the street whilst assuring foreign bankers that his
regime was their regime. Accordingly, the speech referred to ‘changes’,
‘new roads’, and the ‘exhaustion of a [neoliberal] model’ which Lula then
qualified by speaking of a ‘gradual and continuous process’ based on
‘patience and perseverance.’ He then spoke of ‘zero hunger’ as the priority
of his government. Most significantly, although agrarian reform and
developing the internal market were both mentioned, Lula then proceeded
to criticize protectionism and subsidies and endorse agro-export elites and
free trade. In other words, in terms of agrarian policy he voiced support for
the interests and objectives of poor peasants and rural workers, while
simultaneously approving measures and/or interests opposed to them. This
contradictory agrarian policy was, of course, entirely consistent with his
overall approach. After having appointed the most rigid neoliberals to every
key economic post, he could not possibly claim in all seriousness to be
taking a ‘new road.’ Equally, after signing on to the IMF austerity budget
there was no way he could finance either new employment measures or a
policy of ‘zero hunger.’52 Similarly, by prioritizing anti-inflationary
measures designed by and acceptable to the IMF, there was no way Lula
could lower interest rates to promote the internal market. In keeping with
the ‘Third Way’ approach, this double discourse belied a single practice: to
continue and deepen the model that he denounced as leading to stagnation
and hunger. Once in office Lula very early on demonstrated the vacuity of
his promises regarding social welfare and agrarian reform.
Contrary to the claims made by most of the neo-Lulistas, therefore, the



13

PT is currently a party that aspires to represent an alliance between domestic
big industrialists and agribusiness interests and overseas bankers. It
nevertheless hopes to retain the loyalty of labour via ‘social pacts’ based on
business/trade union agreements which will allow business to reorganize the
workplace, fire workers to lower costs and to increase part-time and shortterm workers, in exchange for which trade union bosses will receive
symbolic and monetary remuneration.53 The appointment of left-wing PT
members to the Agrarian Reform and Labour Ministries is designed to
pacify the unions and the MST with symbolic, not substantive,
representation. The job of the left PT ministers is both to preach ‘patience’
and to make empty but radical speeches at industrial workers’ and landless
workers’ meetings. All the left-wing ministers are faced with limited
budgets and a pro-business economic strategy that will undermine any
substantial reform programmes. They have to plead with the dominant
neoliberal economic ministers for any residual financial outlays, an
undertaking with few prospects of success. Some leftist ministers may
resign, most will adapt to the liberal orthodoxy and argue for what they will
call ‘new realism’ or ‘possibilism’. In short, the PT as a dynamic movement
based on the support of peasants and workers, whose political interests it
represents, is dead.54
L UL A I N P O W E R : PUSHING NE OL IB E R AL ISM TO T HE L IM IT S

What is important in analyzing a political leader is not where he comes
from, but where he is going; not his reference group in the past, but his
present and future reference groups. Political observers have been wrong in
their analysis of Lula because they focus on his distant past, his former trade
union comrades, not his present neoliberal banker, businessmen and
imperialist allies. When Lula proposed a social pact between labour,
business and the government, purportedly to work for the betterment of
Brazil as a whole, he set up a Social Economic Development Council to
formulate policy recommendations. The composition and agenda of the
Council revealed Lula’s pro-business, anti-working class bias. Of the 82
members of the Council, 41 are businessmen and 13 are trade unionists, a
better than three to one proportion favouring the bosses. The purpose is to
discuss tax reform – reduce business taxes, in other words – and social
security reform, decrease payments to workers, pensioners and other state
beneficiaries. When Lula was confronted with the preponderance of the
business elite among his inner circle, he roundly defended his proindustrial/agribusiness bias, embellishing his choices with an apolitical,
meritocratic varnish and accusing his critics of nepotism.55 Lula
conveniently forgets that his businessmen’s ‘disinterested talent for thinking


14


for the country’ has resulted in the greatest social inequalities in the world.
Like his ‘Third Way’ counterparts elsewhere in the world, Lula deliberately
overlooks the class interests of the business elite precisely because they are
his strategic allies in the pursuit of a neoliberal project.
Lula’s neoliberal appointees to economically strategic positions
established the parameters for the formulation of macro- and microeconomic and social policy. To understand what has transpired since Lula
took office it is essential both to understand the underlying philosophy
which guides his regime – economic liberalization – and to set aside his
populist rhetoric in the public arena, the object of which is to pacify the rural
and urban poor, the rank-and-file membership of the social movements, and
dissident members of the PT. Taken together, the elements structuring the
neoliberal philosophical assumptions guiding Lula’s economic policy
provide the basis both for analysis and criticism, and also a background to
his agrarian reform programme (see below). One thing that can be said
about Lula’s economic team is that its members have lost no time in
fulfilling their pre-inauguration promises – about the budget, the market,
prices, pensions, taxes, wages and employment – made to the international
financial institutions, international bankers and the local industrial elites.
Few ex-leftist governments have moved as rapidly and decisively to
embrace and implement a right-wing agenda as has the Lula regime.
The operating philosophy of Lula and his PT regime has four key
postulates. First, that Brazil is in a crisis which can only be solved by
implementing austerity policies promoted by the international financial
institutions in order to secure new flows of loans and foreign investment,
identified by Lula as the principal vehicles for development.56 Second, that
Brazil will grow economically only by providing incentives to domestic big
business, agribusiness enterprises and foreign multinationals.57 These
incentives include lower taxes, reducing labour welfare provisions and
strengthening business positions in labour/management negotiations. Third,
that in Brazil the free market, with minimum state intervention, regulation
and control is essential for solving the problems of domestic economic
growth, unemployment and inequality. The priority of Lula’s economic
team is thus to promote Brazilian exports to overseas markets – over and
against domestic markets – and to pressure the United States and Europe to
liberalize their markets.58 And fourth, economic growth in Brazil will
eventually result from price stability, foreign capital flows, tight fiscal
policy and above all strict payment of public and foreign debts; hence the
need to slash government budgets, particularly social budgets, to
accumulate a budget surplus for debt repayments, and to control inflation.
Once stability (the ‘bitter medicine’) is achieved, so the argument goes, the
Brazilian economy will ‘take off’ into market-driven export growth,



15

financing those domestic poverty programmes designed to alleviate
hunger.59
In order to meet the conditions laid down by the IMF, and in keeping
with the interests of newly acquired allies among the economic elites, the
Lula regime slashed the budget by US$3.9 billion.60 Included in the budget
cuts was a reduction in the promised minimum wage from US$69 to US$67
per month, to take effect in May 2003, five months after taking office.
Given the sharp rise in inflation, this will reduce the minimum below the
miserable level of the previous Cardoso regime. Over US$1.4 billion of the
US$3.9 billion cut will come out of the social budget. A closer analysis of
the budget cuts reveals that reductions will affect food programmes,
education, social security, labour, agricultural development, and social
promotion. Altogether, social cuts amount to 35.4 per cent of the budget
reduction.61 Even Lula’s much publicized pet project Fome Zero (‘zero
hunger’) was slashed by US$10 million, leaving a paltry US$492 million to
meet the needs of 40 million malnourished Brazilians. The budget cuts
mean the funds budgeted for the hungry amount to US$10 annually, or
US$0.85 a month – a princely sum of 2.5 cents per day. The major reason
for the social and other budget cuts was to increase the budget surplus to
meet IMF and debt payments, and to this end Lula increased the surplus to
4.25 per cent in February 2003. In other words, the budget allocation to
meet debt obligations has expanded from US$17 billion to US$19.4 billion,
an increase of nearly 14 per cent. This corresponds to a direct budgetary
transfer, taken from the social funds, of an additional US$2.4 billion from
the very poorest, the working and middle class to the very rich.62
Lula and his Finance Minister Palocci, a former Trotskyist, and Chief of
Staff José Durceu, a former student leader who trained as a guerrilla fighter,
reject any protectionist role for the Brazilian state, opting instead for
supply-side economic policies and an extension of Cardoso’s privatization
policy. Defending international regulations (World Trade Organization
policies) as a means to attract foreign investment, rejecting protectionism
for local industries, and privileging foreign capital competing for public
tenders (state contracts), Palocci argues: ‘Brazil doesn’t want to close itself.
We want to sail the open seas of the global market’.63 He has rejected any
state intervention as ‘artificial mechanisms’ of public financing to stimulate
consumer demand among millions of impoverished Brazilians, adding that
‘generating the right conditions, market forces will increase income and
corporate productivity’.64 Such an assertion ignores the fact that it was
precisely the ‘market forces’ in Brazil which created the mass poverty and
the worst inequalities in the world over the last 100 years of capitalist
expansion. In keeping with this neoliberal approach, the Lula regime
approved new price rises by privately owned utilities – thus increasing the


16


burden on the poor in general, and the rural poor in particular.65 Given the
price/wage squeeze on those who sell their labour-power for a living, and
the potential for discontent, Lula is ensuring the loyalty of the police – he
granted them a 10 per cent salary increase.
Since he has identified pensions as the source of fiscal deficits, ignoring
thereby mass tax evasion by the rich, the long-term tax concessions and
incentives to the multinational corporations, Lula proposes a massive
reduction in pensions, especially those of public employees. Citing a
handful of generous pensions paid to some top officials, the intention is to
reduce public employee pensions to the low levels of employees in the
private sector. In line with the ‘Third Way’ discourse, which labels all
neoliberal policy as ‘reform’, Lula presents his pension reduction as a battle
for equality. This overlooks the fact that lowering public pensions to the
level of private ones is equalizing misery, whereas progressive egalitarian
measures would seek to do the opposite: raise the lower pensions to the
level of the higher. The savings generated by these cuts in public sector
pensions will not only fund tax cuts for the industrial and agribusiness elites
in Brazil, but are also likely to further aggravate class inequalities,
particularly in the countryside. Accordingly, the Lula regime is to reduce
taxation paid by employers, particularly industrialists; by contrast, he has
increased the taxes paid by salaried employees and wage workers by some
27 per cent since coming to power. Lula justifies his regressive tax policies
where employers and industrialists are concerned by insisting on the
necessity of maintaining capitalist ‘competitiveness’, while defending
increased taxation on employees and workers because of the fiscal deficit.
Unemployment is increasing, consumer purchasing power declines,
increasing interest rates preclude new investments, and high budget
surpluses allocated for debt repayments undermine public investments.66
Whereas early in his regime Lula and his economic team predicted upward
of 3 per cent growth, by the end of February 2003 most economists were
talking about zero per capita growth.67
The aim of Lula’s labour reform strategy is to weaken the trade unions
by undermining constitutional guarantees of labour rights, thereby lowering
labour costs to increase profits for employers, with the object of making
exporters more competitive. One piece of legislation proposes both to
eliminate payments made by private sector capitalists to trade union funds
and to abolish obligatory payments of union dues. Another proposes to
allow capitalist enterprises to impose labour contracts that override legally
established workers’ benefits.68 Any opposition to this from the main trade
union organization – the Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (or CUT) – has
been circumvented by the simple expedient of co-opting the bureaucratic
bosses of the CUT by offering them positions and stipends as advisers to



17

Lula’s regime.69 Decapitating the leadership of the trade union movement in
this fashion has been effective, since co-opted union bosses either endorse
or do not criticize his anti-labour policy. Thus, for example, CUT president
Joao Felicio, one of the co-opted bureaucrats, has stated: ‘We have a certain
sympathy for the reforms, but they have to be negotiated and imposed
gradually.’ In a similar vein, the trade union national secretary of the PT,
Hergurberto Guiba Navarro bluntly stated the purpose of labour reform:
‘We are going to undertake a grand reform and many unions will
disappear’.70 Given Lula’s neoliberal policies where labour is concerned,
plus his hitherto successful co-optation of the CUT leadership, it is not
really surprising that the main working class opposition now comes from
the moderate right-wing trade union confederation Forza Sindical (FS). In
March 2003, the metal workers affiliated with FS went on strike over
declining real wages. FS is now leading the fight to reduce the working
week from 44 to 40 hours, to increase severance pay, to extend
unemployment benefits (to increase coverage from 5 to 12 months), and for
legal recognition of workers’ representation on the shop floor. Needless to
say, the Lula government is adamantly opposed to all of FS demands,
claiming they are inflationary and threatening repressive measures against
what government spokespersons label as ‘political demands’, an old ploy
used by all previous right-wing regimes, not only in Brazil but globally.
The combined impact of economic liberalization policies, co-opting the
CUT, and a deliberate manipulation by Lula of his working class origins in
order to promote a big business agenda was – and is – much appreciated by
the shrewd financiers on both sides of the Atlantic. Little wonder, therefore,
that he received such thunderous applause from the super rich in Davos. As
Caio Koch Weser, German’s State Secretary of Finance, said of Lula: ‘The
key is that the reform [= neoliberal] momentum gets the benefit of the
enormous credibility that the president brings’.71 Lula’s appeal to the Davos
billionaires for ‘a new world order’ and contributions to an anti-poverty
fund, however, drew scepticism and most probably discreet and cynical
smiles. ‘Why’, asked a commentator in the financial press, ‘should the
billionaires support a new order when they are doing so well with the
existing order?’72 It is a sentiment with which it is impossible to disagree.
Agrarian Reform, Free Trade and US Imperialism
Currently, some of the worst poverty, hunger and under- or unemployment
worldwide is found in rural Brazil [CEPAL, 1998; ILO, 2000].73 The
principal problem is the concentration of landownership in the hands of a
small (mainly agribusiness) elite, the ‘other’ of which is the presence of
millions landless peasants and rural labourers. Until the late 1990s Lula
promised peasants and agricultural workers comprehensive land reform if


18


he were elected. On the question of the scope and extent of this agrarian
reform, however, Lula was strangely silent. Once he was inaugurated, he
announced that for 2003, the agrarian reform target was to settle some 5,500
families on 200,000 hectares of land. Lula’s target was a mere one-tenth the
number of families settled under the previous neoliberal regime of President
Cardoso, and only one-twentieth what the MST was expecting from the
‘people’s president’. At the rate of settlement Lula was proposing it would
take a thousand years to provide the currently landless families with
adequate holdings, while those who came after would remain landless.
Once in office, Lula continued the old reactionary policy of violently
evicting land squatters from unproductive land. His nominally left-wing
Minister for Agrarian Reform announced new plans, to be unveiled in the
second half of 2003.
Significantly, agrarian reform is equated by Lula not just with what
might be termed a social (or humanitarian) programme, but also with
political ‘redemocratization’ and economic development.74 Hence the
interrelated nature of what he calls ‘a new economic model’:75
Fighting hunger includes both structural measures – in support of
small farmers… – and emergency relief to those suffering from
malnutrition. The social and political conditions are now in place to
launch a sustainable cycle of development. That will require the
enlargement of the internal market, particularly for mass consumer
goods, by integrating into it millions of excluded citizens. Agrarian
reform is also fundamental if the Brazilian economy is to be rebuilt.
And it will play a crucial role in making the country fully democratic.
Ironically, this agrarian policy hearkens back in part to the development
theory advocated by the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin
America (ECLA) during the late 1950s and early 1960s. Like ECLA
(nowadays ECLAC, reflecting the addition of ‘the Caribbean’), Lula sees in
the expansion of the internal market the key to economic growth in Brazil,
and – again like ECLAC – he allocates a central role in this process to the
peasantry.76 There is, however, a crucial difference. ECLA advocated an
agrarian reform programme in order to generate domestic industrial growth.
Its idea was to take land away from unproductive and parasitic landlords
and redistribute it among peasants and/or landless agricultural labourers
who would cultivate it, and thus make productive use of this resource. The
rural poor would thus secure the purchasing power necessary to generate
demand for consumer goods, a demand that would be met in turn by
domestic capitalists. This would prevent expenditure on the import of
foreign consumer goods, making such savings available for infrastructural
investment, thereby contributing to industrialization. The latter could then



19

be realized without borrowing from international banks, thus solving the
interrelated problems of inflation, balance-of-payments deficits, and the
consequent lack of national economic sovereignty.
In a neoliberal model, however, many of these same policy initiatives
have both a different meaning and – more importantly – a different
outcome. That economic liberalization will be central to Brazilian agrarian
policy is clear from the appointment by Lula of Robert Rodriguez, president
of the Brazilian Agribusiness Association and strong advocate of genetically
modified crops, as Minister of Agriculture.77 This appointment sits ill with
the Keynesian demand management of ECLAC, which required state
intervention both to expropriate large rural properties and to redistribute the
holdings thus acquired among peasants and landless labourers. Lula has
shown no inclination to do this, much rather the opposite: his government
has assured national and international capitalists that existing property
rights ‘will be respected’. ECLAC policy also required a strong state,
willing to provide smallholders with credit and other inputs, as well as to
undertake planning (low-interest loans, etc.) that would contribute to the
development process. Such a role is the antithesis of Lula’s neoliberal
laissez-faire state.78 Under the latter regime, it is likely that peasants and
workers will increasingly be required to migrate to the shantytowns, there
to provide cheap labour-power for multinational corporations fleeing higher
labour-cost areas by relocating to Brazil.
Several points are clear. Lula’s agrarian policies are a huge step
backwards from the point of view of Brazilian politics. From the
perspective of agricultural policy, his regime is fully committed to
supporting economic growth generated by the better-off: large landlords in
Brazil, and in particular agribusiness export elites.79 His policies will greatly
enhance the already profound inequalities in the Brazilian countryside and
lead inevitably to greater rural discontent. The most likely result will be
bloody clashes between the landless peasants seeking land and the military
police implementing Lula’s law and order legislation. No doubt Lula will
ask for forgiveness and shed a few tears for the dead peasants as he proceeds
to embrace his new allies among the big bourgeoisie, both national and
foreign. An example of the latter are those connected with ALCA, a freetrade policy favourable to US imperialism.
ALCA is a radical comprehensive trade agreement which, if
implemented, would transfer all trade, investment and other economic
policies to a US-dominated economic commission, probably located in the
US, which would oversee the privatization and a US takeover of the
remaining lucrative state-owned public utilities, petroleum, gas and other
strategic industries. Throughout Latin America mass popular movements
have taken to the streets in protest against ALCA, and millions of peasants


20


in Mexico, Ecuador, Colombia, Bolivia, Paraguay and Brazil have blocked
highways and demanded that their governments reject it. However, the main
objection of Lula and his economic team to the implementation of ALCA is
that it must reduce trade barriers for Brazil’s big agribusiness exporters. As
many critical economists have demonstrated, it is ALCA that will in the end
destroy family farmers and peasant agriculture, increase the number of
landless peasants, hunger and mass migration to the urban slums, making a
mockery of Lula’s ‘zero hunger’ programme. Lula’s derisory handouts of
temporary food relief will not compensate for the millions of new poor and
destitute resulting from his neoliberal agrarian policies. Recently Lula has
claimed that his ‘zero hunger’ scheme was ‘much more than an emergency
donation of food. We need to attack the causes of hunger, to give fish and to
teach how to fish’.80 Instead, with ALCA, Lula will be attacking the poor,
not hunger, and strengthening and deepening the causes of hunger, not
lessening them.
There are some 25 million landless Brazilians in the countryside, 95 per
cent of whom will not be the beneficiaries of any land reform, but who will
be further marginalized by Lula’s promotion of the agro-export strategies.
There are 40 million un- and under-employed who have no future
employment prospects, given Lula’s budget cuts and high interest rates.
Hundreds of thousands of small and medium sized enterprises (and not a
few large national firms) face bankruptcy from the high cost of credit (26.5
per cent interest in March 2003), and the free trade policies promoted by
Lula’s regime. Rather than generate domestic demand, therefore, Lula’s
agrarian policy will suck in imported consumer goods, dumped by advanced
metropolitan capitalist nations in so-called Third World countries the
economic liberalization of which means they are no longer defended by
tariff barriers. Unlike ECLA, Lula’s agrarian policy will in all likelihood
generate economic growth only outside Brazil, as multinational
corporations repatriate earnings and profits at an estimated rate of return of
22–34 per cent on capital invested.81
Rural Grassroots Opposition to Economic Liberalization?
Long before Lula’s electoral campaign of 2002, the main source of
grassroots opposition to agribusiness interests and landlordism in rural
Brazil was the MST. Since 1983, the latter organization has – through great
sacrifice and discipline – occupied large landed estates and settled over
350,000 families on close to 25,600 hectares of land belonging to large
proprietors – a rate of 345 occupations a year, involving up to 1,200 rural
families [Dataluta, 2002; INCRA, 2000]. During his election campaign,
however, Lula demanded that the MST cease to engage in land occupations
– it complied, and undertook no land occupation or resettlement for the first



21

time in its history.82 In his campaign speeches, by contrast, Lula sought the
support of right-wing pro-landlord parties by promising to apply the full
force of the law against ‘illegal land occupations’ – those outside the bounds
of his proposed agrarian reform.
Prior to the presidential elections, there had been intense political
discussion within the MST regarding the future direction of the movement.
The rank-and-file membership was concerned that the PT was turning into
a conservative or social democratic electoral party, that many of the state
and locally elected PT leadership were hostile to agrarian reform, and in
some cases actually repressed those who occupied land. In the light of these
considerations, three discernable tendencies emerged inside the MST. Rankand-file members who composed the first of these concluded that the MST
should form its own party, and unite with other social movements and leftist
groups. A second group within the MST conceded that the PT was becoming
more conservative, and similarly repudiated the right-wing PT governors
and mayors, but argued for a different political strategy. Namely, that the
MST should run its own candidates within the PT, or at least work more
actively inside the party so as to influence it to follow a more progressive
direction. The third strand of opinion within the rank-and-file membership,
and the most influential, at least among the national leadership, tried to
bridge the differences between the first two. This tendency agreed to work
outside the PT, and to try to build a common platform with the progressive
church, human rights groups and left intellectuals, the object being to
elaborate an alternative programme and organization. Thus was born the
Consulta Popular (CP), which began with great fanfare and then rapidly
decayed. This was because combined with this new tactic of a turn ‘to the
left’ was the old tactic of influencing the PT from within. In effect, the CP
was neither a new movement nor a new electoral party. It was squeezed
between direct action and electoral politics and was unable to attract any
sizeable trade union or urban support.
Unfortunately, most of the MST leaders cling to a misplaced optimism,
and continued to pin their hopes for a positive outcome not so much on Lula
himself as on the Minister of Agrarian Reform and other left functionaries
in the same ministry. Miguel Rossetto, the Agrarian Reform Minister and
member of the left Socialist Democracy tendency of the PT, argued he
would do everything in his power to comply with the agrarian reform
promises, but that he would have to do this within the extremely limited
budget constraints imposed by his government – a clever piece of
demagoguery. In the light of this inactivity over the agrarian reform
programme, tensions mounted within the MST, as rank-and-file activists
and over 60,000 land squatters who were camped out under plastic tents
(suffering from heat, cold, and food shortages) became increasingly restless.


22


No emergency measures were forthcoming from the Lula regime, and a
small number of land takeovers began to take place. As it became clear that
even the limited agrarian reform programme was being relegated to the back
burner, along with ‘zero hunger’ and other electoral promises made by Lula,
the recommendation by some of the MST leadership to work to change
things from within began to wear increasingly thin. Some national and
regional leaders publicly expressed their discontent with the government’s
unresponsiveness.83 For example, Joao Paulo Rodríguez, the national
coordinator of the MST, demanded that the government provide a time
schedule within which to realize the agrarian reform, expressing worries
over the inaction – some 40 days after Lula’s inauguration. Rodríguez
warned the Lula regime that the MST rank-and-file members could not
continue to wait, stating that there were 60,000 families waiting for
settlement.84 The government has appointed several progressives
sympathetic to the MST and other groups to the Agrarian Reform Institute
(INCRA) – but, somewhat predictably, with few resources. More
importantly, Lula has taken an extremely rigid and hostile position toward
the traditional land occupation tactics of the MST, promising to apply the
full repressive force of the law to curb the movement.85
Unleashing the government’s repressive apparatus, including the jailing
of activists, forceful evictions,86 frameups by the judiciary, murders carried
out by paramilitary groups that are allowed to run free and act with
impunity,87 infiltration of the movement by the intelligence services, and –
in August – the use of 800 military police to violently dislodge a group of
homeless people from an unused lot in a Sao Paulo suburb, Lula has pushed
the agrarian reform movement back to the early 1980s, beyond the ‘new
republic’ of constitutionally established civilian regimes. He continues to
insist that any agrarian reform measures will not respond to direct collective
action but will have to be part of a regime-sponsored programme, which in
the context of the post-election budget promises to be totally insignificant.
In August 2003, Lula was still talking about his ‘project’ to settle 60,000
families on the land in 2003 but noted that progress would depend on the
government’s ability to reach an agreement with the IMF to reduce the
latter’s target for applying the mandated budget surplus to payment of the
external debt.88 In this and other contexts Lula continues to play on the
unavoidable constraints that his government has to work under. In early July
the Minister of Agricultural Development stated that the government only
had sufficient funds to buy land for 11,300 families (as against Lula’s
declared target of 60,000).89 This represents about a quarter of Cardoso’s
land reform programme, and one-tenth of what the MST had anticipated and
was demanding. In January the federal budget had allocated 462 million
reais for the purchase of expropriated land under the government’s ‘land



23

reform’ programme but after ‘adjustment’ it was reduced to 249 million
reais and in June INCRA’s budget was reduced to 162 million reais
[Zibechi, 2003]. Under these constraints INCRA did ‘settle’ some 9,500
families on their land between January and June but 7,000 of these families
had had their plots assigned to them under the previous Cardoso regime.
In effect, Folha de Sao Paulo (3 July 2003) points out, Lula has
managed to reach less than 5 per cent of his target of 60,000 settled families,
and this under conditions of growing violence (13 killings in land conflicts)
and 128 occupations – more than those that occurred in the whole of 2002.
All appearances aside, says Lula, informing anyone and everyone who
might be concerned (and many are) ‘the agrarian reform will be
accomplished in the adequate (sic) moment and in the measure that it is
possible’ (La Jornada, 18 August 2003).90
The MST faces a profound dilemma: after years of building a successful
mass independent socio-political movement that settled landless families on
unproductive land via direct action (land occupations), it has in effect been
immobilized. Its role has become instead a purely electoral one,
campaigning on behalf of Lula in the hope of securing agrarian reform
legislation after his election. In the past, MST successes were based on its
capacity to initiate and then undertake independent mass action, a
programme of direct action combined with electoral support for some of the
more progressive candidates put forward by the PT. Having relied on Lula’s
election as the fulcrum for a comprehensive agrarian reform, however, the
MST is now faced with a regime that has repudiated every one of the
MST/PT ‘shared reforms’. Sooner or later the MST will have to recognize
that the landless rural workers have no future with the Lula regime, that the
movement will have to part ways and return to the tried and proven method
of mass direct action or suffer splits, decline and co-option.
C ONC L USION: PR OSPE C T S FOR C HANGE

One of the great political myths, and for those on the left a disabling one,
has been and remains that the global demise of explicitly neoliberal regimes
– such as those of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Ronald Reagan and (the
first) George Bush in the US, and Augusto Pinochet in Chile – signalled
either the end or at least a move away from the economically dominant
neoliberal project. In fact, the opposite has been the case, since in each
instance the successor regime (Blair in the UK, Clinton in the US, and
Aylwin in Chile) either continued with or did not challenge the project of its
predecessor. Although political labels changed, therefore, the economic
content of the policies did not. Insofar as he continues implementing in
Brazil the neoliberal agenda of Cardoso, Lula adheres closely to this pattern.


24


The electoral programme of the PT spoke to all of the major concerns of the
financial, industrial and agribusiness elites. Private property and privatized
enterprises would be respected. Foreign debt repayments would continue.
Tight fiscal policies would be rigidly adhered to. Labour and pension
‘reform’ would be at the top of the agenda. In keeping with ‘Third Way’
idology, however, ‘reform’ signals weakened trade union rights, anti-labour
legislation, and reductions in public sector pensions. There would be – and
there has been – no indexation of wages and salaries, but there would be for
bonds and debt payments. Land occupation by poor peasants and
agricultural workers would be – and is – discouraged, and where it does
occur it is repressed. Fitting neatly within this neoliberal programme, the
agrarian reform would be minimal, underfunded, and remain ‘real’ only at
the level of rhetoric. Accordingly, the case of Lula and the PT represents a
break not between a new political leadership and an existing systemic
project, but rather between a new political leadership and the majority of its
grassroots support.
As such, the volte face on the part of the Lula regime poses three
immediate dangers. First, it threatens to undermine the living standards and
working conditions of the vast majority of Brazilians who depend on a
waged income, especially those on the bottom rungs of the socio-economic
ladder – peasants and workers. The threat is all the more acute because it
comes from political parties (or a coalition of parties and social
organizations) that were the prime defenders of the urban and rural working
classes, and who have now joined their enemies, thereby leaving peasants
and workers temporarily defenceless.
Second, in addition to this process of socio-economic disempowerment,
the right turn on the part of the Lula regime will also generate mass political
disillusion and alienation. Peasants and workers in Brazil will accordingly
become disenchanted not only with the PT regime and its public
functionaries, but also with the whole spectrum of parties, trade unions and
social movements which promoted Lula as the ‘people’s president’. It is
precisely this kind of depoliticization that creates a fertile ground for
reactionary movements of the political right, which – as the events in
Europe during the 1920s and 1930s underline – are not slow to recruit
disaffected plebeian opinion in town and countryside alike. Such a process
is further fuelled by PT ideologues, like Sader and Frei Betto, who justify
Lula’s politics as ‘realistic’ and/or ‘pragmatic’, thereby reinforcing the idea
that no alternatives exist to the present reactionary policies.91 And third, the
international left, which by joining the chorus praising Lula, is reinforcing
its own movement toward political debacle. The endorsement of Lula’s
electoral victory in Brazil as the greatest revolutionary change since the
1959 Cuban revolution, the election of Allende as Chilean president in



25

1971, or the 1979 Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua, is likely to generate a
similar kind of disillusion among the international political left.
Among the possible outcomes, two are as follows. On the one hand, a
part of the Latin American left will take Lula’s right-wing path as a model,
and abandon historical demands for policies/programmes that reflect the
interests of peasants and workers at the rural grassroots (domestic economic
planning, collective/cooperative land reform, income redistribution
measures, anti-imperialist foreign policy initiatives, etc.). This will be done
by invoking the ‘constraints’ facing Lula, and other such rationalizations.
On the other hand, some left-wing movements will be compelled to rethink
the entire electoral strategy, particularly the relation between party and
movement. From a practical and historical perspective, therefore, it is clear
that the divorce of the PT from the mass movement and mass struggle early
on laid the groundwork both for its current devotion to class collaboration
and eventually for its pro-imperialist policies. In other words, the palpable
bankruptcy of the parliamentary road to bourgeois ‘redemocratization’, let
alone anything resembling socialism, may give an impetus once more to the
non-parliamentary alternative.
In the case of Brazil, the dynamics of class struggle and the emergence
of direct action mass movements like the MST were instrumental in creating
a challenge to the prevailing neoliberal orthodoxy. Although the failure of
the neoliberal project – economic stagnation, deepening inequalities,
ballooning external debt – together with a leftist critique, created the basis
for the decline of the traditional right, this combination was not of itself a
sufficient condition for the rise of radical or even reformist alternatives.
What happened instead was the adoption of a stereotypically populist
strategy, whereby the neoliberal project continued under a different political
banner, based now on an incorporated plebeian – and petit-bourgeois –
leadership drawing support from a socio-economically heterogeneous base.
In short, a multi-class alliance composed of workers, elements of the
bourgeoisie, poor peasants and landless agricultural labourers, all led by exleftists, but directed and subordinated to the interests/objectives of
international capital.
The effectiveness of this populist ‘Third Way’ strategy derived from a
dual process: the retention of an oppositional rhetoric (= radical discourse)
about the desirability/achievement of grassroots empowerment that was
nevertheless combined with what was actually a disempowering economic
project. Hence the break by the PT with its leftist past was made possible
because of the plebeian nature of the leaders, the manipulation of popular
imagery and the hierarchical, personalistic and authoritarian nature of the
party leadership. The grassroots origins of the leadership neutralized
internal leftwing opposition (= ‘I/we understand your situation because it


26


was my/our experience as well’), which enabled it to proceed along a rightwing path, claiming that this was in conformity with grassroots opinion.
Consequently, no dissenting voice from the ranks of pragmatic ideologues
in the ‘people’s movement’ was raised against the ‘people’s president’ when
Lula embraced George W. Bush, calling him an ‘ally of Brazil’.
Lula has a clear, coherent neoliberal strategy based on an alliance with
the IMF, Washington, overseas investors and creditors, and an internal
alliance with key elements of the dominant class, including the agro-export
elite. The harsh budget cuts, the decline in pension payments, the real
reduction in the minimum wage, and the deterioration of social services will
all reduce living standards below current levels. These policies will have an
especially deleterious impact in the Brazilian countryside, on poor peasants
and workers. Payments to wealthy bond-holders, subsidies to big agroexporters and inflation will all widen the existing inequalities. Although
Lula is still seen by some as ‘the Brazilian workers’…last chance to make
a humane country out of their grotesquely unfair society’ [Cooper and
Frasca, 2003], his neoliberal policies will lead to a more profound social,
financial and economic crisis than that which affected the Cardoso regime.
High interest rates, budget cuts and the payment of the debt (the equivalent
to 65 per cent of GDP) will undermine productive investments, weaken the
domestic market and increase future debt obligations, leading to a
deepening recession. In short, the economic conditions generating
opposition are already in place: all that remains is the organization of a
coherent opposition to Lula’s continuation of the neoliberal project, and it is
precisely over this process that he still exercises some power. The prognosis
for the emergence of a coherent opposition from within the part or regime
is therefore not good.
Together with his advisers, Lula has put in place an effective strategy to
limit internal party opposition, using the carrot (= offering ministries and
secretariats) and the stick (= persistent critics threatened with censure
and/or expulsion). Through state patronage and party discipline, he has
converted PT mayors and congress people into transmission belts for his
harsh austerity programmes. There are exceptions, of course; a handful of
PT elected officials who still uphold the traditional social democratic,
reformist programme, but they have been marginalized, abandoned in large
part by their former comrades with a voracious appetite for the spoils of
office and small fiefdoms of state power. Bluntly stated, having enforced
compliance within the party, the regime now has both the will and the power
to impose harsh neoliberal policies on the nation generally, and especially
on the rural poor. Having put all their efforts into supporting Lula, the
opposition – the left PT and the social movements – continue the hopeless
task of working within the elite, hierarchical party apparatus, where they



27

have no future prospect of changing the political course of the regime.
Accordingly, the main source of potential opposition to Lula is currently
to be found outside his government and the existing party hierarchy. This
underlines the extent to which it is perhaps necessary to rephrase the
question contained in the title: from ‘Whither Lula’s Brazil?’ to ‘Is Brazil
Lula’s?’ The small but disciplined United Socialist Workers Party (PSTU)
has been gaining a following among trade union militants in the CUT and
currently influences about ten per cent of the Confederation. The PSTU has
potential for growth, but will become a formidable opposition only if it
allies itself with other larger and more significant social movements,
political opponents, church dissidents and trade union forces. One such
configuration could find left-wing MST leaders, a sector of the CUT,
progressive Catholic clergy and dissident left PT leaders (about one third)
and the PSTU coming together to form an alternative opposition coalition
or political party, one which focuses on mass direct action over and against
electoral politics.92 This possible formation has tremendous possibilities in
taking up the banners of anti-ALCA mobilization, debt repudiation,
opposing internal market development, and arguing instead for an agrarian
reform programme plus re-nationalization of strategic industries and banks.
Strategically this opposition should be in a powerful position.93 The right
turn of the Lula regime, the precipitous decline in living standards and the
deepening recession will put at risk his initial high popularity ratings, and
grassroots disenchantment is growing, leading to open expressions of
discontent. Strikes among metalworkers started within two months of his
taking office, and land occupations by landless workers have spread.
Despite the favourable strategic objective and even subjective
conditions for the re-emergence of a new left-wing formation, however,
there are serious political obstacles militating against the emergence of a
united and powerful opposition. First is the absence of a political party with
a national following that is capable of serving as a focus for regrouping. A
new leading political party has therefore to be created in the course of the
social struggle which will, in the beginning, be led by social and political
fragments of the rural and urban working class. At the moment the MST
constitutes the main organized form of opposition to the neoliberal model
and the Lula regime, but it has not managed effectively to move into the
cities, linking up with forces of resistance there; nor has it managed to elude
the trap set for it by Lula and the PT. The leadership has to distance itself
from Lula and return to its roots, but even so it is unlikely to constitute a
political formation that can contest the impending struggle for state power.
Second, the new political formation will have to engage in a fierce
ideological struggle to counteract the label ‘people’s president’ and its
spurious claim to empower grassroots Brazilians. This will be a lengthy


28


struggle, not least because of the politically entrenched position of those
defending Lula (the mass media, ex-leftists). Third, any new political
formation will have to avoid being linked to right-wing criticisms of the
regime, though there is plenty of room for possible tactical alliances with
the moderate trade union, Forza Sindical, on issues of wage, salaried and
labour legislation. And fourth, any political formation will have to develop
theoretical and programmatic clarity about a series of interrelated political
issues: not just the major contradictions undermining the viability of Lula’s
economic model, but also the nature of the neoliberal crisis, and the
aggressive new imperialism of the US.
Any new political formation will also be faced with a major
organizational task. There are over 90 million Brazilians living in poverty,
most of whom are not organized and will be impoverished further by Lula’s
policies, the so-called zero-poverty programme notwithstanding. This is
especially true of the countryside, where the diversity of relational forms
and regional/locational interests threaten to fragment any attempt at national
unity. In both urban and rural Brazil, therefore, the political opposition is
confronted by a formidable challenge of organizing not just the unorganized
but the disorganized.94 Without such organization, any mobilization will
amount to nothing more than spontaneous and local protests, easily and
harshly repressed by the state, as Lula has promised the transnational
capitalist class. The danger is that this will lead to disenchantment,
favouring recruitment by right-wing parties. Finally, any new political
formation, whilst appealing to the discontented voters abandoning Lula,
must also make a thorough and complete break with the PT, a party that –
like many others in Europe and Latin America – began on the left and has
finished on the right.
AC R ONYMS

ALCA

Area de Libre Comercio de las Américas [Free Trade Area of the
Americas – FTAA]
CP
Consulta Popular [Popular Consultation]
CUT
Central Unica dos Trabalhadores [All Workers Central]
ECLAC Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean
[Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caríbe –
CEPAL]
FS
Força Sindical [Unionized Force]
Fome Zero Zero-Hunger programme
INCRA
Instituto Nacional de Colonização e Reforma Agrária [National
Institute of Colonization and Agrarian reform]
MST
Movimiento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [Movement


PC do B
PSTU
PT

29

of Rural Landless Workers]
Partido Comunista do Brasil [Communist Party of Brazil]
Partido Socialista dos Trabalhadores Unificado [United
Socialist Workers Party]
Partido dos Trabalhadores [Workers Party]
NOTES


1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

It is of course true that the iconic date 11 September is now associated wholly with the events
which occurred in New York in the year 2001. For inhabitants of and those with an interest in
Latin America, however, that same date – equally iconic – is ineradicably linked to an event
that took place three decades earlier, the military coup in Santiago de Chile in 1973.
For ‘Third Way’ politics, and significance of the participation by Lula in the celebration of this
approach, see below. In the words of one of its exponents [Giddens, 1998: 26, 70], the ‘Third
Way’ is described politically as ‘the radical centre’, and is said to constitute ‘an attempt to
transcend old style social democracy and neo-liberalism’.
This dilemma is rather obviously an old one, and evokes some longstanding debates on the
left about the nature of power, its political capture and retention. Not the least of the many
ironies here is that Allende regarded himself, and was regarded by many others in Latin
America, as the embodiment of a constitutional (= ‘moderate’) socialist politics, working to
realize the latter objective within and through the existing state apparatus. His approach to
political power was accordingly regarded as the antithesis of revolutionary socialist agency (=
guerrilla activity) designed forcibly to capture and overturn the state, a position represented at
that conjuncture by Fidel Castro and Ernesto Ché Guevara. Indeed, in an interview with Régis
Debray [1971: 74] Allende drew attention to precisely this distinction, observing: ‘there is
something else I want to show you, something which has inestimable value for me. Something
exceptional, which I guard as a treasure: The Guerrilla War [the book about the 1959 Cuban
revolution written by Ernesto Ché Guevara]. This copy was on Ché’s desk; it must have been
the second or third copy, since I imagine the first was given to Fidel. And here is a dedication
which reads: “To Salvador Allende, who is trying to obtain the same result by other means.
Affectionately, Ché.”’
Advocates of a non-parliamentary road to Latin American socialism included not just the
Tupamaros in Uruguay (on which see Labrousse [1973]) but also Debray [1967; 1970; 1975],
whose theory of ‘the Long March in Latin America’ popularized the strategy of the guerrilla
vanguard (= foco), as applied by Castro to Cuba and Guevara to Bolivia [Peredo, 1970]. The
influential views of Debray were discussed critically in Huberman and Sweezy [1968], Ramm
[1978], and also by their author [Debray, 1973: 40ff.; 1977].
In the category of those who advocated following a parliamentary road to socialism come
most, if not all, Moscow-affiliated Latin American communist parties. Compared to the
cautious conservatism of the latter, for whom the political objective remained always the
realization not of socialism but rather of bourgeois nationalism, the Popular Unity coalition of
leftist groupings headed by Allende [1973] attempted to put into practice a socialist
programme, albeit within the context of a bourgeois polity. As many have argued [Payró et
al., 1971; Palacios, 1979] this was always going to fail, given that the capitalist class would
be unwilling to surrender its ownership/control of the means of production (mines, industry,
land) to any president, regardless of any popular mandate to do so.
Some 52 million Brazilians voted for Lula, and a crowd of 200,000 cheered him at his
inauguration. Six months later Lula would receive the Prince of Asturias Prize for
International Cooperation in Oviedo, Spain. The award was given for his ‘admirable record of
fighting for justice’, his status as a ‘symbol of hope’ and his role as ‘the promoter of political
attitudes marked by good sense’. He received this prize at a time when, as Sylvie Duchamp,
writing for the liberal magazine Revista Cambio in Bogota, puts it: ‘Every day it is clearer

30


7.

8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

that, even though he won office with his left hand, he is now governing with his right. Those
who accused him of being a dogmatic socialist have been forced to eat their words … just
when observers closed their eyes so they would not have to watch the disaster hit, Lula chose
to continue his predecessor’s economic orthodoxy and followed the recipe to the letter.’
According to Candido Grzybowski, head of a social policy thinktank in Rio de Janeiro, Lula’s
victory represents a ‘new stage of the national project, where the poor, the marginalized, the
workers become the driving force in the rebuilding of the nation’. Citing the Italian socialist
Antonio Gramsci, he says, ‘there are times when an individual becomes himself the project.
This is one of those times.’ Bello [2002], another leftist critic of the anti-globalization project,
opines that ‘over the last 22 years, the PT under Lula’s leadership has developed a distinctive
elan, one that combines the fervor of an insurgent movement with the hardnosed pragmatism
of an electoral party’. The PT, he adds, ‘is perceived as a non-traditional party that is solidly
rooted in the masses … uncorrupt … [and] innovative’. Unlike other parties on the left, Bello
[2003] continues, ‘the PT [can be] seen as non-doctrinaire and flexible’. In this connection he
quotes Kjeld Jacobson, head of the international relations department of CUT (the Workers’
Confederation), to the effect that ‘the party started out quite sectarian but it soon learned that
to win elections it had to make alliances. Without these alliances, the most you could get was
only one third of the vote, so if you wanted to win elections, you had to win the centre.’ It
transpires that ‘you’ – Lula – also have to win the support of those on the far right.
Leonardo Boff, a Brazilian priest who was in the forefront of the Theology of Liberation
movement in Latin America, opposed the power of the institutional Roman Catholic church,
and was considered by much progressive political opinion – in Brazil and Europe – as
someone who could genuinely be said to be a voice of the poor in Brazil [Boff, 1985, 1992;
Boff and Boff, 1987; Boff and Elizondo, 1995].
Starting out as an impoverished migrant from the Brazilian Northeast, Lula entered political
life as the feisty head of a metalworkers’ union in San Bernardo de Ocampo, one of the
proletarian strongholds in the vast Sao Paulo industrial belt. Persecuted by the military
government, he came to prominence as a mass leader at a time when social struggles were
gathering the momentum that would eventually displace the military dictatorship (1964–85)
and establish the social movements as a key actor in Brazilian political life. The PT, which
Lula helped found in 1980, was one of the points of confluence of the struggles involving
workers, peasants, urban poor, the progressive intelligentsia, and Church activists [Bello,
2002].
Among the many texts that fall into the category of over-optimistic interpretations of Lula are
those by Gurgel [1989], Meneguello [1989], Sader and Silverstein [1991], Keck [1992],
Lemanski-Valente [2001], Branford and Kucinski [2003], and Saad-Filho [2003]. Late in
2003 it is still possible to encounter the following inaccurate assessment, this time in an article
by Wallerstein [2003: 23]: ‘The currency devaluations of the 1990s in East and Southeast Asia
and Brazil brought to power a series of leaders – Roh in South Korea, Putin in Russia,
Megawati in Indonesia, Lula in Brazil – whose electoral platforms or performance in office
have not always followed Washington’s prescriptions’.
Kenneth Maxwell, Director of the Latin America Programme at the Council on Foreign
Relations, represents a somewhat ‘sober voice’ in this cacophony of unbridled support for
Lula’s wholehearted, if unanticipated, adoption of the neoliberal agenda. Like others,
Maxwell admires the way in which the PT has consolidated its hold on government by
catering to powerful foreign investors and the domestic political and economic elite without
losing the allegiance of the overwhelming majority of Brazilians, who have been persuaded
to set aside promised improvements to living conditions pending a resolution of the state’s
fiscal crisis. At a meeting in Washington on 20 June 2003 with George W. Bush, Lula is
reported to have agreed that the negotiations on ALCA (see below) would be concluded
successfully by January 2005, a date fixed by the US (see La Jornada, 21 June 2003).
On Cardoso’s neoliberal agenda and policies see Petras and Veltmeyer [2003a; 2003b].
According to University of Rio de Janeiro economist Reinaldo Gonçalves, a comprehensive
index that takes into account key items like the public debt, external debt, inflation, inequality,
and unemployment would ‘unambiguously show that the economic record of Cardoso is the
worst among all of the country’s 24 chiefs of state’ [Bello, 2002]. We concur with this view –

Lula's Brazil: Neoliberalism and the 'Third Way

Lula's Brazil: Neoliberalism and the 'Third Way

Recommandé

Recommandé

Contenu connexe

Tendances

Tendances (17)

Similaire à Lula's Brazil: Neoliberalism and the 'Third Way

Similaire à Lula's Brazil: Neoliberalism and the 'Third Way (6)

Dernier

Dernier (20)

Lula's Brazil: Neoliberalism and the 'Third Way