Brazil - October 15th, 2022

Second round of Presidential elections in Brazil 2022

In an open policy of class collaboration… 

The PSTU-LIT calls to vote for Lula-Alckmin

Faced with this scandalous policy, the PSTU is confronting itself

The PSTU (LIT), which in the first round ran their own candidates together with the CST-UIT, the MRT-PTS and others, in the “Polo Socialista y Revolucionario” (Revolutionary Socialist Pole). They had workers and independent candidates who said they were enemies of class collaboration with Lula-Alckmin and denounced this openly grim role played by the scoundrel bureaucracy and the PSOL. But we reached the second-round, now the dispute between "Bolsonaro and Lula" puts the PSTU VS PSTU itself. Let's see what they said in the first round. Let them speak for themselves, because they erase with their elbows what they wrote yesterday with their hands.

Facing the "Brazil of Hope" of Lula-Alckmin, dozens of bourgeois parties and the PSOL, they said: The PT program (...) with a wing of world imperialism linked to the Biden sector and the classical right-wing. (...) The rich defend their interests. The workers have to defend their own. What about the PT? (…) It serves the rich and the capitalists as it did in 13 years of government”. ("The fantastic world of the PT program". July 12, 2022.)
“(…) This is the essence of his alliance with Alckmin. Just as the electoral fronts that the PT is forming in the States with other sectors of the bourgeoisie (and even with Bolsonaro's party) are only further demonstrations of this same commitment." ("The Lula-Alckmin ticket is a bitter dish for workers" August 17, 2022)

In face of the PSOL capitulation, they added: “But this act also marks something else: the total capitulation of the PSOL to the Broad Front and to Lula-Alckmin's unity with the bourgeoisie. (...) the PSOL justified joining the Front by saying that it would revoke the Labor Reform (...) Luciana Genro, from the current MES [Socialist Left Movement], in turn, positioned herself as a representative of the PSOL left and, by accepting that role, (…) We are seeing a pure and simple adhesion to the Lulista Broad Front with the bourgeoisie and imperialism, where once again the working class will be sacrificed on the altar of the capitalist project..”.
("Defeat the unmentionable, yes! But choose the lesser evil, no!" September 27, 2022)

The second-round the PSTU now calls to vote for Lula-Alckmin against Bolsonaro...
At decisive moments, with the Stalinist program of support the "progressive bourgeois" against the "reactionary bourgeois"

What it was about was not submitting to class collaboration and truly organizing the fight against fascism. Class-collaboration is precisely what comes before it. Of course, the PSTU and the LIT do not rely on this policy or these lessons. Not only are they not consistent with what they stated in the first round, but they also they end up applying the same policy of class collaboration as the PSOL, although in an “ultracritical” way .
Let's see what they say now: “In the second-round, when we cannot present an independent candidacy, We support a critical vote for Lula to defeat Bolsonaro in the elections. (...) We support a critical vote for Lula because we do not support the capitalist, social-liberal and class conciliatory project of the PT, expressed in the Lula-Alckmin candidacy, of broad alliances with capital”. (“To defeat Bolsonaro in the elections, the PSTU calls for a critical vote for Lula” , October 7, 2022)

The PSTU does not even raise the policy of "Worker does not vote for boss, only votes for worker" of the PT of the '80s and call without any problem to vote for the bourgeois candidacy Lula-Alckmin in the second round.
Now, in the second round, like the PSOL before, it tells us that "to defeat Bolsonaro in the elections, we must vote critically for Lula-Alckmin." Let the PSTU get to an understanding with the PSTU, but from the ongoing combats of the working class and its interests and, like PODEMOS, the PSOL has gone over to the camp of the bourgeoisie against the exploited masses.

WE HAVE TO BREAK WITH THE BOURGEOISIE! WE MUST DISOBEY THE SCOUNDREL BUREAUCRACY, THE PSOL AND ALL COLLABORATIONISTS! The old “anti-capitalists” have openly gone with the bourgeoisie. It is a path of no return. Today more than ever LONG LIVE THE STRUGGLE FOR THE SOCIALIST REVOLUTION!
The workers ranks must be regrouped before it is too late. We must regroup the forces of those of us who refuse to submit to the mermaid songs of the Collaboration front with the bourgeoisie that will inevitably lead us to defeat. The revolutionary masses and the resolute Trotskyist militants, who fight under the banners of the Fourth International of Trotsky and the young Mario Pedroza, will not allow so much surrender of the legacy and program of the socialist revolution and the Fourth International! We are not facing an election or a trade union struggle as reformism would like, we are facing an entire era of revolutions, counter-revolutions, war and fascism. Today the time has come for the Popular Front. In its path, it has swallowed up most of the currents that spoke in the name of socialism.

The working class will have a thousand and one opportunities to change the course of history that is marked by a tortuous path plagued by treacherous leaderships as we are seeing today with the PSOL in Brazil. The workers gave their trust, decades of enormous effort and devotion, and even their blood like comrade Marielle Franco to them, but, when they are most needed, they show their servility to the bourgeoisie and prepare to do quite the opposite of what they said yesterday. It is time to know how to swim against the current. Reformism at every step cuts its own branch that sustains it. Because Bolsonaro is not defeated with Lula-Alckmin. With it, neither democracy nor concessions are coming, but more sellout, repression and misery. Those who support it and generate illusions in it will be the main responsible.
The Fourth International has not died and lives in each decisive combat and we will recover its clean flags from its detractors. Long live the Fourth International and Trotskyism! Death to reformism and class-collaborationism! As the Transitional Program says: “The Fourth International, already today, is deservedly hated by the Stalinists, Social Democrats, bourgeois liberals and fascists. There is not and there cannot be a place for it in any of the People’s Fronts. It uncompromisingly gives battle to all political groupings tied to the apron-strings of the bourgeoisie. Its task – the abolition of capitalism’s domination. Its aim – socialism. Its method – the proletarian revolution.”