How the Workers' Party works

I am a founding member of the Workers' Party in Brazil - the Partido dos Trabalhadores, often called simply the PT. I have been active almost 20 years now since we founded it in 1980. The party has come a long way. We've won political office in 115 cities. We now control three of the major states of Brazil. We have the third most important national force in Brazil's Congress, having a total of 91 seats in the Congres and seven seats in the Senate.

So, we have come from being a small, urban, labour-based party, born from the struggles of metal workers, auto workers in Sao Paulo in 1978, 1979, and 1980, to becoming a major national political party organised in virtually every state in Brazil, organised from the base up, wielding political power without losing our connection to the neighbourhoods, to our social base, and to the social movements.

It is a party very intimately connected to social movements. It is almost a channel of social movements to political action in the legislature and having a great deal of experience in government.

The PT was born really as a political consequence of the popular education movement in Brazil, in particular the Paolo Freire method of education. Then especially with the major strikes of 1978, 1979, and 1980, which confronted the state in a very real way with over three million workers on strike throughout the country, it became very clear that we needed a political party, and that you can't just have have social movements, you can't just continue doing popular education, without having the political expression that can actually start to change the nation.

And yet you cannot just have power, and the taking over of the state, and then exercising it the way it has always been exercised. That is the big danger of building a political party, because when you reach power, you become what they are, and we have all seen that. It is very difficult to change the state that is made to be oppressive to a state that is participatory and democratic.

[In Paolo Freire's education method you come to] see the forces that keep you not only oppressed economically but keep you depressed as a person, taking away your humanity and taking away your dignity.

That awareness is the key to the moving force of our popular educational work, because the moment you become aware that these forces of oppression have made you feel inferior and feel less human, it allows you to see why you have become oppressed. And when you have become empowered with your feeling that within you lies the dignity that makes you a human being not inferior to anyone else, it immediately leads to thinking about political action and how to change it.

I have been told by a Chilean friend who was observing us in a union course: "If I was the military, I would kill you first". And I said, "Why is that?" He said, "Well, didn't you notice that wherever you give a course it ends up in a strike?" I hadn't noticed in fact. It was me and another woman who were doing the series of courses for unions and different work forces in different towns, and he had been travelling with us, and he said, "It happened wherever you went... This is the eleventh strike". And it is because people become so angry in discovering the root of their oppression, and yet at the same time discover their power to change it, that they move to action.

They don't change their mind. They become conscious of their mind. It is the root of what we call the conscientisation process, that you become conscious of your environment, of the forces of oppression that keep you that way, and the fact that they are trying to keep you oppressed by removing your identity and the very sense of your being. So, that is the first important aspect of the Paolo Freire education movement - to allow people through the participatory nature of the education process to come to that conclusion.

The minute you start an organisation such as a political party, you begin to have problems in terms of participation. In our experience, for example, our first problem was how to unify the left. We have myriads of social movements; we have a lot of groups that were doing popular education and within each of these you had people on the left thinking different things, from Trotskyists to people in liberation theology connected to the church, people who had been in the Communist Party, people who had not been in parties at all but just in unions, people who had been working in peasant movements, people who did popular education and had no ideology, neo-Marxists, you name it.

How do you build a political party that can be at the same time democratic, allowing in an organised way all the different beliefs in terms of programs and political participation to be expressed and organised, and yet sufficiently disciplined to be a party? Otherwise, you are building a front and an anarchistic movement, too, and we did not want to build a front of different groups. We really wanted to build a party, and the way that the Workers' Party has done it has been by being very carefully connected to its own roots, which were roots, as I mentioned, in popular education and social movements - that is, taking seriously what we have always done, which is discussing with people, sitting down in groups all the time, finding where the meeting points are, finding what the common issues are, and finding what is really important to each group by theme, by issue, and then the mechanisms that allow that to be represented on a proportional representation basis at the party level, in all the leading posts of the party, and even in the choosing of candidates for political office. We have actually after 20 years built into the statutes of the party certain mechanisms of representation that allow each tendency to have its own slate, its own candidates, and have their representation in the leadership.

A political party can lose the connection with its base after it wins power, that has been always a dialectic through the almost 20 years existence of the Workers' Party. That has been very interesting at times, and very conflictive. We have had periods where we elected a mayor and he didn't do what he was supposed to do, that had just been agreed by the unions, for example, and he was faced with a strike led by workers and leaders of the unions that were members of his own party.

The problem is to enforce that dialectic, to be sure that really the party represents the social movement. It has got to be a political channel for the actual desires and needs and beliefs and decisions of the people in the social movements, not the other way around. The PT is very far from the old conception of political parties where the leadership decides, the central committee decides and hands down the order, and the social movement obeys. That conception going from the party to the unions is reversed. It is really from the social movement through the party, thinking of it as just a channel for political aspirations and a way of getting legislation passed and public policy done, constantly being revised, constantly being watched, and constantly criticised.

Some people cannot stand to be in political office as members of the PT and some have left once they are elected because they are constantly criticised, and they are constantly faced with, "Well, we put you there, so you listen. And if you don't listen, you're out!" And that is a very clear message that some of the people can't stand, the ones in power. So, this has been important also, and it comes from the strength of the social movements, based on people really believing they count. They are the ones who have the dignity, have the needs, and have the activity, and the other guys are just representing collectively these needs. So, it has to be listened to from the bottom up.

A city in the south of Brazil, Porto Alegre, has been in the hands of the party now for ten years. This is the third administration. We have now won the state as well, and we got, by the way, in the last election, 98% of the vote, if you can imagine such a thing, in the city, a major city of 1,800,000 people. So, we were doing something right in the last two administrations.

All questions are discussed at the neighbourhood level, and decided at the neighbourhood level. They elect members to neighbourhood councils. Each neighbourhood elects members to a council covering a larger geographic area, and they discuss and decided on things such as education, health, urban development, transportation, and their decisions work within the larger council that has representatives from all the neighbourhood councils. We call that the budgetary council, and that is the council that makes decisions on the budget. The city council has to approve the budget, then they decide in the budgetary council how to use that money, how much for the education budget, for the health budget, which are going to be the priorities?

Sometimes there are conflicts. For example, Paolo Freire was the first minister of education in Sao Paulo. Then there was a major teachers' strike, and of course the right was very interested in how Paolo Freire was going to deal with a teachers' strike. And what he did is, he inaugurated the idea of the budgetary program. He said, well, come in and tell me what you want to do. You have that much money. How do you want to allocate it? For the first time in the history of Sao Paulo people had seen the budget. They had had no idea what the education budget was and how it was allocated, and they formed a council that was composed of members of each school's teachers' association. Parents and kids were also represented on the council to decide the priorities of the budget. And in the end the teachers decided not to have a salary raise, and instead to build new schools, and they got involved in other programs, and the situation turned around. They participated in that decision.

You can't just discuss class in classical terms that are also exclusive. Because you are working class, it doesn't mean that you don't have within the working class this strong oppression of women and tremendous racism within the very working class, so having people discuss that, what Paolo Freire used to call the oppressor within the oppressed. The oppressor is always present in the oppressed, and the oppressor in that case meaning your own feelings, as a working class person, of racial anger, sexism or bigotry against someone who chooses another sexual behaviour. This is part of the oppression of the dominant class within you, because you are formed that way.

This is not easy. One of our people ran the committee of a very large public education program we had that we got the University of Rio to support through the central union of workers. And we did a lot of courses, including economics, etc., and one of the courses that we thought we would do and we proposed to the board of directors of the central union of Rio was, of course, on the oppressor within the oppressed, which would be exclusively for the leadership. And so we thought we would have them confront the oppressor within themselves. We have never been able to give that course.

There is such resistance that they have never allowed it. That says a lot. Their immediate reaction is "Me? No, I don't have any of that. I don't need that course". Again and again we have brought it, and still no.

It happens with all such issues, that they have this tremendous resistance. The women finally pressed the party sufficiently to create a post system. That is the only way we could do it. We decided, well, there's been lip service enough. Thirty per cent of all directed posts in the party have got to be women. That is already in the statute. And 30% of the candidates have got to be women. So, that was one way of pushing it, and now we are debating how to bring representation by race and representation for homosexual groups into that, too.

It is the single issue of identity that is the most difficult within your own class, because it is easy to say that we are all working class and are all together, and to keep your feelings hidden and not want to really deal with it in a way that allows representation for other groups.

This account is abridged from an article (based on a talk to a meeting) in the US magazine Labor Standard, November-December 1999.
E-mail: bidom@igc.org, http://www.laborstandard.org, or write to P O Box 35541, Tucson, AZ 85740, USA.