Donald Trump’s inauguration is scheduled to take place on January 20th, and Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro is invited. However, the right-wing leader may not be able to attend. Brazilian authorities confiscated Bolsonaro’s passport while investigating his role in a 2023 coup attempt. Similar to the pro-Trump attack on the US Capitol on January 6th, 2021, Bolsonaro supporters stormed and ransacked government buildings in Brasilia, Brazil’s capital, and it is alleged that Bolsonaro planned and participated in the action. Unlike Trump, Bolsonaro has been banned from seeking office until 2030.
The U.S. and Brazil are both experiencing the rise of a violent, populist right wing, with Trump and Bolsonaro as national figureheads. In 2024, DSA’s International Committee, in collaboration with the DSA Fund and Perseu Abramo Foundation (Fundacao Perseu Abramo) of Brazil, hosted an exchange program under the theme “Socialist Strategy & Tactics in Times of Crisis,” in an attempt to foster discussion on ways the left can address challenges like an insurgent right wing. This program gathered socialist leaders and activists from both the U.S. and Brazil (including members of both DSA and Brazil’s Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT) or Workers’ Party) for a wide-ranging set of conversations over several months. The exchange of ideas was incredibly informative. Despite differences between our circumstances, DSA and the PT share many challenges: right-wing populism, a disorganized worker’s movement, reactive strategic thinking, and a party disconnected from its mass social base. As participants shared best practices and key strategic questions for us to consider, we continually returned to a key theme: how can DSA and the PT make more spaces for working people to debate, determine and engage in collective political action?
The political situations in Brazil and the U.S. have much in common. Brazil and the U.S. are experiencing a rise in right-wing populism, with Jair Bolsanoro and Donald Trump as their respective electoral leaders. In Brazil specifically, this right-wing resurgence is tied closely to the rise of evangelical, Pentecostal churches. These conservative religious institutions are rapidly supplanting the popularity of Brazil’s Catholic church, historically a faction within the PT and the broader left in Brazil. In both countries, however, the rise of right-wing populism can be linked to various shared national trends: deindustrialization, structural unemployment, and a neoliberal assault on labor rights. This has led to a decline in social organization and the rise of a “hustle and grind” neoliberal work culture that continually alienates workers from each other. For example, the gig economy is on the rise in both countries, encouraging people to think of themselves not as workers on a shop floor with others doing the same job, but as independent entrepreneurs with their own small businesses. In the face of an intolerable neoliberal status quo and the decline in left organizational alternatives, many in Brazil and the U.S. are turning to the right wing.
In addition, DSA and the PT share organizational similarities. Both are mass-membership political parties with a diverse range of political tendencies falling broadly under the “democratic socialist” label. Both parties engage in a diverse set of political work: legislative-electoral campaigns, sustained organizing within the workers’ movement, and political education. Furthermore, both organizations are internally democratic, with rank-and-file membership given the ability to formally elect leaders as well as establish priorities for these leaders and the organization’s full-time staff to carry out. That said, while we have much in common, the Brazilian left is in a much stronger position than in the U.S. In Brazil, the PT is in government, led by popular leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in the presidency. In the US, while DSA continues to grow our bench of elected officials around the country, we are far from legislative or executive control and do not have our own formal party infrastructure.
As such, the Brazilian comrades’ experiences with governance are a crystal ball for the U.S. Left, allowing us to understand what challenges we may face once we achieve our dreams of a socialist majority. While the PT controls the executive, the party is in the minority in Congress, the judicial system is weaponized against them, and the rest of the bourgeois institutions like corporations and the media are likewise stacked against them. As a result of this hostile political system, the PT is unable to implement many aspects of its popular program. To the contrary, this arrangement forces the party to govern according to a pragmatic realpolitik.
For example, a Brazilian comrade claimed that, while the majority of the PT members would support a policy of cutting diplomatic ties with the state of Israel, this position was not approved by the PT’s central leadership because of the necessity of retaining diplomatic ties between the Israeli state and the Brazilian state. One Brazilian comrade even stated that socialism had left the PT, replaced by a defensive program of stopping this or that privatization attempt. The PT’s defensive orientation — focused on moderate economic reforms, “good governance,” and retaining institutional norms — has led communities in Brazil to be skeptical of the party’s ability to fight for a break with the neoliberal status quo. For many, the PT is the face of that status quo, which is one reason many in Brazil, as previously mentioned, have turned to right-wing leaders like Jair Bolsonaro or right-wing institutions like evangelical, Pentecostal churches.
This tension between fidelity to a social democratic program and the pressure to adopt an approach of pragmatic governance is not unique to Brazil. It is a challenge shared by all nominally socialist governments that exist within the capitalist world system and are attempting to transform existing capitalist relations within their societies into socialist ones. If DSA ever gains a socialist majority, this is a challenge the organization will also face. What is the pathway out of the status quo? How can socialists implement their program when the capitalist system stands in the way? One Brazilian comrade suggested that the answer lies in transforming the political system, removing the vestiges of imperial and dictatorial tutelage, and finally making Brazil a true democracy. This rings true in the U.S. as well: how do we win the battle for democracy, empowering the people to enact a program for socialism and liberation?
Of course, winning the battle for democracy in Brazil or the U.S. will require a mass movement for democratic socialism. On this front, the Left in both countries still has much work to do, with the aforementioned neoliberal assault on labor resulting in a disorganized workers’ movement. Brazilian comrades remarked that young people today are not as involved in trade unions, both because of a general decline in political consciousness and because many believe that the trade unions are corrupt and out of touch with workers. This perception, while influenced by capitalist propaganda, contains a truth rooted in the aforementioned tension between fidelity to militancy and the realpolitik approach to governance. As one Brazilian comrade remarked, with Lula in power and the trade union leaders at the bargaining table (especially the Central Única dos Trabalhadores, or CUT, a national trade union federation), working people are easily convinced that they are no longer protagonists in social change, that they must wait for these leaders to change the system for them or give up hope. Accordingly, comrades noted that rebuilding the labor movement in Brazil must entail the unions meeting workers where they are at (including part-time or unorganized workers) and providing meaningful political education to help rebuild socialist consciousness amongst the masses in Brazil.
On this front, the U.S. has made some advances. While we face the same challenges as the Brazilian comrades (disorganization, lack of protagonistic consciousness, disconnected trade union leadership), the youth have been leading the charge. As Eric Blanc noted in his speech to program participants, models like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) have helped shift labor organizing from a staff-driven model to a more scalable, empowering, worker-driven model. Young workers are teaching each other to get organized, and are taking bold political steps in doing so. For example, Blanc noted the highly effective Palestine solidarity boycott that was independently started by Starbucks workers. Starbucks Workers United is organized under the SEIU, (not at all a radical union in the US) but nonetheless, the union was forced to follow the lead of its workers.
In addition to the work of building the worker’s movement, merging those forces with the socialist party is a challenge faced by both DSA and PT, as some Brazilian comrades also noted. The PT’s local cells (the equivalent of chapters in DSA) are declining in member participation, and the party is struggling to reconnect with its social base. One reason cited for this decline is a conscious choice by the party to focus on electoral politics – running races and governing in areas where they are victorious – at the expense of engagement in social movement struggles. In prioritizing electoral campaigns, the PT has committed itself to a tactical orientation that is relatively short-term and defensive, repeating itself every two years. In year one, the focus is on winning the election, and in year two the focus is on defending the candidate. Other strategic priorities are similarly reactive: for example, the campaign to “Free Lula” from prison that the PT ran from 2018 to 2021.
While this work is important, the short-term, campaign-centered approach has led a large proportion of the PT’s activist base to become absorbed with electoral campaigns, resulting in less capacity for engaging in social movement struggles that can reconnect the party with its social base, and less capacity for strategic and programmatic debate focused on the medium- to long-term. The lack of focus on merging the party with its social base has real consequences. As mentioned earlier, Brazil’s political system is a major barrier to implementing the Left’s program, and without a social base willing to fight the battle for democracy and socialism, attempts to push through even moderate reforms will be stymied, leaving the Left constantly on the back foot.
This short-term, reactive campaign orientation is one that we have in the DSA as well. Where I organize in New York City, for example, the bulk of the chapter’s work is structured around the city and state electoral cycles, with the largest member mobilizations happening during campaign season. While this is improving, there is very little room for reflection in the chapter that can translate into strategic adjustments. Projects that do not fit into a short-term, electoral-legislative campaign box (such as the chapter’s Independent Working Class Organization project focused on connecting the party to its social base through autonomous tenant organizing) do not have the same level of prioritization and engagement.
To step off the treadmill of reactive campaign work and to begin waging the battle for democracy, DSA and the PT must find ways to prioritize both short-term campaigns and the longer-term work of building a social base for our party’s ambitious goals. We must also make spaces within the party for rank-and-file members to participate in the development of a program and strategy for what one Brazilian comrade described as a new era in the capitalist world system. Making spaces for everyday people to do politics is easier said than done. Comrades in DSA and the PT both noted that professionalization and skills monopolization are barriers to a more inclusive process of democratic deliberation. Paid staff, elected leaders, and volunteers with the skills and time to participate in a more “full-time” capacity are disproportionately represented in party spaces. On the other hand, the perspectives of members who do not have the same time and ability (such as parents or people not working “computer jobs”) are deprioritized.
The Left in Brazil and the U.S. face many of the same challenges: a disorganized worker’s movement misled by right-wing populism, an individualistic “hustle and grind” ideology, a reactive and short-term strategic orientation, a party disconnected from its mass social base, and a system that is waging class war against our project while encouraging the dilution of our program for democracy and socialism. Finding a way out of these impasses requires us to build more spaces for politics, from the local to the regional and all the way to the global. It is only through hard work, experimentation, honest conversation, and debate that we can move our movement forward. This exchange program is one step in that direction. Thanks to the organizers for facilitating such a critical dialogue, and to the participants for their sharp political insights and critical perspectives.