The Workers Party in Rural Brazil
Nylen, William R.
PT heterodoxy-as practiced in the towns of Icapui and Quixad-tempers the goal of distributive justice promised by socialism in order to improve upon the procedures of political...
...2 People would demand services and attention from the government without being willing to help carry out those services or to protect them from conservative assault...
...With that goal in mind, Airton's Secretary of Education and a small group of assistants went door-to-door in Icapuf's neighborhoods, inviting residents to participate in community meetings alongside teachers, students and administrators to discuss the problems and needs of their local schools...
...The president of Quixadi's Landowners' Union, for example, an organization with which Ildrio Marquez had often clashed as lawyer for the Rural Workers' Union, said of Marquez and his administration: It's much easier to talk with Ilhrio than with anyone from a party of the right...
...Margaret Keck, The Workers' Party and Democratization in Brazil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 79...
...5 (1991...
...Democracy is instrumental to the extent that public office enables a broader audience to hear the messages of the Local P1 "vanguard" leadership, and to actually have tl see anti-capitalist policies in action such as publicly sponsored land invasions and Lenin rent strikes...
...Ricardo Tavares is a Brazilian political scientist and a consultant to non-governmental organizations...
...The choices of why, when, and where these new associations would participate in government decisionmaking would be entirely their own...
...She accused the council members of representing only the interests of Quixadi's powerful minority of economic elites and of engaging in clientelistic exchanges of favors for promises to vote "accordingly...
...It now reappears, along with the sort of traditions that sustained it...
...the number of teachers increased from 37 to 115 (and their quality improved as many took advantage of a new teacher-training program...
...That they will come from the ranks of the poor majority rather than exclusively from the elite will help to assure that representative democracy may, someday, live up to its name...
...Ia for Rather, these activists have traded one leftist agenda-Leninist and vandecisively guardist-for another decisively radicaldemocratic one...
...By the 1992 elections, conservatives split into two, with some supporting the former pro-military party's candidate, and others supporting a local renegade faction of the PSDB...
...8. Luiz Teixeira, Airton's executive assistant, personal interview, Icapui, July 15, 1993...
...See Jorge Bittar, ed., 0 Modo Petista de Governar (Sao Paulo: Teoria & Debate, 1992...
...Teixeira's contribution came in the form of overseeing the construction of a pro-active municipal health program that went beyond traditional curative and emergency medical services to include and even prioritize preventative and rehabilitative medicine to fit Icapuf's specific needs...
...In spite of obstructionism from local elites and opponents in the city council, overall results were impressive...
...This point follows Anthony Wright in his Socialisms: Theories and Practices (Oxford: Oxford U.P, 1986), p. 18: "The world is full of socialisms...
...and the number of school buildings increased from nine to 30.6 Airton's successor, Francisco Jos6 Teixeira (19881992), launched a new program focusing on public health, this time in alliance with former opponents in the center-left Democratic Workers' Party (PDT...
...Twice a month, the mayor and his retinue of about 80 officials arrive at one of Quixadi's urban neighborhoods or rural districts to receive the community's list of priorities for that year's municipal projects...
...hortly after his 1992 election as mayor of Quixadd, a town of 72,300 inhabitants in the drought-ravaged interior of the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceard, Ilario Marquez of the Workers I rarty r l) unveiled his administraton s flagship program, "Prefeitura Com Voce" (PCV: The Administration With You...
...Less-than-hoped-for levels of popular participation resulted in ever-increasing workloads for already overworked officials and employees, and for the citizens who did choose to participate...
...Teachers were paid the maximum salaries allowed by law, making them among the best paid in the state...
...The party in power will need to implement a shock program of honest, efficient and public-spirited government...
...6. Icapui's accomplishments in public education came to the attention of UNICEF, which awarded its "Child and Peace-Education" award to the town in 1991...
...This pattern served to further discourage new participants while at the same time encouraging veteran administrators and party activists to drag their feet, to complain about and distance themselves from the "selfish" and "ungrateful" masses, and even to drop out of activism or public administration altogether...
...Blaming long-suffering victims of paternalism for acting paternalistically or apolitically leads too easily to the morass of party vanguardism and the rejection of formal democracy from which the left, worldwide, has so recently escaped...
...PT heterodoxy-as practiced in the towns of Icapui and Quixad-tempers the goal of distributive justice promised by socialism in order to improve upon the procedures of political democracy...
...Together, they decided to prioritize public education not just because of the dismal state of the existing system, but because they felt that significant and demonstrable results could be obtained before the next elections...
...Proponents of heterodox socialism see socialist transformation as beginning and flourishing only when people feel that they are active participants in all aspects of their emancipation from paternalistic capitalism, including the very conceptualization of the socialism of which they want to be a part...
...Icapuf's Mayor Airton began his second term in 1992 by setting up a Secretariat of Community Action to stimulate the creation of autonomous neighborhood associations...
...Furthermore, as the oligarchy flourished during Brazil's military regime (1964-1986), the city itself had noticeably deteriorated...
...They did not vote for the unpopular PT, which did not win a single city-council seat in the same election...
...In Quixadi, Mayor Marquez focused on participatory health care as a priority for his incoming administration...
...Officials attend a series of question-and-answer meetings and engage in informal conversations...
...1 (1980...
...Similarly, when Mayor Teixeira set out to restructure Icapuf's public-health services, he stressed "strengthening popular participation in health-related activities, and achieving social control by the end-users of services provided...
...Somewhat similarly, the voters who elected Ilario Marquez mayor of Quixadd in 1992 voted for the popular rural-union lawyer and his "Novo Tempo" (New Times) alliance with the even more popular PSDB governor Ciro Gomes...
...1 1 -26...
...A usually festive i f i dA Ircept on o processlu onsIbl , lances, Imus c and children's theater is followed by a round of speeches extolling the virtues of citizens' participation in government and the PCV program's effort to instill those virtues at the community level...
...Jose Nobre Guimaraes, personal interview, Fortaleza, July 27, 1995...
...3. See Victor Nunes Leal, Coronelismo: the municipality and representative government in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) [translated from the 1949 Brazilian edition...
...During the long period, intensified by the Cold War, when this diversity was compressed into the two opposing blocs of official communism and official social democracy, this could be forgotten...
...These will be the activists and the political representatives of tomorrow...
...2. For an analysis of the growth of neighborhood associations in Brazil in the 1980s, see Ruth Corrba Leite Cardoso, "Popular Movements in the Context of the Consolidation of Democracy in Brazil" in Arturo Escobar and Sonia E. Alvarez, eds., The Making of Social Movements in Latin America: Identity, Strategy, and Democracy (Boulder, Colorado: Westview, 1992), pp.291302...
...Between 1987 and 1991, 13% to 20% of the municipal budget was directed to health care...
...Augusto Alvaro Jer6nimo Gomes, secretary of education, personal interview, July 19, 1995...
...The importance of the Airton administration's education program went beyond merely increasing literacy levels...
...The Workers Party in Rural Brazil 1. For a more detailed rendering of this argument and these case studies, see my "Heterodox Socialism and Brazil's Workers' Party (PT): Building from the Lessons of Local Governance" in The New Politics of Inequality in Latin America (forthcoming...
...At these meetings, residents got the chance to meet with the entire Secretariat of Education and to participate in decisions such as where schools should be built and who should be trained to teach there...
...Local circumstances explain these anomolies...
...Valeska Peres Pinto, "Prefeitura de Fortaleza: administra(ao popular, 1986-88," Pdlis, No...
...Reflecting these local histories as well as the ideology of the national party, leaders of both administrations believed that the participatory ethos of governance had to be shared by their constituents if "popular and democratic" government were to become a reality...
...The only way to fight this over the long term, she Voi XXIX, No 1 JULY/AUG 1995 27 William R. Nylen teaches political science at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida...
...The book's editor, Jorge Bittar, argues that it represented an alternative governing project for Brazil: The experience of the PT in its municipal governments points towards a path of democratic reform of the State and of social policies that confronts the currently fashionable neoliberal conceptions, at the same time that it challenges the lines of the authoritarian, centralizing and populist State with which Brazilian society has historically lived.' 7 The book suggests that the PT's electoral gains had more to do with a protest vote against incumbent politicians than with any principled support for the party itself...
...This was followed by requests for an ambulance, bathroom construction, a police station, and running water for the local maternity center...
...See MEDIUNICEF/CENPEC, "Todas as Criangas na Escola: A Experi~ncia De lcapui-CE, 1989/1992," Vol...
...The implications of activists' and administrators' disappointment and disengagement are worrisome...
...Quixada's Marquez admitted to using both the book and the network of experienced party members when establishing his administration's policy priorities...
...Political scientist Valeska Peres Pinto describes the conflict there accordingly: One [so-called "orthodox" faction, which included the mayor and her closest advisors] identified the administration as an instrument that should be put to the service of the general political struggle and used fundamentally as a lever to accelerate the revolutionary process...
...The commitment to eliminate government paternalism in Icapuf and Quixadd by promoting popular participation in the provision of public services is a trait of many PT-led municipal administrations...
...Requests for personal favors are redirected to leaders of the neighborhood association...
...The "real" means at least two things: first, relatively few people can be expected to sacrifice their time and energy to participate in politics on behalf of any transformative agenda, even a more "pragmatic" one of the heterodox variety...
...4 So it was a surprise to everyone, includiJE iii ing the PT itself, when the party won the 1985 municipal elections in the state capital .- of Fortaleza (the PT's first electoral victory 1 in Brazil's still nascent-democracv...
...See Claudio Goncalves Couto e Fernando Luiz Abrucio, "A Dialetica Da Mudan(a: O PT confronta-se com a institucionalidade," working paper for Centro de Estudos de Cultura Contempordnea (CEDEC), Sao Paulo (mimeo, no date...
...The Airton administration's Secretary of Health had paved the way by opening two abandoned health centers and constructing a third, setting up a dental center, acquiring a municipal ambulance, and inviting Icapuf's first resident doctor and nurse to set up shop...
...Initial meetings were sparsely attended...
...As the PMDB turned increasing conservative at the national and state levels, Airton switched to the PT in 1988, and most of his administration and supporters followed...
...One might expect that the biggest barriers encountered by these administrations would come from the local economic elites, and from national and state political elites anxious to derail precedents of successful PT governance...
...Quixadi's Marquez and other local party members cut their political teeth in struggles over land and fair wages that relied heavily on mobilizations and political struggle...
...13 Among the factors contributing to this decline were lack of transportation, lack of time to attend meetings and carry out voluntarily the tasks of representation, loss of interest following the excitement of the first meeting, and the "social distance" between the mostly educated and middle-class PT administration's leadership and the general population...
...While different in numerous particulars, all of these non-Marxist conceptualizations have in common a rejection of the competitive individualism and activists social inequality inherent in liberal capiaded a talism, and the embrace of political decentralization and democracy...
...In this context, the existence of PT administrations in Icapuf (1985, 1988 and 1992) and Quixadd (1992) was nothing short of remarkable...
...Francisco Gladstone, personal interview, QuixadB, August 4, 1993...
...In fact, the most troubling barriers encountered by the PT in Icapuf and Quixadi came from within the community itself...
...s The disastrous experience of Fortaleza stood as a particularly negative example of such debates...
...This political system fosters dependence upon and fear of long-established economic and political elites, and has led to what more than one observer has called a mass "culture of silence...
...Indeed, some local elites found these administrations to be quite "moderate" and, therefore, easy to accommodate...
...12 (Brasilia: Quantum/ MED/UNICEF/CENPEC, 1993...
...2 (1992...
...To achieve this, the administration adopted Paulo Freire's method of "empowerment education...
...Discussion was fueled and impassioned by a history of ruinous struggles within many PT-led municipal governments between orthodox and heterodox factions of the party...
...2 he ideals of popular participation and representation expressed in Quixadd's PCV program run counter to long-standing patterns of paternalistic, exclusionary politics common to Brazil's rural unfortunate combination of circumstances including the administration's fiery revolutionary rhetoric, its lack of administrative expertise, unrealistic public expectations, economic stagnation, and the determined resistance of political forces ranging from city-council members to the federal govern-- l ment made Fortaleza an unmitigated disaster for the PT.5 Meanwhile, a set of reformist governors from the centrist Brazilian Social Democratic Party (PSDB) pushed through several progressive reforms, most notably in health care, tax collection, and emergency public-works projects...
...and Peter Oakley, "Participation in Development in N.E...
...on a permanent basis, such a project is a crucial instrument to break down the old politics of paternalism...
...15, No...
...19, No...
...The 29-year old leader of that movement, Jos6 Airton, was elected mayor under the banner of the then-centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB...
...Cust6dio's four-thousand residents had " "l ALhL1U1 Au.at11 4 u Ainhn tno neIIg U 0l aassUla lOn, so a m lll- istration officials called several open community meetings to explain the PCV program and to foster interest in creating an association...
...Whatever the prospects cal- for a more participatory kind of politics tic one...
...On the other hand, the way that the reforms were implemented was meant to demonstrate the administration's commitment to decentralization and popular participation...
...Months prior, administration representatives meet with the neighborhood association as often as necessary to explain the general philosophy behind PCV, and to outline what each muncipal department does and what it can do for the community...
...11 (1993...
...She responded that Quixadi's city-council members had traditionally shirked both their representative and oversight functions...
...With the resulting information, and in conjunction with a new state-government effort to improve rural Ceard's health care, the administration initiated or expanded existing free immunization programs for children, in-home maternity care and education, the training of local health-care agents, and the construction of health-care facilities in outlying areas...
...Halfway through that meeting, someone asked the mayor's executive assistant who was leading the discussion why the city council existed if not to carry out the representative function being delegated to the neighborhood association...
...Indeed, the PT's early history was infused with an "ethos" of popular participation "stressing autonomy and self-organization...
...Quixadd's PCV program mirrors the PT's founding commitment to participa~go popular-popular participation-in governance, and was actually modeled on similar PT programs implemented elsewhere in Brazil...
...Orthodox critics counter by equating PT heterodoxy with "electoralism," "bourgeois reformism," and abandonment of the party's grassroots...
...By 1992, Icapuf's mortality rate was 50 per thousand live births, compared with 70 per thousand in the rest of the state, and 105 per thousand in the entire Northeast...
...In Icapuf, a similar ethos emerged from the mobilization for the town's emancipation, from previous efforts by some activists to build and maintain Christian base communities, and by the participation of others in student movements against the dictatorship...
...Icapui's leaders were quick to point out their active part in the project's formulation...
...7. See Marco Antonio de Almeida, "Estudos de gestao," P6lis, No...
...hrough the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the PT won more and more elections, "on-the-job training" of these activiststurnedpoliticians began to have an impact on debates within the party...
...Ignored by the PMDB and with the state's left focused on Fortaleza, Mayor Airton and his small group of fellow activists from the emancipation campaign were on their own...
...4. William W. Goldsmith and Robert Wilson, "Poverty and Distorted Industrialization in the Brazilian Northeast" in World Development, Vol...
...The idea is to work to approximate the ideal without losing sight of the need to work within the real...
...second, ample opportunities and encouragement must be given to all those who express a desire to participate...
...10 This ethos was rooted in the struggles of the new unions and social movements of Sao Paulo's industrial heartland in the late 1970s and early 1980s against the dictatorship, and in the conviction of PT activists that workers and the poor needed to project their own voices into politics...
...s On the one hand, the content and practice of education were supposed to reflect the values necessary to sustain broader participation: a commitment to self-rule and a concern for community well-being...
...The right is always hemming and hawing, playing personalistic politics...
...6 (1992...
...The federal government, however, lost this power with the passage of Brazil's 1988 Constitution, which set strict technocratic guidelines regulating federal allocations to state and municipal governments...
...Within today's context [of drought and economic crisis], our relationship with the administration is much more relaxed and open...
...Not only did he adopt Icapuf's model of improving and decentralizing the existing system but he "borrowed" the town's secretary of health to help implement the model...
...Unlike the municipal councils of the first two administrations, these associations were to be independent from both the party and the municipal government...
...To this end, Teixeira's Secretary of Health initiated a house-to-house survey of some 90% of Icapuf's 2,275 families, and discussed local needs and resources in numerous community meetings...
...At day's end, Marquez gives a closing speech formally recognizing the leadership of the association, acknowledging their expression of the community's collective demands, and promising to attend to those demands in the coming year...
...Cust6dio's PCV day came off on schedule...
...Cut off from Aracati, Icapuf's tiny elite were powerless beyond a few feeble attempts to threaten and bribe their way into the new political order...
...27 VOL XXIX, No 1 JULY/AUG 1995REPORT ON LOCAL POLITICS continued, was to create another set of institutions run by the people themselves...
...I witnessed part of this process in Cust6dio, a rural district of Quixadf, a half hour's drive from the town's center...
...I can sit down and talk with Ildrio about specific programs and ideas without all the politics getting in the way.11 National opposition was not an insurmountable obstacle either...
...also Valeska Peres Pinto, "Prefeitura de Fortaleza: administraoo popular, 1986-88," Polis, No...
...In Icapuf, Mayor Airton's first administration (1985-1988) was also the town's first...
...6 (1992...
...7 ut "democratic and popular government," as understood by Icapuf's PT leadership, meant going beyond improving and "universalizing" public services such as education and health care...
...On numerous occasions and in many variations, I heard frustrated party members and leaders complain that citizens would "embrace their rights without embracing their responsibilities...
...Since Icapuf received 70% of its revenues from the federal Municipalities' Participation Fund in 1991, for example, dependence on federal revenue would seem to suggest that national political elites could easily starve "renegade" local governments into submission or disintegration (as they did, in fact, during the PT's administration of Fortaleza...
...Fortaleza was looking like merely the first case of a developing model of PT "fratricidal" governance...
...edition (Fortaleza: Expressao, 1992...
...The experiences of PT governance in Quixadd and the nearby coastal fishing town of Icapuf with 13,658 inhabitants illustrate the emergence of a "heterodox" interpretation of socialism on the part of a significant portion of the broad umbrella of social movements, party factions, union organizations, and individuals that make up the PT nationwide.' In a nutshell, PT heterodoxy-while not formally organized-expresses a perceived need to temper (without abandoning) the goals of distributive justice promised by socialism in order to preserve (and slowly improve upon) the procedures of political democracy...
...st and The Icapuf and Quixadi cases of PT governance suggest that "heterodox ardist socialism" is not "sell out" revisionism...
...But a warning is in order: heterodox activists run a serious risk of falling into what I would call "benevolent vanguardism" (or, worse, losing themselves to despair and disdain for the masses) if they don't realize that they must fully embrace representative democracy even as they attempt to construct more participatory institutions...
...Through education," one party member explained, "the community is awakened to participate...
...Ceari's state party president, speaking of the frustration of the PT's experiments in popular participation, revealed just such a tendency: Brazil will not change from below...
...Previously prescribed channels of popular participation were to give way to collective strategizing from below...
...5. For information on the PT's experience in Fortaleza, see Ercilia Maria Braga de Olinda, A Dimensao Educativa do Partido Politico (Fortaleza: Expressao, 1991...
...UNICEF co-sponsored a 15-volume series entitled Education and Municipal Development with Icapui and four other PT-administered cities each meriting their own volume...
...17...
...Airton tracked down and recruited friends, university colleagues, relatives and former residents to build the necessary cadres for his governing team...
...Francisca Alves de Sousa, secretary of education under Mayor Teixeira, personal interview, Icapui, July 15, 1993...
...In 1990, just two years after the PT won municipal elections in 32 cities, 12 (or 38%) of those mayors had left or been expelled from the party...
...There is no unitary tradition...
...In four years, the number of doctors increased from one to seven, and the number of health posts grew from three to seven...
...This will challenge the public to participate and to mobilize in defense of these gains.' 4 Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the PT has been enmeshed in a debate over the lessons of its experiences in local governance...
...S]ocialism has always been distinguished by its diversity...
...They also explain that such communal decision-making must become institutionalized in an active neighborhood association for this and future dealings with the administration to bear fruit...
...9. See Odorico Monteiro de Andrade and Neusa Goya, eds., Sistemas Locais de Saude em Municipios de Pequeno Porte: A Resposta de Icapui, 2nd...
...Brazil" in Community Development Journal, Vol...
...Mayor Marquez received a list of demands prioritizing expansion of the local water cistern and construction of a water-distribution network to outlying areas...
...Such "good works" were complemented by efforts to decentralize public administration, open government decisionmaking to public scrutiny ("transpardncia"), and stimulate popular participation in all areas of governance...
...also see Jose Alvaro Moises, "Poder Local e ParticipaiCo Popular" in Pedro Dallari, ed., Politica Municipal (Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto/Fundayao Wilson Pinheiro, 1985), pp...
...An or being sold at bargain-basement prices...
...In Icapuf, for example, in the case of both the Municipal Council of Education and the Municipal Council of Health, initial interest gave way to declining participation of the community representatives...
...Local circumstances help to explain why local elites' resistance failed...
...They explain that the city's resources are limited, and that the community must therefore come together to decide which demands will receive the highest priority...
...After a year of cajoling local teachers, religious leaders and party members to talk up the program, 75 to 100 residents attended a two-hour meeting, and about 30 signed up to found the association...
...3 Social history in the state of Ceari long reflected the regional pattern of "regressive politics, an oppressive internal social structure, low productivity, and vast inequality of income and wealth, all adding up to widespread impoverishment [and] the lack of a responsive politics that would put control of change more in the hands of those most in need...
...It will only change from above...
...By voting for Marquez, she explained, Quixadi had already expressed its discontent with this form of politics...
...Quixadd's powerful oligarchy had already been weakened by the region's severe drought, as factories were forced to close and cattle were dying 28 NACIA REPORT ON THE AMERICAS Northeast...
...also Edson Campos, "Longe das capitals," Teoria & Debate, Vol...
...The other ["heterodox" faction] insisted upon the necessity of combining political with administrative action, and believed in the importance of administrative gains to advance the party's political project, principally in support of the most marginalized and exploited sectors of the population.16 Most orthodox adherents see their practical task as revolutionizing society-that is, radically transforming capitalist social relations into socialist ones...
...In Icapui, the party emerged from a grassroots popular movement that had "emancipated" the town from the neighboring city (and oligarchy) of Aracati...
...In three years, student enrollment increased from 700 to 3,059...
...Evidence of that impact could be found in the formulation of a relatively coherent "heterodox" interpretation of PT govis vangu agency another c radi democra ernance (formalized in a 1992 book entitled The PT's Way of Governing) by a nationwide network of party members experienced in local-level governance...
...As in Icapuf, newly created health-care posts in Quixadi were made part of the local community, to be staffed and administered by trained residents rather than outsider "experts" or political appointees...
...Rather than abandoning a transformative socialist agenda, I would argue that PT heterodoxy has returned to a socialist tradition even older than the Leninist and European social-democratic traditions of the twentieth century.is There are many pre-Marxist conceptualizations of socialism, variously known as "ethical socialism," "libertarian socialism" or "democratic socialism...
...Far from being a bad thing ("false consciousness"), this was interpreted as an opportunity for the party to construct new bases of support upon the twin pillars of "moral reform and the recovery of the credibility bility of public service" and the "lessons, hopes and accomplishments in arenas of popular participation...
...These festive days of interaction between citizens and public officials do not materialize overnight...
...While required by federal law to spend 25% of the municipal budget on education, actual expenditures reached 38% (part of which paid for free student transportation...
...9 Interested community residents, health professionals and administration officials participated in a municipal health conference where they discussed and approved Icapuf's municipal health plan, and elected the first set of officers, two thirds of whom were representatives of local communities, to a municipal health council...
...18, No...
Vol. 29 • July 1995 • No. 1
