Andre Ferrari, ISA International Political Committee
(This article was originally published in May 2025, in issue #1 of International Marxism, international political journal of International Socialist Alternative)
Forty years ago, a civilian became president of Brazil after 21 years of military dictatorship. José Sarney’s March 1985 inauguration is officially seen as marking the end of the military regime. But it represented, above all, the ruling class’ strategy of promoting a “democratic transition” from above, seeking to avoid deeper social ruptures. Above all, the ruling class was desperate to contain, or divert, the enormous pressure coming from below, from the mass struggles of the workers, the poor, and oppressed.
The new political regime established with Sarney’s inauguration, which was further enshrined in a new 1988 Constitution, is today experiencing a profound crisis. Decades of neoliberal policies and attacks on the working class and oppressed have generated great dissatisfaction and enormously discredited the political system.
In recent years, a new extreme right has re-emerged from the cellars where torture, murder, and violence were widely practiced under the dictatorship. Taking advantage of the crisis of bourgeois democracy and adopting cynical and demagogic, though thoroughly reactionary, rhetoric against the system, the phenomenon of Bolsonarismo (named after former far-right President Jair Bolsonaro) has put the specter of a coup d’état and authoritarianism back on the agenda.
The majority leadership of the Brazilian left, in turn, has failed to draw the necessary conclusions about the limits of the “redemocratization” process and the conservative nature of the 1985/88 regime. After all, for a large part of the working class, especially the poorest, Black and indigenous people, the dictatorship never really ended.
The dominant forces on the left today place themselves in the role of mere defenders of order and institutions. This failed policy ends up making room for the authoritarian and cynical anti-system demagoguery of Bolsonarismo.
Rescuing the lessons of the workers’ struggle against the dictatorship, but also of the workers’, popular and left-wing opposition to the governments that operated under the subsequent bourgeois democratic regime, is an essential task if we are to confront and defeat the extreme right today and rebuild a consistent socialist left.
1964 – Preventive counter-revolution and Bonapartism
The 1964 coup d’état was a preventive counter-revolution, promoted by the Brazilian ruling class and imperialism. For Brazilian big business, the multinational companies based in the country and the U.S. government, it was essential to contain the rise and radicalization of working class struggles in the cities and countryside.
The second half of the 20th century in Brazil was marked by a capitalist modernization which was full of limits and distortions typical of a country on the periphery of the system and subject to imperialist domination. The rise of workers’ and popular struggles that had been going on since the 1950s ended up culminating in more politicized struggles in the early 1960s.
For the capitalists, the overthrow of President João Goulart and the establishment of a military-led regime were necessary steps to guarantee and expand the high rates of profit which were threatened by working class resistance. They also aimed to block the gestation of a pre-revolutionary situation in Latin America’s largest country, a few years after the Cuban revolution (which overthrew capitalism in 1959) and in the midst of mass struggles in other countries.
The 1964 coup also confirmed the failure of the reformist and class collaborationist policies adopted by bourgeois populist governments and the parties that dominated working-class movements.
The absence of an effectively revolutionary strategy on the part of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the left wing of the Brazilian Labor Party (PTB) paved the way for the preventive counter-revolution of the Brazilian bourgeoisie and imperialism. The armed forces were instrumental, playing a Bonapartist role in the service of the ruling classes.
Resistance to dictatorship
The brutal repression that hit the workers’, popular and peasants’ movements – and even rebellious sectors within the ranks of the armed forces themselves – from 1964 onwards, was not met with a clear strategy of resistance, despite the strength of the mass movement.
Before the coup, the PCB leadership failed miserably with its strategy of gradual reforms, relying on a supposedly “democratic and progressive” wing of the national bourgeoisie and completely underestimated the risks of reaction. It was no better prepared to organize the post-coup resistance.
The “partidão” (the big party – as it was known) went into crisis as a result of the failure of its policies and the dictatorship’s harsh repression. Numerous dissidents (old and new) from the PCB and other sectors of the left formed new groupings which, in general, adopted variations of a strategy of armed struggle against the dictatorship.
Despite the heroism and spirit of sacrifice of these militants, and their sincere search for a strategy different from that applied by the PCB (something they did not fully achieve), the armed struggle in the city and countryside did not show a path capable of leading to victory against the dictatorship.
In 1968, mass struggle resurfaced with a student movement and important workers’ strikes in Belo Horizonte and Contagem (Minas Gerais region) and Osasco (São Paulo). In Rio de Janeiro, the murder of high school student Edson Luis by the state apparatus triggered a mass response, with 100,000 people taking to the streets and forcing the dictatorship to hint at an opening for dialogue. The military, however, only bought time to crack down for good. Their adoption of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) in December 1968 gave way to the darkest phase of the dictatorship in Brazil.
The armed struggle organizations were crushed through systematic arrests, torture, and murders. The trade union and popular movement was subjected to equally ferocious repression in the years following AI-5, and the resistance to the dictatorship largely took place more discreetly, through patient, clandestine or semi-clandestine grassroots work. This took place on the outskirts of the big cities, inside factories and workplaces, in schools and universities, and in the countryside.
A new generation of workers, born out of the intense recent process of industrialization and urbanization, was activated through this work, which served as the basis for a new wave of mass struggles that was about to emerge.
In the political realm, despite the dictatorship’s repression, censorship, the removal of opponents from office, intimidation and authoritarianism, the forces of the bourgeois opposition – generally quite moderate and organized in the MDB (Brazilian Democratic Movement, the only opposition party allowed by the dictatorship) – were gaining ground in the legislature and other limited institutional spaces.
Economic, social, and political crisis
In the mid-1970s, with an economic crisis hitting the country, in the international context of the oil crisis and the Latin American foreign debt crisis a few years later, an earthquake began to be felt in Brazilian society.
The fear of new social upheavals, the partial electoral victories of the bourgeois opposition, and the worsening prospects for the regime meant led to a new strategy prevailing within the regime, albeit with strong resistance from hard-line sectors. This was a strategy of “slow, gradual and safe opening up” – a political transition, controlled from above to avoid a rupture and profound changes forced from below.
This process resulted in the approval in 1979 of an amnesty law for political prisoners and persecuted people, which had been drafted by the regime itself. However, this did not meet the opposition’s demand for a broad, general, and unrestricted amnesty for those persecuted by the dictatorship.
The bill excluded many political prisoners from the amnesty while granting pardons to the regime’s criminals, murderers, torturers, and defenders. In this way, the military was preparing to leave center stage without paying for their crimes and remain behind the scenes of a democracy under their tutelage.
New wave of workers’ and popular struggles
The military’s strategy was challenged by the beginning of a powerful cycle of mass struggle at the end of the 1970s.
Although it started with the youth in the universities, the main trigger for the new upsurge of struggles was workers’ strikes in the metropolitan region of São Paulo, particularly in the so-called “ABC paulista,” an area with a high concentration of the automobile industry.
The ABC strikes were led by union leaders who were pushed to the left by grassroots pressure and took up more militant positions. This is where so-called “new unionism” and the leadership of Luís Inácio da Silva, subsequently known as Lula, emerged.
In other regions, such as the inner city of São Paulo (with the largest metalworker base in the country), the main role in organizing struggles and strikes was in the hands of the Trade Union Oppositions, which had a much more combative stance than the ABC leadership.
During this period, union struggles spread throughout the country, involving metalworkers, chemical workers, oil workers, bank workers, teachers, public sector workers, and many other categories, including rural workers. Many “yellow” union leaderships were replaced by more combative leaders with left-wing positions.
In addition to the trade union movement, a new popular movement emerged in poor neighborhoods, on the outskirts of the big cities, building the struggle for housing, hospitals and health centers, schools, bus lines and urbanization, but also raising other issues like the fight against price increases. In the same process, the Black movement and the women’s movement were reborn. In the countryside, rural workers’ unions were taken over by combative leaderships, and land occupations began to take place again in an organized way.
This process gave rise to new combative working class organizations, in particular the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (Unified Workers’ Centre – CUT) and the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra (The Movement of Landless Rural Workers – MST). But it was the formation of the Workers’ Party (PT) that gave political direction to this whole process.
The PT, the struggle for elections, and against the transition from above
With the end of the two-party system imposed by the dictatorship, the PT was officially founded in 1980. Its formation reflected the correct conclusion, drawn from the experience of the ongoing struggles, that the trade union struggle alone would not be enough to achieve workers’ demands. In order to win social, labor, and democratic rights, it was necessary to fight for political power for the working class.
Acting in an ardent atmosphere of strikes and mass struggles and under the influence of political cadres who came from the radical left, Marxist intellectuals, and sectors linked to (Christian) liberation theology, the new movement’s leaders adopted much more radical positions than those of the old traditional left-wing parties, such as the PCB and the heirs of “Varguista” populism (named after a 1930s Brazilian President who pursued independent capitalist development for the country).
The PT was born defending class independence (“a workers’ party without bosses”) while the PCB and PCdoB (originally a Maoist split from the old “partidão”) prioritized alliance with the bourgeois opposition and, in practice, subordinated themselves to it.
After the ABC strikes and their expansion to other regions, the turning point for the fall of the dictatorship was a large-scale struggle demanding direct elections for President of the Republic. In 1984, millions of people took to the streets and squares across the country for several months under the slogan “Direct Elections Now!”.
The PT represented the strongest and most combative section of this movement. While the bourgeois opposition was already negotiating with the military and dissidents from the ruling party for a transition from above, without direct elections, the PT insisted on defending direct elections now.
Despite this, the leadership of the PT and the CUT failed to develop a strategy, independent of the bourgeois opposition, that included working class methods of struggle. Despite the enormous importance of the mass gatherings in squares and avenues across the country, there was no call for a general strike against the dictatorship, to win direct elections now and for rights and gains for workers.
When the constitutional amendment that would restore direct elections for President failed to get the two-thirds majority needed in the Chamber of Deputies, the PT correctly refused to support a bourgeois opposition candidate to contest the indirect election.
The crisis of the regime, and the effervescence of the masses in the streets in the midst of a serious economic and social crisis, made maintaining the military regime untenable. A dissident from the pro-dictatorship party (Frente Liberal – Liberal Front) then united with the bourgeois opposition (PMDB) to form the so-called “Democratic Alliance”.
An opposition slate, with Tancredo Neves as its Presidential candidate (from the more moderate wing of the PMDB) and José Sarney as vice-president (former leader of the pro-dictatorship party and now conveniently a dissident of the regime) ended up being elected in January 1985 via a restricted Electoral College, under the rules of the dictatorship.
The PT remained consistent by boycotting the vote and insisted on fighting for direct elections and against conciliation from above. Three of the PT’s federal deputies failed to comply with these positions and were expelled from the party.
A few days after his election by the Electoral College, however, Tancredo Neves was hospitalized and died before the inauguration date. José Sarney, a notorious supporter of the dictatorship for almost 20 years, ended up taking over as the new president of the Republic to promote the “democratic transition”.
Left opposition to the “New Republic”
The PT was in open opposition to the Sarney government and the so-called “New Republic” from the outset, even raising the slogan “Out with Sarney, direct elections now!”. At that time, the struggle for a single, autonomous and sovereign Constituent Assembly took on central importance.
However, once again, a potentially transformative democratic demand was distorted and co-opted by the system, mitigating the risks of it escaping their control. In 1986, a new National Congress (deputies and senators) with constituent powers was elected with a large majority from the PMDB and other bourgeois sectors. The PT had won 16 deputies.
The new constitution adopted maintained the framework of a more democratic capitalism, but without any real fundamental change, despite reflecting the pressure from below by guaranteeing some social and workers’ rights which were then gradually dismantled in the following years. The PT’s deputies refused to vote in favor of the final text. However, they did sign the new Constitution.
Years later, Lula declared that he regretted his position. He said it had been a mistake not to vote for Tancredo and Sarney and to vote against the final text of the 1988 Constitution. This statement sums up the depth of the turn to the right which the PT experienced from the 1990s onwards, but especially after coming to power in 2003. It became a party of order.
Lula also regretted the “excessive radicalism” that the PT adopted in the first direct election for president since the 1964 coup, which took place in 1989. At that time, in alliance with center-left forces, Lula reached the second round, arguing for positions much further to the left than in any other campaign he would run in the following decades. In 1989, Lula ended up losing by a narrow margin to Collor de Mello, the candidate of the ruling classes who would end up being overthrown by a mass movement in 1992.
Conclusions
It was not broad alliances with the “democratic” bourgeoisie or political “prudence” and conciliation that ended up removing the military from power. In 1985, the bourgeoisie and the dictatorship had to give up their rings in order not to lose their fingers.
The dictatorship, headed by the military in the service of the ruling classes in Brazil, fell as a direct result of the strength and pressure of the mass movement and in particular the weight of the working class since the late 1970s.
This force served to push the transition process further than the military and bourgeois politicians had intended. It even served to forge a new mass political tool for the working class, which the PT was in its origins. But it was not enough to prevent the rearrangement of the political system from above, in a way that would maintain the power of the big bourgeoisie associated with imperialism.
The main reason for this was the absence of a clearly defined socialist program and strategy on the part of the majority of the PT’s leadership. The party’s official “popular democratic” program and strategy turned out to be very similar to the reformism and electoralism of the populist, Stalinist and social-democratic left, which the PT was born in condemnation of.
With a powerful neoliberal offensive of the 1990s and the retreat and defeats of the workers’ movement during this period, the PT took a qualitative step backwards. From being an opposition to the governments and political regime created by the democratic transition, the PT became an expression of that same regime when it took office in 2003. This is no different now that Lula is back in office for his third term.
The crisis of bourgeois democracy in Brazil and the threat posed by the extreme right demand the reconstruction of a socialist left that is based on the resumption of workers’ struggles and, at the same time, adopts the consistent socialist strategy and program that the PT lacked since its inception.
