THE WORKER'S PARTY IN RURAL BRAZIL
In Brazil's Northeast–a region notorious for paternalistic, corrupt politics–the Workers Party in local power has focused less on distributive justice and more on encouraging citizens' involvement in government.
By William R. Nylen
Shortly after his 1992 election as mayor of Quixadá, a town of 72,300 inhabitants in the drought-ravaged interior of the northeastern Brazilian state of Ceará, Ilario Marquez of the Workers Party (PT) unveiled his administration’s flagship program, “Prefeitura Com Você" (PCV: The Administration With You). Twice a month, the mayor and his retinue of about 80 officials arrive at one of Quixadá’s urban neighborhoods or rural districts to receive the community’s list of priorities for that year’s municipal projects. A usually festive reception of processions, dances, music and children’s theater is followed by a round of speeches extolling the virtues of citizens’ participation in govemment and the PCV program’s effort to instill those virtues at the community level. Officials attend a series of question-and-answer meetings and engage in informal conversations. Requests for personal favors are redirected to leaders of the neighborhood association. 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.
These festive days of interaction between citizens and public officials do not materialize overnight. 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 municipal department does and what it can do for the community. 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. 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.
I witnessed part of this process in Custódio, a rural district of Quixadá, a half hour’s drive from the town’s center. Custódio’s four thousand residents had no neighborhood association, so administration officials called several open community meetings to explain the PCV program and to foster interest in creating an association. Initial meetings were sparsely attended. 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.
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. She responded that Quixadá’s city-council members had traditionally shirked both their representative and oversight functions. She accused the council members of representing only the interests of Quixadá’s powerful minority of economic elites and of engaging in clientelistic exchanges of favors for promises to vote “accordingly.” By voting for Marquez, she explained, Quixadá had already expressed its discontent with this form of politics. The only way to fight this over the long term, she continued, was to create another set of institutions run by the people themselves.
Custódio’s PCV day came off on schedule. Mayor Marquez received a list of demands prioritizing expansion of the local water cistern and construction of a water-distribution network to outlying areas. This was followed by requests for an ambulance, bathroom construction, a police station, and running water for the local maternity center.
The experiences of PT governance in Quixadá and the nearby coastal fishing town of Icapuí 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.[1] 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. Quixadá’s PCV program mirrors the PT’s founding commitment to participaçao popular –popular participation–in governance, and was actually modeled on similar PT programs implemented elsewhere in Brazil.[2]
The ideals of popular participation and representation expressed in Quixadá’s PCV program run counter to long-standing patterns of paternalistic, exclusionary politics common to Brazil’s rural Northeast. 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.”[3] Social history in the state of Ceará 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.”[4]
So it was a surprise to everyone, including the PT itself, when the party won the 1985 municipal elections in the state capital of Fortaleza (the PT’s first electoral victory in Brazil’s still nascent-democracy). An 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 government 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.
In this context, the existence of PT administrations in Icapuí (1985, 1988 and 1992) and Quixadá (1992) was nothing short of remarkable. Local circumstances explain these anomolies. In Icapuí, the party emerged from a grassroots popular movement that had “emancipated” the town from the neighboring city (and oligarchy) of Aracatí. The 29-year old leader of that movement, José Airton, was elected mayor under the banner of the then-centrist Brazilian Democratic Movement Party (PMDB). 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. Cut off from Aracatí, Icapuí’s tiny elite were powerless beyond a few feeble attempts to threaten and bribe their way into the new political order.
Somewhat similarly, the voters who elected Ilario Marquez mayor of Quixadá 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. They did not vote for the unpopular PT, which did not win a single city-council seat in the same election. Quixadá’s powerful oligarchy had already been weakened by the region’s severe drought, as factories were forced to close and cattle were dying or being sold at bargain-basement prices. Furthermore, as the oligarchy flourished during Brazil’s military regime (1964-1986), the city itself had noticeably deteriorated. 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.
In Icapuí, Mayor Airton’s first administration (1985-1988) was also the town’s first. 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. Airton tracked down and recruited friends, university colleagues, relatives and former residents to build the necessary cadres for his governing team. 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.
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). Teachers were paid the maximum salaries allowed by law, making them among the best paid in the state. In spite of obstructionism from local elites and opponents in the city council, overall results were impressive. In three years, student enrollment increased from 700 to 3,059; the number of teachers increased from 37 to 115 (and their quality improved as many took advantage of a new teacher-training program); and the number of school buildings increased from nine to 30.[6]
Airton’s successor, Francisco José 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). 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 Icapuí’s first resident doctor and nurse to set up shop. 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 lcapuí’s specific needs. To this end, Teixeira’s Secretary of Health initiated a house-to-house survey of some 90% of Icapuí’s 2,275 families, and discussed local needs and resources in numerous community meetings.
With the resulting information, and in conjunction with a new state-govemmcnt effort to improve rural Ceará’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. Between 1987 and 1991, 13% to 20% of the municipal budget was directed to health care. In four years, the number of doctors increased from one to seven, and the number of health posts grew from three to seven. By 1992, Icapuí’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.[7]
But “democratic and popular government,” as understood by Icapuí’s PT leadership, meant going beyond improving and “universalizing” public services such as education and health care. Such “good works” were complemented by efforts to decentralize public administration, open government decisionmaking to public scrutiny (“transparência”), and stimulate popular participation in all areas of governance.
The importance of the Airton administration’s education program went beyond merely increasing literacy levels. “Through education,” one party member explained, “the community is awakened to participate.”[8] 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. To achieve this, the administration adopted Paulo Freire’s method of “empowerment education.” On the other hand, the way that the reforms were implemented was meant to demonstrate the administration’s commitment to decentralization and popular participation. With that goal in mind, Airton’s Secretary of Education and a small group of assistants went door-to-door in Icapuí’s neighborhoods, inviting residents to participate in community meetings alongside teachers, students and administrators to discuss the problems and needs of their local schools. 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.
Similarly, when Mayor Teixeira set out to restructure Icapuí’s public-health services, he stressed “strengthening popular participation in health-related activities, and achieving social control by the end-users of services provided.”[9] Interested community residents, health professionals and administration officials participated in a municipal health conference where they discussed and approved Icapuí’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.
Icapuí’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. Unlike the municipal councils of the first two administrations, these associations were to be independent from both the party and the municipal government. Previously prescribed channels of popular participation were to give way to collective strategizing from below. The choices of why, when, and where these new associations would participate in government decision-making would be entirely their own.
In Quixadá, Mayor Marquez focused on participatory health care as a priority for his incoming administration. Not only did he adopt Icapuí’s model of improving and decentralizing the existing system but he “borrowed” the town’s secretary of health to help implement the model. As in Icapuí, newly created health-care posts in Quixadá were made part of the local community, to be staffed and administered by trained residents rather than outsider “experts” or political appointees.
The commitment to eliminate government paternalism in Icapuí and Quixadá by promoting popular participation in the provision of public services is a trait of many PT-led municipal administrations. Indeed, the PT’s early history was infused with an “ethos” of popular participation “stressing autonomy and self organization.”[10] This ethos was rooted in the struggles of the new unions and social movements of São 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.
In Icapuí, 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. Quixadá’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. 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.
One might expect that the biggest barriers encoun tered 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. Local circumstances help to explain why local elites’ resistance failed. Indeed, some local elites found these administrations to be quite “moderate” and, therefore, easy to accommodate. The president of Quixadá’s Landowners’ Union, for example, an organization with which Ilário Marquez had often clashed as lawyer for the Rural Workers’ Union, said of Marquez and his administration:
It’s much easier to talk with Ilário than with anyone from a party of the right. The right is always hemming and hawing, playing personalistic politics. Within today’s context [of drought and economic crisis], our relationship with the administration is much more relaxed and open. I can sit down and talk with Ilário about specific programs and ideas without all the politics getting in the way.[11]
National opposition was not an insurmountable obstacle either. Since Icapuí 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). 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.
In fact, the most troubling barriers encountered by the PT in Icapuí and Quixadá came from within the community itself. 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.”[12] 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. In Icapuí, 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.[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.
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. 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.
The implications of activists’ and administrators’ disappointment and disengagement are worrisome. 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. Ceará’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. It will only change frorn above. The party in power will need to implement a shock program of honest, efficient and public-spirited government. This will challenge the public to participate and to mobilize in defense of these gains.[14]
Throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s, the PT has been enmeshed in a debate over the lessons of its experiences in local governance. 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.[15] The disastrous experience of Fortaleza stood as a particularly negative example of such debates. 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 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. Democracy is instrumental to the extent that public office enables a broader audience to hear the messages of the “vanguard” leadership, and to actually see anti-capitalist policies in action such as publicly sponsored land invasions and rent strikes.
Through the course of the late 1980s and early 1990s, as the PT won more and more elections, “on-the-job training” of these activists-turned- politicians began to have an impact on debates within the party. Evidence of that impact could be found in the formulation of a relatively coherent “heterodox” interpretation of PT governance (formalized in a 1992 book entitled The PT’s Way of Governing) by a nationwide network of party members experienced in local-level governance. 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 fashionahle 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. [17]
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. 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 of public service” and the “lessons, hopes and accomplishments in arenas of popular participation.” 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.
Orthodox critics counter by equating PT heterodoxy with “electoralism,” “bourgeois reformism,” and abandonment of the party’s grassroots. 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.[18] There are many pre-Marxist conceptual izations of socialism, variously known as “ethical socialism,” “libertarian socialism” or “democratic socialism.” While different in numerous particulars, all of these non-Marxist conceptualizations have in common a rejection of the competitive individualism and social inequality inherent in liberal capitalism, and the embrace of political decentralization and democracy.
The Icapuí and Quixadá cases of PT governance suggest that “heterodox socialism” is not “sell out” revisionism. Rather, these activists have traded one leftist agenda– Leninist and vanguardist–for another decisively radical-democratic one. Whatever the prospects for a more participatory kind of politics on a permanent basis, such a project is a crucial instrument to break down the old politics of paternalism.
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. The idea is to work to approximate the ideal without losing sight of the need to work within the real.
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; second, ample opportunities and encouragement must be given to all those who express a desire to participate. These will be the activists and the political representatives of tomorrow. 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.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR William R. Nylen teaches political science at Stetson University in DeLand, Florida.
NOTES 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). 2. For an analysis of the growth of neighborhood associations in Brazil in the 1980s, see Ruth Corrêa 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.291-302; also see José Álvaro Moisés, “Poder Local e Participação Popular” in Pedro Dallari, ed., Política Municipal(Porto Alegre: Mercado Aberto/Fundaçao Wilson Pinheiro, 1985), pp. 11-26. 3. See Victor Nunes Leal, Coronelismo: the municipality and representative government in Brazil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) [translated from the 1949 Brazilian edition], and Peter Oakley, “Participation in Development in N.E. Brazil” in Community Development Journal, Vol. 15, No, 1 (1980). 4. William W Goldsmith and Robert Wilson, “Poverty and Distorted Industrialization in the Brazilian Northeast” in World Development, Vol. 19, No 5 (1991). 5. For information on the PT’s experience in Fortaleza, see Ercília Maria Braga de Olinda, A Dimensão Educativa do Partido Politico (Fortaleza: Expressão, 1991); also Valeska Peres Pinto, ‘Prefeitura de Fortaleza: administração popular, 1986-88,” Pólis, No. 6 (1992). 6. Icapuí’s accomplishments in public education came to the attention of UNICEF, which awarded its “Child and Peace-Education” award to the town in 1991. UNICEF co-sponscred a 15-volume series entitled Education and Municipal Development with Icapuí and four other PT-administered cities each meriting their own volume. See MED/UNICEF/CENPEC, “Todas as Crianças na Escola: A Experiência De lcapuí-CE, 1989/1992.” Vol. 12 (Brasília: Quantum/MED/UNICEF/CENPEC, 1993). 7. See Marco Antonio de Almeida, “Estudos de gestão” Pólis, No. 11 (1993); also Edson Campos, “Longe das capitals,” Teoria & Debate, Vol. 18, No. 2 (1992). 8. Luiz Teixeira, Airtons executive assistant, personal interview, lcapuí, July 15, 1993. 9. See Odorico Monteiro de Andrade and Neusa Goya, eds., Sistemas Locais de Saúde em Municípios de Pequeno Porte: A Resposta de Icapuí, 2nd. edition (Fortaleza: Expressão, 1992). 10. Margaret Keck, The Workers’ Party and Democratization in Brazil (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 79. 11. Francisco Gladstone, personal interview Quixadá, August 4, 1993. 12. Francisca Alves de Sousa, secretary of education under Mayor Teixeira, personal interview, Icapuí, July 15, 1993. 13. Auguste Alvaro Jerônimo Games, secretary of education, personal interview, July 19, 1995. 14. José Nobre Guimaraes, personal interview, Fortaleza, July 27, 1995. 15. See Cláudio Gonçalves Couto e Fernando Luiz Abrucio, “A Dialética Da Mudança: 0 PT confronta-se com a institucionalidade,” working paper for Centro de Estudos de CuItura Contemporánea (CEDEC), São Paulo (mimeo, no date). 16. Valeska Peres Pinto, “Prefeitura de Fortaleza administração popular, 1986-88,” Pólis, No. 6 (1992). 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. Fortaleza was looking like merely the first case of a developing model of PT “fratricidal” governance. 17. See Jorge Bittar, ed., O Modo Petista de Governar (São Paulo: Teoria & Debate, 1992) Icapuí’s leaders were quick to point out their active part in the project’s formulation. Quixadá’s Marquez admitted to using both the book and the network of experienced party members when establishing his administration’s policy priorities. 18. This point follows Anthony Wright in his Socialism's Theories and Practices (Oxford: Oxford U.P., 1986), p. 18. “The world is full of socialisms. There is no unitary tradition. […S]ocialism has always been distinguished by its diversity. 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. It now reappears, along witin the sort of traditions that sustained it.”
