A - I n f o s

a multi-lingual news service by, for, and about anarchists **
News in all languages
Last 30 posts (Homepage) Last two weeks' posts Our archives of old posts

The last 100 posts, according to language
Greek_ 中文 Chinese_ Castellano_ Catalan_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Francais_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkurkish_ The.Supplement

The First Few Lines of The Last 10 posts in:
Castellano_ Deutsch_ Nederlands_ English_ Français_ Italiano_ Polski_ Português_ Russkyi_ Suomi_ Svenska_ Türkçe_
First few lines of all posts of last 24 hours

Links to indexes of first few lines of all posts of past 30 days | of 2002 | of 2003 | of 2004 | of 2005 | of 2006 | of 2007 | of 2008 | of 2009 | of 2010 | of 2011 | of 2012 | of 2013 | of 2014 | of 2015 | of 2016 | of 2017 | of 2018 | of 2019 | of 2020 | of 2021 | of 2022 | of 2023 | of 2024 | of 2025

Syndication Of A-Infos - including RDF - How to Syndicate A-Infos
Subscribe to the a-infos newsgroups

(en) Brazil, UNIPA: Communiqué No. 81: The Advance of Counterinsurgency, the Agony of the Democratic Rule of Law, and the Gap for Popular Revolt! (ca, de, fr, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Date Sun, 16 Nov 2025 07:36:27 +0200


To the workers of Brazil ---- To the poor youth of the periphery ---- To the indigenous and peasant peoples ---- To the Black people of the favelas and peripheries ---- To the women fighters and LGBTT groups ---- To the workers, the unemployed, informal workers, students, and teachers ---- Bakuninism interprets bourgeois politics through class warfare, analyzing the economic and political situation, the interstate system, as well as the structural aspects of bourgeois elections, their role in reproducing systems of exploitation and oppression, and the actions of each of the actors involved (parties, interest groups, class entities, and factions of the bourgeoisie), their programs in appearance and substance.

The Bakuninist approach requires: 1) a materialist analysis, that is, understanding class war by analyzing the concrete actions of political subjects, organizations and class fractions in the processes of capitalist exploitation and oppression; and 2) a dialectical analysis, which we resort to the authority-freedom antinomy, that is, the contradictions between the forces of the bourgeois order, or the system of authority, and between the popular and revolutionary forces, or the system of freedom.

In the current moment of class war in Brazil, we do not have a democracy to defend, but a tyranny and fiscal adjustment to combat. The recent conflicts within the bourgeois state and parliament express conflicts within these structures, with no group within the power bloc able to hegemonize politics and impose its policies on power, generating a crisis of power. In this sense, popular and revolutionary forces must act to combat tyranny or any measure that protects power and the groups in power.

The Crisis of the Power Bloc: the paths and wrong paths of Tyranny

The position of the dominant political groups in Brazilian working-class organizations tends to strengthen the system of authority, and therefore the State, as it seeks to save the 1988 Republic. This limits and hinders the actions of revolutionaries who seek the destruction of the State and capitalism and the construction of socialism, since by strengthening and legitimizing state powers, it strengthens the reaction and weakens the revolution. However, the actions of the groups and class factions acting in this direction directly clash with the physiological and far-right clerical-military-bourgeois groups organized in the National Congress and strengthened by the international situation, both by the organization of the far right and by the systemic economic, political, ecological, cultural, and social crisis, and in global social democracy, which is the hegemonic force, with different national and regional nuances, in working-class organizations and their ways of acting and thinking. In light of this, we have a Power Bloc that is unable to articulate and direct other forces to transform itself into the Power Bloc , since the counterinsurgency since 2013 has attacked not only the autonomous and revolutionary strands, but also the class conciliation organizations at the base of Lulopetismo.

This situation demonstrates an attempt by a portion of the Supreme Federal Court (STF), the Workers' Party (PT), some allies, and sectors of the bourgeoisie to save the 1988 Republic. However, the clerical-military-bourgeoisie and political bloc in Congress will not back down, seeking to ensure its self-protection and maintain its political, economic, and judicial privileges within an international coalition led by the far-right sectors of this bloc. The conviction of retired Army Captain Jair Messias Bolsonaro (PL) and the Generals set off alarm bells for the clerical-military and political bloc, known in the mainstream media as the "centrão," which led them to act to save their position, embodied in the attempt to pass the "Protection of the Blindage" (PEC), popularly nicknamed the "Protection of Banditry." On the other hand, degenerate reformism (Frente Brasil Popular e Povo Sem Medo, CUT, UNE, MST, MTST, PT, PCdoB), renewed reformism (PSOL, PCB, PCBR, UP-PCR) and sectors of multicultural liberalism are holding on to the action of the majority of the STF and seek to keep the streets immobilized or controlled by their policy of saving the bourgeois State.

However, the ultra-authoritarian reactionary bloc's attempt to create self-protection for parliamentarians via the Banditry Amendment Proposal (PEC da Bandidagem) and to secure amnesty for the captain and the generals following the Supreme Court's conviction prompted liberal, social, and social-democratic forces to issue a call to the streets, clearly within their repertoire of action and mobilization: an ultra-festive and peaceful one. The success of the mobilizations, albeit limited by their peaceful nature, resulted in the Shielding Amendment being buried in the Federal Senate, still in the Constitution and Justice Committee, by a unanimous 26-vote vote. Thus, the victory of street pressure on senators opens an opening for revolutionary political and popular forces and direct action by the working class.

The irony of this process is that the generals and the army captain were convicted by a law sanctioned by Bolsonaro in 2021 based on a proposal by Deputy Hélio Bicudo/PT back in 1991. As we had already stated, the Bolsonaro-Mourão government confirmed itself as a government of clerical-military-bourgeois reaction, a return to the dictatorship, but of the backroom wing that failed to assert itself at the end of the dictatorship within the armed forces and no longer had the full support of the high command of the armed forces that directed the redemocratization process.

The ruling classes broke the pact of class conciliation that sustained the Workers' Party governments (2003-2016). This represented the advance of proto-fascism, strengthening the system of authority, militarism, theologism, and ultraliberalism within the Federal Government's power structure. This was yet another counterinsurgency reaction, a reaction to the 2013 popular insurgency and the escalating cycle of strikes and occupations that followed (2013-2017). And even their defeat by the federal government did not demobilize their base in the National Congress, especially since during the Bolsonaro years they managed to raid the federal budget by increasing parliamentary amendments, a crucial point for analyzing the actions of parliamentarians and the National Congress.

At this moment, we have, on one side, reformists and social-liberal political forces attempting to strengthen the Democratic Rule of Law, increasing its authority. A large portion of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the Workers' Party (PT) and its allies are primarily responsible for this policy, which is expressed in the Broad Front and the immobilization and/or control of the masses. On the other hand, we have the far right and the right-wing political elite seeking to double down on amnesty and the defense of parliament and increase their powers in the Senate as a way to gain greater control over the judiciary, especially the Supreme Federal Court (STF). The vote in the first session of the first panel of the Supreme Federal Court (STF) revealed an internal divergence that still maintains the presence of the far-right sector in the Supreme Court and has a real chance of a majority in the short term, while the entire judgment and the Attorney General's thesis leave the armed forces protected.

On the other hand, there is no contradiction regarding the economic perspective between the Supreme Court and the physiological and clerical-military forces; on the contrary, the ultraliberal agenda unites these sectors. However, the strengthening of the agribusiness and financial bourgeoisie has dismantled other sectors of the bourgeoisie itself, which have lost power in the National Congress due to the strengthening of the agricultural sector through the policies of the Brazilian state since the second FHC administration.

The Colonial Policy of the Clerical-Military-Bourgeois Bloc and the Physiologism of the National Congress

This political bloc in the National Congress, known as the Centrão (centrão), of which Bolsonaro and his family are a representative, represents the sewer of the dominant class's infrapolitics, of the militias' strategies for ascension to political and economic power. It has an intrinsically colonial and mafia-like character of private property itself, that is, a self-defense system designed to guarantee the process of plunder, exploitation, and domination, which also entails total surrender and its association with international capital for its own benefit.

The class and political configuration of the Bolsonarist bloc presents an essential ideological aspect in the legitimization of its project: it abandons the "universalism" of declining neo-imperialism and adopts the openly unilateral, subservient, and pragmatic bias of its class objectives. This is what leads Bolsonarism to detach itself from certain myths and illusions of the traditional liberal bourgeoisie, such as democracy in the abstract, violence in general, corruption in general, humanity in general, and even scientific universalism.

Giving up this neo-imperialist "universalism" is what explains the apparent contradiction in Bolsonaro's discourse, which denounces a "left-wing globalism," including entities like the UN and transnational corporations. These liberal/capitalist entities, at a given moment, in fact absorbed and subverted the social demands of the poor, women, Black people, environmentalists, and democratic groups, etc., to better govern: addressing absolute poverty with policies focused on income rather than class, integrating race and gender demands into the logic of consumption and the occupation of spaces of corporate and government power, the environmental agenda being embraced by selective criticism of carbon emissions and encouraging alternative energy sources without questioning the model of production and accumulation, the absence of social policies being "solved" by private and direct funding of grassroots groups through foundations and NGOs in a cynical, supposedly disinterested "corporate anti-statism," etc.; The issue is that Bolsonaro's discourse is ultra-liberal and conservative and does not admit such absorptions, labeling these forms of domination through the co-optation and subversion of social demands applied for decades by traditional international organizations and capitalist companies as "leftist"/"communist."

Thus, the meaning of the development of the reactionary program, expressed by Bolsonarism, means the legal-institutional recognition of the relations of power and property instituted through theft and colonial violence by these sectors, exposing the power of the State and operating with a permanent logic of capital accumulation, state centralization and epistemological centralism/racism that means: direct attack on rural and urban workers, permanent plunder, exploitation, environmental destruction, male domination and Christian domination.

Faced with the economic, political, ecological, cultural and social crisis, it is necessary to order the world according to the system of authority: militarism, patriarchalism, theologism and ultra-liberalism.

Paralyzed Lulopetism

The strategy of Lulopetismo and its organizations is to save the Democratic Rule of Law, the Republic of 1988, through a Broad Class Front, whose only point is the abstract defense of democracy, against the extreme right and its most immediate expression, Bolsonarism, without, however, challenging neoliberal hegemony in the economic and public policy aspects.

In this sense, we have the main organizations of Lulaism, such as the CUT and MST, more or less paralyzed by the Broad Front agreement, at the same time that the centralization of state power advances and the actions of workers are reduced to state demands and the production of public policies, thus helping to domesticate the popular masses and their adherence to the bourgeois order.

Contradictorily, the advance of neoliberalism and class conciliation during the first Workers' Party governments, developing Brazilian dependent capitalism with an increase in the primary export agenda and the increased power of the agribusiness sector, with Brazil's subordinate insertion into the new international division of labor in the face of technological changes and the organization of value production chains, provoked a substantial change in the composition of the Brazilian working class, including impacting the main unions and the CUT, the main trade union federation. Its main constituents, such as bank workers and metalworkers, lost collective strength. On the other hand, the years of Workers' Party government strengthened the union and workers' know-how of conciliation and negotiation, leaving even unionists unsure of how to act other than through conciliation rather than conflict.

This has led to a paralysis of social movements, youth, and unions that participate in electoral situations under the leadership of the Workers' Party, especially in the face of the rise of conservatism and reactionism at the grassroots level and the electoral confrontation with the far right. This global rise and the attack suffered by the Workers' Party and Lula before the 2018 elections clearly reflected political persecution coordinated by the global far right and imperialist state forces, such as the United States.

In our March 2018 press release No. 57, we assessed four possible scenarios for the unfolding of the dispute over the Brazilian state within the context of the election of the first Trump administration and the height of Operation Car Wash. The scenarios outlined at that time were:

1) Lula reverses the decision and runs for office;

2) Lula out of the elections, but the PT launching an alternative candidate;

3) Lula out of the elections with the PT declared illegal as a criminal organization;

4) Lula out of the elections, with all Left-wing Parties having their candidacies made unviable by a strategy of judicialization and criminalization.

Scenario two, which we defined as the most likely at the time, consolidated, leading to the candor of Fernando Haddad (Workers' Party), former mayor of São Paulo at the time of the June protests and a leading figure in the party's social-liberal leadership. After losing the election, we saw the continuation of the clerical-military-bourgeois reaction that took over the federal executive branch and began to strengthen the system of authority, as well as militarism, theologism, and ultraliberalism with the privatizations of BR Distribuidora and Eletrobras, for example.

In this way, counterinsurgency and the attack on workers' rights advanced, since in relation to economic matters the STF is in agreement with the proto-fascist groups and the Brazilian ruling class, already paved by the Temer Government (MDB) that created the necessary bridge for this rise.

However, the emergence of "Vaza Jato", the Pandemic and the Election of Biden allowed sectors of the Judiciary, in particular the STF, to react in the name of its salvation and for more noble reasons, the Democratic Rule of Law, at the same time that Lula's defense was able to prove the political persecution and setup that the prosecutors and judges of the operation carried out in collusion with the US State Department.

The attempted coup at the Capitol in 2021 and its aftermath enabled the Biden administration to react, thus preventing the coup d'état of January 8, 2023, from taking place. Without external support, the leadership of the Brazilian Armed Forces took a step back, leaving everything to the generals, the captain, and the mobilized social base.

Expanding the Domestication of Popular Struggles

The relative novelty in the strategy of domesticating the popular masses and their adherence to the bourgeois order is found in the ministerial formation, such as the incorporation of the false discourse of "representation" and "identitarianism" with political figures that would meet the demands of black, indigenous and LGBT movements.

From the perspective of the ruling classes, Bolsonaro's electoral defeat and Lula's return to the presidency did not pose a threat to capitalist exploitation and domination in Brazil. The immediate interests of certain ruling factions may be affected, but by no means in ways that would suggest the possibility of liquidating their power or investments.

The conviction of Bolsonaro and the generals who orchestrated a coup attempt saves the Armed Forces and its top brass under the protection of Defense Minister Múcio. For now, the Supreme Federal Court (STF) and the more legalistic and republican forces led by the Workers' Party (PT) are seeking to preserve the legitimacy and legality of the 1988 Constitution by neutralizing the high command of the Armed Forces, the Supreme Federal Court (STF), and the current executive branch from advancing far-right judicial policies.

On the other hand, Bolsonarism has further exposed the Brazilian National Congress, which was supplied with substantial parliamentary amendments under the leadership of Artur Lira (PP of Alagoas), who oversaw the budget plunder, giving parliamentarians relative autonomy over executive resources. This new configuration alters the power play in Brasília and the negotiation of votes according to the ministries in the Esplanade.

In any case, no structural change in the Armed Forces' policy will alter their doctrinal stance of maintaining bourgeois order by persecuting and combating popular forces recognized as class enemies. Furthermore, state military forces operate with the same logic, now intertwined with organized crime or the ramifications of its control.

In this sense, the scenario we predicted in our previous statements was confirmed: that the base of Lula's PT would maintain the cowardly political option of defending the "democratic rule of law," calling for actions by repressive forces to legitimize the decisions of Supreme Court Justice Alexandre de Morais.

In this situation of forming a conciliatory government, the tendency toward systemic integration increases. We are facing a scenario of strengthening reformism and the disintegration of combative or revolutionary sectors that have difficulty operating in a less explosive and revolutionary situation, such as 2013. This conciliation should further expand the Lula-PT's systemic integration, including increasing control over its youth , given the reactionary and elitist interpretation these forces have of the Popular Uprising of June 2013.

The PT-CUT know-how of conciliation between the union, popular and student movements, the policy of degenerate reformism (Frente Brasil Popular e Povo Sem Medo, CUT, UNE, UBES, MST, MTST, PT, PCdoB) further increases integration with the State and interpenetration between classes, which is quite explicit in the positions of the PCdoB and its main leaders and intellectuals.

The Workers' Party government's dilemma and the restructuring of the ruling bloc are related to the crisis of power in Brazil, and therefore, not only to disputes within parliamentary politics and ideology, but also to economic and social class disputes and the appropriation of capital within the new wave of national and international colonialism. This is where the importance of understanding the "(open) assault on power" by militias and theological elites comes in. Obviously, all these sectors were already integrated in varying forms and degrees into the state and even into the Workers' Party governments. However, the discursive structure (participationist, multiculturalist, environmentalist) that materialized in concrete forms of exercising and negotiating power, such as the tripartite forums, proved limiting to the class interests of these sectors.

What the Lula administration is doing is attempting a new conciliation, but at this point its social foundations are weakened and lacking roots among the new groups of workers emerging from the extremely precarious labor market that characterizes Brazil's flexible dependent capitalism. Dilma's administration had already fallen because the ruling classes, especially its two main factions today: the agrarian and financial classes, which grew stronger under Lula (2003-2010), no longer needed a grand compromise, leaving President Dilma with the stigma that she wouldn't know how to negotiate conciliation like Lula.

The domesticated movement and the guideline for maintaining the Broad Front based on a neoliberal economic agenda with social actions underneath, maintains the power crisis, since at the moment the bourgeoisie and its allied sectors do not yet have the possibility of sidelining the PT and its allies.

In turn, the rising "renewed" reformism, recently articulated by the UP/PCR, PCB, and PSOL factions, also suffered from internal processes, as in the case of the PCB and the split that gave rise to the PCBR under the leadership of Jones Manoel, and the internal disputes within the PSOL that led to the party's greater integration under the leadership of Guilherme Boulos into the Lula-PT bloc. Meanwhile, the neo-Stalinism of the UP-PCR managed to gain ground within the student movement, becoming a leading political force, given its character freer from the degenerate reformism of the PT and PCdoB.

The reversal of the Supreme Federal Court's authority and its attempt to safeguard the republic also signifies the legitimacy of the anti-worker, neoliberal measures the Supreme Court has ruled on. Furthermore, the Broad Front has continued its policy of advancing privatizations, dismantling public services, and destroying social and labor rights. In practice, the strengthening of the State and the 1988 Republic involves increasing guardianship and control over popular movements as a way to safeguard "democracy."

It's no coincidence that Lula returned to the spheres of class conciliation: the so-called national conferences, tripartite forums that bring together government, business leaders, and the union, student, and grassroots bureaucracies. Chief among them, the Council for Sustainable Economic and Social Development (CDESS), was reinstated.

However, unlike the first Lula administrations, we are experiencing a post-pandemic moment of deepening class struggle, where reactionary far-right forces have advanced in the face of the paralysis of neoliberal policies implemented by social democratic or liberal governments.

As positions become more radicalized in society, the social democratic strategy has been to further integrate the working class into the bourgeois democratic system, especially through elections and parliamentary pressure. The social democratic camp has abandoned the strategy of force and popular power for its reformist and petty-bourgeois illusions.

In early 2021, we asserted that the defense of a military coup in Brazil as a strategy of the national and international bourgeoisie was losing momentum. Thus, bourgeois factions pointed to two likely trends: 1) the construction of a more pragmatic and neoliberal electoral alternative without Bolsonaro and 2) a new pact of class conciliation with the left-wing union-party bureaucracies, now weakened and with a smaller social base. This second trend gained momentum through a series of decisive combinations, including the change in the US administration, the opening of the Parliamentary Parliamentary Inquiry into the Pandemic, and a bourgeoisie of national and international origins from so-called "green capitalism" that aligned itself with Geraldo Alckmin's position as vice president.

During the ultra-monopolistic phase of capital, the "developmentalist" model of the Workers' Party governments in the first decades of the 21st century guaranteed and reinforced the Brazilian economy's subordinate position in a regime of concentrated capital accumulation, with the so-called macroeconomic tripod (floating exchange rate, inflation target, and fiscal target), and the export dependence of agro-extractive activities. This increased the power of the "bankocracy," rentierism, and agribusiness itself, while also favoring a portion of the formal "CLTtista" (CLT-compliant) salaried working class, whose official unions were linked to the CUT, and public servants. This was the basis for the class conciliation of the 2003-2015 period.

Growing competition for mineral resources, such as rare earth minerals essential for the semiconductor industry, and infra-energy resources, is impacting the expropriation of common goods to convert nature into a commodity. Resources such as water and forest conservation are becoming commodities to be traded, a key focus of global climate conferences. Furthermore, demand for water and energy is increasing due to the development of AI and its data centers, which are major thieves of natural resources essential to life, such as water. In this context, Brazil is portrayed as a neocolony of data centers.

Furthermore, Brazil, Indonesia, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo are already negotiating a sort of "OPEC of forests," given that they have the largest tropical forests on the planet, with the aim of transforming tropical forests into commodities to be traded on the carbon market. Thus, the Lula-PT policy is not about mass popular confrontation, but rather about ensuring the stability of the republic and promoting the rise of certain segments of the ruling class through some very specific distribution of resources to the masses as a whole.

The know-how of the Workers' Party (PT), the Workers' Party (CUT), and their allies and organizations has been developed and reinforced in recent decades to ensure and promote the interpenetration and conciliation of class interests, not their conflict and division. While the counterinsurgency advances within the bourgeois state, equipped with every possible digital and political technology, popular forces are unable to, at the very least, prevent this process of surveillance and militarization of society. Quite the contrary. Sectors of the mass movement disregard surveillance and militarization of society as an element to be combated, or have already assimilated surveillance as part of state policy and, irresponsibly, idealistically believe that they will not be affected by this same surveillance/control.

Break with Lulism, unleash the collective forces of the proletariat

The Bakuninist perspective of the Anarchist Popular Union invites us to view counterinsurgency not as an anomaly, but as the state's standard response to any real threat to its order. The period from June 2013 to the 2016 coup was a complete cycle of this strategy: from popular outburst to violent repression, passing through media co-optation, and culminating in institutional reorganization. The result was the strengthening of a more authoritarian state, more aligned with capital and more efficient in neutralizing popular insurgency, all under the aegis of the "Democratic Rule of Law." Recognizing this dynamic is essential so that future popular struggles avoid falling into the same institutional traps and can, in fact, build popular power outside and against the state.

Building this anti-state popular power requires multiple factors, but among them is the need to break with the idea of the State as a regulatory body for social life, as well as a break with State Trade Unionism, which is expressed in the State's attack on popular representation bodies such as unions, student organizations, and community organizations. It is necessary to build unified struggles against the 6x1 scale, in defense of a 4x3 scale that can guarantee employment for the people and accentuate the strategic offensive our class has embarked on. Pointing to the General Strike as a horizon is fundamental to building insurrectionary conditions that can bring down capitalism and statism in Brazil.

We harbor no illusions that these conditions will fall from the sky, but rather will be shaped by the very dynamics of the class struggle. To achieve this, we must emphasize the denunciation of the Congress as an enemy of the people. Such a denunciation alone will not point to an organizational horizon. Such a horizon must be presented by revolutionaries, and for us Bakuninists, it is the People's Congress, a body of dual power that must polarize the regulation of social life with the bourgeois state.

While parties and organizations of the reformist left, at best, call for a constituent assembly to "democratize the State," or those of the bourgeois left that accept anti-people measures from the Workers' Party governments as a "lesser evil," Unipa understands that crises are cyclical and should not involve any popular sacrifice to save the system. Likewise, it understands that the State is an instrument of oppression, and no attempt to seize this bourgeois power should count on popular support. Thus, beginning the construction of a People's Congress is an urgent task, both current and historical. Its construction may be rushed or may take longer, but it is the only way to pave the way for People's Power in Brazil and defend the freedom and well-being of the people against capitalism, the State, and their crises.

END OF THE 6 X 1 SCHEDULE WITH A 30-HOUR WORK WEEK WITHOUT WAGE REDUCTION!

REPEAL OF LABOR AND SOCIAL SECURITY REFORMS!

NO TO ADMINISTRATIVE REFORM!

REPEAL OF THE NEW SPENDING CAP!

LAND AND FREEDOM (AGRARIAN REFORM)!

END OF TAX EXEMPTIONS FOR AGRIBUSINESS AND LARGE CORPORATIONS!

TAXATION OF PROFITS AND DIVIDENDS AND GREAT FORTUNES!

uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com = unipa@protonmail.com
https://uniaoanarquista.wordpress.com/2025/10/04/o-avanco-da-contrainsurgencia-a-agonia-do-estado-democratico-dedireito-e-a-brecha-para-revolta-popular/
_________________________________________
A - I N F O S N E W S S E R V I C E
By, For, and About Anarchists
Send news reports to A-infos-en mailing list
A-infos-en@ainfos.ca
Subscribe/Unsubscribe https://ainfos.ca/mailman/listinfo/a-infos-en
Archive: http://ainfos.ca/en
A-Infos Information Center