Young people are experiencing an equally acute crisis, combining high unemployment, a lack of perspective for the future, and countless mental health problems. Around 20 percent of young people in São Paulo, a figure representing hundreds of thousands, neither study nor work. Those young people who are employed work in precarious jobs, such as app delivery drivers and call center operators, who, at the beginning of the pandemic, staged numerous strikes and protests against low wages and unsafe working conditions.
The election in São Paulo is taking place amid a serious environmental crisis and a new wave of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil and worldwide, an issue totally ignored by the São Paulo candidates. If Nunes and Marçal represent a more open form of attack on public health that combines the defense of the expansion of its privatization and the propagation of anti-scientific measures against COVID-19, Boulos’ role is no less reactionary.
Following the Lula government, Boulos and the pseudo-left in general have ignored the dangers still posed by the pandemic and its consequences, especially Long COVID. The only time the Boulos’ government plan refers to COVID-19, it mentions the “new urban habits of the post-pandemic” to supposedly create a “fairer and more balanced city.” At no point does the need to create a “fairer and more balanced city,” let alone the need to end the pandemic, mean for Boulos, the PSOL and the PT to call into question the profit system of global capitalism.
In recent weeks, in addition to the new wave of the pandemic, São Paulo and the whole of Brazil have faced the harmful consequences of global warming produced by capitalism. Brazil has been facing a historic drought, spurring criminal fires mainly in the Amazon and Pantanal regions, home to a rich diversity of Brazilian fauna and flora.
Almost half of Brazil has recorded the worst air quality in the world. The typical blue skies of winter have turned gray, forcing people to wear masks and intensifying health problems throughout Brazil. This situation is particularly worrying in São Paulo, where breathing the city’s polluted air is equivalent to smoking four cigarettes daily.
Addressing these intolerable living conditions requires a socialist and internationalist program based on Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution, which has its historical continuity represented in the International Committee of the Fourth International (ICFI).
As the ICFI stated in its New Year’s Statement, this work “does not take place in a political vacuum.”
The world crisis is radicalizing tens and hundreds of millions. The chasm between the essential interests of masses and the privileges of the ruling class is becoming ever more obvious. Imperialism’s normalization of war, genocide, pestilence, and fascism will provide a mighty impulse for the revolutionizing of mass consciousness and, therefore, the normalization of socialism in the political outlook of the working class.
Build a socialist leadership in the working class in São Paulo!
The youth and working class in São Paulo have an enormous history of struggle, with a deep democratic and socialist tradition. In 1917, amid the effects of the First World War and inspired by the February Revolution in Russia, the city of São Paulo witnessed Brazil’s first general strike, led by European immigrants who brought anarchist and socialist ideas to the country.
Over the last century, São Paulo, and the cities around it, particularly the important ABC region, became an industrial force driven by the import substitution policy, especially after the Second World War. This laid the foundations for the formation of one of the most powerful sections of the Brazilian working class.
At the end of the 1970s, the youth and working class of São Paulo and the ABC region led mass protests and strikes against the military dictatorship in Brazil. In the 1980s, São Paulo was the political center of mass demonstrations demanding an end to the dictatorship. The Workers Party and CUT, the PT-controlled trade union center, emerged in the early 1980s amid this enormous uprising.
Throughout the 2010s, protests and strikes erupted in São Paulo as part of a global wave of protests against the lowering of living standards and continued austerity measures that targeted the whole political establishment, including the Workers Party governments at the federal level and in the city of São Paulo.
In the early 2020s, different sections of São Paulo’s working class—industrial workers, bus drivers, app delivery drivers and teachers—rose up to protect themselves against the threats posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In all these situations, they clashed not only with the official representatives of bourgeois politics but also the bureaucratized unions run by the PT and the pseudo-left, which have worked to isolate and divert the struggles of the youth and the working class into the dead end of bourgeois politics. This same process manifests itself today in their support for the candidacy of the pseudo-leftist Boulos.
In recent decades, capitalist globalization has not only intensified the widespread discrediting of pro-corporate and nationalist unions but has also allowed youth and the working class to become more objectively connected to workers around the world.
The history of struggle in São Paulo and the objective development of global capitalism form a powerful basis for workers to develop rank-and-file committees independent of the unions and to link up with the workers’ struggle in Brazil and internationally through the International Workers Alliance of Rank-and-File Committees (IWA-RFC). The potential for intentionally coordinated actions by the working class and youth, whether in the form of protests or strikes, is a factor that the IWA-RFC has been developing since 2021, made possible by capitalist globalization, particularly the technological revolution.
This potential, however, can only be fully realized on a socialist and internationalist program. This, in turn, is embodied in the historical struggle of the International Committee of the Fourth International against bourgeois nationalism, Stalinism and Pabloism, especially its Latin American variant, Morenoism. Having faced numerous attacks from the PT governments, the unions controlled by it and the pseudo-left, the Socialist Equality Group (GSI) believes that this program will find an enthusiastic response in the working class and youth of São Paulo.
In these elections in São Paulo, the GSI calls on all those who agree with this socialist and revolutionary perspective to fight against fascism, the threat of world war, and the environmental and pandemic crises to join it and help it build the ICFI.
Sign up for the WSWS email newsletter
Source link : http://www.bing.com/news/apiclick.aspx?ref=FexRss&aid=&tid=6700c2c514ec4f3a8c88291821596b47&url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.wsws.org%2Fen%2Farticles%2F2024%2F10%2F05%2Fqfjd-o05.html&c=9573544250630264697&mkt=en-us
Author :
Publish date : 2024-10-04 16:45:00
Copyright for syndicated content belongs to the linked Source.
