On the Urgency of a Cunning Politics

Early in his extraordinary new book, John French recounts how in 1960 a then-teenaged Luiz Inácio da Silva gained admission to the prestigious training program that would set him on an unlikely path to become president of Brazil. It began when his mother, Dona Lindu, determined for her youngest child to become a torneiro mecânico—a metalworker, a member of the emerging labor elite. Like most northeastern migrants who made their way to the rapidly industrializing fray of 1950s and 1960s São Paulo, Dona Lindu was poor, illiterate, and bold, twice uprooting her family with little but risk in hand: first in trekking south, eight children in tow, to a world in flux, then in leaving her abusive husband to seize opportunities in a city undergoing an urban explosion. So she walked long miles and waited longer hours in search of a spot at the program where her son would learn an industrial trade and from there, eventually, the skills in life and politics that would turn Dona Lindu's Luiz Inácio into Brazil's Lula.In lesser hands, the story of how Lula took his first steps in metalwork—oft narrated by and about the former union leader and president as a pivotal event of otherworldly provenance and significance—would be another feel-good moment in the telling of a remarkable life. In French's hands, the episode is an opportunity for deep insight, about Lula and Brazil, about memory and biography. Discarding “narratives of underdogs succeeding” as pleasing but ultimately limiting, French shows how in bustling midcentury São Paulo Dona Lindu's efforts were remarkable but not exceptional; thousands of illiterate migrant mothers toiled tirelessly for a chance to better the lives of their children, an effort “not always successful,” as French is quick to note (58). Neither was her quest to educate her youngest indicative of the boy's special gifts. Instead, it was the product of timing and circumstance, a last chance requiring “cooperation and potentially fraught trade-offs” among the entire family (60), set in a context that French expertly illuminates. What makes this story extraordinary is what it reveals about the blend of luck, tenacity, wit, and sacrifice—about teimosia, in popular parlance—at the heart of the worlds that shaped who Lula became: “Teimosia for the weak,” writes French, “is about dogged, fearless pursuit of the unlikely and improbable. It is ambition made formidable against the odds” (52).Lula and His Politics of Cunning is many things. Partly, it is a sweeping reappraisal of Brazilian labor, social, and political history since the 1950s, one that sets Lula's decades-long march to the presidency against the backdrop of an arduous struggle to redefine the meaning and power of the working class in and to the nation, a struggle that took place as much among workers as against their antagonists. Partly, it is a defense of affective leadership of the sort that privileges personal relationships and charismatic pull, maligned by left and right alike as unprincipled opportunism or populist demagoguery or both. Partly, it is a methodological master class on the biographical genre, drawing on the analytical tools and sources of history, anthropology, linguistics, sociology, and more to extract meaning from deep in the weeds of Brazilian popular, political, and intellectual culture. Partly, it is a searing indictment of dogmatic thinking by intellectuals and activists who bemoan political calculation as always already corrupt, rather than as a potent tool for those aiming to improve the lives of the world's long oppressed.At its core, though, the book is about the kind of “ambition made formidable against the odds” that informed the lives of people like Lula's mother, and the type of politics it gave rise to in a hardscrabble migrant turned metalworker turned leader of one of the most successful, and improbable, political movements in Latin American history. This movement, French reminds us at the book's beginning and end, improved the lives of millions of Brazilians materially and symbolically, helping working-class Brazilians long accustomed to believing political power was out of their reach to believe instead “in their own power to change things they disliked” (92). It was the movement's achievements more than its shortcomings that fueled the ire of a revitalized, vindictive right wing.That reminder is not gratuitous but urgent. In the wake of the PT's fall from grace amid Dilma Rousseff's impeachment in 2016, Lula's imprisonment on politically motivated corruption charges in 2018, and Jair Bolsonaro's hard-right presidency since 2019, it has become easy—especially for the left—to forget the momentous nature of Lula's election and two-term presidency. Worse, the right's return in Brazil and elsewhere has led to retrospective disavowals of Lula and the PT as failed bids from the start, with Lula as an “unprincipled shape-shifter who . . . disillusioned everyone who ever believed that the PT and its project radically differed from the rest of Brazil's parties” (11) and thus opened the door to the likes of Bolsonaro.For French, such appraisals are not only empirically wrong but politically self-defeating. They betray both a fundamental misreading of who Lula is and what he represents and an impoverished understanding of politics more broadly, more content with speaking and writing and fretting about power than wielding it. In this sense, while the book is nominally about Lula, it would be a mistake to read it simply as biography. French's larger and more ambitious goal is to reclaim politics with a small p as the condition of possibility for worlds more equitable, a politics of everyday interactions, fraught trade-offs, strategic calculation, and patient coalition building beyond like-minded allies that make possible not only imagining but advancing the cause of social justice. “The actual practice of politics,” argues French, “consists not of working out principles or ideologies on paper but, rather, of continually assessing forces and personalities as they emerge, unexpectedly and unpredictably, in the unfolding of events. What is often called pragmatism,” he continues, “refers to the clarity that guides decisions when one knows the principal enemy—that is, the antagonists against whom one can unite difference” (329).Politics seen thus is for French the essence of Lula's astucia, his cunning—“a two-sided process of calculation and performance in which individuals maneuver within webs of power” through deft use of trickery, dissimulation, and personal relationships to curry favor (163). Explaining this politics, how Lula came to it and came to master it and in the process helped transform Brazil, is French's primary aim. Doing so requires dispensing with caricatures of Lula from right and left, which offer him up respectively as firebrand socialist or neoliberal sellout. What links these images is their detachment from what French calls the “biographical individual” (381), not the fully formed individual on whom meaning is projected retrospectively, but the individual in the process of becoming, uncertain about motives and outcomes, navigating life by drawing on combinations of intuition, skill, and experience. Drawing on the insights of his mentor, the late Brazilian historian Emília Viotti da Costa, for whom what mattered most was “the way people interact, the way they think about the world and act upon it, and how in this process they transform the world and themselves” (384), French thus sets out to reconstruct the worlds that shaped Lula and gave rise to his political cunning.What emerges is a formative process in four stages that French unfurls chronologically. The first, captured in Dona Lindu's teimosia, imbued Lula with an early sense of possibility through tenacity. But that tenacity was not innate. Instead, it sprang from a mix of ambition and opportunity afforded by the dizzying growth of 1950s São Paulo. For any of the millions of migrants who flocked to this world from throughout Brazil, making it here was far from foregone. Yet it was at least possible; recognizing possibilities and what it took to seize them provided a life lesson in the power of ambition against formidable odds that Lula carried with him evermore.The second stage took place during Lula's training at the National Industrial Apprenticeship Service (SENAI) and, on graduating in 1963, during his early years as a metalworker. Founded in the early 1940s, SENAI explicitly aimed to train a worker “elite,” in the words of its founder, Roberto Mange (65). Students received technical training and holistic education meant, above all, to teach problem-solving skills and inculcate pride. Yet French draws out an unexpected underside and a key insight into Lula's formation. “As an apprentice,” he notes, “Lula had embraced the values of professionalism, personal responsibility, self-worth, and a dedication to the common goal of industrial development and progress” (120). That dedication might have made him beholden to the industrial world he now entered as a privileged actor. But in a milieu ravenous for Lula's newfound skills, those same values proved a liability as Lula demanded better pay and working conditions, leading him to quit two jobs, get fired from a third, and endure extended unemployment, an experience nothing short of humiliating. Henceforth “a more mature Lula would maneuver more cautiously around those in power, whether in the factory or, after 1969, the trade union” (125).Caution, however, did not mean compliance. Learning to navigate the space between the two informed a third formative stage during which Lula's politics of cunning began to take shape as he entered the world of union politics against the backdrop of an increasingly repressive military dictatorship after 1968. For French this is perhaps the pivotal turning point in Lula's evolution, precisely because its outcome was least expected. Everything to that point in fact suggested Lula would become another pelego, a toady union official “selling out the rank and file for individual advantage” (172): he had voiced support for the 1964 coup that brought the military to power (93); expressed disdain for both politics and unions (80); objected to his brother's radical left politics that would later land him in jail to suffer torture (209); agreed to join the union slate not from ideological conviction but as “an intriguing opportunity within reach” (113); become a full-time union official at a time of social cavorting following the death of his first wife (166); and climbed through the union ranks under the tutelage of Paulo Vidal, seen by some, fairly and otherwise, as a pelego himself.That Lula did not become a pelego illustrates for French the essence at the heart both of the “biographical individual” and of cunning: people change, adapt, and learn in the face of challenges and opportunities. The question is what they learn and to what ends they put that knowledge. In Lula's case, what he learned while managing the union's asistencia (member benefits) wing was the importance of personal relationships and the politics of immediatism. “Political debates,” writes French, “so preoccupying to labor leaders, leftist priests, radical students, and disgruntled politicians, had little meaning for the working class's nonpoliticized majority, who were most concerned about a sustained, perceptible drop in real wages” (137). Meanwhile, the always jovial Lula “interacted personally with as many workers as possible, often informally over a cachaça. . . . ‘This business of talking a lot, of listening a lot’ . . . was the basis of his learning” (229). In other words, it was union life that informed Lula's politics, not the other way around.It is a key point, one that French develops to powerful effect to reinterpret Lula's fourth formative stage, when he steps into the limelight first as president of the union, beginning in 1975, and then as leader of the massive ABC strikes that captivated the nation and beyond between 1978 and 1980. Though amply documented, this period has nevertheless for French resulted in most retrospective misreadings of Lula insofar as it is taken as the start of his political awakening, rather than the consummation of a politics long in gestation. For some, the strikes showcase the birth of Lula the radical. For others, his dealings with the dictatorship as union president are evidence of long-compromised principles. What French sees instead is the rise of what he calls Lula's higher cunning, “a blend of craft, skill, and expertise that included . . . a form of intelligence, learning, and even magic applied to dealing with superordinates” (248).This is when Lula assembles his range of experiences in life, labor, and politics to formidable effect: taking place against the backdrop of emerging rifts within the dictatorship, Lula recognizes and seizes the opportunity—fraught with risk but clear—to press advantages on behalf of workers; drawing on his SENAI training as a citizen-machinist inculcated in the same developmentalist values ostensibly upheld by military and business leaders, Lula maneuvered to win labor demands without looking like a threat to the regime (251); deploying the personal touch that informed his relationships in and outside the union hall, Lula leveled honestly and transparently with his fellow workers when labor struggles turned sour, and in so doing he turned personal trust into collective power (292); shaped not by ideology but by the immediatism that informed his asistencia, Lula made clear and consistent demands that threw adversaries off balance and reached an audience beyond workers: “When asked what workers wanted,” observes French, “Lula always answered with a straightforward ‘more’: more salary, more dignified conditions, more consumer durables, more time with their family, and so on” (237).Here, perhaps, lies the book's most important insight: what distinguishes Lula's politics of cunning from crass calculation is the ends to which he places it. His politics is one not devoid of but rife with basic principles of justice, equity, decency, and fairness deep in the heart of Lula's life history (284). These principles, and Lula's efforts to make them real via a cunning approach to politics, informed his quest for the executive beginning in 1989, and shaped both the ambitions and limitations of his presidency. In this sense “Lula's gifts and talents,” writes French, paraphrasing Lula's brother Frei Chico, “must be seen in relation to the overwhelming majority of Brazilians denied not only a hunger-free decent life but even the opportunity to ‘be someone’ with a least a minimal capacity to change his or her immediate world, however modestly” (340). Elevating the politics of immediatism to a national stage, and in the process enlarging the horizon of what is possible for Brazilians long sidelined from the political game, especially the young people of the book's cover, is Lula's lasting legacy.But that same legacy also raises a nagging question: How could a politician so skilled at reading and navigating landscapes of threat and opportunity vis-à-vis the powerful—the essence of cunning—be railroaded by a resurgent right, his successor impeached, himself in jail, his party on the ropes? Squaring that circle requires a nuanced understanding of the inner workings of Brazil's political class, of which Lula was at best an unwelcome interloper rather than full-fledged member, “a foreign body to be ritually expelled” (371). Partly, French's answer is that much as Lula drew on cunning to change, learn, and adapt, so too did Brazil's entrenched right adapt to Lula's accomplishments, and once he was out of office, it marshalled the legal and extralegal tools at its disposal to engineer a return to power. But it may be that the limits of cunning are more significant than French allows, or perhaps that Lula's own politics of cunning, informed as it is by powerful principles of social justice, has an analogue in the right, one that lurks throughout the book but remains out of view until it surges with fiery rage. Shining a spotlight on that underside of cunning remains a pending and urgent task, for which French has laid the groundwork and terms of debate.Ultimately, the Lula who emerges from French's account may not satisfy critics or supporters. It is, however, the Lula that is. And while French does not hide his own admiration for Lula and his politics, his aim is another: to give an account of Lula on his own terms rather than those projected onto him. On that score and myriad others, French has ensured that debates about Lula, cunning, and their implications for left politics in Brazil and beyond can henceforth move forward on firmer ground

Political science · Politics · French Urban and Social Studies · Law · Psychology