The Emergence of the Workers' Party

This book is a journalistic account of the rise of the Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers' party-PT) in Brazil from its formation in 1980 to the 1994 general election. It has seven chapters and one additional one containing an interview with Luis Inaicio (Lula) da Silva, one of the main framers and founders of the PT, its principal leader, and twice its unsuccessful candidate for the presidency of the republic (in 1989 and 1994). The text reads easily, follows a suitable chronological arrangement, and covers some of the present-day problems of Brazil's complex society. All the same, it fails, precisely because of its journalistic approach, to treat the crucial factors of the country's social and political structure in any depth. It is also unsatisfactory in the way it interprets some aspects of the day-to-day struggle against oppression of every type in modern Brazil, from the political oppression of the 1964-1985 dictatorship to the economic oppression of these times of freedom of expression. The quotation marks are needed here because in Brazil only one section of society has access to the means of spreading its ideas: the faction that has been in control of the country politically and economically ever since the time of the dictatorship. The press and even more the electronic media are dominated and manipulated by a small group of businessmen who block any attempt to spread any information beyond what suits the government and the ruling classes. This has surely been a key to Lula's two defeats, but it is a point, I feel, that the book hardly touches upon. The book begins with an introductory chapter presenting the background to the creation of the PT and explaining the climate of optimism that enveloped the party and a considerable proportion of Brazilian society at the beginning of 1994, when Lula's electoral triumph seemed a certainty. It goes on to discuss how the forces of conservatism united behind and worked to promote the sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso, seeing in him and his monetary stabilization plan, the so-called Real Plan, the answer to Lula's seemingly victorious progress toward the presidency of Brazil

Contempt · Democracy · Dictatorship · Government (linguistics) · Impunity · Oppression · Political economy · Political science · Politics · Presidency · Sociology · Brazilian cultural history and politics · Law