Partido Dos Trabalhadores

The Partido dos Trabalhadores (Workers Party, PT) of Brazil is one the world's largest and most original democratic socialist parties. In the early 1980s, while most left-wing parties elsewhere were moving away from class-based programs, PT's founding members explicitly conceived it as a party representing the interests of the working class.

The PT has its origin in the metal workers' strike of 1978, led by the Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, in the ABCD industrial belt around São Paulo, which initiated a wave of strikes throughout Brazil in 1979 and gave birth to a new generation of union leaders, referred to as the autênticos (authentics). Ever since, Lula has remained the undisputed leader of the party and has had considerable weight within it. The credibility of this new unionism also helped to attract to the party activists from the Landless Rural Workers Movement (MST), the Christian base communities of the Catholic Church, numerous small revolutionary organizations, university professors and students, gay and lesbian rights groups, as well as some dissident congressmen from the Movimento Democrático Brasileiro (Brazilian Democratic Movement) from the region of São Paulo.

If we look at its social base and many of its leaders, the PT is certainly the party of the poor in Brazil. Starting with Lula, many of its leading figures come from poor families themselves. People like Benedicta da Silva, a black woman and shantytown dweller from Rio de Janeiro, or Maria Silva de Souza, Afro-Indian woman and rubber tapper from the Amazon, becoming senators would be inconceivable in any other party.

For the union leaders who were simultaneously involved in the creation of the Central Única de Trabalhadores (Central Workers Union), as well as social movement activists, the PT was meant to be the voice of social movements in the political arena. Social movements were not to subordinate their [Page 1095]struggle to the political objectives of the party. Hence, social movements always viewed the PT as part of the movement that opposed the implementation of neoliberal policies.

The PT is a party of activists and a party of tendencies. In 1982, its membership amounted to 245,000, and it is said to have reached around 1 million members in the late 1980s. The most active petistas (PT members) belong to one of the numerous tendencies, whose ideologies range from variants of Marxism to European-style social democracy. Tendencies have their own leaders, meetings, and newspapers and are constantly negotiating to influence the party and to have some of their members appointed within the party, within PT governments, or as candidates for office. Until the 1990s, the majority tendency was Articulação, which was dominated by the autênticos. In the early 1990s, Articulação split into three tendencies, making the internal politics much more dynamic but also less cohesive.

Reflecting this diversity, PT's ideology has always been eclectic and has evolved throughout the years. When it was created, most petistas called themselves socialists but criticized socialist regimes of Eastern Europe for not respecting democratic rights. At the same time, most of them were also very critical of the inequalities inherent to the capitalist system and the restrictive character of liberal democracy. They also argued for a democratic revolution that would redistribute wealth and implement forms of direct democracy. Since the mid-1990s, the PT has moved to the center, and some of its prominent leaders have accepted many of the precepts of neoliberalism. Despite this shift, the PT is the only party in Brazil that has taken up issues of discrimination on the basis of gender, race, and sexual orientation.

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