Power and the opposition in power: Brazilian Elections 2002
By Pablo Assumpção

I was there among thousands of people celebrating the election of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, on October 27, 2002. At Paulista Avenue, financial center of the country, the crowd gathered in harmony as they celebrated democracy, change, and hope. I felt love and friendship coming out of their eyes – no one was a stranger, everyone had a bond, which was the knowledge of a collective act of change. As I was jumping up and down in the middle of the cars, a young man left his driver seat, his car with doors wide open, and ran to give me a hug. I thought to myself this can’t be Sao Paulo. Luckily I had arrived in Brazil after 15 months living in New York City in the morning of this very historical day.

Lula is nordestino from Pernambuco, has no college education, and his past is marked by workers’ radical strikes and socialist charged discourses. He first received political projection as union leader, when he was ahead of ABC Paulista’s metal workers strikes beginning in 1978. In 1980 he founded PT (Partido dos Trabalhadores – Workers Party). His victory against the official candidate of the president, José Serra, a well-known economist and former minister of Health and Economy, is an emblem of a double democratic meaning. First of all, it is the fourth time since the end of military regime that Brazilians elect their president through direct and free vote. The results prove that our democracy can bear real change in power. Second of all, due to his origins and union related past, Lula represents more than a renovation within governmental circles. He embodies the well recognized though constantly postponed expectations of social disparity reduction and democratization of opportunities. He is the man who represents, by his own image and history, large masses of people repressed and hurt by the “benefits of progress”.

Beginning to lead a country given to open neo-liberal economic policies for the last twenty years, Lula is now presented as hope, not only to Brazilians but to the entire Latin American continent. Hope that things will change, that the economic policy imposed to the continent by the IMF and the World Bank will start to be fought against. This historical election, made possible by 52 793 364 votes (61.27% of all valid votes), points to the fact that, as I heard an old man saying in a Sao Paulo street, “the hands of power will shift”.
I’d like to take some time here to look into the possibility of such an utterance.

Concentration of Wealth
Built as a review of Lula’s alliances with the right wing business elite and his promises of keeping previous contracts with the financial system, Cesar Benjamin wrote an article at Caros Amigos, a very progressive magazine in Brazil, stating his fear that such a political articulation could ruin Lula’s governmental plans.
Roughly, Benjamin’s argument is that the opposition would need to re-found the nation by taking away all instruments of power from the hands of our business bourgeoisie and placing them on the hands of chosen social groups living within the realms of work and culture. Making bonds with Brazilian bourgeoisie would only secure their power and consequently increase their wealth.

The matter seems rather delicate and deserves some attention. When one thinks about how a country like Brazil, with abundant natural resources and sufficient technical and productive capacity, can present such extreme poverty levels one realizes the problem is distribution of wealth. More precisely, the lack of it. In the early 90s we were the 8th, and are now the 12th largest economy in the world. We have a high medium per capita income, one of the highest in the so-called third world. Nevertheless, regarding poverty indicators we’re behind much more politically and economically disabled countries. We carry the fame of having the planet’s greatest social discrepancy. The concentration of wealth – that is, the stock of goods in the form of real estate, industries, land, etc. – is figured on the top of the social scale, restricted to less than 5% of the country’s population.

According to Benjamin, changing this frame of social discrepancy has to be the main goal of Lula’s government. And the problem is that PT’s alliances during campaign – documents that secure the power of the economic elite – are barriers Lula himself created for his own path. It is important to expand this thought to a higher level of discussion.

To alter systems of power
If in order to make a difference what the new government needs is an alteration within the systems of power – and NOT huge economic decisions – what does this “alteration” exactly mean?
‘Power’ could be explained as something kept by those groups that control resources and decisive institutions to the organization of social life, making sure that society works according to their interests. In the same article, Benjamin points to the four main instances of power in Brazil: the property of land, the country’s main natural resource; the control over the financial system, which determines the allocation of available net resources; the command of means of mass communication, which in a society like ours are at the base of opinion and value making; and the access to education and culture, propellers to the formation of citizenship.

If the same elite is able to keep control over land, wealth, information and culture, preserving its capacity to organize and command social life, the poverty situation in Brazil will not change. To alter the systems of power, then, would mean to transfer control of such instances and institutions to other social groups.
Apart from not understanding how exactly this alteration will radically change a frame of social disparity as ancient as the colony itself, what in my opinion Benjamin doesn’t make clear is who will be these “other” social groups. In a country as diverse as Brazil, what social group is able to represent our population? Moreover, what is the criteria for choosing such ‘new elite’? Should we propose a plebiscite? “Who do you think should be given the right to organize and command the Brazilian social life?” “Who deserves to hold the power of manipulating our opinions and agenda setting through media industry?” Sounds wonderful, but in our so praised electronic ballot box one would have to find all of our one hundred and fifty million names written as possible options.

It is not my intention to render vulgar Benjamin’s well-articulated argument, but rather to propose the possibility of being the whole system of representation that which is flawed. It would be wonderful to have real democracy – power to all social strata. But democracy demands political representation. Nowadays, who can represent whom? Who can speak in my name? And yours?
While Benjamin proposes to transfer power from the hands of a right wing oriented elite to the ones of a left wing oriented one, I realize that the most radical change of all, which is that of a system of power as the organizing factor of political life, its ontology and our dependency on it, is not being discussed.

The bourgeoisie we criticize today was once responsible for a historical revolution that put the aristocracy in jeopardy. Today it somehow becomes this aristocracy. Take this new one away in order to replace it for another ideology appears to be a repetition of History. Some may call it democracy. So be it. I still believe that it is in the power of “power” that lies all of our social injustices.
I try to believe Lula will be able to make some difference in Brasilia. I would have voted for him if I had the chance, though I do not consider myself represented by him or by all the different “elites” surrounding him in Congress and elsewhere.

As a response to the plurality of critics regarding his “alliances” during campaign I could say that a president is only a chief of State – the role of a president is but a performance with designated social contracts. Lula did not have so many options regarding whom to make deals with. And that is not the fault of a man, but of a whole system of political representation (and consequently, power) created by the logic of western thought.

So, then, what to be done? What other way of organizing political life if not through distribution of power? How to govern societies if not through political representation? Maybe that should be, in my opinion, the debate among political scientists and intellectuals who consider themselves “opposition”. Some day, who knows, an exit is found.