The secret rictual of the old democracy – the elections – has served, everytime more, to prove exactly the contrary. That is: if the electoral farce tries to present the government system as a democratic one, actually unmasks it as the opposite.
One can see: who guarantees the good performance of a certain candidate? Ultimately and exceptuating some cases and particular moments, it is his assignment with the “ votes’ merchants “. The merchants of votes, those who could offer them to the candidates – in a local or general election –are the local oligarchies.
The base of the local power
Where does this power of the local oligarchies come from, and for what reason, in the local elections, their power is still more effective? The power resides, above all, in the landownership. The giant land monopoly in the hands of the landownership in a backward country like ours, producing a huge ruined peasant mass and hunger-stricken semi-proletarians in the villages – municipalities around which generates the inevitable reproduction of the semifeudal economic relations – the underlying servitude in different grades and shapes. It does not matter if the landownership is a property of an individual or a financial corporation, “unproductive“ or “productive agrobusiness” as long as it did not alter essentially ( just in the form) the way it is related with the explored peasant masses and semi-proletarians, directly or indirectly, by its dense networks of economic domination.
Revolucionários do movimento tenentista depõem governo oligárquico de São Paulo em 1924. Foto: Arquivo do estado de São Paulo.
It rises, upon this landownership economic basis, a political dominance much rougher and more backward than the classic liberal bourgeois type. Such a domination is the direct political-militar control, despotic and classist, guaranteed and manifested by troops of private gunmen, more and more profissionalized and militarized and the corresponding underlying political-social clientelism never surpassed in essence. Any person who lives and knows the corners in any region of the country is able to certify the currency of this phenomenon in different grades.
With this system, paradoxically complex and rough, arcaic and sophisticated, fragile and resistant, the landlords obtain, every election, the guarantee that the polls result the election of those politicians directly indicated for the Cityhalls, city Council, even the federal government, Senate, Second Chamber and the high summits of the Judiciary. Being the basis for the reproduction of the political system, such content crosses the countryside and is reproduced in the cities through the paramilitary groups and traffic dealers, whose similar despotism and patronage over the masses guarantee their reproduction in the old State apparatus.
Not a mere bourgeois democracy
A regime of democratic-bourgeois contents like that appeared after bourgeois revolution in imperialist countries is generally characterized by breaking the direct control the landlords enjoy over the masses and break the feudal monopoly of the land in order to boost the national capitalism. It is clear that nowadays, in the imperialist countries, this liberal democratic regime, politically and legally, is no longer the same as its emergence since the passage of the capital to the monopolist stage (parasitic, decomposing and agonizing imperialism), the State has moved on to its reorganization which is increasingly forming and dismissing the conquered rights, not without high political costs.
In countries of bureaucratic capitalism, dominated by imperialism, however, for not breaking the feudal monopoly of the land but rather strengthened it and their forms of property relationships evolved, neither was the direct military control over the masses broken, and any possibility of establishing a democratic bourgeois republic with its effective content was always aborted, although a republiquet had emerged. The formal democratic rights appeared only in the letter of the law, due to pressure from the mass media or by counterinsurgent action by imperialism, are not applied in their entirety and are discarded without delay and large costs when convenient. They are not effective. The masses of the feudal countries, for not having experienced the founding milestones of a democratic regime, are not able to see clearly the seriousness of the situation that weighs on them, how undemocratic the political system is and in which way it could be different. These are the effects of the defeat and pendency of the democratic revolution.
Furthermore, what do the nearly 90 executed candidates and 170 other victims of attempetd homicides in this year municipal elections tell us – a case every 3 hours – in the final stretch of the campaign? (Underestimated figures). What do the news reveal on the military wardlords in the metropolises and countryside that are demanding the ‘free voters’ comprovation of their votes in their candidates? Why corruption in our country is the modus operandi of oficial politics and reproduction of the political and economic system? All of this reveals to us that this democracy is a bureaucratic, caudillist and landowner democracy, even lacking bourgeois republicanism which reproduces political power through direct control guaranteed at its base by the land monopoly of the ownership distinctly semifeudal factors that the wrongly called “Revolution of Thirty” did not even scratch, betraying the Tenentist Movement. On this semifeudal bureaucratic building, endemically sick, the germ of fascism is constantly incubated often used “to put order in the house” when major crisis arise driven by the development of revolutionary situations. That is why in our country the political system has always oscillated between overtly and tyrannical and the ‘democratic rule of law’.
The democratic path of the people
Can dream the so-called “liberal-democrats” when they think it is possible to avoid fascism ( or reach and preserve “individual freedoms”) within this system of exploitation, without subverting it and without replacing it with the Power of New Democracy. The coup generals and their eat-and-sleep captain, Bolsonaro, can dream when they think it is possible to have a great power under the claws of imperialism and untouched landownership. Electoral opportunists can dream as well, believing it is possible to achieve better conditions for the poor, through unworthy addiction to the increasingly absolute power of reactionaries, at the time of imperialism.
The effective democracy in Brasil and all the consequent historical progress are only possible by denying this semifeudal and semicolonial republic, which involves destroying the landownership, confiscating the great bourgeoisie and expelling imperialism. These tasks can only be accomplished and concluded through the Democratic, Agrarian and Anti-Imperialist Revolution uninterrupted to Socialism initiated by the Agrarian Revolution, therefore led by the proletariat through its revolutionary party. This revolutionary party, based on the worker-peasants alliance as the nucleus of the United Front through the protracted people’s war carried out by the people’s Army of the new type.
Well, the proletariat is neither deaf nor oblivious to the call made by such historical tasks and
will put all the Brazilian people on their feet and, with it, the Republic of New Democracy, the People’s Republic of Brasil.
