The first round of the Brazilian elections leaves a question that the left should not dodge. Lula finished second against Flávio Bolsonaro, with 45.16% against 47.03%, and lost around 3.4 million votes compared to the first round of 2022. Beyond the electoral result, the politically significant fact is the wear and tear of a government that came to power promising to represent the workers and the poorest sectors again.
The explanation cannot be reduced to the advance of the right. We must also look at the limitations of the Lulista project.
Lula promised a reduction in the working day, the end of the 6×1 scale of working days (six days on, one day off), greater rights for platform/gig workers, an increase in the minimum wage, housing and social policies. Some measures advanced; others were left pending or unfinished. But reducing the problem to a list of unfulfilled promises would be insufficient.
The central question is why a left-wing government finds it so difficult to carry out even its most basic reforms.
Limit Not only Lula
The fundamental problem of Lulism is its reformist strategy: it aims to improve the lives of workers by maintaining the fundamental economic structures of capitalism.
To govern, Lula needs to negotiate with Congress, with businessmen, with large economic interests and with the institutions of the state. But the demands of the workers have an obvious limit for those who control capital.
A significant increase in wages, a reduction in working hours or greater rights for workers can affect corporate profits. Therefore, as long as the economy continues to be organised around the private ownership of the large means of production and the search for profitability, the reforms will have limits that no government can eliminate simply through good intentions.
This is the contradiction that reformism fails to resolve: it wants to transform the living conditions of the majority without transforming the power relations that produce those conditions.
From Reform to Revolution
The problem is not that the reforms are useless. On the contrary: every conquest that improves the living conditions of the workers has value and must be defended.
The problem arises when these conquests are presented as the definitive path to a just society.
A higher wage does not eliminate exploitation. A shorter working day does not eliminate the power of capital over production. A social program can reduce poverty, but it does not eliminate the economic relations that reproduce inequality.
For this reason, the struggle for reforms must be linked to a perspective of revolutionary transformation.
The decisive question is who controls wealth and who makes the fundamental decisions of the economy.
From this perspective, workers should not limit themselves to pressuring governments to make reforms. They must organize themselves to conquer political and economic power and bring the main means of production under the democratic control of the working class itself.
That means building trade union and popular organisations capable of disputing power from below and developing a political alternative independent of business interests.
The Real Brazilian Lesson
If Lula loses the second round, the left should not limit itself to saying that Brazilian society has turned to the right. It should also ask itself why a government that presented itself as a defender of workers failed to turn its expectations into sufficiently profound transformations.
The answer is not to seek a more efficient reformism.
It is in recognizing that there is a contradiction between administering capitalism and ending the conditions that produce exploitation and poverty.
Lula’s problem, then, is not simply Lula. It is the political project he represents.
The Socialism and Liberty Party (PSOL) could have raised an alternative but gave up doing so, not even presenting its own presidential candidacy in the first round to take advantage of the opportunity to offer a path to those who were disappointed with the unfulfilled expectations of the Lula government. Defending anti-capitalist public policies for the benefit of the people, the poor and the workers would have strengthened the struggle against Bolsonaro. But by becoming more Lulist than Lula, the PSOL gave up on building a solid dam against the advance of Bolsonarism.
As long as the left limits its objectives to better administering capitalist society, its conquests will be conditioned by the power of those who control the economy. The revolutionary alternative proposes another direction: that the workers go from being voters and beneficiaries of reforms to becoming the protagonists of political and economic power.
Because a truly dignified life for the majority cannot depend eternally on the promises of a government.
The revolutionary thesis is simple: reforms can achieve improvements; only a transformation of economic power can create the conditions to definitively overcome exploitation and poverty. And this transformation can only be the work of the organized workers themselves.