In recent months, Brazil has been embroiled in a dispute over the recent presidential election, a familiar terrain of slap fights, sermons by politicians and heated arguments at the family dinner table. None of these activities are of any importance to the proletariat, even though they are advertised as part of democracy, this putrid and lying system that dilutes the voice and power of the proletariat into appeals to the “people” and the nation, seeking always to derail the class struggle into the harmless path of the parliament.

After a first round in which a host of insignificant figures were eliminated after being written off by the public and the media, Luís Inácio Lula da Silva, the leading leftist candidate, was elected president, unseating his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, much maligned for his involvement in corruption and scandalous comments – that is, for not being able to competently run the bourgeois state. But while Lula promises to “govern for all Brazilians” and Bolsonaro shouts and cries that there was fraud in the election, we all know that it is a fruitless and futile effort for anyone but the elected politicians and their lobbying groups.

In the same vein as the pro-Bolsonaro faction, the pro-Lula faction and its allies (PSOL, PCdoB, regime unions) compose a multi-classist group, only different from the former by their discourse, their symbols, and the numerical composition of classes and social strata within them. Although they drag proletarian, lumpen-proletarian and peasant groups in their midst, these two parties are, in program and practice, bourgeois. They do not advocate for the political independence of the proletariat and will never do so.

An important detail to keep in mind is the result of the 2022 elections: while Lula boasts of having mobilized 60 million Brazilians to vote for him, Bolsonaro managed to reach 58 million. Although this sounds horrible to the reformist’s mind, we must point out that the Brazilian state runs on corruption and unstable governments, and that the working class in Brazil still does not possess the developed and competent organizations that could expand its activity in the terrain of class struggle, thus letting the airwaves be dominated by populist and electoralist garbage. This is not something that has been ignored by the Brazilian proletariat, a large part of which sees no possibility of systemic change within this democracy.

To illustrate this point, out of a total population of 214 million, Brazil has a registered electorate of 156 million. Of these 156 million citizens, Exame reports that about 32 million did not show up to vote in either of the two rounds of elections (having justified their absence in court or not – in the latter case, they are obliged to pay a fine). According to Estadão, another 1.9 million cast a blank vote (accepting the winning candidate) and almost 3.5 million cast a null vote (not accepting any of the candidates in the second round of the elections).

Lula and Bolsonaro together totaled 118 million votes. But that means 96 million people – more than twice the population of Argentina – were left out of the country’s “festival of democracy”. Politicians always claim to have massive popular support behind them, but at the end of the day, they can only rule on behalf of the bourgeoisie, and their once solid popularity frequently vanishes into thin air.

As we have observed over the last ten years, Brazil has seen the rise to media prominence of a stream of right-wing petty-bourgeois activists and political figures, who have united behind the nation’s green and yellow banner, denouncing the “chaos” and “instability” of Brazilian politics, complaining about corruption scandals (but never those of their faction) and giving airtime to anyone who agrees with their narrative. They identify a vast and vaguely defined “communist conspiracy” as the source of all their ills, in a carbon copy of the standard discourse of the political right everywhere, from the United States to Europe to the less prominent states of the world. They do not recognize the outcome of the 2022 election and insist that Bolsonaro won it.

On January 8, 2023, this mob, dominated by petty bourgeois elements (but dragging along people from other social groups) decided to join forces and march towards the state’s palaces in the capital, Brasilia, occupying the buildings for a few hours and engaging in an orgy of vandalism, breaking pots and throwing chairs, all while live-streaming their actions and taking pictures of each other for all the world to see. The police made their class interests clear by refusing to do anything more than stand by and watch the crowd sow chaos. Upon learning of this, the president decreed a federal intervention in the district of Brasilia, sending in the army and the rest of the police to arrest more than 1,000 demonstrators. The palaces were quickly reoccupied, and the uproar died down. Lula took advantage of the situation to put forward his own national-reformist discourse.

The bourgeois media, especially the Marinho family mouthpiece, Rede Globo, which has intelligently supported Lula and “democracy”, rushed to condemn the incident, launching a barrage of concerned words, such as “terrorists”, “criminals” and “insurrectionists”. They cried their eyes out for the toppled tables, scratched paintings of Cândido Portinari and desecrated insignia of the Brazilian State. Many governments, the UN and the OAS have already repudiated the incident and made political attacks against former president Jair Bolsonaro.

Meanwhile, the proletarian watches the events on TV, says “what a mess”, shrugs their shoulders and takes the bus to work.

The Brazilian “left”, of course, did not think twice about heroically condemning the offensive of this dangerous army of Instagram influencers and pool cleaning supply store owners which descended upon the most sacred temple of the people: the Trotskist Esquerda Diário has called on the proletariat to organize a “national strike against the putschists”, as if the repressive apparatus of the state would have too much trouble dealing with the latter.

These actors of this perpetual theatrical play of the bourgeois state can lament the pictures of all the acts of vandalism which occurred in the state palaces of Brasilia, as if it were Rome and the Vandals; but this does not concern the proletarians, most of whom have never seen any decent, guaranteed infrastructure in their neighborhoods, in the workplaces or in their children’s schools. And while the new government will hire workers to clean up its house in a week, to the latter they can offer nothing more than Lula’s sentimentalist stunts and words.

The events of January 8 in Brazil were, down to the tiniest detail, an almost exact replica of those of January 6, 2021, in Washington D.C. In both cases, a group of hysterical petty-bourgeois right-wing activists ran over a sympathetic police guard, which did not oppose them, into the main seat of the country’s government, occupying the building before being quickly ejected from the premises. In both incidents, the bourgeois media worldwide spread panic over the threat of a fascist coup, declaring that “democracy is in danger” as if it were a kidnapped princess. And now, the State has tested and improved a set of tools that it can and will one day use against the proletariat, when the politicians, the treacherous regime union leaders and the discourse of “defending the nation and democracy” will not be enough to contain their struggles.

As has already been demonstrated, right-wing petty bourgeois putschism has become a common and even predictable fact of life in modern political society. But, unlike the pundits of anti-fascism, we do not attribute its rise to abstract motives. In any case, it is the logical culmination of tectonic forces occurring under the bourgeois state, a damning piece of evidence that the ruling class cannot rule as it once did. The old consensus, built on the “fight against corruption”, has collapsed, and now they must begin another theatrical play; and almost all the old “anti-corruption” factions, which once supported Bolsonaro’s presidency, have jumped off the boat long ago. As Marx once succinctly put it in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

“Society is saved just as often as the circle of its rulers’ contracts, as a more exclusive interest is maintained against a wider one. Every demand of the simplest bourgeois financial reform, of the most ordinary liberalism, of the most formal republicanism, of the shallowest democracy, is simultaneously castigated as an “attempt on society” and stigmatized as “socialism”. And finally, the high priests of “religion and order” themselves are driven with kicks from their Pythian tripods, hauled out of their beds in the darkness of night, put in prison vans, thrown into dungeons or sent into exile; their temple is razed to the ground, their mouths are sealed, their pens broken, their law torn to pieces in the name of religion, of property, of the family, of order. Bourgeois fanatics for order are shot down on their balconies by mobs of drunken soldiers, their domestic sanctuaries profaned, their houses bombarded for amusement in the name of property, of the family, of religion, and of order. Finally, the scum of bourgeois society forms the holy phalanx of order, and the hero Crapulinski installs himself in the Tuileries as the ‘savior of society’.”

Bolsonaro’s supporters fit the mold quite well here as followers of Crapulinski, but the Brazilian ruling classes have no interest in any more of what they have to offer. Democracy, with its reserve of scapegoats, false solutions and pacifying dead ends, has proven more capable of masking and maintaining bourgeois domination than the naked military dictatorship (like the one that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985) that is called for by the pro-Bolsonaro mob. The leadership of the armed forces, satisfied with their pensions and privileges, which will not be threatened by Lula, has also decided to withdraw from the pro-Bolsonaro riots, so as not to risk their assets again.

And while the “left” and the new consensus rush to proclaim the “victory of democracy against authoritarianism”, other tectonic shifts are sliding under our feet. Bolsonaro’s supporters have been so thorough in appropriating the nation’s sacred symbols – the flag, the Brazilian Football Confederation jersey shirt, the national anthem – that his opponents have become allergic to them by association. Even the bourgeois media have tacitly admitted that what we call Brazil was built on the backs of African and indigenous slaves, a society unequal by provenance. And while observers are likely to fall for identitarian narratives without a party or reading culture that explains the class relations of society (something we will always work to diffuse or recover), whatever “magic” once permeated these once sacred symbols of the nation is dissipating, and many have begun to question whether they represent the working masses at all. As we wrote in our analysis of the January 6 riots at the U.S. Capitol in our February 2021 issue:

“The riot at the United States Capitol on January 6 was the convulsion of a dying social system. The deep crisis of capitalism became a political crisis in the leading power of the bourgeois world. The U.S. has not seen an emergency like this one since the outbreak of its civil war in 1861, before it rose to become the leading capitalist power. The extent of its fall – from the triumph of the Union in 1865 over the slaveholders’ insurrection to the seizure of the Capitol by the MAGA mob– seemed unthinkable even a few weeks ago. But as Marx and Engels observed, under capitalism ‘all that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man is at last compelled to face with sober senses his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind’ (Manifesto of the Communist Party)”.

Regardless of whatever sermons they currently come up with, the Brazilian bourgeoisie and its State will treat Bolsonaro’s supporters with a relative slap on the wrist. The governor of the Federal District of Brasilia, the center–rightist Ibaneis Rocha, was suspended from office for 90 days in retaliation for not doing enough to deter or crush the rioters. But this only means that he will assume office in April this year. Supporters of the current government boast of using facial recognition technology to identify and catch the rioters, who did not even bother to cover their faces, but money and connections will ensure them bail or a golden cage.

But, of course, as the increasingly harsh repression in Brazil’s neighboring countries shows, none of this will await the next proletarian revolt, which they will try to crush by any of the means at the disposal of the bourgeoisie and its State. The working class will be shown the iron gauntlet –since this class, which sustains this whole society through its labor, is the only destabilizing group that really frightens the bourgeoisie.

The working class does not deserve to be the footstool of any opportunist politician or faction of the ruling classes.