The proletarius response to unemployment, misery and hunger

Masses, 30^th year, n. 570 – August 19^th to September 2^nd, 2018.

There is an absolute link between low wages, unemployment, misery and hunger. They are manifestations of capitalism, in general, and of backward economies, in particular. The history of capitalism in semi colonial Brazil, marked by the law of uneven and combined development, is based on the poverty and misery of the masses. The country still has inheritances from its colonial-slave past.

The development of capitalism was presented by the bourgeoisie as the way to solve the old scourge of misery. In the past, there has been a discussion of the need for agrarian reform as a means to overcome the extreme poverty of the peasantry and to boost the internal market in order to boost industrialization. This thesis of nationalism was buried. The MST sought to revive it, especially in the 1980s and 1990s, with no result. The national reformist PT government put an end to it.

The penetration of capitalist relations in the countryside advanced in the form of large estate and latifundia. To a great extent, the countryside was subjected to the city. Indicator of the development of the capitalist productive forces and reduction of the weight of the old pre-capitalist relations. The leaps in industrialization and urbanization, however, did not uproot the peasant and proletarian masses of misery. The various stages of the construction of capitalism show the growth of the high concentration of wealth under the control of the bourgeois minority and the expansion of the poverty and misery of the majority.

This polarization comes to this day in such a magnitude that it becomes an economic-social disintegration and a potentiation of barbarism. The labor force – a fundamental component of the productive forces – is mutilated by unemployment, underemployment, a minimum wage of hunger and an average wage of poverty. The 32 million children and adolescents who suffer from poverty undoubtedly portray the social ruin of capitalism. They correspond to 61% of 53 million of a whole generation, who would have to be prepared to join the workforce. Unemployment and underemployment hit 27.6% of workers. It is a high percentage of the workforce.

The six thousand job search queue, recently formed in São Paulo, through a sham advertisement from the UGT bureaucracy, portrays the desperate quest for survival. No wonder the 63,880 homicides per year. Much less the prediction that, in a short time, Brazil will surpass the mark of one million inmates. The economic crisis only aggravates the structural social crisis.

One of the fundamental contradictions: the national productive forces, conditioned by the world’s stagnation, cannot make a leap forward. Poor growth has prevailed for decades. It is symptomatic of the severe recession of 2015 and 2016, considered the largest in Brazil’s economic history. The next two years only interrupted the downward curve. Real growth, capable of catching up with the productive forces, has not been established. The masses bear the brunt of the negative consequences.

It is on this collapse that the political crisis, the failure of PT reform, the coup d’état, the installation of the civil dictatorship, the anti-national and anti-popular reforms, the reaction of the exploited, culminated in the general strike of April last year and now the current elections. The impose transition is completed; and soon the country will have an elected bourgeois government. The exploited do not expect anything from the restoration of the “democratic” order prior to the coup. They know that unemployment, underemployment and misery will continue to plague their lives. Whoever be the elected candidate will have to bow before the financial capital and the growing trade war waged by imperialism.

The exploited will have to resume the path of direct struggle, strikes, blockades and demonstrations. The task at hand is to denounce undemocratic elections, to reject electoral maneuvers, to unmask the lies of the candidates and to propagandize the proletariat’s claims and strategy of power. The flags of employment and wages, of combating poverty and miseries, should head the claims program.