Lula and the Future of the Past

Abstract

In 2012, John French and Alexandre Fortes wrote in the pages of this journal about Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, Dilma Rousseff, and the legacies and challenges of Brazil's Workers’ Party (PT).1 Writing from a moment in which many imagined the future of the left emerging from the “country of the future,” French and Fortes reiterated the sentiment that we were living then “not only in an epoch of changes but in a change of epochs,” in which the historical roadmaps of the past did not hold sway.2 In such a context, for those wishing to understand PT governance, one salient question involved the ways in which the Lula government had broken with the past (11), and one compelling answer evoked Stephane Monclaire's notion that “political life is not above or beyond the day-to-day” (22).Those ruminations have acquired contorted significance in the tumultuous near-decade since they were written. Fortes and French saw many storm clouds on the horizon even in 2012; the endurance of corruption and “physiological” interest politics, looming economic challenges, accelerating social demands, and the difficulties of integrating the contradictory, patchwork left of the PT without Lula's unparalleled political savvy. Yet virtually no one foresaw how those difficulties would be amplified and subsumed in a calamitous storm of dirty politics and economic collapse that ripped President Rousseff from power in 2016 and eventually upended the democratizing process that had shaped Brazil's political teleologies for more than three decades. Brazil's 2010s certainly marked a change of epochs for which we lack effective language, and the notion that political life is woven in the day-to-day has never seemed more apt. But the path thus charted is so radically different from that projected by Lula that the question of whether or not he broke from the Brazilian past takes on new significance. Is what we are seeing a fiercely reactionary blowback to radical transformation? Is it instead a violent stirring of deep currents of Brazilian conservatism, which the PT was not radical enough to eradicate? Or is it these things and also something more, a transformation in the very fabric of Brazil's “day-to-day” that ultimately drained vitality and resonance from a democratic and institutionalist vision of the future that was irrevocably entwined with Lula's own triumphant past?John French's Lula and His Politics of Cunning deserves to be read on its own terms, as a landmark biography of a pivotal political figure, grounded in French's four decades of intense scholarly and personal engagement with the industrial world that shaped Lula and the PT. Yet as I followed French's deeply researched account of Lula's riveting life story, and especially as I pondered the mid-twentieth-century decades that French brings to life with especially forceful detail, I could not help but wonder: How much of Lula's dynamism was based on his embodiment of a projected future that, for many people, was fragmenting and dissolving below the surface even in the halcyon days of Lula's presidency? And might we find in that dissonance some explanation of Brazil's recent unraveling?Many of French's most finely rendered arguments are rooted in his vivid depiction of the electric energy of mid-twentieth-century São Paulo as it was experienced by a generation of young migrant men who lassoed their fates to the city's heady developmentalist ambitions.3 Lula and his family were part of Brazil's own Great Migration, a massive, racialized, generational move from the Northeast to the Southeast, from the countryside to the city, from the patriarchal logic of a slave past to the hybrid dialectics of Brazilian modernity. After a harrowing journey from rural Pernambuco in the tracks of an abusive husband and father who had already established a second family in the port city of Santos, Lula (along with his mother and siblings) eventually moved to São Paulo with virtually nothing in the mid-1950s. According to French, they entered a world where nothing was rooted or grounded, an urban, industrial environment undergoing fevered change with few preexisting communities, durable identities, or well-established structures of understanding. . . . The rapidly industrializing São Paulo was thus a city where luck seemed real and ambition could flourish in the decades after 1950, a place “where the different social classes were linked to each other by a similar mentality. The spirit of adventure was visible from the top to the bottom of the social scale.”4Lula was literally and figuratively a favorite son of that migrant family, moving with his mother's tenacious guidance from street vending and odd-jobbing to the heights of working-class social mobility. The contours of Lula's socioeconomic progress were delimited by generations of developmentalist social and industrial policy. As was typical in his social world, Lula's academic education did not go beyond the fourth grade. But as a teenager he forged a path to “winning in life” through São Paulo's dynamic iteration of Brazil's innovative industrial education and apprenticeship programs, driven into high gear with the explosive midcentury influx of multinational heavy industry.5 As a torneiro mecânico (lathe operator), the young Lula had his choice of prime jobs in the most technologically advanced sector of the Brazilian economy; as a graduate of the SENAI industrial education program, his success was forever linked to an iteration of state-led industrial development that viewed investment in human capital as a sine qua non of economic modernization.In French's portrayal, Lula's experience of that world “barreling full speed ahead” and his membership in a generational cohort of “happy, hard-working young men who saw a clear path to a better future” were foundational to his subsequent political formation.6 Most crucially, unlike his older brother, Frei Chico, the young Lula was not inclined to political radicalism. He had no known connection the grassroots activism that pushed his home state of Pernambuco to the effervescent forefront of progressive experimentation in the 1950s and 1960s; he did not participate in labor union politics in São Paulo before the late 1960s; he was never a communist and had little use for intellectual leftism. Emblematically, like many of his fellow workers, Lula was initially “open” to the military coup of 1964 (83). His rise in military-era union politics—from reluctant recruit to union president in six short years—was in fact predicated on his ambivalent relationship with labor activism, which allowed him to emerge as a consensus candidate, at once trusted by his fellow workers and ideologically unthreatening to collaborationist politicians such as Paulo Egydio Martins, the ARENA governor who attended his swearing in as president of the São Bernardo and Diadema metalworkers’ union in 1975 (161, 236).Though Lula was radicalized by his brother's arrest and torture in 1974, French attributes Lula's spectacular development as a union leader to more tactile political experiences: an intense apprenticeship with former union president Paulo Vidal Neto, which taught him to navigate the technical and political complexities of bread-and-butter union politics; and a total immersion in the daily realities of workers while advocating for union members in need of social welfare benefits. Even as Lula emerged after 1978 as the leader of the greatest industrial strikes São Paulo had ever seen, his vision was less revolutionary than it was a radically pragmatic and egalitarian variant of developmentalism: Lula wanted to open space for workers to claim—independently and without deference to anyone—their rightful share of the economic miracle they had helped to create (244).Throughout Lula and His Politics of Cunning, French underlines the taut and fraught relationship between Lula's supple, experiential brand of working-class activism and the rigid idealism of many students, intellectuals, and activists who protagonized the leftist political struggles of the military era. While Lula learned to collaborate with the lettered left, his disdain for filinhos de papai (coddled children) with romantic ideas about material deprivation remained; French pointedly quotes a landmark 1978 Vox Populi television interview in which Lula said that “the best way for students to help the working class is for them to stay in their universities” (242). Lula's insistence that workers of every class speak to their own realities became core to his politics in partial reaction to the illuminati's condescension and ignorance, which would persist throughout and beyond his presidency (241–44).Lula's rise to political prominence marked a kind of détente; subsequently the PT, almost miraculously, brought together a generation of skilled and organized workers—politicized by a lived sense of exploitation, disrespect, and frustrated expectations—and a heterodox coalition of intellectuals and activists transformed by the experience of military-era repression and the fragmentation of the Marxist left. Democratization and the 1988 Constitution seemed to provide the PT's working-class founders with the tools to “free labor relations of the authoritarian encumbrances that . . . left workers at the mercy of capital and the state” (298). At the same time, the party became a hothouse of experimentation with participatory democracy and progressive crusades for racial and gender equality, environmental protection, and social and economic rights.Yet even as the Constitution was formalized, French emphasizes, Lula himself remained acutely aware that one of the central fissures between mobilized workers and the lettered left had to do with trust in the transformative capacity of institutional change. Ordinary poor and working-class Brazilians, Lula remarked, were “disbelieving of everything” (307), and their priorities were painfully concrete: “We live in a country so miserable, the needs of the people so great, that the people want immediate results” (309). In those circumstances, the fundamental idiom of Brazil's working povo is what French refers to as “cunning”; effective advocacy did not depend on soaring rhetoric or ideological purity or on the construction of perfect institutions. Leadership depended, rather, on an ability “to relate to and manipulate those antagonistic to one's interests and desires” in order to achieve progress in a world “stacked against the poor, the weak, the colored and the uneducated” (335–36).In French's rendering, Lula's political ascension was largely based on a powerful sense of recognition: his supporters understood the dream of Great Migration mobility and progress that Lula personified and the idiom of cunning that guided his politics. Observers have sometimes attributed Lula's 2002 presidential win to ideological backtracking, an instrumental retreat from the red radicalism they projected onto Lula's fiery first forays into presidential politics. Yet French's account suggests that the compromises that Lula made in the 2002 campaign (and the many accommodations in ideology and practice that he made as president) were rooted in his political being, part and parcel of a political sensibility forged early on by the day-to-day realities of popular life, according to which the politics that can be trusted are those that achieve, with dignity, what is possible.By that measure, Lula's two terms delivered a great deal. The economy grew, hunger and inequality shrank, the minimum wage rose, and legions of workers were brought into the arena of formal employment and benefits. Access to primary and university education expanded rapidly, and access to consumer goods grew more quickly still. Affirmative action and educational reforms recognized for the first time the enduring power of slavery and its afterlives. All of this was driven, some said, by a purposeful amplification of the same forces that transformed Lula's life possibilities in the 1950s and 1960s: public policies that simultaneously opened channels of mobility and facilitated economic growth, distributed in such a way that everyone reaped the benefits. Briefly but brightly, Lula projected the dream of egalitarian developmentalism that his own life had embodied onto an entire nation. Little wonder that Lula left office with more than 80 percent approval, worthy of President Barack Obama's envy (1).Yet popular belief in Lula's ability to deliver meaningful change does not seem to have extended to enduring faith in the PT's vision of democratic, egalitarian, institutionally rooted development.French, echoing many sage observers, suggests an array of convincing reasons for Brazil's recent political calamities. In explaining Dilma Rousseff's fall, he points rightly to the cynical political calculations of corrupt legislators and the venal ambitions of center-right politicians. Lula's imprisonment was by most accounts a political hack job aimed at blocking his 2018 presidential run, spearheaded by a prosecutor who sought political fortune by prosecuting political enemies under the guise of an anticorruption crusade. Lula's persecution can also be reasonably understood as a “brutal comeuppance from those on Brazilian society's upper floors” (370), resentful of the equalizing forces Lula had set loose.But none of these factors can quite explain the Brazilian public's tolerance and even enthusiasm for wholesale attacks on the very forms of institutionalized citizenship and democratic practice that were central to Lula's trajectory and to his generational political project. Jair Bolsonaro—in so many ways Lula's antithesis—was elected by a decisive margin in 2018; his support was especially strong in São Paulo and across Brazil's South and Southeast. His constituency included significant numbers of people who were poor, Afro-descendant, and working class and who had previously voted for Lula.The question of why brings us back to the question of Lula's relationship with the past. It would be difficult to overestimate just how much the lifeworlds of Brazil's urban povo have diverged from the aspirational, upwardly mobile, industrializing world that forged Lula and his generation. Even in Lula's heyday, his brand of social mobility was a regional phenomenon; and even in São Paulo, it was the scarce privilege of a narrow band of young men, inaccessible to many in Lula's own family. After the crisis of the 1980s, Lula's trajectory largely ceased to be a realistic dream, as industry's share of GDP fell dramatically and employment in industry and the public sector stagnated and shrank. At the same time, even as the institutions of democratic governance theoretically expanded, schools and basic services often declined and the day-to-day experience of life in poor neighborhoods across Brazil became increasingly insecure, violent, and unhinged from reliable civic protections or guarantees.7 By the early 2010s, life in many of São Paulo's poor and working-class peripheries had been drained of the vital forces that had allowed Lula's generation to see democratic governance and citizenship as transformational tools. Rather than the electric urban landscape described by French, these are the urban spaces depicted since the early 2000s by sociologist Gabriel Feltran, defined over generations by “a series of crises: in formal employment, in Catholic religiosity, of the promise of social mobility for the working family, of social movements and their representativeness.”8Largely unprotected by democratic governance, unable to envision a clear path to social mobility, acutely aware of lost possibilities and forced to constantly code-switch between criminal, informal, and governmental logics of order and authority, residents of the modern equivalents of Lula's childhood neighborhoods still often retain enormous loyalty to the man himself. But the same “politics of cunning” that conditioned Lula's rise point the present generation toward an array of achievable futures that are not necessarily linear or progressive and that only sometimes pass through the mechanisms of state-led development of institutional democracy. For many in São Paulo, the kind of work that Lula once performed as a union leader charged with navigating social welfare benefits is now performed by a member of the Primeiro Comando da Capital (PCC) criminal organization.Lula and His Politics of Cunning is a signal history. But it is also an elegy for a lost future. At the height of his force, Lula embodied a moment in Brazilian history that generated exceptionally compelling emancipatory visions, conditioned by radical democracy, equitable development, and palpable faith in institutionalized progress. Lula's tragedy—and ours—is that the day-to-day world that forged these visions has become too frayed and fragmented to sustain them.