Another quick translation, this time of a short report from the national secretariat of the Brazilian Movement of Landless Rural Workers (MST) Yesterday, June 20, more than one million young people came out onto the streets in 15 capital cities. There is a bit of everything here. In each city, there is a dispute for hearts and minds. In Sao Paulo and Rio, right-wing sectors have taken the lead, attacking leftist militants and provoking violence in order to generate chaos. But in other cities, the left continues to set the pace. Briefly: 1) This is a social mobilisation of a nascent sector that has emerged after neoliberalism. They are middle and lower middle class youth. The workers remain silent. They are a sector that only communicates via social media and is not influence by TV or the corporate media 2) It is the result of 12 years of class conciliation (like in Chile) that excluded the youth from political participation. And they want to participate in some form, even if it is by simply walking in the streets, without repression. 3) It is the result of a grave urban structural crisis, created by speculative financial capital that led to rent hikes, the massive sale of cars financed by banks and chaotic transit, with no public transport, where people lose 2, 3 hours going to and from work or school 4) No one controls them. They have no political leadership 5) Of course the most affected are the traditional politicians, bourgeois politicians and of course, the method developed by the PT in its years in government, the governments, all of them, whether right, centre or left. 6) The right wing is infiltrating and attempting to generate a climate of violence, chaos and put the blame on the PT and Dilma 7) The Dilma government is paralysed given its lack of politics. It simply wants to administer, and now it doesn’t know what to administer. 8) The social movements are trying to intervene politically, in order to come out in front (see letter to President…) and broaden the demands so that they aim towards a political reform, media reform, taxation reform, and land reform. 9) No one knows what will happen: will we go down the Spanish road (where the right capitalise in the voting booths – which could happen in 2014) or the Argentine road (2001), with advances… or will we end up like Greece in a stalemate? Probably none of them, we will find a Brazilian formula that for now no one knows… 10) But, no doubt we will need and there will be changes, in all senses!
Posted on: Sun, 23 Jun 2013 01:22:20 +0000
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