Note from Serve the People Blog: We are publishing the following document from RFDPR - Brazil, which celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. The document was published in the context of the June 2013 Days. This is a forceful manifesto by the Marxist-Leninist-Maoists of Brazil, pointing out the path of rebellion and revolution in Brazil, which is the New-Democratic revolution uninterrupted to socialism, in service of the world revolution.¹

Proletarians and oppressed peoples of all countries, unite!

Brazil Needs a Great Revolution!

Revolutionary Front in Defense of the People’s Rights

Brazil, June 2013

Fight, fail, fight again, fail again, fight again… till their victory; that is the logic of the people…

— Chairman Mao Zedong²

Protests are erupting all over the country and in a spontaneous movement, colossal contingents of hundreds of thousands of masses are taking over the centers of the big cities and spreading everywhere, shaking and shattering the old order in its entirety. A new phase in the development of the revolutionary situation is underway in the country, great storms are looming!

This time, the last straw was the brutal repression of the just and peaceful demonstration against the increase in bus fares in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro. The outrage spread across the country and unleashed the popular anger that had been stifled for decades by political cover-ups, demagoguery, and the propaganda bombardment of successive governments about a Brazil of progress and improvement. Just when the television, radio networks, and newspapers were boasting about President Dilma’s glorious popularity, full employment, the creation of a new middle class, the country’s development with a solid economy in the face of global crisis that is sinking the world’s largest economies, suddenly revolts erupted like a tsunami.

In the midst of the deep and protracted general crisis of the imperialist system, which is wreaking havoc around the world, hitting the working masses hard with massive unemployment and brutal cuts to hard-earned rights, it is pushing them into the streets by the millions in a desperate struggle for survival and resistance against the repression launched by the capitalist governments and their lackey regimes in the dominated countries.

As a direct result of the contradictions and weaknesses of our country’s economy, which is dominated and sucked dry by imperialism, and the repercussions of the general crisis on it, the current popular uprising is the explosion of the cry that has been stifled for decades, the cry contained by the “eternal” deception of farcical elections, their never-fulfilled promises of a false democracy, in which the people are the constant victims of the cunning lure of politicking and the savage repression of their protest. Now the mask of this demagogic and opportunistic regime of the false left of the PT/PSB/PCdoB,³ etc. has also fallen. What happened? In one fell swoop, the enchantment of a truth made of lies repeated a thousand times was broken, the opium of bread and circuses failed.

A Cry of Revolt Echoes through the Air

And the start had to come from the younger generation of youth who thought they were less doped up by all this brainwashing. The youth uprising against these odious bloodthirsty police shattered the clay wall that imprisoned reality and broke down the path, transforming itself into a growing popular revolt of repressed dissatisfaction with the whole order of exploitation, inequality, privileges for the rich and politicians, abuses by the authorities, generalized corruption, delinquency and insecurity, the precariousness of public health, education and public transport services, the subservience of rulers to capital and foreign agencies (such as the current “state of exception” decreed to serve FIFA), massacres of the poor in the slums, concentration camps for workers on the billion-dollar PAC⁴ projects and the slaughter of peasants and indigenous people fighting for land.

Against the Old State and Its Anti-people, Sell-Out Leaders

The popular explosion expresses the general discontent with the whole order of exploitation, abuse, and daily police violence in the lives of the people. There are the low salaries and cuts in rights, the dictatorship of extortionate taxes on workers while the national budget favors banks and the rich to the detriment of public health services, education and public transport, which are utter garbage, the mismanagement and corruption, the spending on billionaire and overpriced construction projects to favor the mafias of contractors and electoral financing, the spree of public money to banks and transnationals and a public debt that has already reached 3 trillion reais, whose bankers’ bonds are redeemed at the highest interest rates in the world, the handing over of natural wealth, state assets, and the exploitation of basic services to foreign capital, etc. The outrage and revolt is against this system of exploitation and its old state, its rotten and immoral institutions, and its anti-people, lying, cynical, corrupt, and sell-out rulers.

A System of Exploitation and Repression

The system in which we live is that of the exploiting classes and their old state, which for centuries have oppressed and kept the people in misery, handing over the wealth of our country to foreign powers. A system of absolute privilege for the rich and injustice, deceit and genocide for the poor. And the greatest proof of this was the arrival of the PT in the federal government, which from being “radical defenders” of the workers has become their newest executioner. In order to maintain the global imperialist system, the dominated countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, such as Brazil, are subjugated to serve all the interests of the foreign powers and their monopoly corporations, and do their bidding. To this end, the Brazilian state was set up and structured as a dictatorship of the big bourgeoisie and landlords to subjugate our people and our homeland.

But these old ruling classes and their politicians, lackeys of imperialism, haven’t always been able to dominate in any way, shape or form. In their history, they have oscillated between moments of openly fascist regimes (Vargas’ New State [Estado Novo], Dutra’s regime, the military regime of 1964, etc.) and liberal-democratic regimes (JK, Jango, Sarney, Collor, FHC, Lula/Dilma, etc.).⁵ As in recent decades, they need to deceive the people by using a system of government, which they call democracy or the democratic rule of law, through a farcical and corrupt electoral process and bureaucratic institutions called the executive, legislative, and judicial branches.

In reality, this state is a machine for subjecting the people to accept this system of exploitation, spreading the illusion that it is the people who elect their representatives. A machine to extort and rob the people with taxes in order to fill the pockets of local and international bankers and moguls, to hand over the country’s natural wealth to foreign powers and to repress the people when they rise up in defense of their degraded rights and trampled national interests.

We are currently living under the propaganda that democracy in the country is consolidated and that the democratic rule of law is in full force; that all that is needed is for the people to vote correctly so that corrupt politicians don’t get elected, as if the people were to blame for the corruption and rascality of those in power. Faced with popular rejection of so much crookedness, the system’s defenders say that political reform is urgently needed to improve the way the political system works and to put an end to corruption. However, over the last 20 years, in every election where voting is compulsory, tens of millions of citizens, a third of the electorate, have boycotted the electoral farce by not turning up to vote, or by voting null or blank.

What we are really experiencing is a lot of lies, deception, and more and more violence against the people. What have we seen these days? That any popular demonstration in defense of the most basic rights, such as the just struggle against fare increases, is brutally repressed. The police apparatus has long since ceased to be content with beating the people with batons, tear gas, pepper spray and rubber bullets; now the order is to shoot to kill, because never before have the police killed so many poor people in the city and countryside. The killing of poor young people has become routine. That’s why the people have risen up in protests here and there and now all this popular fury has exploded across the country.

A Just Repudiation of the Political Decay and Its Parties of Crooks and Scoundrels

That’s why, in this system in which we live, taking part in elections, voting for one party or another, for one candidate or another, is giving our endorsement to all the disgusting rot that is official politics. To vote is to consent to this shameful situation that is there and that today the whole country is rising up against. To vote is to legitimize this old state and its bourgeois-democratic system of exploitation, oppression, misery, violence, and corruption. This bourgeois-bureaucratic democracy is false, narrow, hypocritical, and corrupt. Its defenders say with their millionaire propaganda that the vote is the power of the people to decide their future. It’s a lie, it’s cynicism and pure deception! The truth is that the people are obliged to vote, from time to time, only to elect those who will decide in their place and against their interests.

Over the last few decades, the Brazilian people have patiently tried out all of these electioneering parties (PDS, PMDB, PFL, PSDB,⁶ PT/PSB/PDT/PCdoB),⁷ those on the declared right, those claiming to be in the center and those on the “left.” And there is no other possible conclusion than that they are all part of the same bag. In fact, they are different acronyms of the Singular Party of the exploiters, billionaires, and leeches and its old bourgeois democracy of parliamentary cretinism. Acronyms that fight each other for the benefits of the public coffers, but are united by the same program of serving capital. They are all, each in their own way, at the service of the interests of the big bourgeoisie, landlords, and imperialism. With all these parties, nothing has changed in the country or for the people, except crumbs and handouts. Only their faces and ways of deceiving the people have changed.

The Fight Didn’t Start Now:
Even under the Governmental Offensive, the People Never Stopped Fighting

The official propaganda of the governments and the unofficial propaganda of the bourgeois press had been hammering home the fact that everything was going wonderfully in the country. That the economy was solid, that there was full employment, that poverty was coming to an end and that the majority of the population was already middle class. But underneath all this boastful propaganda, the reality of the country and its people is quite different and the facts are stubborn. Never have bankers been so rich, never has imperialist finance capital dominated and subjugated our economy and country so much. The prices of food, medicines, and other basic necessities keep skyrocketing, inflation is eating away at the people’s economy and absurd interest rates are still the highest in the world. Unemployment continues to affect millions, particularly young people, and the government’s “agrarian reform” is yet another farce and deception for the people in the countryside.

Diseases that had previously been eliminated returned and others, such as dengue fever, spread in waves of epidemics, killing hundreds of children and adults across the country. The public education and health systems are being scrapped, and the salaries of teachers, civil servants, and workers are being cut. The spree of easy credit has only been another illusion, deception, and brutal indebtedness of the people, to hide the fragility of an economy based on the production of primary goods for export, completely subservient to foreign powers and dependent on imported capital and technology.

But under the systematic and orchestrated campaigns of criminalization and repression, facing arrests and murders and the very leaderships of their unions and the corrupt central unions co-opted by the government, the workers, public servants, teachers, students, and peasants have never stopped fighting and have bravely resisted with strikes and land seizures throughout the country.

In every corner of the country, the cry for jail for the torturers of the Military Regime echoes! Students across the country went on strike and occupied university buildings, demanding an end to the government’s disastrous REUNI/PROUNI⁸ plans and in defense of free, public education and democracy in schools and universities. Workers, teachers and civil servants are striking for better wages and working conditions. At the large PAC construction sites, Jirau, Santo Antônio, Belo Monte, SUAPE, workers have risen up in revolts, stopped the work, set fire to the barracks and revealed to Brazil the slave labor conditions to which they are subjected.

In the countryside, the government’s “agrarian reform” does nothing but finance the landlords and repress. It is only through the Agrarian Revolution, by seizing the land of the blood-sucking landlords into their own hands in an organized way, that the peasants have been seizing the land to work and produce, and seizing their freedom.

And now that the masses of the people in the cities are exploding in revolts and they can’t crush them with the cowardly repression, firmly repelled by the fighting youth, they want to use their poisonous orchestrations to melt everything down, qualifying what is right and what is not, editing images and stories in the dirtiest manipulation and psychological warfare against the people from their gigantic communications apparatuses. This entire monopolized press is the enemy of the people. May all reactionaries and miserable rats tremble!

Vandalism Is What This Governing Scoundrel Does

The streets have shown once again that for the people to guarantee their interests, they have to impose them by force in a massive and combative way. The authorities and the press, who attacked, disqualified and criminalized the first demonstrations, just as they have done for years against popular struggles in order to crush them, amazed and frightened by their explosive growth, are now posing as champions of freedom and democracy, defending peaceful demonstrations and hypocritically claiming that the radicals are only a minority, calling them vandals. In the art of manipulating “public opinion” and the lies they’re used to, with the Globo network always at their head, they make the loudest noise, trying to scandalize, frighten, and intimidate the demonstrators. Terrified of the popular fury, they are now trying to stifle and domesticate the protests.

The people are attacking their enemies, the seats of government and legislative houses (dens of lawlessness and corruption), the banks that leech off the people and the nation, and vigorously rejecting the attacks of the genocidal police troops. The episodes of looting by profiteers and delinquents transformed by the press into a great terror are just part of the sad reality created by this same vile system that we want to overthrow. Because the real vandals are these anti-people, sell-out rulers. Vandalism really is the criminal practice of these scoundrels who kill people in hospital queues, starve them to death and shoot them by their bloodthirsty police, who rob the nation’s coffers on a daily basis and don’t even pay for school meals for the children of the poor, who hand over the country’s natural wealth to foreigners, who sell the sovereignty and honor of the country to imperialist plunderers and even to mafias like FIFA.

To Build the New, You Have to Destroy the Old

This is the struggle of peasants, workers, students, civil servants, intellectuals, Indigenous Peoples and small business owners and manufacturers, we are the majority and we are millions! We are fighting against this old, rotten Brazilian state represented today by the PT/PSB/PMDB/PCdoB/PDT government and its support base, which commits all kinds of attacks and crimes against our people on a daily basis. A fascist state that needs to be completely overthrown and only a Great Democratic Revolution can destroy it and build a new and different state in its place. The New-Democratic State of the revolutionary united front, based on the worker-peasant alliance together with all the exploited and oppressed.

Every democratic and revolutionary popular struggle must uphold the struggles’ demands in defense of the rights of the people for:

• a general increase in wages and an end to the cost of living;

• full public health insurance and pensions;

• free bus passes for students; for free public transportation;

• free and decent public health and education;

• against violence against women, equal rights and decriminalization of abortion;

• punishment for the criminals of the military regime, those who ordered and carried out (civilian and military) torture, murder and forced disappearances;

• the end of slave labor on agribusiness plantations, on PAC projects and throughout the country;

• immediate recognition and demarcation of the territories of Indigenous Peoples and Remaining Quilombola Communities;

• land for those who live and work on it;

• stop the mining companies and their plundering of natural wealth and environmental degradation;

• the bleeding of public resources to banks and transnational corporations;

However, it must be emphasized that our main demand is for power.

Organize the people to make the Revolution!

The de facto democratic question, i.e. the establishment of a true Democratic Republic, has never been fully resolved in Brazil. The local exploitative ruling classes and their imperialist masters fear the existence of a real democracy because it would mean the end of their domination and exploitation. But since the class contradictions and the people’s aspiration for democracy are so great, they maneuver to impose on the people and the country this travesty of the old democracy with its dirty and corrupt elections and drag in the opportunist parties to legitimize them. And every time the masses rise up, they send out repression with one hand and they make the bla-bla-bla of “dialog,” “negotiations,” “peace” for the submissive, against the “violence” and “vandalism” of the exploited and oppressed with the other hand. To bring about general and complete change, the people must seize power and subdue their enemies!

Brazil’s problems are structural and secular, their solutions require profound and radical transformations that only the audacious and permanent mobilization of the popular masses around a revolutionary program can achieve. Because only a Great Democratic Revolution uninterrupted to Socialism can sweep away so much exploitation, misery, injustice, and violence against the working people. To put an end to this old state, this true machine of corruption and oppression, to sweep away backwardness and the centuries-old foreign plundering of the nation.

The people can and will destroy this old power, tearing it apart piece by piece, demolishing it bit by bit. If today the people are able to mobilize in hundreds of thousands in demonstrations, which are great accumulation and learning experiences, little by little they can build solid organizations in the workplaces, in the neighborhoods, in the schools/universities and unite with the masses of poor peasants who are landless or who have little land who are waging a tenacious struggle to carry forward the agrarian revolution, to destroy the latifundia step by step, handing over the land to those who work it, to do justice, to free the productive forces of the countryside, to produce and create the new revolutionary power.

The Great Democratic Revolution that is urgent in our country can only be won through a long process, because our enemies are still strong, they are defended by the police and the armed forces, supported by this monopolized bourgeois press and the parties of this old order, and they will have the support of the imperialist powers, especially U.S. imperialism. It is not possible for the people to overthrow their enemies in a single blow, in a few days or months, let alone overnight. A protracted struggle is needed to build the fundamental instruments of the revolution, the embryos of the new power and the new People’s State: the true Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat, the Guerrilla Army and the Revolutionary United Front. Clandestine revolutionary organizations, the Revolutionary Party is not for asking for votes and fattening up deputies to rot in the comfortable armchairs of this pigsty that is the bourgeois parliament, but built in the fire of the class struggle to master and apply the science and ideology of the class, Marxism-Leninism-Maoism, and firmly guide the masses. The People’s Guerrilla Army is to wage people’s war to defeat the enemy power and establish the New-Democratic new power. The Revolutionary United Front is to unite the revolutionary classes by the same Program of political-economic-social and cultural transformations, to support the people’s war, encircle the enemy and defeat him.

The democratic, agrarian-anti-feudal, and anti-imperialist revolution will confiscate all the land of the landlords, all the bureaucrat-comprador capital (the big bourgeoisie) and all transnational capital (imperialism), nationalizing these large estates and concentrating them in the hands of the new People’s State, which will apply everything to the establishment of a new, self-centered and self-sustaining economy, for the general well-being of the people and the progress and independence of the nation. This Great Democratic Revolution will be unleashed with the agrarian revolution, to destroy the latifundia, handing over the land to the poor peasants who are landless or who have little land, and with the struggles of the people in the cities in defense of their rights, such as the great street demonstrations we see today.

Down with the fascist state and its anti-people, sell-out leaders!

Long live the New-Democratic Revolution!

Long live the demonstrations and the revolutionary popular struggle!