Workers' Party (Brazil) - History

History

The Workers' Party was launched by a heterogeneous group, formed by trade unionists, left-wing intellectuals and artists, and Catholics linked to the liberation theology, on February 10, 1980 at Colégio Sion in São Paulo, a private Catholic school for girls. The party emerged as a result of the approach between the labor movements in the ABC Region – such as the Conferência das Classes Trabalhadoras (Conclat), which later developed into the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT) – which carried major strikes from 1978 to 1980, and the old Brazilian left-wing, whose militants were returning from exile with the 1979 Amnesty law.

The party was launched under a democratic socialism trend. After the 1964 coup d'état, Brazil's main federation of labor unions, the General Command of Workers (Comando Geral dos Trabalhadores - CGT) – which since its formation gathered leaders approved by the Ministry of Labour, a practice tied to the fact that since the Vargas dictatorship, unions had become quasi-state organs – was dissolved, while unions themselves suffered intervention of the military regime. The resurgence of an organized labour movement, evidenced by strikes in the ABC Region on the late 1970s led by Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, enabled the reorganization of the labour movement without the direct interference of the State. The movement originally sought to act exclusively in union politics, but the survival of a conservative unionism under the domination of the State (evidenced in the refoundation of CGT) and the influence exercised over the trade union movement by leaders of traditional left-wing parties, such as the Brazilian Communist Party, forced the unionist movement of ABC, encouraged by anti-Stalinist leaders, to organize its own party, in a strategy similar to that held by the Solidarność union movement in Poland.

Therefore, the Workers' Party emerged rejecting the traditional leaders of official unionism, and seeking to put into practice a new form of democratic socialism, trying to reject political models it regarded as decaying, such as the Soviet and Chinese ones. It represented the confluence between unionism and anti-Stalinist intelligentsia.

It was officially recognized as a party by the Brazilian Supreme Electoral Court on February 11, 1982. The first membership card belonged to art critic and former Trotskyst activist Mário Pedrosa, followed by literary scholar Antonio Candido, and historian Sérgio Buarque de Holanda. Holanda's daughter, Ana de Holanda, later became Minister of Culture in the Rousseff cabinet.