The fading light of 2024 leads to personal and political retrospectives. The working class and activists as a whole take advantage of their scarce moments of rest to spend time with family and/or friends, whilst the media promotes a review of the most relevant news.
The persistence of a world in crisis, marked by the disposition of neo-fascist poles to carry forward their programme (where Trump’s victory is its highest cardinal point), by the profound crisis on multiple fronts (polycrisis or convergence of crises), especially by the developing environmental catastrophe, has marked reflections about 2024. Some Marxist authors call the present time the “age of catastrophes”.
For the coming year, we schematically present five challenges that corroborate the reflections that socialists make regarding the “time of urgencies”.
1. Stop Trump and His Project of Civilisational Destruction
The “mother of all battles” will be the fight against Trump’s plans, supported by Musk and a predatory elite that flirts with neo-fascism. From the first weeks of January, Trump will return to the world’s most powerful political seat, from which he will sustain his plan of war not only against the American people but also against the peoples of the world and, without exaggeration, against civilisation itself. His first target will be immigrants.
Trump expresses the extreme right’s voluptuousness, which seeks to organise the hopelessness, frustration, and resentment of millions regarding living conditions and how politics is conducted today. But he also expresses the enormous crisis in political relations in general, and in international relations and the decline of the American empire in particular. We face risks, turbulence, and a life-and-death struggle to prevent the imposition of a new pattern of capitalism—ultra-liberal, supremacist (racist), and violent against the mediations won by workers over the last hundred years.
To this end, Trump, Musk, Milei, and their allies need to impose themselves by force. These coups have the potential to unleash new and old reserves of the mass movement, moving to a scenario of “open struggle”. For now, a scenario of uncertainties awaits us. However, the ’Christmas’ strikes that the United States is witnessing, led by Amazon workers, indicate that the path will be one of intensifying class struggle and a greater need for collective organisation.
In the international arena, threats against the Panamanian people to once again usurp the canal are awakening fury and putting into action the fighting vanguard of Central America, evoking the best traditions of anti-imperialist struggle. Just as it is necessary to continue combating and denouncing the genocide against the Palestinian people, which is expanding, not only in the atrocities in Gaza but in the military offensive on Lebanon and the West Bank.
The international dynamic of crises, where instability marks the national scenario of several countries relevant to international capitalism—as in the revolts that occurred in recent years in countries such as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, Sudan, and—now—South Korea, complete the picture of the balance of forces. Much less defined by the triumph of the extreme right as a project (which is an effective and dangerous risk) and more by the crisis of bourgeois, interstate projects, of the so-called ’world order’.
If for some Trump may be a “Caligula”, the cruellest of Roman emperors, it is true that he could also end up like a “Nero”, whose destructive will ended up imploding Rome.
2. Pull the Emergency Brake in the Face of Environmental Catastrophe
In 2024, it was Rio Grande do Sul and many points in Brazil. The dead were counted in hundreds, those whose lives were affected forever in tens of thousands. The climate catastrophe knocked at the door, in a desperate and merciless way.
In Valencia, Spain, in the centre of European capitalism, the rains and floods left marks as deep as the disasters of the first semester in Rio Grande do Sul, with an equally morbid toll of deaths and displaced persons. Not a week goes by without news of strong climate events that end with the same plot of death and destruction. Mayotte, a French territory in South Africa, suffered from the arrival of Cyclone Chido, which partially destroyed the island, claiming 40 lives and exposing the hypocrisy of French colonialism.
No issue is more urgent than taking concrete measures against the ongoing “ecocide”.
COP29, held in November in Azerbaijan, frustrated expectations regarding greater regulation of fossil fuels, having disappointing results even for advocates of “green capitalism”.
Luiz Marques has pointed us to the need to face the “decisive decade”, a concept that gives name to one of his latest books, where he states that the coming years will be fundamental to avoid a ’point of no return’, caused by global warming and its direct consequences on the global ecosystem.
Brazil will host COP30 in November in the region of one of the planet’s greatest natural assets, the Amazon. It is the task of the social movement as a whole, including PSOL and different actors in the ecological struggle, to think about and organise throughout the year a consistent intervention in the wake of COP30.
3. Combat, Demoralise, and Fight to Crush Bolsonarism
Braga Netto’s arrest was a relief. News that was celebrated by millions, providing relief at the end of such a complex and hard year for the majority of the people. More than that: Braga Netto’s detention put back on the agenda the fight for Bolsonaro’s arrest, as well as amplified the fight for “No Amnesty”.
It is vital to reverse the political and social balance of forces, isolate and defeat the extreme right and its programme. It is no small thing to prevent Bolsonaro from being a candidate and to demoralise Bolsonarism as a majority expression of coup-plotting in Brazil. The disorganisation of the Bolsonarist camp, which will struggle in the coming months to seek a substitute, if the most probable hypothesis of Jair’s impediment is confirmed, is a fact that helps the mass movement.
The revelation of plans to assassinate Lula, Alckmin, and Moraes, besides demonstrating irrational improvisation, indicates how far this sector can go to attack liberal democracy and the pact that sustains the New Republic. This requires that the centre of the struggle—unitary, of course—to stop the extreme right target the “hard core” of the political and economic agents of January 8th. Undermining and attacking the underground network that made the “Brazilian Capitol” viable is a central part of the broader struggle, calling on activists to be present on the front line. The different entities and sectors must take up the fight against amnesty for the coup plotters.
This broad struggle must be connected to the programmatic fight against the militarisation of political and social life that is underway, especially in the state of São Paulo. It involves not renouncing the tasks that were interdicted during the transition period and that provide material bases for the conscious action of the extreme right, within the forces of repression, in para-state militias, and in political representations.
We must face Tarcisio’s military violence, which reinforces the hard line in the Military Police, seeking to naturalise in public opinion the genocide against black youth in the periphery and advances with the militarisation of schools.
4. Defend and Organise the Fight for Rights, Articulating the Social Majority
There is no magic pass to guarantee a social majority in favour of changes and against the fallacy of extreme right discourse. Only with confidence in workers’ strength and in defence of their rights can we drag broad layers of the people towards a project that combats authoritarianism and neoliberalism.
To this end, we must build a calendar and plan of struggles that mobilise important portions of the class. And the fight against the 6×1 schedule indicates that the working class may be returning to the scene, around a concrete banner, giving centrality to their condition as a class. After the success of the virtual petition and support for VAT, with Rick Azevedo’s strength multiplying as a reference, new mobilisations demonstrated the strength of this agenda.
The Pepsico strike and recent mobilisations of retail workers at Matheus supermarket in São Luis do Maranhão and at Zaffari, in Rio Grande do Sul, show that we are only at the beginning of a long struggle. This struggle has enormous potential to access broad portions of workers, abandoned by their unions, without associative tradition or channels of democratic participation in political life.
To be consistent, we must also continue positioning ourselves against the adjustment that the government promotes, when it has just voted for a package of evils against the poorest. PSOL’s position, followed by a few PT deputies with the correct position on the matter, against the package, indicated that austerity is a path to organising defeats for the working class. The manifesto articulated by sectors of intellectuals, social assistance, political and union leadership, and driven by Movimento Magazine was an important support point for this struggle.
These struggles must be articulated with other important battles that took place in 2024, such as the fight that the women’s movement waged against PL1904 or the denunciation being made of the repressive escalation of Tarcisio’s Military Police, so that next year we can build a common political agenda, founded on a coherent plan of struggles, involving the combative sectors of the social and union movement.
5. Build a Left That Affirms Its Name
One of the lessons of 2024, given the weak result where the left disputed the electoral process with chances, was that giving up the programme does not guarantee votes. Moreover, the disfigurement of the flags and identity of the left itself leads to an even greater political defeat than the electoral defeat.
We are in the opposite direction of the pragmatists. We want an independent, anti-capitalist, and militant left. Independent to face the extreme right, but without ceasing to fight against the adjustment measures of the Lula government; anti-capitalist to defend democratic freedoms, but also to articulate an alternative project of society outside the frameworks of private property, oppression, and exploitation; and militant, to engage thousands of new comrades who share our programme, vote for our parliamentarians, support us in elections, to organise a social force capable of fighting in the terrain of direct action.
Our parliamentary mandates, our fronts of action, our presence alongside PSOL, our international solidarity are at the service of this project.
We conclude here the Movimento editorial wishing happy holidays to all readers, demanding an end to the genocide in Palestine and informing that we will have good news, both for the website and for our print magazine, for the first quarter of 2025.
Israel Dutra
Click here to subscribe to ESSF newsletters in English and or French.