This is the first major scholarly study of the Brazilian Workers Party. Drawing on documentary source material as well as on extensive interviews the author—assistant professor of political science at Yale—offers a fascinating history of the origins and formative years of the Partido do Tabalhadores (PT). She places the birth of the party in the context of burgeoning political opposition to military rule in Brazil, showing how the development of the party was both constrained and sustained by the process of democratization. She also discusses the essential differences between the PT and all other Brazilian parties created during the transition from the military regime to democracy: its ongoing relation with an increasingly well-organized and combative sector of the labor movement and its uniquely democratic internal structure.

The Workers Party was founded in 1979 when Brazil still was under military rule, in the wake of two big strike waves, sparked by the metal workers union of Sao Paulo’s industrial area (the so-called ABC towns). Several factors contributed to its formation: first of all the existence of a nationally known labor leadership, whose most prestigious figure, Luis Inacio da Silva (“Lula”)—president of the Metalworkers’ Union of Sao Bernardo do Campo—soon became the key figure in the creation of the party. But there existed also a mass base: a growing urban working class and an extended network of Ecclesiastic Base Communities—both committed to an ethos of grass-roots organization and change from below. To this one has to add the significant contribution of leftist militants and activists, belonging to various small groups (particularly Trotskyist), as well as the support of socialist intellectuals and politicians.

While during its first five years the PT seemed doomed to marginality (it garnered only a disappointing 3.3 percent in the elections of 1982), this started to change during the second half of the eighties because of: (a) the growth of the new, “authentic” trade-union movement, centralized since 1983 in the CUT (United Labor Confederation) and (b) the accession to governmental positions of the PMDB (Party of the Brazilian Democratic Movement), the main representative of the liberal opposition to military authoritarianism, which had, until then, received most of the popular vote.

The Workers Party’s relatively strong performance in the mayoral elections in the state capitals (1985) gave it a new lease on life and projected it onto the national stage as a viable and growing political force. Precisely because it was an “anomaly” in the Brazilian political scene, the PT could serve as a vehicle for the expression of widespread dissatisfaction with the status quo. The same differences that were responsible for its marginality until 1985 were what helped it to become the axis of a new opposition a the end of the eighties.

Acts that were initially taken as evidence of “rigidity” and “sectarinism”—for example, non-participation in the indirect presidential elections of 1985 (an elite maneuver that led to the election of Tancredo Neves, a conservative figure of the PMDB)—eventually came to be seen as evidence of coherence and principled behavior. In the second half of the eighties, the contrast between the party as movement builder and the party as instiutional actor began to be bridged.

In November 1988 the Workers Party sent shock waves through the Brazilian political elite by winning the mayoral races in three state capitals (Sao Paulo, Porto Alegre, and Vitoria) and twenty-nine other cities in Brazil (including many of the major industrial centers in Sao Paulo). And finally, in 1989, in the first direct presidential elections in three decades, Lula won 16 percent in the first round, and then came very close to winning the presidency, losing in the runoff with 47 percent of the valid vote as against 53 percent for Fernando Collor de Melo, a conservative populist supported by the media (and particularly by the powerful Globo TV network). Nothing in the party’s incremental growth in the intervening years made either of these extraordinary events inevitable. Once again, the peculiar dynamics of the Brazilian transition to democracy determined the place the PT was to occupy, that of the last hope for change.

Several commentators referred to the 1989 election as a contest between organized Brazil (urban and rural unions, base communities, neighborhood networks, social movements) and unorganized Brazil. The result demonstrated that organized Brazil is not sufficiently strong to carry a national contest in which images projected by the mass media—the political spectacle—outweigh programmatic and institutional considerations. However, the more surprising message, and one that much of the left, including the PT, was slow to recognize in the midst of disappointment, was that “organized” Brazil was almost strong enough to win. In a political system with a long elitist history, a party dedicated to organizing workers and the poor came within a hair of winning the presidency.

In her conclusion, Margaret Keck emphasizes that the PT is a novel development in Brazil, because of its links to the labor movement, its commitment to change from below, and its internal democracy. The very organization of the Workers Party challenged the Brazilian political tradition of elite conciliation and negotiation as well as co-optation of popular leaders.

To a large extent, the party grew less on the basis of an ideology than on an ethical stance, within which a number of alternative visions competed, using different languages. Whatever its future, the very existence of the PT has already helped to redefine the configuration of Brazilian politics.

This excellent book is a most useful analysis of the origins and consolidation of a surprising phenomenon whose political impact already transcends Brazilian borders. Some of its limitations are acknowledged by the author in her preface: more work is needed on the PT’s relationship with the church, on its various internal leftist currents, and on its growth beyond the Sao Paulo area and the urban labor movement into rural unions and landless peasant movements.

But there is also, in my view, a serious methodological problem: the theoretical framework is for the most part that of mainstream U.S. political science, resulting in the absence of key Marxist concepts. How can we understand, for instance, the formation itself of the PT without referring centrally to the capitalist structure of the Brazilian economy and society? Already in the first manifesto of the party (February 1980) it is said: “The PT will be the political expression of all those exploited by the capitalist system.” The anti-capitalist ethos has been, from the outset, one of the main unifying forces in the PT’s political culture. In a recent document on socialism (approved by the Seventh National Conference in May 1990) it is said: “Our basic commitment to democracy also makes us anti-capitalist, in the same way that our choice of anti-capitalism unequivocally determines our struggle for democracy.” The party’s adversaries are not only the “political elites” but, above all, the capitalist ruling classes, of which these elites are the expression.

In spite of this shortcoming, Margaret Keck’s book is a remarkable contribution to the knowledge of the Brazilian labor movement and certainly deserves to become the standard work for all interested in the history of the Workers Party.

One last word: since the book was written (1991), some major events have taken place in Brazil, confirming the PT’s capacity to combine institutional action with change from below. President Collor de Melo was ousted by a powerful mass movement (millions of people went into the streets in the main towns of Brazil) which compelled a reluctant Parliament to investigate the charges of corruption against the President and finally to vote for his impeachment. The Workers Party was the main initiator of the Parliamentary enquiry and of the mass mobilizations, which resulted, for the first time in the history of Brazil and Latin America, in the legal ousting of a president by the people.