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Editorial: Brazil elections - lose-lose for workers
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- 18 October 2026 36 hits
As the crisis of capitalism deepens and the world’s bosses lurch toward world war, fascism is on the march from the U.S. to France and Germany to India and China—and, once again, in Brazil. On October 4, Flávio Bolsonaro, a Trump ally and son of the openly fascist, arch-racist ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, edged fake-left incumbent Lula da Silva. The two misleaders will settle the contest in an October 25 runoff.
If Bolsonaro wins, Brazil will join a growing axis of Trump-aligned regimes to militarize the U.S. backyard. As global capitalism decays and U.S. imperialism loses ground to China, the scramble to control South America’s oil and minerals is heating up. Fake leftists like Lula and Mexico’s Claudia Sheinbaum can never fix the root problems of capitalism; their job is to deceive and pacify workers. Liberal democracy and fascism are two sides of the same rotten capitalist coin, and the billionaire capitalist bosses switch between them as needed. The rise of fascist politicians reflects the rulers’ need for more discipline in their own ranks and more brutal control over the international working class.
Brazil in Crisis: A Prize for the Bosses
Brazil is projected to be the world's 10th-ranked economy, home to the planet’s largest rainforest and vast mineral wealth (datamarnews, 6/1). That makes it a prize for U.S. and Chinese bosses alike. But with crushing debt, weak profits, and a shrinking industrial base (courthousenews, 9/27).
Workers are paying the price. The official unemployment rate of 5.3 percent hides 39 million workers in the informal economy. Black workers, especially Afro-Brazilian women in domestic and care work, bear the heaviest burden. Poverty and police brutality are rampant (Valor International, 10/6). Fed up with corruption and Lula’s broken promises, many of these workers, along with a battered middle class, have turned to Bolsonaro.
The candidate’s father, Jair Bolsonaro, is an ex-army officer who rode to power on the back of the “Beef, Bible, and Bullets” caucus. He sold off the Amazon rainforest to agribusiness and mining and launched a genocidal assault on Indigenous peoples. The younger Bolsonaro is equally skilled at playing the crime card, using trafficking gangs like the Comando Vermelho to continue terrorizing Brazil’s most super-exploited workers: Black workers in the inner-city favelas (BBC, 05/7/21; The Guardian, 10/4).
Lula lies, workers lose
Lula’s Workers’ Party (PT) has governed on and off for 17 years. In his first two terms, Lula called a truce with the Brazilian ruling class, making huge concessions to finance capital and tossing the poorest crumbs like Bolsa Família, a cash transfer program (America’s Quarterly, 12/19/25). Corruption scandals, from the Mensalão to Operation Car Wash, landed Lula in jail and paved the way for Jair Bolsonaro’s election in 2019 (AFP, 9/23/23; BBC 11/9/19).
Lula’s 2023 return to power rested on a coalition stretching from the poorest workers to finance capital. He handed ministries to the Bolsonaro-aligned Progressive Party, an old dictatorship stronghold. In line with Lula’s pledge to eliminate the country’s deficit, the country’s central bank raised interest rates to 15 percent, a gift to bondholders and a misery for indebted workers.
While Lula poses as an “environmental defender,” he broke his promises to return land to Indigenous workers (Mongabay, 12/22/24). Under his administration, Petrobras, the mostly state-owned oil and gas company, has earmarked $3 billion and 15 wells for the offshore Equatorial Margin, including the basin off the mouth of the Amazon River (Mongabay, 6/29).
Lula’s record on police violence is just as damning. In October 2025, three days after Rio state police carried out a raid that killed more than 121 people (BBC, 10/29/25), he signed a bill raising prison sentences for gang members to up to 30 years (CNN Brasil, 10/31/25). In his first two terms, Brazil’s prison population almost doubled (The Guardian, 06/29/15), and in 2025 police killed 6,602 people nationwide, the most on record, 82 percent of them Black (Brazilian Public Security Forum, 7/23/26).
U.S.-China rivalry sharpens
A Flavio Bolsonaro victory would hand Trump another enthusiastic ally for his “Donroe Doctrine.” Eighteen Latin American nations have joined the U.S.-led Shield of the Americas, a coalition that claims to attack drug cartels, organized crime, and “illegal” migration. At least four of those countries--Colombia, Guatemala, Honduras, and Ecuador—have signed up for joint military operations with the Pentagon. As the racist bosses pour billions into war to defend their shrinking pools of profit, they know that scapegoating Black and migrant workers for the profit system’s crises is the oldest trick in their book.
For the imperialists, the real prize is Brazil’s wealth of critical minerals, the second-largest reserve of rare earths after China’s, and the U.S. is pressing the region to restrict Chinese access (Statista, 4/6). Yet whoever wins on October 25 will likely keep close ties with China, Brazil’s largest trading partner, just as Flávio’s anti-communist father did (South China Morning Post, 10/9).
Workers must fight back
With the collapse of the old communist movement and the reversal of the great Russian and Chinese revolutions, workers are offered a rigged menu: open fascists like Bolsonaro and Trump, or liberal counterweights like Lula and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani. Yet Brazil’s workers have always fought back, with Black workers in the lead. In the late 19th century, enslaved Africans and Indigenous people rose up, escaped, and built free communities called quilombos, helping to force the abolition of slavery in 1888. In 1935, communists led an armed uprising that was crushed by the Vargas regime. After the military regime killed, disappeared, and tortured tens of thousands of workers between 1964 and 1985 (humanconflicts.org), mass strikes eventually forced the generals to retreat. But with the communist movement weak and divided, the bosses’ liberal democracy filled the gap with the likes of Lula, a metalworker who’d helped lead the historic Paulista strikes.
Still, the workers kept rebelling. In 2017, in a general strike against austerity, 40 million workers shut the country down. In 2025, after the cops’ Rio massacre, Black workers led mass protests. But without a class-conscious compass and a mass communist party like PLP, workers’ anger continued to be diverted into the dead end of “lesser evil” voting.
Fight for communism!
Elections are the bosses’ tool for allowing rival capitalist factions to take turns running the same horrific system. A case in point is 1930s Germany, where Nazi Hitler rose through elections and was handed power by a decaying ruling class. The bosses use the ballot when it serves them and smash it when it doesn’t.
Today’s reform struggles must go further. Masses of workers are in the streets in France (see page 8), Chile, Spain, India, Belgium, Germany, and the U.S. They need to be organized under the banner of one international communist party: Progressive Labor Party. In World War II, communists led by the Soviet Union and China dealt deadly blows to the Nazis and Japanese fascists. To smash today’s fascist imperialists, we must build a communist-led working-class movement. We must cast off the illusions of reformism. We must remain confident in the international working class that built the quilombos and rose up against slavery, dictatorship, and police terror.
Each person who joins this fight is another nail in the bosses’ coffin. Read and distribute CHALLENGE, build ties with your co-workers and neighbors, and fight racism where you live and work. Be that next nail. Join PLP!
Bridgeview, IL Oct 4 – “DEATH, DEATH, DEATH TO THE NAZIS! POWER, POWER, POWER TO THE WORKERS!” This chant rang out from five members of the communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) and three base members as we protested the rally of social media fascist Jake Lang and his pathetic supporters outside an annual festival for Palestine today. Under local police protection, Lang spewed vile Nazi filth, specifically attacking the existence of the Little Palestine neighborhood in Chicago’s southwest suburbs, on disgusting signs and banners.
We were there to spread a message of multiracial working-class unity and introduce militant working-class young people to the PLP line, through our chants and by distributing CHALLENGE. The militant crowd far outnumbered the gutter racists there, who were barely audible (though what they did say shocked base members towards better comprehending their fascist menace).
Like the many antiracist fighters who showed up today, we in PLP know that fascists will not just “go away” if we ignore them. Fascist scum like Lang are going to become even more useful to the capitalist bosses around the world as their profit system goes deeper into crisis. What is necessary is not only to fight like hell against these foot soldiers at such rallies, but to build the mass revolutionary PLP to crush the capitalist system that breeds them and their billionaire masters.
Communists make plans, carry out with workers
Communication was important in every aspect of our participation. As it says in PLP’s document “Build a Base in the Working Class,” the Chinese revolutionaries of the Red Army would often hold meetings in the middle of battle. We met before the action to discuss the political purpose of our rally, the roles that certain comrades would lead. Tactical leaders would make the decision on when to move and where, though during the action comrades and base members made suggestions.
PLers were key in persuading an angry group of youth to try and push through a weak spot in the police barricade rather than “rush” the racists without a disciplined plan. The pushing match on the police barricade sent a strong message to the workers that only their collective force can and will bring a permanent end to fascism.
A young woman worker joined our initial push through the police lines. Other antiracists initially pushed with us, but we fell short of breaking through the police lines. After the initial pushing match this working-class young woman discouraged counterprotesters from individually trying to push through the police line. She used our megaphone to communicate that we needed to not only smash Jake Lang but the whole system. She went on to describe her difficulty finding employment and suggested that refusing to continue seeking employment was a way to defeat the system.
Multiple comrades used the bullhorn to share an encouraging message with the working class and raise political consciousness. We explained to the young woman that though she didn’t have work right now she was still a part of the working class, and the mass nature of our class makes us a historical force that can overthrow this rotten system and bury fascism once and for all.
Fascists strike but the masses are stronger
As the fascists retreated under a shower of rocks and bottles, kkkops threw a flash grenade to try and clear the way and intimidate antiracists. They also grabbed a young Black worker leaving the counter-protest with their arm in a cast, pinned him on the ground, and twisted his limbs while accusing him of resisting. PLers saw the violent arrest and began chanting “Let him go!” to launch a de-arrest. As the cops began choking the young man, PLP and the masses around united to physically defend the worker. The working class refused to witness a George Floyd style murder and seized the moment. The kkkops, surrounded by furious workers and youth, were forced to back off.
The direct conflict with the cops today made some of our collective reflect on past battles with the bosses’ forces, including the Party’s organizing against Nazis in Chicago’s Marquette Park in the late 1970s. The fact that the Party maintained a sustained campaign to integrate the park until we were able to march through unopposed in 1979, highlighted the dialectical relationship between the Party and our working-class base. Today many anarchists showed up with costumes completely obscuring their identity and wearing tactical gear or carrying shields that would protect them in the event of police attacks. Yet because of our chants and our unified disciplined presence, the masses rallied behind our banner spontaneously to form a larger force. This illustrates a veteran comrade’s saying, “We may be small but we ain’t all.” The working class is ready to fight, and what we do counts.
Sharpen the struggle for communism
In line with our commitment to planning, we debriefed after the action. Self-critically we could have brought a flyer specific to the event. Also, there were rival racists who showed up to protest Lang, calling him a Jew. We confronted some of them, but we could have struggled more sharply to demonstrate we are resolved to smash all gutter racists. We should learn more about the local capitalist base of support for Lang and gutter racism in general so we can pull out the roots of fascism. No doubt some local racists brought Lang’s attention to the existence of Little Palestine.
Overall, comrades and base members were stimulated and agitated to a higher level of commitment to class struggle and the struggle against fascism. We will continue to grow together and to strengthen the working class. The Party’s battle-tested line allows us to attract large masses when the class struggle reaches a heightened state. Let’s keep combining theory and practice and winning the working class to the fight against fascism and inter-imperialist war. Turn the guns around and turn inter-imperialist war into an international communist revolution!
The capitalist profit system’s ongoing and profound failure to provide decent education to working-class youth has triggered mass rebellion in France, an uprising that demonstrates the radical power of the international working class and the necessity of communist revolution. Workers have joined massive and militant high-school-student-led protests that began two weeks ago, and the estimated 450,000 who marched on October 6 make this the largest protest in the recent history of the country.
Students throughout France are fighting back against proposed budget cuts and worsening learning conditions. Teachers have joined them, parents have formed front lines between their children and police (Reuters, 10/6). Over 6000 have been arrested, the vast majority being minors. The demonstrations began in the suburbs outside of Paris spreading to cities including Dijon, Lyon, Strasbourg, Lille and Marseille. By October 5 half of France’s high schools were shut down.
Students are standing up against ever-increasing budget cuts and demanding more teachers and resources and lower class sizes amongst other things. The French government under President Macron has plans for a budget “savings” of 54 billion euros while increasing war spending (Outlook India, 9/30). The plan includes freezing public sector wages, most pensions, and cutting healthcare benefits.
France is facing a serious budget squeeze in 2027 because two costs are rising at the same time: military spending and the cost of servicing its debt. “The ministry projected debt interest costs would rise to €74.2 billion in 2027 from €64.8 billion in 2026, while defence spending would increase by €6.4 billion in line with France’s military programming law (Reuters, 07/26).”
The world’s bosses have only one plan for the future of working-class youth: a demand for more sacrifice – including our very lives – amid ever expanding imperialist war for control of profits, resources, labor and markets. The international communist Progressive Labor Party (PLP) applauds the anger, fightback and working-class unity shown in this fight, and strives to give rebellions like these revolutionary leadership and direction. The capitalists will always choose to pay back the banks and spend money for war instead of providing the working class with basic needs. A system like that does not deserve to exist. Instead, workers around the world deserve and must fight for communism; a system where workers’ needs will always be the priority.
The Spectre of 1968
As workers are moved to join this student uprisings it begins to echo 1968, where students sparked a general strike that ten million industrial and government workers joined and shut down the country. Workers around the world took their leadership and followed suit. They showed the power the working class can have but they didn’t go far enough – the mighty struggle was surrendered to revisionists and liberals and didn’t overthrow capitalism. And so almost 60 years later here we are again, still fighting for crumbs the capitalists throw at us.
Presently, the repression is ruthless. Pepper spray, thousands of arrests and police violence is the answer the French government has for these young people. In one video shared on social media, a teenager was shot in the face with a tear-gas grenade at almost point-blank range by a policeman (CNN, 10/2). Another had his hand blown off by a grenade (Guardian, 10/7).
While some teachers have sided with student protesters, others have taken a stand against them with reports of 78 education workers injured while defending school property from angry youth (Le Monde, 10/5). Yet several French teacher unions called on their members to stand with students to hold before-school rallies on October 6th (InfoOccitaine.fr, 10/3) This stark choice for educators - to stand with students against fascist repression - will be presented again and again, as the future capitalism has in store for us all is one of worsening living and working conditions.
It’s validating to an outlook of mass antiracist and revolutionary class struggles that the current school protests originated in the suburbs to the north and east of the capital Paris. These working-class suburbs, known as the banlieues, historically housed migrant workers and their families from Africa and Asia following World War II. The lower-income banlieues still are home to many migrant workers to this day, a re-settlement for some of the millions displaced globally from capitalist-caused climate disaster, famine, and war each year.
In the summer of 2023, there was another mass rebellion in the Paris suburb of Nanterre over the police murder of a 17-year-old named Nahel from North Africa. What’s crucial to the development and growth of the current student protests is that they unite with the struggles against racist state terror and inequality – the likes of which stole Nahel’s life and so many others – to form a broader multiracial movement under the leadership of Black workers, whom PLP recognizes as a key revolutionary force.
Two roads: Continued capitalist misery or communist revolution
“They want to divide the young people into good and bad protesters,” said Omar Slaouti, a high-school teacher in Argenteuil, a northwestern suburb of Paris. “If there were no trash cans on fire, the government would not have stepped back and become aware of the issues at stake (Reuters 10/6).”
This teacher’s analysis of government awareness as a sort of victory is misguided, but his embrace of student militancy is the stuff that revolution is made of. The ruling class wants schools to be factories for compliant labor and nationalist ideology, preparing students to accept racist genocide, endless war, and permanent climate crisis as inevitable. We in PLP understand that communists must fight to make schools sites of struggle, clarity, and preparation for a world beyond capitalism.
Capitalism can never satisfy the aspirations of youth for equality and productive, meaningful lives. The only solution to the problems of the education system is a new system where workers organize society around our needs, not around the profits of the bosses. Only communism can solve the problems of capitalist education.
No matter who gets elected next year, Le Penn’s openly racist party or the budget-cutting-liberals, bosses will choose to increase war spending on the backs of workers and our children.
You cannot vote in fundamental change, change the international working class deserves. We need to organize to smash capitalism and bring forth workers’ real power: communism.
On September 26th, nearly 10,000 students and workers joined a march. They protested the Mexican government’s failure to find the 43 student-teachers from Ayotzinapa. A group shared about 500 copies of a DESAFIO (CHALLENGE) leaflet. Marchers, including many from the teachers’ union CNTE (Coordinadora Nacional de Trabajadores de la Educación), received it well. The content is below:
Under the capitalist system we live in, there is no justice for the working class: the laws serve to guarantee the bosses’ profits, private property, dispossession, and exploitation. The capitalist class in power enjoys impunity and uses the force of the state to stay in power and protect its interests.
Twelve long years have passed since the 43 student-teachers from Ayotzinapa were kidnapped and vanished. Justice has yet to find them, leaving families and classmates adrift in despair. For more than a decade, these families, alongside their working-class siblings, have fought a relentless struggle—both legal and political.
We communists of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP) reiterate our solidarity and urge our class broaden the struggle to end this system of capitalist oppression and build a communist society of social equality, where the laws serve the working majority and punish exploitation, racism, sexism, crime, and the disappearance of our young people.
Reform parties work to increase profits for bosses
The petty Mexican political parties, such as AMLO’s MORENA Party (also known by its political platform the 4th Transformation, or Cuarta Transformación in Spanish, abbreviated 4T), the National Action Party (Partido Acción Nacional, or PAN), the Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI), Movimiento Ciudadano, and other parasitic splinter groups, uphold capitalism and make sure the government runs efficiently to reproduce and perpetuate the system of profit for the benefit of the capitalist ruling class. To accomplish this, they increasingly rely on their official repressive bodies (the army, the navy, the National Guard, and the police) and on unofficial ones, such as paramilitary groups directed and financed by the CIA, the DEA, and the U.S. embassy, made up mainly of criminal groups. This represents a clear step toward fascism, which is growing worldwide. To confront it, it is vital that we workers organize ourselves into a revolutionary party and fight for communism. Liberals like the 4T open the door to the fascists. We communists will defeat them, as we did in the Second World War.
The enforced disappearance of the 43 student-teachers of Ayotzinapa in 2014 is a sign of growing fascism. Journalists and researchers have documented links between the case and Guerrero’s mining belt, and argue that mining interests and organized crime sought to control the territory around the Raúl Isidro Burgos Rural Teachers’ College in order to exploit minerals, produce opium poppy, and move drugs, weapons, and mining products (Proceso, 9/26/2020; Proceso, 9/30/2020, Harvard ReVista, 7/26/2023). Mexico’s Truth Commission concluded that the disappearance was a state crime involving the bosses’ state,involving the bosses’ state at the municipal, state, and federal levels, and the army has been implicated in both the disappearance and the cover-up
Student-teachers targetted by criminal bosses
The presence of the student-teachers and their political influence were getting in the way of the criminal bosses’ profiteering. Fascist repression, such as disappearance and forced displacement, consists of systematic practices meant to terrorize the working class and weaken resistance and organization.
The recent arrest of the former PRD governor of Guerrero, as well as the development of supposed new lines of investigation by the Attorney General’s Office (FGR), look like new smokescreens from the government in power. The bosses will not deliver justice because their criminal system is the root of all this injustice. Mothers, fathers, and comrades, we know that the only alternative is struggle, ultimately for the end of this system. For Ayotzinapa 43, for our students, and the working class, let’s march non-stop and keep organizing for the egalitarian communist future we all deserve. Join us!
Corbin, KY, Sep 26, 2026 - Progressive Labor Party (PLP) members and friends, including Chicago PL’ers, attended Corbin PRIDE. Local comrades had deep relationships with the organizers, and, weeks prior, circulated CHALLENGE on the Party’s Klan-smashing history. PL’ers distributed 60 flyers, dozens of CHALLENGE, and made more than 20 new contacts interested in building an antiracist committee.
Why Corbin?
Corbin has a deep history of racist terror. Fighting it is central for PLP. In the ‘Red Summer’ of 1919, a white mob drove nearly all of Corbin’s Black population out at gunpoint onto southbound trains. The town became a sundown town whose legacy carries on today. The KKK remained active here, including in local government.
But there’s a growing “progressive” presence, including our comrade who organized Pride. Queer-worker-led groups are popping up across Southeastern Kentucky to fight the reactionary politics gripping the region. But they remain limited, focused only on identity issues and tied to local Democrats.
Our comrade hopes PRIDE can introduce communist ideas to workers. Many queer, women, and trans workers we met work industrial jobs—they can break the alliance between white workers and chauvinist racist culture. They deserve communist ideas!
Why communists showed up
Corbin PRIDE was nearly cancelled after volunteers dropped out over Klan threats. That threat was real: in 2023, two Klan members harassed a Corbin trans rights rally. They flashed cards and shouted slurs. When a demonstrator slapped a card away, the Klansman pulled a gun. KKKops returned the gun, let them walk, and told queer workers they needed a permit. Workers didn’t back down. They showed up armed next time! This year, PLP and community workers made sure PRIDE continued. Chicago comrades came down specifically to fight the threats. In the end, KKKowards never showed up.
We showed up because ALL workers deserve to rally in peace. Racist terror isn’t defeated by waiting on the bosses’ “justice;” It’s smashed by multiracial working-class power. The KKKourts & KKKlan go hand in hand! Communism, abolishing the system that produces the terror, can make that peace permanent!
Chicago comrades make cross-border fightback a success!
One Chicago comrade worked in Beijing and connected our fight against racist lawyer-landlords to the Chinese peasantry’s struggle. “These ruthless slumlords ran their racket with a smirk. They raised rents while tenants lacked savings, lawyers, and a way out. But like peasants in the Chinese countryside, they found their power…the smirk disappeared!” Chicago comrades toured the rail depot where Black workers were sent off, linking Corbin’s history to Chicago’s 1919 Red Summer expulsions.
Racist past and communist future
Our flyer traced Corbin’s 1919 expulsion to today. The same inter-imperialist war, competition, and class struggle that define our moment also shaped 1919. Black workers fled Jim Crow to fill Northern industry’s labor demand, and bosses used racism to divide workers whose victory required fighting side by side. Now those contradictions produce ICE ethnic cleansing, world war, and fascist attacks on LGBT events.
The flyer linked “spontaneous” racial violence to eventual organized Klan fascism, which attacks all workers’ organizations, scapegoating Black workers to achieve this. We contrasted this with Appalachia’s fighting history in Matewan, Blair Mountain, and Harlan County. We explained communism as the only solution: workers of all races, nations, and identities uniting against their exploitation.
One system, many targets
A KY PLer’s speech linked housing, unemployment, food, opiates, and police/Klan/ICE terror as one system attacking different local and international targets. It traced slave catchers who became police to unaccountable raids on Doug Harless and Breonna Taylor. It showed how each crisis lands hardest on Black, queer, trans, and immigrant workers. We named those communists who’ve always led the fightback, and proposed the Corbin Committee Against Racism as the working-class solution for the abolition of the system that produces these crises!
“We need it!”
One moment in the speech: “From Palestine to Mexico, f– their borders, f– their walls!” -met the widest applause of all.
Locals came up wanting to know more about 1919 and how to fight racism in Corbin. A young medic working security thanked us, saying our work globally was making a difference.
We faced no hostility, and met many workers we’ve had in our base. The most common response to our goal of forming the committee: “We need it!”
All in all, over a whole page of contacts not only embraced but shaped it, naming what issues it should fight against: surveillance, wage inequality, bigotry, transportation, and more!
The Party after the party: building ties, deepening the struggle
After Pride, we joined friends and contacts at a local Mexican restaurant and had a deep discussion about communist politics with a factory worker.
The next morning, we met with comrades who couldn’t make Pride and some who did. Some met Chicago PLers for the first time, strengthening Party ties. A comrade from an addiction recovery group, who we’d encouraged to come to Pride, joined us and connected Kentucky conditions to those in Chicago. We spoke with one comrade’s contacts in China over the phone, singing red songs, inspiring Chinese students unsure about American workers’ revolutionary potential. We plan to extend this to workers and revolutionary organizers in India.
As a comrade said, “These Pride rallies give us an opportunity to go all over the state- building the Party and schools for communism across Kentucky, essential for multi-racial working-class unity and revolution!”
