It’s important to listen to the two speeches Lula made at the event in defense of democracy, held on January 8, 2025.
Both speeches – the official one and the impromptu speech – can be watched here: Lula delivers a speech defending democracy on the 2nd anniversary of the January 8 attacks.
Like every speech, it had high moments and some moments that weren’t so high.
Among the highest moments of the official speech, I would highlight Lula’s reaffirmation that democracy will exist in Brazil only when people’s social rights are guaranteed.
Re-establishing this broad sense of democracy is crucial if we want democracy to be defended by the people as a whole, not just by an elite.
I would also highlight the reaffirmation that all the coup plotters must be punished.
Before the official speech, Lula gave an impromptu speech.
In this impromptu speech, Lula said that “democracy is so good that it allowed a lathe operator without a university degree to become President of the Republic, in the first real change of power in this country. That can only happen in a democratic regime. It can’t happen in any other regime.”
Lula then said, “If you look at a photograph of the Russian Revolution of 1917, there isn’t a worker in it (…) because it was the intellectuals, the political activists, students and people with a bit more education, because, historically, people have always believed that workers were no good for anything except working. People didn’t imagine that workers could organize a party and reach the presidency of the Republic (…).”
I don’t know which photo Lula is referring to. Perhaps it’s a photo I was told he’d seen at the famous Smolny Institute in St. Petersburg, Russia.
But there are thousands of photos showing the opposite, that is, that the participation of workers, especially factory workers, including metalworkers, in the October Revolution of 1917 and the civil war that followed, was widespread and decisive.
In fact, this is the soul and driving force behind great revolutions, such as the Russian, Chinese, and Cuban revolutions: the massive participation of the working class. That is why revolutions are profoundly and incomparably democratic.
Perhaps, in speaking of “intellectuals, activists, students, people with a bit more education”, Lula meant to refer not to the Russian Revolution as a whole, but to those who led the Revolution, especially the members of the Bolshevik Party.
Many people say that the leadership of the Russian Revolution of 1917 fell to an elite of intellectuals.
But this is not accurate either.
As George Haupt and Jean-Jacques Marie, among others, have shown, in the Bolshevik “general staff” “the proportion of worker militants of both social origin and presence in the production sector, equalled, if not exceeded, the proportion that existed in the leading cadres of the great European social democratic parties of the time. This phenomenon is all the more significant given that the microcosm of the leading cadres was not recruited from the macrocosm of a mass party made up largely of workers – as was the case, for example, with the German Social Democratic Party – but in the more dangerous and delicate conditions of illegality.”
If you want to read the full text of the book quoted above, you can do so here: Los_bolcheviques_por_ellos_mismos-K.pdf.
Although incorrect, Lula’s statement has an extremely positive side.
After all, if I understood correctly what he meant, I agree with him: There will only be democracy in Brazil if the working class mobilizes, organizes and fights.
And for this to happen, it will always be fundamental for the Brazilian left to have a large proportion of workers in its leadership, “of both social origin and presence in the production sector.”
I leave you with the question: Today, is the proportion of worker militants “of both social origin and presence in the production sector” in the leadership of the Brazilian left higher or lower than in the Bolshevik Party in 1917?
The answer to this question may help explain some of the difficulties the Brazilian left is facing today.
*Valter Pomar is the son of Workers’ Party militant Wladimir Pomar. He has a PhD in Economic History (University of São Paulo) and is a professor of international political economy at the Federal University of ABC.
** This is an opinion piece. The author’s views do not necessarily express the editorial line of Brasil de Fato.
Edited by: Nicolau Soares