A-Infos (en) Spaine, EMBAT: Interview with OSL - Libertarian Socialist Organization - from Brazil[Part 3] (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

What follows is the third and final part of the interview we have been 
conducting with the sister organization in Brazil OSL (Organizazione 
Socialista Llibertaria). This part focuses on: Guidelines and work of 
the OSL. Trying to delve deeper into the specific tasks they perform in 
their political work. ---- You can retrieve the previous parts: First 
(OSL and its conception of anarchism) and Second (Brazilian culture, 
history and struggles) ---- Can they explain their concept of popular 
power? ---- The construction of a self-managed popular power is the 
basis of our strategic conception. It requires a general strategy which 
involves, for the oppressed classes, a transformation of their capacity 
for realization into social force, and then a transformation of social 
force into power. Here's how we understand this process.

For us, the oppressed classes have a capacity for realization, that is, 
a potential or possibility to produce social force. When they put this 
capacity into action, they become a material/real existence and form a 
social force, that is, this energy applied in social conflicts to 
achieve certain goals. Workers who are not organized and do not 
participate in movements and struggles do not produce social force. 
Therefore, when we organize or strengthen popular movements, we are 
doing exactly that: giving materiality to the transformative potential 
of the masses; bringing into play a force that, in conflict with other 
forces, will establish power relations and determine the shape of social 
reality.

But it is not enough to build a social force. This force needs to grow 
to deal with the other forces at play. So an important task is to find 
ways to permanently increase this strength, whether through life growth, 
strength optimization, capability development, resource management, etc. 
It turns out that for anarchists in general, and the OSL is no 
different, it's not about doing anything to increase that force. This is 
what those who have mortgaged their principles in favor of pragmatism 
do. This force must be increased, but in accordance with certain 
strategic, programmatic and ethical criteria. Because it is these means 
that will indicate the ends we want to build.

This requires defending and promoting a mass line in these movements, 
often in dispute with other sectors, currents, etc. This line - which, 
as we say, has similarities with revolutionary syndicalism - includes 
some important elements.

Strengthen grassroots organizations in all sectors (union, community, 
agricultural, student, etc.). Guarantee the strength and prominence of 
grassroots workers. Do not subordinate movements to political or 
ideological positions (anarchist union, anarchist student movement, 
etc.). Fight for class independence against all the institutions and 
people who exercise relations of domination with the movements or 
promote their dependence (employers, State, parties, churches, NGOs, etc.).

Permanently cultivate class solidarity, avoiding the social mobility of 
individuals or sectors and betting on the structural and revolutionary 
transformation of society. Strengthen social struggles and conquests 
through combative mobilizations, so that immediate struggles and 
conquests (reforms) point towards a transformative and revolutionary 
horizon (revolution). Confront enemy institutions through popular 
movements, which means promoting direct action and developing workers' 
politics in their own institutions. Remember that the State is an 
institution of the dominant classes and that it has the capacity to 
produce a dominant class: the bureaucracy.

Guarantee the protagonism of the workers, with widely participatory 
decisions taken by the grassroots, as this will strengthen the workers. 
Struggles and movements are spaces for the creation of a new 
revolutionary subject and a new society; this subject is not 
automatically produced by the unequal structure of society or by the 
authoritarian vanguards, whose submission to the bases produces subjects 
incapable of promoting the transformation we seek.

It is the social force produced by the oppressed classes in this line 
that is able to impose itself on the others (social revolution) and to 
establish a form of self-management or libertarian power, that is to 
say, this temporary balance that establishes when there is this 
superposition of forces. Power that can be based on domination (as in 
the case of capitalism, "socialist" experiments, etc.) or on 
self-management and federalism. Our ultimate goal is libertarian 
socialism, with a generalized socialization (economic, political, 
cultural), the end of classes and all forms of domination. Only in such 
a society will popular power be fully consolidated.

Can you give us specific examples?

Let's see how this concept of popular power is applied, for example, in 
the housing movement. The first is that there is a huge contingent of 
workers who do not have access to housing or decent housing. And it is a 
small minority that articulates itself in the housing movements. We see 
that there is a whole capacity for realization that has not been 
transformed into a social force. If we think that it is strategic to 
work with this sector, the first step will be, on the one hand, to think 
of ways to organize these unorganized people, to create struggles, 
movements, etc. On the other hand, we will also need to map the existing 
movements, strategically evaluate their prospects and, if necessary, 
participate in them by promoting our program.

Most of the Brazilian housing movements focus on the organization of the 
homeless, with the aim of building a social force destined to contest 
the State through elections. These movements are usually articulated by 
parties that make the homeless their base for the elections or what we 
call "electoral corrals". These politicians promise that when they are 
elected (councillors, deputies, senators, etc.) they will defend the 
housing agenda in parliament. But we already know how these things work.

In the case of participation in movements with this perspective, it will 
be essential to combat this partisan sector and this relationship of 
domination between party and movement. It will also be up to us to 
promote this self-managing way of building the struggles and the 
movement itself: fight for permanent assemblies, so that the grassroots 
are encouraged and trained to participate, so that the leadership is 
legitimate and responds to the interests of the grassroots, etc.

It will also be crucial to promote our revolutionary conception, which 
is the most effective even for immediate gains and to put pressure on 
governments in turn. We try to promote the idea that any immediate 
conquest within capitalism-statism will be vulnerable and will be 
snatched away at the first opportunity by the ruling classes.

We remember that those who are disorganized in a movement or do not have 
a program are used by other forces. They reproduce the positions of 
others, they become the auxiliary line of others, even if they don't 
know it.

Here's how this and other types of movement work. Participate in 
everyday political practice and confront it. Assess in which sectors, 
the forces at play, how to position ourselves internally (allies, 
adversaries, etc.) and how to advance our program. It is important to 
mention that there is a double movement on our part: workers who are 
already in a certain sector (for example, a professional category), who 
become anarchists, and work to articulate this sector; but also sectors 
that we consider strategic and that move militancy to work, with a view 
to advancing strategic efforts and also promoting anarchism for certain 
militancy.

For the OSL, what does anarchism mean for the peoples who inhabit the 
territory of the Brazilian State?

Brazil is a country of more than 200 million inhabitants and its 
internal composition is complex and diverse. If we understand "people" 
not in the liberal-bourgeois sense (like the totality of this 
population), but in a classist way, as many anarchists have done in 
history, we can say, according to an analysis we elaborated some time 
ago, that the Brazilian oppressed classes have an important diversity.

Currently, there is a majority of urban and rural proletarians (75% of 
the population), but with very different working and living conditions: 
salaried, self-employed, precarious workers; private, public and other 
sectors, who live in the city and the countryside, etc. There is also a 
significant contingent of farmers and traditional peoples (10% of the 
population), who are also diverse: small owners, tenants and illegal 
occupiers, indigenous people, quilombolas, riversiders, etc. Finally, 
there is a smaller number of completely marginalized people (2% of the 
population), which includes those in a situation analogous to slavery, 
prisoners, the homeless, etc. This class situation is deeply 
crisscrossed by issues of race, gender, ethnicity and sexuality.

In other words, in Brazil we have to deal with this complex and deeply 
diverse reality of oppressed peoples or classes. The challenge we have 
to face is that these classes are, in most cases, demobilized. And when 
they are mobilized, they are embroiled in countless issues and engaged 
in sectoral, partial, etc. struggles. There are wrong ways of dealing 
with this situation that have been adopted by sectors of the left. We 
can give some examples.

1.) Choose in advance a supposedly revolutionary sector, either the 
industrial urban proletariat, because of their position in the mode of 
production, or the marginalized, because they have nothing to lose; this 
severely limits the social force of our project. 2.) Mobilize different 
sectors with different flags of struggle, through countless isolated 
movements that have nothing to unify them, and when they work on issues 
that go beyond class, they do so from a polyclass perspective; this 
reinforces fragmentation and greatly reduces the transformative 
potential of these struggles. 3.) Work with a reductionist classism, 
leaving issues like race and gender for another time or ignoring them 
and understanding that somehow it is possible to mobilize workers in 
Brazil without addressing these issues; this complicates our ability to 
mobilize and engage.

We understand that it is necessary to move away from homogenizing 
statistical models and, at the same time, guarantee certain positions 
capable of giving unity to this diversity. In other words, we need, on 
the one hand, to break with the erasure or silencing of certain classes 
and class fractions, as well as their struggles and demands. For us, 
self-managing federalism is a model of organization that can support the 
construction of a front of oppressed classes, embracing all their 
diversity. But, on the other hand, we also need to break with isolation, 
rebuild the social fabric and, above all, unify the different struggles 
in a transformative perspective, so that they serve the construction of 
the libertarian socialism we aim for.

These are the reasons why we defend a feminism and anti-racism that are 
simultaneously libertarian, classist, revolutionary and 
internationalist. They are fundamental elements of our self-management 
project of popular power.

Act against PL 1904, Belo Horizonte
How does OSL relate to social and popular movements? In what struggles 
does the organization participate?

Before mentioning the sectors and struggles in which we are present, we 
think it is important to return to our limited time strategy, mentioned 
above. This broad strategy has guided all our particular social work in 
different movements.

We start from our reading of reality, which shows that there has been a 
considerable advance of neoliberalism in recent years. This has led to 
harsh attacks on the few welfare measures that existed, through 
"reforms" (attack/withdrawal of rights) in areas such as employment, 
social security, etc. And also greater pressure from the dominant 
classes on the oppressed classes.

The extreme right has been growing, among other things, because it has 
aligned itself with this radicalized vision of neoliberalism and thus 
attracted a significant part of the interests of big capital. And also 
for an abstractly anti-systemic discourse ("against everything there 
is"), which mobilizes a popular base, at the same time a victim of this 
process of strengthening neoliberalism. The "answer" that has been 
offered by the social-democratic/social-liberal camp (Petism and the 
democratic-popular camp) is based on the conciliation of classes and the 
displacement towards the center of the political spectrum, in order to 
defend the " Democratic Rule of Law", the "institutions", etc. And this 
has further eroded his already very moderate and also political project.

Faced with this medium-term situation, we have developed a strategy for 
a limited period of time (between the tactic and the general strategy). 
It proposes to build/strengthen a radical and combative left, to the 
left of PTism, which prioritizes criticism and anti-capitalist and 
revolutionary analysis, as well as class conflicts and confrontations. 
This obviously requires alliances with other sectors and places us in 
the role of left-wing opposition to the popular-democratic project. 
Although this field (radical, anti-capitalist, revolutionary) has always 
existed in Brazil, in the last decades of PT hegemony on the left, it 
has weakened more than in other times. Today it is very much a minority 
in Brazilian society, both on the left within the State and outside it.

This strategy also proposes, at the same time, to dispute the line of 
this field, reinforcing elements of our program such as direct action, 
independence and class consciousness, and pointing out the need to 
advance in a project of self-managed popular power. This shows somewhat 
that, in the medium term, our goal is to recover the social vector of 
anarchism, a line and mass influence; in other words, to make anarchism 
a considerable force among Brazilian workers.

Bearing in mind that the OSL is an organization of (anarchist) workers, 
that these workers are involved in different sectors, movements and 
struggles of the oppressed classes, and that social (grassroots, mass) 
work is at the center of our strategic priorities, all the activists of 
the organization contribute daily to promote these lines on the trade 
union, community/agrarian and student fronts. In geographical terms, our 
presence in the movements and struggles of these sectors goes hand in 
hand with our national presence, as mentioned above. We have a greater 
presence in the South-East and Mid-West regions of the country (due to 
our constitution as an organization) and are gradually moving towards 
the South, North-East and North.

In the union sector, we have allied ourselves with these more 
radicalized sectors. We have fought right-wing trade unionism, such as 
Força Sindical, and also the complacency of the CUT, CTB, etc. We 
constantly carry out basic work in our categories, articulating, 
mobilizing, stimulating the perspectives of organization, struggle and 
mobilization. This is done in four different circumstances. 1.) In some 
cases, we act as the opposition (when we are not in the leadership, 
because we lose or do not run in important union elections); 2.) In 
other cases, we act as the situation (when we are part of the 
management, because we win the majority union elections); 3.) There are 
also cases in which we act with proportional presence in the management 
(when the union does not have majority elections, but proportional ones, 
and includes in its management all the political forces of the union); 
4.) Finally, in cases where there is a lot of repression in the 
organization of workers, we opt for clandestine unionism, articulated 
outside the official structure of the union.

Our union work has focused on various sectors and categories, such as: 
public and private education (workers and teachers); welfare, health and 
social assistance; transport services; journalism; research and 
technology. Although we do not have an organic militancy, we maintain 
close contacts and ties of solidarity with workers in the industrial 
sector, such as metal workers. And recently, we have been involved in 
the struggle of uberized workers (delivery people and Ubers). Our work 
involves formal workers, outsourced workers, part-time workers and 
precarious workers in general.

In the community sector, our work is a little more diffuse and is 
distributed among different urban and peripheral movements, whose 
activity revolves mainly around the organization of 
neighborhoods/regions and the struggles for housing (occupations of land 
and buildings, fights against evictions and access to services, etc.). 
In some cases, we participate in already existing movements, with 
diverse political and strategic lines (sometimes we are the majority 
force and in others the minority), and in others we build the movements 
ourselves, having a greater influence on the lines, as is the case of 
the Grassroots Organization Movement (MOB) in certain localities.

We also work in the countryside, with rural movements and struggles of 
workers, farmers and indigenous peoples. Among workers and farmers, we 
have participated in movements with flags that include struggles against 
agribusiness and latifundia; for access to land and the conditions to 
remain in the countryside; radical agrarian reform and agroecological 
food production. Due to the more restricted existence of rural 
movements, and also thanks to contexts often marked by violence and 
repression, we have participated in broader movements of national scope, 
but which are under the hegemony of petism, such as the Movement of 
Landless Rural Workers (MST) and the Movement of Small Farmers (MPA). In 
this case, our option is to build an alternative position within the 
movements themselves, in which, in some cases, we only constitute the 
base and, in others, we have positions in the structures.

Support for the families of: Ocupação dos Queixadas, Cajamar, in Greater 
São Paulo
In the indigenous movement, we have a presence in some towns, in some 
towns and in some regional and national organizations. We have 
contributed to the reorganization that the movement has undergone in 
recent years and we have tried to break with positions that are limited 
to welfare and institutional action. Certain sectors of the movement 
already have a culture of autonomy and resistance close to our lines, 
which makes our work much easier.

Rural work has allowed us to connect the class struggle more directly 
with other issues. For example, on the coast, our work among the 
indigenous people articulated with other fronts has taken as a 
fundamental point the protection of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest, so 
this work acquires an ecological perspective at the same time. Working 
with farmers and small producers in the countryside has allowed us to 
take on demands such as food sovereignty, the end of pesticides in food 
production, the need to preserve the soil, etc.; and this also adds 
other relevant elements to our struggles.

In the student and youth sector, we have a presence in public and 
private universities, as well as among young people from the outskirts 
who are (or are not) in school and/or have not gone to university. In 
some cases we are active in movements and trends that we have built 
ourselves, and in others we are part of broader movements, trying to 
prioritize those that have a greater affinity with the radical left. In 
universities, we have defended public education under worker control, 
student retention and fought against neoliberal and privatizing 
influence. In the peripheries, we work with young people, mainly 
organizing the peripheral neighborhoods through cultural activities of 
capoeira, music, events, etc., and trying to move towards building more 
direct struggles, for housing for example , and towards grassroots 
organization through periodic popular assemblies that address local 
issues and the national situation.

It is important to mention here that we have chosen not to have fronts 
dedicated exclusively to issues of gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity, 
because we believe that these issues are cross-cutting across all fronts 
and must be addressed by all activists in all places where we work. . 
Thus, all activists - union or student, for example - are also activists 
on issues of gender/sexuality and race/ethnicity in their workplaces or 
studies.

If we put women, LGBT+s, blacks, indigenous people, etc. to work only on 
these issues, this would mean, on the one hand, that trade union, 
community/agrarian and student work would be restricted to a majority of 
men, whites, etc.

on the other hand, it would encourage the opinion that only women should 
promote feminism, blacks should promote anti-racism, etc. If we put 
these colleagues (women, blacks, LGBT+, etc.) in charge of the trade 
union and community fronts, it would overload them. It would mean 
working two jobs, while those who do not belong to these historically 
oppressed social sectors would only have one.

To avoid these problems, our line on issues of gender, sexuality, race 
and ethnicity is that they must be permanently promoted on all our 
fronts and in all our work: in workplaces, in neighborhoods, in 
settlements, in universities, etc. Of course, this does not exclude the 
existence of exclusive spaces that are convened when necessary to deal 
with certain topics that require this type of forum. The OSL has a 
secretariat in charge of these issues, which not only guides the 
organization on a political level, but also contributes to the 
development of guidelines that support social work on the front lines. 
This line also contributes to our involvement in other national and 
international mobilizations, such as the struggle in defense of Palestine.

Finally, it is important to mention that, in reality, this division or 
separation into fronts that we use only serves as an organizational 
solution to articulate the work. That is, we understand that there is 
only one set of oppressed classes to organize, regardless of where it 
is. That is why we do not consider the different sectors, movements and 
struggles to compete with each other, nor do we take them in isolation. 
They can always relate and converge, something we constantly encourage. 
As we said, this is an important aspect of our power project. We must 
pay attention to local specificities, but without forgetting to make 
these different efforts point towards a broad movement, a front of 
oppressed classes, a project of self-managing power.

NOTE: special thanks, in addition to theOSL, to the tune of 
Batzac-Joventuts Libertarianswho have collaborated in the re-correction 
, for its publication.

https://embat.info/entrevista-a-osl-organitzacio-socialista-llibertaria-de-brasil-part-3/
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