I think Lula is going to lose, by a lot, because on the one hand people in Brazil are gulled by the 'respectable' promises of what we would call the right, and because on the other hand they know from experience that Lula's party is hardly the left, ie, committed to real social change, real equality and democracy. Worker Party hero and inspiration Paulo Freire ran the Sao Paulo education system for two years and related his expereince in pathetic book, Pedagogy of Hope. Those who read that will notice the incredible timidity and opportunism that drives the Workers Party of Brazil, and those who lived with the schools are not likely to pour out to vote for more of it. In a sense, this is a universal metaphor, the left has been unable to articulate a new vision, and has a dubious history to point to as proof of the reasonablness to sacrifice. It also points to the need for revolutionary consciousness to strip ahead of material conditions at a certain point in capitalist development. Unfortunately, revolutionary consciousness has meant, in too many cases, consciousness for national economic development, which stood in contradiction to equality and democracy--and thus meant simply a new form of oppression for working people. Workers seem to know that. Ollman has done the nicest work (for a North American) that I know about in trying to probe the question of why it is so many people are so often willing to become instruments of their own oppression. (See his "Toward Class Consciousness in the Working Class").
On a more hopeful note, see the short article in todays NYTimes regarding the students near S. Francisco striking against the prison system--which they identify as their future under capitalism....
All the best, rich
Rich Gibson Program Coordinator of Social Studies Wayne State University College of Education Detroit MI 48202
http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/index.html http://www.pipeline.com/~rgibson/meap.html
Life travels upward in spirals.
Those who take pains to search the shadows
of the past below us, then, can better judge the
tiny arc up which they climb,
more surely guess the dim
curves of the future above them.