Labor Parties in Brazil: Current Reflections

• Autor(a) principal: D'Araujo, Maria Celina Soares
• Data de Publicação: 1990
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Estudos Históricos (Rio de Janeiro)
• Texto Completo: https://periodicos.fgv.br/reh/article/view/2307

As institutions, Brazil's political parties have earned themselves scant legitimacy, and this characteristic is aggravated in the case of working-class parties. The article analyzes the origns and activies of the 1945-1965 Brazilian Labor Party (Partido Trabalhista Brasileiro, or PTB), with the intent of demonstrating how slowly the incorporation of workers into the political process has transpired. Although the PTB was a labor party, it did not adopt a strategy of representing autonomously organized workers. It maintained strong ties to corporatist labor unions and was internally characterized by an extremely hermetic structure and by the cult workship of Vargas' charisma. The article draws a comparison with the Workers' Party ( Partido dos Trabalhadores, ou PT), created in 1979. It shows how the quality of the relations between political parties and labor unions has been altered and how these two party experiences have been distinct in organizational terms. This is what distinguishes the PT as more representative of unionized works and, furthermore, it is something that has contributed to the emergence of a plurality of positions within the labor movement.