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!
