Thousands of people, especially young people, joined the demonstration on Avenida Paulista last Sunday in support of Lula’s candidacy, visibly determined to defeat the far right. In the days that followed, this social force proved decisive in securing Senate approval for a proposed constitutional amendment (PEC) to end the six-days-on, one-day-off work schedule. Yet, speaking from a sound truck, Lula once again channeled that energy toward the pragmatic interests of the Broad Front.

No politician on the platform embodied this more clearly than Geraldo Alckmin, São Paulo’s former PSDB governor. The very place where he was speaking had recently been the scene of violent attacks by his police on secondary-school students and teachers. Readers of Esquerda Diário are already familiar with the rest of his record. Today’s paradox is that even when Alckmin tries to appear ‘democratic,’ he reveals his reactionary character. This is undoubtedly one factor explaining how the far right has grown stronger during his four years in government with Lula.

At least, his speech allows us to make a historical analogy with the first fascist experience in Brazil in the 1930s and, through this path, extract concrete lessons for today's battles. Into the microphone, Alckmin shouted: "-São Paulo does not want dictatorship. Our idol is not Colonel Ustra. Our idols are the students who died in the dictatorship: Martins, Miragaia, Dráusio and Camargo."

The MMDC, the 1932 São Paulo uprising and the rise of the AIB

What is the catch? The students Alckmin named were not killed under the military dictatorship associated with the torturer Ustra. They died in the May 1932 demonstrations that preceded the armed uprising of São Paulo’s bourgeoisie later that year. Far from being a ‘constitutionalist revolution,’ as leaders of both the traditional and Bolsonarist right unanimously claim, it was a reaction by the state’s ruling class to losing its dominance within the federation to the faction of the bourgeoisie led by Getúlio Vargas. The four young men were commemorated in street names and monuments. Their deaths also led to the formation of the secret civilian organization MMDC, which acted as the paramilitary wing of the São Paulo United Front (FUP). The front comprised the PRP and PD, parties representing the traditional coffee oligarchy and its dissident factions.

After São Paulo’s bourgeoisie was decisively defeated by the troops of Vargas’s Provisional Government, many former combatants of the uprising, mainly from the agrarian elite, regrouped under the authoritarian banner of Integralism.

Integralism and the Liberal Party (PL): similarities and differences

The crisis of hegemony that emerged then had much in common with today’s. Between 1932 and 1934, Plínio Salgado's AIB grew rapidly, also driven by the rise of Nazism and fascism in Europe. An organization with just 40 participants at its first public appearance in 1933 grew to almost 200,000 members shortly after the Constituent Assembly elections of 1934.

Historical comparisons must consider differences as well as similarities. Historical Integralism and the far-right forces now gathered in the PL are both ultraconservative, but their structures differ. The AIB was a centralized, openly antidemocratic movement that advocated a corporatist state, adapting Italian fascism to Brazilian conditions. The PL’s current electoral coalition, by contrast, operates within the bourgeois-democratic regime: it promotes a reactionary political agenda alongside an economic program focused primarily on neoliberal interests.

Valdemar da Costa Neto’s Liberal Party (PL) was not always Bolsonarist. It emerged from the patronage politics of the centrão bloc and once even counted Lula’s first vice-president, José Alencar, among its members. It now provides a political home for the social movement of Bolsonarism. The AIB, by contrast, took its inspiration directly from Mussolini’s regime. These are two variants of the far right arising from an organic crisis, but each reflects a particular stage of the class struggle. Until November 1937, the AIB maintained a mutually beneficial relationship with Vargas’s government; the drafting of the Cohen Plan marked the high point of this convergence. Drawing on the anticommunism spread by the Integralists, Vargas whipped up public panic to contain the left and pave the way for the coup that established the Estado Novo (‘New State’) regime.

The antifascist struggle of the Trotskyists in Brazil

The rise of Integralism was therefore a concrete threat amid geopolitical instability and working-class mobilization, with the Russian Revolution still a recent memory. While the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) suffered repeated leadership crises under Moscow’s directives, the Trotskyists gained ground in internal political struggles and the labor movement, particularly in São Paulo’s printers’ union following the major strike of 1929.

The Communist League (LCI), aligned with the International Left Opposition—the predecessor of the Fourth International—became an organization independent of the PCB in October 1933. Four fundamental strategic factors contributed to this:

  1. Stalinism’s capitulation to Nazism and fascism under the sectarian Third Period line of the Communist International (Comintern).
  2. Mário Pedrosa and Lívio Xavier’s formulation of foundational theses on the development of Brazilian capitalism.
  3. The winning of influence in São Paulo’s printers’ union after defeats in strikes led by the PCB.
  4. The call for a coalition of left-wing forces in the Antifascist United Front (FUA), issued through the newspaper O Homem Livre (The Free Man).

The PCB, immersed in political crises and sectarian directives, refused to participate in the FUA. By contrast, the Communist League (LCI) achieved important successes with its united front policy, recruiting new cadres and bringing together various left-wing trade unions and workers' organizations in the coalition, such as socialists and anarchist currents. Mário Pedrosa and Fúlvio Abramo were among the main organizers of O Homem Livre, a newspaper that became the movement’s official mouthpiece and published the FUA’s manifesto to the Brazilian people:

"Fascism means misery, oppression, and the debasement of consciences. It begins by destroying all organizations of the proletariat and ends by becoming the absolute master, 'integral,' who does not respect ideologies and tolerates no dissent. Neither communists, nor socialists, nor anarchists, nor democrats can exist under its yoke." (O HOMEM LIVRE, 1933, p. 6)

With each new rally, the LCI’s growing influence intensified the political struggle within the PCB. In São Paulo, activists in the Regional Committee—which would later be openly led by Hermínio Sacchetta—were increasingly drawn to united-front tactics. In 1934, they defied the party’s national leadership and joined the FUA in fighting the Integralists. The antifascist movement also grew in other major Brazilian cities, including Rio de Janeiro and Belo Horizonte, facing brutal police repression by Vargas’s government, which tried to weaken the coalition through successive arrests of its leaders.

The FUA’s best-known action, immortalized in Abramo’s book, became known as ‘The Flight of the Green Chickens.’ The name refers to the olive-green uniforms of the 8,000 Integralists who fled Praça da Sé on October 7, 1934, in the face of the disciplined action of left-wing trade unions and political organizations. The counter-demonstration initiated by the Trotskyists won a victory and dealt a serious blow to the ‘virile and unshakable’ image Plínio Salgado sought to project for the AIB. Its growth stalled, and a long time passed before it could hold another public demonstration.

The outcome of the clash was also decisive for the balance of forces at the time. On the eve of World War II, Vargas was already bargaining politically and economically with the countries that would later form the Axis and the Allies. The disruption of the AIB (Brazilian Integralist Action) placed real limits on the further advance of fascism in Brazil.

This is a small example of the strategic importance of the workers’ united front advocated by Trotsky in France, Germany and Italy against the rise of Nazism and fascism. The bitter conflicts in those countries exposed the disastrous consequences of the Stalinist line. The Communist International responded by swinging from its ultra-left course to the opposite extreme: the Popular Front tactic, which instructed Communist parties to forge class alliances with the bourgeoisie against dictatorships and Bonapartist governments.

From the Popular Front to the Broad Front

This Popular Front policy of class conciliation became a legacy of classical Stalinism, later adopted by social democracy and parties such as the Workers’ Party (PT), and it exacts a heavy price today. It abandons working-class independence in confrontations with the far right. While the trade union bureaucracy holds workers back, the Broad Front welcomes right-wing forces pursuing interests alien to the working class’s democratic and economic aspirations.

The past four years of the Lula–Alckmin government have demonstrated this fully. Temer’s and Bolsonaro’s neoliberal reforms were preserved in their entirety. Through the Fiscal Framework, Haddad served the interests of Faria Lima’s financial circles, imposing spending caps on health and education while advancing privatization. Tarcísio’s PR and Derrite’s PP were guaranteed ministerial posts. When elections come, workers are offered only one way forward—the ballot—and even that is made conditional on political support for this project. Yet the project has repeatedly demonstrated, most recently in the first round, its inability to defeat Bolsonarism.

That is why it is especially important today to recover the historical memory of the working class. Above all, we need to draw lessons that prepare us for a real fight, rather than make humiliating appeals to the traditional right, such as the MBL. Young people and the working class have already shown that they can send the ‘green chickens’ fleeing. They have every chance of doing the same to the ‘yellow ducks’ today.