Political society, social movements and the workers' party in Brazil

Brazilian social movements are fully recognized political actors at all levels of governance (municipal, state and federal) and present distributive social claims that favor the working classes through their involvement in participative democratic processes and in party politics. Many have cultivated a symbiotic relation with the Workers’ Party (PT).

Since it's founding, the PT created a new type of social movement – political party relation that broke with the traditional transmission belt model. Since then, the PT has gained significant power at all levels of government and this has consequently transformed it relation with social movements. PT governments have integrated many of the movements’ demands into their government programs especially where these programs strengthen their electoral chances and where they do not conflict with neoliberal macro-economic policy. Consequently, some social movements have come to depend on PT governments to express and achieve their existential and program claims thus abandoning their goals of social transformation and forms of transgressive contention for what they call the “struggle for the possible” being specific social programs obtained through negotiations and more restrained forms of collective action. The result is that social movements in their relationship to the ruling national party, contribute to reproducing the structure of power, but concurrently open a political space for excluded populations.

This paper proposes to study the changes that have taken place in this relationship through the specific cases of the housing movement, the MST and the women's movement and their relationship with the PT as a governing party. It will especially look to the concept of political society as a way of understanding how this sphere mediates the social movement - state relation and how the structure and dynamics of political society can condition the way social movements are organized and their choice of claims and meaning.