It's kick-off time in Brazil

When protesters seize a transport hub in a protest against fare increases, allowing passengers to travel free for a short time, you can understand why Brazil’s authorities are preparing to establish an armed camp for this year’s World Cup.

Brazil is a social tinder pot, a county where endemic corruption and decaying public services constantly drive people on to the streets. Spending billions on a football tournament has proved the last straw for many.

As the comparative stately 48-hour Tube strike drew to a close in London, a march in Rio was heading for the city’s Central Station in protest against fare rises of nearly 10%."We want Fifa-standard hospitals too," marchers shouted, making reference to the high standards demanded by the World Cup organisers for the event's venues.

As they reached their destination, some activists leaped over the barriers and before long a crowd had taken control of the station. The riot police showed up and in the clashes that followed, many were injured. They included a cameraman who was apparently the victim of a police tear gas grenade. He suffered terrible head injuries.

Last year, similar protests that began in Sao Paulo grew into a nationwide movement against corruption and excessive spending ahead of the tournament, which begins in June. Local authorities were forced to withdraw fare rises. Since then, the state has created a mass surveillance programme, no doubt with a little help from the United States.

According to a Reuters news agency report, the security forces are using undercover agents, intercepting e-mails, and monitoring social media to try and keep one step ahead of the protests. President Dilma Rousseff's government is terrified that actions could severely disrupt the tournament. Protests are being planned in all 12 cities that will host matches.

The state is ostensibly targeting the anarchist-inspired Black Bloc members, but the surveillance is taking in all anti-government protesters. Agents are said to have infiltrated the movement and are no doubt acting as provocateurs with the intention of getting activists arrested before the World Cup kicks off.

Ironically, Rousseff herself was the target of the military government that ruled Brazil from 1964-85. A genuine case of poacher turned gamekeeper. She is also mobilising at least 100,000 security personnel across Brazil for the World Cup itself. That’s twice as many as were deployed for the 2013 Confederations Cup which drew mass protests. As well as police and military, members of the elite National Force unit will be “ready to intervene where necessary”, according to Andrei Rodrigues, special secretary for security and safety at major events.

  

Rafael Alcadipani, a professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation business school who has researched the group and interviewed its members, says the Black Blocs "believe that the Brazilian political system is broken and that it doesn't represent them".  said. "As long as the government doesn't address the main issues, people are going to keep protesting," said Alcadipani. "Nothing has changed since last June."

Actually what has changed is the Brazilian economy. A slowing growth rate – the economy shrank in the third quarter of last year for the first time since 2009 - has prompted global investors to pull out their cash, causing the real to depreciate by nearly 20% against the dollar in the last year. That makes imports much dearer for ordinary Brazilians. Abnormally dry weather could threaten agricultural produce and exports, deepening the crisis.

Brazil may be one of the favourites for the tournament but, to coin a phrase, it’s kicking off all over the country and football is likely to take second place to a continuing social upheaval in the world’s fifth largest country. The system is not only broken – it can’t be fixed.

Paul Feldman

Communications editor

Tube workers defy 'brutal' logic

The RMT rail union may have suspended the strike by a group of Tube maintenance workers while it considers a fresh offer, but not before enduring hysterical press and political attacks. What angered the London media and politicians from Ken Livingstone to Gordon Brown, was the fact that a group of workers rejected soothing words and actually dared to take action that was more than just a gesture. The London Underground network ground to a halt following the strike by staff who formerly worked for Metronet. This consortium, set up after New Labour’s partial privatisation of the network, collapsed recently, leaving it in the hands of administrators and Transport for London, which is part of the mayor’s Greater London Authority.

Union action on this scale is not supposed to happen any more. But while leaders from unions like Unison roll over like pussycats and allow the government to break up the health service, and dither about action over a pay award that is actually a pay cut, others are not so compliant. Last week the Prison Officers Association led an illegal walk-out. Then the Tube maintenance workers launched their strike over pensions and job security, both undermined by the collapse of Metronet. Led by general secretary Bob Crow, they also demanded the return of the Tube maintenance system to public ownership.

This was too much for the right-wing media and politicians. Yesterday the Evening Standard devoted page after page to an assault on the RMT and Crow in particular. One edition had a picture of Crow on the front page alongside a banner headline declaring ‘MAN WHO STOPPED LONDON ITS TRACKS’. On pages two and three, interviews with commuters ran under the headline ‘travellers forced to endure days of delay and frustration express their disgust at Tube strikers on a good wage’. Leaving aside the fact that the strike was actually nothing to do with wage demands, the barrage continued on the following pages.

Another double-page spread ran under the headline ‘Union plays politics and costs £50m a day’ and a sub-heading which carried the predictable report that business leaders condemned the RMT’s ‘pointless’ action over jobs and pensions. Underneath there was an attempted character assassination of Crow as the country’s “most hardline and notorious” union leader. It reported that he had been banned from a pub near his union HQ for singing too loudly! The report had to acknowledge, however, that he had built up the union’s membership. Further on in the paper, Mayor Livingstone had a whole page to condemn what he described as a “deeply damaging and pointless strike”, an article no doubt written by his £100,000-a-year advisers, many of whom laughingly claim to be left-wingers.

But the real issues were posed in another column, this time by financial editor Anthony Hilton. He wrote that the union was wrong to think its members had any more right to “future guarantees of their income and job security than anyone else who has worked for a company which went bust. It’s brutal, but it’s capitalism.” The logic is inescapable. Don’t bother resisting – it’s market capitalism stupid. You have to love it because there is no alternative. Well, the RMT – which is no longer affiliated to capitalist New Labour – is challenging that entirely business point of view. While prime minister Brown goes on constructing his one-party state, where confrontation and classes are declared things of the past, resistance is growing to Hilton’s “brutal” society. The RMT leaders have, in effect, said that another world is necessary and their action should be supported.

Paul Feldman
AWTW communications editor