Lula: A Biography
Fernando Morais, Verso, £25

LAWFARE is a relatively new term. In essence, it is the weaponisation of bourgeois law, usually by the right wing. 

In Latin America, lawfare has been mostly used to try to eliminate leftist opponents who operate within the confines of bourgeois law. Probably the best known use of this tactic is when Brazil’s far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro employed it against Brazil’s former president Lula. 

A brief description of these attempts goes like this. 

Various elements of the mainstream media in Brazil published stories that suggested Lula had laundered money and illegally owned property. These charges were then brought to the legislature by opponents of the left, who then employed an ambitious right-wing prosecutor to fabricate charges of corruption.

Although the charges were somewhat fantastical, the right-wing media were able to convince the public via what we now call fake news that there was genuine substance to the charges. 

In July 2017, Lula was convicted on charges of money laundering and corruption in a trial that could best be described as questionable. He spent 580 days in prison. He was released in 2019, and his conviction was nullified in 2021 by the Supreme Court. The same ruling also annulled all other pending cases against him. 

He fought the charges hard. His supporters backed him in the streets and in the courts.

This book, written by journalist Fernando Morais and originally intended to be a history of Lula’s first presidency, instead became a history of the fraudulent legal attack on Lula that put him in prison. 

This is the story — a history — of working-class politics in an economy where exploitation and super-exploitation were the norm; where the state was rarely democratic and its laws were enforced by a code that emphasised subordination and enforced class division in favor of the ruling elites. In short, a capitalist dream and a worker’s nightmare. 

Once Lula had worked for a few years and began to understand why unions were not only useful but necessary to a life even slightly beyond mere survival, he dedicated himself to the union movement, defending workers’ existing rights and constantly fighting for less inequality and more working class power.

Indeed, it was when he realised that the composition of Brazil’s national legislature was close to 100 per cent from the ruling class, that he decided to enter the electoral arena.

It’s never an easy task to get elected in a system designed to keep the class one represents out of power. As most readers probably understand, it is this design that informs every legislature in the capitalist world, with that in the United States being the most restrictive in that regard. 

When Lula first ran and the military and the capitalist class ran Brazil. Lula was not successful, but eventually garnered enough respect and popularity to be elected president as a candidate of Brazil’s Workers Party — the party he helped found.

Morais writes his biography of Lula in a tight, suspenseful manner. The excitement of a union hall filled with workers determined to prevent Lula’s arrest should he ask them to do so jumps from the page. As a former local union president, I was reminded of those moments when the membership truly realises their power and stand poised to act should the situation require it. 

In one moment the reader finds themselves in a massive protest, police pushing against the crowd anticipating an outburst from the disciplined crowd. In another, one is locked in with Lula in his cell after his arrest in what was a vain attempt by the government to end a massive strike. 

We are brought into political debates within the union membership and its leaders. Lula and his faction work hard to keep the demands of the membership front and centre as different political factions push for their own agendas. Usually, Lula and his associates succeed in keeping the union focused on worker demands. In turn, the union membership grows and a true sense of workers’ power begins to take shape. Despair is replaced by hope and actual progress in terms of salaries and working conditions. 

The next step is to change social conditions; to make the needs and hopes of the workers and other oppressed sections of the Brazilian economy the law of the land. 

Of course, the reaction from the propertied and monied class is relentless and angry. Gathering their forces, they enlist their own politicians, law enforcement, the military and the pressure of foreign interlopers from the global North. The battle is joined. Ultimately, Lula is arrested and convicted on contrived charges. And we are back to the point where the book begins.

Ron Jacobs is the author of several books, including Daydream Sunset: Sixties Counterculture in the Seventies published by CounterPunch Books. His latest book, titled Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, is now available. He lives in Vermont. He can be reached at: ronj1955@gmail.com.