O partido dos trabalhadores e o foro de São Paulo: “laboratório” de hegemonia política partidária na América Latina

Abstract

The present paper seeks to analyze, from the Gramscian theory point of view, the role of the Workers’ Party (PT) in the creation and in the process of building the Forum of São Paulo in the period 1990-2018. I work on the hypothesis that the Workers’ Party played a leading role in the Forum, giving at various moments the political-ideological direction of the broad spectrum of Latin American leftist entities involved. The documents emanating from the Forum, the bibliography on the theoretical approach to hegemony, as well as the one associated with the history of the Workers' Party and the Forum of São Paulo were used as research sources. As a complement, we used interviews with key figures who worked in both the Workers’ Party's Foreign Relations Secretariat, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and the overall leadership of the Party. Exploratory in nature, the research seeks, through analyzes on the internationalist perspective of the Workers’ Party, to point out ways to understand its process of hegemonic construction in Brazil and its developments in Latin America. It is concluded with this paper that the action of the Workers' Party in the Forum of São Paulo took place in the sense of gathering around its leadership the aspirations of building a counter-hegemonic movement, a task that was facilitated by the characteristics of the Party itself, strictly speaking, its internationalist vocation and its plural constitution.