The Legacy of the PCB

Image: Jimmy Chan
Whatsapp
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram
Telegram

By MILTON PINHEIRO*

The Brazilian Communist Party completes one hundred years of existence in 2022

We are approaching an important historical event, March 25, 2022, a date that represents a milestone of profound repercussions in Brazilian political history as it is the moment when the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) completes one hundred years of existence. It is an event that must be debated, celebrated, analyzed in all its fullness and studied with due critical rigor. However, it cannot be captured by the intellectual dishonesty of historical revisionism that guides the liquidators of 1992, today enshrined in the Citizenship Party Foundation.

The PCB, after the extinction of the Paulista Republican Party (PRP) – an instrument of order -, is the party with the greatest longevity and political intervention in Brazil. Even though he spent 56 years in hiding, due to the action of the bourgeois State that persecuted him violently and put him in this long period of illegality.

The emergence of this political operator was confirmed by the crisis of anarchism and its union project, but, in particular, by the need to build a program for the working class to be able to organize the confrontation against the capitalist State and the bourgeoisie, at the same time proposed to articulate the process of socialist rupture, inspired by the Russian revolution of October 1917.

The Brazilian Communist Party prevailed in the battles of class struggles. Brazil thought, acted together with the working class in defense of the project of the proletariat and popular demands. Throughout the 1920th century, there were no political and social struggles that did not have the indelible presence of the PCB. He acted in trade union and popular struggles in the 1930s, when, still in that same period, he built a strong space to present himself to Brazil through the popular press; presented candidates to the various parliaments and even to the presidency of the republic in 1935. In this last decade, the party organized the fight against the exceptional regime at the time and built a perspective of breaking with order from the uprising in XNUMX.

From 1935 to 1943 the party faced brutal repression, suffering imprisonment, torture, exile and even the murder of many of its members. Coming out of the darkness of that long night, after the Mantiqueira conference – but also, with the changes that took place after the second world war, the PCB was able to present itself in the light of day and enliven the political reality with its strong mass presence . The party's intervention in social reality meant that it managed to elect an extremely important communist group in the republic's parliament and with great repercussions in political, proletarian and popular struggles.

The PCB, again suffered the coup attack of the bourgeois State, having its federal and state parliamentarians and councilors impeached from 1948 onwards. , popular and deepened its presence in the Brazilian intellectual world.

No party in the world, perhaps with the exception of the Italian Communist Party (PCI) and the French Communist Party (PCF), had among its cadres what was most important in the intellectual, artistic, cultural and scientific world, even with the long period of illegality imposed by the order of capital on the Brazilian Communist Party.

Strikes, rural uprisings, intellectual confrontations in the battles of ideas, women's struggles, the fight against racism, the relentless struggle against the oppressions of capitalist sociability, international solidarity with peoples in struggle, the interpretation of Brazil were slogans of the giant PCB intervention in defense of the Brazilian revolution, based on Marxist and Leninist ideas and a whole theoretical framework of the revolutionary field.

Once again, the bourgeois autocracy imposed its violent logic of domination on Brazil, based on bourgeois articulation and the operation of the military, carrying out the bourgeois-military coup, a long period of exception that cost the PCB a dramatic process of defeats, with many organic ruptures. and a very high political cost. The party, in the 21 years of the dictatorship, suffered a brutal repression with hundreds of arrests, torture, exile and murders of 43 militants, being a third of the Central Committee (CC).

The Brazilian Communist Party prioritized its action in the struggle for mass intervention in the fight against the dictatorship, however it left the dictatorial period weakened because of a dubious political line and, weakened again, by a great internal split with the departure of the legendary communist leader , Luiz Carlos Prestes.

However, new issues from the so-called socialist world and the fall of the Berlin Wall had an impact on the PCB. Liquidationist narratives, political capitulation were opportunistically presented by the long-standing and stagnant Central Committee, which had already been operating a policy of integration into formal democracy through the leaders of Salomão Malina and the anti-communist Roberto Freire.

The destructive plot that befell the PCB, from 1989 onwards, was built during the period of Prestes' removal and was consolidated in the political tacticism of the 1980s, in addition to gaining contours in the opportunistic following of the principles defended by the agent of imperialism, Mikhail Gorbachev , leadership of the USSR. This political process led the stagnant leading core of the Brazilian party to articulate internally and externally to destroy the PCB, including giving voice and vote in the PCB congress to people who were not from the party to win the battle for the attempt to destroy the historic operator politician of the Brazilian communists.

Approaching the anniversary of one hundred years, the political group that left the PCB to create the PPS, and more recently transformed it into a political association completely integrated into the order (Citizenship), tries to capture, in a dishonest and opportunistic way, the historical legacy of the PCB . The struggle profile that I presented here, from the PCB, never fit into the political dimension of this group. This arm of political opportunism defenestrated and threw into the garbage can any connection with Brazilian communism. It never hurts to remember that this liquidationist group abandoned the PCB and founded a party that before and now is committed to bourgeois domination, was an agent associated with the 2016 coup and, therefore, also responsible for what is happening in Brazil today, without forgetting which is also composed of right-wing politicians who routinely stand against the interests of the working class.

In this debate, I am not discussing here the right of intellectual figures from this political force of order to debate the legacy of revolutionaries such as Astrojildo Pereira, Giocondo Dias, etc. Foundation of the Citizenship party is realizing, after all, those who claimed that the PCB was an “unburied corpse” that needed to be buried cannot claim what they tried to destroy, they cannot claim the history of the PCB when they abdicated that legacy and in the present defend the bourgeois project in deep contradiction with the Party. Therefore, in the hundred years of the PCB, those who joined the attack against its history and defended its destruction do not have the right to enter, even through the back door, in this debate, they only have a place in the trash of history

In 1992, therefore, 30 years ago, the red phoenix began its revolutionary reconstruction process. This movement rebuilt the PCB, making it a party of the revolutionary countryside, committed to the battles of the Brazilian revolution, integrated into the proletarian and popular struggles of the present time from the perspective of socialism.

*Milton Pinheiro is a political scientist and professor of history at the State University of Bahia (UNEB).

 

 

See all articles by

10 MOST READ IN THE LAST 7 DAYS

See all articles by

SEARCH

Search

TOPICS

NEW PUBLICATIONS