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CP of Brazil, Interview for Vermelho (red) website: The Way Out is Socialism!
March 24, 2009
Communist Party of Brazil
Crisis ripens the system’s contradictions, says PCdoB secretary
About to join another event in the revolutionary movement – the meeting of the São Paulo Forum Workgroup, to be held on March 18 in Mexico City – José Reinaldo Carvalho spoke with Vermelho. In the interview, PCdoB’s secretary of International Relations addressed the preparations for the 12th Congress and the improvement in the struggle for socialism in face of the hard capitalist crisis. “The crisis ripens the system’s incurable contradictions and, for that reason, there are no alternatives within capitalism”, he said.
The relevance of the 12th Congress
“PCdoB’s Congress, aside from its national importance, is a great political event in the international sphere given the importance our country has and the importance of the process under development in Latin America. Moreover, PCdoB plays a relevant role in the revolutionary movement. The party maintains relations with more than two hundred political organizations from all continents, organized a few months ago the 10th Meeting of Communist and Labor Parties and develops intense internationalist activity both in the communist movement and in the anti-imperialist movement. PCdoB has clear stands on the international events, an established class and communist identity and a distinct position regarding the struggle for socialism. And at the same time it condemns all war policies of imperialism and any other that aims at the maintenance of the hegemony of the United States and other powers. Therefore, the 12th Congress is an opportunity to reaffirm and update those positions and it will certainly resound in the revolutionary and communist international movement.”
Internationalist activity
“The year has just started and PCdoB’s international activity has been intense. We participated in the ‘Fiesta de los Abrazos’ organized by he Communist Party of Chile, congresses of the Communist Parties in Turkey, Greece, and Lebanon and in the Congress of Colombia’s Alternative Democratic Pole. We were also present in multilateral meetings, such as the Workgroup of the Meeting of Communist and Labor Parties and the New European Left Forum (NELF), established in Rome and sponsored by the Party of Italian Communists (PDCI). It was extraordinary because we had the opportunity to know the opinion of European communist and progressist parties on the alternatives to the crisis, on the restructuring of the left-wing forces in that continent, on the cooperation among international forces etc. Those meetings offered us many elements that will serve in the interpretation of reality. The exchange of experiences and ideas and the multilateral cooperation among communists, progressists and socialists are very useful factors to us, Latin American, since we are living a process of transformation in that direction.”
Fanciful opinions on the crisis
The 12th Congress will be remarkable also because it will delve deeper in the crisis of capitalism and will take a stand before it. The Central Committee’s has been divulging its opinion according to which that is not merely a financial crisis – as many wrongly put – but a crisis of capitalism. Therefore, it is not episodic and shakes all of the system’s foundations. Today there is a critical convergence among communist parties regarding the fanciful opinions present in some academic centers, in the bourgeois media, in reformist governments, among conservative groups and even in left-wing political currents that, in general, define their operation according to what Leninism classically defines as opportunism. Such fanciful interpretations reside in attributing the cause of the crises only to phenomena in the financial sphere, as if there were a detachment between what takes place in that sphere and what takes place in real economy. Absurd positions such as that are often varnished over to look like Marxism. But there is no doubt – and that is the position maintained by the reasonable international left – that those opinions are expressions of vulgar Marxism. And they are opportunist because they lead to reformist and partial solutions and, therefore, to false solutions. The formulation of communist and revolutionary parties is that the crisis ripens the system’s incurable contradictions and, therefore there is no alternative to the crisis of capitalism. The way out is socialism.”
Platform of resistance
“By reaffirming the socialist alternative, communist and left-wing parties elaborate platforms in two levels. First there is the one of resistance. The first thing that capitalists do in the middle of a crisis is to attack the rights of workers. Therefore our role is to defend workers so that they will not pay for the crisis. Thus it is also necessary to defend dependent countries that struggle for their autonomy in the international scene, the ones forced to bear the consequences of the crisis by the capitalist system. Added to that, we must not accept protectionist measures that imperialist countries are imposing on us so that they can save themselves. And we also refute the idea of understanding among classes. It is not possible to have collaboration between a decadent bourgeoisie attacking their rights and trying to escape that situation. Another point in that same platform is the matter of the use of public money in the crisis. A neo-Keynesian wave was devised consisting in throwing in public money in order to bail out monopolist banks and enterprises. And that is useless. The crisis only deepens. From September 2008 till now how many rescue packages have been issued? Public money must be used to maintain the social achievements and to further development, responding to the interests of all society and not to those of a bunch of people trying to plunder the national State.”
Platform of political organization
“There is another sphere dealing with the organization of a struggle for socialism, a medium and long-term struggle that has a character related to the conjuncture. The party will try to balance that matter during the congress, when it will approve a new socialist program addressing the struggle for socialism in Brazil in the current conditions after two decades of the debacle of socialist countries in Eastern Europe, in a situation of advances made in the democratic, popular and revolutionary struggle in Latin America and in a moment when the country intensifies its democratization process with the Lula administration. That struggle involves the improvement of democracy, the defense of national sovereignty, social achievements and social progress.”
Lessons from the socialist experience
“Among the main lessons learned by PCdoB form the socialist experience, I highlight first of all the fact that there is no single model of socialism. The party defends the set of experiences that built socialism in the 20th century and the legacy of the Russian revolution and of all democratic and popular revolutions in the 20th century. We consider that rejecting that legacy would be a form of liquidationism. But, at the same time, the party has evaluated those experiences and became aware of many mistakes. Along with victories there were also false attitudes, dogmatisms and the attempt to impose a single model, causing harm to the revolutionary movement and to the construction of socialism, thus weakening the revolutionary trend in the moment of facing the enemy. Another conclusion learned was that the working classes would not go for socialism while they are politically isolated. They must develop systems of democratic, popular and patriotic alliances, and that depends on the conditions of each country. The communist party must not lead that struggle if it is not deeply rooted in the masses. Lenin said that parties must merge with the masses because facing the dominant classes – which are reactionary, powerful and enemies of progress – demands political force.”
Concrete struggle for socialism
“Another lesson we learned is that the struggle for socialism is not wages only by propaganda and that is not its most important aspect. The struggle for socialism is concrete and can only be waged if the parties interested in leading it are able to find out the great political issues that mobilize the people. In our case, those issues are the anti-imperialist struggle against the state power of the dominant class and the struggle for social progress. Today that struggle is developed under better conditions because we are living in a paradox: we have a reactionary state power, but a democratic and patriotic government, that of president Lula. So that gives better conditions to open the path to the struggle for sovereignty, democracy, social justice and, therefore, socialism.”
Sao Paulo, Brazil, March, 2009. |