Manifesto in defense of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB!

“We continue to fight for the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), taking the spirit of initiative and of criticism and self-criticism as the heart of our democratic centralism. We take the path of struggle, not that of conciliation, as we believe is the duty of communists.”

Source: https://emdefesadocomunismo.com.br/manifesto-em-defesa-da-reconstrucao-revolucionaria-do-pcb-post/

On July 30, in a virtual meeting, the majority of the Central Committee of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) decided to reject the clamor of the communist militancy for the 17th (Extraordinary) Congress of the PCB, which could solve the current party crisis in a unitary and democratic way. Moreover, just as it initiated the present crisis by means of expulsions and persecutions, the majority of the Central Committee has also chosen to try to end it by launching a purge — initiated in the CC, but plus the indication to the Regional Committees to promote its second wave.

This purge is one more reason that adds to many others that already justified the reasons and proposals developed here, in which the realization of the 17th (Extraordinary) Congress of the PCB stands out.

Believing to act in consonance with the aspirations of thousands of Marxist-Leninist militants throughout the country, the Provisional Coordination of the National Movement in Defense of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the Brazilian Communist Party presents this Manifesto, hoping to offer an organized path of struggle for the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB.

We emphasize that this is a text for debate, as a kind of pre-thesis for the opening of this necessary and unavoidable process. Therefore, we suggest that comrades who choose to join the National Movement that we launch here send their opinions, criticisms and suggestions on this preliminary draft to the e-mail indicated at the end, and that they promote in their various forms of reorganization the debate with comrades who identify with our initiative.

The revolutionary reconstruction of the international communist movement and its impasses

In the last decade, the bourgeoisie’s offensive against the proletariat has entered a new stage worldwide as a result of the crisis and contradictions of the capitalist mode of production. This situation is clearly manifested in economic attacks and the dismantling of social rights, on the one hand, and in the strengthening of the far right and militarism, on the other.

In this context of sharpening class struggles, the reconstruction of the international communist movement has found fertile ground for its development to a new level of amplitude. In many countries, and in Brazil in particular, Marxist-Leninist revolutionary propaganda and agitation once again attracted the sympathy of growing sectors of the working class, especially its younger members. This resurgence of Marxism-Leninism was often accompanied by important self-criticism on the inadequacies of the communist movement itself on issues such as race and gender, offering a fight against the liberal tendencies of the movement of the oppressed from a revolutionary proletarian elaboration on the most diverse issues that cross and unequally mark our working class.

However, since the 2008 crisis and especially after the beginning of the inter-imperialist war in Ukraine, the immense contradictions of the communist movement have come to the fore, and the revolutionary and conciliatory wings have begun to demarcate themselves more clearly within and between the Marxist parties. A number of so-called communist organizations, even some that had been moving closer to the revolutionary bloc of the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties (IMCWP), began to defend chauvinist positions more or less openly, abandoning the defence of the actuality of the socialist revolution in the name of the struggle for a “stage” of multipolar capitalism that would supposedly undermine the forces of Western imperialism and NATO.

While Lenin, in his time, advocated the transformation of imperialist war into revolutionary civil war and defined imperialism as a global stage of capitalist development; some communists today mistakenly consider imperialism as a mere foreign policy, exclusive to the US-EU bloc, and as “anti-fascist” and “anti-imperialist” the expansionist war of the Russian monopoly bourgeoisie — initiated, not coincidentally, right after the forceful joint statement of China and Russia, declaring their “boundless partnership”, in the framework of the dispute for world hegemony in the political and economic field!

Indeed, the Ukrainian regime is a fascist plaything in the hands of NATO expansionism. But this does not authorize any revolutionary to declare himself in favor of the actions of Putin’s chauvinist Grand Russian army, supported by the most reactionary elements of the Russian property classes — only the Russian and Ukrainian proletariat could, if they were able to form a revolutionary vanguard, offer the conflict in question an outcome favorable to the working class. Such a deviation from Marxism-Leninism could not fail to result, in several countries, but in a wave of conflicts and splits. With the Brazilian Communist Party it was no different.

At the outbreak of the war, the PCB issued a note (“Political statement on the military crisis in Ukraine”) which, in an arduous effort at unity, attempted to reconcile the irreconcilable. While the note stated, under pressure from the internal struggle of the party’s left wing, that “the interests of the US and Russian bourgeoisies are evident in this struggle for the partition of the capitalist world and war is not in the interest of the workers”; the note hesitated on a rigorous characterization of imperialism, repeatedly assigning the term only as an adjective of the bloc under US hegemony. It was enough for the General Secretary and the International Relations Secretary, in absentia of the Central Committee, to feel free to agitate in their social networks the celebration of Russian military victories against NATO and, at the level of the international communist movement, widen the PCB’s distance from the parties of the revolutionary bloc (which the resolutions of the 16th Congress of the PCB itself defined, without any ambiguity, as the organizations “that articulate themselves in spaces such as the European Communist Initiative and the International Communist Review” — that is, the KKE, the TKP, the PCM, the PCTE, the PCV, etc. )

This international reorientation of the party, in direct violation of the resolutions approved by the party majority at the 16th Congress (2021), reached an absurd level when, after successive maneuvers and concealments, and now in violation of a direct decision of the Central Committee itself, the Secretary for International Relations sent for the third time a statement from the party to the notorious “World Anti-Imperialist Platform”, to which he had been seeking to bring the PCB closer under the consent of the General Secretary of the Party (who even attended the Platform meeting in Caracas). This international articulation, which openly admits among its objectives the organization of the political support of the world left to the Russia-China bloc, defends the thesis that “the main contradiction in the world today is that between the NATO imperialist bloc led by the USA and the mass of suffering humanity” (see the “Seoul Declaration”) — and not, as revolutionary communists defend, the contradiction between capital and labor. The so-called “WAP” has managed, in less than a year, to organize four international meetings, with who knows what resources, since its main articulator is a newly created and obscure South Korean party … What are the interests behind this sneaky approach, which violates not only the PCB’s congressional resolutions on proletarian internationalism, but also successive political notes and decisions of the Central Committee?

This drift to the right in the PCB’s international policy would perhaps be insufficient in itself to justify a split in the Brazilian communist movement. But the centrist hesitation is not exclusive to the PCB’s internationalism, and has also marked the party’s national policy throughout the last period. And, as we will seek to show, this hesitation is one of the main expressions of centrist petty-bourgeois hegemony over the Communist Party — and, as such, an expression of the class struggle in our organization.

A hesitant Marxism and the resurgence of etapism in tactics

It is worth remembering that, even at its 14th and 15th Congresses (2009 and 2014), the PCB had reaffirmed its defense of Marxism-Leninism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. However, different from what may seem at first glance, this controversy divided wings already at those Congresses. The academicist fraction of the party, with its typical hesitation, has always had as its main concern the production of a “pure Marxism” — that is, a Marxism that, in the name of affirming its right to exist, needs all the time to reiterate its penances in the face of the experiences of the proletarian dictatorships of the 20th century and today. Therefore, in order to secure this academically acceptable Marxism, they prefer the defense of a less rigorous formulation, “Marxism and Leninism” — a formula that is quickly justified by affirming “Marxism in social theory and Leninism in organization theory”, demonstrating not only a scholastic view of Marxism, but also its repudiation of Leninism in its political-philosophical consequences. What is more, even with this rhetorical concession to Leninism, they have on several occasions publicly reiterated that they consider Leninist organizational theory to be “dated”. By way of criticism of the Soviet experience, they break with Leninism itself.

But why has this wing of the Party waged such a persistent polemic of principle against a hyphen for so long? We will go into the theoretical aspects of these disagreements in greater depth on another occasion. Suffice it to record here that the political defeat of this wing did not prevent them from remaining in prominent positions in the leadership, from continuing to agitate publicly against the line of the Congress and from taking the lead in the PCB’s political formulations, leading to an eclecticism and hesitant positions towards social democracy, which began to transform the Party’s tactics. Two years later, at the 2016 Conference, they even fought to reverse the congressional decision, reopening the same debate won at the Congress.

With the departure of comrade Ivan Pinheiro from the General Secretariat in October 2016, this academicist fraction gained new impetus. Without this comrade whom they considered “harsh” and “sectarian” to counterbalance them, they believed that their time had come. But it is clear that the Party’s hesitation to the right has much deeper material bases than just the replacement of a member of the leadership: with the impeachment of Dilma Rousseff and the correct tactical reorientation of the Party towards the policy of the proletarian united front, favorable conditions were germinating for the resurgence of etapism in tactics, since the Party was reapproaching, in the struggles, the social bases of the democratic and popular camp. The approval, in November 2019, of the resolution “PCB, Marxism and the proletarian revolution”, seeking to attest to the anti-Stalinism of the PCB, in fact only reprimanded and curbed the agitation work in defense of socialist experiences and the controversy around the liberal balance of these experiences, hegemonic on the “left” — an agitation work firmly founded also in congressional resolutions of the party, notably, the document “Socialism: Balance and Perspectives” (14th Congress, 2009).

In parallel to this, with the publication in 2017 of a document prepared by the new General Secretary, Edmilson Costa, “Preparing the Party for the New Cycle”, the turn began that conceived as the main objective of the party no longer the deepening of its Revolutionary Reconstruction, but its mere quantitative growth, in numbers. The socialist, anti-etapist strategy, which had been consolidated since the 13th Congress, was defended in public, but etapism reappeared in tactical conceptions, more clearly in the particular spaces of the party leaderships, but objectively in its application.

The first sign of this turn to the right on national issues occurred in electoral politics. From 2008 to 2014, the PCB maintained its own electoral policy, an expression of the political independence of the proletariat, in opposition to a government of class conciliation and refusing political subordination to the petty bourgeoisie. But from the municipal elections of 2016 onwards, the PCB began to coalesce with Party of Socialism and Freedom (PSOL) in the elections in the main capitals of the country and then at the state and national level, without any official balance sheet of the Party on the correction of the previous electoral tactic or the grounds for this change. Even with the 15th Congress (2014) affirming several times the need for an electoral stance closely linked to our strategic objectives, again in 2018 and 2020 the PCB was placed in tow of PSOL not only in the electoral field, but also in the trade union field, with increasingly downgraded alliances with this strand of social democracy. This piggybacking produced absurd situations such as, in 2016, the PCB’s support for Edmilson Silva, PSOL candidate for mayor of Recife, whose campaign adopted the motto “Recife, entrepreneurial city”; or, still that year, support for Luciana Genro, who openly defended outsourcing in the public service in her campaign. And even today this followership is manifested in our tactics, as in the case of the PCB’s adherence, in São Paulo, to the majority reformist slate in the Union of teachers of official education of the State of São Paulo (APEOESP) elections in 2023.

It is also between the 15th and 16th Congress that the PCB begins to devote less and less to definitions and constructions aimed at the Anti-Capitalist and Anti-Imperialist Front, our strategic north (which can be exemplified by the end of bilateral dialogues with various anti-capitalist organizations). Instead, the PCB starts to adopt an erratic posture in relation to the various fronts of struggle and articulation in the mass movement. Under the logic that, on the one hand, one can only do politics from the fronts in which we are (a practical abandonment of our political independence) and that, on the other hand, “we must participate in all fronts and forums of struggle”, the PCB was placed in various spaces of articulation that, in practice, centralized it in political action — without any evaluation of the tactical sense of each front, its composition, its objectives and the means of disputing them and expanding our influence in them. Here, too, we are constantly cajoled by the reformist hegemony. The predominance of the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia in the PCB prevents a clear demarcation and differentiation with the politics of the “radical” petty bourgeoisie, expressed in our “socialist allies” of PSOL, for example, who throughout the last period gave up their political independence in the name of reconciliation with Worker’s Party (PT).

This tactical “no holds barred” became even clearer in the conformation of the National Campaign Out Bolsonaro, especially during the pandemic. This Campaign, with a clear broad front character, was not only claimed by the PCB leadership as the main articulation forum, but ended up imposing the Campaign’s own tactics on the Party. In 2020, the PCB was subjected to the tactic of defending Bolsonaro’s impeachment, demonstrating the hesitation in having an independent proletarian policy even while participating in the National Campaign; that is, for fear of developing proletarian slogans for the struggle and thereby “upsetting” the “allies” of the moment (which included the PSB, PDT, PV and other bourgeois parties). The tactic of the impeachment of the Campaign, which objectively meant appealing to the parliamentary right to “change sides”, had no practical result. Even worse was the other simultaneous tactic (because eclecticism allowed the PCB leadership to have several disconnected tactics) of appealing to the National Electoral Court (TSE) for the impeachment of Bolsonaro and Mourão, instead of basing its agitation exclusively on the slogan for a General Strike (for which there were even sanitary needs!) as the only adequate tactical path for the proletariat, not only to overthrow Bolsonaro and Mourão, but also to confront the ongoing counter-reforms. In defiance of Leninism, the PCB has shown to conceive its slogans without any rigor, as a compendium of militant common sense. But, in the view of the majority of the leadership, “it makes no sense to talk about a deviation to the right”, since it would be enough to simply crown every note and speech with a “For People’s Power and Socialism” and call it a day.

This oscillation and the lack of an independent tactical plan naturally prevented the unification of mass work on a national scale under a common orientation, with common slogans, within a common plan of organization and professionalization of mass work. In this period, as a rule, the rooting in the midst of urban and rural occupations and the expansion of political work in the peripheral neighborhoods occurred through the effort and spirit of initiative of the bases, especially the younger ones, and in contrast to the complete absence of a general planning of the leaderships. The lack of sharing of experiences of struggle, in the absence of party communication based on the intense flow of information, made it impossible to socialize the accumulations and unify the work under common methods, giving each new initiative an amateurish character, without the benefit of the lessons already acquired in other spaces.

For example: the Party’s important experiences in the struggle for housing in Ceará state (whether in Fortaleza, through the Classist Unit, or in the countryside, through the OPA), unknown to most party militants, were always underutilized as a reference for our collective learning, and the struggles developed later in this same field benefited little or almost nothing from the accumulations possible from the work in that northeastern state. Another example: even in the same region of the country, there is little or no articulation between the local governing bodies, directly or within the CC, so that our process of scientific and political reflection on the particularities of historical and political development throughout the national territory becomes fragmentary. In the absence of efficient common communication, which socializes experiences and discussions, what the resolutions of the 14th and 15th Congresses of the PCB condemn under the name of federalism flourishes.

We would add that, despite repeated definitions and redefinitions of the sectors of the proletariat considered strategic, work on this front also advanced timidly and, in the absence of a defined plan, much more relying on the spontaneity of the conscious workers who knocked on our door. In the party bodies, progress in this direction was often slowed down by those who insisted on the need to “grow in society as a whole”, making work among the proletariat secondary. And even among the sectors most closely linked to trade union work, tactical piggybacking often entailed prioritizing the construction of common forums with hesitating political forces, to the detriment of prioritizing the strengthening of the communist current itself amidst the workers’ movement.

Finally, it would be important to highlight the deliberate inability of the central leadership to coordinate in a unified and cohesive communication complex the numerous militant initiatives of agitation and propaganda on social networks. While trying to bureaucratically restrict these initiatives, the leadership hesitates to converge them into a truly centralized apparatus because it fears the practical and ideological consequences of doing so. It knows that it is impossible to operate this centralization process without incorporating on an equal footing a number of comrades responsible for this successful work. And it knows that by going down this road, it would further accelerate the loss of ideological direction by the professional university intelligentsia. Therefore, it is more worthwhile to maintain the dispersion of these initiatives and the amateurism in communication than to promote a real centralization and coordination, under the direction of militants experienced in these tasks. For this reason, to date, no step has been taken to comply with the resolution of the 16th Congress that states: “Propaganda and agitation in virtual media also needs to undergo a process of professionalization and centralization by the Party and its collectives, following the example of what is already being done by part of the party complex”. (Organization, paragraph 86).

The same is reflected in the case of the party newspaper, which remains at an artisanal level of connection with our political and organizational work, and reveals notorious weaknesses. Meanwhile, successful youth initiatives (such as the newspaper O Futuro de São Paulo) are opposed and feared by the majority of the party leadership. If the youth newspaper is more widely distributed and communicates a much more interesting content (a content that socializes among the militancy the information and experiences of struggle, and that is organically linked to political work among the masses) than the Party’s “magazine”, it would be the case to learn from the journalistic work of these comrades, especially the youth, and to incorporate this experience to the maximum in the Party’s own press. But today, months after the party leadership convinced the majority of the youth to give up their own national newspaper, our party newspaper has not overcome any of its weaknesses. In this sense, it is also worth self-criticizing some comrades of the party’s left wing for their naivety in believing in this mediation proposal, when everything already indicated that there was no willingness of the majority of the leadership to reformulate the newspaper Poder Popular.

The limitations of the 16th Congress

As criticism of hesitations and shortcomings multiplied, internal political persecution became more severe. The intermediate leaderships refused to even transmit the militants’ criticisms to the Central Committee and several processes of political expulsions were triggered. This situation reached its peak during the process of the 16th PCB Congress, which began in 2019 and was suspended during the pandemic. The PCB had already had a similar experience in 2013: it had to suspend its 15th Congress, which had already started, in the face of the June Journeys, and resumed it from the beginning later, in 2014. This time, fearing the growth of the party and the loss of influence over the militancy, the option was different: suspend the Congress for a year and a half, but not restart it from scratch, fearful of growth and change in the social composition and correlation of forces of the Party. Therefore, the delegates elected in early 2020 remained “frozen” until the end of 2021, distorting party political representation significantly. In an act of curtailment of internal debates, the majority of the PCB’s CC restricted delegates to the national stage to access the internal Debate Tribune, where several militants were already criticizing the organizational confusions and political mistakes of the Party leadership. Even with several party bodies requesting the reopening of the Tribune, the Central Committee denied the broad participation of the militancy and allowed only the delegates elected to the 16th Congress to read and send their texts for discussion — in addition, of course, to the CC members themselves. This situation is even more absurd if we consider that, in the history of the PCB, the congressional Tribunes of Debates were published in the pages of the party press itself, even in periods of the fiercest state repression.

In this period between March 2020 and October 2021, prior to the national stage of the Congress, internal political persecutions intensified: among other bureaucratic aberrations, comrades were called to individual “meetings” with members of the regional directorates in the states of Minas Gerais and São Paulo to be literally asked what they would vote for and what their positions would be at the Congress; the state of Bahia Regional Committee intensified a smear campaign against several militants, including a document sent to the CC on the eve of the Congress, with the intention of revoking the mandate of a delegate; comrades were banned from holding debates and book launches in other states.

More concerned with machine control than with political discussion, the overwhelming majority of the CC did not contribute to the discussion in the Tribunes. This majority of the leadership, which always shies away from exposing its political convictions to the militants, remains politically amorphous, deserving the old designation consecrated by Lenin of swamp. The silence of those who tried to impose a new political line on the Party was justified by the expedient that was already being used: regardless of what was approved at the 16th Congress, it was enough to “control the machine” so that the decisions taken later would be in the line they wanted.

The exception to this stance was that of Mauro Iasi, who took it upon himself to dispute the line in favor of the minority of the 15th Congress and published, not in the Tribune of Debates, but in the Blog of Boitempo, a true Tribune against Marxism-Leninism, during the congressional process. Again, no reprimand to the member of the academicist group.

In fact, this academicist faction never renounced to publicly polemicize against the conceptions of the majority of the Party. Using Caio Prado Jr. Institute as the center of its fractional propaganda, it even published several documents with a view to the internal dispute. During the 16th Congress, to cite an example, even with the Debates Tribune restricted only to the delegates of the national stage, they published the brochure “The fire of the conjuncture”, where the ideological triumvirate of this fraction (Mauro Iasi, Milton Pinheiro and Edmilson Costa) publicly defended their congressional positions. And again, this centrist agitation of the academicist fraction found space amid the leniency of the majority of the PCB leadership.

In the resolutions of the 16th Congress, the line of deepening the Revolutionary Reconstruction won. This line of the party’s left wing prevailed in the policy of international relations, consecrating the PCB’s adherence to the “revolutionary bloc” articulated around the International Communist Review and defeating the proposed Pre-Theses of the Central Committee which, incredible as it may seem, said: “We fight for the transformation of the UN and other multilateral organizations into effective instances of promoting development and social justice on the international plane”.

Another victory of the party’s left wing was clearly manifested in the characterization of Brazilian capitalism as dependent, in a defense that openly claimed the Marxist Theory of Dependence (defeating in the Plenary the anti-Leninist academic fraction). Behind this controversy was the possibility of arming the Party with a consistent anti-dependency theoretical conception, capable of avoiding any political hesitation towards national-developmentalism and the defense of tactical alliances with the bourgeoisie. At stake was the definition of the material bases underpinning the socialist character of revolutionary strategy in Brazil. If, as the current General Secretary argues, Brazil’s “maturity for socialism” is based only on the level of development of the productive forces, it is therefore understandable why the Party’s policy today clearly wavers towards reformism when it debates issues such as deindustrialization and the means to reverse it. But at the 16th Congress, the party majority rejected this conception incapable of completely overcoming etapism and defined that it is in the dependent character of Brazilian monopoly capitalism that the material foundation of the proletarian revolution in our country rests.

The party’s left wing also prevailed, finally, in the very definitions of tactics, formulated in opposition to the patent vagueness of the original Theses of the PCB’s CC, and warning precisely of the risks of revival of etapism in tactical mediations against the far right — a warning that, although recorded in a congressional resolution, never found an echo in any subsequent party document.

The Pre-Theses elaborated by the CC said that “the current moment of the PCB is characterized by the overtaking of the stage of revolutionary reconstruction”. In a discreet gesture, they decreed its imminent end. In different cells and states the formulation of the party’s left wing won: the present moment was characterized by the deepening of revolutionary reconstruction, and so it was incorporated into the final resolutions. But the veiled divergence began to delineate irreconcilable directions.

With contradictions sharpening within the Party and the Congress, with the party’s left wing willing to open up the discussion about the excesses, persecutions and boycotts, the General Secretary quickly began to organize an “agreement”, which we make public for the first time in this document. This “agreement” implied that the party’s left wing would give up the denunciation in plenary of various leaders in exchange for the guarantee that disciplinary proceedings and internal persecution would be brought to an end. Accused until then of jeopardizing party unity with their attacks on members of the former Central Committee, some comrades of the party’s left wing believed that this “agreement” would at least allow for the possibility of maintaining unity in positive practical work, as well as the conditions for waging the ideological struggle within the Party. The incorporation of a few party’s left wing cadres into the central bodies helped to confirm the seriousness of the compromise — which, however, was soon to be torn up by the party’s right wing after the Congress.

On the very eve of the first meeting of the newly-elected Central Committee, a letter was sent to the CC on behalf of the Rio de Janeiro Regional Committee, containing a fractionalist reading of the congressional process, by way of a “balance sheet of the congress”. In this letter, accusations of “setting up a clique” by comrade Ivan Pinheiro demonstrated that there was no willingness to maintain the unity of the PCB along the lines of the 16th Congress while maintaining internal differences.

The wing defending the Revolutionary Reconstruction sought, at this time, to preserve the unity of the PCB through positive practical work — building our insertion in the proletariat and class struggles in a situation where the world was barely out of a global pandemic and already entering a scenario of inter-imperialist war; closing ranks without any boycott in mass struggles and elections. Here, however, it is necessary to emphasize a self-criticism of the wing defending the Revolutionary Reconstruction: it was too late to recognize the fragility of the “agreement” sewn by the General Secretary at the 16th Congress, which did not stop the boycotts and persecutions. If this movement of compromise for unity allowed us to defend the Party against the split and to deepen the positive work of the PCB, at the same time it contributed to a certain ideological confusion of the bases that had already understood the divergences that were maturing within the Party.

Thus, the 16th Congress, which was supposed to deepen the Revolutionary Reconstruction, overcoming the stage of party dependence on the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia, and the need to support the ever-widening development of a proletarian intelligentsia of a new type; faltered, failed to fulfill its task, and resulted in a compromise between the party’s left wing and right wing.

Even beyond the political line, even the advanced organizational measures won by the party’s left wing at the 16th Congress were boycotted. The progressive membership fee (which was supposed to force academicists and other better-paid sectors of the party to contribute more financially than unemployed and precarious militants) remains a dead letter. The internal bulletin for debates and socialization of reports, which could enliven the participation of the bases in ideological and tactical polemics, is still non-existent, although this does not prevent academics from polemicizing publicly by all possible means, nor bureaucrats from charging militancy to keep disagreements limited to the interior of the organization. The subordination of the Caio Prado Jr. Institute to the Party, approved at the Congress despite the resistance of the academicist fraction, proved to be a false victory, since this body, in practice parallel to the Party, continued to be instrumentalized by them for the propaganda of their anti-Leninist views. It is not difficult to understand the connection between the boycott of these congress decisions and the interests (material and ideological) of the anti-Leninist academicist fraction.

Throughout the 2022 electoral campaign, the RC of the state of Bahia continued its fractional persecution of several comrades, even deploying obscurantist and reactionary public denunciations against a comrade running for federal deputy. And in the middle of 2022, seeking to reaffirm the bureaucratic line of curtailing divergences, the PCB’s right wing definitively broke with the “agreement” and began its persecution by the state of Minas Gerais, where it undertook the now public expulsion of a comrade delegate of the 16th Congress — with the knowledge and consent of the General Secretary.

In the course of the electoral work, the deviations and persecutions continued. During the campaign, the candidate Sofia Manzano convinced the majority of the PCB’s National Political Commission (CPN) to sign the Party’s “Letter to Brazilians in defense of the Democratic Rule of Law”, demonstrating our political, even electoral, subordination to the democratism of the bourgeoisie, justifying this piggybacking in a “tactical” etapism that sees the overcoming of fascism as a stage prior to the socialist offensive. Another blatant example of a violation of our revolutionary line during electoral agitation is the way the issue of public security was presented in the state campaigns in the states of Bahia and Rio de Janeiro. In Bahia, a reformist proposal never debated in the Party to charge military police’s soldiers the cost of each bullet they use, which was intended to be the panacea against police violence, only exposed party militancy to a wave of threats and intimidations of retaliation, without actually presenting any revolutionary alternative for the working class. In Rio de Janeiro, in addition to the demagoguery in the discourse on the fight against organized crime, the gubernatorial candidate did not even take into account the program approved at the 16th Party Congress and openly defended an eccentric conception about the reorganization of the police apparatus.

In parallel, internally, the National Political Commission of the CC sought to prevent the re-election of comrades of the National Coordination of the PCB’s Union of Communist Youth (UJC) by lowering the maximum age for participation in the UJC. The persecution was partially repulsed and the intervention in the UJC failed to impose the new line — in flagrant disagreement with the 16th Congress — at the 9th Congress of the UJC itself. This episode, of course, was only one of dozens of boycotts of the work of the UJC and other party collectives.

In practice, party collectives are being built despite certain party leaderships at national and state level. There is no point in having collectives that try to express and embrace the contradictions of class, gender and race if they are sidelined in party life. As they are not seen as tasks of the organization, militants who are in the collectives, in general, have multiple militancy tasks between cells, directions, collectives and work at the bases. This overload of militancy in the collectives is an expression of the contradictions of the sexual and racial division of labour in our organization.

The situation in the states of Bahia and São Paulo, where the state coordinators of the Classist Feminist Collective Ana Montenegro and the Black Collective Minervino de Oliveira were totally disintegrated due to persecution processes, or the departure of half of the Bahia Regional Committee of the party (a majority of black women and men), are some of the most striking cases. It is symptomatic that the disciplinary process against Jones Manoel has progressed in record time and a process against harassment promoted by militants of the Bahia Regional Political Commission has been stalled for more than a year.

With the reflux of mass struggles at the turn of the year and after the establishment of a new class conciliation government in Brazil, persecutions and violations of the congressional line intensify. The hesitant position of the PCB’s CC at this time is marked by the practical abandonment of socialist strategy — instead of declaring principled opposition to every bourgeois government, the CC determined that it would remain in a position of “independence” from Worker’s Party (PT). To see the implications of this inconsistent conception that the majority of the CC holds about the PCB’s “independence”, we need only look at the Party’s positions since Lula resumed government. Our immediate response in relation to the New Spending Ceiling, for example, was limited to an article by the General Secretary on the organization’s website, and then to the waiting bar, refusing to take the initiative in the struggle. With its characteristic followership, the PCB only got moving when, influenced by other anti-capitalist organizations, some unions called for small local mobilizations.

During this period, we could have launched pamphlets, collective statements, carried out activities in our places of activity with agitation material, called small demonstrations, that is, we could have had a policy organized by the PCB’s National Political Commission itself for the performance of cells and collectives. However, the guidance for carrying out street activities was only sent the week before the approval of the measure in Congress, and even then without any indication of a practical nature.

Another example is the popular plebiscite against the liberal counter-reforms, approved months ago in the Central Committee and, so far, without any prospect of implementation. The plebiscite could agitate the working class against the set of attacks of recent years, publicize the political line of the party and bring together sectors of the working class where we have no insertion. But, waiting for our “tactical allies”, we did not move to put into effect by our own hands a proposal that was born from our proposed ranks.

It is in this context, finally, that, without consulting the CC, the National Political Commission of the Party decides to approve our participation in the meetings of the World Anti-Imperialist Platform, with the General Secretary going to Caracas, in an event organized by PSUV in the middle of the liquidationist judicial persecution of PCV. Subsequently, even though unauthorized by the PCB’s own CC, the Secretary for International Relations, Eduardo Serra, attended the WAP’s Seoul Conference.

The degree of publicity of the violation of the resolutions of the 16th Congress (which speak about our revolutionary internationalist and anti-apartheid position) and of the CC (which not only suspended participation in the Platform, but twice approved a position on the Ukrainian War distinct from the position of the WAP, which is openly pro-Russia) was the last straw. Following a text by comrade Ivan Pinheiro, his denunciation of the rightward turn of the PCB made known among the militants the degree of violation of our political line and generated the agitation of some comrades, even aware that the selective centralism that is now the current method in the Party would fall upon them.

Far from being the beginning of these disagreements, the episode was the culmination of the various violations of the line of the 15th and 16th Congresses incurred by the majority of the CC. The persecutory processes intensified but, unsurprisingly, in a unilateral manner: while comrade Jones Manoel was dismissed from the Central and Regional Committees of Pernambuco for going public to denounce the violation of party congressional resolutions in the name of defending our revolutionary line; the CC willingly accepted the “self-criticism” of the then IR Secretary, even after he had taken over the writing, together with the General Secretary, of the document presented at the WAP Conference in South Korea. Selective centralism was becoming increasingly evident to the broad mass of party militancy.

Fractionalism in the PCB

The analysis of this entire recent period of internal struggle in the Brazilian Communist Party reveals a multifaceted fractional division within the organization, which was becoming increasingly acute precisely in the face of the fact that the party’s left wing, although a minority in the leadership bodies, was growing in influence and ideological preponderance in the party’s ranks. The insufficiency of our democratic centralism in promoting a true ideological synthesis provided fertile ground for the crystallization of divergences and for the growing consolidation of organizational parallelism. When the diffuse wings existing in each party polemic cease to express only momentary differences and consolidate into interest groups, it means that the internal struggle has led to the conformation of fractional ideological blocs. We regard this deviation from democratic centralism as an extremely harmful phenomenon. We are not advocates of the consolidation of tendencies within the Communist Parties. But there is no point in swearing at reality without understanding its fundamentals. That is the only way to find ways to solve the present crisis.

In recent months, the accusation of fractionalism has been used by all against all, and, as one comrade put it, “where there is one fraction, there are at least two”. But, after all, what is fractionalism, and how did it express itself in the PCB in this last period?

Fractionalism, in a broad sense, consists of the organization of the internal struggle through circles whose agents are centralized not by the party, but by their own particular, group objectives. It consists of organizational parallelism as a means of articulating influence in the internal party struggle, rather than waging an open ideological struggle.

The predominant form taken by fractionalism in the PCB has long been federalism. Denounced in successive resolutions of previous Congresses and Conferences as a malady that continued to mark party life, federalism was curiously forgotten among the mentions of the 16th Congress. The fractionalism of so many regional caucuses in the Congress plenary (some even with parallel meetings), perhaps acceptable in a party Congress, was not enough; the fractionalism of the party’s intermediate bodies continued to flourish in the subsequent period. Setting themselves up almost as superior bodies to the 16th Congress, several Regional Committees met soon afterwards to hold, in an unprecedented way, “balances” of the Congress — where a minority who had openly fought the party’s left wing at the 16th Congress went to the rematch, railing against the outcome of the Congress and now counting on the support of the opportunists who had preferred to remain silent on matters of principle.

Throughout the subsequent period, some of the country’s main Regional Committees (in particular, Bahia, Minas Gerais, São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro) continued to wage an unprincipled internal struggle against the party’s left wing, using the party machine to promote persecution, boycotts and expulsions, refusing to incorporate militants into the most diverse jobs and arbitrarily blocking recruitment according to their interests. The Regional Political Commissions, in particular, became openly fractional bodies: from being executive bodies subordinate to the full members of the Regional Committees, they remained increasingly hypertrophied and omnipotent, withholding information from the full members of the Committees and from the grassroots, refusing to send their minutes for consideration, embargoed pressing discussions of planning and balance sheets, concealing disgracefulness and harassment of leaders and refusing to open disciplinary proceedings against notorious absurdities, and demanding of their members strict centralism in discussions and votes with the whole of the members of the full bodies. The party’s right wing opted for the path of fractional instrumentalization of the executive leaderships in the internal struggle and demanding a body discipline of the Political Commissions before the full Committees, as if they were above them, and not subordinate to them. With this choice, the party’s right wing made, several times in succession, a conscious and consistent choice for fractionalism and internal struggle without principles. A choice to curtail the ideological struggle within the party by bureaucratic means, leaving as the only alternative the absence of criticism or the bloc counter-offensive of the disaffected — which always allowed the executive leadership to respond by brandishing the accusation of fractionalism!

This fractionalism of the executive secretariats is firmly based on the politically swampy and amorphous majority of the Committees, which is little involved in the work of leadership as a whole and little concerned with conceiving it in an integral and systematic way — limiting themselves, in turn, to federalist politics in their own cities and respective regions, and unwilling to jeopardize their “prestigious” leadership positions on account of any criticism… Thus, federalism and the hypertrophy of political commissions feed off each other. Bossiness and careerism thrive under the complacency of inactive and lenient leaderships.

In his time, Lenin fought hard against the methods of the so-called komitetchki, the “committee men”, who feared the broad participation of the party’s “periphery” (the cells and collectives linked to the party) in decisions and information. But this type of fractionalism in the leadership, which positioned itself more consistently to the right and towards workerism, was not the only one that was accentuated throughout this period. The fraction of academicists has also acted with an orchestrated unity of action in recent months. This wing, which throughout most of the revolutionary reconstruction of the PCB had a significant petty-bourgeois ideological influence on the party, had already been defeated, however, at the 14th and 15th Congresses (2009 and 2014 respectively), in its attempt at revisionism of Marxism-Leninism. But in 2016, with the departure from the General Secretariat of Ivan Pinheiro (who, because of his firmness, the hesitant academicists used to cowardly refer to behind the scenes as “General Sectarian”), they believed they would once again have a decisive influence — but were faced with the opposition of a new generation of militants whose influence tended to surpass that of the academicists.

Thus, the anti-Leninist academicist fraction was confronted at the 16th Congress with the shadow of the loss of its predominance, in the face of the agitation and propaganda work of a whole new generation of organizers, tribunes and publicists, as well as practical work, especially among the youth, which terrified them by the lack of reference in their scholastic Marxism. With more and more recruits knocking on the doors of the party due to the influence of this work of the party’s left wing (which was not only at the head of the mass communication work, but also strongly present in the youth and in the party collectives, and which never hid its opposition to the anti-Leninists), the academicist fraction tried to promote purges on the verge of the Congress, but was restrained by the fear of splitting. Lashing out against the supposed “anti-intellectualism” of these cadres and a thousand other mutually contradictory straw men, from then on the anti-Leninist academicist fraction articulated itself in a growing offensive.

Despite its contempt for the workers, the anti-Leninist academicist fraction established a tactical alliance with them on questions of organization, in the name of combating the anti-academicist hard line of the party’s left wing. In fact, the recent recomposition of the National Political Commission of the PCB Central Committee in July 2023 marks the victory of this tactic of the antileninist academicist fraction which, relying on the party’s rightmost wing to crush the party’s left wing, reaped the spoils of the weakening of some centrist cadres and advanced in appointments to the National Political Commission.

Throughout this process, the party’s right wing has formed a bloc made up mainly of these academicist and workerist fractions, which have in practice lost the revolutionary horizon and conformed within the structure under bureaucratized practices, seeking to remain in the leadership at all costs. This tactical alliance took place under the aegis of what we have long called “PCBism”: uncritical party chauvinism, the spirit of a cult, contrary to the profound self-critical spirit that marks the Revolutionary Reconstruction. This “PCBism” is nothing more than the attachment to a political organization without concern for its historical and political development to become the vanguard of the proletariat in Brazil. This defense is not new: at the 9th Congress of the PCB in 1991, this position received 8% of the votes in the election of the CC — these were the members who wanted to keep the PCB, with its historical legend and name, but make the change in the political line in the sense proposed by the Eurocommunists. It is understandable that, in that period of “low tide” of the international communist movement, of defeats of the proletariat, the nostalgic desire to return to the “mass PCB” (etapist and nationalist) of part of the twentieth century feeds this sense of unprincipled belonging to a name, a legend, the nickname of “Partidão (Great Party)”. For these sectors, “Revolutionary Reconstruction” means only the recovery of the party’s legal registration with the National Electoral Court (TSE). The unconditional defense of an organization to the detriment of the principles that must be defended by a revolutionary party ends up weakening even its own sense of self-criticism — all attempts to advance the Party that clash with the sense of laziness and sluggishness of the leaders is agitated by them as “attacks on the PCB”.

Moreover, it is precisely the practicalist ideological content of the federalist fractions that has made them prone to cede ideological direction to the petty-bourgeois intelligentsia: in the spirit of economism, they think that the party’s grassroots militants should work uncritically, and only intellectuals can criticize and formulate, since they have a monopoly on theory. For this very reason, despite their alliance with the practicalists, the anti-Leninist academicist fraction constantly accuses the party’s left wing of “anti-intellectualism”: they are so convinced that academics have a monopoly on theory that they cannot conceive of any criticism of academicism as anything other than “anti-intellectualism”.

It is clear that faced with this picture of an internal struggle without principles, based not on open ideological struggle but on bureaucratic persecution, the left wing of the Party could only choose between an increasing degree of articulation or crushing. Falsely accused of “defending fractionalism”, most elements of the party’s left wing hesitated and were slow to realize that the fractional struggle had become irreversible in the party. For months, they watched in disarray as the bureaucratic offensive hit dozens of militants with irregular expulsions. This reluctance had a reason: the comrades of the left wing are aware that fractionalism (defined by Lenin as the nominal unity of the party, but its effective organizational disunity) is the antechamber of the split. Precisely aware of this, it was only a few comrades of the party’s left wing, at first, and only from the second half of 2023, who gave coordinated form to their struggle, preparing for the armed crisis by the “anti-leftist united front”. These comrades of the party’s left wing increasingly understood the need to offer cohesive resistance in defense of the PCB’s Revolutionary Reconstruction. Evidently, the party’s right wing would have preferred just to expel some, isolate others, etc., without resistance. The party’s left wing, united by the principles of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB, could not facilitate this attempt.

Crisis and split

The proximity of this crisis became crystal clear after the July plenum of the Central Committee, which rejected with irony and derision the proposal of comrade Ivan Pinheiro to convene an Extraordinary 17th Congress of the PCB. A Congress was the only way to put an end to the fractional division, opening the internal debates to the participation of the whole militancy and putting an end to the persecutions, boycotts and violations of the common principles of the Party’s strategy, tactics and organization. By making a mockery of the Congress, the majority of the Central Committee chose to resolve the party crisis by crushing one wing (the left one) and turning a blind eye to the national articulations of other wings. One vote in particular made this clear: the full body accepted Mauro Iasi’s proposal that the scope of the established Disciplinary Commission would be “to investigate evidence of the formation of a clique around former General Secretary Ivan Pinheiro” — to the detriment of the proposal of other comrades that the Disciplinary Commission should investigate any denunciation and evidence of cliqueism that it might receive. Thus, the CC opted for a unilateral investigation. Moreover, by refusing to convene the Congress, the majority of the Central Committee has clearly signaled that it places the imposition of the policy of one wing, in violation of congressional resolutions, above the party unity of the communists. And since the majority of the leadership has adopted a choice that certainly goes against the will for unity of the majority of communists, it has left those who are fighting for the deepening of the Revolutionary Reconstruction no other option but the radicalization of the internal struggle and (with the lack of willingness for a democratic and unitary debate, and with the continuation of the purges) the split, in the name of carrying forward what the majority of the leadership has broken with.

But this refusal to resolve the crisis through a Congress, as well as the taking sides of the majority of the CC in favor of the wing led by the anti-Leninist academicist fraction is, in fact, quite understandable, since it expresses precisely the impasses of the current stage of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB around its conception of democratic centralism. An impasse whose main common denominator involves the debate on theoretical centralism and freedom of criticism in the Party. In the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB, it was intended to overcome the theoretical monolithism that characterized, in an anti-Leninist manner, numerous parties organized around the Third International. But the ideological predominance of the anti-Leninist academicist fraction gave this ideological-organizational transformation of the Party a purely negative aspect: the “theoretical non-monolithism”, the “non-existence of a theoretical centralism”, means the impossibility for the party collective to restrict the freedom of polemics for academics, in their theoretical divergences in the most varied spheres of society, whether in universities or in the publishing world.

We see, therefore, that the “non-existence of a theoretical centralism” was a formulation that expressed only the convenience of academics, not a rescue of Leninist democratic centralism. That is why when, through a real work of historical recovery of Leninist democratic centralism, the left wing of the Party began to raise the banner of the organization of polemics in the party press, the academics tried to relativize this very freedom. Stripped of its negative expression and put in positive terms, the absence of theoretical centralism came to imply the need to dialectically forge, through a common “literature”, the party’s ideological unity. This meant raising the freedom of criticism to its practical organizational level in party life — but this, for the academics, meant consolidating the process of loss of ideological influence for the younger Party militants, and thus it was a life and death battle against Leninist democratic centralism. It is also in the field of polemics of principle about our organizational form that the class struggle against petty-bourgeois hegemony over the proletariat is expressed in our Party.

But how can we build an effectively democratic centralism without collectively organizing individual critical voices? Without openly welcoming polemics and, through responses and debates, convincing or being convinced by the militancy? Without keeping the party open to deep self-criticism, as was the abandoned spirit of the 15th Congress? The fact is that while some comrades see in criticism and self-criticism a mere means of wearing down the leadership in the internal struggle, or a self-immolation that can only please our enemies; other comrades see in criticism and self-criticism a scientific method of work, by which we advance, educate, convince and learn. While some comrades regard public polemics as disorganizing on principle, other comrades regard them as educational and instructive, and that they would be all the more so if we knew how to organize them in such a way as to neutralize their spontaneous and anarchic outburst, which result from the curtailment of party debate. Thus, the Party leadership prefers to depress the spirit of initiative of the grassroots, especially in the field of digital communication production, rather than organize itself at a higher level to be equal to the new tasks and new forces in front of us.

And even worse: precisely because it prohibits any external dissent and persecutes internal dissent, the leadership makes any legitimate methods of ideological struggle in the party impossible, making the struggle for positions the only way to guarantee space for opinions, and creating a climate of servility, subservience and apathy among the militancy. Do you want to debate with all comrades? Take the debate only to your cell — only if you are in leadership positions, then you can take the debate to your higher instance, etc. So that the position in the party structure becomes an unequal condition for the imposition of your political line or combat against the others.

This growing bureaucratism has inevitably led to discouragement and decline in our ranks. For several months we have been trying to dissuade dozens of comrades from leaving the organization, pointing out the imminence of the Party Conference and the possibility, perhaps in this context, of promoting the necessary rectifications in our Party. But, with the intensification of persecutions, expulsions and boycotts, expectations of the truly democratic potential of this Conference were fading, even more so in the face of its repeated postponement.

Finally, last Sunday (July 30, 2023), the majority of the Central Committee absolutely closed any path to party unity: not only did it approve a series of expulsions in absentia, guaranteeing a cemetery peace in the CC, but it also directed the regional leaderships to deepen the purge, now by the bases.

And, what is even more important: it reiterated its refusal to convene the 17th Extraordinary Congress of the PCB, even after having received motions and manifestations from various party bodies in favor of this unitary exit. And we say more important because, in fact, even if this meeting had not approved the absurd expulsions it did, only an Extraordinary Congress could safeguard legitimate means of internal struggle and preservation of party unity — precisely because what is at stake is not only the personal situation of one or another militant, but the principles of democratic centralism and the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB.

Conclusion

Comrades: we are not happy that, in order to continue carrying out the Revolutionary Reconstruction, we have to break the organizational unity between revolutionary communists and hesitant communists, which in recent years has been possible within the PCB under the spirit of so-called sectarian and identitarian “PCBism”; a unity under which, even, so many etapists and reformists remain to this day, trying to avoid exposing themselves openly, but betraying their personal convictions in debates on tactics and through praise of reformist Communist Parties around the world.

Comrades, we had a choice before us, which we tried to avoid and postpone as long as we could in the name of organizational unity. But finally we were forced into it: to be fought in isolation by the academicist fractionalists and see the end of the Revolutionary Reconstruction in practice; or to organize ourselves to face openly the inevitable split, now deflagrated by the party’s right wing, and continue fighting for the deepening of the Revolutionary Reconstruction. We take the path of struggle, not that of conciliation, as we believe is the duty of communists.

We continue to fight for the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the Brazilian Communist Party, taking the spirit of initiative and criticism and self-criticism as the heart of our democratic centralism. We will work for fuller and more conscious coordination between political work and mass communication work, overcoming the amateurism and spontaneism present in our organization. We will continue to seek to build a communist organization firmly rooted among the working class and the poor and oppressed people; a Party that assumes organically and with full responsibility the work that, today, the PCB outsources to its collectives, whose accumulations it does not appropriate in a true and consistent way. The struggle against all forms of oppression must be a struggle of the entire party militancy, not only of those who suffer it directly. We will forge the closest link between the communist party and the struggles of the working class, taking into account all its historical-concrete particularities of race, gender and sexual orientation.

We will also work to overcome the federalism that characterizes the PCB today and that makes the national unity of the party merely formal, while the most diverse methods and contradictory policies flourish under the same acronym. It is necessary to establish permanent discussion forums that allow the organisms of the same region of the country to jointly formulate their challenges and tasks, for a truly organic nationalization of the communists.

We want a Brazilian Communist Party that, in keeping with its name and consistent with its anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist strategy, declares a combative and decisive opposition to the social-liberal government of Lula and Alckmin in alliance with the center of Arthur Lira. In bourgeois society, the revolutionary proletarian party must be the party of opposition to every bourgeois government. This is how revolutionary Marxism conceives the true political independence of the working class — not through hesitations that consider independence as a position on the fence between adherence and opposition. And this means, among other things, giving our revolutionary strategy rigorous definition not only tactically but organizationally, facing openly as far as possible the questions of the most diverse forms of organization and struggle of the revolutionary party.

At the same time, we are convinced that by taking this step backwards in the nominal unity of the communists, we place ourselves in more favorable conditions for taking leaps forward. We set ourselves the task of overcoming the sectarian spirit of “PCBism”, and of establishing the firmest unity of action among all revolutionary communists organized beyond the PCB’s legend, regardless of size and registration with the National Electoral Court (TSE) — organizations which, today, the PCB treats with contempt and detachment. Despite existing disagreements, there can be no serious talk of an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist front in Brazil today without dialogue and consistent unity of action among all communist forces in fact, not just in words.

Likewise, we will be willing to continue to act in the closest unity of action with the militancy that chooses to remain in the PCB, in all the mass activities and all the struggles where we now share ranks. We are convinced that, with time and the test of practice (which is, after all, the criterion of truth), the majority of comrades will follow the same path we are now following, and we will unite again. But for now, we commit ourselves to work without any sectarianism and hostility, for the sake of not letting the practical organizational level of the various common struggles we conduct fall. We will remain in full solidarity with every worker fighting in the class struggle taking place in our country. Let us move beyond the spirit of cult, towards a real class solidarity, which is not hindered by the existence of tactical and organizational polemics. Only in this way will we advance in the construction of People’s Power, socialism and communism.

This path of independence, it is true, may mean a temporary period of reorganization. But we, who do not subordinate the revolutionary struggle of the masses to bourgeois institutionalism, know that, above all, our commitment is to the Socialist Revolution in our country and in the world, and to the construction of the political instrument capable of carrying it out. And today, we affirm without hesitation, neither the current leadership of the PCB, nor our own movement in defense of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB, are up to this task. The difference is that, on our part, we will build an organization that admits this insufficiency loud and clear, and works to resolve it; while the majority of the PCB leadership will continue on its cowardly path of silencing criticism and empty self-proclamation.

Finally, we appeal to all the organisms of the Brazilian Communist Party and its party collectives to debate in their meetings this Manifesto and the possibility of joining us in this course of struggle in defense of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB, through an organizational alternative that, at this moment, advances beyond the legal legend of the PCB, although it continues to struggle to live up to the centenary legacy of the Brazilian communist movement. Of course, this invitation implies the most complete openness to receiving criticism and expressions of disagreement on any aspect of our tactics and this Manifesto. We will respond promptly to any communication sent to us, within the framework of a democratic debate that, towards the 17th Congress, encompasses not only the militancy that today makes up the cells of the PCB, but also extending full party rights to the militancy that today acts in the collectives, in the party’s trade union movement and in the youth of the PCB. Only in this way will we be able to overcome the profound disorganization and lack of coordination that exists within what some are currently calling the “party complex”, an expression that in itself already indicates the segmentation of the Party’s political action.

It is not possible to continue to recognize the authority of a Central Committee that violates the resolutions of the Party Congress (the highest governing body of our organization) and that unilaterally endorses the policy of persecution and boycott promoted by the anti-Leninist academicist fraction, which refuses to openly put its differences at a Party Congress. We hope to count on the confidence of the comrades of the PCB and of all the organisms linked to the Party to, through a process of broad, transparent and frank debate, organize the 17th (Extraordinary) Congress of the Brazilian Communist Party.

We ask the comrades to organize plenary sessions in their localities in order to elect, where appropriate, members for the Regional Provisional Coordinations in charge of congressional preparation, as well as to elect in each state a comrade who can join the National Provisional Coordination that subscribes this Manifesto, in order to make the process of organizing our Congress as democratic and comprehensive as possible — which should be carried out in the shortest possible time, although without prejudice to the broadest and most in-depth debate. We take this opportunity to submit for the consideration of the militancy the proposal for the provisional designation of our initiative as “Brazilian Communist Party — Revolutionary Reconstruction” (PCB-RR). This name, intuitively proposed by dozens of comrades over the past few weeks, clearly points out the legacy we do not intend to renounce, as well as the directions we intend to follow.

Collective and individual contacts, for further guidance, information, criticism and suggestions, may be carried out by the following means:

E-mail: pcb.rr.central@gmail.com
Facebook: /pcb.rr
Instagram: @pcb_rr
Twitter: @pcb_rr

The adhesions to this Manifesto will be disclosed in the coming days and updated later, in order to signal our intention, as writers, not to put any individual name above this broad collective movement.

Organize the 17th (Extraordinary) Congress of the PCB!

Provisional Coordination of the National Movement in Defense of the Revolutionary Reconstruction of the PCB