Brazilian Communist Party
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The history of the Brazilian Communist Party (in Portuguese, Partido Comunista Brasileiro), best known by the abbreviation PCB, started with its foundation on March 25, 1922 in the city of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. On that day, nine representatives of communist groups from the cities of São Paulo, Santos, Cruzeiro (in countryside São Paulo), Porto Alegre, Recife, Niterói, Juiz de Fora and Rio de Janeiro met and approved the party's statutes and the twenty-one conditions for entering the Communist International. The meeting ended with all the seventy-three members of the party singing L'Internationale (but not very loudly, due to security reasons).
The PCB's first years were marked by an effort to encourage socialist thinking in Brazil. It must be noted that, unlike many other countries, Brazil had not had much anti-capitalist political experience, except for the 1917 anarchist actions in São Paulo. During those years, the party was declared illegal by the government. On May 1, 1925, during the party's Second Congress, its weekly newspaper A Classe Operária (The Working Class) was announced, with five thousand copies being sold on the factories. This number grew to nine hundred copies by the ninth edition, but the police shut the newspaper down shortly after the twelfth edition was published. The paper reappeared in 1928, after the Third Congress was held.
By 1930, after being recognized by the Communist International and with its Socialist Youth division formed, the PCB had nearly eleven hundred members. This decade also marked two cycles on the party's history: one of increasing influence, until 1935, and one of decline, until 1942. Both cycles are comprehensible when seen in the context of the Vargas era.
On 1943, during the so-called Mantiqueira Conference, the party secretly met in the small city of Engenheiro Passos, Rio de Janeiro, and in an open letter to Vargas decided to support a declaration of war on the Axis. At the same time, Luís Carlos Prestes was elected to the party's presidency. On 1945, after Vargas's dictatorship ended, the PCB became legal once again. By 1947, it had nearly two hundred thousand members. However, this period of official tolerance did not last long, as President Dutra denounced the PCB as "Internationalist, and therefore not committed to Brazil's own interests" in 1948, an action supported by the American government.
In the 1950s, as the party was driven underground, it began supporting major workers' strikes around Brazil. However, this did not prevent the beginning of internal clashes between different factions within the PCB. This became more evident after the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's policies. The factionalization of the party accelerated after a new Manifesto was passed in 1958, proposing new ways of achieving communist goals. This Manifesto linked the establishment of socialism to the broadening of democracy. As the party had gained a clearly reformist agenda, some of its top leaders quit the PCB, forming the new Communist Party of Brazil (Partido Comunista do Brasil - PCdoB) in 1962.
With this new orientation, the PCB grew in size and exercised a much greater role in the Brazilian left. However, the alliance forged with the other parties did not survive the 1964 coup d'état, following which the PCB was again banned. However, unlike other leftist groups, PCB did not play an important role against the dictatorship, refusing, for example, to engage in armed struggle. Many important leaders left the party, while many others died in the hands of the military regime.
After the 1979 amnesty, the PCB's leaders began to restructure the party. The 1982 Congress confirmed the revisionist agenda, declaring the PCB "a party of the masses, linking socialist goals to true democracy, which will be constructed based on the values of freedom". Once again, internal clashes developed in the party, as the members became divided between Communists and Social Democrats, mainly after Prestes left the party. This crisis came to and end only in January 1992, during the Tenth Congress, when the majority of the members decided to leave and form another new party, the Socialist People's Party (Partido Popular Socialista - PPS).
The new PCB, which formed after the PPS's foundation, decided to return to the party's original Marxist-Leninist agenda.
Related articles
List of political parties in Brazil List of Communist Parties Politics of Brazil
External link
- Brazilian Communist Party (http://www.pcb.org.br/) (in Portuguese)
Sources
- PCdoB timeline (http://www.vermelho.org.br/pcdob/80anos/trajetoria.asp) (in Portuguese)