Comrades,

To address the struggle that we are waging by addressing the context in which it takes place may sound like justification. It is not so. Bearing in mind these conditions, the framework in which the struggle is being waged, the existing balance of forces, assessing the means used to condition our action, identifying those who oppose it - are all essential starting points in order to confront obstacles, overcome difficulties, guarantee success for the Party's response.

The conditions of struggle and the PCP’s influence cannot be separated from the predominant social relations of production, nor from the existing balance of class forces. It is in these conditions that the Party must affirm its action, resist the political and ideological offensive to which it is subjected, lead a process of struggle that contributes to accumulate the strength needed to assert its proposals and project.

What is fundamental should not be overlooked. The struggle that we are waging is an expression of a class confrontation that subsists and is prolonged; that sees a confrontation of antagonistic interests; that exposes this unreconcilable clash between the forces that aim to perpetuate the system of exploitation and those who, like the PCP, want to overcome it. Our struggle, our experience and our history teach us that every right, whether it be far-reaching or limited, must be won by struggle. Nothing is given by Capital. Especially when what is at stake is its power and domination. The intense offensive against the PCP, is just an expression of the fact that we are the force that, by its action and goals, can call into question these interests. This is what they do not tolerate, and they do not forgive. It is not a mistake, it is a fact of life: the PCP is, and will continue to be, the main target of this offensive and the object of this class hatred, because we are what we are and we will not cease to be; because we are the bearers of the true alternative; and because we reaffirm every day a program and project that we embody with pride.

This reality conditions us, but it is not an unsurmountable obstacle. It is true that Capital does not lack resources and power. But it is no less true that the PCP can count objectively on that immense strength that resides in the workers and the people, on our identification with their interests.

Comrades,

Understanding the conditions of struggle is a precondition for a better intervention. To do so is not to disguise one's own difficulties. We do not diminish the need to identify shortcomings, to assess what can and must be improved. But it would be a mistake to lose sight of the fact that in the concrete conditions in which we act there are objective and subjective factors that condition us. It would be a mistake to observe the evolution of the Party’s influence, in its various expressions, only with the sole and unilateral vision of our activity, isolated from the action of others with whom we are confronted, deluding ourselves that it is an inseparable part of a broader political and class struggle, not limited to a given time period. It is a mistake, because it disregards factors that cannot be disregarded and because it carries responsibilities for our actions that do not belong to us. And above all, because it does not contribute to a lucid assessment of the situation and to mobilizing militant energy when confronting such demanding present and future battles.

The Party’s influence is a whole – political, ideological, social and electoral. It is expressed, more or less, according to the objective and subjective conditions of each moment. It is not measurable by strictly observing one of its expressions. Electoral expression is one of these expressions, perhaps the most evident. It cannot be underestimated. But it is certainly not the most decisive. It is in the battle for the construction of the Party’s overall influence, of its social dimension and of what flows from it to the level of political consciousness and support, that decides the [Party’s] role and the action to which it is called.

The Party’s influence cannot be separated from this activity, which brings together immediate goals of struggle and the assertion of a project of emancipation and social transformation. But its influence also cannot be separated from the ebb and flow of the political process; from changes in social structures and composition; from the means of ideological domination that shape awareness and stances. This influence is conditioned by the ideological offensive that we face. This offensive, in its various expressions, takes on new forms today.

It is true that the offensive against the Party did not start today. It has always existed and will exist. But, without disdaining other expressions of ideological conditioning of previous periods, to devalue its intensity today would only serve to disarm the Party, to absolve the anti-communist gall that grips the media space. To do so would be to ignore the enormous development of the tools of domination. It would be to ignore the mass impact of the disinformation by the means that spread falsehoods, misrepresentation, lies.

It would be to ignore the immense concentration of centres of ideological production that invade all spheres of life in society, on a national and worldwide scale.

At the risk of simplification, perhaps it can be said that in the past the production of bourgeois ideology passed from the elites to the masses, whereas today it invades the masses through the arsenal of means that they now have available and of which they make use.

This offensive has the PCP as its main target. It is an offensive that is characterized by the enormous means which it mobilizes; by its persistence and intensity; by its non-stop campaigns, in a process that cannot be viewed or assessed just in terms of the impact and consequences of each isolated campaign, but rather by what each one adds, stratifies and consolidates in terms of overall prejudice and of obstacles to the Party’s message and activity.

A prejudice that capital inspires so as to make it difficult to accept what the PCP states and proposes, due to the artificial barrier that it creates even when people are not aware of it, and that leads to assessing the Party, not for what it stands for and represents, but rather through the sieve of prejudice that creates distrust in this relationship.

It is within this framework that the Party must resist the intense political and ideological offensive to which it is subjected, and lead the struggle that contributes to accumulate the forces that can project and assert its proposals and its project.

That is the struggle that continues and to which we are committed. These are times marked by the ideological misrepresentation of reality according to the dominant interests, which live from the promotion of what is short-term and sectoral, in the attempt to instil a way of acting that dispenses with reflection; that links the action of each to interests which, not being their own, are presented as if they were. This is a cobweb where extreme individualism and the nourishing of envy, selfishness and competition in social relationships crush what is the common and collective interest.

It is a framework in which the response to this misrepresentation - without discarding the specific field of the ideological struggle – needs to find in the contact with reality and concreteness, the main condition for opposing it.

Difficulty is not synonymous with impossibility. We must not just look at the offensive of capital, at its intensity, with the perception of an avalanche that seems to bury everything. It is so, but that is not all. Between what big capital wants and what it can do, there is that harrowing ‘detail’ which is the struggle of the workers and of PCP. As is the duty of a revolutionary force, we must also look at the other side of this reality in motion: that is, look at the side of the strength of resistance, the mobilization of combative forces and the courageous attitude of not giving in to the dominant power. These are the reasons that explain why, despite the disproportion in means and forces in confrontation, the ambitious decades-old agenda of big capital to complete the counter-revolutionary project, has not seen its anti-democratic goals fully achieved, thanks to the struggle of the workers and the people and to the PCP’s intervention.

These are times of resistance which, globally, are already an expression of the imposition of setbacks to reactionary projects and ambitions. These are above all, times of accumulation of the forces that, with the struggle and concrete action, will open up and impose more favourable horizons. The sum of wills will result from the process of the growing awareness of each regarding the concrete conditions of their lives, from the sense of class belonging that their involvement in the struggle for their interests and rights will provide.

The reality of life and the problems that it highlights, as well as asserting their rights - to work, to wages, to healthcare, to housing, to retirement, to education and everything else that a just society must ensure – is where lies the answer to overcoming the factors of subjectivity that are imposed by the dominant ideology, which seek to elude the deep root causes of inequalities and injustice.

There are no contexts that are immutable. Fatalism is not a concept that befits those who know, like we Communists do, that life is always on the move, that reality changes under this material force that springs from the ideal that we embrace. Today and in the future, as always, it will be the role of the masses and their struggle that paves the paths of progress. And they will be all the more decisive if there is a vanguard force with clear goals and embodying a program of social transformation.

This is the path of progress and future for our country on which we travel every day with our activity and our struggle, this struggle that is made of coherence, conviction, determination and courage. This is the conviction and courage of those who know that, no matter how demanding the times that we live and face, the goals, the ideal and the project that we defend will win.

Long live the XXII Congress!

Long live the PCP!