Interview by Jeronimo de Sousa, General Secretary of the PCP to the Newspaper "Pravda" - Communist Party of the Russian Federation
1 – What are the Party's tasks in the context of the global economic crisis?
As we have been saying, particularly in the documents adopted at International Meetings of Communist and Workers' Parties, the world is facing a structural crisis of the capitalist system, one that highlights its historical limitations and insuperable contradictions. This crisis is far from over. It confirms the system's underlying tendencies, including the unprecedented concentration of capital and wealth, financialization of the economy as a result of the falling rate of profit, intensified exploitation of working people and plunder of natural resources, greater social polarization, a systematic attack against the social functions of the State, the commoditization of all spheres of social life, and an accentuation of the system's parasitic and decadent nature.
The context within which the PCP – and we believe communists generally – is working is extremely complex: A deepening crisis, and “crises”, of capitalism (financial, economic, environmental, food, energy and cultural crises); The class struggle becoming rapidly more acute; A multi-faceted and large-scale intensification of the imperialist offensive; Sharpening inter-imperialist contradictions; a powerful media and ideological offensive to try to depoliticize the struggle; attacks against democracy and harassment against the most consistent forces such as communist parties; and lastly, a very dynamic and complex realignment of forces on a world scale, one that is far from over and that can still lead to major “shake-ups”. Communists must necessarily pay attention to these underlying trends – to each one of them individually, and to all of them taken as a whole – within a context where there are also new conditions for the ideological struggle and where Socialism can be asserted as the alternative.
The development of objective conditions to advance the struggle is on the agenda, and we note a revitalization – albeit a still fragile and insufficient one – in the struggles of workers and peoples, particularly in Europe. In Portugal we are seeking to promote this revitalization, aiding and supporting workers' struggles even more, strengthening the class-based trade-union movement – a key element to advance the struggle – and clearing the road to politicization of working people's struggles, raising their political and class awareness and organizing them around the revolutionary party, and thus advancing the subjective aspect of the struggle. The tasks before us all are huge, multi-faceted, moving at sometimes different paces and along different routes, and such is the case in Portugal too.
Portugal is undergoing a deep economic and social crisis. It is a crisis that has deepened as the international economic crisis has intensified and as the European capitalist integration process – embodied in the European Union – has advanced. But it is essentially the result of decades of right-wing policies implemented by both the right-wing and the socialdemocratic parties, and that can in very broad terms be characterized by five major aspects:
1 – Radical privatization policies, encompassing the State-owned sector and the key economic sectors, as well as the State's social functions and public services;
2 – A high and rising degree of capital concentration and centralization, expressed both through greater inequality and injustice in the redistribution of wealth produced, and through a growing submission of political powers to economic powers; this has led to, for example, corruption becoming firmly entrenched as a systemic factor;
3 – A far-reaching attack against the rights of workers and of people generally, through policies to reduce real wages, cut back social services and labour and social rights;
4 – Policies of national surrender, of subjection to European Union and NATO dictates, with major negative consequences, destroying the nation's productive apparatus, basing the economy on services and finance, as well as providing support for imperialism's aggressive and warmongering strategies – it is these policies that lie at the heart of the country's inability to confront the economic crisis that it is facing;
5 – Weakening of democracy, attacks against the Constitution of the Republic – one of the April 1974 Revolution's major achievements – whitewashing of the fascist dictatorship's history, stepped-up anti-communism, diverse attempts to hush up the actions, struggle and proposals made by the trade-union movement and the PCP, an artificial media inflation of self-proclaimed left-wing forces whose work is characterized by systematic struggle against the PCP and by a socialdemocratic-leaning political line.
In this context, our Party's action can be summarized into three major lines of work:
1 – Developing social and mass struggles against the Socialist Party government's right-wing policies and for a clean break with decades of right-wing policies, defending social and labour rights, fighting against injustices and against the attempts to make working people pay for capitalism's crisis. This is done above all by strengthening working people's struggles and the class-based trade-union movement, but also by making a very determined effort to bring into the struggle the more backward strata of the working class and other working people, as well as diverse sections and strata such as farmers, teachers, nurses, higher education and secondary school students, young workers, civil servants, services workers – all severely affected by casualization of labour – among others. Our assessment of the results achieved in this line of work is clearly positive. The last few years have been marked by some of the largest struggles, demonstrations and strikes since the 25 April 1974 Revolution. And now, confronted with the Socialist Party Government's stepped-up anti-social offensive, the coming months, and very specifically the month of May, will be a time of great mass actions and struggles.
2 – Strengthening the Party's organization and activities, viewing them as part of a close and dialectical relationship with the Party's mass work and the development of the struggle. This effort has yielded very positive results in terms of recruitment – particularly the recruitment of young people - , better Party structure, organization and handover of responsibilities to cadres. Given the PCP's nature, but also the objective needs that we face, we are assigning great priority to workplace Party organizations and to better rooting the Party among the workers and the masses of the people. At the same time, we are making a major effort to activate the work of the Party as such, through major Party actions, such as the Marches that we held in 2008 and 2009 with tens of thousands of participants, or the Central Committee's recent decision to hold – prior to the “Avante!” festival, Portugal's largest and most important annual political-cultural event, this year being held on 3-5 September – 500 major Party political events in all regions of the country, to assert the Party's line of making a break with right-wing policies the key element to change the country's economic and social situation.
Lastly, and considering our ability to operate within the institutions too – be it in Local Government (where we have over three thousand councilors in local government bodies, and we govern 28 municipalities in our country), in the Assembly of the Republic [the national parliament] (where the PCP has 13 out of 230 elected members), or in the European Parliament (two members) – we are advancing an important line of work based on a close relationship between institutional work, Party work, and mass work to support the struggle. This is a dialectical relationship, where these three areas of work are equally important and mutually reinforce each other.
3 – Developing the offensive in the struggle of ideas. This is a line of work that seeks to explore the potential created by the sharpening class struggle, and the greater visibility that the system's contradictions and limitations now have, to assert Socialism as the true alternative to the capitalist system and its crisis, while at the same time seeking to provide a strong ideological response to the attacks that – as the crisis deepens – are becoming more intense; attacks against working people, against the trade-union movement, against the April revolution's values, against the PCP and its ideology. This line of work is strongly based on a message of confidence in the future – one that for us is closely connected to the struggle to defend and expand democracy in keeping with the PCP's programme for an advanced democracy for Portugal – as an element and a stage in the struggle to build socialism in Portugal.
2 – In this context, who are the allies in the struggle for working people's interests?
Salaried workers, and in particular the working class – within which we count a growing mass of immigrant workers – are the great driving force of social struggles, in alliance with other intermediate social strata hit by capitalist exploitation. Our experience teaches us that a strong trade union movement – with a clear class line, close ties to the working people, fighting spirit, and independent from economic powers – is the key to advancing the struggle of not just working people, but of the people as a whole. Working people's struggles have been numerous and have involved very diverse sectors.
At the same time, we consider that the struggle for a break with right-wing policies, and to build a patriotic and left-wing alternative, will only be possible by changing the balance of forces in society. And for that, it is essential to build and consolidate important social alliances. First of all, with farmers and fishermen, two sectors to which we pay great attention, because they are among those hardest hit by the European Union's capitalist integration, because they are essential to national sovereignty, because they suffer unbridled exploitation by large scale distribution and commercial companies, and because they are victims in a deep social crisis. These two strata have waged major struggles, as was recently made clear when the National Agriculture Confederation (CNA) held one of the best-attended congresses ever in its history.
In Portugal, the proletarianization of increasingly broad strata of society – specifically technical workers and managers, teachers, doctors, law professionals, nurses, etc – have increasingly confronted us with the challenge of working more actively among those strata, and of winning them over to the workers' side in the struggle. We have scored several successes in this area such as for example – and these are just two examples – the powerful teachers' struggle over the past two years (which at one point brought out onto the streets in a single demonstration about two thirds of all teachers in Portugal), or the recent nurses' struggle with its strong fighting spirit.
We also make efforts in an important line of work, among micro-, small- and medium-scale businesspersons. Micro- small- and medium-scale businesses account for 98% of Portugal's productive fabric. While this social stratum does not naturally converge into the basic social alliances, the fact is that the capitalist concentration and centralization process has increasingly pushed some of these strata into subordination to big business's interests and activities, and therefore also into the struggle to defend their economic survival and to defend the nation's production and sovereignty against capitalist concentration and the financialization of the economy.
At the same time the PCP, as well as the class-based trade union movement, have been making efforts to maintain close ties with intellectuals, particularly salaried intellectuals. This is a stratum that – when it joins working people's struggles with a class spirit and solidarity – can make important contributions to the struggle's development as well as dynamizing several important types of movements, in particular movements to defend the democratic regime or for peace and solidarity with peoples in struggle.
3 – What are the specificities of the Party's social composition and of its support base?
The Portuguese Communist Party has, in the main, retained its character as the Party of the working class and of all working people. This is clear in the social composition of its membership – based on a strong majority (72%) of industrial and office workers, that is also reflected in its Central Committee. However, as a result of decades of destructive policies against the nation's productive structure – with the dismantlement of major industrial centers, tertiarization of the economy, higher unemployment and rampant casualization – there is a trend toward a lower percentage of industrial workers in the Party's membership, side by side with an increased percentage of other salaried workers. This is a trend that we try to counter by efforts specifically geared to recruiting industrial workers and to strengthening Party work at the workplace level. The other strata that are numerous in the PCP's membership are intellectuals, technical workers, students, self-employed persons and small- and medium-scale businesspersons – and their percentage has been growing steadily.
As far as age is concerned, over 65% of Party members are under 64 years of age, and two major trends are identifiable: many thousands of members who joined the Party in different historical periods have maintained their membership – and that is a positive thing – , while there is a growing number of young people joining the Party (without counting those who join the Communist Youth – JCP). This is borne out by the organizational survey made at the Party's 18th Congress, which found that 60% of all members were under 40 years of age when they joined the Party, and one third were under 30 years old.
Concerning the Party's support base, we can say that it bears a direct relationship with the Party membership's composition. It is in the parts of the country with a greater concentration of industrial workers – and particularly the large urban areas with many working people – that the struggle is most intense, and that the Party has greatest influence. The bulk of its social, political and electoral influence is among industrial workers and working people. The Party also has strong influence among farm workers – particularly in the South – and fishermen. In the meantime, and due to its very wide-ranging work, the Party is getting a hearing and even support among various social strata such as technical workers and micro- and small-scale businesspersons. We believe this is due to the Party's support for struggles that have taken place around issues such as the defence of public services, local issues, and defence of national production, among others. Because of their social breadth, these struggles mobilize very diverse social strata. Lastly, I would like to point out that our Party's social influence is far greater than its electoral influence. A good example of this is our determining influence in the Unitary Trade Union movement and in various people's movements, while electorally; our Party only represents 10% of the electorate.
4 – We see a wide-ranging anti-communist campaign in many European countries. In some countries, there have already been calls to ban Communist Parties and their Youth organizations. There is something new in these campaigns: An attempt to rewrite history, falsify the outcome of the 2nd World War, distort the Soviet Union's role in the victory over nazi-fascism. How are you fighting anti-communism in your country, and what can we do together to counter this campaign?
Anti-communism is not something new in the world. Suffice it to recall Churchill's words immediately after the bolshevik revolution's victory, when he stated that the “bolshevik baby must be strangled in the cradle”. Anti-communism, as a political – and a thoroughly anti-democratic – element of capitalist repression, can take on many diverse forms. Like fascism, it is a tool used by ruling classes to try to hold back, or even reverse, gains made by workers' and peoples' struggles – and to thus maintain their own rule.
Capitalism's deepening crisis, and imperialism's offensive, bear great dangers – particularly as concerns the development of anti-democratic, extreme right-wing and totalitarian tendencies. But at the same time, they develop the objective factor of revolutionary struggle for change and open the road to greater mass political awareness, to a development of the subjective factor, and to the assertion of socialism as the only real and possible alternative solution to capitalism's crisis.
It is in this context that we have to look at stepped-up repression and anti-communism. The ruling classes are trying, within this context, to delay the development of the revolutionary struggle's subjective factor, attempting to imbue the masses with feelings such as fear, individualism, xenophobic nationalism, and conformism, while at the same time oppressing and harassing those forces – such as trade unions and communist parties – that can, in this situation, lead the masses to make a determined stand and undertake organized struggle.
The attempts to rewrite the history of workers' and peoples' liberation – and specifically in the second world war –, the attempts to ban communist parties, the more or less overt ways of isolating communists – portraying them as retrograde forces closed upon themselves (and this is done not just by the traditional right-wing but also by socialdemocracy and by some so-called “new left” forces) – as well as the institutional measures against communist ideology, all converge into a single strategy: to hinder communists' work and ties with the masses, and to remove from the collective mind the example and the hope that – in spite of errors and deviations that did exist and from which we must learn – is contained in the communists' struggle and in the experiences (both past and present) of building socialism.
That is why, in Portugal, we make a very strong connection between the struggle against anti-communism and the struggle for democracy and to defend the 25 April 1974 Revolution's values. And that is why we think that the best way to confront this ideological offensive is with a counter-offensive, based on a strong Communist Party organization with roots in the workers and the masses of the people, and by developing and furthering our policy of social alliances, by developing the social and mass struggle, by convincing our people's collective mind that the struggle is worthwhile and that there are alternatives to right-wing policies and to capitalism. It is through the struggle, with the masses, and with an organized mass party that we can best fight against anti-communism and the attacks against democracy that it bears within it. At the same time, the development of internationalist solidarity, the development of closer cooperation among communist parties, and between communist parties and other progressive and left-wing forces – strengthening and consolidating the anti-imperialist front, expressing our strong and unflinching solidarity with peoples in struggle and with peoples and countries that are, under very difficult conditions, pursuing the goal of building socialism – all are essential components of the communists' counter-offensive and create conditions to strengthen the struggle for socialism and communism.
