Translated "Avante!"article by Albano Nunes, Member of the International Department

The PCP begins a year of celebrations with the “ Karl Marx II Birth Centenary – Legacy, Intervention, Struggle. Transform the World” Conference, as with the October Revolution Centenary, directed towards the present and the future of our struggle .One ought to recall the scientist and revolutionary of exceptional importance who, in close collaboration with Engels, discovered the social development laws, handing over the scientific foundation to the working class emancipating struggle, missing at the time, by proceeding on realities and tasks of our times, with the conviction that a deeper knowledge of his life and works ought to reinforce confidence in the strength of workers and popular masses organized struggle.

In two hundred years, the world suffered many changes. By reading and studying Marx, the very deep changes, that took place concerning the capitalist system and worldwide reality, became more visible. Humanity progressed dramatically concerning knowledge on Nature and Society, and through great class struggles, along an irregular and rough process, advanced with giant’s steps, towards its liberation, from all forms of exploitation and oppression. The context, that currently the communists struggle, is totally different from the written in “ The Communist Manifest” (on the eve of the 1848 /49 revolutions), so-called the “ Peoples Spring”) or the “ Civil War in France” ( just upon the 1871 Commune de Paris). Also different, is the international communist and workers movement, when compared with the Communists League or the Workers International Association (1864) that moulded the Manifest famous key-word, “ proletarian from all countries, unite!”. The situation having changed, organization and struggle methods also changed. But it is absolutely admirable how the great principles and thesis, the historical materialism fundamental laws, discovered by Marx, were confirmed by life, and of how the further developments and enrichments, beginning by Lenin, hold a flagrant timeliness. A timeliness that even Marxism adversaries are obliged to admit, within the economic sphere, even if to deny it concerning the capitalism demolishing revolutionary essence. Therefore, and as Lenin underlined, “ the essential in Marx doctrine was to have placed in evidence the world proletarian historical role, as creator of the socialist society”.

In a time of instability and uncertainty, despite the workers and peoples resistance and multifaceted struggle, the capitalist system responds to the deepening of its structural crisis with a huge social and democratic retrocession along with the nuclear threat, one sees in Marx and in Marxism-Leninism the safe moral compass to guide, with all the confidence, the struggle for democracy, social progress, peace and socialism. Considering that no counter-revolutionary setback, the hardest and long it ought to be, can change History’s direction, pointed out by Marx.