Speech by Jeronimo de Sousa at the Seminar promoted in the scope of the celebrations of the Centennial of the October Revolution. held in Lisbon on the 17th June

On behalf of the Portuguese Communist Party, I would like to convey our warmest and most cordial greetings to all the participants in this Seminar "Socialism, a demand of timeliness and future", promoted in the scope of the celebrations of the Centennial of the October Revolution that our Party is promoting with several initiatives and great success all over the country.

A special greeting and thanks to the University of Lisbon and its Faculty of Arts for all the support and availability for the holding of this important initiative. A very special greeting to the guest speakers who will be present here with their views and communications, addressing the wide and varied range of themes that this pioneering enterprise of universal historical significance raises, particularly for those of us who have not given up fighting for the new society freed from the exploitation of man by man and seek in their own and others' past experience and in the deepening of the reality of today's capitalism and its deep structural crisis, teachings for the combats of the future.

The Seminar, that now begins, answers and is of course within the objectives of the Central Committee of the PCP for the celebration of the Centennial of the Socialist Revolution of October 1917.

First and foremost, they reaffirm the value of this unprecedented historic achievement that marked the twentieth century - the most advanced in the millenary process of liberating humanity from all forms of exploitation and oppression - and which has established itself as a driving force of great political and social values around the world and at the same time the values of the confirmation of the validity of socialism and communism as a solution to address the great problems of the peoples and of humanity.

In these celebrations we have been showing the heritage of achievements, conquests and progressive transformations which marked the last century through the action of the communists.

We have rightly emphasized the great political, economic, social, cultural, scientific and civilizational achievements of socialism in the USSR and its huge contribution to the advancement of the emancipatory struggle of workers and peoples, including support in the gaining the independence by numerous nations which were for centuries under colonial yoke, but also in its role as the global force of progress and peace, and in the victory over Nazi-fascism.
In all the initiatives promoted, we showed how the Revolution was prepared by the progress of world capitalism in its imperialist phase that Lenin revealed, based on the theses and instruments of analysis developed by Marx and Engels, and became reality due to the conscious action of the Russian proletariat and its class Party - the Bolshevik Party.

We have highlighted and shown the valuable role of the working class, workers and peoples, their unity, organisation and struggle in the process of social transformation, and particularly in the emergence and building of this great experience of the world revolutionary process and the future of a new society, with the revolutionary overcoming of capitalism by socialism.

In the various initiatives held, we analyzed and debated the evolution of the world revolutionary process, including the negative and dramatic consequences for the workers and peoples resulting from the defeats of socialism in the USSR and in other socialist countries, not only for world peace , but also in what it has meant in the worsening of the calamities and perversions of the capitalist system and in enhancing its exploitative, oppressive, aggressive and predatory nature - a historical setback that proves the importance and scope of the objectives of the October Revolution and of socialism as a necessity and demand of timeliness and future.

Today, in this Seminar, we will have the opportunity to continue to deepen, and in a more comprehensive way and from different angles, the extraordinary importance of this Revolution, which ushered in a new historical epoch - that of the transition from capitalism to socialism - which, contrary to what imperialism’s propaganda and bourgeois ideology announces, remains with all its potential for achievement on the horizon of the struggle of the workers and peoples.
It remains not just because we state it, but because capitalism has no solutions to the problems of the contemporary world. On the contrary, its action worsens all problems and all around and is constantly confronted with the needs, interests and aspirations of the workers and peoples.

And, however they deny it, class struggle continues to be the engine of history. Faced with the brutal social scourges that remain and the intensification of the exploitation of labour that we are witnessing. Faced with the growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth that deepens both between classes and between countries, what capitalism has to expect is not the consensus and harmony between the exploited and exploiting classes, but the struggle of workers, peoples and nations, and the dawn of new revolutionary explosions to put an end to it.

Aware of this unavoidable reality that the bourgeois historiography and the centres of capitalism still struggle with the task of rewriting the history of the October Revolution, and each of the steps taken in the course of the construction of the new society that emerged, disfiguring it, caricaturing and distorting facts, omitting and erasing its unprecedented and impressive achievements that introduced a new and unparalleled dynamics in the processes of social and human development.

They have always done it in the past and over the years. We know that the October Revolution and socialism faced from the very first moment not only the siege, subversion and aggression by imperialism and two great wars, but also a powerful and persistent anti-communist and anti-Soviet ideological offensive. Against it they launched a vast arsenal of mystifications and arguments that the propagandists of capitalism inflated and spread, under a halo of being scientific, presenting and stigmatizing it sometimes as a "voluntarist act", or as a "local and particular experience" not repeatable, or even as a" violation of the natural laws of social development." Against the Soviet communists they unleashed a wave of ferocious attacks, accusing them of using putschist methods and of imposing the Russian experience as a universal solution. They never spared means, including the most violent, to uphold and enforce their class interests!

This Seminar will be an important time to fight and deconstruct old and new falsifications regarding the October Revolution.

Here in Portugal we know the version widely promoted by the fascist dictatorship that used it to legitimise its terrorist power at the service of the monopolies and to justify its brutal violence against the workers' movement and against the democratic movement, particularly against the PCP and its struggle for democracy and freedom.

They resorted to all means to prevent workers and peoples from becoming aware of the true meaning of this singular historical event that allowed the broad masses to take destiny into their own hands and to delay the emergence of the alternative to capitalism in other places that the October Revolution announced was possible.

They have been resorting to all means to give life to a systematic action of misinformation, intoxication and manipulation of consciences, aiming at the rehabilitation and eternalisation of capitalism, as in the course of this seminar, will certainly be shown.

In this eagerness to preach the renunciation of the Socialist Revolution, they pitted socialism against democracy and following the events that dictated the defeat of socialism in the USSR and Eastern Europe, imperialism’s ideological offensive has assumed a gigantic dimension, seeking in the October Revolution, the cause of distortions, errors and deviations, which, under certain historical conditions, gave rise, as we have said, to a "model" that prolonged in time and distanced itself on fundamental issues from the communist ideal and project.

The centres of capitalism and imperialist propaganda presented these events as proof of the historical failure of the communist ideal, while proclaiming capitalism as the "end of history” and projecting it on a triumphal march on the road to universal democracy, without wars and crises.
Enough time has elapsed to see how deceptive they were, as if we did not know it before, on their prophecies about such a triumphal march and how false are the theses that dictated the "end of history."

Capitalism’s structural crisis, with its roster of unemployment and poverty, economic destruction and social regression, and the dramatic trail of death and destruction of whole countries as a result of its predatory action, because war is increasingly emerging as the answer to the crisis in which it has plunged, are a clear proof that capitalism has not only continued to maintain its essential characteristics, as a system of exploitation, oppression and aggression, as in the new situation of change in the correlation of forces, momentarily freer and less conditioned, came to confront the workers and peoples with the more brutal and inhuman consequences.

In fact and contrary to what has been proclaimed, capitalism has nothing to offer to the people but worsening of exploitation, increase of social injustices and inequalities, attack on social and labour rights, denial of democratic freedoms and rights, usurpation and destruction of resources, interference and aggression on national sovereignty, militarism and war.

Unable to overcome its insurmountable contradictions, capitalism is not the terminal system of history.

Yes, the October Revolution continues to announce that another world is possible, as will be made clear, we are sure, in the course of this Seminar!
And it will not be the fact that the enterprise of the construction of the new society - the socialist society – has proved to be more difficult, more complex and more turbulent than we, communists, expected, that one can question its fairness and its necessity.

Therefore, more than ever, socialism emerges with redoubled timeliness and necessity in the process of the emancipation of workers and peoples and which the PCP assumes as a supreme goal in its Programme.

Of this project where it is not only about the achievement of its great goals - the construction of socialism and communism - but also the many causes that give meaning to today's struggles for the construction of a better and fairer world on the path of this greater goal.

The timeliness of socialism and its necessity as a solution to the problems of people’s demands taking into account a great diversity of solutions, stages and phases of the revolutionary struggle.

It needs considering that there are no "models" of revolutions, nor "models" of socialism, as the PCP always upheld.

Under the conditions of Portugal, the socialist society that the PCP points to our people, has to pass the stage we have characterised as an Advanced Democracy, itself an integral part of the struggle for socialism.

In its Programme "An Advanced Democracy – The April Values in the Future of Portugal", the PCP believes that the realization of such a project is a process of profound transformation and development that meets the concrete needs of Portuguese society in the present historical stage.

A Programme whose materialization is objectively in the interest of all workers and of all anti-monopolist classes and social strata, whose basic definition is based on the concept that democracy is simultaneously political, economic, social and cultural.

The project of Advanced Democracy being an integral part of the struggle for socialism, its implementation is also inseparable from the struggle we are waging today to achieve a rupture with right-wing policies and the materialization of a patriotic and left-wing policy that gives shape to this construction, in a process that coherently integrates all the objectives of struggle.

Enriched with the experience of the first victorious Socialist Revolution and the practical demonstration of the superiority of the new society, it is with the strong conviction that socialism and communism are the future of humanity, that we continue our struggle, assuming the necessary and indispensable ideological combat against all attempts to crush the dream, hope and confidence in the possibility of building this new society to which we aspire.
It is this confidence that we want and have the duty to keep alive with realizations like the one that brings us here.

To all of you, our wishes for a fruitful work!