Speech by Jeronimo de Sousa, General Secretary of the PCP at the "Avante!" Festival Rally
Here we are making and remaking this Festival of peace, friendship among peoples, of solidarity and fraternity, against exploitation, on this ground of ours from which every year springs an explosion of creativity, convictions and joy, embodied by this immense participation to which youth gives an indelible mark, youth that giving colour to life gives colour to our «Avante!» Festival.
We salute you all. But it is only fair that from this tribune we send an special salutation to the builders of the Festival that participated in the work days with unequalled militancy and generosity. It would be possible to erect this Festival another way. But it wouldn’t be the same.
So our Festival will continue, erected every year. It will continue to be this way because we are the masters of our fate. Because this is a sovereign and independent Festival that depends solely and exclusively on the will, dream, effort, work, imagination and passion of all and each one that makes it what it is. And that is what we want, that is why we fight, for our people and our country.
We are communists. Throughout the History of our Country and our Party we have always expressed our confidence when we imagined the future before us, future for which we fought in the present, animated by a hope that does not wait. We face the future this way because we are sure, as our Festival proves, that unity around values and ideals, the strength of struggle for rights, justice, truth and progress can move worlds and confront the most powerful offensives against our people and our homeland.
We stated this is a sovereign Festival, because we know and have conscience of our strength. That is what sovereignty means to us. To affirm, as we affirm every year in this Festival, that free in thinking, with the strength of our convictions, united in action and masters of our fate, we will stride forward with the values of April and further this millennial human dream of freedom of man’s exploitation of man.
We hold this Festival at a time when workers, popular and anti-monopolist classes and sectors, the vast majority of Portuguese are confronted with a ferocious and brutal threat upon their living conditions and the country is subject to the pillage of its wealth and resources and the evermore drastic mutilations of its sovereignty.
The political forces that, in government and throughout the last several years, have led the country to its current crisis with their policies of national disaster – the Socialist Party (PS), the Social-Democratic Party (PSD), the Democratic and Social Center (CDS) – have handed over the destinies of the country to the humiliating dependency of foreign intervention, in relation to which they assume themselves as collaborationist forces in the execution of a vast plan of extortion of the Portuguese and Portugal.
An illegitimate plan in its nature and content that the collaborationist forces assumed, in consonance with their usual policies, as their common program of governance for the country for the next years, and that need be stopped and defeated.
A program executed today by the new PSD/CDS government, but that had as its first subscriber the previous PS government. PS, which maintaining its tacit alliance with the remaining forces of submission, is now manoeuvring, with its change of leadership, to cast away past responsibilities.
A program that is, firstly, a genuine declaration of war upon workers and their living conditions. That aims to promote limitless exploitation, with new and more brutal measures of attack upon worker’s incomes and pensions. Cuts on wages and devaluation of the National Minimum Wage, drastic reduction in social benefits, namely to the unemployed, general degradation of the Social Security system, unacceptable increase in taxation upon work and basic items, increases in prices of essential items and services.
A program that advances a number of privatizations of public companies and services, broadening the expropriation of national wealth. How shameful to see Passos Coelho with his hand held out towards Spain asking Spanish capital to buy our national public assets.
A program that implies a new assault in the offensive against the Public Administration, against its workers and the social functions of the State, with new and significant cuts in Health, Education, Justice, Local and Regional Administration, with new closures and greater concentration of services that will translate in a deepening degradation of the services rendered to the populations.
(…) But if this is a policy that opens the country to pillage, it is democracy itself that is also placed in question across all its dimensions. It is not only the decisions taken without the participation and behind the backs of the people here and in Europe; it is the attack upon the rights, liberties and guarantees, and the disfigurement of the democratic regime being pursued in sensitive areas, such as the Information Services.
The offensive of the present Government to concentrate these Services even more, to ensure their strict party and government control, to obscure all illegalities by invoking State Secrecy, namely the wire-tapping and interception of communication of journalists or the intimidation of Magistrates, as was indicated during the PS/Socrates government, and all the more that is hinted and known about the illegal monitoring of the activities of those that protest and fight against right-wing policies.
The novelty is that now there is proven traffic of information benefiting the large economic interests and, once more as in the past, PS, PSD and CDS maintain their strategic alliance – impeding the discovery of the truth and imposing vacuum and deceit upon the oversight of the Information Services, while they prepare their concentration.
Serious for our democracy is also the government’s plans for Local Administration, with the complete complicity of the PS. It is a program of complete subversion of Local Democratic Power and its characteristics of plurality, participation and transparency. The whining of José Seguro’s [present PS leader] criticisms of the government nearly crack the street cobblestones. (…)
Contrary to what those newly in power would have us believe, cronyism, promiscuity between public and private interests, political appointments along party lines continue! We need only look at the hundreds of new nominations, and many are still hidden, over these last two months, or at the nominations for the administration of the Caixa Geral de Depositos [partly state-controlled bank], but also at the privatization options of BPN to state that nothing has change and nothing will change as was made clear in the hypocritical bill that alters the statute of the Public Administrations officials.
(…)
An attack that has been generalized and that lately has unacceptably also spread to the military institutions and the Security Forces to create the idea among people that they are living a genuine revelry. Almost every day we hear news about millions in debt by the military institutions, as well as the police and republican guard. Millions that are necessary to fulfill commitments with wages and personnel.
None of this is innocent. This news dissemination aims not only to create the idea of imminent financial breakdown of the State, in order to continue to ride the wave of austerity measures, but particularly to cover up the systematic practice of under financing and unacceptable liberalism in acquisition of hundreds of millions of euros in equipment that do not correspond to the national priorities.
If there are problems in these institutions they are the result of laws to stifle discontent, but that are not fulfilled. If there is just dissatisfaction it is because of attempts to treat as equal that which is different and, for this reason, these institutions find themselves in a straight jacket with serious consequences for it functioning, operationalization and cohesion.
Yes, it is possible to save in this area. Off the bat in the commitments assumed with NATO and the hegemonic objectives of the USA. (…)
It is necessary and indispensable to erect a strong and robust barrier of resistance and struggle against each and every announced measure, to fight each and every imposed decision, defeat each project of assault against social rights and achievements. But it is also necessary and indispensable to inscribe the struggle for the rejection of a pact of aggression and submission as a general objective of the workers and people! Reject it as a national imperative, an indispensable patriotic objective in the defense of the dignity and living conditions of the Portuguese and in defense of national sovereignty.
Creating and developing a broad popular movement demanding the rejection by national institutions of the illegitimate agreement subscribed with the European Union and the IMF: this is the objective that PCP presents to the country and around which it appeals to all workers, all democrats and patriots that are not resigned with the path of economic decline and impoverishment of the Portuguese.
An appeal to all those that trust the energies, resources and abilities of the people and the country to build a more developed, just and sovereign Portugal, that do not accept that the country be transformed into a mere protectorate, subject to the decisions and colonial interests of the main European powers.
We speak to the Portuguese workers and people so that by their action, convergence and struggle, they build and broaden a vast current of protest and struggle that holds as a central objective of its action and mobilization Portugal’s rejection of the pact of aggression and submission that the European Union and the IMF want to impose, with the complicity of the PSD, CDS and PS.
The governmental program that integrates the troika program of aggression and submission, targeting all sectors and antimonopolistic classes, has as its main axis increasing the exploitation of workers. In its program are the old objectives of the large capitalist interests. Old and reheated objectives of right wing politics and economics that, from a class point of view, never conformed with the parcels of dominion lost to the social advances and achievements brought by many struggles before and after April, before and until their constitutional enshrinement.
Fearing that the workers gain conscience of the dangers, brush off the ideology of inevitability, and transform indignation and revolt into struggle, the Government makes cynical appeals to concert and dialogue. (…)
The workers have always been the motor of development of struggles. We salute CGTP-IN for its affirmation and determination, faithful to its principles, refusing to collaborate or be a mere spectator of the assault on the rights and wallets of workers, that positions itself as a mobilizing and organizing force of Portuguese workers. The decision to call for a national day of action on October 1st has crucial importance. We shall be there.
The dimension of the diversity and depth of the offensive demands many actions and much struggle by the workers, but it will have all the more success the more the newer generations are called to be the protagonists of their own future, the more the populations do not allow themselves to be expropriated of their right to public services, the more the retired and handicapped defend the pensions, their dignity, their right to health.
If the intellectuals and technical staff assume their weight in society. If the elements of the Armed Forces and Security Forces demand respect for their statues and their rights. If the micro, small and medium business people and farmers fight against ruin. If democrats and patriots transform their disquiet into action. Then we will build a new path and alternative that saves the Portuguese and Portugal from the path of injustice and national decline. (…)
A widespread sense to demand the rejection of the programme of rejection and submission and this road of decline is inseparable from the affirmation of the need to make a rupture with them and to present to the workers, the people and the country an alternative, patriotic and left wing policy, able to answer the more pressing problems and to support a different course of development.
An alternative, patriotic and left-wing policy that counterpoises to the Pact of submission and interference the solution of an immediate renegotiation of the public debt – involving terms, interest rates and amounts – in an attitude that fights the subjection of the country to the impositions of financial speculation and plunder of national resources and opens the way to re-launch the country´s development.
A patriotic and left- wing policy aimed at the promotion of national production and employment that: valorises agriculture and fisheries and promotes a programme of industrialization of the country; valorises domestic market with the imperative raise of wages, pensions and income of the population; strengthens public investment guided towards economic growth, defends and strengthens the business sector of the state in the basic and strategic sectors, namely banking; supports the Medium, Small and Micro Enterprises, namely by controlling the main production factors and through public funding.
A policy to affirm and defend the social functions of the state and the public services, to ensure a Quality Public Education and for all, a free and universal National Health Service, a public and solidary Social Security.
These proposals by the PCP are based on a fundamental principle: the right of the Portuguese people to be masters of their own fate. This is a central issue today. Central because, as we have always stated and the situation shows, the struggle for the defence and achievement of social and labour rights, the battles for the right to progress, development and peace, for democratic, progressive and revolutionary changes, are inseparable from the exercise by the peoples of their rights of sovereignty, of the right and mission of “moulding with our own hands/all that concerns us”. This motto is of particular importance in the present.
Capitalism is plunged into one of the deepest crisis of its history. Its contradictions and historical limits are too clear. We are witnessing, as long foreseen by us, a fast and violent deepening of capitalism´s systemic and structural crisis.
Faced with the defeats of socialism we were told then that the class struggle was buried, that our ideology and our project for society were dead, as was our Party and the communist movement. We then answered that they were wrong, that they mistook their wishes for reality. We told them that reality would prove us right by showing that, with the field open for their hegemonic domination, without the strength of the socialist countries, capitalism would deepen its own crisis and show the need for its revolutionary overthrow.
We then affirmed that the coming times would not be of justice, freedom, progress and peace, but of increased exploitation, more oppression and war, And here we are today to tell them that these two decades, and specially in these days, they can throw into the dustbin of history all the lies of triumphant capitalism and the end of history. Today we tell them: we were and are right! And it is not only we who say so, others affirm it in articles that travel the world: «Marx was right». And indeed it is so, reality and history prove the validity of Marxism-Leninism´s analysis and theses and prove how unsustainable the capitalist system is and how the world needed and needs Socialism.
But, just as Lenin in his times reminded us, however deep its crisis, capitalism will not fall by itself, it will only be possible to defeat and overcome it with a daily and concrete struggle and the gaining of awareness by the masses.
In a framework of an obvious decline of the main capitalist powers, the inter-imperialist contradictions deepen, while at the same time the tectonic plates of international geopolitics and economy slide in movements whose result can only be determined once and for all by the struggle of the peoples. The dangers of an answer by force by the system are already visible. Once again we are witnessing phenomena that we know quite well from history, like the attempts to rehabilitate fascism, the intensification of anticommunism, the persecution of those who do not remain silent nor submit themselves, colonialism and ... war. The imperialist war that in these days has its highpoint in the heinous crime that NATO, with the consent of the United Nations Security Council at the service of imperialism, is committing in Libya.
A shameless war dictated, not by the defence of human rights or more democracy, but by economic interests, supported by a powerful campaign of misinformation and lies and brings old colonialism to the 21st. century, with massacres after massacres and where plunder is carried out openly, discussed on television and propagandized.
Simultaneously, the system responds to its crisis with an accelerated concentration and centralization of economic and political power and with an anti-social offensive without precedent in post-war history.
A clear example of this is the situation in the European Union. We look around and what do we see? A European Union in deep crisis and decadence, with the sovereignty, identity and the social and cultural wealth of its peoples crushed through a violent process of capitalist accumulation. We are witnessing a European Union closed to the world, like an imperial, militarist and interventionist power with policies that remind us of the foregone days of capitalism. We look around and we see how capital and the European Union institutions launch themselves into a process of social throwback, in a squaring of accounts with the social gains led by the struggle of the workers and peoples of Europe, in a repressive and anti-democratic vision and in the imposition of the dictatorship of the so-called “markets”.
Today there are many who agree with us when we say that the European Union and the Economic and Monetary Union serve neither the interests of our people nor the interests and aspirations of the peoples of Europe (,,,)
From this rostrum we tell all these people that we do not fall into the traps of the discourse of “more European Union to overcome the crisis” and that we will intensify the struggle for another Europe of the workers and the peoples. A Europe that stands for democracy, social justice, sovereignty of the peoples, real cooperation and solidarity among states which are sovereign and equal in rights and duties.
It is for this Europe that we fight and will continue to fight with proposals and struggle! This is our main internationalist responsibility. To defend the interests of our people and continue the struggle for a change in the correlation of forces that will open new avenues in the development of societies.
We are still living a period of resistance and gathering of forces and it is crucial not to falter or hesitate even for a second. These are times when the role of the Communist Parties is fundamental to drive the motor of history and prevent the crisis of capitalism from resulting in greater throwbacks. Times when unity in action, cooperation and solidarity among Communist Parties and among these and other progressive forces assume great importance in strengthening and consolidating the communist movement and the anti-imperialist front.
We live in times of intense struggle, a hard but passionate struggle which shows us daily the real possibilities of progressive or even revolutionary advances. It is from these struggles that we draw energy, inspiration and confidence. From these struggles and from the struggles of the workers and the peoples that grows stronger. We are communists, we are patriotic and we are internationalist. In assuming the commitment to continue and intensify our own struggle, we also want to warmly salute the struggles of the workers and peoples all around the world. On this stage we have many champions of these struggles. There are many who in their countries represent the vanguard
We salute the Parties that in a difficult context continue the struggle for the national rights of their peoples, be they in Palestine, Western Sahara or in Cyprus, to whom from this rostrum we send a special solidary embrace, and to all those who resist imperialism’s provocations, interferences and wars, with special emphasis on the peoples of the Arab World.
We salute the Communist and Progressive Parties of Europe who resist the offensive by capital and who, as in Greece, in France, in Spain, in Italy, in Ireland or the Eastern European countries, among others, have led important actions of struggle for the rights of the workers and their peoples.
We would also like to salute all those who carrying out struggles, already represent the hope for a future of progress, peace and cooperation among the peoples. And of course, from this stage we send a huge solidary embrace to the peoples and Communist Parties and revolutionary and progressive forces from Latin America whose action, from Cuba to Venezuela, from Bolivia to Chile, inspires and lends confidence and encouragement.
To all of them, to all of you, in this “Avante!” Festival we wish to confirm our solidarity and friendship. And to all we wish to confirm that you can rely on this Portuguese Communist Party.
The harsh reality of these days gives still more reason to PCP’s cautions, alerts and struggle throughout the years. The reality of our days makes all the more timely the decisive role of the Portuguese Communist Party, its mobilizing intervention, the rupture it proposes, its proposals and project. PCP is the necessary and irreplaceable force in the combat and opposition to the right-wing policy, in the change that is needed and in building an alternative.
We are a great Party, with an unparalleled intervention, we fulfil our role but, in view of the great demands of the situation, based upon the communist identity which affirms and distinguishes us, aware of this huge strength, we need a stronger Party. To give more strength to the PCP, organize for the intervention, struggle and affirmation of the project of a fairer society, is a necessity.
The affirmation of the communist ideal and project, the promotion of the party intervention, the development, growth and intensification the mass struggle, are key issues present in the goal of a stronger PCP, which can only be materialized with permanent, patient and firm work.
Strengthening of the Party also at the electoral level, namely in the coming regional legislative elections in Madeira, in October, where, together with the Green Party and independent democrats, with CDU, the communists from Madeira are committed to strengthening positions with the workers and population of Madeira.
We are doing this and will continue in different and integrated lines of work such as strengthening the capacity of leadership, giving responsibility to cadres and their political and ideological preparation, the strengthening of the intervention and organizations with the working class and the workers, in the companies and workplaces, the strengthening and promotion of grass roots organisations. We will continue to organize work with anti-monopolist classes and social strata, the recruitment and integration of new members, the growth of militancy, the diffusion of the Party press and propaganda, the increase in the collection of funds, an indispensable condition for the Party’s activity and independence.
From here, from the Avante! Festival, affirming the need to continue and intensify the action “Forward! For a stronger PCP”, I salute the Party’s organizations and members for their dedication and militancy, worthy of the heroic history of nine decades, whose meaning is projected in the struggle of today and of the future. I salute JCP, the Portuguese Communist Youth, its intervention, its role and combativeness.
In this year of the 90th. Anniversary of the Portuguese Communist Party, I appeal specially to the youth, the younger generations. We have thousands and thousands of you in this extraordinary rally, who are affected in your rights and interests by the right-wing policy at the service of capitalist exploitation, you hold in your hands, in the strength of your ideas, of your struggle, the possibility to contribute in fighting and defeating the policy of national disaster and open the ways of the future.
You hold in your hands with all the workers and the people, of whom you are part, the prospect of a different life and society. Fight for it with your creativity, with your convictions, with the strength of the struggle of all. Your option for the Portuguese Communist Party, means taking sides with justice and social progress, for a fairer society.
Carry further this appeal, so that more and more join the PCP, materializing this option and answer to intervention and confidence, necessary in the days we live. The need to defeat the programme of submission and aggression, the urgency of a rupture with the right-wing policy and national abdication, of an alternative and a patriotic and left-wing policy, of an advanced democracy and socialism is clear.
In this demanding international and national situation, the PCP acts and prepares itself to act. It carries out its role regarding the workers, the people and the country, ensures its internationalist duties, fights for the alternative to capitalism that becomes increasingly pressing, for the communist ideal and project of a society free from exploitation and oppression, raises and will raise higher the banner of freedom, of democracy and of socialism.
Harsh combats? Undoubtedly. Difficulties? Many. Dangers? Huge. But the confidence, the trust in the Party, the workers and the people give us much strength, much hope, much courage that yes, it is possible to open a new road and redouble the struggle for a better future.
September 4, 2011 * General Secretary of the Portuguese Communist Party
