Comrades,

1. The right-wing policy of the PS, PSD and CDS has led the country to disaster. Covid has only made it much worse. And it has been effective in revealing its causes. It has made it possible to take snapshots of the multiple dimensions of the disaster. And it has clearly identified those who are responsible: PS, PSD and CDS. But those policies were also supported by those who, today, are sailing in different right-wing waters. Policies which had the support of those who, yesterday, were ultra-leftists, petty-bourgeois radicals with a socialist façade and who later moved to the right, where they swim today. But always, at all times, anti-communists.

Amidst the country’s disaster there is anguish, despair, fatigue, rage, dead-ends. Emigration is a way out. There is the opportunism of a peripheral capitalism, consolidated by the right-wing policies, addicted to subsidies and dependent on the State, averse to risk-taking, avoding taxes, chummy with precariousness and low wages.

And we have deficits, debts and structural dependencies. But it appears that the more debt service we pay, the more we cut the [budget] deficit, the more we cut back in public investment, the wider the holes into which we sink, more of our national income flees the country as dividends, as capital that moves to tax havens, as endless corruption. We have motorways, but we do not have means of transportation. We have special tracks for bicycles and eco-pathways, but hundreds of kilometers of railways have been destroyed. We have much foreign capital, but to buy strategic companies, not to invest in creating new ones. We have many banks with Portuguese names, but which are Spanish-owned. We have big economic groups that take out loans to pay more dividends than the profits that were made, compensating shareholders beyond their real resources. We have a National Health Service that is being eaten away by the healthcare business. We have Universities and educational institutions that train first-class professionals which we later ‘export’. We have multinational corporations with high profitability, but we are the champions of low wages. And whenever we talk about raising the National Minimum Wage, there is always someone who draws their guns… We have much low-cost generation of renewable-based electricity but we pay among the highest electricity rates. We have many mass media, but we have no information. We have disinformation, manipulation and fake news. And, in what regards the PCP, we also have concealment. We have agricultural lands and water, but the country registered in 2018-19 the smallest surface area for the production of cereals in over one hundred years! We have forests, but they are left to burn. And when they do not burn down, they are felled to give way to wind and photovoltaic parks. We have regulators, and even a Competition Authority, but cartels flourish, as does rentism and the abuse of dominant positions and economic dependence. Even when there is money in the Public Treasure, it is not guaranteed that the State will pay, on time, to those to which it owes money, because the budgetary rules determine wether the till boxes are to be opened or closed. They tell us that we have European solidarity, but their institutions kill our budgets when they decide to give a 10 euro increase to pensioners who have a 300-euro pension!

We can say, as did the poet [António] Gedeão: just like [King] Phillip II, we have everything, everything, but we don’t have a zipper to close the country to the right-wing policies… But, in fact we do. We have the PCP’s intervention. We have our people’s struggle.

Comrades,

2. When talking about this disaster, the mass media, by and large, has only one solution. And that is shooting at will against the democratic regime of April, so as to preserve the right-wing policy. They want to break – with April, so as to not break with the right-wing policy.

In the swamp of this disaster grow – they never die – the far-right political solutions, so as to enhance exploitation with a so-called liberal capitalism. The political solution to the disaster, according to these people, is to demolish the Constitution, freedom and democracy. To reduce MPs to non-MPs. To replace the Republic of April with a second Corporate Republic.

The other political path is to proceed with a reformed right-wing policy. Sustained by a re-designed ‘central bloc’ which could ‘modernize’ it, with so-called structural reforms, with some home-made liberalism in its midst. Without forgetting reforms of the political system, such as the reduction in the number of MPs.

A right-wing policy, after adequately whitewashed by the soap of the digital economy and energy transition and the ideological and diversionary shower of capital’s propaganda and strategic thinktanks. Of Davos, with the ‘stakeholder capitalism’ reforms, of Bilderberg which here at home is disguised as the modest thinkers of the Cascais Meetings. Everything is in the pages of the Expresso newspaper.

This is not in contradiction with people who are good-faith social-democrats, committed neo-Keynesians, prepared to reform capitalism with some social responsibility cloaked with entrepeneurial ethics and glorifying cultural patronage.

It must be said that they have learned with Covid. Which forced them to restore formulas and instruments of government which they thought were outdated. This is clear in the plans of the PS Government planner, António Costa Silva. They are again considering – for the time being only in words – elements of a coherently left-wing and Marxist political arsenal: State intervention, planning, public investment and reindustrialization, sovereignty in terms of the production of foodstuffs and strategic goods, the need for a capable and qualified State apparatus.

Naturally, without ever questioning the logic, the dynamics and the class nature of monopoly capital. Without questioning the capitalist European integration and federalism, the Euro and the imperialism of the Directorate’s great powers.

Comrades,

3. What cannot be denied is that the PCP denounced, warned and opposed, even if some are only now discovering the truth.

There is a one-to-one relation between monopoly capital that was reconstituted by capitalist recovery and the degradation of democracy.

The [European] Community integration and joining the Euro served to ensure an asymmetric European division of labour, which corroded the productive structure and worsened our dependence to foreign capital, increasing asymmetries and deficits.

Weakening the State apparatus, reducing its role to economic regulation and to handing out public funds to private capital would hand over the economy to big capital and weaken public services.

Comrades,

With the political solution adopted in 2015, the country took a breath. We breathed, but we could not ensure the atmosphere, the oxygen that the country needed to live and work.

We do not underestimate the, insufficient and limited, advances in jobs, in income, in growth of the domestic market, in the encouragement to economic activity as a result of measures proposed and even imposed by the PCP.

After these years of minority PS governments, the results are what they had to be. They are what they are because the PS Government insisted on ensuring continuity with the structural guidelines of the right. It didn’t even make good use of the cracks that opened up with the political solution in order to solve problems that could be solved, even within the limited framework of its core options.

Just look at the insufficiency and lack of response to social and economic problems that were caused by the epidemic. Look at the delay in implementing timid measures aiding families and small companies. They even managed to subvert measures that the PCP forced them to adopt in the July Supplementary Budget. All this in order to contain budgetary expenditure and in response to Brussels’ demands.

Comrades,

4. We have a roadmap for our course. Our solution lies with April! A Programme for an Advanced Democracy, the Values of April in the Future of Portugal. A Patriotic and Left-wing Policy. And this Congress’ Political Resolution.

We know how to march. We know that we do not march alone. We know that there are powerful obstacle on the road ahead. But the Portuguese Communist Party continues to be absolutely decisive. One hundred years of history are the best guarantee that we are standing on our two feet, resisting and moving forward. We are a tree with a strong trunk and profound roots, in this soil and this sea. We are faithful to our legacy. We have confidence today. We are certain of the future. The future of this human community with almost 9 centuries of history.

Long live the Portuguese Communist Party!