The Communist Party of Brazil (, PCdoB) is a political party in Brazil. The PCdoB officially adheres to Marxist–Leninist theory. It has national reach and deep penetration in the trade union and student movements.
PCdoB shares the disputed title of "oldest political party in Brazil" with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). The predecessor of both parties was the Brazilian Section of the Communist International, founded on 25 March 1922. The current PCdoB was launched on 18 February 1962, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split, initially having a Maoist guideline, which would later substitute with Hoxhaism in 1978. Outlawed after the 1964 coup d'état, PCdoB supported the armed struggle against the regime before its legalization in 1988. Its most famous action in the period was the Araguaia guerrilla (1966–1974)."Araguaia guerrilla movement case" . Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, March 6, 2001.
After the Redemocratization in Brazil, the PCdoB was legalized and adopted a more moderate leftist stance. Since 1989, the party has been allied to the Workers' Party (PT) at the federal level, and, as such, it participated in the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration and joined the "With the strength of the people" coalition, which elected his successor, Dilma Rousseff. In 2018, the party again allied with PT and the candidacy of Fernando Haddad. Haddad's running mate was PCdoB member Manuela d'Ávila. In 2022 it joined the Brazil of Hope coalition with the PT and the Green Party.
In 2018, after falling to get enough votes to break through the electoral threshold and to keep receiving funds, the Free Fatherland Party (PPL) voted to merge into PCdoB.
PCdoB publishes the newspaper Working Class (Classe Operária) as well as the magazine Principles (Princípios), and is a member of the Foro de São Paulo. Its youth wing is the Union of the Socialist Youth (União da Juventude Socialista, UJS), launched in 1984, while its trade union wing is the Central of the Workers of Brazil (Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil, CTB), founded in 2007 as a dissidence from the Unified Workers' Central (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, CUT).
History
The Communist Party – Brazilian Section of the Communist International (Partido Comunista – Seção Brasileira da Internacional Comunista, PC-SBIC) was founded on 25 March 1922, gathering Brazilian Communists under the same label until the international rupture in the movement that occurred after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, and the 5th Congress of the PC-SBIC in 1960, when Brazilian Communists found themselves divided into two tendencies. At the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev had delivered the so-called "Secret Speech", which denounced the abuses committed by the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin's rule. Khrushchev was considered a revisionist by supporters of the late Stalin, which led to a rupture in the Communist movement in various countries.
In Brazil, the rupture reached the party leadership, which had rebuilt PC-SBIC after the setbacks it suffered under the Estado Novo regime (1930–1945), which tried to pit workers against the party and violently repressed it. The party leadership prior to the rupture, primarily composed of revisionists, was formed in 1943 by João Amazonas, Maurício Grabois, Pedro Pomar, Diógenes Arruda Câmara, and Secretary General Luís Carlos Prestes, among others.
PC-SBIC (1922–1962) The PC-SBIC was ideologically grounded in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the actions of Vladimir Lenin in the aftermath of the October Revolution, advocating democratic centralism and Marxism–Leninism. It was launched on 25 March 1922 in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, when members of the Brazilian working class took their first big step towards arranging themselves under a class organization; nine delegates, representing 50 workers, held a Congress and founded the PC-SBIC. On 4 April 1922, it was recognized as a political party by the federal government, with its manifesto being published in the Official Gazette. Following the international guidance, the party was given the name of Communist Party – Brazilian Section of the Communist International.
The nine delegates which attended the founding Congress of the PC-SBIC were Abílio de Nequete, a Lebanese Brazilian barber; Astrojildo Pereira, a journalist from Rio de Janeiro; Cristiano Cordeiro, an accountant from Recife; Hermogênio da Silva Fernandes, an electrician from Cruzeiro; João da Costa Pimenta, a linotype operator; Joaquim Barbosa, a tailor from Rio de Janeiro; José Elias da Silva, a shoemaker from Rio de Janeiro; Luís Peres, a broom seller from Rio de Janeiro; and Manuel Cendón, a Spanish-born tailor.
A series of influential parties in the Brazilian political scene emerged from the PC-SBIC, such as the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) and the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR), in addition to many Trotskyist and Stalinist groups. The international rupture that arose in the Communist movement after 1956 caused the PC-SBIC to split on 18 February 1962, during its 5th National Congress. At the occasion, the Manifesto – Program, which advocated the disassociation of the party with the Communist International, was approved, and the party took the name of Communist Party of Brazil (Partido Comunista do Brasil, PCdoB).
Schisms
The Trotskyist Dissence (1928): In mid-1928, PC-SBIC suffered its first schism, when a small group of Marxist intellectuals broke with the political theses of PC-SBIC influenced by Leon Trotsky's Left Opposition, and its criticism of Stalinism prevailing as the official ideology of the Communist International and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Brazilian Communist Party (1961): In 1961, the "revisionist" group held an Extraordinary National Conference, adopting a new program, a new statute, replacing the main body of the party (The Working Class), and adopting the name of Brazilian Communist Party, keeping the acronym of PCB, until then popularly used to identify PC-SBIC. The maneuver was led by Luís Carlos Prestes, which claimed that the move made it possible for PC-SBIC to regain its legal registration – which was ultimately not obtained. The Marxist–Leninist group claimed that Prestes' move broke PC-SBIC's statute and was, therefore, illegal according to the party rules. They launched a document called The Hundred Men Letter, claiming the implementation of an extraordinary congress to validate the changes. It also criticized the new party line, accusing it of being "right-wing and opportunistic." After that, the self called "anti-revisionist" group adopted the name of Communist Party of Brazil and the acronym of PCdoB to differentiate themselves from PCB. Communist Revolutionary Party (1968): The Revolutionary Communist Party (Partido Comunista Revolucionário, PCR) emerged as an internal split of PCdoB in 1966, four years after the split of PC-SBIC into two parties. It was formed by activists of the student movement and the peasant leagues (a pro-agrarian reform group, considered the predecessor of MST). Its party line was that of Mao Zedong's people's war, aiming to besiege the cities from the countryside, considering the Northeast Region the best area to trigger the revolution. PCdoB's Red Wing (1968) Revolutionary Communist Party (1979) Communist Party of Brazil (formerly Red Fraction) (1990s): The Partido Comunista do Brasil – Fração Vermelha originated as an anti-revisionist split of the Communist Party of Brazil in the 1990s. In late 2022 they began appearing as the "Communist Party of Brazil" on documents, removing "Red Fraction" from their name. They are a founding member of the International Communist League (ICL) and currently uphold an ideology they describe as "Marxism-Leninism-Maoism principally Maoism with the Contributions of Universal Validity of Chairman Gonzalo".
Reorganization of the Communist Party of Brazil
The 1st Reorganization (11 August 1943) The National Party Conference (Conference of Mantiqueira) was held on 11 August 1943, in the era of Estado Novo, with delegates from Rio, São Paulo, Minas Gerais, Paraná, Rio Grande do Sul, Bahia, Sergipe, and Paraíba. This conference would play an enormous role in party life. The Conference reviewed the political situation and the tasks of the Party, politics, and tasks of construction and rebuilding to which it must attend. A new Central Committee was elected, for the old leadership and the party organization was almost torn apart due to arrests by the police. Defeated factions dissolved, and a need to reorganize the party was established, as well as an outlining the tasks of communists in the struggle against fascism, and a declaration of war on the Axis, sending an expeditionary force to fight in Europe. Many Communists marched willingly into the theater of operations in Italy, and the Party organized a broad movement in solidarity with the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB). On 1 August 1950, the Manifesto of August, was released to the public from the Central Committee of Communist Party of Brazil. An attempt to break with the remnants of the "right-wing" and "opportunist" line of the period under review, the Manifesto presented, in essence, a revolutionary line, urging the people to overthrow the regime of landlords and capitalists in the service of American imperialism, and to provide for this a popular army.
The 2nd Reorganization (18 February 1962) At the 5th National Conference Meetings, held on 18 February 1962, in São Paulo, with the dissent of Marxist-Leninist tendencies, the party was reorganized. Delegates from Guanabara, São Paulo, Rio, Rio Grande do Sul and Espirito Santo were in attendance. Embracing the acronym and symbol PCdoB, the party was proclaimed the legitimate successor of the Communist Party – Brazilian Section of the Communist International (PC-SBIC). This conference marked a break with Luís Carlos Prestes, who had usurped the party leadership in 1943 and reorganized it along a revisionist line. In opposition to the revisionist line of the 5th Congress, the Conference adopted the Manifesto-Program, which draws a revolutionary line, reintroduced the Statute adopted at the Fourth Congress, adopted a resolution on the unity of the Communists, signed the principle that each country can only exist a single Marxist–Leninist party, decided to reissue The Working Class, a former central organ of the Party, approved the break with the USSR, and, finally, elected a new Central Committee. These historic resolutions mark not only a decisive break with the revisionists, but also purposed the organization of a true Marxist–Leninist vanguard in this conference Brazil. These meetings were attended by Joao Amazonas, Mauricio Grabois, Camara Ferreira, Mário Alves, Jacob Gorender, Miguel Batista de Carvalho, and Apollonius.
Maoist guideline (1962–1969)
The crisis between the Soviet Union and China reached its peak when the Chinese leader Mao Zedong criticized the ongoing process of de-Stalinization in the USSR, and accused Khrushchev of "opportunistic" and "reformist" deviations. A division of Mao with the rest of the communist movement attracted the sympathy of the PCdoB, who sent emissaries to Beijing to formalize the ideological link with the new ideological guidelines of the Chinese Communist Party. Among these messengers was the party's exiled former president, Joao Amazonas, who was received by Mao Zedong. Subsequently, the party gravitated towards Maoism, considering only China and Albania socialist countries, and asserting that others were no longer revolutionary, but revisionist.