Brazilian Communists Back "Lula"

“Lula’s” Workers party campaigned in Brazil’s election in partnership with the largest of Brazil’s many Marxist-Leninist organisations, the Communist Party of Brazil(PCdoB).

“Lula” himself is a Marxist and his party is an alliance of dozens of socialist and Marxist groups, so Brazil is effectively governed by a socialist/Marxist-Leninist coalition.

Below is a year old article from the newspaper of the US Workers World Party, covering the PCoB’s 11th National Congress Oct. 20-23,2005 in Brasilia. It gives a useful insight into the state of the left in Latin America’s largest nation.

Central Committee of the Communist Party of Brazil.

From the continued heroic resistance of socialist Cuba to the profound Bolivarian revolution in Venezuela, from mass upsurges that reversed governments in Bolivia and Ecuador to the elections of governments in Argentina and Uruguay that have thrown up obstacles to International Monetary Fund and U.S. demands, people south of the U.S. border have refused to submit to U.S. imperialist pressures.

In Brazil this resistance led to the 2002 election of Luis Ignacio “Lula” da Silva as president. A former steel worker and leader of the Workers Party (PT), he won almost 61 percent of the vote. A central point of political discussion at the PCdoB Congress was the complicated relationship between this party and the Lula government, which it supports.

The PCdoB has 250,000 members. Some 70,000 take active part in party discussions and organization; they are called “militants.”

World imperialism claims that communism is dead. Yet the PCdoB has more than doubled its membership in the last four years. It is 3.5 times bigger than it was at the 9th Party Congress in 1997.

The delegates came from all 27 Brazilian states. They reflected all the various peoples of Brazil, including Indigenous, Afro Brazilian, Arab and East Asian. The many young comrades present at this leadership meeting indicated that the party in general must be quite young.

Some 80 people making up delegations from 45 countries were also present. Most represented communist parties and revolutionary and progressive organizations.

Among them were representatives of the ruling parties of Cuba, China, Vietnam, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and Angola. The U.S. delegation included Workers World Party and the Communist Party USA.

Brazil is about the size of the lower 48 states of the United States, with a population of 185 million people. It has a relatively developed capitalist economy, but one whose foreign debt to the imperialist banks is the greatest in the world.

Brazil borders on 10 other South American countries; it has enormous military, economic and diplomatic weight.

The PCdoB, reviewing world developments since the 1989-91 counter-revolution in the USSR and Eastern Europe, says that despite the positive examples of Cuba’s defense of its independence, the developments in Bolivarian Venezuela and the success of the Iraqi resistance, the world balance of power is still unfavorable for socialist revolution; it is a period to “gather strength.”

Under these conditions, the PCdoB believes that the best choice for Brazil today is to continue to support the Lula government. The PCdoB believes that Lula’s foreign policy is progressive and that the alternative to Lula would be a rightist, pro-U.S., neoliberal regime that could isolate Venezuela and Cuba and leave Brazil wide open for imperialist penetration.

Lula has attended every PCdoB congress since 1989. This time, as president of Brazil, Lula was the main speaker at the opening session. He thanked the PCdoB for its loyal support, to the enthusiastic applause of the delegates. He spoke under the PCdoB banner with its hammer and sickle and the slogans, “A renewed party, a socialist future, a sovereign Brazil.”