Portugals future is socialist!

Our project of socialism for Portugal

de Albano Nunes
Member of the Secretariat of the Central Committee, Almada, 19th PCP Congress

PCP has as supreme objectives the construction of socialism and communism in Portugal. One of the essential components of the Party's identity is its project of a new society in which exploitation of man by man is definitively abolished, with the power of the workers, the social control of the main means of production, economic planning and, a decisive condition, the edification of a State that promotes and ensures the most ample participation, initiative and creativity of the masses.

The project that PCP proposes to the Portuguese people is not an idealist abstraction, nor a copy of any model, but a response to the concrete demands of the social-economic development of Portugal, project that evolved through time and ripened with the maturation of the Party itself and its analysis of the national reality and the world evolution, and its fraternal reflection in solidarity but independence of the experiences of building socialism, of which an example is the book“Party with glass walls”, written by Álvaro Cunhal before the defeats of socialism.

The global process of emancipation of workers and peoples is irregular and bumpy, with advances and retreats, victories and defeats. The defeats of socialism in the end of the XXth century represent perhaps the greatest leap backwards in the History of Humanity. The brutal ongoing capitalist offensive against the achievements and rights of workers is its direct consequence. But these defeats to not call into question the direction of world evolution, nor call in question, but rather confirm, the strategic objective of socialism and communism enshrined in the Party's Program. Contrary to what our adversaries claim, the XXth centrury will go down in history not as the century when “communism died” but as the century when communism was born and took the first steps in the edification of a new society without exploiters and exploited.

This is a thesis that has to to strongly underlined in the engagement of campaigns of falsification of history that tend to become increasingly sophisticated with the deepening of the capitalist crisis. Thus some of the significant proposals of modification of the Party Program. The delays, errors and distortions of a “model”that departed, contradicted and affronted fundamental characteristics of a socialist society cannot lead us to forget the historic universal value of the October Revolution, nor the extraordinary scope of the conquests and achievements of the USSR and other socialist countries. Without altering the deeper analyses of the XIIIth and XIVth Congresses, it's a question of considering the deeper analysis done since regarding the causes and consequences of the defeats of socialism, particularly in the XVIIIth Congress. As affirmed in the Project of Political Resolution, the Party's analyses on this matter “are of great importance in orienting Portuguese communists in the difficult ideological battle imposed on them and are still current: their deepening and updating should be wrought from this solid and proved Party heritage”.

Socialism (and communism) as an aspiration, ideal and project of revolutionary reorganization of society, is largely an historic necessity born from the entrails of capitalism and that only knows its first and pioneering practical realizations.

Contradicting the triumphalism of Capital, twenty years ago, the deepening of the structural crisis of capitalism, the spread of the sores of unemployment, misery and the most criminal forms of exploitation, the specter of a social regression of a civilizational dimension is before us, confirming not only the necessity, but the how current and urgent it is to build, upon the ruins of capitalism, a new society a thousand times more just, rational and humane, a society guided by the power of the workers and for the workers, a socialist society.

The deepening of the contradictions and impasses of the capitalist system; the brutal demonstrations of its exploitative, aggressive, oppressive and predatory nature, which the dominion of the financial and speculative capital extraordinarily accentuates; the inability to develop productive forces to benefit social and human progress –all this demonstrates that the material, objective conditions are ripening for the revolutionary supplanting of capitalism, and that the great and decisive task of revolutionaries is to strengthen the communist parties and the unity of the international communist movement, recover in the consciousness of workers and peoples the power of attraction of the communist ideal and project, win the masses to the communist program.

If in general world terms socialism presents itself as the only and true alternative to capitalism, this does not mean that everywhere there are conditions for the conquest of power by workers, that the immediate task is a socialist revolution, particularly accounting for the delay of the subjective factor. The context of communists' struggle throughout the world presents a great diversity of situations and stages of revolutionary struggle. In Portugal, we consider that the Party's Program “An advanced democracy – the values of April in the future of Portugal” corresponds to the present historic stage of the liberating struggle of the Portuguese people.

Considering that an advanced democracy is a constitutive part of the path towards socialism – as the Democratic and National Revolution was in time – is of crucial importance. Although different, and it would be an error to confuse them, between the present stage of advanced democracy and the subsequent socialist stage there isn't, not could there be, an unsurpassable barrier. We need only consider how within the five fundamental components or objectives of the project of an advanced democracy, there are numerous tasks and objectives that are simultaneously tasks and objectives of a socialist society. The approximation and transition from one stage to the other will depend on various factors, namely the strength and authority of PCP and the strength of the mass movement and its revolutionary dimension.

Comrades

In the struggle for the supreme objectives of socialism and communism, more than the proclamation of an ideal and project, it is necessary to travel with determination and confidence through the indispensable path towards its concrete realization. Organize the resistance and the daily struggle in defense of the interests of workers and people, fight the violent offensive of big capital and reject the pact of aggression, struggle for the rupture with decades of right-wing politics and of a patriotic and left-wing politics and government, constitutive part of the struggle for an advanced democracy and socialism.

And above all, strengthen this revolutionary vanguard force, broadening its ranks, caring for its cohesion and ever tightening its ties with the working class the popular masses, because these will be the great protagonists of the socialist revolution and the construction of a new society without exploiters and exploited to which we aspire.