Translated "Avante!" article by Albano Nunes, Member of the PCP Secretariat of the Central Committee

To recall the 7th November and celebrate the first victorious socialist revolution, is, for the Portuguese communists, an act of revolutionary coherence and trust to the party’s roots. The PCP, being the creation of the Portuguese working class and the result of the Portuguese workers’ movement maturing, was born from the extraordinary world impact of the October Revolution and the exalted example of the Bolshevik party and Lenin. On celebrating the 90th Party’s anniversary this current year, it is particularly timely to underline the 6th March and 7th November as history ’s inseparable marks in this patriotic and internationalist party, a history with many achievements and defeats, lights and shades, entirely rendered with pride by the PCP.

Recalling the 7th November, represents the just appraisal of an epic which, from the power achievement of the working class unto the pioneer undertaking of a new society the building of a new society, totally changed the old Czarism imperial Russia, proving to workers and peoples of the whole world, that their liberation from the capital bonds was not only possible, as it were, through the engaged and creative participation of workers together with the leadership of its revolutionary vanguard, to build upon the old order , a new free, more just, more peaceful, more human order, a much more superior society than the capitalist.

Currently, the struggle against campaigns to tarnish the October Revolution significance and rewrite history in order to ravish hope from the exploited and oppressed and reliance in the victory of their struggle, occupies a central place within the struggle against bourgeois ideology. Therefore, it is necessary not to forget that the great liberation advances during the XX th century, from a new generation holding social rights to the Nazi-Fascism defeat, are inseparable from the abnegated action and the communists’ project and insisting so that the USSR and Eastern Europe socialism defeats do not erase their extraordinary achievements, nor change the exploiting, oppressor and aggressive capitalism’s nature.

Twenty years upon Lenin’s homeland counter-revolution and the triumphal explosion of a victorious capitalism on the dressing -out of the “cold war” arm, what comes first in the political headlines are the violent demonstrations on the capitalism’s crisis and the confirmation that socialism is more necessary and urgent than ever.
At the historical moment one is living, introduced by the October Revolution, the time of the passing on from capitalism unto socialism, a solution for the difficult problems the world is being confronted with, can only but be found on the path of deep economic and social transformations, of anti-monopolist and anti-capitalist nature, which will overcome the contradictions which are in the origin of the structural and systemic crisis in which the capitalist system plunged, starting by the contradiction between production’s social nature and its private appropriation.

Such as the October Revolution signified a gigantic leap forward in the history of Humanity.

But such a direction is not inevitable. It is being attacked in all the continents. In Portugal, inspired by the October Revolution’s ideals and achievements, truces will not be called upon the aggression pact and the struggle for a a patriotic and left wing policy, an advanced democracy, for socialism and for communism, the PCP’s supreme objectives.