No other theme deserved to open the cycle of debates in the context of the celebrations of the Centennial of our Party with more symbolic meaning and at the same time more central, vital and urgent in these times, than the one that brought us here: “The PCP, organisation, unity and struggle of the workers”.
A theme for a debate that meets the first feature of PCP's identity - its class nature, as a Party of the working class and of all workers and to which it has remained faithful in defining its guideline and its action and practical intervention in these hundred years of its existence.
Constituted as a superior form of organisation and struggle, by the express wish of the Portuguese workers, the PCP is this Party conceived to always uphold with the workers, with the people, their just interests, rights and aspirations, contributing to their organisation, their unity and the development and success of their struggles.
So it has been for the past hundred years, during which time it has embraced all the struggles against exploitation, oppression and inequality, leading, like no other, the front of the battle for the achievement of their political, labour, social and cultural rights.
One hundred years later and always present in times of resistance, transformation and advancement, keeping alive and affirming, without discouragement, the original project of giving form to an independent and autonomous intervention by the working class as a historical subject of social transformation, distinct and opposed to that of dominant classes.
Yes, the PCP confirmed itself in practice as the only Party that upholds the interests of the workers. This reality is also very present today in the work in the institutions, in the action of the communists in the trade union movement and in other workers' organisations, in the general intervention of the Party.
The contributions that came here today, and which we now underline, show that the workers need the PCP as a superior figure of their organisation in companies, in the workplace and in the country, and the PCP needs the workers. It needs to invigorate and continually deepen its roots with action, organisation and a careful and rigorous study of their living and working conditions, interpreting and expressing their problems and aspirations, their struggle and the struggle of their organisations, which are the reason for its existence.
Making the Centennial a moment of affirming this connection and rooting, aiming at strengthening their struggle and claiming action is one of the major objectives that we affirm in these celebrations, with the decision to work for the creation of 100 new company, workplace or sectorial cells by March 2021, as well as the accountability of 100 new comrades for the task of monitoring cells.
All of this requires knowledge and political initiative. An initiative that does not wait for everything to come from the top. This implies, in fact, the active political life of the grassroots organisations and an intervention by the whole Party.
It is decisive for the Party to ensure a substantial reinforcement of its organisation and intervention with the workers and presently redoubling the effort when added to the serious economic and social problems resulting from years of right-wing policies by PS, PSD and CDS governments, the problems that arise from the Covid-19 epidemic and the use they make of it to intensify exploitation, those who were the main beneficiaries of these years and years of policies of social regression and economic degradation.
The central axis of an intervention to ensure the success of the fight against the intensification of the exploitation and to raise the living conditions of the workers and the people, it does not dispense with, but rather reinforces, the commitment in a necessary and indispensable development of a vast front of social struggle , involving the various classes and anti-monopoly strata to respond to the problems that years of right-wing policies imposed on the country and which are present in the Portuguese reality.
Yes, this is a time when the communists are called to redouble the work to fulfil their irreplaceable role alongside the workers and the people, fighting exploitation and injustice, but also resignation, bolstering the struggle of the working class, the workers and populations.
Times of great demand that call for perseverance, revolutionary availability and a firm and determined Communist Party.
To be where the workers and the popular masses are and working with them, and learning and acting with them, joining efforts to uphold their interests, continues to be, and today with more determination, the watchword that most needs to be materialised, at a time when big capital and its agents bet on conditioning and confining the struggle and intervention of the organisations of the workers’ and trade union movement, denigrating their action with the clear objective of paralyzing it.
Without failing to take the necessary sanitary defence measures, bringing back labour in the open is a requirement of the present time!
The communists proved throughout the course of their Party's existence, their commitment to the construction of the unity of the working class, of the workers and popular masses. They were and continue to be the main drivers of unitary forms of organisation, namely trade unions and workers' committees.
It is true that we, the communists, by will, free choice and decision of the workers, have great strength in trade union structures and in workers' committees. An influence and role that have historical roots.
Now that we are celebrating the Party's Centennial, we cannot fail to remember the vanguard role played by successive generations of communists, including during the difficult conditions of absence of freedom and repression, in building solutions for unitary forms of organisation and intervention, both in terms of companies, or trade unions, with which ensuring the development of the claim struggles in companies and workplaces and in the most varied sectors.
That was how unity committees were born - those predecessors of the current workers' committees.
It was with this central concern of uniting the working class and workers in the defence of their true interests that the original and creative response to the specificity of the Portuguese situation was found - the solution taken from the inside, in slates of unity, of the trade unions of the fascist regime - and that would influence and determine the unique characteristics of the Portuguese unitary trade union movement.
Characteristics that asserted themselves and took root in its evolutionary process and define it as a class-oriented, mass, democratic, unitary and independent trade union movement.
It was this guideline and the struggles that were fought that enabled the emergence of Intersindical, in 1970, and for it to play the role that it played in the great mass movements in the period before the April Revolution and soon to be quickly recognized as the great trade union central of Portuguese workers with the role it has played and plays today in Portuguese society in defence of the interests of all workers.
Yes, the communists have made a great contribution to the development of unitary workers' organisations and their struggle. It is the selfless work of thousands of Party members who base their intervention on principles they have developed and respect - the defence of unity, autonomy and democracy in the organisations in which they participate - and who today commit themselves with the same dedication as always to reinforce and develop them.
A necessary and urgent contribution, given the recent deterioration in the working and living conditions of hundreds of thousands of workers, due to the options taken in the context of the epidemic outbreak, on whom was imposed a lay-off situation with a significant cut of their wages, tens of thousands are faced with dismissal, unilateral changes in work schedules, withdrawals of rights and the imposition of arbitrary working conditions.
Problems to which there was not the required response from the PS government, which essentially maintained the criteria and options of the right-wing policy, favourable to monopoly groups in the face of the serious economic and social situation.
A response that also falls short to tackle the foreseeable dangers that are present in the Portuguese reality, namely: the risks of mass bankruptcies and the significant reduction in the purchasing power of the workers and population.
The battle for unity, within the framework of a fair orientation, independent from the interests of capital, has always faced the committed action of those who are betting on the intensification of exploitation and the eternalisation of the system that serves it.
The divisive action has a long history in Portugal, taking the most varied forms and mobilising powerful resources. Big monopoly capital always found in the political forces that promoted the process of recovering its lost domination with the April Revolution, its most devoted allies - the governments of PS, PSD and CDS.
From the dawn of the April Revolution till today, in a perfect symbiosis, we see them brandishing all their instruments and resources on various fronts, mobilising their powerful means of ideological dissemination and intoxication, investing powerful resources to foster parallel organisations submissive to their purposes and making abundant use of the state apparatus in the production of legislation that weakened and fragilised not only the individual labour relationship in favour of capital, but also the collective action and the action of organisations that truly represent the workers.
From “open letters”, with the proclaimed frustrated aim of “breaking the backbone of Intersindical”, to the production of cyclical “Manifestos” that either announced the extinction of the working class and the end of the class struggle, or the exhaustion of the model of class-oriented unionism and the end of unionism itself. From the sophisticated proposals that left for the trade union movement the exclusive mission of civilizing capitalism to the many theories given birth to justify the integration of the action of workers' class organisations in the harness of solely institutional action and the so-called “social dialogue”, they did everything with the aim to divide, weaken and force workers and their organisations to renounce the fundamental and determining role of mass action to solve their problems.
In the last three decades, with particular emphasis on these first years of the 21st. century, we have seen them, government after government, indistinctly, taking as their own the theses of the neoliberal guidebook of permanent and never-ending “structural reforms”, which were always translated into more deregulation of the labour market, more flexible dismissals, more precarious employment relationships, less social security, liquidation of collective bargaining, less public services.
Packages after packages of labour legislation with increasingly negative impacts on workers' lives.
An attack that equated labour and social rights of workers with corporatist interests and justified the extortion of labour rights and income as the false need to affirm the country's competitiveness.
And always and always against the backdrop of a brutal ideological offensive of division of workers that remains and that throws workers against each other, those in the private sector against those in the public one, the new against the older, those with a precarious link against those who with struggle achieved something and is presented as privileges, men against women. That explores and fuels racism and xenophobia. Divides to reign and level low wages and rights, intensifies the exploitation of labour and hides the brutal inequalities that such policies have dug with the growing imbalance in the distribution of income between capital and labour.
It is riding on this logic that they extol, and even promote, the “niche” or the so-called “inorganic” and “spontaneous” trade unions created on the spot, which appear and disappear according to the circumstances, manipulated by the powers and that the system absorbs, ready to drop the defence of the right to work and the persistence of the necessary fight for the affirmation of fundamental labour and social rights, only possible to ensure and build on the basis of a broad class solidarity that they do not recognise, let alone assume.
An evolution that capitalist globalisation and its processes of planetary liberalisation of markets and free movement of capital, privatisation and commodification of economic and social life under the dictatorship of large transnational corporations promoted, supported and fed, and which the European Union at their service enforced, accelerating the process of capitalist recovery and the restoration and monopoly consolidation in our country, with the resulting concentration and centralisation of capital.
The consequences of such processes have been translated here and everywhere in the worsening of exploitation and in the increase of injustices and social inequalities that show that capitalism only knows the way of the refinement of its exploitative, oppressive, aggressive and predatory nature, as indeed the current epidemic shows in all its rawness, with contempt for human life revealed in the most important capitalist countries.
Yes, these are not baseless statements. There is no serious study that does not reveal this barbaric refinement of capitalism. It would be enough to see the evolution of the weight of profits in the global GDP, which has almost doubled since 1989, to the detriment of labour earnings that have deteriorated and sunk in precariousness, indebtedness and unemployment to reveal its most significant mark - its insatiable greed for appropriation and accumulation of capital without limits, against everything and everyone.
It is not by chance that in the antechamber of the emergence of the Covid-19 epidemic, in the face of the huge accumulation of the wealth of some and the relative impoverishment of the work of many, warnings started to sound in the main centres of world capitalism.
They are the ones who accumulate millions, in an act of contrition of false altruists, fearing the worst for their power and unfettered interests in the face of the growing awareness of the working population, started to promise a new world, purged of the excesses of a capitalism that hypocritically now they say they abjure.
In a permanent confrontation with the needs and aspirations of the workers and peoples, unable to overcome the irreconcilable contradictions, capitalism at the beginning of the twenties, in the person of its highest representatives, the CEOs of the world economic colossuses, started to use yet another marketing operation, repeating and renewing the old discourse of capitalism with a human face that now goes around with new formulations in the hope of defusing the struggle and pursuing its usual aims.
By overcoming liquidationist purposes and tendencies, without disarming and persisting in the ways of connecting and organising workers and the development of the mass struggle, aware that, as Álvaro Cunhal stated, “Portuguese political life is not only decided in the high spheres” and certain, as history shows, that it is the mass struggle that, in the end, always ends up determining the course of the things that the workers, their truly representative class organisations have been paving to contain the powerful offensive that has fallen on the working world.
A path that has always counted on the hard work and committed dedication of the communists and their Party and their initiative.
It was with the struggle that assumed a great and powerful dimension that the attack and the offensive of the right-wing policies of the SGP and of the Pact of Aggression, enforced in political terms by the PS, PSD and CDS governments, were faced. Had it not been for the vigour of the struggle, the many small struggles and the great and impressive actions of broad convergence and unity, the blows on wages, careers, employment, work schedules, collective bargaining would have taken on an even more dramatic dimension than the one assumed in that dark period of national life.
A struggle that isolated on the social level the PSD/CDS government which implemented it and that enabled with the determined action of our Party to defeat it and create the conditions to restore wages, rights and income, containing the offensive of many years.
Nothing that was obtained was granted, but conquered!
A powerful and determined struggle, inseparable from its class organisations, from the Unitary Trade Union Movement, from the role of CGTP-IN, the great trade union central of Portuguese workers and from the initiative of the PCP, something that honours us.
The offensive against the workers went too far in recent years. The action of the right-wing policy, carried out by PS, PSD and CDS, devaluing work and its role in the development of society, and attacking the fundamental rights of workers and their living conditions, was very broad and diverse.
What has been achieved in the last four years with the struggle and the initiative of the PCP has been important, but we are far from seeing solved the problems that years and years of right-wing policy have created and to which current government policy is unable to respond.
Portugal, despite the advances made in recent years, is a country in which the distribution of national income is deeply unfair.
Job precariousness remains a serious social scourge and at unacceptable levels.
The norms that changed the labour legislation for the worse, in recent years, remain unchanged, having paved the way for a greater devaluation of work, of fundamental rights and workers' wages, namely by attempting to liquidate collective bargaining.
Problems that are particularly brought to light with the epidemic outbreak and that will be aggravated if the response to overcome them is delayed.
We have said that “in the fight against the virus, not a single right less” and that means that it is necessary not only to ensure sanitary conditions to defend all lives, guaranteeing the right to healthcare for all, but also to prevent the destruction of the lives of those who lost their jobs, their wages, lost individual and collective rights.
And this is the first and most immediate battle that we need to continue to fight and that the PCP seeks by all means to ensure with its intervention and proposal in the Assembly of the Republic, including in the context of the ongoing debate on the drawing and adoption of the Supplementary State Budget.
To begin with, the proposal to prohibit dismissals during this period, involving the replacement of the bonds of all those dismissed in the meantime. Just this week we saw new cases of large companies, supported with public money.
A proposal that must be associated with the just claim to guarantee 100% pay to all workers and with imperative urgency the creation of special social protection support to workers without access to other social protection instruments and mechanisms, namely workers with atypical forms of work, such as hourly and daily work.
These proposals are important not only for the sake of social justice, but because they are an integral part of a policy aimed at the economic recovery of the country, and also for the defence of the economic fabric.
Proposals that confront not only the government with its responsibilities, but also PSD and CDS and their most reactionary surrogates, Chega and Iniciativa Liberal, which have, in general, made them unviable, keeping active their dislike in enshrining workers' rights.
In view of the situation that has been created, said to be a serious “health crisis”, it is stated that “we cannot expect yesterday's solutions to be tomorrow's solutions”.
Wise words if they mean that crises cannot be the pretext nor the solution, as they have been, to centralise and concentrate more capital and wealth in the hands of a few, at the expense of the regression of wages, rights and the lives of the majority, as happened in the last five crises that the capitalist system has generated and blew up.
With every crisis declared in recent years, whatever its nature, economic, financial or of debt, what we have always seen was a quick recovery of capital yields, its profits and dividends, with the richest of the rich becoming richer, while real wages were at standstill and regressed, to the point that they stayed below the levels of the first years of the start of the century.
We are not talking only about Europe, nor about the United States of America, we are talking about Portugal. So it was in the declared crisis of 2009 and the so-called debt crisis that followed, with big economic and financial capital gliding over the difficulties of an entire people, not only intensifying exploitation, but ensuring at the expense of the state and absorbing billions the maintenance of its assets and its scandalous levels of income.
Billions that have always been lacking for the development of the country and to ensure the improvement of the living conditions of workers and people.
New millions are now announced - a “bazooka” of 750 billion euros that people will have to pay - at the same time great interests queue to guarantee their share of the cake, and plague us with doomsday visions in the future, where the scenarios of prolonged catastrophe abound.
Their aim is clear. They want their share and want to justify maintaining their levels of exploitation with such scenarios.
We are just at the beginning and the government is already doing badly. It went wrong when it failed to defend wages and jobs and to respond to the many that were left without any means of subsistence, and opened the door to lay-off with the transfer of millions of euros from public coffers to large companies and multinationals with billions of profits. The transfers and benefits of lay-off were mainly concentrated on them!
It acted poorly in its Stability Programme and in its Supplementary Budget proposal when what are tabled are essentially measures to favour large companies, which have already benefited from lay-off, including in fiscal terms and in incentives for the acquisition of companies and for operations of concentration of capital,
We have to make a break with this logic!
Yes, the solutions cannot be those of yesterday, the country needs new solutions. It needs new solutions to respond to the backlog accumulated by years of right-wing policy, namely its structural deficits and its chronic social and public services’ problems.
Portugal needs a new, patriotic and left-wing policy, which has as one of its central axes the valorisation of work and workers.
It needs solutions to guarantee full employment. Solutions to promote the development of productive forces and national production. Solutions to reduce sharp social inequalities, a reality where low wages, low pensions, precariousness and work without rights weigh.
Solutions that need to be built now and with the essential struggle of workers and their organisations. A battle that cannot be postponed, because these are also the battles of the present and of the future!
Solutions that must be considered as a decisive issue for the country, the need to value wages and workers' rights. The general increase in wages, including the National Minimum Wage. A national emergency, for a fairer distribution of wealth, for the revitalisation of the national economy, to strengthen Social Security and ensure better pensions in the future.
It involves valuing those who work, but also those who worked, ensuring the general increase in the real value of pensions over the next few years, as well as the right to full retirement and without penalties for workers with 40 years of social security payments.
It involves combating precariousness, where a permanent job corresponds to an effective employment contract, either in public administration or in the private sector.
It involves ensuring time to live, harmonising professional life with personal and family life, combating deregulation of working hours, reducing working hours to 35 hours a week for all workers, preventing, protecting and compensating work in shifts.
It involves the repeal of the grievous norms of labour legislation, the reinstatement of the principle of more favourable treatment and the prohibition of the expiry of collective labour agreements.
It involves fighting inequality and discrimination, guaranteeing the rights of men and women, of the youth and the elderly, of all workers, regardless of their ethnicity or nationality.
It involves ensuring a fair fiscal policy, based on the effective taxation of big capital and the reduction of taxes on workers and of indirect taxes.
It involves the expansion of social protection with the reinforcement of the Public Social Security System, capable of ensuring the universalization and increase of family allowances and the reinforcement of social benefits, providing the necessary response to situations of unemployment and illness.
It is said that the path is made by walking, but this Party does not start from scratch, or blind and without aim, but with a clear memory, gathering the teachings of a century of journey made at the service of the workers and the people, with eyes wide open and keeping in safe hands the compass that brought us here and that we want to keep pointing to the future. The compass of the communist ideal that we carry and that we want to continue to guide us on the path that we want to build and travel towards the construction of a fairer, more fraternal and more solidary society - socialism.
Yes, we will move forward, with the struggle and courage that generations of communists who preceded us never lacked, convinced that the future does not happen, it is built!
