Good afternoon, everyone, participants and those who are following this debate. Our thanks to the speakers of this session and especially to Ricardo Paes Mamede for accepting the invitation to participate in it.

Among others, there are three great lessons that can be learned from this crisis, of health and economic, that I would like to highlight in this debate.

The centrality of work, of workers; the enormous importance, of public services, of public intervention; the core issue of national production and national sovereignty.
Marx recalled in a letter to a friend that even a child knew that a society would die if it stopped working for a few weeks.

We are currently going through a difficult period, with difficulties and restrictions - due to the epidemic -, but we are managing to overcome some of these difficulties, because a large part of the workers, despite the conditionings, perhaps in a different place or way, continued to work , kept up the work, kept production, distribution, basic services, care and aid.

We were all able to see this.

We went for a short walk, for shopping, to the supermarket, to the pharmacy. And we found that, with the exception of one product or another, the supply of the shops did not fail. Just as water supply, electricity, gas and communication services did not fail. As well as garbage collection, transport, policing, key basic and public services.

Doctors, nurses, most healthcare professionals remained at their post, treating patients. Social workers also took care of the elderly, the disabled and the underprivileged. Children and youth were not able to go to school, but the teachers reorganised and taught at distance, via the internet, mobile phones, television.

Hundreds of thousands, millions of Portuguese workers, with competence, with professional pride, with dedication, in the midst of various difficulties and constraints, in many cases with risks to their own health, did whatever they could so that the goods, services and support did not fail for the sick, the families, the population, nor for companies, institutions, economic activity, the social life that managed to be kept.

Yes, it is the workers who sustain society, who sustain production, supply, public health, possible social well-being, the clashes of the crisis. Let us remember this not only in bad times, but especially when it comes to pay for work.

It is intolerable to take advantage of the epidemic outbreak to cut wages, incomes and rights of the workers and pensioners. It is unacceptable to cheer the efforts of workers at this stage, to quickly stop recognising them, allocating them less in the distribution of national income.
The same goes for public services and public intervention, with the respective funding.

Portugal benefited from the experience of others and took timely, adequate, necessary sanitary measures, which should not be mistaken with the imposition of the State of Emergency, harmful to the rights of workers and citizens, or now with the state of calamity, with which the President of the Republic, PS, PSD, CDS and BE sought to give them cover.

But if there is one thing that has enabled us to cross this storm with fewer victims to mourn and, in particular, has reassured the population, it is the existence and action of a National Health Service that, despite the under-investment it has suffered from successive governments, remains strong, operational and reliable.

It was in the National Health Service, which did not turn its back to the difficulties, that the Portuguese trusted and not in the large private health groups that profit from the disease and were more interested in state payments than in fighting the epidemic.

In healthcare, it was possible to intervene, and well, because, although underfunded, the State has the instruments for this intervention, such as hospitals, health centres, equipment, doctors, nurses, technicians and assistants.

In banking, in the granting and restructuring of credit, a different intervention would have been possible, if the State had maintained public control over the financial system. Which instead of being a drain on public funds, as in this bottomless hole of Novo Banco, could have served, in conjunction with budgetary policy, to ensure more support for families, producers and micro, small and medium-sized companies, providing resources to shore up and to leverage an intervention of greater reach and strength, which better safeguarded employment, productive capacity and economic activity.

This crisis, like the others, showed the importance of maintaining and strengthening the de-mercantilization of crucial areas of our collective life, in order to guarantee quality and universal access to basic services. To guarantee, through the ownership and management of public companies, the existence of economic and financial instruments to contain and reverse the deterioration of the national situation. To progressively subordinate production and economic activity to social goals and objectives, instead of maximizing the profits of monopoly groups.

A country that does not produce does not feed its population, does not support its national life, does not obtain what it needs from abroad, does not create resources to pay its debts.

The crisis made even clearer the need to ensure sovereignty and security, as much as possible food self-sufficiency. It showed, more generally, that diversified, balanced, articulated, modernised and technologically advanced production, which ensures domestic supply, exports and debt service, is the basic condition for deciding, guaranteeing and materialising free choices and adequate boosts for our development.

National production is necessary to defend our sovereignty. And sovereignty is necessary to defend our national production. To prevent the single market, the single currency, single policies, called common, of the European Union from wiping out national productive activity and destroying the country's development conditions.

We do not know how long this virus will be around. We do not know if we will have new waves that force us to reintroduce new restrictions, in mobility, in contacts, in activities, namely in economic activity.

Obviously, we cannot, for the time being, exclude this risk, which could have very serious consequences and would require urgent and vigorous measures to mobilise resources, requisition and possibly nationalise private companies and equipment, public control of the financial system, subordination of sectors and branches of the economy to combat the epidemic outbreak and contain economic and social degradation.

But we also run another risk, of returning to the "normality" of recent decades, of the great vulnerabilities evidenced by the crisis, of deindustrialisation, of external dependence, of feeble growth, of social stagnation, of divergence from Europe, of degradation of democratic life, of cultural impoverishment, environmental degradation, territorial imbalances, lack of prospects and resignation to backwardness.

Today, the European Commission announced a proposal for a Recovery Fund for Europe. Regardless of the limited nature of the amounts - below the reference values that had been pointed by several institutions - the fundamental question that arises is to know what are the constraints and impositions that will be associated with these funds and whether they will remain tied to the European Union's criteria throwing the country into a debt spiral, or if they will be channelled to what the country needs.

Portugal - like the world - does not just need to create collective immunity against this virus. It also needs to create antibodies against neoliberal policies, combat monopolistic concentration, accelerated by the crisis, the regressions that accompany it, the European capitalist integration that serves it, the crippling and subordination of its collective future to the needs of accumulation of big capital, domestic and foreign.

Vaccine for this may be more difficult than for the coronavirus. It implies ruptures. It demands ruptures.

It is unfortunate that such a crisis must arise for public authorities, both national and European, albeit so often without recognising it and sometimes without complying with what they recognise, to agree with the PCP, with the proposals of the PCP, for the country to be able to face this and other crises and to be able to grow and develop without them.
The need for Portuguese workers to have the motivation, the preparation, the qualification, the adequate conditions in their work and in their lives. That is, the need to value work and workers.
The need to strengthen the National Health Service, in human and material resources, as well as most public services, to serve and protect, without discrimination, most of the population.

The need for a strong state business sector, a fundamental component of a mixed and dynamic economy, which contributes to the modernisation of the productive apparatus, the elimination of serious dependencies and the strengthening of national autonomy. A State business sector that should include a nationalised TAP, a strategic company for the development and the future of the country.

The need for public control of the financial sector, of public ownership and management of the fundamentals of banking, starting with Novo Banco, to irrigate with credit the needy productive fabric of small businesses, promote investment, help families, curb speculation.

The need to defend agriculture and national production, capable of feeding the population and supplying the country, of recovering, relocating, renewing industrial activities criminally neglected or abandoned.

The need for a major reinforcement of public investment and productive investment, which increases the application of new technologies, installed production capacity, national productivity and production, which resumes, encourages and sustains the acceleration of growth and the reduction of the weight of debt.

The need to defend national sovereignty. To act in defence of its people without dependencies or conditioning from external powers, distanced, when not opposed, from this purpose. To definitively revoke the constraints imposed on the country, which the crisis temporarily forced to suspend. Namely, the prohibition of State aid to national production, the Stability and Growth Pact and other limitations on public expenditure.

The need for economic protectionism, judicious and selective, that does not harm, but rather reinforces, through the increase of national production, foreign commercial exchange.

The need for broad cooperation, namely economic, technological, environmental, social, cultural, scientific, informative, recreational and sporting, with all countries in the world.

The need for a currency and monetary policy adjusted to the reality, needs and potential of the national economy. For a central bank serving the country, to fund the banks and the State if necessary, without paying the brokering of speculators as in indirect purchases of government bonds by the ECB.

The need for a renegotiation of public debt, achievable and immune to blackmail with the recovery of monetary sovereignty, to maintain its service at levels compatible with the growth that the country needs.

The need to combat monopolies, the concentration and centralisation of capital, the hoardings, the suppression of small producers and competition, the external control of national supply chains, the financial, speculative and predatory bias of economic groups.

The need to protect the environment, ecosystems, biodiversity, the harmonious relationship of human communities with nature, also contributing to the prevention of pests, viral outbreaks, and epidemics.

We do not need nor can we dwell here on our proposals for a patriotic and left-wing alternative, aiming at building an advanced democracy, materialising the April values.

We can simply benefit from the lessons learned from this crisis.

Like the importance of work, public services and public intervention, national production, sovereignty. Like the shattering of neoliberal dogmas. Like the need to make internal decisions without external constraints, to suspend absurd restrictions on State action [for example, the ban on helping own companies or the counterproductive limits on public expenditure and investment].

Like the requirement to subject economic activity to the priorities of protecting the health of the population.

All of these important lessons serve to summarize PCP’s project.

The "model", that is, the proposal of the PCP, is the firmest deterrent against the phenomena, trends, purposes, options, decisions, which have weakened, made vulnerable, unprotected our country. And, simultaneously, the most consequent expression of the content of just, necessary, essential measures that the crisis led to take to defend the workers, the people and the country.
In necessarily very broad lines, we could summarise this proposal, as the need to guide economic activity, and more generally socially organised human activity, towards objectives linked to the common good, the protection of life, health, well-being, freedom, autonomy and development of the population, rather than profit, capital accumulation and the private interests of monopoly groups.

This is the general meaning of our proposal, to combat the crisis, recover the economy, open up prospects for development for the country, which will certainly benefit from your observations on the dangerous moment we are going through and on this theme.