Comrades and friends, we celebrate the ninetieth anniversary of the October Revolution!
Without underestimating the millenarian struggle of human kind against oppression and exploitation that influenced determinately the march of the world and its civilizational advances , from the revolt of the slaves of Rome, of the serfs against the feudal lords, to the workers insurrections of the XIXth century and the Paris Commune, the October Revolution distinguished itself - the historically dominated class became the dominant class, the October revolution paved the road for the construction of a new society never before known to humankind, bearing a project of elimination of all forces of social and national exploitation and oppression, defending peace and friendship among peoples. The detractors of history, tailoring facts, ignore the social reality that arose from the tsarist heritage in a country devastated by imperialist war, with a people barbarically downtrodden by exploitation, repression, hunger, illiteracy. The workers, farmers, the revolutionaries of October, dared not only «touch» but «counquer the heavens».
The October Revolution has singular characteristics that result from the history, culture, traditions, the socio-economic reality of the Russian society and tsarist empire. The «soviets» and the soviet power, the single party system, are not the product of a theoretic conception but of concrete conditions of the Russian revolutionary process. What marked the revolutionary act and process of October was, and is, its universal character, its correspondence with the demands of social development, inaugurating a new historic era - the transition from capitalism to scientific socialism that Marx and Engels founded, and that Lenin developed in the conditions modified by imperialism.
It was the first victorious socialist revolution, in which for the first time the working class and its allies (first and foremost the farmers) conquered power and restructured society as a function of the interests of workers and the overwhelming majority of the people.
It was a pioneering undertaking, without historic precedent: for the first time in millennia of human society, dream, utopia, aspiration became a political project and a tangible undertaking of building a new society, without antagonistic social classes and free from the exploitation of man by other men.
Based on the analysis of objective and subjective conditions, of the role of the working class, of revolutionary parties, of the stage and nature of capitalism, of strategic and tactical issues, on the need and possibility of revolution and supplanting capitalism, the Party of Lenin did not delimit the border where daring ended and risk begun. As Marx wrote, regarding the problems faced during the Commune: " World history would indeed be very easy to make, if the struggle were taken up only on condition of infallibly favorable chances." In 1917, power was conquered through a new and extraordinary process of building a new society, where millions of humans excluded from political and social intervention became the protagonists and builders of their own future.
The achievement of work with rights and free from exploitation, the end to discrimination and the promotion of true equality between men and women, the right to health, education and culture became a revolutionary purpose, and the condition of liberty and progress, the nationalization of land and strategic sectors constituted the base and mobilizing pillars to answer the question: it is not enough to conquer power, one need exercise and defend it, trusting the strength and determination of the workers and people.
In a colossally backwards country, predominately rural where feudal relations still persisted, the revolutionary process of October led to impetuous advances and transformed the homeland of «soviets» into the most industrialized and socially more advanced country, provoking tremendous effects on a planetary scale.
The revolutionary transformations and realizations, the strength of its example, permitted other countries to achieve important social conquests, the building of the so-called Social State in developed capitalist countries, where the dominant classes feared new social revolutions.
Strong communist parties and national liberation movements arose in numerous colonized or semi-colonized countries (including India, China, Vietnam, Korea, Egypt, and Iraq). The Soviet Revolution, its successes and advances, and the emergence of an international communist movement profoundly shook the dominant classes of the planet as they were healing the wounds of the imperialist war of 1914-18. Their reaction came soon enough: five years after the October Revolution and following the huge and influential struggles of the Italian working class, the big bourgeoisie took to a solution of violence and force that would lead the planet to catastrophe: fascism. Once again the example of strength exalted the dominant classes. The ascent of Hitler and Nazism had the sympathy and complicit silence of the European ruling classes, during the militarization of Rhineland, the annexation of Austria, and the shameful complicity of delivering Czechoslovakia to Hitler.
Under the guise of a need to save peace and the policy of «taming the beast», the political calculus of European capital, even with the sacrifice of some peoples and countries, and as stated by the British prime-minister Chamberlain in Munich, was to direct the Nazi bestiality towards «solving the Russian problem». It was incumbent upon the USSR and the communists to give a determining contribution to the defeat of Nazi-fascism, which in 1941 controlled the whole of continental Europe, from the Iberian Peninsula to the doors of Moscow. Here they concentrated three fourths of their military might. It was at Leningrad, Stalingrad and Kursk, as in other battlefields on soviet soil, that the beginning of the end to Nazi-fascism took place, without forgetting the epic resistance of communist parties in Greece, Italy, France and Yugoslavia. Nazi-Fascism was defeated. The price paid by the Soviet Union amounted to 20 million dead and a country devastated by barbarism. The slight of hand of European leaders towards Hitler did not solve their main problem: the soviet question.
The correlation of forces in the period immediately after World War II, with the processes of social victories and national liberation that irradiated upon numerous countries, forced the representatives of capitalism to make tactical concessions, given where the dangers and examples came from.
As soon as conditions were ripe, and with US imperialism at the helm, an economic, ideological and military offensive using powerful means and forces took place. From invasion to nuclear blackmail, from sophisticated or violent methods of anti-communist and anti-soviet ideological struggle, the convergence of a broad spectrum of economic, political, religious, military, intelligence forces, from the extreme-right to social-democracy and trotskyist and maoist groups - everything was game!
We have yet the evaluate with rigor and depth the weight of external factors in the defeat of socialism and the disintegration of the Soviet Union, but that does not invalidate, as referred to in our XIV Congress, that clearly errors of evaluation led , one the one hand, to a decrease in vigilance in relation to counter-revolutionary influence of capitalism and, on the other hand, to exaggerate results, undermining negative tendencies and even justifying politically and ideologically a reality that was evermore distancing itself from the basic references of communist ideology.
The errors and departures made in certain historic conditions led to the essence and conception of a «model» that shackled and divorced itself from the social and human forces that had been released during, and led to, the triumph of the revolution. A «model» that denied the principles and development of the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism, subverted the socialist legality, cast aside and underplayed the participation and intervention of workers, and betrayed the fundamental principals of the communist ideal. These conceptions and practices, allied with foreign pressure, led to a defeat which not even the brutal means of Nazi-fascism had managed.
Given that there are general laws of social transformation, in agreement with historic materialism, there are no models of socialism, nor can revolutions be exported or copied.
One lesson we must learn from the first experiments with a new society, perhaps the first lesson, is that the revolutionary undertaking of social transformation must necessarily be the result of the masses themselves and that their conscientious, dedicated and creative participation is indispensable to its triumph.
A critical reflexion, always subject to deeper analyses, cannot however lead us to deny what the existence of the USSR represented to the workers and peoples at a political, ideological and social level, on issues of peace and war. If we look upon the world we live in today, we see no reason to waver in the struggle or doubt the modernity and validity of the communist ideal.
In our profoundly contradictory times, at both a national and international level, where threats and serious dangers occur, with demanding but real possibilities of resistance, struggle and even advances, we need not only celebrate, reflect and seek to understand the October Revolution, all it entailed, the difficulties it faced, that it represented a first historic attempt, but simultaneously to situate, in its long history, the meaning and significance of the painful defeat of the edification of a society that had as its objective socialism and communism. It is worth doing so at this time, when the bourgeois ideology is singing the triumph of capitalism, presented as an eternal system for human history. Except, of course, that the world is more unfair, unsafe, less peaceful and less democratic.
Capitalism is more than getting even, as a result of its nature, but developing an offensive that entails the recovery of all the parcels of domination lost by direct or indirect effect of the conquests and advances of the October Revolution and the stimulus and trust it gave to the workers, popular democratic and national liberation movements.
It is exalting to imagine how much strength was necessary, how much energy, creativity and intelligence, to begin the enterprise of building that new society and civilizational advances. And evaluate the gigantic forces that were brought together in a process of accumulation of forces to manage the defeat of the October Revolution. The dominant ideology and its defenders persist in disfiguring the October Revolution in its attempt to avoid that the workers and peoples gain the understanding and consciousness of the predatory and cruel nature of capitalism, when it expropriates social and civilizational rights, when it brings war to various parts of the globe, always in the name of more and more profit.
Involved in a profound crisis, capitalism embarked on a neoliberal offensive from 1979-85 having as its epicenter the USA, that constituted a fulcral turning point in the correlation of forces between capital and work, in the offensive against workers, their unions and parties, in the reinforcement of US hegemony on a financial and military level. This offensive was articulated with the geopolitical objective of defeating the Soviet Union and counted on internal allies, elements of its own political leadership.
The implosion of the socialist countries was a central episode in the history of class struggle. It was confirmation of Lenin's thesis: "to picture world history as advancing smoothly and steadily without sometimes taking gigantic strides backward is undialectical, unscientific and theoretically wrong." Casting the correlation of forces in its favor, with the complicity or capitulation of social-democracy, capitalism sought answers to its structural crisis. However, its answers accelerated its contradictions and limits revealing the intrinsic instability of capitalist accumulation. With the emergence of the so-called capitalist globalization the financial flows were inverted, from the developing towards the more developed countries. With the deepening of exploitation, unemployment, hunger, poverty, disease (with the return of eradicated illnesses), drug addiction spread on a planetary scale and afflicts many millions of human beings. Exploitation and war became commonplace.
On the other hand, there is a deepening of the contradiction between accumulation of capital and the limits that nature can withstand, with the rapid dilapidation of natural resources and progressive scarcity, in an irrational management of resources by the system, a progressive concentration of pollution and consumption, namely of energy, that represent a serious limit on capitalist accumulation and a elevated risk for all humankind. But with different degrees of intensity and in different places, different conjectural conditions arise and and crises resurface giving it a systemic character. In the meantime, without brakes, capitalism continues to attack workers and peoples rights conquered after the October Revolution .
However, recent history and in the short period since the defeat of socialism and disintegration of the USSR - despite the powerful, sophisticated and broad ideological campaign about the nature and character of capitalism and imperialism, aiming to present it as amenable to becoming civilized and democratic, and as the everlasting and final system of history - workers and peoples, resist, struggle and conquer rights and sovereignty.
We must be aware that capitalism has evidenced its survival skills and capability to regenerate, of being able to revolutionize the means of production, of finding new and old forms of intensifying exploitation, of changing the energetic or technological paradigm. But capitalism cannot resolve the contradictions inherent to its mode of production, it parasitic and unjust character, its addiction to limitless profit. It cannot alter its «genetic code».
The progressive militarization of the economy turns conflict and war into an exit strategy to the crisis, an exit to the use/destruction of productive potential. The question is on the table: humanity faces a world burdened with enormous dangers. The system can respond with barbarism, destruction and war, as it did in the XXth century. The risks are so great that a new emerging social-democracy is restructuring itself around the general theory of Keynes in order to save capitalism from its excesses, thus fulfilling its woeful historic role beside the dominant classes.
But, in this crucial stage of history, the consciousness of the systemic causes of social inequalities emerges amongst the masses, which point their accusatory finger at capitalism, and attempt to find exits and solutions, albeit still giving the reformist solutions of this new social-democracy the benefit of the doubt. The structural crises of capitalism are key moments for the intensification of the class struggle, stages that potentiate working class consciousness and the development of revolutionary action.
For those, was we, that persist in the struggle for socialism, overcoming the system demands in certain historic moments a minimal program of resistance and struggle for the improvement of living conditions for the socially less favored, an endogenous project of economic and social development aimed at satisfying human needs, an advanced democracy in all fronts of human relations, that at the same time projects, creates and potentiates the revolutionary conditions for the real transformation of society.
The «old order» implies the question of knowing whether it is possible to produce a class ready and able to cut the chains of capitalism, that recognizes its role in the transition towards a socialist society, grounding on its ideology, on its emancipatory aspirations and its concrete rights, creating and strengthening its party in a confrontation with the nature of capitalist relations of production and the dominant class.
Facing the defeats of socialism, the question is whether those defeats have changed the exploitative, oppressive, aggressive nature of capitalism, and if there is a need for communist parties and their transforming, revolutionary project. Even in those countries where disorientation and defeatism lead to their disappearance, workers and peoples will recreate and rebuild them, with or without the name of communist.
We do not have all the solutions. We have a path and an answer to the capitalist system. Capitalism and its defenders mystify history and the range of the October Revolution, they try to cast dreams and utopias aside from human feeling and thought, for they know that socialism is not an utopia, it is not only a possibility. Socialism is the alternative to capitalism and imperialism.
Our party, creation and result of the Portuguese working class, which creatively defined itself as a party of the proletariat and all workers, is inseparable from the influence and impact of the October Revolution. The importance of the October Revolution in the history of PCP manifest itself, in particular form, during its re-organization in 1929. Bento Gonçalves' visits to the USSR, first as union leader then as party leader, deeply marked his ideological orientation, and political and organization thinking.
The sheer existence of the USSR, its role in the concert of nations, its policy of peace and solidarity, gave a determining contribution to the creation of an international climate favorable to the triumph of the April Revolution, and halted the plans for forceful intervention in the internal life of Portugal
PCP, a simultaneously patriotic and internationalist party, considering the Portuguese process as intrinsic to the world revolutionary process, will always be in solidarity with the struggle of communists and peoples worldwide, always open to learn, to learn and respond to new phenomena with political, social and ideological conclusions that pave new paths and perspectives to correct mistakes, overcome difficulties and build the future. Founded by the influence of the October Revolution, it assumes its identity and own experience with pride, and presents its own program to the Portuguese people, its own project for a socialist society in Portugal.
To its ideals, struggle and project, it aims to bring hope and trust in the conviction that another world is possible, with freedom and democracy, with social well-being, with cultural creation socially reappropriated, with the power of the workers, with the victory of the universal cause of workers in a future of socialism and communism.
Long Live the October Revolution!
Long Live International Solidarity!
Long Live the Portuguese Communist Party
