Comrades,

The most striking feature of the world evolution during the last four years, is the brutal escalation of imperialism’s offensive to expand the domination of big capital to the whole planet.

An offensive conducted under the pretext of the “struggle against terrorism” but which is, in itself, the main source of terrorism, with State terrorism at the forefront. An offensive which, while cynically waving the banner of “democracy”, represents an escalation of fascistic trends – of which Guantanamo and the Palestinian holocaust are symbols – directed against the forces that resist it. An offensive which, in the struggle for markets and raw materials like oil, is leading to a new partition and re-colonization of the world, making the struggle in defence of sovereignty a fundamental factor of resistance to imperialist globalisation. An offensive which has at its core the intensification of workers’ exploitation and the destruction of very hard-won rights.

This is, comrades, a reality from which we cannot escape. Unlike in the Seventies, when the Portuguese Revolution benefited from a favourable international context, today we live in times of resistance and of assembling forces, times that are characterized by great uncertainties and perils.

However, the message that the Draft Political Resolution presents is anything but a message of pessimism, of resignation, of defensiveness of wait-and-see. On the contrary. Our message, which is solidly based upon our analysis of the contradictions and trends of development in the contemporary world, is a message of struggle and of full confidence in the course of our struggle.

Great dangers coexist with a strong potential for liberating advances.

Everywhere, the struggle of the workers and the peoples goes on. Our thoughts immediately go out to the heroic resistance in Iraq and in Palestine, to whose peoples we reaffirm here our active solidarity. But from Cuba to Afghanistan, from Venezuela to Uruguay, from the struggles of he workers in Europe to the hopes in Brazil, everything tells us that nowhere have the peoples given up the struggle for a freer and fairer world.

It is still premature to speak about a new surge of popular struggles. But how far we have come from the delirious triumphalism of the “end of History” and the “demise of Communism” with which the reactionary forces celebrated the defeats of socialism and the disappearance of the USSR!

It is clear today that capitalism is not only unable to solve the problems of the workers and the peoples, but that it tends to worsen them brutally, creating unbearable injustice and social inequalities, causing great regressions and even threatening the future of Humanity.

All of this is the product of the structural crisis that corrodes capitalism, a systemic crisis that demands deep anti-monopolist transformations and objectively places Socialism on the agenda as a necessary alternative.

But capitalism will not die by itself. Overcoming it demands the revolutionary intervention of the workers and the masses. It demands the re-aunching, in the consciousness and in the will of the peoples, of the necessity and the prospect of Socialism. It demands the dialectical conjugation of many and different struggles, with victories and defeats, to pave the way for a new time of revolutionary upsurge. It demands the strengthening of the Communist and revolutionary parties in each country and the internationalist cooperation and solidarity among them.

For the PCP, the issue of a revolutionary Party is central and decisive. It involves, not just working with tenacity to overcome the retreat and ispersion of the Communist movement, but also ideologically defeating anarchistic, reformist and anti-communist concepts, that have regained strength. The great changes in the contemporary world undoubtedly require new and creative answers, but without abandoning principles, without reneging history, without denying the value of theory, without abandoning the concept of social revolution and the goal of socialism.

It is with this prospect that the PCP develops intense and diversified international relations with a large number of left and progressive forces, contributing to unite all that can be united in the struggle against imperialism and war, but giving particular attention to the relations with other Communist and revolutionary parties, whose affinities should not be diluted within the framework of broader alliances. In Europe, Asia, Latin America and Africa, namely in the so-called PALOP [African Countries with Portuguese as Official Language], the PCP maintains fertile relations of friendship, cooperation and internationalist solidarity.

The PCP does not set aside working towards stable forms of international articulation. That is a need deriving from the objective and growing processes of internationalisation. But the PCP continues to give priority to a cooperation based upon unity in action and based upon the principles of equality, sovereignty and non-interference in internal matters. The diversity of situations in each country and in the history of the left forces and even among parties defining themselves as Communist is such, namely in Europe, that the attempts at having ideological and programmatic uniformity, and hastiness in forms of articulation, can only lead to results that are the opposite of those that are proclaimed.

Hence, our bilateral relationship with parties and forces from all five continents. Hence, our committed contribution to the GUE/NGL Group in the European Parliament, and the PCP’s participation in various Meetings, Conferences and other international initiatives, from the S. Paulo Forum to the Athens Meetings. And thus also, without jeopardizing bilateral relations that we wish to continue developing, our disagreement and non participation in forms of organisation which, like the “European Left Party”, bear, in our opinion, a federalist and excluding logic. We therefore greet with joy our foreign guests and we assure them of our determination to continue, with them, the struggle.

Comrades

From our analysis of the international situation, and of the dangers and possibilities that it enshrines, we draw not less, but more reasons to persist in the struggle to materialize our Party’s Programme.

Yesterday, like today, voices of abandonment and reformist adaptation, ideological pressure and blackmail, even laws that have been fabricated against our Party, will not make us change course.

Whatever the difficulties, and however hard the battles that lie ahead, we will always stand with the workers and with the people, against capital and for socialism!