Article by Jorge Cordeiro, Member of the Political Committee and of the Secretariat of the PCP’s Central Committee

«The political framework and the intervention of the PCP. Background, current situation and prospects»

«The political framework and the intervention of the PCP. Background, current situation and prospects»

The ambition of the PS [Socialist Party] for an absolute majority, which led to the call for early elections, has been achieved. The manoeuvre set in motion to guarantee the interests and privileges of the ruling classes was accomplished with one of the possible solutions on which the centres of big capital and the promoters of right-wing policies were seeking What these interests gained, the country has lost in termos of the prospect of solving the problems confronting it. The policy needed to provide pressing answers for the lives of the workers and people is now more distant. The development of the struggle and the convergence of democrats and patriots will be decisive in view of the PS government's options and the action of backward and reactionary forces. The PCP’s intervention and initiative take on redoubled importance. To fight for what cannot be postponed and assert alternative policies as a pre-condition for development and progress. To confront and contrast capitalism, and what it means in terms of exploitation and inequalities, with the communist ideals and project and the construction of a more just society.

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The PS was not alone in this political and electoral ambition. It had at its side all those who saw in the PCP’s role and intervention an obstacle to their projects of exploitation, a factor hindering a more overt execution of the right-wing policy, an obstacle to restoring the path that the interests of big capital wish to see, without the risk of further surprises. The PS’s strategy had the collaboration of the President of the Republic, committed to the “normalisation” of right-wing policies, and the unbridled enthusiasm of monopoly capital – the true and decisive centre of power – which is used to deciding the course of national political life through its representatives in the governments. The centres of capital have for a long time not been satisfied with the circumstances that, in 2015, interrupted the dynamics of the onslaught on wages and income, the liquidation of social rights, and the attack on the democratic regime. The reckoning was too long in waiting. The irrepressible revanchism that was increasingly expressed in the attack against the PCP, expressed in the campaigns of fascist hatred launched against it, took off with the mobilisation of all the levers of political and ideological domination that were available.

The PS at no point abandoned its class options, its subordination to the big bosses and its submission to the impositions of the European Union. It continued to defend structural policies resulting from these options. Capital knew it. But circumstances had opened up the possibility to defend, restore and achieve rights that, even if only in non-essential matters, the ruling power could not tolerate.

This goal had long been set in motion. The 2022 State Budget was the pretext. The PS wanted to evade the solutions that reality revealed as unavoidable. And, above all, it wanted to evade the PCP's intervention required to implement them. From the very beginning, the PS had limited or dragged its feet on measures and proposals, many of which were eventually adopted despite its resistance. The path of progress that the PCP's determination and the balance of forces had imposed showed the PS's growing reservations to going further, submitted as it was to its essential options and commitments.
The PS always found partners in the PSD, the CDS and their surrogates to reject the PCP’s proposals of enormous significance for the workers and for the country. To a large extent, with the exception of the State Budgets, it was with the PSD and the CDS, even during the 2015 legislature, that the PS joined its votes to prevent the recovery by the State of strategic companies; to adopt the European Union-imposed stability programmes; to revoke the grievous norms of labour legislation. In the midst of the epidemic, the State Budget for 2020, against which the PCP voted, had given a clear sign. But the PCP’s persistence also forced the adoption of important measures in 2021 that responded to the demands of the epidemic, strengthening the healthcare response, protecting wages and incomes, safeguarding the interests of sectors such as culture or small businesses. The determination with which the PCP intervened in this process led the PS to conclude that it was necessary to remove this hindrance, a stumbling block as they called it, which forced it to do what it did not want to do.

The blackmail operation was set in motion. The PS knew in advance the solutions that could not be postponed. While the PCP persisted in finding the answers which the situation required, the PS refused them, having in its political horizon the triggering of elections. A refusal that was even more unacceptable with the growth of the problems and the obvious existence of means to tackle them. It manoeuvred until the end to capitalise on a non-approval, hold the PCP accountable for what it did not want to do, stage its victimisation. The machinated falsification of facts and the inversion of responsibilities projected by a media barrage set in motion a lie that persists today.

The PS and the President of the Republic were confident that the PCP would yield to the blackmail, they believed that, in the face of the operation that had been mounted, the PCP would abandon its commitment to the workers and the people, for electoral calculations. They admitted, judging others by their own criteria, that the PCP would be led under pressure to endorse what the PS had determined for the Budget and even beyond it, to cover their options with the accumulation of problems and a trajectory of inequalities and injustice. They even dreamed of seeing the PCP curbed, under the threat of that axe, watching the lack of a response that the PS had deliberately decided not to give, on the path to destroying the NHS, conformed to a country doomed to low wages and leaving in the hands of the big bosses the instruments that enabled them to destroy rights and intensify exploitation. They believed that the PCP, in the name of this calculation, could give up the autonomy and political independence that it has always preserved, stoop to sharing the options that it opposes, and that it would submit its class links with the workers and its commitments to the Portuguese people. They were wrong. The role and struggle of this Party goes beyond an election, however important it may be. The loss of electoral expression is not positive, nor can it be underestimated. But for the PCP, with its objectives of struggle and its action with the workers and the people, what would prove to be dramatic would be to lose this priceless asset, built throughout one hundred years, of identifying itself with the interests and aspirations of the people.

It was this sense of intervention, this commitment and these goals of struggle that justified the PCP’s decisive role in 2015, in order to stop the trail of destruction, impoverishment and intensification of exploitation. A decision that was worthwhile given what was defended, restored and achieved in terms of rights, after uninterrupted decades of setbacks, but also for what was prevented had the PSD and CDS - as the PS had already admitted - remained in office. It was worthwhile for what it revealed about the importance of the mass struggle and the decisive force that it carries, even when its results are not immediate, and for the confidence that it added to that very same struggle, in terms of prospects and results.

One cannot assess the period of the new phase of national political life without taking these circumstances into account. Without losing sight of the nature of the PS which has not changed at all. Without taking into account what that phase really represented and not the mockery that was, and still is, made of it. Without rejecting accusations of a non-existent “minimum programme”, when what prevailed was the maximum determination to intervene for the interests of the workers and the people. Without taking into account the conjunctural possibilities that it opened and which the PCP pushed for, as well as the limitations that it involved and which were confirmed. Without refuting the falsification about so-called “left-wing” government, majority or budgets. What was achieved is valuable and enduring – even beyond possible future setbacks, even beyond abuses that benefited third parties, even beyond what was disseminated through a gigantic and continuous operation to present a PS converted to left-wing values ​​– for what it meant in terms of the PCP’s intervention dictated by the interests of the workers, of not ignoring any opportunity to express them, to articulate immediate and general goals of struggle. What was achieved is valuable and endures as a concrete example of the action of a Party that does not give up a consistent revolutionary practice in the name of pamphleteer proclamations.

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The operation by big capital was successful. Of the two options they were betting on – an absolute majority of the PS or a formal or informal governance involving the PS and the PSD with the common objective of safeguarding their interests and casting aside the PCP’s intervention – the one that resulted from the elections will not frustrate the expectations of this operation. The desired “stability” of the course of right-wing policies is ensured. Witness the undisguised expressions of enthusiasm from the bosses' confederations and financial groups, the alignment of postponed pretensions of the centres of financial capital and economic groups, the words of relief for the liberation of the PS from the influence of the PCP's action. As the experience of the domestic political life proves, big capital, in the current context, has not been served worse. Not because objectively one should mechanically level the nature and objectives of the PS with those of the parties more to the right. But because subjectively a PS government with an absolute majority can benefit, even if only temporarily, from a support base that provides more guarantees to big capital’s projects and postpones the inevitable expansion of the base of discontent, protest and struggle that will be generated by the PS’s options in refusing to respond to real problems. These guarantees will not obviate the fact that, once the conditions are met, the ruling centres of power will try to promote an even more determined course of setbacks and regression, which they want to see implemented.

The result obtained by the PS cannot be separated from the set of factors already mentioned and from the extent of the lie built upon the PCP's supposed responsibility for the non-approval of the State Budget. A lie spread unendingly by its direct promoter, fed by the court of commentators at the service of right-wing policies, amplified by the media. And which has now resumed, after the elections, to justify its results. Even when the position of the PS, the electoral arguments used and the result obtained today leave no room for doubt that it was for this purpose that the PS led the discussion of that document. The outcome also fed on three factors:
– the persistent distortion of what was decided on January 30 – the election of 230 MPs and not that of a prime minister, nor who came first – which was projected until the very day of the election by television channels and where the televised debates had a non- negligible impact;
– the overt conditioning that the opinion polls and their media coverage had on the electoral options of hundreds of thousands of voters. The authors themselves confessed the manipulated construction of a supposed electoral proximity between the PS and the PSD that never existed except in the published polls and in concealing their real expression of the proximity of an absolute majority. To use the “experts’” own words, without the polls, there would have been no absolute majority;
– the staged “left-wing” posture of the PS, encouraging a false rhetorical confrontation with the PSD to conceal the fact that both parties are broadly in agreement. This persisted and resisted even despite the repeated statements by the main leaders of the PS regarding future understandings for a case-by-case governance or one based on a 'regime pact'. This stunt exaggerated the “danger from the right”, either by recalling the recent memory of the PSD/CDS government, or by stirring up PSD agreements with [the far-right] Chega [party], the fuel to induce a vote not based on the judgment of what the PS proposed or represented, but on what it claimed to be the only way to avoid that outcome .

The many thousands who gave their support to the PS based on these factors will soon recognise the deception to which they have been led. Sooner, rather than later, the government's choices will lead to this perception and recognition. The latent contradiction between an electoral base that voted PS based on certain assumptions and the reality that PS policy will be responsible for, will inevitably emerge.

The Party’s future intervention and initiative requires an assessment of the political context; of the alignment of forces; of the converging but also conflicting dynamics and objectives between an absolute majority of the PS determined to accelerate right-wing policies and its institutional expression; and furthermore, of the backward and reactionary forces. It is to be expected that the PS, without forefeiting its attachment to executing the right-wing policy, will seek to simulate an attitude of dialogue, make the absolute majority more acceptable, adopt one or other positive measure - from the outset those that by action of the PCP ended up inscribed in the draft Budget – and which do not jeopardise the interests and privileges of big capital. The PS will make the confrontation with the right, and in particular with Chega and IL, a feature to disguise what essentially marks its commitment to right-wing policies, cultivating with this distancing with the more reactionary right-wing a more “left-wing” image, legitimizing its agreements with the PSD in the name of rejecting radical and extremist proposals.

The promotion of Chega and IL, without underestimating what they ideologically represent and their anti-democratic projects, will continue to constitute a veil to cover the course of right-wing policies, which the PSD embodies in terms of an anti-democratic agenda. If during the election period Chega, in particular, was a trailblazer and a trump card in favour of those who in the name of fighting it bolstered themselves electorally, it is likely that, in addition to its class nature, its racist and xenophobic and reactionary and fascist projects, it will continue to serve the goals of others and thereby serve its own goals.

IL, sold as a novelty and modernity, embodies, with years of delay, a well-known regression project. Under the slogan of “freedom,” it embodies the most basic and exacerbated individualism on the social level, a contempt for the common interest and collective life submerged by “every man for himself.” Denying the most valuable aspects of relationships in society, it instrumentalises the concept of freedom, strips it of the word’s meaning in terms of relations, of what it must hold in terms of social ties, subordinating it to the isolationist individual, denies what mutual fulfilment of being free must mean, deluding that there is no isolated fulfilment or individual self-sufficiency.

Conceptions that, on the ideological level, are an instrument of domination, which abstracts from social action, reducing it to the individual, and which is a safety net for capitalism, that knows that it will not be jeopardised by individual action. On the economic front, its programme is that of capitalist pillage, privatisation, destruction of social rights and the denial of universal access. A programme dissociated from and counter to the Constitution of the Republic. What some people are trying to present as a “novelty” has already been seen, and known, in the experiences of Chile, Reagan or Thatcher.

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The holding of elections did not elude the problems and difficulties which confront the workers, the people and the country. The PCP’s intervention will be called upon to provide solutions for problems, to open up prospects for an alternative policy and for the project enshrined in its Programme.

This intervention, which must be based on its strengthening, has the conditions to confront the challenges that we face through the development of the mass struggle and in the convergence with other democrats and patriots. Assuming a clear role of confrontation and real struggle against reactionary projects and forces, with the courage and determination that the history of the PCP testifies, denouncing them, exposing their objectives, not undervaluing them but also not magnifying them, refusing to contribute to their promotion even though invoking the need to fight them. Denouncing and fighting against what the PS majority will concretely bring about with its policy and options in the worsening of problems, not losing sight of the fact that, in the current context, the right-wing policies have their main centre of irradiation in this and in its convergence with the PSD in key matters, the so-called "structural reforms".

It is in the PCP that the workers will find the most determined force of opposition to the policy that PS alone, or whenever necessary, together with the PSD, will carry out to serve big capital. The growing problems and difficulties in the lives of many thousands, the worsening of inequalities and injustices, the lack of solutions and responses to what is needed, the promotion of the interests of economic groups and big bosses, all of this will increase discontent, protest and struggle.

Discontent and protest that must be translated into the broadening of the social base of struggle not only for the defence and concrete implementation of their rights but also to expand the strength of a political alternative. The goals of the struggle for a break with the right-wing policy and to build an alternative, require that the just popular discontentment can strengthen the demand for a policy dictated by the values of April and not be used by those who, demagogically inveighing against the “system”, are the worst that the capitalist system produces and whose rise would only exacerbate the problems and reasons for this discontent.

The PCP will intervene with its proposals and solutions, it will not ignore any possible advance, it will point the way to an alternative, patriotic and left-wing policy, as an unavoidable path towards a developed and sovereign country. An alternative policy that fully responds to the problems of the people and the country, which frees Portugal from constraints and impositions contrary to national interests. A policy that confronts and breaks with the interests of big capital and that assumes the need to free the country from submission to the Euro and the impositions of the European Union.

At a time when more favourable conditions for right-wing policies are increasing, in which anti-democratic projects are ostensibly emerging, in which the ideological offensive continues and intensifies, centred on the attack on the PCP and on sowing anti-communist prejudice, and which is aimed against the regime itself, democracy and freedoms, new and demanding tasks are placed for the Party’s activity.

The anti-communist onslaught, the mobilisation of all the instruments of ideological conditioning, the paraphernalia of means used by the centres of big capital clearly reveal who is considered the main danger and enemy by those who want to perpetuate the system of capitalist domination.

The undisguised display of a system that gives millions of human beings no other prospect than the denial of their rights, dooming them to poverty and which reveals its obscene reality in these times of pandemic in which millions are thrown into poverty and deprived of access to vaccines, while at the same time flourish as never before the profits of technological giants, the behemoths of the pharmaceutical industry, or the immeasurable fortunes of a handful of people. This reality makes it more obvious and essential to overcome it.

It is a matter of increased relevance to denounce what capitalism is, to expose the iniquitous system of exploitation and inequalities in which it flourishes, the obstacle it represents to the construction of a society where rights, well-being and living conditions are fully materialised. This is inscribed and articulated with the struggle for concrete objectives and for the revelation of the reasons that prevent the satisfaction of aspirations and the achievement of a better life.

It is for these specific and general objectives of struggle that the workers and the people can count every day. The PCP is here and will continue, as its one hundred-year long history proves, to have a future and to see a possible and achievable future for this country. The PCP is here with the strength of the electoral expression now obtained, but above all with that great strength of a Party that, through its intervention, roots and project is, and will be confirmed, as an essential force to uphold the interests of the workers and the people, and fight for the construction of a fairer society, freed from the exploitation of man by man, for socialism and communism.