The history of the Brazilian Communist Party (in Portuguese, Partido Comunista Brasileiro), best known by the abbreviation PCB, started with its foundation on March 25, 1922 in the city of Niterói, Rio de Janeiro. On that day, nine representatives of communist groups from the cities of São Paulo, Santos, Cruzeiro (in countryside São Paulo), Porto Alegre, Recife, Niterói, Juiz de Fora and Rio de Janeiro met and approved the party's statutes and the twenty-one conditions for entering the Communist International. The meeting ended with all the seventy-three members of the party singing L'Internationale (but not very loudly, due to security reasons).

Early years

The PCB's first years were marked by an effort to encourage socialist thinking in Brazil. It must be noted that, unlike many other countries, Brazil had not had much anti-capitalist political experience, except for the 1917 anarchist actions in São Paulo. During those years, the party was declared illegal by the government. On May 1, 1925, during the party's Second Congress, its weekly newspaper A Classe Operária (The Working Class) was announced, with five thousand copies being sold on the factories. This number grew to nine hundred copies by the ninth edition, but the police shut the newspaper down shortly after the twelfth edition was published. The paper reappeared in 1928, after the Third Congress was held.

By 1930, after being recognized by the Communist International and with its Socialist Youth division formed, the PCB had nearly eleven hundred members. This marks the beginning of a long period of submission to, initially the Third International, and, after its dissution, to the political leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This decade also marked two cycles on the party's history: one of increasing influence, until 1935, and one of decline, until 1942. Both cycles are comprehensible when seen in the context of the Vargas era.

On 1943, during the so-called Mantiqueira Conference, the party secretly met in the small city of Engenheiro Passos, Rio de Janeiro, and in an open letter to Vargas decided to support a declaration of war on the Axis. At the same time, Luís Carlos Prestes was elected to the party's presidency. On 1945, after Vargas's dictatorship ended, the PCB became legal once again. By 1947, it had nearly two hundred thousand members. However, this period of official tolerance did not last long, as President Dutra denounced the PCB as "internationalist, and therefore not committed to Brazil's own interests" in 1948, an action supported by the American government.

In the 1950s, as the party was driven underground, it began supporting major workers' strikes around Brazil. However, this did not prevent the beginning of internal clashes between different factions within the PCB. This became more evident after the Soviet Communist Party's 20th Congress, when Nikita Khrushchev denounced Stalin's policies. The factionalization of the party accelerated after a new Manifesto was passed in 1958, proposing new ways of achieving communist goals. This Manifesto linked the establishment of socialism to the broadening of democracy. As the party had gained a more reformist agenda, some of its top leaders quit the PCB, forming the new Communist Party of Brazil (Partido Comunista do Brasil - PCdoB) in 1962, while the majority of the party remained faithful to the new political line emanated from the Soviet Union.

Military rule years

With this new orientation, the PCB grew in size and exercised a much greater role in the Brazilian left. However, the alliance forged with the other parties did not survive the 1964 coup d'état. PCB did play an important role against the dictatorship, by organizing the workers movement and participating in efforts to unite the opposition in its demands for democratic reforms. At that point in time the communists were a fraction of the democratic opposition front, the MDB. It refused, for example, to engage in armed struggle, differently from other left wing organizations that decided to follow that path. The clandestine operations and the political disputes regarding the strategies to resist the military regime led to many important leaders leaving the party, while many others died in the hands of the military regime. While the Communist Party in Brazil was involved in several internal clashes, the Worker´s Party (Partido dos Trabalhadores)was founded. Its creation was the project of a series of left wing groups independent from the PCB (Trotskyists, Stalinists, communist dissidents, ex-guerrillas), together with some left wing Christian groups. It was structured as an alternative to Communist-led unionism in Brazil. It used to take radical instances against the military regime and gained a strong presence in between high skilled workers and middle-class intellectuals. The growth of the PT accelerated the fragmentation process inside the PCB leading ultimately to the PCB's dissolution in 1992.

After the 1979 amnesty, the PCB's leaders began to restructure the party. The 1982 Congress confirmed the "revisionist" agenda, declaring the PCB "a party of the masses, linking socialist goals to true democracy, which will be constructed based on the values of freedom". Once again, internal clashes developed in the party, as the members became divided between Communists and Social Democrats, mainly after Prestes left the party. The fall of the Soviet bloc was also a strong blow to the party, which had been, since the 1930s, a faithful instrument and financial dependent of the CPSU. This crisis came to an end only in January 1992, during the Tenth Congress, when the majority of the members decided to dissolve the party, refounding it as the Socialist People's Party (Partido Popular Socialista - PPS), in a very similar way to what happened in Italy.

Current situation

After that, a minority group of unsatisfied leaders left and tried to refound the PCB, returning to the party's original Marxist-Leninist agenda. Effectively they created a party using the name Brazilian Communist Party. It is today a very small group with no real relevance in national politics and no representation in the Congress. The PPS is now a national party being one of the most important political groups in the left wing Brazilian scene.

In 2006, the PCB agreed on an unprecedented nationwide alliance with two other left-wing parties, P-SOL and PSTU. Putting aside some significant ideological differences, the three parties built a common agenda to try to break the polarity between presidential candidates Luís Inácio Lula da Silva (PT) and Geraldo Alckmin (PSDB). The coalition also extends to gubernatorial and parliament elections to take place at the same time all over the country.

See also

List of Communist Parties

Politics of Brazil

External links

• Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) (in Portuguese)

• Popular Socialist Party (PPS) (in Portuguese)

Sources

• PCdoB timeline (in Portuguese)

• http://www.pcbsaocarlos.hpg.ig.com.br/historia_pcb.htm

Communist parties in the Americas | Political parties in Brazil | ComIntern sections | 1922 establishments

Partido Comunista Brasileiro