ONE of the fiercest discussions at the First Congress of the
"Committee of Correspondence", estab-
Brazilian Workers Party (PT) which took place in Sao Paolo at lish a newsletter, begin to work on the the end of November 1991', concerned the question of
1992 elections and the mayors' march on socialism; the debate concluded with the defeat of those
"launch a labor
Washington next spring, project"
and meet again in about six currents identified as the right of the PT, who had put forward months.
the theses entitled "A project for Brazil".
The situation in the CPUSA today can
This debate allowed the PT to develop clearer positions best be described as one both of turmoil and fluidity. Party members, whether supconcerning its socialist objective at its last national meeting.
porters of the majority or minority, have
In an article which first appeared in the December edition of been thoroughly disoriented by developthe magazine Em Tempo, Jose Correia, a member of the ments in the USSR and Eastern Europe.
They are now locked in a factional battle
Socialist Democracy current of the PT, examines below what over differences that have not yet fully crystallized. Anyone searching for clear- cut and definitive programmatic differences will not find them in the CP today.
At least not yet.
Profoundly undemocratic
What is clear, though, is that the CPU-
SA remains a profoundly undemocratic party, with no tolerance for minority views and with a top leadership seemingly incapable of shedding its Stalinist past.
But there is no doubt that that very leadership, for the most part, retains the allegiance of the CP's working class and trade union membership.
The opposition is a hodgepodge, heterogeneous grouping which has yet to come up with a clear alternative to the Hall line.
What binds them together is more the demand for greater democracy in the CP and a greater openness to new ideas than anything else. But as important as these are, they hardly constitute a program.
For now, revolutionary Marxists may be able to establish dialogue with some
CPers who are open to discuss ideas which the party shunned in the past. In addition, every effort should be made to forge united fronts for action in areas of agreement, such as opposition to US intervention in Cuba.
Further developments within the Communist Party together with the deepening of the crisis of capitalism may well lead some Pers towards genuine proletarian internationalism, to democratic instead of bureaucratic centralism, to building workers united fronts instead of reformist multiclass popular fronts, and to help construct an urgently needed mass revoluworkers' tionary party in the United
States. *
OPUSA
18 is at stake in this discussion. JOSE CORREIA
T HE initial theses proposed by the
PT on the attitude of the peoples of Latin America towards the "new international some ambiguities. An amendment proposed by the left (theses 9 and 10) stipulated that the "emancipation of Latin America and the construction of a new society necessitates going beyond a world order... which assures the domination of those sectors which, both inside and outside the continent, profit from it".
The congress debated the question of Cuba at length: the majority of delegates rejected both the arguments of those who demanded an abstract engagement in the struggle for democracy in Cuba, ignoring amendments which called on the Cuban masses to bring down the Castro regime through political revolution. The text adopted stressed that the deepening of democracy is the best way of defending the revolution: it underlined the need to build a broad movement imperialist blockade and in support of the gains of the Cuban revolution.
The identification made by the right of the PT, between Stalinism/ actually existing socialism" and the theoretical sources of Marxism and the real movement which was at the origins of the Russian Revolution, was rejected. The initial text adopted states that the process of bureaucratization constitutes a negation of the theoretical and practical sources which inspired October 1917.
Another amendment, which was integrated into the text, explains that: "The Russian revolution was at the heart of the revolutionary upsurge which took place in Europe and Asia at the end of the First World War. However, despite the resistance made to the military pressure of its fered a mounting series of defeats — international isolation, the result of the defeat of the revolution in countries like Germany, Italy and Hungary and its encirclement by the international bourgeoisie; the massive destruction of the country and its social consequences; the suppression of the conquests of 1917 in the field of political democracy; the growing power, in the new state and in the party, which was intertwined with it, of a bureaucracy autonomous of any control, and so on.
### Errors committed
"This process, the product of "objective" circumstances which should not be underestimated, was also the product of errors committed by the revolutionaries who were at the head of the new regime. It led to a veritable counter-revolution, which dispossessed the workers of the exercise of power and which concentrated [the latter] in the hands of a bureaucracy transformed into a new dominant layer of Soviet society.
"Starting from this, conceptions like that of the construction of socialism in a single country, founded on state ownership of the means of production under bureaucratic control, became predominant. This model, as well as the material, political and ideological pressure that it exercised, weighed in a decisive fashion on the course of the subsequent revolutionary processes, like the Chinese, Yugoslav, Vietnamese or even, to a lesser degree, Cuban revolutions"
The discussion on socialism was launched through a prominent Brazilian newspaper, the Folha de Sao Paolo, by PT deputies and leaders Jose Genoino and Eduardo Jorge. They took violent exception to certain amendments proposed by
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socialism
Pluralism and tendency rights
THE question of tendencies dominated a good part of the debate on the functioning of the PT. The position finally adopted assured the effective right of tendency, while trying to resolve some of the practical problems.
February 17, 1992 • #222 International Viewpoint gress at Sao Paolo, which disavowed the positions of the "social-democratizing" sectors of the party, reaffirming that "the ideas which were at the root of the social and revolutionary movements throughout this century persist: they are a source of
BRAZIL
The congress discussed two proposals on functioning. One, based on the inspiration for our party, which is engaged existing regulation of tendency rights, proposed the broadening of democracy in the struggle for the abolition of capitaland pluralism, to unfreeze the internal life of the PT.
ism". The amendments clarify the kind of
The other, presented by the Articulation and the right, advocated the suspensociety for which the PT is fighting: "a sion of certain prerogatives, which amounted to a restriction of the right of tengoverment of freely associated individudency. Such a change would have destroyed or severely damaged the process als"; the end of all forms of exploitation ot synthesis which has constituted the PT, and opened the road to expulsions.
and oppression; the end
Finally the conception adopted by majority vote envisages that:
"labour power as a commodity", and so
• Tendencies can maintain spaces (of expression), but their use to organize on. This amendment was finally adopted activities external to the PT or meetings with non-affiliates is forbidden... It is at the national congress.
recommended that the tendencies meet in the offices of the party [their activi-
Another modification proposed by the ties should be open to any militant of the PT.
left was approved: it dealt with the impor-
• The different tendencies can produce information bulletins inside the party, tance of direct democracy in the objective or publications on theoretical political debate, with proposals on the conjuncof the extinction of social classes and the ture and the social movement. The publication of any material which seeks to state: "The problem of the links between orientate and organize the autonomous political intervention of tendencies in the direct and representative forms of the social movement is forbidden, as is the diffusion of the positions of tendendemocracy should take into account the cies outside the PT...
objectives of the destatization of politics.
• Tendencies can conserve the mechanisms of collection of resources pro-
"Socialist democracy is based on the viding that this does not prejudice the finances of the party...
growing overcoming of alienation and of
• International relations are the exclusive domain of the party, through its the political apathy of the majority of the leadership bodies. The national leadership will pursue the international relapopulation, on the basis of a greatly supertions entered into by its tendencies with the perspective of taking them over ior level of activity, of participation, of itself, if they correspond to the policy defined by the party...
consciousness and of organization of the
• The tendencies of the PT cannot impose on their militants an obligatory people. It necessitates also different sociocentralism. The positions of the tendencies cannot be counterposed to the economic conditions from those currently implementation of the decisions of the party."
in force, including a significant reduction
From Em Tempo, December 1991. *
"In this framework, the abolition of the currently existing institutions, responsible for the significant autonomy enjoyed by the rulers in relation to the people (such as is the case with the classic mechanisms of liberal representative democracy) is an objective to be pursued. It amounts to the abolition of the distinction between governing and governed and the beginning of the extinction of class inequalities and of the state as an apparatus of domination".
The PT is, then, making an important clarification of its previous texts; this represents a real defeat for the social demo-
However, the discussion on the economy and socialism has been cursory and must
Victory for right
The only victory scored by the right of the PT came during the debate on the dictatorship of the proletariat - thanks to an agreement made with the majority current of Lula, an amendment was adopted rejecting this concept. According to this text, "For us, democracy is both a means and an end. To say that implies the rejection of any kind of dictatorship, even the dictatorship of the proletariat, which can be nothing other than the dictatorship of the single party over society, and even over the workers... We struggle for a genuinely pluralist society; it is yet another reason to be anti-capitalist, for capitalism, by oppressing and alienating individuals, amounts in fact to a pluralism narrowed by inequality of conditions and opportu-
"It is also a reason to reject that which is called "pluralism for the workers parties" — that is, "pluralism for those who think like us" - historically, this can only concretize itself as a transitional expression of the dictatorship of the pro-
This amendment equates Stalinism and the dictatorship of the proletariat. It introduces a theoretical confusion on the question, reducing this concept to its Stalinist interpretation and affirming that the dictatorship of the proletariat can only exist as the dictatorship of a single party.
But, inasmuch as the text adopted does not end the discussion on the theory of the state, its class character, the necessity of destroying the bourgeois state and building a new class regime, this is not a major blow. For revolutionary Marxists, the dictatorship of the proletariat has democracy organized in a pluralist framework, capable of integrating all currents which accept the legality established by the regime of the workers, born out of the smashing of the apparatus of bourgeois domination.
An amendment proposed by the right currents defending non-violence was rejected by the congress. Moreover, another modification proposed by the left was adopted: it stated that "political power is built everyday in the struggles, in the trade union, in the factory organization, in the enterprise committee, in the neighbourhood association, in the school or in the countryside... This popular power, meanwhile, has a character limited by the dominant institutions in capitalist society and by the relation of social forces - in particular political situations, it could take on a new character, extending and general-
Finally, amendments presented by the PT commissions for intervention in the mass movement were adopted, concerning women, the racial question, and so on.? The discussion on socialism has, then, been a positive one. At this level the PT has made some clear progress towards revolutionary and socialist positions. * 2. Several draft theses were presented to the PT congress: thesis 5, proposed by Socialist Convergence, a Trotskyist grouping linked to the international Morenist current (6 to 7% of the delegates); thesis 7, put forward by the O Trabalho current, linked to Pierre Lambert's international tendency (4%); thesis 8, A Project for Brazil, proposed by various currents from the right of the PT (12%); thesis 9, A Revolutionary Road for the PT, presented by Socialist Democracy (Brazilian section of the Fourth Intemational) and other sectors (12%); and thesis 10, associated with different left sectors (10-12%). Finally, thesis 11, proposed by the Articulation, the majority tendency, had the support of 47% of the delegates. Its draft was finally adopted as the basic text for discussion on socialism and strategy, and amended. 3. A proposal emerging from the commission of women delegated to the congress, seeking to establish a or tie PT, us a dog% women in the leading bodies 1 9
From the plan to the clan
THE dissolution of the former Soviet
International Viewpoint #222 • February 17, 1992
CIS
OW would you define unable to keep them.
H of the main features the new situation in the