Partido Comunista Research Articles

Democracy and Social Transformation in Chile

Delineating the transition to socialism has been a major theoretical problem for Marxists. The debate over strategy and tactics has been played out in a number of countries. As in other less developed countries, debate in Chile took place over how to transform their country from dependent capitalism to socialism, and was similar to that which occurred in Russia over permanent revolution or in China during the 1970s. Despite this apparent similarity, the debate in Chile took a somewhat unusual form because pre-1973 Marxists in Chile opted to pursue the second route to socialism, the so-called via pacifica (or peaceful route) rather than the via armada or via insurreccional (insurrectionary route). This strategy was not common in less developed countries, where the struggle for the seizure of power most often took the form of guerrilla warfare as happened in China, Cuba, and Vietnam. For many observers, pre-1973 Chile, with its long parliamentary tradition, constituted perhaps the premier example of the application of the via pacifica to less developed countries. Despite basic agreement on the via pacifica, serious theoretical as well as personal and sectarian differences existed between the two largest left parties, the Partido Comunista (Communists, or PC) and the Partido Socialista (Socialists, or PS). The two parties clashed on a number of critical issues, both historically and during the three years of the Unidad Popular (UP) government. Their differences were grounded largely in divergent understandings of the path to socialism and the means to attain it. Differences arose over the limits of legality, the scope and speed of the transition process, the role of the working class and other classes (especially the petty bourgeoisie) during the transition process, and the role of

Mexican Communism 1968–1981: Eurocommunism in the Americas?

In November 1981 the oldest political party in Mexico, the Mexican Communist Party (partido Comunista Mexicano or PCM) dissolved itself and together with four other left parties established the United Socialist Party of Mexico (PSUM). This was the culmination of more than ten years of debate and internal transformation during which the PCM had come to reject many of the traditional assumptions of Latin American communist parties. The most important change within the PCM in the 1970s was a new openness to the broad left seen in the creation of the Left Coalition (Coalición de Izquierda) in 1977 and in the establishment of electoral alliances with Trotskyist parties like the Revolutionary Workers Party (PRT).

The left and the Catholic question in Spain

Conflict between the Left and Catholicism has played a major role in twentieth-century Spanish politics. The Church in Spain, as elsewhere 'in its historic heartlands', has served as the bulwark of order, representing one of the most important obstacles to the legitimation of the parties of the Left and to their accession to power. Controversy over its place in society contributed decisively to the outbreak of the Civil War. After the Franco victory in 1939, the Church and Catholicism served as the principal ideological pillars of the regime. Despite the important socio-structural changes of the last four decades, the Catholic Church's presence and influence continue to generate tension in Spain. Thus, even today, as Juan Linz has noted, 'religion continues to be the decisive variable in accounting for the moderate and conservative electoral choices of the voters. In fact, it is a more important factor than social class.' The Left has been forced to devise a strategy for dealing with the Catholic phenomenon in Spain. A first line of attack, in line with the anti-clerical tradition of its Latin European counterparts, was a call for a frontal assault on the Church. The Anarchists, Communists and Socialists pursued this strategy in the years preceding the Civil War and for the first two decades of the Franco regime. Eventually, under the impetus of changes taking place in Spanish society and among Catholics, as well as of lessons learned from having allowed the Right to exploit religion in its favour, a less conflictual alternative emerged. Socialists and Communists—the Anarchists having lost their prominence in the Left by the 1950s—inclined their parties toward more flexible postures. As we shall see, the degree of interest and innovation in policy was not the same among the two parties, but both sought to break the marriage between Catholicism and social/political conservatism. This essay will analyse the evolving policies and attitudes of the Socialists (PSOE: Partido Socialista Obrero Espanol) and Communists (PCE: Partido Comunista de Espana) with respect to Spanish Catholicism. The first section explores the role of the Church and subculture in Franco Spain and discusses the reasons for and extent of their evolution. The second section focuses on the PSOE and PCE analysis of and response to that phenomenon, and the final section assesses the efficacy of those policies and the place of the Catholic Church and subculture in Spain today.

Slavery and Modes of Production in Brazil

No other problem so obsesses Brazilian Marxists working in the social sciences nowadays as the characterization and analysis of modes of production. The problem is doubly important. On the one hand, it represents the Brazilian equivalent of what Marx studied in Capital, the evolution of a mode of production, the central historical process, to which all other historical phenomena relate in a more or less dependent way. On the other hand, one's perspective on the problem can have direct consequences for political action: if capitalism arrived only belatedly in Brazil if precapitalist or noncapitalist work relations still predominate in many rural areas then alliances with progressive sectors of the national bourgeoisie should be taken more seriously, and alliances with semifeudal peasants should recognize that the peasants' basic interests may differ from those of the urban proletariat. The books by Gorender and Souza Martins represent two serious efforts to understand modes of production in Brazil. Gorender, a member of the Brazilian Communist Party or Partido Comunista Brasileiro (PCB) since the 1950s, helped found the Partido Comunista Brasileiro Revolucionario (PCBR) in the mid-1960s; this latter party supported urban guerrilla actions, and Gorender spent over a year in jail. He has since written a long book based on hundreds of published sources in which he defends the idea that throughout the period and up until final abolition in 1888, Brazil's dominant mode of production was neither feudalism nor capitalism, but colonial slavery. Gorender devotes a large part of his book to an explanation of five laws of the slavery mode of production those characteristics which differentiate it from other modes of production, and hence justify his thesis. First, the law of monetary income: all the slave's labor, beyond that needed to keep him alive (if not for very long), was converted into monetary income. This distinguished slavery from ancient slavery and also from feudalism, where only a very small portion of the surplus product was commercialized. Because the slave himself earned no money, the slave society had a very

New Political Parties

Brazil has never had a popular political party of national scope organized around a clear set of ideas and with democratic structures which could serve as a tool in the struggles of our people. The only national structures created since the beginning of the Republic have been clandestine ones those of the Partido Comunista Brasileriro (PCB) and of the Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B) obviously limited by their illegal status and by the repression which they suffered. It has been a Brazilian tradition, both during the Empire and the Republic, to have regional parties. Normally they have been organized around personal leadership, which in turn has depended on personalistic local leadership, that of the famous rural coroneis.1 The Old Republic (1889-1930) expressed its recognition of this situation through Rodrigues Alves'2 so-called politics of the governors,3 which resulted in the coups in the governments during Hermes da Fonseca's Presidency (1910-1914), the building of state parties such as the Partido Republicano Mineiro, the Partido Republicano Paulisto, and the Partido Republicano Riograndense, and the reduction of political life to an extremely limited group of regional elites. Only Rio Grande do Sul had a regional party with a clearly ideological message. From the very beginning it was organized around republican and

José Revueltas (1914-1976): a Political Biography

Jose Revueltas, author and independent militant of Mexico's left, whose political and literary militancy extend over forty years of Mexican history, died in April 1976 in Mexico City at age of sixty-two. Revueltas had committed most of his life to important struggle within Mexican left for formation of ideological arm of proletarian socialism. This struggle often found its way into Revueltas' fiction, where his contributions to modern Mexican novel are significant. Octavio Paz called him the purest man in Pablo Neruda called him synthesis of Mexican soul. And for those of us who called him compafiero, his death brings to an end a life of leadership, love, and sacrifice within oftentimes brilliant struggle he waged for development of a rational and legitimate rev-olutionary consciousness among working class and oppressed peoples of Mexico. It is difficult to separate Revueltas author and Revueltas active militant. I remember having attempted to do just that while preparing my doctoral dissertation back in 1971. The thesis suffered from self-conscious pedantry and sophistry of fulfilling an academic requirement, and I remember straining and manipulating my literary criticism so as not to offend Harvard's New Critics. In so doing, I committed a great disservice not only to intellectual integrity or to Revueltas himself but, ironically enough, to those works I had chosen to examine on their own terms. I remember that I argued in my dissertation that Revueltas' fiction approached a rigid Stalinist socialist realism during his years of militancy within Partido Comunista Mexicano (PCM) and that his two expulsions from PCM (1943 and 1960) produced an embracing of a kind of decadent existentialist humanism. And I suppose that even now an innocent reading of his works would lead one to sustain this argument. Nevertheless, Revueltas was never a rigid Stalinist nor a tragic Sartrean. In order to understand fully dramatic impact and ideological tension of Revueltas' fiction, one must see that Revueltas' literary works are quite simply part of his political arsenal in an ongoing and ever-intense participation in intra-leftist dialogue in Mexico. The essential informing motives of Revueltas' political life, and therefore also of his literary works, are: denunciation of bourgeois class conscious-