RANKS OF BRAZILIAN CP REVOLT AGAINST SOFT LEADERSHIP
In the March 18 National Guardian, the progressive weekly published in New York, Editor-in-Exile Cedric Belfrage reports from Mexico City that a storm is brewing in the biggest Communist party in Latin America, the PCB of Brazil. This is shown by documents snuggled out of Brazil on the eve of a projected clandestine congress.
"In recent years the 'soft CP line' has drawn increasing fire from left militants, including hundreds who have quit the party," Belfrage writes. "Only in Guatemala does the CP leadership seem to support the Cuban doctrine of the unavoidability and primacy of armed struggle -- the impossibility at this stage of achieving democracy and national liberation by the ballot. Many revolutionaries who appreciate the CP's importance in the struggle believe that nothing can be done without greater independence from Soviet ‘peaceful co-existence' diplomacy."
Referring to recent credits of $100 million extended by the Soviet government to the military dictatorship of Brazil, Belfrage notes that most of the Latin-American left “and presumably most Washington experts" believe that "Moscow doesn't want any more revolutions in the hemisphere."
On the eve of the CP congress in Brazil, one of the top leaders, Carlos Marighella, resigned from the Central Committee in order to carry his battle to the rank and file. “The positive manner of his resignation, and the broadness of the inner-party protest against the leadership, have heartened revolutionaries who are reluctant to conclude that they must proceed without the CP."
Marighella, a former Communist deputy, went into hiding after the April 1, 1964, coup d'état. He was trailed by the police into a movie theater and shot by them as he sat unarmed in the audience. He recovered in jail and later wrote a book calling for all-out resistance to the dictatorship. He said that the coup should have made clear once and for all two party mistakes during the Goulart administration: "deference to the ‘national bourgeoisie' in alliances against the extreme right, and reliance on ‘nationalist' elements in the army to take the people's side against counterrevolution."
"In his resignation letter," continues Belfrage, "Marighella accuses the leadership of still trying to avoid the fight and to suppress expressions of militancy, and of playing down the crimes of the dictatorship.
"'Instead of a revolutionary tactic and strategy, all is reduced overtly or covertly to an impossible peaceful solution, an illusory re-democratization.... The executive still believes in the leadership of the bourgeoisie' and that a return to democracy is possible under a constitution which destroys state enterprises, ‘maintains a retrograde agrarian structure and assures the country's total surrender to the U.S.' Its position on the peasants' role, Marighella wrote, is ‘a flagrant negation of Marxism.' In Sa Paulo, he charged, site of the decisive concentration of workers, bourgeois influences have brought the party to a 'disastrous' situation. State party leaders have declared as much, he said, but the national executive acts over their heads. Meanwhile students and intellectuals move ever farther away from the CP, the letter said, and the party is sponsoring no theoretical works examining the lessons of the past."
The party's underground publication Vox Operéria [Workers Voice] recently devoted eight of its twelve pages to letters from members analyzing the theses proposed by the executive. All the correspondence was "profoundly critical."
"The protest against the soft line seems to be torrential. The 'theses' are denounced as ‘opportunistic.' The leadership is called upon to face its 'rightist' errors more frankly, especially with regard to the role of the 'national bourgeoisie' on the one hand, the peasantry on the other. Party critics demand the recognition, not in words but in action, of the peasants as 'the fundamental allies of the proletariat.' There are also protests against alleged attempts to pack party congresses with non-representative and subservient delegates -- a practice, said one critic, which 'was largely responsible for the defeat of 1964.'
"Inside and outside Brazil, revolutionaries of various complexions are expressing
encouragement at the fact that the criticism is so liberally aired on the eve of this important clandestine congress."
THE COSTA E SILVA