It was a pleasant surprise to receive at AND’s Office a copy of the manifest-book Ruptura (SP,2019, n-1 editions) subscribed by the colective “Centelha”. It is significant that, in a moment of exacerbation of the class contradictionss in Brasil, inaugurated with the outbreak of the June, 2913 demonstrations, many different political, artistic and intellectual expressions emerge, claiming the need to release the mass struggle from the bonds of opportunism, as well as the need to resume a combative and revolutionary stance within the ranks of the people’s movement. For us who have passed through long years as a lonely voice to defend the Democratic, Agrarian and Anti-imperialist Revolution in Brasil, it is gratifying to notice the multiplication of these revolutionary circles at the same time we are forced to point out their limitations.

The main merits

The main merit of the Ruptura editors is undoubtedly the overwhelming defence of the split with the reformist illusions. This has, in this regard, identity with what we have been saying ever and always at this tribune. Thus, we can read:

“Any attempt to restore the pact system of the New Republic in the name of  any government delusional form can only expresses the deep absence of horizons and final capitulation. The misery of the Brazilian politics is in the incapacity to be able to mourn its models of commitment and take over the obrigation to act, acknowledging the impossibility of conciliations. Let us say aloud: the era of conciliations is over!” (page 55)

Without doubt, the “era of the conciliations” is over. Or better, the reformists believe that such a thing would be possible. Actually, the period that followed the military regime was not even a moment for significant extension of the democratic rights (as in Europe after the war), especially for the tens of million workers, mostly the million of poor and landless peasants and the marginalized youth in the big cities, target of a systematic policy of imprisonment and murder. Against the damned of the Earth of the 21st century, the tortures have never stopped operating, the murders and the forced disappearances let alone stopped happening the legal or extralegal persecution of the combative revolutionary movements intensified during 13 years in which PT and its satellites occupied the government on duty.

And this whole reformist illusion had at the eclosion on the 2013 June Journey its death knell. Great days!

The text is also correct when characterizes the reactionary process of the Brazilian State as “ the preventive counter-revolution” which had a clear expression in the fascist Bolsonaro’s election.:

“Fascism has always been a desperate reaction against the force of an imminent revolution in the horizon. If it has returned now it is because the ground shakes, it is because the cracks are everywhere. Listen how the  ground shakes, how there is something that wants to go through the soil. Let us not deceive ourselves again; we live a preventive counter-revolution that will not fear any necessary violence level to keep us quiet, that will tear all the disguises so that we can act freely. The moment is more decisive than some people would like to believe in.” (page 10)

And ahead: “ The Revolution, and the Revolution only, will give voice to those who looked  forever muted. It is precisely this unavoidable account settling that the counter-revolution tries to postpone”.(page 110)

Our readers know we have been insisting in this subject since 2017. Fortunately, the editors of Ruptura do not fall into the common of those that, ideologically ragged, only know how to regret for the “difficult times”, paying tribute to the discouragement and lost of perspectives, the present state of spirits not only among the reformists but in many allegedly combative circles emerged during 2013. In the background, they cry like widows the funeral of the “liberal democracy”, forgetting the elementar truth that, under capitalism, even the most “democratic” of the governments will always be a dictatorship of the capitalists and landlords over the workers. And that, if this bourgeois dictatorship becomes more explicit is not for any other reason but being threatened by the imminent revolt of the masses.

We also stress, in the publication, the reference to the landownership as “the soul of the Brazilian capitalism in all its phases” (page 41), a central thesis of the communist movement in the country, buried in the last decades by the prevalence of the trotskyte perspectives and the neo-development which resulted in PT.

Limitations

The limited space does not allow us to an axhaustive interlocution with the authors of Ruptura, and this is not our intention. Nevertheless, we think that if the defence of Revolution and Communism, as well as the critique to reformism, are the strong points of the related work, more fragile – and, on a few points, almost nil – it is its argument on how to do this revolution and which are exactly its driving forces. Thereby, in the section “Campos de Batalha” (Battle Fields), Centelha’s friends list which would be the main targets of the Brazilian counter-revolution: women, young people, intelligentsia, nature. Here, although the class analysis crosses every one of those targets, it comes up tangential. We doubt whether which classes and social layers are the most potentially “explosive”? And for what does one propose therefore the substitute of the class dictatorship of bourgeoisie? Which stage to begin with?

Related to this, the problem of the revolutionary party appears. If it is true that the people’s uprisings have their own dynamic ( and it would be idealism and even conservadorism to think they could be either preset or directed in details by any person), it is also true that the simple spontaneous insurgency is not able to overcome the class domination of the bourgeoisie, break the medulla of its class State, the reactionary Armed Forces. One can see the so-called “Arab Spring” which had the squares crowded and it was summoned as “revolution”, and the bloody repression which followed, without happening any answer from the mass movement for the everytime more complex conditions that come up in the sequence of any uprising. The mass revolt is one of the necessary conditions for any revolution but it is not the revolution yet, let alone the guarantee per si that it can advance and have the victory. The consequent and honoured revolutionaries, true mass leaders and not coward rogues must indeed work vigorously along with the “combative mass of the oppressed “(Lenin), linking at every step the spontaneous people’s movement to the conscious strategy of the proletariat, not creating illusions as to the arduous and protracted character of the revolution whose concrete form at the time is the civil war. As Chairman Mao Tsetung affirms:

“To launch the revolution we need a revolutionary party. Without the revolutionary party, without a party founded in the revolutionary Marxis-leninist theory and a Marxist-leninist style, it is impossible to lead the working class and the great masses of the people to victory over the imperialists and their lackeys”.

This means a great true, confirmed by the experience of all revolutions.

Anyway, we cannot demand immediately from those who present themselves for the struggle a full accordance to all principle questions. One’s own persistence is the commitment to follow the difficult revolutionary path up to the end will take care of new conclusions to be added up to the initial propositions. The important thing, in that case, is to take the first step. Ruptura integrates itself undoubtedly to the democratic-revolutionary field that is renewing and growing in Brasil and we from AND wish that the debates it arouses may continue.