THE PREPARATION OF THE FIFTH CONGRESS OF THE COMMUNIST PARTY
The leadership of the CP has just issued the "Discussion Thesis" for the 5th Congress. The last Congress was held in 1954, notwithstanding the fact that the line of the 4th Congress has been left aside in 1955 (beginning of the rightist course) and that it had been formally rejected and criticized during the discussion after the XXth Congress of the CP of the US SR, and especially after the Prestes* document of March 1958 (where the line of alliance with he national bourgeoisie was established
In Brazil, the :P leadership walks behind the reaction ary nationalist candidate Marshal Lott. Lott repeats incessantly that he is, above all, anti-communist. Recently, on the occasion of his opponent's, Janio Quadros, journey to Cuba, Lott reaffirmed that he is a m'reformist radicalism of janio. Adidate, opposed to the the same time, he made another statement that should have gone right to the heart of the Gl leadership: he declared himself absolutely hostile to the re-establishment of the diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, the latter had a democratic government, elected by secret ballot, and even then the initiative must come from the
Janio Quadros, who has the support of the rightist bourgeois opposition, tries to run away from his position as
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*
a candidate representative of the taking advantage of Lott's peculiarities and of the credit of the Kubitschek government, in order to enforce a break-down inside the nationalist front, and especially taking advantage of the situation confronted by the CP.
This explains his trip to Cuba, his ever more stressed "leftist" campaign, his" declarations in favour of plomatic recognition of China, of the US SR, of the revolutionary Algerian government, in favor of CP legality, ethe contents of the Thesis do not differ from the line applied by the Party to date. The most they have tried to do is to introduce some order in the midst of the frequently contradictory positions publicly stated by the Party
In a total amount of 23 pages, 10 are devoted exclusively to the self-criticism made over the last 15 years, a subject which has raised the most different positions among the leaders themselves.
From 1956, self-criticism has been one of the Prestes' leadership's more developed subjects. The reason : lies in the fact that this leadership, after the XXth Congress, was not able to recover its equilibrium in front of the rank-and-file criticism. It was obliged to recognize more and more "mistakes" in its past, sometimes beyond that which wisdom requires. To codify its self-criticism, to put it in order, with the intention of resisting the rank-and-file, is a pressing need of the leadership.
So, the leadership go on with an endless enumeration of "mistakes," trying to take out of it a line favorable to his ultra-rightist present positions. The method is the common one: it dissociates the real tendencies that had existed inside the Party, and puts them arbitrarily amalgamated, in two sacks: that of the "dogmatism and sectar-
" in one hand, and that of the "revisionism" in the
FOURTH INTERNATIONAL
Thus, the leadership expects to jet discredit upon the resistance to the pro-bourgeois policy, amalgamating with the abhorred stalinist past, the of the personality of Prestes and of Stalin, and the putschism and adventurism from 1948 to 1954. On the other side, it tries to mix up the resistance against the bureaucratic line and the terrorist methods, with the real liquidationist tendencies like that of Agildo Barata.
The pro-bourgeois policy, which goes against reality and against the cause of this crisis. The leadership was not free when the support to Lott was decided. It was tied up by a thousand compromises, and in addition there was the situaton created by the former line of support "nationalist sector of the government." In fact, the leadership was put in front of the masses by its own line.
The task of the revolutionary Marxists, identified with the workers interests, is to intervene in this crisis in order to open the way to an independent expression of the communist left. This must be not against the party and in favor of another bourgeois experience, against the party leadership, for an independent and proletarian communist policy, against both bourgeois candidates, tor the independent intervention of the mass organizations in the Brazilian political life, for a worker candidate to Presidency of the Republic, supported by a front of the trade-unions, the peasants' leagues and the students' associations.
The Brazilian Trotskyists, as a well-known tendency in the workers' movement, fight for their right to intervene in the discussion and in the Congress itself, as well as for the right of all the excluded tendencies which maintain their fidelity to communism. April 1960
Ceylon