Abbreviation PCR Headquarters Pernambuco | Founded May 1966 | |
Founder Emmanuel Bezerra, Manoel Lisboa de Moura Split from Communist Party of Brazil Merged into October 8th Revolutionary Movement (later split in 1995) | ||
The Revolutionary Communist Party (Portuguese: Partido Comunista Revolucionário) is a communist and anti-revisionist Marxist-Leninist political party in Brazil with strong Stalinist tendencies. It originally formed in 1966 after a split with the Communist Party of Brazil. It later merged with the October 8th Revolutionary Movement in 1981, but split in 1995. It is a member of the International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations (Unity & Struggle) (ICMLPO), an organization of anti-revisionist and Hoxhaist parties.
History
Unhappy with the Communist Party of Brazil's (PCdoB) "revisionist" stance on the direction of the Soviet Union, a group of PCdoB members left the party and formed the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR) in 1966. The PCR maintained that the PCdoB had abandoned Leninism in favor of Soviet revisionism.
Brazil had fallen under a right-wing military dictatorship in 1964. Supported by the United States in the Cold War as a strong opponent to communism, the dictatorship committed numerous human rights abuses, including torture, towards suspected communists and other political subversives. Despite the danger, the PCR remained committed to the armed struggle against the government. The party was instrumental in organizing labor strikes and student demonstrations, but they also engaged in more destructive activities such as burning government-owned sugarcane fields.
The party was partially dismantled in the early-1970s after a brutal torture campaign was waged by the government against suspected communists and leftist political parties. The party's leader, Amaro Luiz de Carvalho, was arrested by the authorities. Several other prominent party members were murdered. This culminated with the arrest of Carvalho's successor, Edival Nunes Cajá, on May 12, 1978. In response, more than 12,000 students from the Federal University of Pernambuco went on strike in Recife, where Cajá was being held. The student protest eventually procured his release, although he was arrested again soon afterwards for publicly detailing the torture he had suffered while in prison. He would not be permanently released until June 1, 1979.
In July 1981, due to the limited success of PCR resistance operations against the government, the party made the decision to merge with the October 8th Revolutionary Movement (MR-8), an urban guerrilla organization that had likewise split from the PCdoB years earlier. MR-8 also publicly declared itself Marxist-Leninist, but its "bourgeois" organizational structure and affinity toward "bourgeois nationalism" led to serious disagreements with the former members of the PCR. After internal struggles within the party, the PCR elected to split with MR-8 in 1995, resulting in the re-foundation of the party.
The re-founded party established a youth wing, known as the Youth Union Rebellion (Portuguese: União da Juventude Rebelião) (UJR). The PCR held its Second Congress in 1998, which resulted in an overhaul of its statutes. The party remained ideologically devoted to Marxism-Leninism, but it adopted a much more extensive theoretical approach to its methods, contrasting with the previous statutes that regarded the armed struggle as its top priority. The re-foundation of the party came well after the end of military rule, so the party decided to take advantage of the press freedom that hadn't existed before the merger. The first issue of the theoretical organ of the party, The Truth, was published in December 1998.
In 2004, the PCR became a member of the International Conference of Marxist–Leninist Parties and Organizations (Unity & Struggle) (ICMLPO), an organization of anti-revisionist and Hoxhaist parties throughout the world. From then on it would also contribute to the theoretical organ of the ICMLPO, Unity & Struggle, which is published biannually.