Brazilian Communist Party (1922)

The Brazilian Communist Party (Portuguese: Partido Comunista Brasileiro, originally founded under the name Communist Party of Brazil — historical acronym PCB) was a Brazilian political party of Marxist orientation. With national expression throughout the 20th century, it consolidated strong penetration among workers, intellectuals, and students, operating under the official doctrine of Marxism-Leninism.

Founded between March 25 and 27, 1922, in the city of Niterói, it was the first structured political party openly to the left of the republican political spectrum in the country.^[1] From its genesis, the group sought to fulfill the so-called "21 Conditions" demanded by Lenin, and the organization was formally admitted to the Communist International (Comintern) during its 5th Congress, held in Moscow in 1924.^[1] Thus, the organization obtained official recognition as the "Brazilian Section of the Communist International" (formally adopting the name Communist Party - Brazilian Section of the Communist International, or PC–SBIC).^[4] Its classic symbol was the crossed hammer and sickle, in yellow on a red background, representing the political alliance between the peasantry and the urban proletariat.

Popularly nicknamed the "Partidão" (Big Party), the PCB faced successive periods of proscription and clandestinity dictated by the Brazilian state. At its institutional peak, during the redemocratization process between 1945 and 1947, it reached an estimated 180,000 members and won 10% of the votes in the 1945 presidential elections with the independent bid of Yedo Fiúza.^[1] Since 1927, its youth cadre base was organized in the Federation of Communist Youth (later União da Juventude Comunista – UJC).^[1] In August 1961, to circumvent legal restrictions and distance itself from the internationalist stigma, the association changed its official name to Brazilian Communist Party (Partido Comunista Brasileiro), a change that triggered the historical split of the PCdoB the following year.^[1] The PCB functioned as the organic matrix from which emerged the main revolutionary currents and left-wing associations in Brazil, including armed struggle organizations during the military dictatorship, such as the October 8th Revolutionary Movement (MR-8) and the National Liberating Action (ALN). Its complex trajectory resulted in a severe dispute over its historical and legal continuity, culminating in the crisis of the 10th Congress in 1992.^[1]

Currently, the legacy of the historical PCB is disputed in two distinct spheres: the legal-institutional order and the political-ideological claim. In the legal sphere, before the Superior Electoral Court (TSE), the association was officially succeeded in 1992 by the current Cidadania (formerly the Popular Socialist Party – PPS), led by the faction of Roberto Freire, which inherited the party registration No. 23, the assets, and promoted the abandonment of Marxist theory in favor of a program aligned with social democracy.^[1] On the other hand, from the perspective of the Marxist theory of political organization, the historical continuity of the vanguard and class is claimed by two other parties: the current Brazilian Communist Party (registration No. 21), rebuilt by the 1992 minority faction that denounced the dissolution promoted by Freire as a liquidationist maneuver;^[5] and the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB, registration No. 65), which has operated since the 1962 split, originating from a rupture with the PCB leadership that had adopted the reformist theses of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Both historically coexisted with the "Partidão" until its legal dissolution.

The party was founded on March 25, 1922, in Niterói by nine delegates, representing 50 members.^[6] On April 4, 1922, its founding was published in the Diário Oficial da União (Official Gazette of the Union), under the name Communist Party–Brazilian Section of the Communist International (PC–SBIC). The founding congress was attended by Abílio de Nequete (a barber of Lebanese origin), Astrojildo Pereira (a journalist from Rio de Janeiro), Cristiano Cordeiro (an accountant from Recife), Hermogênio da Silva Fernandes (an electrician from the city of Cruzeiro), João da Costa Pimenta (a graphic worker from São Paulo), Joaquim Barbosa (a tailor from Rio de Janeiro), José Elias da Silva (a shoemaker from Rio de Janeiro), Luís Peres (a broom maker from Rio de Janeiro), and Manuel Cendón (a Spanish tailor), the latter being the only one among the founders who possessed an anarchist ideology, rather than a socialist one.^[6][7] The founding name of the party is "Communist Party of Brazil" (Partido Comunista do Brasil), but its militants referred to the organization as either Brazilian Communist Party or Communist Party of Brazil interchangeably, as attested by Astrojildo Pereira's letter to the Communist International dated August 9, 1922.

The founding meeting is considered the 1st Congress of the PCB, during which the first Central Executive Commission (CCE) was chosen, composed of ten members (five full members and five alternates). The full members were: Abílio de Nequete (secretary-general), Astrojildo Pereira (press and propaganda), Antônio Canellas (international secretary), Luís Peres (union fractions), and Cruz Júnior (treasurers); the alternates were: Cristiano Cordeiro, Rodolfo Coutinho, Antônio de Carvalho, Joaquim Barbosa, and Manuel Cendón. Following the worldwide trend among communist parties, on April 4 of the same year, the announcement of its founding was published in the Diário Oficial da União, however under the name Communist Party–Brazilian Section of the Communist International (PC–SBIC). A statute was also drafted at the first meeting.^[1]

As early as June of the founding year, the government of Epitácio Pessoa placed the party in illegality.^[1] The PCB won a brief legal window in January 1927, when it elected Azevedo Lima to the Chamber of Deputies, but on August 12 of the same year it returned to proscription through the "Celerated Law" (Lei Celerada) of the Washington Luís government.^[1]

In the late 1920s, the party aligned itself with the directives of the "Third Period" of the Communist International (Comintern), adopting the sectarian tactic of "class against class" and the thesis of Social fascism. Under this narrow, workerist line, the PCB refused to form alliances with the dissident bourgeoisie during the 1930 presidential elections. Although communist delegates sought out Luís Carlos Prestes to lead a ticket, Prestes refused the invitation, as his tenentist positions were still considered petty-bourgeois by the party's orthodoxy. Faced with this refusal, the PCB, through the Worker and Peasant Bloc (BOC), launched the marble worker Minervino de Oliveira for the presidency of Brazil, garnering an insignificant number of votes.^[a] By the same theoretical consistency, the PCB opposed the Revolution of 1930, classifying Getúlio Vargas' rise to power as an inter-bourgeois rearrangement that would benefit British imperialism at the expense of the working class.^[8]

The rise of fascism in Europe forced the Comintern to abandon sectarianism at its 7th Congress (1935), guiding the formation of "Popular Fronts". In Brazil, this shift allowed the formal entry of Luís Carlos Prestes into the PCB (in 1934) and the articulation of the National Liberating Alliance (ANL), a mass anti-fascist and anti-imperialist front with significant popular support. With the closure of the ANL by the Vargas government in 1935, the party leadership unleashed an armed insurrection in November of that year, whose poor planning resulted in its rapid crushing by state forces. Although military historiography and conservative sectors coined the pejorative term "Intentona Comunista" to classify the episode, from the perspective of Marxist historiography the event is categorized as the "National-Liberating Uprising".^[1]

The failure of the insurrection served as justification for the repressive intensification that would culminate in the Estado Novo in 1937. During this period of violent police-led clandestinity and isolation, the party was beset by internal paranoia that resulted in episodes of "vigilante justice" – the execution of party cadres decided by the communist leadership itself. The most notorious cases corroborated by historiography were the brutal murders of the student Tobias Warchavski (in October 1934) and the young woman Elza Fernandes (in March 1936), both executed under unfounded suspicions of collaborating with the police of Filinto Müller.^[9]

With its leaders imprisoned or dead, the PCB was virtually shattered. Organic reorganization only occurred in August 1943, with the Mantiqueira Conference. Led by physician Milton Cayres de Brito and other non-incarcerated leaders, the conference purged the liquidationist sectors, elected a new Central Committee, and aligned the party with the anti-fascist "National Union" policy, supporting the dispatch of the Brazilian Expeditionary Force (FEB) to World War II and rapprochement with democratic sectors of civil society.^[1]

In the context of the country's redemocratization in 1945, with its leaders amnestied, the PCB obtained institutional legality and experienced its period of greatest mass influence. It launched the independent candidate Yedo Fiúza for president, who surprised by obtaining almost 10% of the votes (569,818 voters). The party formed a strong constituent bench with 14 deputies – including the writer Jorge Amado and the union leader João Amazonas – and elected Luís Carlos Prestes as senator.^[1][b] In 1947, the party reached the historic mark of around 200,000 members, structuring significant control over urban union apparatuses. However, under the impact of the Cold War, the association's electoral registration was revoked in May 1947 by the Superior Electoral Court during the government of Eurico Gaspar Dutra, under the justification that it was an organization at the service of a foreign power (the Soviet Union). Still that year, there was an attempt by communist leaders to register other parties – first with the attempt to create the Popular Progressive Party^[11] and later with the Brazilian Constitutionalist Party.^[12] However, repression against the party was violent, and all its parliamentarians had their mandates revoked the following year.^[c]

Forced back into illegality, the Central Committee launched the "August Manifesto" in 1950, radically breaking with the policy of peaceful alliance, denouncing bourgeois parties like the PTB, and adopting an insurrectional rhetoric aimed at the revolutionary overthrow of the regime, a tactic that temporarily isolated the party from the broad masses.^[14]

In February 1956, the international communist movement was profoundly shaken by the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), at which Nikita Khrushchev denounced the crimes of Joseph Stalin (the "Secret Speech") and instituted the policy of peaceful coexistence with the capitalist bloc. This theoretical shift postulated the possibility of a peaceful and institutional transition to socialism.^[1]

In Brazil, the impact of de-Stalinization generated a serious internal crisis within the PCB, resulting in the disaffiliation of a significant number of intellectuals and militants. Aligning itself with the new Soviet guidelines, the Central Committee published the "March Declaration" in 1958. From the perspective of historical materialism, this document marked the official adoption of stagism: the party began to advocate a "national-democratic" revolution, betting on a class alliance with the so-called national bourgeoisie to defeat latifundia and imperialism before transitioning to socialism.^[15]

As a result of this strategy of institutional integration and aiming to regain electoral legality, the party held a national conference in August 1961 where it decided to change its official name from Partido Comunista do Brasil to Partido Comunista Brasileiro (maintaining the acronym PCB). This legal maneuver sought to demonstrate to the Superior Electoral Court the national character of the organization, expunging the internationalist veneer of the former designation, which denoted direct subordination to Moscow.^[1]

However, the adoption of the "peaceful path" and the denunciations against Stalin encountered severe resistance from an orthodox wing of the Central Committee, led by João Amazonas, Maurício Grabois and Pedro Pomar. Amid the incipient Sino-Soviet split, these leaders aligned themselves with the criticisms of Mao Zedong and the Party of Labour of Albania, accusing the PCB leadership of "revisionism" and betraying the revolutionary principles of Marxism-Leninism.^[1]

Expelled for forming a factional tendency, these militants convened an extraordinary conference in February 1962 and founded a new organization. Claiming for themselves the uninterrupted legacy of the 1922 foundation, they adopted the original name Partido Comunista do Brasil and the acronym PCdoB. This dissidence definitively broke with the PCB of Luís Carlos Prestes, rejected the alliance with the national bourgeoisie, and began advocating the strategy of protracted people's war based on peasant mobilization, following the model of the Chinese Revolution.^[1]

The civil-military coup established on 1964-03-31 imposed on the PCB another long period of clandestinity and exposed a profound crisis in its political line. The party's national leadership, relying on the nationalist military apparatus of the government of João Goulart and on respect for democratic institutions, was taken by surprise and demonstrated complete unpreparedness to organize any resistance to the coup.^[1] The subsequent repression dismantled the party's trade union bases and imprisoned historic leaders such as Gregório Bezerra and Carlos Marighella.^[16]

After the fall of Jango's constitutional government, the party fractured around an acute strategic debate. The majority group of the Central Committee (CC), led by Luís Carlos Prestes, carried out a self-criticism pointing to "rightist errors" and class illusions committed before 1964, but maintained alignment with the foreign policy of the Soviet Union, defending the formation of a broad, peaceful, mass-based anti-dictatorship front.^[1] In direct opposition, a dissident wing consolidated itself – led by cadres such as Marighella, Mário Alves, Jacob Gorender, Manuel Jover Teles and Apolônio de Carvalho – which accused the party of reformism and demanded the immediate adoption of the revolutionary path and armed struggle.

The intensification of this ideological dispute was catalyzed by the influence of the Cuban Revolution. In 1967, defying the PCB leadership's prohibition, Marighella attended the conference of the Latin American Solidarity Organization (OLAS) in Havana, an event that advocated continental armed struggle.^[1] The PCB orthodoxy, anchored in democratic centralism, categorically rejected "foquismo" (the guerrilla foco theory formulated by Régis Debray and endorsed by Cuba). From the classical Marxist-Leninist perspective of the Central Committee, foquismo was considered an anti-Marxist and petty-bourgeois thesis, as it sought to substitute the mobilization of the working class with the isolated action of a militarized vanguard.^[1]

The institutional rupture was consummated at the VI Congress of the PCB, held clandestinely in December 1967. The Central Committee ratified the expulsion of the radical wing, resulting in the greatest organizational disintegration in the party's history. This culminated in the emergence of the main urban and rural guerrilla organizations in Brazil:

• The Ação Libertadora Nacional (ALN): Founded by Carlos Marighella and Joaquim Câmara Ferreira in São Paulo, primarily centered on urban guerrilla warfare to destabilize the regime.
• The Partido Comunista Brasileiro Revolucionário (PCBR): Led by Mário Alves and Apolônio de Carvalho in Rio de Janeiro and the Northeast, attempting to reconcile mass work with armed struggle.
• The Partido Operário Comunista (POC): Originated in Rio Grande do Sul from the merger of the PCB's "Leninist Dissidence" with Polop.
• The Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (MR-8): Created from the "Guanabara Dissidence", grouping the university sector that broke with the party in Rio de Janeiro.^[17]

With the outbreak of armed struggle by dissident groups, the official PCB maintained a tactic of non-violent resistance, guiding its militants to infiltrate the Brazilian Democratic Movement (MDB), the party of the allowed opposition, to operate in the electoral contests tolerated by the regime.^[1]

Despite refraining from the guerrilla actions and kidnappings that occurred in the late 1960s, the PCB became the main target of state terrorism under the governments of Emílio Garrastazu Médici and Ernesto Geisel. Between 1973 and 1976, after the armed struggle organizations had already been militarily crushed, the repression agencies – especially the DOI-CODI – unleashed "Operation Radar".^[18][19][20] The strategic objective of this operation was to annihilate the PCB, which had survived the first decade of the dictatorship and maintained a strong capacity for clandestine organization and influence within the MDB's grassroots.^[20]

Operation Radar resulted in the murder or forced disappearance of ten of the twenty members of the PCB's Central Committee.^[1][18][19] In 1974, the leaders David Capistrano da Costa, João Massena Melo, and Luiz Ignácio Maranhão Filho were captured and killed under intense torture.^[18][19] The following year, historical cadres such as Nestor Veras, Itair José Veloso, and Hiran de Lima Pereira disappeared or were executed within state facilities. The party's organic structure and its clandestine press network (the newspaper Voz Operária) were completely dismantled, forcing the surviving leadership to transfer the central direction to exile in Europe.^[1][d]

It was also within the scope of this extermination operation against the PCB that the murders of two notable grassroots militants of the party occurred at the DOI-CODI facilities in São Paulo: the journalist Vladimir Herzog (October 1975) and the metalworker Manoel Fiel Filho (January 1976).^[18][19][23] The repercussion of these deaths in civil society, masked by the state as false suicides, generated an unprecedented institutional crisis within the Armed Forces and catalyzed international and internal pressure for the country's redemocratization.

It is during this period of extreme fragility of the traditional communist movement that the so-called "new unionism" began to emerge in the ABC Region of São Paulo. Adhering to strike practices of direct confrontation detached from classic party structures, this sector gradually isolated the unionists and bureaucratic leaders linked to the PCB, constituting the political embryo that would lead to the founding of the Workers' Party (PT) in 1980.

The enactment of the Amnesty Law in August 1979 allowed the return of exiled communist leaders and exposed the organic exhaustion of the PCB. The leadership nucleus that had operated in exile, strongly influenced by the Eurocommunist current then prevalent in Western Europe, had abandoned the perspective of revolutionary rupture. Led by Giocondo Dias and Armênio Guedes, the majority of the Central Committee began to advocate an institutional and gradual transition to socialism, prioritizing the consolidation of a broad front in alliance with the oppositionist bourgeoisie for the conquest of democracy.^[1]

This reformist turn clashed head-on with the organization's historical Secretary-General, Luís Carlos Prestes. Rejecting the gradualist transition led by the leadership, Prestes launched the "Letter to Communists" in March 1980. In this document, he publicly broke with the Central Committee, denouncing the leadership for right-wing deviations, for "backroom deals at the top", lack of internal democracy, and for failing to protect the cadres murdered during the repression. Prestes defended the formation of a bloc of anti-monopoly, anti-imperialist, and anti-landowner forces.^[1]

The clash dissolved the unity of democratic centralism. In May 1980, the Central Committee removed Prestes from the position of Secretary-General, formalizing Giocondo Dias as leader. Isolated within the party apparatus, Prestes officially left the PCB in January 1984.^[1]

With the beginning of the New Republic, the PCB regained its institutional legality, with its statute and program published in the Diário Oficial da União on May 8, 1985. The party supported the early years of the government of José Sarney and the economic plan of price freezing (Cruzado Plan) in 1986.^[1]

At the PCB's 8th Congress (1987), which elected Salomão Malina as president and Roberto Freire as vice-president, the party consolidated its theoretical shift: it declared that the maintenance and deepening of the Democratic Rule of Law were integral parts of the struggle for socialism "via mass democracy".^[1]

However, from a sociological and class representation perspective, the PCB had already lost its historical hegemony. The space in the trade union movement and among intellectuals was filled by the Workers' Party (PT), which absorbed the mass base that in the past belonged to the "Partidão", emptying the PCB's capacity for mobilization.

The collapse of the socialist countries in Eastern Europe and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 triggered a terminal crisis in the traditional structure of the PCB. Pressured by the unfavorable geopolitical situation, the majority group of the national leadership, headed by Roberto Freire, began to articulate the dissolution of the organization's communist identity.^[1]

The clash culminated in the party's 10th Extraordinary Congress, held in January 1992 in São Paulo. Freire's faction approved the formal extinction of the PCB, the abolition of the Marxist-Leninist organizational model, the abandonment of historical symbols (the hammer and sickle), and the creation of a new successor party: the Popular Socialist Party (PPS).^[24] Under the categories of Marxism and Leninist organizational theory, this institutional maneuver by the leadership is classified as liquidationism – the conscious dissolution of the revolutionary party apparatus. The decision provoked an immediate split. A minority faction of historical militants and leaders – including the architect Oscar Niemeyer and the writer Paulo Cavalcanti – contested the legitimacy of the dissolution. Arguing that the political heritage of communism could not be extinguished by decree, this group organized the "National Conference for the Reorganization of the PCB".^[1]

While the PPS inherited the electoral registration number 23 and the physical structure of the party, the communist faction held a new 10th Congress in March 1993, claiming the uninterrupted continuity of the "Partidão" and maintaining the acronym and classic symbols.^[24] The reconstructed Brazilian Communist Party (current electoral registration No. 21) only managed to regain its definitive registration with the Superior Electoral Court (TSE) in May 1996.^[1]

The first Congress of the PCB took place on March 25, 26, and 27, 1922, in the city of Niterói - RJ. At this founding meeting:

• Its first statute of the PCB (PC-SBIC) was approved;
• It established that the Political Line of the PCB (PC-SBIC) would be Marxism-Leninism;
• The PCB would follow the trend of the world communist movement, becoming the Brazilian section of the Communist International (PC-SBIC);
• It established the color red (flag) and the hammer and sickle as the symbol of the PC-SBIC;
• The first Central Executive Commission (CCE) was chosen: composed of ten members, constituted as follows: the full members Abílio de Nequete (secretary-general), Astrojildo Pereira (press and propaganda), Antônio Canellas (international secretary), Luís Peres (union fractions), and Cruz Júnior (treasurers); and the alternates, Cristiano Cordeiro, Rodolfo Coutinho, Antônio de Carvalho, Joaquim Barbosa, and Manuel.^[1]

The 2nd Congress of the PC-SBIC was held on May 16, 17, and 18, 1925.

• The newspaper A Classe Operária (central organ of the PCB) is created.^[1]

The 3rd Congress of the PC-SBIC took place in December 1928/January 1929.

The political line that guided the congress was debated, taking into account, in understanding the formation of Brazil, the following elements:

• imperialist domination;
• the agrarian economy;
• the land issue;
• the democratic-bourgeois revolution.^[1]

The first split in the PC-SBIC also occurs, the Trotskyist dissidence.

The 4th Congress of the PC-SBIC took place from November 7 to 11, 1954.^[1]

• The reorganization of the Communist Party after the blows suffered from Vargas's Estado Novo, which emerged from the Mantiqueira Conference in 1943, is carried out;
• It established a Socialist Program for Brazil;
• A new statute for the PC-SBIC was approved.^[1]

In 1956, under the impact of the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU), profound internal divergences were established, causing the party to lose a significant number of militants, leaders, and intellectuals. The "March Declaration" of 1958 is launched, in which the party begins to discuss the democratic question.^[1]

In September 1960, the PCB decided to institute a campaign for the conquest of legality, which led it, among other things, to adapt legally, changing its denomination from Communist Party of Brazil to Brazilian Communist Party, but maintaining the acronym PCB. It decided to abandon the 4th program and immediately approve another.

In this process, a group of dissidents formed within the Party in relation to the new adopted line, advocating for the maintenance of Stalinist orthodoxy, linked to Maoism. In 1962, this group was expelled for forming a faction, then building the PCdoB.

• Abílio de Nequete: 1922^[28]
• Astrojildo Pereira: 1924–1930^[29]
• Heitor Ferreira Lima: 1931–1932
• Fernando Paiva de Lacerda: 1932^[30]
• José Vilar: 1932^[31]
• Duvitiliano Ramos: 1932^[1]
• Domingos Brás: 1932^[32]
• Lauro Reginaldo da Rocha (Bangu):^[33]
• Antônio Maciel Bonfim (Miranda): ?^[34]
• Lauro Reginaldo da Rocha (Bangu): 1936–1943^[1]
• Luís Carlos Prestes: 1943–1980^[1]
• Giocondo Dias: 1980–1985^[1][g]

• Giocondo Dias: 1985–1987^[37]
• Salomão Malina: 1987–1991^[37]
• Roberto Freire: 1991–1992^[37]

• Jorge Amado (1951)^[38]
• Elisa Branco (1952)^[38]
• Oscar Niemeyer (1963)^[38]

• List of political parties in Brazil
• Politics of Brazil
• Marxism-Leninism

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• CHILCOTE, Ronald. O Partido Comunista Brasileiro: conflito e integração (1922–1972). Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 1982.
• DIÁRIO da guerrilha do Araguaia. São Paulo: Alfa-Ômega, 1979.
• DÓRIA, P. et al. A guerrilha do Araguaia. São Paulo: Alfa-Ômega, 1978.
• JOFFILY, Bernardo. O melhor aniversário para o PC do B. Questão de ordem, São Paulo, n. 114, March 15, 1999.
• LIMA, Haroldo. Itinerário de lutas do Partido Comunista do Brasil (PC do B) de 1922 a 1984. 3. ed. Salvador: * Editora Maria Quitéria, 1984.
• PARTIDO COMUNISTA DO BRASIL. A linha política revolucionária do Partido Comunista do Brasil. Lisboa: Maria da Fonte, 1974a.
• GÁRCIA, Marco Aurélio. Notas para uma história dos trabalhadores: contribuição à história da esquerda brasileira e outros escritos. São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo, 2019.

• "Acervo PCB" [PCB Collection]. www1.cedem.unesp.br., at the Center for Documentation and Memory of UNESP