The Communist Party of Brazil (, PCdoB) is a political party in Brazil. The PCdoB officially adheres to Marxist–Leninist theory. It has national reach and deep penetration in the trade union and student movements, but little representation in elected positions.
PCdoB shares the disputed title of "oldest political party in Brazil" with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB). The predecessor of both parties was the Brazilian Section of the Communist International, founded on 25 March 1922. The current PCdoB was launched on 18 February 1962, in the aftermath of the Sino-Soviet split. Outlawed after the 1964 coup d'état, PCdoB supported the armed struggle against the regime before its legalization in 1988. Its most famous action in the period was the Araguaia guerrilla (1966–1974). Since 1989, PCdoB has been allied to the Workers' Party (PT) at the federal level, and, as such, it participated in the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration and joined the "With the strength of the people" coalition, which elected his successor, Dilma Rousseff. In 2018, the party again allied with PT and the candidacy of Fernando Haddad. Haddad's running mate was PCdoB member Manuela d'Ávila. In 2022 it joined the Brazil of Hope coalition with the PT and the Green Party.
PCdoB publishes the newspaper Working Class (Classe Operária) as well as the magazine Principles (Princípios), and is a member of the Foro de São Paulo. Its youth wing is the Union of the Socialist Youth (União da Juventude Socialista, UJS), launched in 1984, while its trade union wing is the Central of the Workers of Brazil (Central dos Trabalhadores e Trabalhadoras do Brasil, CTB), founded in 2007 as a dissidence from the Unified Workers' Central (Central Única dos Trabalhadores, CUT).
History
The Communist Party – Brazilian Section of the Communist International (Partido Comunista – Seção Brasileira da Internacional Comunista, PC-SBIC) was founded on 25 March 1922, gathering Brazilian Communists under the same label until the international rupture in the movement that occurred after the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) in 1956, and the 5th Congress of the PC-SBIC in 1960, when Brazilian Communists found themselves divided into two tendencies. At the 20th Congress of the CPSU, Nikita Khrushchev had delivered the so-called "Secret Speech", which denounced the abuses committed by the Soviet state under Joseph Stalin's rule. Khrushchev was considered a revisionist by supporters of the late Stalin, which led to a rupture in the Communist movement in various countries.
In Brazil, the rupture reached the party leadership, which had rebuilt PC-SBIC after the setbacks it suffered under the Estado Novo regime (1930–1945), which tried to pit workers against the party and violently repressed it. The party leadership prior to the rupture, primarily composed of revisionists, was formed in 1943 by João Amazonas, Maurício Grabois, Pedro Pomar, Diógenes Arruda Câmara, and Secretary General Luís Carlos Prestes, among others.
PC-SBIC (1922–1962) The PC-SBIC was ideologically grounded in the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, and in the actions of Vladimir Lenin in the aftermath of the October Revolution, advocating democratic centralism and Marxism–Leninism. It was launched on 25 March 1922 in Niterói, Rio de Janeiro, when members of the Brazilian working class took their first big step towards arranging themselves under a class organization; nine delegates, representing 50 workers, held a Congress and founded the PC-SBIC. On 4 April 1922, it was recognized as a political party by the federal government, with its manifesto being published in the Official Gazette. Following the international guidance, the party was given the name of Communist Party – Brazilian Section of the Communist International.
The nine delegates which attended the founding Congress of the PC-SBIC were Abílio de Nequete, a Lebanese Brazilian barber; Astrojildo Pereira, a journalist from Rio de Janeiro; Cristiano Cordeiro, an accountant from Recife; Hermogênio da Silva Fernandes, an electrician from Cruzeiro; João da Costa Pimenta, a linotype operator; Joaquim Barbosa, a tailor from Rio de Janeiro; José Elias da Silva, a shoemaker from Rio de Janeiro; Luís Peres, a broom seller from Rio de Janeiro; and Manuel Cendón, a Spanish-born tailor.