Dear comrades:
The Brazilian Communist Party – PCB – welcomes the organizers and all participants of the Belgrade International Conference. We consider this initiative to be extremely successful, as it reinforces the importance for the communist and workers’ parties to have a better understanding of the phenomenon of imperialism, in all its complexity, so that communists can formulate adequate strategies and tactical actions with to better organize the anti- imperialist struggle.
Capitalism consolidated itself, throughout the 19th century, as the dominant mode of production on a world scale. With the accumulation of capital and the development of productive forces, stimulated by intercapitalist competition, the mass of wealth in the hands of the big companies expanded and the process of capital concentration took place, a process that, for Marx, is nothing more than the expanded reproduction of capital itself. The strong concentration of capital, the growing productive capacity of companies, due to technological innovations, the intensification of the class struggle, with the strengthening of the labor movement in Europe, provoked the imperative need to conquer territories that represented new consumer markets for industrialized products. At the same time, they characterized themselves as suppliers of raw materials and cheap or semi-slave labor.
As defined by Lenin in his work Imperialism, Higher Stage of Capitalism (1916), imperialism did not only involve a shared world, but a new articulation between science and the productive process, the increase of capital exports, a new correlation of forces between the working class of imperialist countries and their respective bourgeoisies, new relationships between financial capital and the State. According to Lenin, the fundamental traits of imperialism are:
1. The concentration of production and capital taken to such a high degree of development that it created monopolies.
2. The merger of banking capital with industrial capital and the creation, based on this financial capital, of the financial oligarchy.
3. The export of capital, which, unlike the export of merchandises, acquires a particularly great importance.
4. The formation of international monopoly associations of capitalists, who divide up the world among themselves.
5. The territorial division of the world between the most important capitalist powers.
Imperialism has been and is present in Latin America for a long time. The year 1823 is a milestone: in that year, US President James Monroe formulated and instituted a doctrine for the domination of Latin American countries that can be summarized in the phrase “America for the (Northern) Americans”. The doctrine, which bears his name, intended to reserve the continent for the exclusive service of US interests, excluding European countries that had colonized the region.
Its presence takes place through the action developed by the many transnational industrial companies of the United States (and of other countries of advanced capitalism), in the dispute for cultural hegemony, with the cinematographic and phonographic industries and other means. It also manifests itself directly, with the US military bases maintained for a in Panama long time, in armed interventions such as the attempted invasion of Cuba, in Playa Girón, in 1961, by the CIA, in the invasion of Granada , in 1983, and in the support for coups d’état and dictatorial governments, such as the 1964 military coup in Brazil, which started a dictatorship that lasted until 1985, in the coup against Socialist President Salvador Allende, in Chile in 1973, and in the support of the Pinochet dictatorship that followed.
There were also many similar actions, in the same period, in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay and other countries in the region, which experienced a cycle of dictatorships in the 60s, 70s and 80s.
The USA, through the CIA, conceived and participated in the Condor Operation, applied in the countries of the southern cone of South America to persecute, arrest and kill opponents of the existing dictatorial governments. The illegal and absurd economic blockade imposed by the US on Cuba since the early 1960s, even under the systematic condemnation of the United Nations, is another clear example of the imperialist policy towards the region.
Furthermore, US intelligence services trained spies and torturers at the Escuela de las Américas, in Panama, for a long period, and maintain operational bases in all countries, notably in Colombia and in Paraguay. More recently, in Brazil, these services were unmasked in their actions to obtain geological data from the Brazilian continental shelf for the purpose of oil exploration, and there are strong suspicions of their direct participation in the explosion that occurred at the Alcântara rocket launch base and in the articulation of the parliamentary coup that led to the impeachment of President Dilma, in 2016.
Brazilian foreign policy has always oscillated between an automatic alignment with the United States – as in the construction of the Alliance for Progress in the early 1960s – and a more independent and pragmatic posture, as in the breakup, in 1975, of the military agreement with the United States. United States, and in the recognition of the independence of Angola, governed by the MPLA, a national-liberation party influenced by Marxism, carried out by the Brazilian military government. In the early 2000s, during the Lula and Dilma governments, of the Workers’ Party, Brazil, without any break with the US, moved closer to Cuba and the progressive governments that were being formed in Latin America, such as those of Hugo Chaves, in Venezuela, Evo Morales, in Bolivia, and Rafael Correa, in Ecuador, who sought ways of greater independence from the United States – some, like Chávez, directly denouncing imperialist action – and implementing stronger social policies. It was also during this period that the BRICS was formed, bringing together Brazil, Russia, China, India and South Africa, an arrangement that comprises a set of common actions and investment agreements to finance the development of its members. At the international level, since 2013, China has been establishing partnerships for trade and investment in Latin American countries, within the framework of the Belt and Road Initiative, while forming a political and economic bloc with Russia that appears as an important counterpoint to US imperialism.
In the October 2022 elections, Bolsonaro’s proto-fascist government was defeated by a broad political coalition of democratic opposition led by former president Lula. The new government will normalize institutional-democratic-bourgeois life, removing fascists from the core of the State apparatus and adopting, to some degree, better policies in the social and environmental fields, with emphasis on measures to combat hunger. But, as it is a government of class conciliation, the liberal economic policy will be maintained, as well as the withdrawal of workers’ rights to favor big capital. The PCB will be mobilized and active in the fight against liberal policies and capitalism, for the repeal of the counter-reforms that removed workers’ rights, always pointing to the construction of Socialism.
On the external front, Brazil, without distancing itself from the United States, should realign itself with the new social-democratic/progressive governments in Latin America, such as those in Chile, Bolivia, Colombia, Peru, Argentina, Venezuela, Honduras, Nicaragua, will reconnect with Cuba, and will reassume the process of building the BRICS, which tends to contribute to the strengthening of multilateralism and to partially reduce the influence of the USA in the region.
For the PCB, the anti-imperialist struggle is essential and is combined with the anti-capitalist struggle, with the construction of Socialism as its horizon.
Finally, as we once again, welcome the promotion of this meeting, we expect to be able to contribute to the strengthening of this anti-imperialist articulation that now meets in Belgrade, and we present ourselves as partners in this internationalist struggle.
Long live proletarian internationalism!
Long live Socialism!
Down with imperialism!
