The stormy years of the 1960s shook the whole world. At the heart of the great mass struggles was the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) in China, which from the headquarters of the world proletarian revolution inspired and encouraged an avalanche of mass struggles around the world against imperialism. In Brazil, these storms were also expressed with the awakening of the masses after the military-civilian coup d'état of 1964. The Communist Party of Brazil, already reorganized, struggles to forge itself as an authentic revolutionary party of the proletariat, is close to Mao Tsetung Thought and the strategy of the People's War. The struggle for the correct assimilation of this ideology was the main problem that challenged him to take a great leap.

THE GREAT BATTLE AGAINST MODERN REVISIONISM

With the Chinese Letter and the Nine Commentaries1 that followed it, the International Communist Movement was seized by an unprecedented agitation, not least because now objectively the struggle opposed the USSR and People's China. The revisionist hosts found themselves immersed in a terrible ideological storm, which ruthlessly demolished their theoretical falsifications and exposed their coryphaeus, the renegade Khrushchev, his revisionist clique in the USSR and other courtiers around the world. The world reaction grew even more assailant, rejoicing frantically in anticipation of an imminent collapse of communism.

The cemented solidity of Mao Tse-tung's defense of Marxism-Leninism had revealed the whole deception of modern revisionism and established a new general line for the International Communist Movement and the Proletarian World Revolution. This colossal battle marks a new qualitative leap in the struggle of the international proletariat, moving on to a new stage in the development of its ideology, Mao Tsetung thought and its most innovative product, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in China (1966), becoming Maoism2. Revolutions have since demanded not only Marxist-Leninist communist parties, but Marxist-Leninist-Maoist communist parties.

Despite the great blow suffered by the Khrushchevite betrayal and the capitalist restoration in the USSR, with the GPCR communist parties are rebuilt all over the world, with redoubled spirits to prepare the strategic offensive of the Proletarian World Revolution. Guided by Mao Tsetung Thought, they broke with revisionism and reformism and began revolutionary armed struggles as a people's war in various parts of the world. This will be of great importance for the development of the International Communist Movement. In each country, corresponding to the depth of the rupture that was achieved with modern revisionism, different understandings of the fundamental aspects of Maoism (its synthesis) would greatly influence the revolutionary processes that would begin at the end of 1960.

To name the most important: the armed uprising of the peasants of the village of Naxalbari, in India, and the Maoist split giving rise to the CPI (ML) and the guerrilla of Charu Mazumdar (1967); the PCF and the New People's Army in the Philippines under José Maria Sison (1968); the TKP/ML and the Liberation Army of Workers and Peasants of Turkey of Ibrahin Kaypakkaya (1972); and the PCP and the People's Guerrilla Army in Peru of Abimael Guzmán, Chairman Gonzalo. These processes, despite all the twists and turns, continue with the unwinnable people's war, fighting and holding high the red flag of Marxism-Leninism-Maoism.

Unfortunately, the Great Debate, the great struggle between Marxism and modern revisionism, and the magisterial teachings of the ongoing GPCR did not have the proper dissemination, importance, study and assimilation within the Brazilian communist and revolutionary movement. Not only the large number of adherents that the petty-bourgeois revolutionary theories of influence of the Cuban revolution gained, but also the very insufficiencies manifested in the leadership of the party, revealed the poverty of the ideological-political struggle in the Brazilian revolutionary movement.

THE OLD PROBLEMS IN THE INTERNAL STRUGGLE AND THE IMPORTANCE OF CRITICISM OF THE SIXTH CONFERENCE

The struggle to assume Maoism will encounter great obstacles in the leadership of the PCdoB, with the disguised resistance of cadres of the Central Committee, which would only be revealed later, and by the very limitations of the revolutionary cadres in conducting the internal struggle, resulting in only a superficial and limited adherence to Mao Tsetung thought. Thus, contrary to what some propagate, the adhesion to Maoism by the PCdoB as a whole was no more than a formality and fashionable enthusiasm.

The main problem that hindered party building was dogmatism in the form of subjectivism. It is the problem of not starting from a mass line method to solve the problems of the revolution. This was the main strand that undermined the deepening of the ideological-political struggle, preventing by all means the vital internal struggle to develop a line corresponding to concrete reality, to more deeply extirpate opportunism from within the party, and to advance decisively towards Maoism.

In the preparation of the VI National Conference (1966), when the divergences manifested themselves, those who raised them found themselves obstructed in the debate. The criticism that the treatment of the question of the armed struggle was absurdly restricted to the leading organs had repercussions within the party, with the dissatisfaction of many cadres and militants with the bureaucratic conduct of the internal struggle by the Central Committee. To the point that the Conference's own base documents do not circulate between the state and regional conferences, being limited to the debate of a small number of delegates.

The limitations of the leadership of the Communist Party of Brazil were found in the very understanding of dialectics, which took it only as relative and conditional and not applicable to the party and its internal struggle. For Maoism, its correct understanding and application, translated into the two-line struggle and its correct handling as a method, is a key problem for constituting, developing and forging a true communist party. In other words, the communist party, like everything else, is a contradiction, it is a unity of opposites, in which, if unity is vital for the party, the struggle is the means to achieve it on an ever higher level and the very condition for an authentic communist party to develop through qualitative leaps.

Let us see how in the history of the Communist Party of China (founded in 1921), a correct understanding of Marxism-Leninism and the handling of the struggle of lines made it possible, as early as 1935, to defeat the adventurist opportunist lines that manifested themselves in it. And throughout the revolutionary process it was able, for a long time, to defeat the deviations of the right and the "left" that presented themselves along the way. In this way, the CPC was able to formulate and purify the ideological-political line of non-proletarian conceptions, integrating Marxism-Leninism into the Chinese reality, Mao Tse-tung thought. In this way, the masses were also able to gradually and leaps and bounds ideologically assimilate Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought and exercise power throughout the country.

The eclecticism of the resolutions of the Sixth National Conference (1966) expressed the survival of opportunism within the party. And, of course, this deviation will manifest itself in a particular and very serious way in the treatment of the internal contradictions of the party by the leadership. His conduct when the first manifestations of divergences appeared, after the reconstruction of 1962 (those that would lead to the formation of the PCR and the PCdoB-Ala Vermelha), is demonstrative of how sectarianism and administrative methods made a school in the Brazilian communist movement, constituting the source of the most serious damage to the revolution. It also shows how opportunism was still deeply rooted, to the point of blindly disregarding the question of the correct treatment of contradictions in the party, a problem so crucial to Maoism and emphasized to exhaustion by it.

Militants and cadres, many of whom had returned from training courses in the People's Republic of China, were confronted with the formulations then developed in the party. They will harshly criticize the impediment of the flow of ideas and the struggle of lines and the resistance to self-criticism in order to extirpate revisionism more deeply from within the party, in the ideological-political and organizational spheres, in order to advance decisively towards Maoism. However, given the intolerance of dissent on the part of the majority of the leadership, some of these cadres and militants broke with the party to form the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR). This group formulated more precisely the characterization of Brazilian society, stating that "the party of the proletariat is responsible for a correct analysis of the social classes in our country, to define the main contradiction and to specify where it manifests itself in a more acute way. From there, it must work out the revolutionary strategy, clearly define which are the friends and which enemies, and also which methods of struggle are appropriate to the strategy," that "the main contradiction that is manifesting itself in our homeland is that between U.S. imperialism and our people," and "where is the contradiction with U.S. imperialism and our people most acutely manifested? Our answer is Northeast"3.

On the other hand, the divergent cadres who accused the resolutions of the Sixth Conference of betraying the formulations of the Manifesto Program and demanded a deeper and more self-critical assessment of the history of the Brazilian communist movement, as an indispensable condition for the ideological-political weaknesses to be deeply extirpated, will persist more through internal struggle. They stated that "one cannot talk about studying and discussing the problems of the revolution with the united front, the construction of the party, the armed struggle, the agrarian question, revolutionary theory, practice, etc., without raising the need for the rectification of the methods of work and leadership"4.

They showed that despite the definition of the armed struggle as people's war, the debate and the tasks on the military question were restricted to the Executive Committee of the CC and its Military Commission, making the question, mistakenly, the subject of specialists and not of the entire party. They rightly maintained the need to broaden the debates on strategy and tactics to all militants, in order to raise the education and preparation of new cadres for the main task of the armed struggle. And that in such a struggle "one must not shy away from the thorny problems ... nor conceal and cover them up, nor refuse to speak of them," since self-criticism would serve to "know the cause of the mistakes of the past (including the present)" in order to "facilitate the joint effort for the reconstruction of the Party, the formation of the united front and the preparation of the armed struggle."

After clashes in several base and intermediate committees of the party, launching the two-line struggle and gaining adhesions of important cells, although restricted to a few states, the criticisms – essentially correct – of the cadres and militants who, already then called themselves the Red Wing of the party, were completely rejected by the majority of the leadership, which stigmatized its formulators as an "anti-party group", "saboteurs", and were soon expelled. These will later form the Communist Party of Brazil – Red Wing (PCdoB-AV).

THE MEANING AND IMPORTANCE OF THE RED WING

The criticisms undertaken by these cadres had already been systematized in the document Critique of the opportunism and subjectivism of the Union of Brazilians to rid the country of the crisis, the dictatorship and the neocolonialist threat. In a sharp criticism of the subjectivism in which the CC incurred in the analysis of reality, they denounce the opportunism of the derivations of this analysis. Contrasting the class analysis of the CC, which insisted on treating the "military dictatorship" as an isolated group in Brazilian society, being only puppets of Yankee imperialism, he will demonstrate that the military regime established with the coup had a relatively large social and political base in the country. That the coup was, on the one hand, the result of the need of Yankee imperialism, in the face of the new post-war conditions, to articulate the entire capitalist world in an integrated economic, political, cultural and military neocolonialist system, under its absolute control and command.

On the other hand, it was the objective contradictions between the internal classes in the country that determined the need to liberate the national productive forces, through the rupture of the latifundium structure and the domination of national and foreign monopolies. He pointed out that the "neocolonialist military dictatorship" was the armed counterrevolution in state power and that the armed forces played the role of "occupying troops" of Yankee "neocolonialism". As for the reactionary classes that constituted the "internal social support" of "Yankee neocolonialism", they would be composed of the classes: "landowners", the "import-export bourgeoisie", the "financial bourgeoisie" and the "integrated bourgeoisie". The latter would be a fraction of the Brazilian bourgeoisie that, by capitulating to the pressures of the foreign monopolies, had subordinately associated itself with them. There would also be the "non-integrated bourgeoisie", which is the national bourgeoisie, in addition to the existence of a medium and petty bourgeoisie.

Here one can see a more correct class analysis. In it, corresponding to the theoretical framework of Maoism, we would call the "import-export bourgeoisie" and "financial bourgeoisie" the comprador fraction of the Brazilian big bourgeoisie, the bureaucratic fraction of the same Brazilian big bourgeoisie as "integrated bourgeoisie", and the genuine national bourgeoisie as "non-integrated bourgeoisie".



As for the revolutionary camp, the Critique of opportunism and subjectivism... makes a detailed analysis of the classes oppressed by "neocolonialism", verifying, according to their function in the productive process, their main characteristics and tendencies of behavior in the class struggle. This camp would be composed of the proletariat and the peasantry, as the fundamental classes of the current stage of the revolution, the petty bourgeoisie, the semi-proletariat and the "non-integrated bourgeoisie" or national bourgeoisie. It highlights the leading role of the proletariat through the communist party and the peasantry as a reliable ally and "main contingent" of the revolution. He concluded, therefore, that the main contradiction was that between "neocolonialism and its internal social support on the one hand and the great majority of the nation on the other". The critique document points to the incorrect handling of dialectical materialism, the application of the law of contradiction to Brazilian reality as the basis of the leadership's errors. And that this error would result in the incorrect apprehension of the fundamental contradictions of Brazilian society, its main contradiction, the composition of the revolutionary and counterrevolutionary camps, as well as the strategic inaccuracies and the right-wing tactic of the "patriotic front" tactic. It also clarified that a policy of patriotic front would only be justified and would be the correct tactic in a reality in which the country was attacked and invaded by the military forces of imperialism.

The document Critique of Opportunism and Subjectivism... thus represented an invaluable contribution to the debate on the Brazilian revolution by carrying out a detailed analysis of classes based on a correct handling of the law of contradiction. It is a deep and forceful criticism of the opportunism and subjectivism that permeated the conceptions of the "old CC" and a reasoned clarification of the main problems of the Brazilian revolution. It also highlighted, for the formation of the revolutionary united front, the need to establish the worker-peasant alliance through the people's war in the struggle for land and as a condition and premise to expand the front to the other classes of the revolutionary camp, ensuring the hegemony of the proletariat in it, as well as its path from the countryside to the city.

However, the main defects of the Critique of Opportunism and Subjectivism . . . lie in its tactical definition in which it considers the outbreak of armed struggle as the main question, without taking into account that, according to the conception of the people's war, the revolutionary political work of the masses of the Communist Party is indispensable as its connection with them. This error led to another, when he defined the application of the "people's war" in the Brazilian reality, pointing out as one of the ways of its unleashing the creation of the "focus". This form, given the conditions of the counterrevolution of the time, was chosen as the only one possible to be applied in the country, considering, therefore, that it was not possible to carry out mass political work in an unarmed way. Later (November 1969), already as the Communist Party of Brazil – Red Wing, in the document The 16 Points, it will make a self-criticism of this position, advocating the need to develop mass political work in non-armed forms as a preparation for the outbreak of the people's war. However, starting from the fact that the main task of the Communists was to start the people's war, and considering that there had never been a real communist party in the country, it was concluded that it could only be formed in the course of the people's war. Here too there is a very serious error, as it violated Marxism-Leninism and especially Maoism about the necessity and primacy of the communist party as an absolute condition for the leadership of the revolutionary war and the conduct of the revolution. It actually falls into Guevarist criteria that the most important thing is to start the armed struggle and that the party would come in its course.

It turns out that these criteria greatly influenced his formulations that considered the countryside as the main scene of the people's war, simply because it represents tactically the weakest terrain for the enemy and the most favorable for the revolution. This is when the principality of the countryside and its condition as the main scenario of the people's war derive from the objective laws of economic and social development, which determined greater development in the large urban centers of the southeast of the country and the backwardness of the countryside. Hence the need to free the productive forces of the countryside from semi-feudal backwardness, via agrarian revolution, implying the worker-peasant alliance for the destruction of the latifundia and the handing over of the land to the poor peasants without land or with little land, and peasant war as a means, under the leadership of the proletariat through the communist party. In addition to the need to destroy the most archaic bases of society, in which the countryside is the preserve of the bourgeoisie, thus being a strategic problem of the revolution, in addition to being from the tactical point of view more favorable to it. For only in this way is it possible to build the strategic worker-peasant alliance, developing the people's guerrilla army as an armed force of the proletariat and the building of the New Power in the countryside with the bases of support, decisive for the sustenance, expansion and triumph of the people's war and the revolution.

Finally, therein lay the problem of understanding that in the new-democratic revolution the main contradiction of its entire first phase is that which opposes the poor peasants and the landlords, and expresses itself as a contradiction between the poor masses of the countryside against the old and rotten state of the big bourgeois and landlords who serve imperialism.

Once the political and military preparations for a correct unleashing of the people's war have been defined, the PCdoB-AV will still suffer the influence of militarism in its ranks, having to purify itself. Despite his understanding of the importance and significance of the GPCR, he did not consolidate his ideology based on Maoism, he did not succeed in carrying out the unleashing of the people's war. Later, in the 1970s, in a process of "rectification", he revised his analysis of Brazilian society, moving away from the theoretical basis of Maoism, which would derive, among other erroneous conceptions, from that of a "tactical party", frontism with currents of opportunism, such as Trotskyism. However, as we will resume later, in its internal struggle the fundamental principles of Marxism-Leninism prevailed, remaining as a communist party in hiding, already with the name of Red Wing Communist Party – PCAV.

THE EMERGENCE AND FATE OF THE PCR

The fraction that gave rise to the Revolutionary Communist Party (PCR), headed by Amaro Luis Carvalho (Capivara) and Manoel Lisboa, had different and contradictory formulations with those of the document of the CC of the PCdoB, on the class analysis of Brazilian society, on the fundamental and main contradictions, as well as on strategy and tactics. As expressed in the 1966 document Letter of 12 points to revolutionary communists, Amaro Luis Carvalho and Manoel Lisboa distinguished between the big bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie (middle bourgeoisie), considering the latter the only fraction of the bourgeoisie that was part of the Brazilian people and the revolutionary camp in the stage of the anti-imperialist democratic revolution. It characterized the state as an instrument of the big bourgeois and landowners at the service of Yankee imperialism and the need for the policy of the proletariat, in order to carry out the anti-imperialist democratic revolution, to destroy it and replace it with the state of the revolutionary classes, under the hegemony of the proletariat. The document further stated that, as for the construction of the revolutionary united front, it was necessary for the communist party to develop the worker-peasant alliance through the armed struggle for the possession of land for the poor peasants and as a condition for extending the front to other classes, particularly in relation to the national bourgeoisie, thus ensuring the hegemony of the proletariat in it.

As mentioned before, he pointed out that the main contradiction of Brazilian society was the one that opposed the immense majority of the nation to imperialism, mainly Yankee, and that the Northeast region was where this contradiction manifested itself most acutely, hence its backwardness. There he made an important synthesis of the Brazilian reality, in which he stated that, considering the whole country, the large metropolises and more developed areas of the Southeast were cities and the rest of the country was countryside; and considering only the Northeast, its metropolises on the coast were cities and the rest countryside. And that due to the historical process, the Northeast, with a mostly peasant population, brought together the peasant masses with greater experience of struggle and organization. Hence it was from which the party of the proletariat should concentrate its main force and make it the centre of gravity of the unleashing of the revolutionary process, of the people's war, and develop it along the path of encircling the towns from the countryside.

The 12-Point Charter... it brought enormous contributions, despite lacking the most solid understanding of the new-type character of the democratic revolution, as a revolution of new democracy uninterrupted to socialism, on the character of the bourgeois restoration in the USSR and its implications for the world revolution, failing to point out the new regime as social-imperialism and the singular importance of the GPCR. Despite developing important mass work in the Northeast, particularly in the sugarcane zone, formulating analyses and syntheses on the uninterrupted anti-imperialist democratic revolution to socialism in Brazil and on lines for mass work, building the people's army, organizing a popular information service, finance and logistical support, the PCR will not be able to deepen its formulation as a unit. nor to advance in the application of the defined conceptions, isolating itself from the masses and having its leadership fall under the siege of the police repression of the military regime. After the death of its main leading cadres, Manoel Lisboa, Emmanuel Bezerra and Amaro Luiz de Carvalho, the next leadership abandoned the revolutionary proletarian conceptions that had been formulated, capitulating to the people's war, and liquidating itself by adhering to revisionist and national-reformist conceptions.

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By formulating the set of problems in contradiction with the conceptions of the document of the leadership of the Sixth Conference, these factions provided important theoretical and political elements for the two-line struggle in the party, which if it were implemented, applied according to the teachings of Maoism, making it possible to enrich the ideological struggle in the party would, without a doubt, have already taken at that time to the most correct line for the Brazilian revolution. The lack of space in the party for this struggle to be developed, the dogmatic and sectarian way of the leadership in dealing with contradictions, led to the rupture of these fractions. This method of administrative leadership typical of revisionism, which revealed ignorance precisely in one of the decisive contributions of Maoism to Marxism-Leninism, which is the method of the two-line struggle, imposed the dispersion and fragmentation among a group of important cadres formed by the revolutionary process, who had broken with revisionism and were all close to Maoism. at the time called Mao Tsetung thought.

It is palpable how enriching it would have been if the struggle of lines had been waged instead of the prevalence of the petty-bourgeois administrative and formal style and method of conducting struggles and disagreements within the party. This was certainly a gigantic damage to the process of building the Communist Party of Brazil, to its forge in the struggle against revisionism and to the Brazilian revolution. The fact that the two-line struggle was not fully and correctly waged meant a great delay and represented an important trump card for reaction, imperialism and revisionism, at a unique moment in our country and in the International Communist Movement, as were the 1960s and 1970s.

What became known as the Chinese Charter was the document "Propositions on the General Line of the International Communist Movement" of the CPC Central Committee, which was published in June 1963 and which followed the CPSU's response in July 1964 and was followed by the publication of the "Nine Commentaries" with which the CPC dwelt on nine themes and problems of the ICM and the proletarian revolution. Very rich documents that, together with the Chinese Charter, constituted the most important systematization and development of the revolutionary theory of Marxism-Leninism of the time. The problems dealt with there will be further developed and confirmed by the GRCP (1966). The Nine Commentaries are:

1) The origin and development of the differences between the leadership of the CPSU and us; 2) On the Stalin question; 3) Is Yugoslavia a socialist country?; 4) Apologists for neocolonialism; 5) Two different lines on the problem of war and peace; 6) Two diametrically opposed policies of Peaceful Coexistence; 7) The leaders of the CPSU are the greatest splitters of our time; 8) The Proletarian Revolution and Khrushchev's revisionism; and 9) About Khrushchev's false Communism and its historical lessons that it gives to the world.

2 – In the Communist Party of China and other parties called ML in the late 1960s there was already talk of Maoism. However, this will be conceived, grounded and synthesized as the third, new and higher stage of development of Marxism, only in the final 1970s, byGonzalo thought, in the ongoing Peruvian revolution with the unleashing of the people's war.