by Gabriel Martinez (Brazilian communist living in China)
Ivan Pinheiro, a Brazilian communist leader and former secretary-general of the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), recently published an article in which he expressed his concern about his party’s participation in meetings of the World Anti-imperialist Platform. In his words, Pinheiro fears that this participation “will drive us further and further away from the revolutionary camp of the communist parties”. I will not go into the internal contradictions that exist within the PCB – now exposed by its former secretary general – but I will make some comments on the position of Pinheiro and a significant portion of the international communist movement in relation to the conflict between Russia and Nato.
Contrary to what Pinheiro advocates, moving away from the revolutionary camp means, precisely, refusing to create an anti-imperialist bloc that openly condemns the siege and containment campaign promoted by US imperialism against Russia and China.
At the beginning of his article, Ivan Pinheiro seeks to assess the composition of the parties that participate in the Platform. According to him, these would be “organisations, including communist, social-democratic and nationalist parties, collectives and movements, some also recently established”. Pinheiro observes that few of the communist parties have “some connection with the international communist movement”. [1]
From this excerpt, it is possible to identify an interesting logic underlying Pinheiro’s argument. For him, the criterion for determining whether a party is part of the international communist movement is whether or not it participates in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties, an initiative initially convened by the Communist Party of Greece (KKE). In other words, for Pinheiro, communist parties that do not participate in this movement cannot be considered members of the international communist movement. An overly formalist conception of the “international communist movement”.
Pinheiro continues his argument revealing a question that he raised in debates within his party:
“There is a demand for an unavoidable collective debate for communists: what is imperialism today? And it can only be resolved successfully if preceded by another decisive debate: what has become of the so-called Chinese ‘market socialism’? Without it, we could not understand, as a collective, the war in Ukraine or Lula’s spectacular visit to China.” [2]
For a good understanding, it is clear what Pinheiro is trying to take forward with such questioning. Under the pretext of the need to analyse China and “market socialism”, Pinheiro seeks to covertly suggest that it is necessary to begin to characterise China as an imperialist country, like the communist parties with which the former secretary-general identifies himself (Communist Party of Mexico and Communist Party of Greece).
These parties began to characterise China as an imperialist country, based on the revisionist and reactionary theory created by the Communist Party of Greece of the so-called “imperialist pyramid”. Being a ‘left’ opportunist revision of the Leninist theory of imperialism, this theory advocates that the essential element of imperialism would no longer be the division of the world between a handful of oppressing countries and the oppressed countries, but rather that the world is organised in a kind of “pyramid”, where the difference between the various countries would be the role played by each country within that pyramid (strong and weak capitalism), however, all of them being imperialist.
In practice, what the Communist Party of Greece does by sponsoring the propagation of this type of reactionary theory is to divert the focus and attention of the communist and revolutionary parties from organising the fight against US and European imperialism, creating false polemics inside of the international communist movement, seeking to distance the parties from the decisive support of the remaining socialist countries, objectively strengthening the argument of the true imperialists who seek to sell the theory of the “new yellow peril” and condemning China’s supposed attempts to dominate the world.
In this sense, anyone who has closely followed the controversies that have been raging within the international communist movement for more than a decade knows that when Pinheiro raises this type of question (debating what has become of Chinese market socialism), his intention is not really to debate the problems and challenges posed to the construction of socialism in China, but rather to introduce within his organisation the idea that China is an imperialist country.
At another point in his article, Pinheiro discusses the nature of the war in Ukraine. Without going into the question in depth, Pinheiro repeats an excerpt from a note published by his party, which states that the war in Ukraine should be seen as a “divisional war” that “does not interest the workers”. I will not go into the merits of analysing the content of the PCB note, but rather the controversy that Pinheiro seeks to wage with an excerpt from one of the declarations of the World Anti-imperialist Platform, which correctly states that “Russia and China are not aggressive imperialist powers, on the contrary, they are the target of our enemies because they stand in the way of complete US global domination.” [3]
For Pinheiro, this would be a wrong decision, since “The form, the struggle against imperialism boils down to the form of its exercise and not to its nature, thus bringing the illusion that the peaceful side of the powers in dispute will never resort to the force of their weapons, except for their own defensive purposes or out of mere humanitarian solidarity with weaker countries.” [2]
The issue that may have gone unnoticed by Pinheiro is not the need to support one imperialism to fight another, but the fact that, contrary to what the neo-Trotskyists claim, Russia and China are not imperialist countries.
Obviously, the comrades of the parties that subscribe to the theses of the Communist Party of Greece will not be able to accept this statement. Pinheiro still finds time to argue, stating that the main contradiction in the world today is between “capital and labour” and not between the imperialist bloc led by Nato (the only existing imperialism in the world) and the “mass of suffering humanity” (classes exploited and oppressed of all countries), as defined by the Platform. [4]
How to resolve the contradiction between capital and labour without first seeking to defeat US imperialism and all its allies (main pillars of imperialist domination at a global level) is something that Pinheiro, evidently, does not seek to answer in his text. Instead of approaching the problem of the struggle against imperialism from a concrete analysis of reality, dealing with a fundamental problem that faces every revolutionary movement – namely, that an eventual military defeat of the western imperialist bloc would impose an important defeat to the capitalist system as a whole – Pinheiro prefers to resort to a formulation that does not concretely deal with the dilemmas faced by the working masses and cannot mobilise them in the fight against imperialism.
One last comment made by Ivan Pinheiro that deserves to be examined is his statement that the creation of the World Anti-imperialist Platform could end up resulting in the “division of the international communist movement”.
First of all, it is necessary to point out that the international communist movement, in practice, is already divided. The fact that not all the world’s communist parties participated in such a meeting proves this. Secondly, how can Pinheiro be concerned here with the “unity of the international communist movement” while he himself affirms in passages of his text to support a so-called “revolutionary camp” that operates within the scope of IMCWP?
Can some parties create parallel organisations, with their publications and specific meetings, while others cannot? Wasn’t that precisely what the KKE did when it decided to create the so-called European Communist Initiative and the International Communist Magazine? Why would there be a danger of “splitting” the IMCWP in one initiative and not in the other? Here again is something that Pinheiro’s article does not answer.
In conclusion, it is crucial to emphasise the importance of unity in the international communist movement. However, we face an increasing challenge in achieving this unity, as hegemonist and exclusivist currents gain ground. Furthermore, obtaining unity in the international communist movement also becomes quite complicated when theories and conceptions alien to Marxism-Leninism predominate, as is the case of the so-called ‘imperialist pyramid theory’.
Notes
[1] Contrary to what Ivan Pinheiro claims, most of the parties that participated in the meetings of the Platform also participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers’ Parties (the only international communist movement, in Pinheiro’s opinion). Examples: Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia, Socialist Workers Party of Croatia, Communist Party of Poland, Communist Party (Italy ), Italian Communist Party, New Communist Party of Yugoslavia, Russian Communist Workers Party, Party of Hungarian Workers, Communist Party (Switzerland), Italian Communist Party, Communist Party of the Peoples of Spain, Peruvian Communist Party, Communist Party of Brazil, Communist Party of Bolivia, Lebanese Communist Party, People’s Party of Panama, Communist Party of Argentina.
[2] ‘Still on the so-called Anti-Imperialist Platform’ by Ivan Pinheiro, 3 June 2023.
[3] Caracas International Conference, ‘La Marea Creciente Global De La Guerra’, March 2023: Caracas International Conference ‘The rising tide of global war’, March 2023.
[4] Seoul declaration: ‘The rising tide of global war in east Asia’, May 2023.
