The spectacular and successful kidnapping of the American Ambassador in Brazil last year, and his exchange for 15 political prisoners, drew world attention to the increasing struggle of the Brazilian people against the ruling military junta and US imperialism. The students have been playing an important role in this struggle, and it is no accident that the ur ban guerrilla movement forced the dictatorship to liberate, among the 15, the three main leaders of the National Union of Students: Luis Travassos, Jose Dirceu, Vladimir Palmeira (who were arrested over a year ago), and three local student leaders, including a girl, Maria Augusta Carneiro.
STUDENT MOVEMENT The Brazilian student movement has been one of the most consistent and active enemies of the military regime over the last five years. The army putsch of April 1964, the self-styled "Redeeming Revolution" overthrew the elected Presi dent (Goulart) and violently crushed the dents)-which has a large tradition of progressive and anti-imperialist struggles -burned down its building and arrested its leaders. Student demonstrations against the military coup took place in the main cities of the country and were bloodily suppressed by the new junta:
two students were killed by the Army in a popular demonstration in Recife, and in Rio one student was killed and seventy wounded by the Air Force Police: it was the beginning of a war without truce between the top brass and the student movement in Brazil.
1964 PUTSCH AND REFORMISM The military takeover, which of course received the immediate blessings of US imperialism (the US Ambassador, Lincoln Gordon, played an important role in the preparation of the putsch) and of the big landowners, was also supported by the bourgeois parties and by the so-called "Association of the Productive Classes" (Brazilian CBI), the official organisation of the Brazilian bourgeoisie.
The "Holy Alliance" which was formed in support of the coup, showed once more that in the face of a popular move ment (represented in March 1964 by the workers, students, sailors and soldiers in rebellion in Rio) all the segments of the ruling class unite themselves with the local militarists and with imperialism. It showed also the complete irrelevance of rastran Condonist Party (POB): unit ted front with the national bourgeoisie against the feudal landowners and US monopolies", subordinating the class struggle ("secondary contradiction"') to this 'nationalist and democratic front"
which can of course triumph by the "peaceful road". The "national" bourgeoisie knew better than the reformist left where to look for the "main contradiction" ... The 1964 putsch revealed the basic socio-economic homogeneity of the ruling classes in Brazil and their complete integration with imperialist capital. "The local bourgeoisies have lost all capacity of opposition to imperialism -if they ever had any and form only its bandwagon" (Che Guevara, Message to the Tricontinental).
STUDENTS GO UNDERGROUND As a response to government repression, the UNE reorganised itself and went underground; the dictatorship's attempt to create new "moderate" and "legal"
student unions failed entirely; in 1965 the UNE clandestinely organised its 27th congress and successfully boycotted the 'official" and "legal" unions created by the government.
At this period there began among the left in general and the student movement in particular a long political debate on the lessons which should be drawn from the April 1964 coup. The leadership of the Communist Party did not change its orientation. On the contrary its secretary, Luis Carlos Prestes, declared in 1966: "It is foolish to think that the dietatorship can fall by the assault of the nasses; the spontaneous breakdown of It man mat nachablan Some of the political prisoners released from Brazil's prisons in exchange for Elbrick Front" for "redemocratisation", under the leadership of well-known bourgeois politicians like Carlos Lacerda, Juscenno Kubitschek, etc. But inside the Party a growing number of militants and even some leaders began to oppose this line: at the end of 1966 Carlos Mariguella, one of the best-known leaders of the Party, resigned from the Central Committee and denounced in an open letter "the capitulations and the policy of tail. ing the bourgeoisie". At the same time, the left-Christian party (AP-"Acao Popular": "Popular Action") which was powerful in the student movement became radicalised and moved closer to a Marxist position.
REVOLUTIONARY LEFT Finally, the revolutionary Marxist organisation Politics", founded in 1960) began to have "Politica Operaria". (Workers' a decisive influence on the student vanguard, putting forward the following thesis: (a) the capitalist (and not "feudal") character of the Brazilian agriculture and the intimate economical, financial, social and political unity between latifundium owners and industrialists;
(b) the growing integration of the "national industry with imperialist capital, with the progressive transformation of the Brazilian capitalists to minor associates of the US monopolies;
(c) the class character of the Brazilian State and the capitalist character of the present military dictatorship;
(d) the organic relation between. class struggle and anti-imperialist struggle in Brazil;
(e) the armed struggle as the necessary road of the Brazilian revolution, and the socialist character of this revolution.
The influence of the revolutionary lef ras felt during the 28th Congress oi UNE (clandestinely assembled in the vaults of a Franciscan church in 1966)
which planned the first mass demonstrations against the regime in Recife, Belo Horizonte, Brasilia, Rio de Janeiro and S. Paulo; it became oredominant at the 9th Congress (1967), where the reformists were eliminated from the leadership of the UNE and a truly revolutionary strategy was adopted: "to integrate the UNE in the workers' struggle for a revolutionary change of our society"
CP BOYCOTTS OLAS The radicalisation of the student movement and the internal crisis of the PCB reached boiling-point in 1967-68; Prestes and the leadership of the PCB boycotted the OLAS meeting (Latin America Solidarity Organisation) in Havana and expelled Mariguella for taking part in this continental revolutionary congress; thousands of militants and a group of leaders left the Party and new revolutionary organisations emerged: the Revolutionary Brazilian Communist Party, the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard, the National Liberation Action, the Workers' Communist Party, the 8th October Revolutionary Movement, etc. All these groups supported the Cuban Revolution and OLAS and advocated a strategy of armed struggle including guerrilla warfare. The highest degree of political clarification was achieved by the Workers' Communist Party (POC), founded in 1967 by the fusion between "Politica Operaria ("Workers' Politics") and the "Leninist Dissidents" of the PCB. The POC proclaims clearly the socialist character of the Brazilian revolution, and the decisive role of the urban proletariat; its strategy is one of prolonged revolutionOn 19 March 1968, after a peaceful demonstration of students in Río de Janeiro (against a price-rise in the university refectories) the police fired on unarmed youths, killing the student Edson Souto (18 years old). The people reacted with unanimous indignation to this police provocation; in Rio tens of thousands of students and workers demonstrated in he streets, carrying pictures of Che Gue torship". During the month of April, vio- vara and shouting Down with the dict: lent student and popular demonstrations broke out in the main cities; for the first time, the students answered them in their own language and used weapons and Molotov cocktails against the police. In Rio the police forces could no longer contain the rebellion and the army was mobilised with its tanks to "re-establish order". Temporarily suppressed, the movement burst out again in June, stimulated by the French May events; on 26 June 100,000 people demonstrated in Rio against the dictatorship, with the trade unions, associations of "favelas participation of student organisations, (slums), writers, artists and intellectuals. In S. Paulo the students occupied the University and raised barricades in front of the Faculty of Philosophy; in Brasilia the American Embassy was attacked and sacked.
The brutal repression of the military police and the army once more saved the dictatorship: the wave of student and popular revolt menaced the power of the gorillas" but could not break it. Th ber, in order to discuss new forms of ac- UNE decided to call its congress in Octo tion. The Congress (30th) met at a farm not far from S. Paulo, but was discovered by the police who arrested all its 750 delegates (including more than 200 girls). Student demonstrations throughout the country, supported by the population.
forced the government to liberate the majority, but the leaders of the UNE were kept in prison, including the forme President, Luis Travassos, and the famous student leader of Rio, Vladimir Palmeira (the son of a senator from the overnment party...)
A balance of the activities of the UN!
in the last four years shows that the student organisation managed to a large ex tent to fulfil its two main and comple mentary tasks: mobilising the mass of students in the struggle for its own demands free education, democratisation of the University, etc.) and at the same time integrating it in the struggle of the workers against the oligarchic-bourgeois dictatorship and imperialism.
It should be stressed that the action of the students is not isolated: it is part of a process of radicalisation which reflects itself on different levels. First of all, the struggle of the working class against the wage-freeze imposed by the government of Marshall Costa e Silva: the strikes followed by occupation of factories in Belo Horizonte (April 1968) and Osasco (July 1968), the setting-up of clandestine shop committees, the demonstrations of 1st May in S. Paulo, Belo Horizonte and Rio de Janeiro, etc. On the other side, the appearance and development of daring actions of "urban guerrillas": attacks with dynamite against military barracks, police posts, Yankee plants, expropria ions of banks, etc. In June 1968, the General Carvalho Lisboa, commanding officer of the Second Army Corps (based in S. Paulo), threw a public challenge to the leftist guerrillas: Attack from be: the barracks of the Second Army Corps. blowing it into pieces... Another action of the revolutionary commandos which had wide repercussions was the liquidation of a Yankee officer, Charles Chandler, specialist in "counter-insurgency" war criminal from Vietnam and a personal friend of General Westmoreland, in October 1968. And finally, in September 1969, the most brilliant and successful yet: the kidnapping of the US Ambassador.
The government's answer to the students' and workers' "unrest" was the traditional one of military dictatorships from Athens to Madrid: arresting, killing and torturing the militants. Reports from the Brazilian underground press (the public one is completely censored) give a detailed description of the monstrous treatment of political prisoners incarcerated in Brazilian dungeons. Here are a few recent examples: 1. The priests Tolpes and Antonio Soligo, the physician Celerino and the trade union leader Ibrahim (who is among the 15 now freed) were tortured with electrical shocks in their sexual organs. The priest Tolpes witnessed such tortures in numerous other prisoners. 2. In Belo Horizonte, Imaculada Conceicao de Oliveiro, a trade union official, was tortured and aborted in prison. Her brother, also arrested and probably tor tured, committed suicide. 3. In the state of Minas Gerais, the worker Jorge Nahas was killed in prison by the police; his wife, Maria Jose, was violated by soldiers and common prisoners who cut her body with a razor blade. 4. The student Marcos Vinicius dos Santos, 19 years old, was arrested with all his family, including his grandmother He is still being tortured, and his girl friend Ana Maria is now in hospital with kidney wounds provoked by brutal beat5. A medical student of Minas Gerais, Angelo Pezzuti, was arrested with his brother Murilo, a schoolboy, and his mother. To obtain a "confession" from him, the police had the mother beaten and violated in his presence, and the young brother blinded This and other crimes of the dictatorship-like the incredible mass murder of *Service for tine fires of th of she led "Service for ians" and the recent murder of Comrade Mariguella (see Black Dwarf No. 26)will be duly punished by revolutionary justice.
INTERNATIONALISM!
In Brazil, as in Latin America in general, the student struggles are an essential part of the people's fight against American imperialism, the "gorillas" and the bour geois-oligarchic regimes. The historical experience of the military take-over of April 1964 and of five years of hard and bloody struggle against the dictatorship, eliminated from the vanguard of the student movement the reformist illusions on on the "dialogue" with the authorities, on the "peaceful road", on the alliance with the pseudo "progressive bourgeoisie". Its perspective is not that of a vague and improbable bourgeois "redemocrati formation of Brazilian society. On the sation' , but of the revolutionary trans other hand, the student vanguard knew how to avoid the ideological temptations which could sterilise the movement:
either by dismissing it as a "petty bourgeois phenomenon which has no revolutionary meaning and implications, or, on the contrary, to consider the students the "true" revolutionary vanguard which has to substitute itself for a working class class supposedly condemned to reformism. It knew also how to unite the speci fic student struggles with the genera.
workers' struggle against exploitation and the dictatorship, thereby creating the conditions for a workers-studentspeasants alliance, the social basis of the future Brazilian revolution The gorillas arrested and tortured student and worker militants; but they cannot arrest or contain the immense revolt of the Brazilian youth and the Brazilian people against the "Old Regime" th regime of exploitation and obscurantisn of the Marshalls and Generals, bankers
In the summer of 1938, Andre Breton, the founder and leader of the surrealist movement, went to Mexico and met the painter Diego Rivera, and Trotsky. Together they composed this Manifesto although Trotsky did not actually sign it. It was written at a time of great despair for the left in Europe. The Spanish War was ending in defeat and a world war was about to begin, and this is reflected in some of the paragraphs. But they tackled the problem of the artist's role head on, and the ManiWe can say without exaggeration that never has civilization been menaced so seriously as today. Vandals, with instruments which were barbarous, and so comparatively ineffective, blotted out the culture of antiquity in one corner of Europe. destiny, reeling under the blows of reactionary forces we see world civilization, united in armed with the entire arsenal of modern technology. We are by no means thinking only of the world war position of art and science has become absolutely that draws near. Even in times of 'peace' intolerable. Insofar as it originates with an individual, insofar as it brings into play subjective something which brings about an objective enriching of culture, any philosophical, sociological, scientific or artistic discovery seems to be the fruit of a precious chance, that is to say, the manifestation, more creations cannot be slighted, whether from the stand- less spontaneous, of necessity.
general knowledge (which interprets the Testo has enormous relevance for us today It goes to the extreme of saying that fron the very beginning, the revolution must "set up and assure an anarchist regime of individual freedom". statement for Trotsky to support and it is perhaps not surprising that he did not put his name to it. But in a letter written to Breton not long afterwards, Trotsky went on to declare that: the proletarian to aspire to a better world, every The sentiment of nobility and even of human dignity.
young Marx worked out is worth recalling. its But today historic writer,' he declared, 'naturally must make money any circumstances live and write in order to make in order to live and write, but he should not under money.... The writer by no means looks on his work as a means. the little a means in the eyes of himself and of others that if necessary he sacrifices his existence to the existence of his work. ... The first condition of the freedom of the press is that it is not a business talents to create ВОЗЬМЕМ. -% Such This does seem an extraordinary Clive Goodwin "The the revolution.
It is an end in itself and so collapse. organizations which of convulsive reaction and return to savagery cannot fail to be revolutionary by its very spirit, for it can no longer seek a solution in an intolerable social asphyxiation. But art in its entirety and each artist in particular must seek this solution by individual means, without waiting for some external order, without tolerating it, rejecting it and covering with scorn all those who submit to it." political indifference, and that it is far from our wish to revive a so-called 'pure' art which generally serves the extremely impure ends of reaction. No, our conception of the role of art is too high to refuse it an influence on the fate of society. We believe that the supreme task of art in our epoch is to take part actively and consciously in the preparation of But the artist cannot serve the struggle for freedom unless he subjectively assimilates its social content, unless he feels in his very nerves its meaning and drama and freely seeks to give his own inner world incarnation in his art.
In the present period of the death agony of democratic as well as fascist, the artist sees himself threatened with the loss of his right to communication choked with the débris of capitalist live and continue working. He sees all avenues of Only naturally, he turns to the Stalinist hold out the possibility of escaping from his isolation. But if he is to avoid because of the impossibility of delivering his own complete demoralization, he cannot remain there,
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"truly independent creation in our period The conception of the writer's function which the