During his stay in Rio de Janeiro, Alan visited the national headquarters of the PCB (Brazilian Communist Party) for a three hour long discussion with the leadership of this party. In this discussion the Secretary General of the PCB, Ivan Pinheiro explained the struggle that his faction waged within the party since the end of the dictatorship to correct previous mistakes and build a truly communist party.

Ivan explained that this had been a struggle of several decades, first through the building of a minority in the Central Committee in the 1980s, then the battle with the liquidators who left the party to found a right-wing party (PPS) and finally today with a discussion within the party to clarify and correct its political line.

In this respect, he underlined the criticism of the past mistakes and errors of the party, like the attempt to seize power through an uprising in the barracks in 1935 and the mistaken appraisal on the part of the party when it said in 1964 that they were “almost” in power, two weeks before the military coup took place.

Ivan pointed out that the teachings of Marx and Lenin were misrepresented in the former USSR and that this was the cause of the failure of that experience. He also criticized the old “stage-ist” theories, as a symptom of reformism and explained that the struggle of the party today is for socialist revolution, uniting workers from the cities and countryside and drawing behind them other oppressed layers.

Alan explained the struggle of the International Marxist Tendency and the Brazilian Marxist Left (Equerda Marxista) against reformism within the PT. He recalled that the first task of every Communist, of every revolutionary is to have clear ideas and slogans. The second task is to find the workers where they are, and generally they are in the mass reformist organizations, and we need to orientate towards them, including participating in them, in order to help the workers to adopt a communist standpoint. He praised the PCBs in their search for political clarification, and the positive results achieved so far.

In the end, both agreed on the need to continue the political dialogue that is already developing with the Marxist Left and added that we will be together in the great battles which are coming. Both Alan and Ivan agreed that it is essential to fight for the victory of Chavez in the upcoming elections (2012), where the fate of the revolution which is taking place in Venezuela is at stake.