Origins and Foundation
At the end of World War I, in 1918, Portugal fell into a serious economic crisis, in part due to the Portuguese military intervention in the war. The military involvement led to an abrupt rise in inflation and unemployment. The Portuguese working classes responded to the deterioration in their living standards with a vast wave of strikes. Supported by an emerging labour movement, the workers achieved some of their objectives, such as the historic victory of an eight-hour working day.
In September 1919, the working class movement founded the first Portuguese Labour Union Confederation, the General Confederation of Labour (CGT) that saw a steady increase to 100,000 members in few months. But the feeling of political powerlessness, due to the lack of a coherent political strategy among the Portuguese working class, plus the growing popularity of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917, led to the foundation of the Portuguese Maximalist Federation (FMP) in 1919. The goal of FMP was to promote socialist and revolutionary ideas and to organize and develop the worker movement. The FMP started publishing the weekly Bandeira Vermelha (Red Flag) which became a popular newspaper among the Portuguese working classes.
After some time, members of the FMP started to feel the need for a "revolutionary vanguard" among Portuguese workers. After several meetings at various Labor Union offices, and with the aid of the Comintern, this desire culminated in the foundation of the Portuguese Communist Party as the Portuguese Section of the Communist International (Comintern), in 6 March 1921. Soon after, the party's first youth organization, the Communist Youths (Portuguese: Juventudes Comunistas) was created.
Unlike virtually all other European Communist Parties, the PCP was not formed after a split of a Social Democratic or Socialist Party, but from the ranks of Anarcho-Syndicalism and revolutionary syndicalism. Both of these groups, at the time, were the most active factions of the Portuguese labor movement. The Party opened its first headquarters in the Arco do Marquês do Alegrete Street in Lisbon. In the same year, 1921, it also opened the Communist Centers of Porto, Évora and Beja. Seven months after its creation, the first issue of O Comunista (The Communist), the first newspaper of the party, was published.
The first congress of the party took place in Lisbon in November 1923, with Carlos Rates leading the party. The theses of the congress had previously been published in O Comunista and discussed by all the local organizations. The congress was attended by about a hundred members of the party and asserted its solidarity with Socialism in the Soviet Union and the need for a strong struggle for similar policies in Portugal; it also stated that a Fascist uprising in Portugal was a serious threat to the party and to the country.
Read more about this topic: History Of The Portuguese Communist Party
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