Public session on "An effective cultural democracy" - Jerónimo de Sousa Intervention


Lisbon, May 18, 2011








We are waging an electoral battle that takes in the context of the serious crisis in which the country finds itself redoubled and particular importance.
An electoral battle held a lot of pressure and blackmail on board the Portuguese and at a time when the country is faced with the real threat of seeing amputated their right to sovereignly decide about their own future.


A situation created as a result of an unspeakable act of submission of those who have assumed the greatest responsibility in the country to deliver the IMF and its European Union partners to national policy for the coming years, based on a pact whose nature and content It has dramatic consequences for the country's future and for the life of the Portuguese.


A pact with very negative impacts in all areas of our collective life, the rights of workers living conditions of the population; fiscal policy to social policies; Central Administration reordering the reorganization of local and regional authorities and their role in development policies; the financial system, the major beneficiary of this submission pact assumed by PS, PSD and CDS management and disposal of public assets business, regional and local; policies for the health education and culture.
A real program imposed from outside government and the troika of right-wing political parties take on as their own, while competing with each other for leadership of their application.


A program that not only deepens the latest drastic austerity policies of the PEC, as is a qualitative leap in the political offensive striking the rights and interests of the people and the country.
It is now indisputable that we find ourselves on the brink of disaster to which we were led by a policy that for nearly 35 years turns his back to the Portuguese Constitution.


The CRP is a legal and policy legitimized and enshrined the Portuguese Revolution platform.


It contained a draft democratic society pointed to socialism. Although disfigured by successive revisions, the Constitution keeps track of the project and above all does not stop before can host what constitutes the fundamental proposal for the current stage we do to Portuguese, to an advanced democracy, political democracy that is not only representative because it is also participatory and, on the other hand, it is not only political, but also economic, social and cultural.


The COR therefore welcomes the idea that there are rights that are not strictly political and individual, but also rights that are both individual and collective and that, to be effectively exercised, involve the active protection of the state by carrying out certain policies and decision of positive discrimination in favor of the holders of these rights, which are most disadvantaged.


This is the case of social and cultural rights, the right to health, social security, education and culture.


This means that workers are entitled to education and culture as individuals, socially determined.


The fact that they are workers that makes them worthy of positive discrimination in order to exercise, for example, their right to culture.


On the other hand, the right to education and culture is both a right of Portuguese workers and their implementation is a must, a democratic duty and sovereignty of the Portuguese state.


One of scandals about the aggression and interference by the troika of the IMF / ECB / EU is unbearable claim to force a revision of the Constitution. How do these people arrogates to itself the right to issue guidelines have not been elected by the Portuguese and in the absence of constituent powers.


The submission pact that would impose the Portuguese people is not only an attack on our sovereignty, but barely conceals the bias in favor of big business and against workers' rights.


So we have said that a clean break with this right-wing policies and the formation of a patriotic government and leftist is required.


Patriotic, because it refuses to be complicit with the submission pact imposed by foreign and Troika agreed by the troika said "national" (PS, PSD and CDS). Because comprises national sovereignty as one aspect of the sovereignty of the workers.


And left because, faithful to April and our party status of Portuguese workers, we project for our present and our future, the idea of ​​the revolutionary emancipation of the workers passing by the struggle for an advanced democracy, conceived as a Democracy simultaneously political, economic, social and cultural, combined with national sovereignty.


It is this conception that underlies our discourse on culture and it allows us to understand that this is not a mere propaganda speech or florida tactical maneuver.


This design is for us a strategic nature. Is linked to the very heart of our identity when we defend the right of the Portuguese people to culture, when we say that the satisfaction of this right requires the state consequently pursue a policy of effective democratization of culture our voice is the voice of hundreds of thousands of workers Portuguese whom that right has historically been refused.


This is an old demand of the labor Portuguese and worldwide movement, which is born of the historical experience of our lives, the awareness that we have the essential role of scientific knowledge and artistic creation for the humanization of life.


When during the struggle itself met with concrete examples of science's intervention in human development and the creation of art forms to see, feel and imagine the world, we passed a realization of the need to affirm an objective of struggle.


In the concrete situation in which we find ourselves, refusing in practice the right to education and culture prevents many young people from the working classes to reach the higher levels of education and keep them in the background, a process prisoners Dramatically away from the school and the arts.


The absence of a culture of democratization policy adds to the actual and direct limitations imposed on the right to work.


The lack of support for cultural creation not only reflects the irresponsibility of the state before their cultural functions, also translates yourself in the deterioration of working conditions for cultural workers and especially young people.


Today, we must make a devastating assessment of the conditions of the general intellectual work and artistic and cultural work, in particular: Knowledge workers are in certain professions, indispensable participants of the artwork, creative and cultural mediation action. To characterize its current situation, we found that maintaining a trend:


of remuneration but also to the onset of differentiation of frames and functional dependence within the same profession;


growth of unemployment in the intellectual professions, particularly among young graduates looking for their first job;


generalized precariousness of the services provided, reaching sectors, with the April 25, had achieved stability of employment and conditions of professional development.


With this is created a situation that on the one hand, is of increasing wastage of technical potential, scientific and existing intellectual in general, and on the other hand is a blocking situation of prospects for professional realization of young people in the areas of artistic creation and science for which acquired qualifications.


This framework lese rights and expectations is also an injury to the national interest business sectors and in the same stroke, is a way to compress the relative autonomy of intellectual work, and, in this way, try to keep in its political dependence ideological knowledge workers, neutralize them, prevent or stifle their resistance.


We know besides the consequences in cultural terms the attempt to reduce increasing this relative autonomy.


It is closely dependent impose a work of multiple centers of power that should ensure the realization of their work without pressure. Then, it is transforming in obedience dependence.


The PCP struggle for immediate and concrete objectives, but is part of its historical experience and its identity as a party this fight not in the towel nor the vision nor the pursuit of our goals of building socialism.


One of the principles of our humanitarian concept is the idea that the development of each and all of the development are mutually beneficial. That is why, and I think you can understand it that when today we fight the same time for the release of artists and access to all the arts, we are waging a real fight that will open the way for the land without masters have not forgotten in our daily struggle.


We go to these elections strongly stating that the Portuguese are not condemned to having to accept the departure of those who to date have led the country to the social, economic and cultural disaster.


There are alternative solutions and policies to address not only the immediate financial problems other than surrender to the bankers, speculators and plunderers, but also to the major problems of development and future of the country.


To austerity programs, instruments of big capital crisis of the transfer for the people, we oppose the immediate renegotiation of the public debt. Renegotiation which necessarily implies the rejection of this miserable Pact and the measures agreed between Troika of interference and extortion and national troika of submission parties.


When still no one spoke in such a thing and the PCP proposed debt renegotiation were looked askance and soon including and, as usual, is misrepresenting what truly meant our proposal. See that today the current prime minister resigned walks deliberately misrepresent the content and meaning of our proposal, giving us the idea of ​​not absolute and immediate payment of the debt, then waving the banning of markets.


But why there is too much resistance from the European Union, the banking parties and the Portuguese bankers and their spokesmen to accept debt restructuring when it is evidence, as demonstrated by the Greek case, that restructuring is inevitable ?


Because if you want to save time. Buy time for banks holding the debt of peripheral countries bonds to discard these as they already are doing. Winning time for the restructuring is done only in 2013 (after the elections in France and Germany) and after the entry into force of the new European Mechanism. So the renegotiation will no longer be with the banks, but with States, in a situation of much greater fragility and the bill will not fall on shareholders who grow fat at the expense of moneylenders interest rates, but on taxpayers.


We repeat and emphasize: there were and there are alternatives to theft that is being made against our people and country.


As no alternative to the economic downturn, foreign dependence and rising unemployment, with the focus on domestic production, in boosting our productive apparatus.


Producing more we create more wealth, more jobs and even more resources to tackle the debt and budget deficit.


An alternative capable of rising labor income; strengthening public investment and the expansion of services; an end to privatization and the recovery by the State of strategic control of the economy; reform of the tax system and the defense of national interests in the foreign plan for the recovery of the economic and budgetary sovereignty.


The upcoming parliamentary elections are a moment and a unique opportunity to address the problems of the country and halt the dangerous and disturbing national decline.


So we address all the Portuguese, to all anti-monopoly social sectors, the patriots, the democrats and independent personalities who want another turn for the country that through their struggle and for your vote in the CDU, opening the way for a patriotic and left-wing policy.


The vote in force whose political and electoral reinforcement can end the vicious circle with no alternative alternating rotativism and open doors to a new life of progress and development for the Portuguese.
The vote in the major force that left for their journey and action gives security and assurance of a real policy, always present and solidarity to the struggle to defend the rights and aspirations of the public, workers and the people.


The great strength closely linked and identified with the people's aspirations for a better life to the defense of the conquests and rights consecrated in April and a firm and courageous denunciation and fight against injustice and inequality.
