Party, choice and ideology: A case study of Brazilian politics, 1922--1945

The Partido Comunista do Brasil (PCB - Communist Party of Brazil until 1961, when it was renamed Brazilian Communist Party) was founded in 1922 through the initiative of the Communist International (Comintern).;At the ideological level, the PCB adopted the theory of "two-step revolution in the backward countries" as the "scientific" doctrine for political transformation. The two-step revolution theory states that the proletariat should back the "antiimperialist bourgeois-democratic revolution of national liberation" as the first step toward socialism, then proceed to the "proletarian revolution" as the second step of the political transformation.;In practice, the PCB most frequently abided by the Comintern's directives. The PCB was never an autonomous party. Its political project was not originally engendered within the Brazilian process of political and economic development; it was external to this process. Neverthless, the PCB experienced relative autonomy in the 1920s. By the 1930s, however, the PCB completely lost its autonomy in relation to the Comintern.;There are structural constraints that capitalist democracy imposes upon political parties. Socialist parties, in particular, have to face a set of three interrelated structural constraints: (1) socialist parties are led to participate in parliamentary politics because no party can survive in the long-run without a short-run program of immediate benefits; (2) socialist parties are led to seek the support of other social classes and kindred groups due to the minority status of the proletariat in capitalism; and (3) socialist parties can only pursue a policy of mitigating the effects of the capitalist market since the State is structurally dependent on capital.;In backward countries, like Brazil, socialist parties were then led both to participate in parliamentary politics and to adopt a two-step tactic. In the case of Brazil, given the absence of conditions for a socialist revolution, the PCB did not succeed in its goals.