Talk:8th October Revolutionary Movement

Iraq
I'll try write more on this later, but se for example. --Soman 09:28, 8 January 2007 (UTC)
 * It is a LIE!

"Marxist-Leninist"
In English-speaking countries, the term "Marxist-Leninist" has been hijacked by Stalinists, but this is not the case in Brazil. As a result, other than the MR-8 themselves, and of course the right, to which the terminology is indifferent, no one considers the MR-8 Marxist-Leninist in Brazil.

And of course, it is hard to understand why anyone would. It is not organized along the Leninist principle of "democratic centralism", and it is part of a political party that Marxist-Leninists consider a bourgeois party. Participating within a bourgeois political party is anathema to any orthodox Leninist. Ninguém (talk) 18:53, 15 June 2009 (UTC)


 * Well, if your argument on Brazilian definitions of ML could be backed up by reference, it would be interesting. However, we generally don't apply country-specific definitions of ideologies. In the whole its generally preferable to use self-identifications to label parties at wikipedia. MR-8 identifies itself as Marxist-Leninist, its difficult to see why that claim should be questioned. --Soman (talk) 18:51, 29 October 2008 (UTC)


 * Why not to add that this definition is self-atributed? MR-8 activists undoubtely consider themselves as fervent Stalinists, and identify Stalinism with "Marxism-Leninism" - a term coined, by the way, by Stalin himself, when he described Leninism as "Marxism for the imperialist epoch"; Trotskists, instead, prefer to describe themselves as "Bolshevik-Leninists".Cerme (talk) 13:56, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

In the sixties and seventies, when the MR-8 was founded, "Marxist-Leninist" referred to the leftist organisations that had broken with the PCB and PCdoB (usually referred as "reformists" or "populists" because of their belief that a Brazilian revolution was to be a bourgeois revolution and that an alliance with the Brazilian "national" bourgeoisie was necessary) but had not adhered to Trotskyism. The main organisations in this camp (defined by their joint participation in a publication called "Brasil Socialista" and their adherence to a "Programa Socialista para o Brasil) were: - APML (Ação Popular Marxista Leninista), a left split from the PCdoB; - MEP (Movimento de Emancipação do Proletariado), a split from POLOP; - OCML-PO or POLOP (Organização de Combate Marxista Lenista-Política Operária), a movement built in the early sixties and heavily influenced by Thalheimmer. - MR-8.

All these groups considered themselves Marxist Leninist, not Trotskyist, and anti-Stalinist. They stated that the Brazilian Revolution would not be bourgeois and democratic, but proletarian and socialist, and they refused the Trotskyist notion of "permanent revolution". Only in the late seventies - around 1977 - did the MR-8 make a turn towards Stalinism, when they also decided that "the national issue is more important than the democratic issue". The other three organisations joined the PT, with the MEP maintaining itself as an internal tendency within the party, and undergoing a series of mergers, until recently, when it left (as Ação Popular Socialista) for the PSOL. The MR-8's "Marxism Leninism" is highly questionable, starting from it being part of a bourgeois party - Lenin always emphasised the need for an independent proletarian party. Also, MR-8's internal organisation is not "Leninist", ie, not democratic-centralist. Ninguém (talk) 18:53, 15 June 2009 (UTC)
 * yes, but the problem is that PCdoB, PCB, etc. are also self-attributed MLs. We can't have every wikipedia article starting like "PCdoB is a political party that considers itself as a communist party..." --Soman (talk) 14:16, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

There is a huge difference here. While it can be technically discussed whether the PCdoB is "communist", there is no doubt that it made part of an international movement that was generally called "Communist" by most political forces, from the far-right to the far-left. However, "Marxism-Leninism" is a much narrower term, and requires the adherence to some basic tenets. Two of them are, support for political independence in regards to bourgeois parties, and internal organisation based on Lenin's What is to be Done, ie, democratic centralism (and it is arguable that the PCdoB adheres to both). The MR-8 is an internal tendency within a bourgeois party, the PMDB; and it is not organised as a democratic centralist organisation. As such, it is its own self-attribution of "Marxism-Leninism" that is doubtful.

(On the other hand, MR-8's practices can be gauged by the comment in this discussion page "IT IS A LIE": never mind that a students' organisation directed by the MR-8 quotes the MR-8's newspaper Hora do Povo fervently apologising for Saddam Hussein; "IT IS A LIE" and reality be damned.)

We can't have an article describing Zhirinovsky's Democratic Liberal Party as a democratic and liberal party, just because it is its name, when in fact it is very undemocratic and illiberal; or the Nazi Party as a socialist party because it called itself "National-Socialist", when in fact its main business was to streetfight against Communists and Socialists. Ninguém (talk) 18:53, 15 June 2009 (UTC)

As I see it, the whole issue is that political parties' names are often by-passed by historical events, the name becoming an empty label that fails to describe what the party actually stands for or does - even when the name is not meant to be deceptive, as the Nazi Party name obviously was; in early Twentieth Century France, the dominant bourgeois party was the so-called "Radical-Socialist" Party, actually a Center-Left Liberal party that had been at the Left of the ruling political spectrum after the smashing of the Paris Commune. Today's MR-8 should better be described as a neostalinist splinter group inside the PMDB in which the signifiant "Stalin" stands for extreme nationalism (as it seems to do among some groups in today's Russia) instead of International Communism. But perhaps this would be unpublished reasearch....Cerme (talk) 19:10, 30 October 2008 (UTC)

This article is very outdated. It would be very beneficial to translate the brazillian portuguese article, which has been updated recently
This article hasn't been touched since 2008 as far as I can tell, and the organization it refers to has since gone through many changes. These changes are detailed in the brazillian portuguese article, which also goes a bit more in depth about the group itself. I would be very happy to translate the current portuguese article in order to replace this one with a more updated version, but just to make sure I'm gonna announce my intent to do so here and wait a bit before actually doing it. It's actually also because this is my first major contribution on wikipedia and i'm nervous, but that's less relevant. --CityBreakingDown (talk) 17:02, 1 April 2021 (UTC)