The Unified Socialist Workers’ Party of Brazil (PSTU)
Our malungo**, Wilson Honório Silva, left us on September 17, 2025. This is an irreparable loss, given the immense scope of his political activism, spanning countless fronts of struggle. He was committed to workers’ struggles and played a key role in the Brazilian black movement. He was also a tireless advocate for LGBTI rights and a pioneer in this field.
In addition, he was a man of enormous culture and erudition, as evidenced by his lectures, books and articles, which were always marked by his wit, irony and brilliance. Wilson’s militant trajectory is intertwined with the history of the movement against oppression in Brazil, always within the framework of a socialist and revolutionary perspective.
As he often quoted in his decades-long contributions to Opinião Socialista and the newspapers of organisations that preceded the PSTU, ‘there is no capitalism without racism’, to paraphrase Malcolm X. His book The Myth of Racial Democracy (Editora Sundermann) became a reference on the subject for a generation awakening to the struggle and Black consciousness.
Those who knew Wilson or read his extensive body of work will remember him not only for the pain of this moment, but also for his teachings and his example of how race, class, LGBTIphobia, sexism and all forms of oppression are inseparable from the struggle against capitalism. There is also the internationalism intrinsic to his socialist and revolutionary activism.
A life dedicated to the socialist revolution
In a recent text, Wilson recalls the day he decided to join Convergencia Socialista, the main organisation that would later form the PSTU (Socialist Workers’ Party), and consequently the struggle for socialism and revolution.
The occasion was highly symbolic: the 1980 event was held at the São Paulo Chemical Workers’ Union to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Trotsky’s assassination. Organised by Convergencia Socialista (CS) and the International Socialist Organization (ISO) at the time, the event brought together a broad vanguard at a time of effervescence in the labour movement, student struggles, and the reorganization of movements against oppression.
Wilson himself was the best person to describe this moment: ‘In the midst of all this, there I was. An ‘I’ exploding in all directions: recognising myself as a young black man, understanding myself as a gay man, beginning to realise that my ‘history’ extended beyond the sixteen years recorded on my ID. By day, I was an office worker; by night, I was the director of a ‘civic centre’ at the high school, where, since 1978, I had received weekly visits from CS activists who gave me the newspaper and talked about everything.’
Wilson himself said, “It was then that I made a conscious and committed choice to live as a revolutionary Marxist militant. This makes me fully aware that practically everything that happens to me can only be understood from a collective perspective, and has an impact in the same way, whether within the party itself, in the movements I am involved in, or in terms of organised and collective action in the dynamics of the class struggle. This is true even if it is only through producing articles and theoretical material, and the training activities on which I have focused my militancy in recent years.”
Notes:
- “¡Volveremos a hacer Palmares!” is a reference to the Quilombo dos Palmares, a 17th-century community of escaped enslaved people in Brazil. The phrase evokes resistance and the struggle for freedom.
** “Malungo” is a term from Kimbundu (Angola) used among enslaved Africans in Brazil to mean “friend” or “comrade.”
