Portugal will shortly be celebrating the first anniversary of the military coup which overthrew the regime of Marcello Caetano and brought to an end almost a half century of ruthless dictatorship.
But beneath the surface of universal rejoicing the different classes of Portuguese society will each celebrate in their own way, voicing sharply divergent hopes and expectations for the future development of Portuguese society.
The working class will celebrate the occasion massively, in the streets. Feeling their power once again, they will use the opportunity to voice their grievances against a society that remains under the control of capital, both the big Portuguese monopolies and the multi-national corporations. They will demand measures against the chronic inflation and the wave of factory closures, redundancies, and unemployment which has been launched as capital retrenches in the face of the world crisis and the loss of some of the advantages of investing in Portugal. They will demand tough measures against sabotage —like the action of the gas companies who replied to the refusal of their application for price increases last year by cutting off all supplies of domestic gas. They will call for a vigorous prosecution of the reactionaries, many of whom retain top posts in both the state and private businesses.
But the bourgeoisie will look on these tumultuous celebrations from a different point of view. For them the real celebration will have come a few days earlier if, as is widely predicted, the elections for the Constituent Assembly (now scheduled for 20 April) produce a clear majority for the parties of the 'centre' (Socialist Party and Popular Democratic Party). They will then view 25 April as a final outburst of the mass feeling which must now be forced into the institutional channels of bourgeois democracy, which they hope will emerge from the deliberations of the assembly and a second round of elections in the autumn.
Looking forward a year ago, the bourgeoisie must certainly have expected to celebrate the first anniversary of the coup in a much securer atmosphere. After all the downfall of Caetano had been engineered by an historic political instrument of the Portuguese bourgeoisie —the very same that had ushered in the era of reaction a half century earlier —the army; the new regime was headed by a senior military officer who had close social ties with the dominant circles of Portuguese big business and was known as a spokesman of their political views; and the only political forces which had either an organised base or mass influence over the working class the Socialist Party and the Communist Party—had agreed to enter the Provisional Government and apply the brakes to the mass movement.
But the ruling class seriously misjudged the dynamic of the mass movement. They underestimated the depth of the long-repressed mass hatred for the old regime —which impelled the masses into a bitter fight for the dismantling of the most hated sections of the repressive apparatus; they underestimated the capacity of the masses to forge their own instruments of struggle which could at least partly compensate for the vacuum left behind by the years of repression; and they underestimated the ability of a new vanguard to assimilate and generalise the lessons of decades of clandestine struggle and centuries of international class struggle (a process which led to the papers of political tendencies replacing the sports papers as the most popular reading material, and sent almost every major work of Lenin —from 'State and Revolution', through 'Two Tactics', to 'Left-Wing Communism' —to the top of the best-seller list).
At the same time the ruling class failed to grasp the full extent of the impact which the political crisis of the old regime had inside the army. General Spinola might head the new regime, surrounded by a junta and Council of State dominated by senior officers, but real power inside the army was in the hands of the architects of the coup —the Armed Forces Movement. The mass opposition to reaction and the colonial wars had created a political ferment among the military rank-and-file and the conscript officers (many drawn from the universities) which strengthened the hand of dissident junior professional officers, organised in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). At the same time the MFA, under the impulse of the same forces, had undergone a process of radicalisation which, even if it failed to go beyond the bounds of radical petit-bourgeois democracy, still created a major ideological barrier between the orientation of the MFA and the class needs of the Portuguese bourgeoisie.
Thus the months after the overthrow of Caetano saw a massive movement of industrial and political struggle which wrung important economic concessions from the bourgeoisie, forced the dismantling of decisive sections of the old state repressive apparatus (in particular the political police, PIDE/DGS) and undermined the authority of the bourgeois state machine as a whole. The capitalist state in Portugal was left highly vulnerable to proletarian attack.
What saved the Portuguese bourgeoisie was the absence of any force which could centralise and extend the struggles of the Portuguese working class, forge a fighting alliance with other oppressed strata, such as the urban petit-bourgeoisie and the peasantry, and open up the contradictions in the MFA, whose prestige enabled it to play a de-fusing role in many workers struggles. The immense creativity which the Portuguese workers revealed in these days was not able, spontaneously, to go beyond the coordination of struggles within a single factory or firm (or, in a few circumstances, a single monopoly group), and they remained immersed in the conduct of such specific struggles and the task of building new trade union organisations from the ground up.
The only force which had the mass base and organisational resources necessary to turn the workers' upsurge into a struggle for power by the working class, the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), is cast firmly in the stalinist mould, and rapidly became one of the main props of continued bourgeois rule. Once it had received a place in the new Government, most of its energies were devoted to calling off struggles and breaking strikes, rather than fighting to extend them into a struggle for class power.
Nevertheless, even the crisis of proletarian leadership and the treachery of the PCP combined could produce no more than a stalemate in the balance of class forces. And before the bourgeoisie were able to regroup their forces and move to 'normalise' class relations, the working masses were on the move once again.
The political project on which the bourgeoisie embarked aimed to shift the focus of political authority away from the Provisional Government which, dominated as it was by the petit-bourgeois radicalism of the MFA and including the Communist Party, was an unsatisfactory instrument to meet their political needs. In its place the bourgeoisie sought to strengthen the state apparatus centred around a 'bonapartist' President. This project was facilitated by the fact that the current incumbent of the Presidency —General Spinola— was admirably suited to the role. [illegible] to the collapse of that government and the discrediting of what was then the only viable attempt to construct a bourgeois political party —the Popular Democratic Party (PPD). As a consequence the political balance inside the Government shifted decisively in favour of the MFA.
The bourgeoisie then had to turn to extra-parliamentary action to achieve what they could not through political manoeuvre. Once more the person of Spinola provided them with the focus they required, and, amply aided with money and other resources from the main bourgeois circles, plans were laid for a massive demonstration of the 'silent majority' to demand a strengthening of the President's power.
But the balance of class forces had shifted too far to the bourgeoisie's disadvantage for this project to succeed. Already the Communist Party had found that its attempts to hold back the mass struggle were leading to its outflanking by a new vanguard with deep roots in the workers' movement. Thus the PCP faced a series of important mass struggles —strikes over economic questions by the postal workers and airport ground crews, a political struggle against reaction by newspaper workers, and mass demonstrations against the right-wing danger by Lisbon shipyard workers —over which they had no control, and which took place in the face of their steadfast opposition.
All this serves only to underline the fact that the PCP's hold over the mass movement was —and still is— paramountly political, rather than organisational. That is to say it was not based on the PCP's control of a bureaucratic apparatus which exerted a powerful hold over the mass struggle (for the conditions of clandestine struggle had not permitted the creation of such an apparatus), but through its ability to present the masses an apparent way forward —albeit an illusory and potentially disastrous one— in the fight to defend the gains of 25 April and advance the interests of the working class.
(The consequent tenuousness of this hold is highlighted by a number of recent union elections. In the Postal Workers' Union —whose strike the PCP scabbed on last year— almost every single PCP candidate was defeated. In the Bank Workers' Union —a PCP stronghold dating back to before 25 April —the PCP's candidate for the presidency, Avelino Goncalves, Minister of Labour in the first Provisional Government, was similarly defeated. In both these cases the PCP lost to opponents on their left.)
An essential element of this political hold was the PCP's presence in the Government and its close ties with the MFA. But the strategy of the bourgeoisie threatened all that. For the creation of a 'bonapartist' government around the personality of Spinola would make the expulsion of the PCP from the Government and the eclipsing of the MFA inevitable. Given the already established presence of a left-wing current of mass proportions, which would undoubtedly be strengthened both materially and ideologically in the fight against the bourgeoisie's manoeuvres, such a situation could only have spelt a major political crisis for the PCP, and threatened its predominant position in the mass movement.
The Communist Party thus faced a struggle for survival —at least for political survival, and possibly even physical survival should a victory of the right be consolidated. To meet this threat they were prepared to make a tactical turn and sponsor a limited proletarian mobilisation to crush the right-wing challenge. This determination to hold on to their positions was undoubtedly a major cause of the eventual decision of the MFA to break with Spinola, and act against the 'silent majority' [illegible] avenue for [illegible] bourgeois rule was liquidated with the subsequent resignation of Spinola.
But it must be stressed that this was no more than a tactical turn by the PCP. Despite the major defeat they were able to impose on the ruling class, the total disarray into which bourgeois political circles were thrown, and the reversal of the relationship between the armed forces and the mass movement (with the MFA tail-ending the mass movement in this case), no attempt was made to follow through with this victory. Not even simple reformist concessions —like the repealing of the repressive anti-strike legislation previously adopted by the Government— were sought by the PCP. Their tactics may have created a new balance of forces favourable to the working class; but their strategy prevented them from reaping even the most minimal gains from this victory.
[illegible] events today. For the bourgeoisie the central concern is to find a new avenue through which they can pursue their political aims. They have had to accept that, for the immediate future at least, the army has been lost as a political instrument. They have therefore turned from being the most enthusiastic supporters of the participation of the army in politics to advocates of the 'civilianisation' of politics in the interests of 'democracy'. Their current strategy is to ease the MFA out of the political arena, attempt to create a stable alliance of political forces through the emerging institutions of bourgeois democracy (the Constituent Assembly, constitution and subsequent election), and then to use the new political authority so created to de-politicise the armed forces and re-establish them as a reliable repressive instrument of the capitalist state, at the disposal of this authority. Once the relations between the army and the capitalist state have been 'normalised' this is bound to set off political processes within the armed forces which might yet again allow it to become a political tool of the ruling class.
The most important development on the Portuguese political scene favouring this strategy has been the evolution of the Portuguese Socialist Party (PSP). The credentials of the PSP as a workers' party have always been rather slender. Formed under the dictatorship as a loosely organised grouping of the more radical section of the democratic opposition, the PSP operated primarily in exile, and had little real roots in the Portuguese working class.
After the coup it benefitted from a considerable influx of workers attracted by the fact that its leadership included some of the most famous opposition figures (Mario Soares and Raul Rego), by its name and rhetoric, and its influential position in the Government. In the months following the coup the PSP even projected a certain 'left' image compared with the PCP, partly as a function of looser organisational structure which permitted the Party to criticise measures which its ministers were silent on, partly because of the consistent liberal-democratic outlook of its leaders, which led them to be uneasy about certain repressive actions of the Government.
The height of the PSP's 'leftism' came on 28 September when its members manned the barricades along with militants from the PCP and the revolutionary left. In the period following 28 September, however, the PSP began a steady rightward march. Among the factors shaping this were a growing awareness by the PSP leaders of the incompatibility between the further development of the mass movement and the establishment of stable bourgeois democracy; a realisation that they could not compete directly with the PCP for leadership of the mass movement (except by the manoeuvre —very dangerous in the Portuguese situation —of trying to outflank it on the left); and the relative eclipsing of the PSP (and its colleagues of the PPD) within the Government as the MFA ministers began to look to the PCP as the principal spokesman of the mass movement.
This rightward turn of the PSP revealed itself in a variety of ways. The international figures it invited to visit Portugal and boost its political image changed perceptibly in hue as Francois Mitterand and Carlos Altimirano gave way to Willy Brandt and Edward Kennedy! Then the PSP became the principal Portuguese promotor of the cold-war, (and CIA) inspired International Confederation of Free Trade Unions.
This rightward evolution culminated in the stand of the PSP on 'trade union unity'. The PCP —supported by the MFA members of the Government— wanted the proposed trade union law to prescribe a unitary structure for the trade union movement. Effectively this would mean establishing the PCP-controlled Intersindical as the sole trade union federation in the country. Such a plan obviously worried the bourgeoisie and they found a reliable political agent for their opposition in the Socialist Party, who formed a solid block with their thoroughly bourgeois colleagues of the PPD on this question. As a result a predominantly left-wing grouping in the Party —which had gained almost 40% of the votes at the recent Party congress— split on the eve of the massive Intersindical demonstration in favour of trade union unity, largely on that question. (It has since become the Popular Socialist Front.) There are signs that the political differences provoked within the PSP by this clash may yet lead to further splits.
It is worth looking at the struggle over 'trade union unity' in some detail, not just because of its objective importance, but because it illustrates in microcosm the contradictions that are operating in the present situation.
The PCP undoubtedly sponsored the move for trade union unity on totally opportunist grounds. They saw it as a means of assuring their domination over the trade unions, and as an initial step to overcoming the absence of any firm organisational hold over the mass movement to which we have already referred.
They chose to resolve this problem through the intermediary of the Government, probably because they saw this as the smoothest and surest means of getting their policy adopted. But they got caught in their own trap. By trying to avoid a resolution of the question of unity through the working class movement itself they plunged themselves into the controversy on relatively unfavourable terms. The PSP was able to take up the question in terms of regulation by the capitalist state versus 'free choice' by the workers. This allowed the PSP —and the PPD— to take up the debate much more aggressively than they would otherwise have dared to do, and allowed them a certain degree of mass support (an index of the confusion is the fact that a section of the revolutionary left —basically the Maoist groups— supported the PSP: the rest of the revolutionary left, however, understood what was involved and came out clearly in favour of unity, even if they coupled this with sharp criticisms of the PCP's methods.)
Moreover a debate couched in these terms was not one in which the PCP could be certain of getting full support from the MFA. The PSP's arguments on the grounds of democracy would find a considerable degree of resonance within the MFA. (It is significant that a number of amendments to the proposed law were adopted to meet some of the objections of the PSP and PPD with the support of most MFA ministers. They were opposed by the PCP, and the MFA supporters of the PCP on this question —as on many others— were not its most left-wing members but the Prime Minister, Vasco Goncalves, and the Minister of Labour, Rogerio Martins, author of the notorious antistrike legislation.)
The PCP thus found itself in a situation where the only way it could avoid a defeat over this measure —which it had initiated to avoid a mass mobilisation —was through a mass mobilisation. Thus in every union an intensive debate was opened up on the question and a vote taken on the alternatives, while Intersindical mobilised one of the largest demonstrations in Portuguese history in order to back up the demand for unity.
As a result unity now appears to the Portuguese workers neither as a benevolent gift from the MFA nor as a prize won by the skillful politicians of the PCP, but as a conquest of the mass movement. Nor will it have escaped their attention that if such methods can succeed over this issue they can also be used to determine other aspects of Government policy. This is a lesson which the PCP has been frantically trying to withhold from the mass movement ever since the victory of 28 September.
The PCP's overall political strategy has done much to get it into another dangerous position. Throughout the whole period from 25 April until the trade union debate blew up in its hands the PCP has doggedly tailed behind the MFA. During the whole period of the first Provisional Government the PCP did no more than repeat, often word-for-word, in its own statements, official Government pronouncements. Even in the crisis leading up to 28 September, it insisted on working silently inside the Government until the last minute and even then chose to act in the name of its front group, the Portuguese Democratic Movement (MDP). The PCP did not breath a word of criticism against Spinola until after the MFA had broken with him.
As a result the Party has burdened itself with an abysmally low 'political profile'. This is more than just the usual dilemma of 'popular front' type politics —that a Party caught up within a capitalist Government cannot fight to implement the sort of forthright anti-capitalist measures that can offer substantial and convincing solutions to the capitalist crisis. Even in reformist terms the PCP has tripped itself up. For in its attempt to acquire for itself the mantle of the MFA it lost a clear identity in the eyes of a big section of the masses.
This goes a long way towards explaining the contradiction between the influence which the PCP enjoys over the mass movement and the poor vote which it is expected to secure in the elections (10-15% of the poll, compared with up to 40% for the PSP, and an almost certain majority for the PSP and PPD combined). It is also the reason why the PCP, in contrast to the PSP's advocacy of 'civilianisation' of politics, has been in favour of a continued political presence of the MFA in the Constituent Assembly and the subsequent political structures. Despite the agreement of certain sections of the MFA left-wing, the MFA as a whole —once more reflecting their liberal democratic outlook— rejected any such proposal.
There is no doubt that the bourgeoisie still have several important factors operating in their favour: the political heterogeneity of the MFA, the relative immaturity of the Portuguese working class, and the absence of a revolutionary working class leadership. But their room for manoeuvre is still very slim.
The present economic conjuncture in the country is defined by the generalised recession of the world capitalist economy, accentuated by the particular structure of the Portuguese economy (in particular its dependence on foreign investment, multi-national enterprise, and the flow of migrant workers to Western Europe), and the economic impact of the loss of the African colonies. The deterioration of the economic situation means that the bourgeoisie have a strictly limited ability to make material concessions: and this in the context of virtually non-existent social welfare facilities. At the same time the economic situation provides a constant stimulus to working class discontent, centring around the twin axes of inflation and (even more acute at the moment) redundancies and unemployment.
On the political level the bourgeoisie's situation is even more desperate. Virtually continuous mass mobilisation is creating the conditions in which the Portuguese working class can rapidly throw off its backwardness and begin to struggle in a more class conscious, and coordinated way. Increasingly the PCP, instead of operating as an effective restraining force on the mass struggle is finding itself forced by the level of the mass struggle to take —greatly against its will— measures that actually extend and perpetuate the mass mobilisation. (There is not only the example of 28 September. In early February the Lisbon District Committee of the Communist Party organised a workers' conference of delegates from factory committees across the country. The leader of the PCP, Alvaro Cunhal, used this occasion to inaugurate the verbal 'left turn' of the PCP, proclaiming in his summary speech that 'The Portuguese proletariat is ready for socialism'. While the conference was highly bureaucratically orchestrated by the PCP, and instead of producing clear initiatives for the mass movement continued to stress reliance on the Government and the MFA as the way forward, there is no doubt that such moves have a dynamic of their own which the PCP will not be able to control as the political and economic crisis mounts.)
Moreover the political mobilisation is threatening to have an impact on social layers that have recently been unaffected, and among whom the bourgeois parties hope to build their mass base. At the beginning of February the first land seizures by tenant farmers in the south took [illegible] announced measures to takeover some large estates for the benefit of small cultivators.
Meanwhile in the north —a centre of small independent peasants and clerical reaction— the MFA has been trying to do a job which the PCP could not. The MFA's 'cultural dynamisation' programme, largely under the control of the left-wing of the movement, has moved military units into northern villages to hold mass meetings and discuss the nature of the 25 April coup and the programme of the MFA. In many cases the MFA teams have been at pains to stress that 'anti-COMBINE is a tool of fascism', and have been able to organise these meetings only in the face of violent opposition from local clergy and political bosses.
Under these circumstances the bourgeoisie must make its move as rapidly as possible —but there is no immediate way forward for them. The April elections represent an opening —but they will not provide the means of reorganise the country's political structure and create a new focus of political authority on which the bourgeoisie can depend. The present arrangements afford no opportunity for that until the second round of elections in October —and the present pace of events hardly makes that a satisfactory prospect.
However, the April elections will give the bourgeoisie —if things go as expected— a considerably strengthened ideological position. We can therefore expect to see the present campaign of violent propaganda about the Portuguese political situation grow into a positive crescendo, with warnings about the danger of civil war, a communist takeover, and the imposition of a left-wing dictatorship, flying thick and fast.
The aim of such a campaign will be to confuse and divide the mass movement in order to impede its progress, to exploit the political contradictions within the MFA, in order to prevent the Government taking any anti-capitalist measures, and to frighten the PCP away from any flirtation with left demagogy that could get out of control.
This campaign will be international in scope, attempting to bring to bear on the Portuguese situation the entire weight of the international capitalist class. This too has already begun. The first move was the pronouncements of the Tory's 'fraternal' delegates to the conference of the right-wing Social Democratic Centre in Porto, which was broken up by anti-fascist demonstrators. This was quickly followed by the statement of Belgium's Foreign Minister, Renate van Elsdeen, that Portugal could not be admitted to the EEC until it was a 'genuine democracy', adding that 'We would not want anything to do with a country that substituted a left-wing dictatorship for a right-wing one.'
This has recently been followed by reports from the Portuguese national bank that a number of European countries are insisting on payment in advance for all exports destined for Portugal.
Given the dependence of the Portuguese economy on international finance, the widespread acceptance of the political goal of gaining admission to the EEC, and the sensitivity of political circles (not least of all the MFA itself) to 'world democratic opinion', this international campaign could be even more decisive than the domestic one.
In a recent number of the French newsmagazine L'Express Jean-Francois Revel sounds the tocsin for the European bourgeoisie. Warning of the dangers of the 'Portuguese cocktail' ('one-third Chile, one third Peru, one third Czechoslovakia') he urges prompt and urgent action by the European ruling class: 'To ward off this danger immediate and total European economic solidarity must be organised to support Portugal...a genuine Marshall Plan of the European Economic Community for the development of a democratic Portugal, which could, at the same time, integrate itself into this Community. A little political imagination, in this case relatively simple, is needed to save this small neighbour of 10 million inhabitants— and many things in Europe with it.'
If this combination of economic blackmail and economic bait fails to tip the balance, then the ruling classes of the capitalist world will have to set in motion more brutal methods. The CIA are certainly busy setting up future operations in the country, and NATO will undoubtedly be used to groom the more reactionary sectors of the armed forces. But in the long run, if the Portuguese masses should still prove intractable, the possibility of more overt military intervention cannot be ruled out. (After all, NATO would have the precedent of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia to fall back on, and there are reports that Ford and Brezhnev agreed during their November meeting in the Soviet Union that Portugal would remain in the 'western sphere of influence'.)
In the course of the great events that lie ahead in Portugal the forces of the revolutionary left face an immense task. They must propel forward the organisation of the working class towards the creation of an alternate power that can contest the claim of the bourgeois state and its institutions to be the 'democratic expression' of the Portuguese masses. And they must strive to implant the mass movement directly into the armed forces —going beyond the elitist and contradictory ties established by the MFA through the organisation of the ranks of the armed forces, and the integration of their representative organs into the mass organisations of the working class.
In such a task they will require every assistance possible. In particular the revolutionary and workers movements in Europe must maintain a constant vigil against the manoeuvres of the international bourgeoisie, and be continually prepared to mobilise against them. It is only through the preparation and organisation of such solidarity that we can prevent the planting of the seeds of Chile in the soil of Europe.
The Portuguese section of the Fourth International