Throughout the nineteen-sixties, the ruling classes of the American continent were perpetually being shaken by events taking place in a very small corner of ‘their’ continent—Cuba. We should recall this fact when attempting to assess the importance of the political processes now unfolding in Portugal for the European continent as a whole. For just as the Cuban revolution, because it expressed and summarized the struggle of the oppressed throughout Latin America, had an impact far transcending its own borders, so the great political struggles that are clearly on the agenda in Portugal can be expected to reverberate throughout the European continent.
The immediate root of the military coup of 25 April which swept away the dictatorial apparatus of the Salazar regime, carefully constructed over the course of forty years, was a virtual consensus among the Portuguese bourgeoisie that the course of last-ditch resistance to the African liberation movements, to which the old regime was irretrievably committed, was a disastrous one. Such a course constituted a major obstacle to the continued integration of Portugal into the European economy, involved ever-growing burdens of finance and manpower on the fragile Portuguese economy, and seemed in fact to be jeopardizing, rather than reinforcing, the economic hold of Portuguese imperialism on the ‘overseas territories’.
The deeper causes are to be sought in the recent pattern of growth of the Portuguese economy—centring around the development of European-oriented export industries and the establishment of branch operations by European multi-national firms in Portugal—and the development of a new economic strategy for the domination of the colonies, based on a greater readiness to collaborate with foreign imperialist interests. Nor could 25 April have occurred without the mass struggle of resistance to the Portuguese dictatorship, both at home and above all in the colonies, which made it impossible for the bourgeoisie to continue with the strategy of the Salazarist regime and at the same time impossible for the old regime to change its course.
After an unsuccessful attempt at liberalization within the framework of the old regime, during the first two years of the Caetano Government (1968-70), the bourgeoisie realized that the only hope for change was through a break with the Salazarist apparatus. What was lacking was a force that could execute this break without placing the bourgeoisie at the mercy of the mass movement. The rise of discontent among junior career officers in the armed forces, its crystallization into the Movement of the Armed Forces, and the emergence of a popular, top military man, Spinola, who shared the views of the dominant bourgeois circles and was prepared to speak out on their behalf, filled this need. Thus was born 25 April.
But if 25 April was conceived as a strategic manoeuvre of the bourgeoisie, it in turn gave birth to a sweeping mobilization of the Portuguese masses, determined to destroy every vestige of the old regime and assert their own demands for material improvement in their living standards. The masses refused to accept the role of passive spectator in which they had been cast by Spinola and his bourgeois backers. They came into the streets and, linking hands with rank-and-file soldiers and sailors, compelled the military junta to go far further than they wished in the dismantling of the Salazarist machine.
All the repressive apparatus of the old regime—the PIDE/DGS (political police), the riot police and the Republican Guard (fascist militia)—were swept away. Their members still sit in prison, awaiting the future political events which will determine their fate. In almost every company, every Government department and every organ of the mass media, workers demanded the dismissal of senior officials and managers closely associated with the old regime and its repressive policies. In place of dictatorial Government control, measures of workers’ control were demanded. This process, coupled with the political ferment in the armed forces and the bonds being built between the mass movement and the military ranks, means that bourgeois rule in Portugal today hangs by a finer thread than in any other country in capitalist Europe. The main force now keeping this thread intact is the Communist Party.
The problem which has always plagued the Portuguese bourgeoisie has been how to break with Salazarism without touching off a mass movement that would threaten the very existence of capitalist class rule. Reliance on the army as the executor of the bourgeoisie’s political programme was the first answer. But the explosive eruption of the mass movement, coupled with the deep-going ferment inside the armed forces, rapidly rendered this solution inadequate. There was only one alternative—[illegible] into the Government those political forces who could exercise influence over the mass movement and deflect it from a collision course with the bourgeoisie’s political plans.
Thus the decision was made to incorporate the Socialist and Communist Parties into the provisional Government. The presence of the Socialist Party was valuable, since it brought into the Government men who had been among the most popular leaders of the democratic opposition (Raul Rego, Mario Soares). But the presence of the Communist Party was indispensable. It brought to the Government more than a few prominent individuals, more than the prestige of association with the anti-Salazarist struggle: it brought the support of a political apparatus—indeed, after the destruction of the Salazarist ANP, of the only political apparatus in the country.
As the weight of the Communist Party in Portuguese political life is so much greater than that of the social-democrats, so is its treachery that much more dangerous. Today in Portugal the CP has become the main opponent of further development of the mass movement. It supports a Government that can lay no claim to ‘representative’ status, even in bourgeois-democratic terms, but is simply a political front for the junta of senior military officers. It participates in a Government in which almost all the key posts are in the hands of either military men or barefaced representatives of the big Portuguese monopolies. Today the Portuguese Communist Party has given the Stalinist strategy of the ‘anti-monopoly alliance’ a new twist—they are trying to carry it out in alliance with the monopolies themselves!
With regard to the mass struggle the Communist Party now has a simple message: call it off. Since their entry into the Government they have systematically opposed all forms of mass activity. They have supported the Government's decision to fix a minimum wage of only 3,000 escudos a month (less than £12 a week—and even this does not apply to domestic servants and farm labourers), rather than the 6,000 demanded by the trade unions. Workers who have tried to fight for better wages and conditions have been denounced as ‘tools of fascism’. With respect to the clearly evasive manoeuvres of the Government's colonial policy (one immediate objective of which is to keep the Cape Verde islands safe for NATO), the Communist Party has no criticisms to make. It openly supports the negotiations, and has denounced those who call for mass action in solidarity with the liberation movements as ‘leftist and irresponsible’.
What does the CP offer as the way forward? ‘The unity of the people and the army’. By this they do not mean the incorporation of the military rank-and-file into the mass movement, but the subordination of the mass movement to the political needs of the military junta. The experience of Chile has already revealed what this line will amount to in practice. In the name of ‘unity with the army’, all political work within the armed forces will be progressively liquidated in order to maintain ‘unity’ with the generals and professional officers. The way will thus be paved for the fulfilment of the bourgeoisie’s most imperative need at the present time—the restoration of ‘order and discipline’ in the armed forces as the first step to reconstituting the ‘unity’ of the repressive apparatus of the bourgeois state.
What of the future? The present situation is not one in which to mince words. Portugal is teetering on the edge of an immense economic, political and social crisis. The growth of the Portuguese economy in recent years has been closely tied to its economic integration into capitalist Europe—a Europe that is now experiencing almost universal economic crisis. Despite the rapid growth of Portuguese industry and exports to Europe, Portugal has a very serious negative visible trade balance, due to her almost total dependence on the more advanced European countries for both capital goods and important items of middle-class consumption. To some extent this balance is compensated for by foreign investment and the exploitation of the colonies. But more important are the remittances from Portuguese immigrant workers in Western Europe (which alone cover the trade deficit) and the earnings of the tourist trade. Thus, when Portuguese workers are sacked and sent home as a consequence of the deepening crisis of the European capitalist economies, they will not merely swell the ranks of the unemployed in Portugal (joining the 200,000 soldiers who will enter the workforce if the colonial wars end), but will choke off the country’s most important single source of foreign exchange. Nor will depression abroad and political turmoil at home do anything to stimulate tourism.
The combination of mass unemployment, economic stagnation, the drying up of key items of middle-class consumption due to import shortages, and a corresponding acceleration of inflation, will reproduce all the elements of the situation which Chile faced in late 1973 in an even sharper fashion. For the Portuguese bourgeoisie, the need to maintain the position of Portuguese exports in an increasingly competitive European environment and to step up the flow of foreign investment capital will become questions of life and death. But these objectives can only be attained if the living standards of the masses are kept down and ‘discipline and order’ restored in industry.
The conclusion is only too evident: the treachery of the Portuguese Communist Party is not merely paving the way for a restoration of conservative capitalist Government. It is preparing another bloodbath on the lines of Chile. There is only one way out of the impending crisis for Portugal. It is not the road of class collaboration, compromise and ‘restraint’ urged on the masses by the Communist Party. The only solution is proletarian revolution: the total destruction of bourgeois rule, and the creation of a workers’ and peasants’ Portugal, on the foundations of which a planned economy can be built with all the necessary means at its disposal to tackle the immense economic problems of the country. This solution can be placed on the agenda concretely by a determined struggle in the coming period for the creation of independent organs of workers’, peasants’ and rank-and-file soldiers’ power, and around such key transitional demands as: immediate, total and unconditional military and political withdrawal from the colonies; the immediate convocation of a Constituent Assembly and an end to collaboration with the bourgeois ‘government of National Union’ by parties claiming to represent the working class, as first steps to the formation of a workers’ and peasants’ government and the dissolution of the Junta; the election of workers’ control committees in the factories and offices and of committees of soldiers and sailors claiming full democratic political rights; a radical agrarian reform, to cement the worker-peasant alliance; a sliding scale of wages; the complete abolition of censorship and complete freedom of association, freedom of the press, freedom to strike and to demonstrate; immediate repeal of the fascist penal code; a thorough purge of all collaborators with the fascist regime from the armed forces and state apparatus; unconditional amnesty for deserters; immediate abolition of all fascist institutions and their replacement by democratically elected bodies; public, and material, support for the anti-fascist struggle in Spain.
It is this simple fact that throws into the sharpest relief the ‘crisis of leadership’ from which the mass movement is now so painfully suffering. In the present situation in Portugal, this phrase is not just an epochal formula it is a concrete and precise diagnosis of the central problem facing the mass movement. The resolution of this problem will not be easy. There are many signs that the mass movement, despite a certain relaxation at present, will rapidly resume its upwards course. There is every reason to believe that this can produce a decisive outflanking of the Government and their reformist and Stalinist allies, on several fronts. But there can be no leaping over the central practical task of forging, in the crucible of the mass upheaval, a revolutionary party that can lead the struggle for proletarian power.
In this process—which is not merely difficult but also desperately urgent—the forces presently grouped in the International Communist League (LCI—Portuguese sympathizing section of the Fourth International) will have a key role to play. Working together with other forces of the revolutionary left, they must provide the nucleus around which the revolutionary party can be built.
The Bolsheviks managed to forge an instrument capable of seizing power in a space of months, between April and November of 1917. But they started out with much greater advantages: numbers, trained cadre, political experience and the guiding genius of Lenin. Against this we can set only one thing: the experience and material assistance of the international revolutionary movement. It is little enough, but it could be a decisive factor. Revolutionaries everywhere have an obligation to support the revolutionary left in Portugal and assist their struggle for a workers’ and peasants’ Portugal, foundation stone of the United Socialist States of Europe.