The following text is transcribed and edited from a talk by Brian Slocock at the IMG Summer cadre school in September 1975. It introduced a discussion on the origins of the revolutionary process in Portugal within the Salazar regime. This discussion laid the basis for a series of sessions on various aspects of subsequent developments.
The collapse of the Portuguese dictatorship on 25 April 1974 opened up a period of deep social and political crisis which has given birth to the sharpest and highest forms of class struggle that have been seen on the European continent [for many years]. It has posed, in a practical, concrete [manner], the question of the [socialist] revolution. The regime which collapsed on 25 April was a regime [of a fascist type] (as the parallel of its neighbour in Spain indicates), and its particular features gave to the mass upsurge in Portugal many special characteristics which allowed it to go very far and very fast compared with [most of] the other [class struggles] which have taken place on the continent. This regime should be characterised as a dictatorship of military origin. [It was] not simply [a routine] form of dictatorship [providing] a strong, [stable and power]ful central leadership team [for the] bourgeoisie with a certain repressive capacity. Rather, it was based on a state machine which attempted to go further than that. This state machine sought to underpin a strong political leadership team for the bourgeoisie by systematically atomising the capacity of the working class and the exploited masses to organise against and resist the operations and decisions of the capitalist state. It extended its tentacles directly into the masses by outlawing all forms of independent trade union, working class and mass political organisation, attempting to substitute for such organisations with its own state controlled institutions. At the same time it attempted to utilise the intervention of this powerful state machine, built up around an authoritarian and dictatorial government structure, to compensate [for] the very grave social and economic weaknesses of the Portuguese bourgeoisie. Direct state intervention in a [whole] series of spheres of social life — particularly in the [econ]omy — was used to regulate the social tensions which [the] bourgeoisie had been incapable of resolving through the normal institutions of bourgeois democracy. These are the features of a regime of a classical fascist character. But it is necessary to qualify the Portuguese regime as having a number of clear distinguishing features (as we would also have to do for the Spanish regime). In Portugal this apparatus was [less] established on the basis of a clear fascist political project of the German and Italian type involving the mobilisation of a section of the masses primarily drawn from the petty-bourgeoisie for the imposition of this order. In many respects the fascist order in Germany and Italy was created against the will of crucial sectors of the traditional representatives of big capital. In contradistinction to this kind of classic fascist model, the creation of this state apparatus in both Spain and Portugal was carried through with the agreement and the active participation of the traditional representatives and main layers of the ruling class. In particular, it involved the traditional political agents of the Iberian ruling classes — the armed forces. This is certainly a common feature of the dictatorships in both Spain and Portugal. In the case of Spain the rebellion which led to the creation of the Franco regime was, of course, launched by the military — albeit in alignment with other political forces, some of which had a clear cut fascist coloration. And that regime might not have taken on even the degree of open fascist coloration which it did, had it not been for the whole experience of the civil war which forced it to take a much more sharp and intense attitude towards the mass movement than it was originally inclined to do. In Portugal, the process which led to the creation of the Salazar dictatorship was set in motion by the armed forces which, in 1926, overthrew the anarchic and ineffective bourgeois democratic machinery of the Republic. But the 'fascisisation' of the regime did not really begin until six years later, with the emergence of Salazar. Initially the dictatorship had a fairly conventional military character, but the rise of Salazar as prime minister was accompanied by the imposition of a series of fascist-type measures — in particular, the adoption of a labour law in 1934 which banned all forms of independent trade union organisation and substituted in their place state managed labour bodies. It should be noted that this step provoked the only significant mass resistance to the process of the creation of the new regime, with the launching of a general strike and even a local insurrection in one important working class centre, the town of Marinha Grande. By the mid-1930s, 'fascisisation' of the regime was complete, and it assumed the characteristics which it was to retain — albeit with certain alterations in political strategy — right through until its collapse in 1974. It was a regime which incorporated many of the traditional layers of the bourgeoisie, in terms of its relations with finance capital, and in terms of its very close relationship with the armed forces, which continued to provide a major prop for the regime throughout its history. This relationship was expressed in certain special privileges which these groups received. For example, it was the rule that whatever the composition of the Government, the Minister of Defence would be drawn from the ranks of the armed forces. And it was equally the case that while the Prime Minister's post remained in civilian hands — first of all Salazar's, and later Caetano's — the Presidency was always occupied by a military figure. After the Second World War, the regime attempted to continue with the sort of 'isolationist' economic policy which had also been developed by its co-thinkers in Spain. This policy centred around an attempt to follow essentially nationalist policies, designed to preserve and reinforce the self-sufficiency of the economy, minimising its dependence on either foreign trade or foreign investment. This outlook was tied in with a nationalist ideological perspective which was an important part of the regime's official ideology, in particular in relation to its exploitation of the colonies and the myth of the 'civilising mission' of Portugal. It was also tied in with a desire on the part of the regime to avoid any kind of rapid or uncontrolled economic development which might, on the one hand, begin to erode the social base of the regime — primarily based on the rural areas and the independent peasantry — and on the other bring into existence social forces which would have the political and economic capacity to pose a real threat to the regime. The regime thus hoped to regulate the process of industrialisation and the creation of new working class layers. This desire was certainly a conscious [aim, though] not always fulfilled to the degree which the regime might want because, of course, the Portuguese bourgeoisie wanted to force such developments in their own interest and the interest of expanding their capital. These economic policies of the regime were carried out in line with the character of the regime. They were based on developing a special relationship between the fascist state structure and the large monopoly economic groups, which had grown up in Portugal over the preceding period of capitalist development, and controlled the major industrial sectors. These monopolies were accorded various privileges — exclusive rights of operation in certain spheres, generous forms of state assistance, and, in particular, privileges with regard to the colonies. For Portugal, as also for Britain in this period, there was a choice between strengthening its European ties and its integration into the world capitalist economy or the alternative of developing its national economy, on the basis of its colonial ties and imperialist exploitation. The regime strongly favoured the latter. This choice, however, was rejected by all the key sections of the Portuguese bourgeoisie — including those monopolies who, at least on the economic terrain, were the closest allies of the fascist state. By a gradual process of economic and political pressure, culminating in a virtual investment strike by the bourgeoisie with regard to the development plans of the dictatorship, the bourgeoisie forced the regime to reorient its economic approach. A new course was launched which favoured the sections of monopoly and finance capital who had developed certain connections with European capital, and who wanted to see Portugal develop more rapidly on the basis of increasing integration into what was then the booming economy of capitalist Europe. So in the early 1960s, following only three years behind a similar reorientation on the part of the Spanish regime, the Portuguese state turned towards increasing integration into the European economy, and increasingly close relations with North American and Western European capital. Restrictions on foreign investment and thus major barriers to foreign [capital were dropped]. This created a new set of alignments in [which the fasc]ist state was now not simply in a direct partnership in the economy with the monopolies, but part of a three-way relationship with, on the other hand, the monopolies, and on the other, foreign capital. The influx of foreign capital led to a rapid acceleration in the pace of industrialisation in Portugal — again parallel to the situation that was developing in Spain. For the first time there emerged in areas of the country large-scale, technologically modern industry. Partly because of the economic logic of capitalism, but primarily because of the deliberate policy of the regime — wary [as it always was] of any processes which would tend to erode its social base or [bring into] existence new social opponents — this process of industrialisation was heavily concentrated in certain specific geographic regions of the country, in particular the industrial belts around the three main urban centres — Oporto in the north, Coimbra in the centre and Lisbon and its industrial suburbs in the southern part of the country. Growing out of this reorientation — both of the Portuguese bourgeoisie, and under its pressure, of the regime — a number of political problems were posed very sharply from the early 1960s onwards throughout the ensuing decade. On the one hand, there was the crucial question of a 'European' versus a 'colonial' orientation for Portuguese capital. Large sections of the Portuguese monopolies and finance capital, despite the key position which they were ceded inside the colonies, actually found themselves drawn more and more towards the EEC. This was because of the growing interpenetration between Portuguese and European capital, reinforced by the entry of Portugal's main trade partners in the European Free Trade Association into the EEC. While the colonial connection remained important, in line with the development of the Portuguese economy itself the main sections of Portuguese capital began to develop a policy of 'joint exploitation' inside the colonies. That is, they no longer tried to maintain the African colonies as an exclusive preserve for Portuguese capital, but began to encourage joint enterprises with the major European and American multi-national firms. This served to undercut the traditional basis for Portugal's retention of the colonies — the need to exclude other more powerful imperialist competitors brought into existence the possibility of some form of 'neo-colonialist' solution in the colonies. Alongside and related to this particular set of options, was the growth from the early 1960s onwards of large-scale armed resistance inside the African colonies. These wars of liberation began to draw into the huge swamp of the colonial territories a greater and greater proportion of the resources of an already small and impoverished economy. The upshot was the unleashing inside Portugal of an immense social crisis, on a scale unprecedented in Europe outside of a full scale wartime situation. When the parallel between the situation in Portugal and that in Russia prior to the 1917 Revolution is considered, one's initial reaction is to say — well, the social crisis in Portugal couldn't be nearly as great because the scale of the war in which she was involved was much more limited. But one has to look a little more closely. It is true that the war was geographically remote, and was not a clash between contending capitalist powers, but an attempt to suppress an insurgent movement of popular revolt. But the size of Portugal — a small country with a population of less than 10 million — compared with the size of its colonies, meant that the colonial wars involved the kind of drain on Portugal's resources which few states have experienced, except in the context of a major conflagration. For example, the total size of the armed forces sucked into these colonial wars was about 200,000. We must set this in the context of the fact that the size of the entire industrial proletariat inside Portugal was probably something of the order of 1 million. In other words, something like 15 to 20 per cent of the potential industrial working class was being syphoned off into these wars. Another example: the casualties sustained by Portugal in the course of the war, if one extrapolates them in terms of either population or the size of the army, are roughly equivalent to [those] suffered by the British armed forces in the [First World War]. In terms of Government expenditure, not only did the budget grow sharply, but the share of it consumed [by] the colonial wars also mounted precipitously, to the [point] where, by the end of the wars in 1974-75, one-[third] of all state expenditure was devoted to the conduct [of] the wars and related military activities, accounting for something like 8 per cent of the total output of the Portuguese economy. The implications of that for a country already suffering from the backwardness of its capitalist development, from the pressures of its attempts to integrate into the highly competitive world of more advanced western capitalism and from the domination of its economy by vast monopolies, were disastrous. The strains that it produced included a very acute labour shortage, particularly for the most technologically advanced elements of the workforce who were either siphoned off to fight in the war or migrated out of the country in order to avoid such a prospect. During the period of the wars, approximately one-third of the 1½ million emigrants who left Portugal did so illegally, and there were at least 100,000 outright dodgers and deserters among those half million illegal emigrants. Secondly, and related to this labour shortage was an acute and chronic series of economic problems which retarded the rate of economic growth, and gave Portugal the highest rate of inflation of all but one or two of the most acutely affected countries of the capitalist world. Connected with this, and in many ways growing directly out of it, was the increasing organisation of the working class. The nightmare of the fascist dictatorship was now coming true in that the process of industrialisation — despite its geographical isolation and regulation — was bringing into existence a new layer of the working masses, who in terms of their level of class consciousness, their capacity for self-organisation, and their combativity, represented a qualitatively more powerful opponent for the dictatorship. Moreover, the conditions of an acute labour shortage, and economic discontent provided very fertile ground for the beginnings of independent trade union organisation and renewed economic struggle. From the early 1970s onwards there began to arise, even under the conditions of extreme repression and regulation of the labour movement, all sorts of forms of independent working class organisation: attempts to take over the leadership of the state-run trade unions and use them on behalf of working class struggles, the formation of factory committees and the initiation of important mass struggles in the form of strikes, and demonstrations. Whatever repression and setbacks these struggles may have encountered, they did manage to achieve their immediate aim of pushing up the real wages of at least a section of the Portuguese working class, despite the great economic crisis that the country faced, and despite the very high rate of inflation. Inevitably, these kinds of political upheavals and mass discontent were bound to affect all the different social layers inside the country. It certainly gave to the bourgeoisie an increasing sense of the urgency of doing something to resolve the situation — of the urgency of removing all those obstacles to its closer economic integration with Western Europe, which it saw as the indispensable precondition for solving the economic and social problems of the country. That meant removing the grossest forms, at least in appearance, of dictatorship and authoritarian rule of the country, which constituted serious problems as far as the political integration of Portugal into the Common Market was concerned. This coincided with the bourgeoisie's desire for political structures which could integrate the new layers of the working class and regulate politically the way in which it conducted its struggle, as against the prospect that the existing struggles could assume an uncontrollable and explosive character. The bourgeoisie wanted to bring into office a government able to execute the political manoeuvres necessary to bring to an end the immensely costly colonial wars by reaching a political solution as rapidly as possible. This, in combination with certain political concessions [to be made in accord] with other sections [of the bourgeoisie, would allow it to] maintain its economic interests in the colonial territories. The most important political force in the country at the service of the bourgeoisie remained the armed forces. Under these circumstances it was inevitable that this political debate and these political processes should have tremendous resonance inside the armed forces. What took place were two parallel processes with different effects, but in many ways favouring a common outcome. On the one hand, the acute social crisis produced a real political ferment in the various layers of the army — among rank and file, the masses within the armed forces, but also within the officer corps. Both the professional officers recruited from traditional social layers — and hoping to embark on the traditional career of entry into the highest echelons of Portuguese society — and the conscript officers brought in very large numbers out of the relatively radicalised petty bourgeois milieu of the universities in order to staff the swelling ranks of the colonial armed forces, were thrown into a period of political chaos under the impetus of the crisis. In many cases they were inspired not by any particularly high-flown political ideals, but practical questions of self-interest. Thus the origin of the Armed Forces Movement did not lie in any democratic political current or the various movements of Portuguese opposition politics. Rather, it arose from the intense social frustration felt by the professional officer corps at the appearance of a horde of conscript officers with nominally a very similar status to themselves, but who had not gone through the same training or come from the same social origins. This led to the formation of professional grievance committees in the armed forces, set up in order to fight for the preservation of the privileges of the professional officer corps, and it was out of these grievance committees that the Armed Forces Movement was eventually born. At the same time, in the upper ranks of the armed forces, the process of reorientation to the new desires of the bourgeoisie also began to have an effect, even on the highest ranks of the armed forces. On the eve of the 25 April 1974, two senior military officials, the Commander-in-Chief (today President) Costa Gomes, and his deputy Spinola, (whose history has been a little less successful of late) were both influenced by these factors to support the plans for political change being set in motion by the Armed Forces Movement.
What I have tried to do above is to analyse the root cause of the present crisis in terms of the structure of Portuguese society prior to the coup, its particular contradictions, and the way they operated to set a whole series of forces in motion — the bourgeoisie, its instruments and agents inside the armed forces, the Portuguese masses and the population of the colonies — all of whom are contenders in this particular struggle. The period following the downfall of the regime on 25 April did not see the successful realisation of the ambitions either of the bourgeoisie or those of its representatives who played the most important role in bringing the coup about. Corresponding to this failure was an unprecedented upsurge of the mass movement, and the rapid conquests of major material and political gains by the working class. This upset for the plans of the bourgeoisie was due to a number of particular characteristics of the overall situation flowing out of some of the general social and economic factors I have already indicated. The specific nature of the Portuguese regime meant two important things. First of all, that the State as an institution was an omnipresent force that intervened in and regulated social relations and social processes in a much more direct way than normally exists within the bourgeois democratic forms of political rule. In the regulation of transactions between workers and employers, and in the elaboration of the economic policies of large-scale capital, the State played a very specific and direct role. At the same time this State was what might be termed an 'over-politicised' social entity, from the standpoint of capitalist rule. Not just in the sense that it was at the service of a particular class, which is true of every state, but that its political characteristics, its inextricable association with the regime, and its particular political concepts were self-evident facts to every section of the masses. So there were few illusions among the masses that the State was something above the social classes, and no belief in the 'neutrality' of the state machine or of its repressive apparatus. The State was seen very clearly as an agent of repression, and as an agent of capital. The consequence of this was thus that the collapse of the regime touched off inside the state apparatus a much more far-reaching political crisis than would hit that of a bourgeois democratic country in the event of the Government being removed — even in the event of its downfall being occasioned by mass action as happened with the last Tory Government. The collapse of the Tory Government at the hands of the miners didn't produce any kind of real political crisis inside the British state apparatus. People didn't go round tearing up parking tickets, or feeling that they had some kind of new found freedom in their social life, or civil servants start re-thinking their political ideas as a result of the downfall of the Tory Government. But this was precisely the consequence of the downfall of the Caetano regime. It meant that none of the existing organs of bourgeois authority — the civil service bureaucracy, the mass media, or the police force — any longer had any real authority or credibility among the masses. Moreover a whole series of struggles broke out around the central demand of purging the apparatus, in order to break the connection between the state machine and the political traditions and political forces of the old regime. While the essential content of this struggle was a democratic one, aimed at removing the objectionable fascist centre from the State machine, its logic — given the actual relationship between the state machine and the political forces of the regime — was to create a permanent crisis inside the State. [Senior officials were, under] mass pressure, either removed from office — as happened to a series of senior civil servants and top managers in industry — or pushed into a situation where, because of the fear of arousing such mass opposition, they became totally paralysed as a force in the service of capitalism. This political crisis of the capitalist State is by far the most important factor determining the unfolding of the revolutionary process inside Portugal. For whatever the political weaknesses and problems existed among the masses and inside the mass movement, the absence of an effective state machine was a fatal weakness for the bourgeoisie. The absence of an effective central authority, of a body which could expect to have its directives accepted throughout wide layers of society, of a body which could carry out repressive actions against the masses without provoking even larger resistance on the part of the masses, meant that it was impossible for the Portuguese bourgeoisie to develop and implement any kind of viable political strategy in its own class interests. Virtually from the morrow of 25 April up until the present day, this absolutely chronic and insoluble political crisis has sown chaos within the ranks of the ruling class. While there were certain brief periods of 'stability', certain periods during which the bourgeoisie had composed and has tried to implement a relatively coherent political strategy, these led at each turn — in more and more rapid succession — to a sharp confrontation with the masses. Under circumstances in which the bourgeoisie finds it has no instruments with which actually to win this confrontation, a particular strategy and a particular alignment of forces designed to carry it through, is rapidly swept aside and the struggle continues to mount. Within the capitalist State after 25 April there was in fact only one force which could be said to any significant degree not to have suffered from this political crisis — and that, of course, was the armed forces. The armed forces, because of their role in carrying through the coup, and because of the fact that associated with this were not merely rank-and-file or a certain section of the junior officer corps, but a number of the leading figures of the armed forces high command, had a degree of stability which no other institution of the capitalist State could even begin to approach. Of course the bourgeoisie attempted to utilise this institution to control and regulate the mass movement, and on the basis of that control and regulation to strengthen and recompose the apparatus of the entire capitalist State. However, because of the generalised crisis throughout all the other bodies of the State apparatus, the profound ramifications of the social crisis inside the armed forces itself before the coup and the scope and intensity of the mass struggle, the aims of the bourgeoisie to turn the army into a reliable instrument of capitalist policy were blocked. In fact the army was pulled in the opposite direction — towards a sharp internal political strife and decomposition, with sections of it being drawn, not simply on an atomised basis but on a mass scale, into the orbit of a mass movement. The problem was that the attempt to have the army carry out the bourgeoisie's political manoeuvres imposed a certain cost. It meant first of all that the army became not simply a force behind the scene preserving some state of general 'law and order', but had to become a political arbiter of all day-to-day conflicts taking place within the society. After 25 April, almost every significant social and political conflict could only be resolved through the intervention of the army. Increasingly, even the most mundane social questions, the regular problems of public order, became unmanageable by the ordinary forces of order. All and any type of problem that arose — whether it was a question of squatters occupying property, workers on strike or engaged in occupations, or even small scale social conflicts like arguments over the prices in a restaurant — became questions for which the army had to take responsibility. The consequence of this was a situation in which the army was constantly exposed [to] struggles and political demands of the mass movement to a degree which it had never faced before. Moreover, this took place under circumstances in which all layers of the army, particularly within the ranks and the junior officer corps, there was a deep-going politicisation and outright radicalisation as the result of the experience of the colonial wars, the destruction of the old regime, and the impact of the mass struggles which followed. The second element in this situation, alongside the crisis of the State, of bourgeois leadership and bourgeois strategy, was the spontaneous creativity unleashed in the Portuguese masses. There is a very rich lesson for us as to what we can expect to occur in Spain when any removing of constraints of dictatorship takes place. In a situation in which for half a century the struggle of the Portuguese masses had been deliberately atomised and crushed by the repressive power of the dictatorship, the desire and the will of the masses to go into struggle, to begin to seek out and determine their own course, their own policies and their own solutions, was absolutely uncontainable. There was a widespread underestimation on the part of most revolutionaries outside Portugal of the capacity of the Portuguese masses to develop their struggle. Two elements were overlooked in making a particular diagnosis of the perspectives in Portugal. First, the degree to which the limited, but nonetheless important, industrialisation of the 1960s and '70s had created a veritable proletarian vanguard in the large-scale, foreign and monopoly dominated industries in the south of the country. This vanguard, in particular around the Lisbon region, has proved capable of leading the most determined struggles and blocking all of the manoeuvres of reaction, whether the 28 September right wing mobilisation or the 11 March abortive coup, while rejecting the attempts of the Communist Party and other reformist forces to channel the mass movement into support for bourgeois political projects. While the overall structure of the Portuguese working class, its overall class consciousness and experience, is in many ways very backward, nonetheless there does exist this important vanguard which, for a period of time and under certain circumstances was able to occupy the centre of the political stage in Portugal. Secondly, one of the peculiarities of the Portuguese dictatorship — certainly compared with that of Spain — is that it was born in a relatively cold and peaceful fashion. It did not develop out of a period of intense civil war, or a period of mobilisation of big sections of the petty bourgeoisie to engage in the most intense and violent forms of class struggle. It was born out of a relatively undramatic military coup and a gradual process of 'fascisisation' of the regime which that coup gave birth to. As a result, it's had what I have described as a very specific character, one of the features of which was the readiness of the dictatorship throughout most of its history to permit — albeit under tight regulation and not in any permanent form — certain forms of bourgeois democratic opposition. This was something which would have been quite unheard of in Germany or Italy under fascism, and even in Spain up until the most recent period. So there took place in Portugal under the Caetano and Salazar regimes a series of staged elections which, while their effect on the actual structure of the regime was nil, provided an opportunity for political debate and a limited degree of political organisation. This had an important effect on the Portuguese proletariat. For example, May Day in Portugal, under the Salazar-Caetano regime, has been celebrated in a more or less mass way since 1944 — for 30 years. The huge May Day demonstration sweeping through the streets of Lisbon on 1 May 1974, which to many of us must have looked like a completely unprecedented experience, had occurred on that scale — with not only tens of thousands but hundreds of thousands of workers on the streets — on at least two previous occasions in Portuguese history: in 1958 and again in 1962. As far back as 1949, the Presidential candidate of the bourgeois democratic opposition, was able to appear on the streets of Oporto, a fairly small city, before a crowd half a million strong. This occasional political activity did not permit any kind of structuring of the working class struggle. It did not permit the creation of independent workers' organisations, but it did produce a deep-going politicisation of whole layers of the Portuguese working class, which began to express itself in an explosive way once the restraints of the old regime were removed. The spontaneous activity of the masses has led to the creation of its own forms of organisation — of workers' committees in the factories, neighbourhood committees in the workers' residential quarters, various forms of democratic organisations inside the army as the political crisis percolates deeper and deeper into the ranks, and most important, moves to begin to coordinate these bodies of working class power through the creation of popular assemblies and committees tying together the various workers' bodies. All of this grows out of the whole previous period of politicisation within the specific context of a powerful vanguard within the major industrial centres. The coming together of these two factors — the deep crisis of the bourgeois state and the tremendous spontaneity and creativity of the Portuguese working class — have been the dual motive force, the two cogs continuously meshing together that have driven the Portuguese revolution so very far and fast. I want to end by indicating very briefly the limits which this process is now approaching and some of the central problems which therefore flow out of this situation. We are coming more or less to the end of a period in which the pace and direction of the revolutionary process have been governed by the spontaneous upsurge of the masses and the crisis of the bourgeoisie. After a long and continuous period of forward movement, the working class, including its most developed vanguard layers have reached a situation in which they find it extremely difficult to formulate and set in motion the steps necessary to overcome the political problems and the political fragmentation of the mass movement in Portugal and carry the revolutionary process forward. This situation stems precisely from the success that has been attained by the working class thus far. Because capitalist class rule in Portugal has been pushed to the very edge of the precipice, imperialism and the pro-capitalist forces inside Portugal are actually reacting to this situation with bitter intensity and desperation. The bourgeois forces in the country, represented clearly by the Sixth Provisional Government, are working frantically to construct barriers to the forward movement of the masses which they must learn to overcome if the situation is to go forward. We have to indicate a number of the problems facing the mass movement. First of all, the extreme regional and social concentration of the vanguard. The creativity and spontaneity of the masses have been led by a relatively small layer of the Portuguese working class. This layer of the proletariat is centred in the most highly developed industries concentrated in one or two areas, and isolated geographically, socially and politically from the majority of the Portuguese masses, who are either small farmers in the rural areas (about 15 to 20 per cent of the population) or workers in small, almost cottage, industries: 50 per cent of the Portuguese working class is employed in factories with less than 10 workers. The average Portuguese worker works alongside only six or seven other workers in technologically backward craft industries, located in small towns. These conditions are diametrically opposed to those in which that section of the Portuguese working class which has so far governed the pace of events lives and works. So there is this very sharp and dangerous gap born out of the pattern of Portuguese capitalist development and the deliberate policy of the fascist State. Initially this gave an impetus to the struggle of the Portuguese working class but now it is producing an extremely dangerous situation in which this social and geographical isolation of the vanguard has been translated into a political gulf. This gulf was first expressed in the Constituent Assembly elections, and now gives rise to the capacity of the Socialist Party leadership and allied with them a whole host of reactionary forces to set large sections of the Portuguese masses against this vanguard. So we have a grave problem of disunity within the Portuguese working class. How can this problem be overcome? Only by the development of genuine organs of dual power. There exists the nucleus, if you want, of a situation of dual power in the forms of organisations created by the vanguard, but they remain almost the exclusive property of this vanguard. The central task that lies ahead is for the vanguard to break out of its isolation and extend and implant the organs of working class power it has forged among those layers of the Portuguese working class who at the present moment are not under its influence — indeed, are politically quite hostile to it. The problem of the unity of the masses cannot be solved without working out clear tactics towards the bureaucratised mass organisations of the working class — especially the Socialist Party. It remains the case that whatever one says about the possibilities of dual power in Portugal, whatever one says about the representative character of bodies of workers power within the limited geographical zone where they exist, the most 'representative' organisations of the Portuguese masses, in terms of ability to claim their political confidence, are unfortunately, not the Popular Assemblies or the workers commissions, but the mass workers' parties — the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. At the same time, however, both of these organisations have leaderships that are thoroughly class collaborationist. The Portuguese Communist Party bases its strategy on a collaborationist project centred around its alliance with the Armed Forces Movement. Certainly this is an ally whose function as the representative of the bourgeoisie is increasingly a feeble one — indeed, the AFM virtually does not exist today as any kind of unified force, having splintered into a series of different factions and local units, among which are currents which have broken with the bourgeoisie and are orientated towards sections of the working class. Nonetheless, the 'unity' of the Armed Forces Movement — on which the PCP fervently bases itself — can only reflect its character as a movement of petty-bourgeois composition growing out of the state apparatus. That unity can only be maintained on the basis of a programme compatible with the continued existence of capitalism. It is precisely the stress which the PCP places on the [need] to maintain the unity of the Armed Forces Movement, of all its different factions, as the basis for its own unity with the AFM that gives its strategy a necessarily class-collaborationist logic which facilitates the bourgeoisie's aim of [using] the Armed Forces Movement as a force to consummate and develop the political project of restoring the authority of the capitalist State. No political force that bases itself on the 'unity' of the AFM can challenge the basic hold of imperialism and capitalism in Portugal. The PCP's class collaborationism is of a slightly peculiar variety, but nonetheless one that is quite consonant with the general orientation of world stalinism and the stalinist tradition. On the other hand, the Socialist Party is engaged in a much more viable and forthright class-collaborationist project — one in which its allies are the overtly pro-capitalist forces inside Portugal, and the forces of imperialism internationally. The SP leadership has emerged as the most determined spokesman for these interests, the advocate of solving the economic problems of Portugal by [relying] on foreign investment, foreign aid, and integration into the Common Market. It is the most determined advocate of the necessity for capitalist political order to be restored and political guarantees made, in order to resume the flow of foreign investment and foreign trade. It is the force which most sharply inveighs against 'communism', against 'dictatorship' etc., in order to attack all of those political [forces] which threaten the political domination of the Portuguese capitalists. The SP leaders have systematically attempted to use the Constituent Assembly elections to set in motion what is now the main hope of the Portuguese and international bourgeoisie for the restoration of some kind of equilibrium — the construction of a Government with an important civilian complement based on the Constituent Assembly or some similar bourgeois representative body. Such a Government could then try to push the most radicalised layers of the armed forces out of political life and back into the barracks where, with the removal of political influences, bourgeois 'order' and 'discipline' could be restored. On this basis the army could be re[constituted] as an instrument of effective capitalist repression, and the mass movement could be 'disciplined' on the basis of a strengthened capitalist state apparatus. While it is necessary to characterise the Socialist Party in a general sense as a 'workers' party', all these political forces in Portuguese society are new, having exploded onto the scene with a tremendous rapidity. Before 25 April, the Communist Party had about as many members as the International Socialists have in Britain today — albeit in a much smaller country. Today the Portuguese Communist Party has something like a hundred thousand members. The Socialist Party was essentially a small petty-bourgeois clique of intellectuals, lawyers and academics which emerged out of the bourgeois democratic opposition to the old regime — indeed only two years prior to 25 April was it formed as a coherent organisation. It has [constru]cted itself, not so much through the growth of its [organisa]tion, but on the basis of its success in the election. [So] we have on the one hand a huge layer of the masses [who identify], at least on the electoral plane, with the [Social]ist Party; and, on the other hand, a small petty-bourgeois leadership clique floating around on top of this [layer]. We should say the Socialist Party is a workers' party — that's certainly the way in which it appears in the consciousness of those layers of the Portuguese masses who support it — but nonetheless it's a workers' party in which the leadership is far more unattached to the masses, has far more room for manoeuvre, and is far more capable of entering into all sorts of overt deals with capitalism and imperialism than is the case with even the most die-hard and reformist of social democratic bureaucracies, whose position is restrained at least partially by its dependence on the bureaucratised structures of workers associations. The political problem which the vanguard and the revolutionary left must face is how can the masses under the influence of these organisations be broken from the class-collaborationist projects on which they have embarked. This poses the problem of the character and nature of the united front in Portugal today. Certainly the unity of the revolutionary forces — as attained to a large degree in the Revolutionary United Front (FUR) — is of prime importance. But we should not allow this to foster illusions that it is possible simply to push the process forward by some kind of display of will power on the part of the Lisbon proletariat without actually confronting the real problem of the unification of the masses. So the unity of the revolutionary left must not be a substitute for — but a means to developing united front tactics towards the mass workers' organisations under reformist and Stalinist leadership. This task poses many problems for the revolutionary left, but two points deserve particular stress. First, the attempt to solve the problem of the united front must continually be linked up with the task of creating bodies of dual power, of extending and building them throughout the country. Secondly, the preservation and defence of the democratic gains of 25 April is a very clear and important task around which united front action must be fought for. This task is now decisive because of the offensive being launched by reaction. But successful creation of mass unity around this pole can lay the [basis] for taking on the task of carrying the revolutionary process forward through to the rupture with capitalism and the creation of a proletarian state power. These are the range of problems which are most pressing for the Portuguese proletariat today, and they all have practical implications for the revolutionary struggle throughout the world. Their study and assimilation is essential for the workers' vanguard across Europe.