Portugal—Revolutionary Developments (Sam Marcy)

Portugal—Revolutionary Developments
Author	Sam Marcy
First published	1975
Type	Newspaper articles

Kornilov with a Monacle

The political crisis in Portugal is deepening. On the surface everything is being done to present a picture of calm and serenity. Underneath, however, political tensions are rising. Class antagonisms are growing more acute. The workers, encouraged by the monumental and spectacular victory on September 28 over the fascist conspirators, are more confident than ever.

The mood, even according to the hostile Western capitalist press, is one of a growing sense of strength and solidarity. The possessing classes feel more threatened than ever. However, all the basic social and political forces which plotted the fascist conspiracy on September 28 and mounted the aborted march of the phony "silent majority" on Lisbon are still at large and free to pursue the same objective they set out to achieve then.

"Not a shot was fired exclaimed General Costa Gomes in commenting on the victorious confrontation of the masses with the fascist conspirators. True enough, not a shot was fired. The masses are a thousand times more generous in their treatment of vanquished enemies than are the tormentors of the working class. That's been so ever since the Paris Commune, down to the last socialist revolution in Cuba.

Only right fringe arrested

It should be noted that only about 200 of the fascist elements have been arrested. Almost all of them, without exception, are from three obscure, ultra-right groupings. The offices of these three fascist groups have been occupied and closed by the security forces.

The core of the conspiracy, however, does not lie there. These are merely fringe groupings which the real conspirators can easily denounce and repudiate. They are really of no consequence so far as the general struggle is concerned.

The heart of the conspiracy lies within the summits of the Portuguese ruling class which is relying on both the fascist right in the military and the covert support of the Western European imperialists and the U.S. Surely CIA clandestine operations in Portugal are in full swing now.

It was to little avail that General Costa Gomes groveled on all fours before President Ford and Secretary Kissinger in Washington last week, asserting that his visit here to the White House "helped to dissipate mutual concern." Nor can there be any comfort in the fact that Ford and Kissinger have dispatched a four-man team to Lisbon to assess that the country's future direction was favorable enough to make U.S. willing to help the crisis-ridden Portuguese economy." Any talk of U.S. "help" is a crude deception, a damnable lie deliberately calculated to sow confusion in Portuguese public opinion and above all to disorient the working class, which is deeply distrustful of any U.S. "favors" or "assistance."

They remember too well, even if their leaders prefer to forget, how the U.S. has really acted in the past.

U.S. strategy on Portugal

The Ford-Kissinger strategy for Portugal is to talk sweet reasonableness to try to intimidate, cajole, and bribe the provisional government and make them do Washington's bidding as much as possible within the limits of the present situation, while stealthily supporting the fascist reaction.

The Portuguese government's pledges to support NATO and to renew the lease on the Lejas air base in the Azores, while ignominious and shameless betrayals of the September 28 victory of the masses, will not satisfy the demands of the Pentagon, although it is undoubtedly delighted to receive Gomes's promises to that effect. The Ford-Kissinger strategy is aimed at crushing the revitalized working class movement and the revolutionary ferment of the masses that has permeated all layers of the oppressed, including vast sections of the petty bourgeoisie.

The aims of the rightist reactionaries in Portugal, both those in the highest circles of big business as well as the rightist generals of the military, coincide exactly with those of Ford and Kissinger. This must be borne in mind. Those who take for good coin the soothing pronouncements of the provisional government are bound to be misled.

It would be far better if the eyes of the masses were fastened on the inner circle of the Confederation of Portuguese Industries (an organization like the National Association of Manufacturers in the U.S.). For public dissemination the confederation talks of the improved economic situation at home and seeks to assure that no real cause for alarm exists in the country. But in reality the lords of high finance and industry and the MNCs (multi-national corporations) in Portugal are preparing for economic sabotage, if that is not already in progress.

Antagonisms sharpen

The soaring inflation, the growing unemployment are grist to their mill. These are the intractable problems that only a truly socialist government can solve. No amount of chatter about democracy can cover this brutal fact. Nor will it be of any avail to beg for foreign investments, as did the Secretary General of the Portuguese Communist Party, Alvaro Cunhal.

The more the CP moderated its demands, the bolder and more insolent big business and their rightist military become. In fact, this whets their appetite.

It was Cunhal himself who wrote in early September, "The intrigues of the reactionaries are becoming increasingly insolent and unrestrained, because they are becoming aware of their imminent defeat."

The reaction has been halted for the moment, but by no means defeated. The intrigues are continuing even if the insolence for the moment has been suppressed.

And who specifically has been at the center of the intrigues? Who was more insolent at the cabinet meeting on the eve of the September 28 confrontation? Who poured the vials of his wrath at Cunhal himself at that critical meeting? General Spinola.

It is Spinola who is still at the center of all the intrigues of the fascist reaction. It is he who summoned the phony silent majority" for the Mussolini-type march on the Palacio De Belem (it corresponds to the U.S. White House). It is he who denounced the working class organizations and charged them with being bent on "bringing on a new slavery."

His resignation speech over radio and TV, after the victorious confrontation of the workers against the fascists, was not one of contrition, let alone a confession for plotting. It was one of insolent defiance and thinly disguised calls for renewed efforts at fascist mobilization.

The very fact that this ex-butcher of the African people is still at large and is permitted to carry on usual activities means that the ruling class and the rightist military are still organizing around him for the counterrevolution.

Spinola at center of the web

There is no doubt that he is serving as the symbol around which all the forces of conservatism and reaction are again gathering and rallying. All the platitudes about devotion to democracy cannot conceal this enormous and ominous fact Nor should it be forgotten that the U.S. military the CIA and Ford and Kissinger have shared a common view with Spinola and his ilk and class supporters all these many years and will at the proper moment throw him all possible support.

Like Russia's General Kornilov, who rallied the reactionary forces in the summer of 1917 in an attempt to overthrow the Kerensky Provisional Government Spinola can be turned back by the organized and determined effort of the working class.

But Spinola-Kornilov and his military camarilla and big business supporters are still at large in Portugal only awaiting the opportune moment. Only the broad masses of people only the oppressed and exploited can stop them. This time, the Portuguese masses must go all the way.

The Political Crisis in Portugal

As the political crisis in Portugal deepens, a classic showdown of unprecedented dimensions seems absolutely inevitable Certainly all the signs point in that direction.

The Oporto events of January 25, in which left-wing militants broke up the convention of the so-called Social Democratic Center Party (a neo-fascist organization) and in which the delegates had to be rescued the next day by government paratroops, is only one symptom of the temper of the mass movement of the working class.

Demonstration in Oporto

The Oporto demonstration was not composed merely of MRPP (so-called "Maoists") militants but encompassed a considerable spectrum of others, even including youths from the Socialist Party, which felt obligated to publicly disavow them. But most important, all accounts in the Western capitalist press, including Le Monde, the London Economist, and the international weekly edition of the Manchester Guardian, show that the soldiers were friendly to the demonstrators and well-nigh fraternized with them.

The London Economist goes so far as to state that "there are unconfirmed reports that the police were fired on by conscripts (soldiers) sympathetic to the rioters, which may be partly borne out by the fact that five policemen were admitted to hospital with bullet-wounds that night. At any rate, it appears that the soldiers, who moved about haphazardly without any apparent direction, made no attempt to disperse the crowd." (London Economist, February 1)

The Manchester Guardian weekly of February 1 confirms that "the conference had to be abandoned after left-wing demonstrators besieged the hall while police and troops stood by."

Thus, while the government sent troops to defend the neo-fascist conference, the soldiers, at least to a limited degree, fraternized with the demonstrators. Alvaro Cunhal, the CP leader, of course denied that the CP had anything to do with the demonstration and condemned it as a "provocation by reactionaries and networks of agents of foreign services." He characterized it as a "valuable contribution to reaction."

Of course, it is entirely possible that there were agent provocateurs in the midst of the demonstration and, in the light of the general political situation, the CIA might very well have been interested in converting it into some sort of a frame-up to utilize it for purposes that would undermine the revolutionary struggle. This could happen at any demonstration, but, it certainly would not, and does not in this case, detract one iota from the political significance of the demonstration which overpowered the neo-fascist conference so that it had to be rescued by government paratroops.

Owners abandon lands, factories

In the background of the political crisis are matters of broader social significance which are responsible for the growing acuteness of class antagonisms. In the first place, the number of estates abandoned by landlords has vastly increased and all the indications are that the abandonments are by no means voluntary acts of the landlords. They have fled, in many cases, for fear of their lives. Many are in Brazil, Paris, and London, and a good many are lobbying in Washington — as if the Pentagon and the State Department would need any nudging to intervene.

But the same story is also true of the abandonment of industrial enterprises. Many capitalists have fled the country. It is well known that agricultural workers have taken over the tilling of the land on many estates and that workers are doing the same thing in some establishments which have been vacated by their employers. It is needless to state that the banks are sabotaging the economy and while the government tries to give the appearance of normalcy, the fact of the matter is that the possessing classes and their representatives as well as sympathizers in the courts, the police, and the military — are not viewing the matter with equanimity at all.

On the contrary, the most frantic efforts are being made by the battered possessing classes to regain their standing, they feel themselves endangered, notwithstanding the assurances of the government.

Behind the growing split

The fear of the ruling class has manifested itself in a virtual split in the coalition forged by the CP with the SP (Socialist Party) and the PPD (Popular Democratic Party). It, explains why the latter two organizations have moved swiftly towards the right at a time when popular sentiment among the masses has shifted to the left. This is a characteristic frequently seen in a revolutionary situation. The masses move sharply to the left while the leaders, frightened by the hostile pressure of the possessing classes, move to the right.

The CP position from the very beginning has been a gradualistic approach towards the economic problems of the working class and the reshaping of capitalist society in general. Its conception of the developing struggle was limited to the framework of bourgeois democracy. It therefore most enthusiastically pushed the broadest possible united front which included the SP and the PPD.

But the course of the struggle has shown that the possessing as well as the non-possessing classes in Portuguese society (as in any society divided into classes) have entirely different, opposing, and antagonistic conceptions of democracy. Each must try to defend its own class interests. In the present critical situation in Portugal, the kind of popular democracy envisioned in the CP program is utopian. The possessing classes are out to fight tooth and nail to regain and enlarge their property, which to them is the essence of "democracy."

Salazar and Caetano defended that kind of "democracy" and a return to those "happy days" is certainly what they have in mind. This is what's at the bottom of the continuing series of political shifts at the top echelons of the Armed Forces Movement and the government.

The trade union law

The most recent crisis over the trade union law gave the SP the opportunity to try to bolt from the coalition because the law would give a tremendous advantage to the new trade union confederation, which has an overwhelming predominance of CP influence.

Wilfred Burchett (Guardian, February 3) states that the antimonopoly bill the terms of which apparently limit the capitalist monopolies, is the real heart of the dispute. But it does not really matter. Nor does it matter that Cunhal has in his latest pronouncement spelled out, more specifically than at any other time, economic measures for a restructuring of Portuguese society which are far more attractive than originally stated in more vague and general terms.

For instance, he is quoted as saying in a January 27 press conference, "It is necessary to limit, then to neutralize and finally suppress the control of the national economy by the big industrialists and estate owners," militant words, indeed, coming from him. Although this gradualist approach is said to be already drafted into the new economic law, it is nevertheless significant that Cunhal should now bring it up, bearing in mind that he himself has said that the country is now going through a "decisive stage" of the Portuguese revolution.

Who will do it?

But the larger question, the one that towers over everything else, especially over programmatic announcements of what will be done, is who is going to do it? This is the key to Portuguese politics at the present time. The CP's strategy of coalition with the SP and the PPD is one thing — and for the moment that coalition is all but broken up. The basic coalition, the key to CP politics, is its alliance with the Armed Forces Movement.

Unquestionably the CP has friends, sympathizers, and members in the armed forces, but its alliance with the AFM is an alliance with a section of the officer corps.

An army is a faithful replica of class stratification in capitalist society. It would be a renunciation of Marxism to deny this elementary truth. The peasants and the workers are among the conscripted soldiers; the officers generally come from the middle class and the bourgeoisie. In a broad way they represent and respond to the class interests from whence they came. Of course, here and there officers, even in the American army and especially during the Vietnam war, have turned against the military brass, against the government, etc. Individual members of the officer corps, especially in a country which has such a vast number of Communists, inevitably are drawn to the side of the oppressed.. But class groupings as a whole in a showdown crisis respond to their class.

For this reason, to rely solely and so heavily on the AFM in a time of crisis is to surrender the initiative of the masses and depend on maneuvers in the military, banking on individual military leaders — and in the end to succumb to paralysis in the event of a right-wing coup. But Cunhal, like the rest of the CP leaders, sees "cooperation between the popular movement and the AFM as the dynamic element" — as the only guarantee against a fascist coup. "Isolated from each other," says Cunhal, these two movements would be powerless to carry out the fundamental transformation of Portuguese society which is on the order of the day.

What if AFM breaks?

There is no doubt that Cunhal relies completely on the unity of the two movements. But suppose there is a break in the AFM, as the capitalist press is daily rumor-mongering. Then what? There is no evidence, at least none available in this country, which would indicate that the party is making any independent preparation or arming the workers for that eventuality.

One can only hope that, given the gravity of the situation and the long suffering of the masses under the Salazar and Caetano dictatorships and the sense of self-confidence obtained since the April 25 coup, any attempt to reestablish a fascist regime will arouse the instinctive and spontaneous drive of the workers and the popular masses generally, and force the working class organizations into a combative, militant, united front for a victorious socialist revolution.

Portugal — another momentous week

Once again, as has happened on so many previous occasions since the April 25 overthrow of the fascist dictatorship, Portugal has passed through a week of high tension and intense political maneuvering in the Cabinet and in the Coordinating Committee of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM), capped by land seizures by landless peasants and a giant demonstration of workers in Lisbon.

The demonstration in Lisbon, which numbered more than 10,000 workers and marched through the center of the city, passing the U.S. Embassy, was in deliberate defiance of a government decree banning all demonstrations. This demonstration was therefore of special significance, not only because it was large, but because it was composed mainly of revolutionary and militant organizations to the left of the Portuguese CP. The size of the demonstration and the fact that the government did not move against the demonstrators was an embarrassment to the CP and undermined its standing from the left.

A principal chant by the demonstrators was directed against the NATO naval exercises in which American, British, French, Canadian, West German, and Portuguese units participated.

'Simulated' NATO intervention

The guns and armor of the American aircraft carrier Saratoga stood out menacingly within sight of Commerce Square, opposite where most of the workers had assembled. This had to arouse the greatest indignation, not only from the demonstrators but from all Portuguese workers, especially when one remembers that the CP itself has stood out so long and undeviatingly against NATO. Yet one must wonder-how could the Armed Forces Movement agree to the participation of Portuguese naval units in an exercise which involved simulated bombings of central Portugal? And how can the Provisional government at this very late date still be a member of NATO, especially when the Pentagon has contemptuously barred the Portuguese armed forces from any so-called secret NATO material?

It is to be remembered that as early as April 29 of last year, barely a few days after the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship, a meeting took place of 700 naval officers who endorsed the program of the AFM and as a result secured the removal of 82 admirals and vice-admirals from the navy. This included a purge of the notorious Admiral Tenreiro, owner of one of Portugal's largest fishing fleets, who was subsequently arrested and imprisoned. Indeed, it was precisely by the navy itself that a good part of the naval brass was purged.

If even this branch of the armed forces, where so many !of the fascist officers had been purged, did not make felt its opposition to naval maneuvers directed specifically against Portugal, then how can the AFM be regarded as a force representing or responsive to the popular masses, as the CP coalition would have us believe? On the contrary, the acquiescence to the provocative NATO exercises represents a danger. It shows that a rightist, pro-imperialist tendency predominates in the Provisional government as presently constituted. Is this what Mario Soares, the leader of the Socialist Party who is constantly forecasting (really threatening) civil war, as he did just recently in the struggle over the trade union laws, has in mind?

What is NATO?

NATO was conceived as an imperialist instrument directed against the USSR. In addition, although not as well publicized, it was intended to be an instrument to suppress internal revolutions in Europe. Only lately has this feature of NATO come to the fore.

The naval exercise, involving simulating bombings of central Portugal was obviously a counter-revolutionary exercise against the Portuguese people. Even those elements in the coalition government who may be anti-Soviet had absolutely no ground for countenancing this military maneuver.

The fact that naval units of the Portuguese armed forces did indeed participate in it is therefore highly significant. Foreign policy is an extension of domestic policy; military maneuvers are an expression of that foreign policy and aim to give it force. The participation of Portugal's armed forces in the NATO exercise tells us a great deal about the preponderant class forces in the Provisional government and the AFM itself.

Emergency economic law

The Emergency Economic Law which had been promised for many, many weeks now, and which had been in the discussion stage at least since June, was finally passed by the Cabinet of the Provisional government on February 8. This law enacts an agricultural reform which is supposed to give land to the peasants from estates where the landlords have long been absent or have run away under the impact of the militant struggle of the landless peasants

The law is also supposed to limit the giant firms and monopolies and restrict them in relation to profits and prices. 'But as far as the peasants are concerned, the measure promulgated on February 8 in reality merely validates measures that have already been taken independently by the peasants. The slogan of "land to those who till it" had caught the imagination of the peasants and been acted upon before February 8, but its validation in law is bound to give a new impetus to the struggle against the landlords and big estate holders.

Masses on the offensive

The fact that the peasants have organized an agricultural workers' association, although deeply influenced by the CP and some of its allies, is a remarkable sign of the growing upsurge in the countryside along with the resurgence in all the industrial centers of Portugal. Indeed, everywhere the forces of reaction and counter-revolution are on the defensive. This is the one absolutely indisputable fact that dominates the Portuguese political situation at present.

Not without reason does the New York Times of February 10 lament that "anti-communism is hard to sustain these days. Those who practice it are immediately branded as reactionaries and as partisans of the old regime."

But while the upsurge of the popular masses continues, the situation is extremely unstable. It is not possible for the so-called Emergency Economic Law to solve or materially improve the economic situation of the country. The reforms are of very limited character and do not go to the heart of the basic property relations between exploiter and exploited. They limit the monopolies but do not eliminate the monopolist class. Even the reforms themselves remain to be effectuated. Only in areas where the workers and the peasants have themselves taken matters into their own hands do the reforms have any real meaning.

They do, however, as all such reform legislation does in revolutionary situations, provide an impetus for mass activity and for extra-legal measures taken by the masses. Unemployment (200,000 in a country of only 8.5 million) plus galloping inflation continue to take their toll, and this without letup. It is characteristic of a revolutionary situation that neither of the basic classes forming the structure of capitalist society can long endure the status quo. Both classes are in rebellion against the status quo. Such is the situation in Portugal today.

As Lenin put it, "neither class can go on living as before." This alone creates the premise for a revolutionary crisis.

Relation between CP and armed forces

A distinctive feature of the coalition backing the Provisional government lies in the relationship between the CP and the Armed Forces Movement. Unlike during the popular front of the 1930s, the CP now has a stronger hold in the armed forces. This is the key to its strength in the coalition. But it is of a purely derivative type. Its strength in the mass movement, with a huge following among the workers and peasants, is what gives the CP a degree of strength in the military, and not the other way around. But the CP's policy utilizes this strength to mask class collaboration with the bourgeoisie.

It must not be forgotten that the other parties, even the MRPP, also have some strength in the armed forces. But it is the reliance by the CP on the coalition with the AFM, more specifically with the officer corps, which marks it out as a medium of class collaboration and holds out limitless dangers in the event of another attempted coup by the right-wing.

Gain of leftists

However, as matters stand now the CP is gaining in the rural areas — as witness its mass support at the February 9 Evora demonstration. Evora is the center of the Alentejo region, an agricultural area properly called the breadbasket of Portugal. But in the industrial areas the CP is losing strength to more militant and revolutionary organizations further to the left. The Lisbon anti-NATO demonstration was not only an embarrassment to the CP, it undermined its strength and showed that the pendulum in the mass movement is moving leftward away from the class collaborationist policy of the CP.

The greatest hopes for a resolution of the conflict in Portugal lie in the realization of the need for a broad working class united front by those political organizations which can take on the historic responsibility to meet the challenge which the possessing classes are surely preparing. It makes imperative the need to arm the proletariat, not only politically and ideologically, but physically.

Portugal — who will strike first?

With the announcement by the Provisional government that elections to the Constituent Assembly will take place on April 12, the Portuguese revolution has entered its truly critical phase.

Normally, the setting of a definite date for the convocation of a Constituent Assembly should ease political tensions and quiet rumors of another right-wing coup in the making. However, the opposite is turning out to be all too true.

A second version of the September 28 abortive coup attempt is obviously out of the question. It will be remembered that on that date General Spinola attempted a military coup. He tried to mask it by staging a Mussolini-type fascist mobilization in Lisbon under the guise of a call to the "silent majority to avert a left-wing dictatorship."

Sept. 28 — workers turned back fascists

The attempt failed because the CP and its allied organizations mobilized workers, students, and soldiers who successfully turned back the demonstrators. Spinola resigned, two small outright fascist organizations dissolved, and their leaders were arrested along with several hundred low ranking officials and military leaders.

It should be added that alongside the CP and its allies, all other working class organizations to the left of the CP enthusiastically participated in the call to stop the fascist mobilization. It was, however, undeniably a CP initiative which evoked the massive working class demonstration which stopped the abortive coup.

Upsurge everywhere

A militant resurgence of the working class movement has held sway in principal industrial centers of Portugal ever since. Land seizures by landless peasants in recent weeks have shown an upsurge of the struggle in rural areas. The events in Oporto, where thousands of militant workers and students broke up the convention of the Christian Democratic Center, a neo-fascist organization, have heightened the working class upsurge, which was capped by the giant anti-NATO demonstration in Lisbon on January 31, held in defiance of a government decree banning demonstrations.

A call to another fascist mobilization to cover a right-wing military coup is therefore most unlikely. A new fascist conspiracy would have to be tried differently, but there is no question that the center of the right-wing plotting is in the upper echelons of the military. That is where the hope of the possessing classes lies; that is who they are banking on.

The possessing classes, however, are in complete disarray. Their political institutions, as well as their leaders, stand discredited by decades of fascist collaboration, and many have fled the country. Others have put on the mask of democracy merely to get a hearing.

Fascists look to imperialism for rescue

The bulk of the ruling class is in an exceptionally weakened position. Their main source, in fact their sole hope for support, lies in the concerted effort of the leading imperialist powers, headed by the U.S. to bring about a counter-revolutionary overturn.

Hence, the most severe external pressure by the leading European imperialist powers, and most of all by the U.S., is being brought to, bear on Portugal. It is now 3 weeks since NATO naval maneuvers took place on the coast of the Iberian peninsula, involving simulated bombing and invasion of Portugal. Nevertheless, 19 ships including the U.S. aircraft carrier Saratoga are still prowling in the vicinity of the Portuguese coastline.

The most striking feature of this NATO naval exercise was that it marked the first time that NATO has been used as an instrument of counter-revolutionary subversion against a European country which it has pledged to defend. NATO, it must be remembered, was ostensibly set up solely as an anti-Soviet military alliance. But here, for the first time, it demonstrated that one of its principal purposes is to stem the tide of revolutionary working class upsurge.

Haig and NATO

Not to be forgotten is the fact that the present NATO commander is none other than General Alexander Haig, Nixon's former White House Chief-of-Staff, and Kissinger's principal deputy during the Vietnam negotiations.

Haig was a key figure in the October 1973 "Saturday night massacre" when Nixon tried to pull a near-coup, firing Elliot Richardson, then Attorney General, Archibald Cox, Special Watergate Prosecutor, and William Ruckelshaus, Deputy Attorney General.

Haig has kept a low profile in his new post, especially as regards Portugal. But C.R. Sulzberger of the New York Times (Feb. 15, 1975) credits him with "taking quiet initiatives" as NATO Commander and, in particular, of "smoothing out wrinkles in relationships with France."

This is profoundly significant since France has really been half way out of NATO and not participating for the most part in any NATO military exercises.

However, French naval units participated with the other NATO powers in the maneuvers aimed at Portugal. Thus a counter-revolutionary front of the leading imperialist powers, composed of Britain, West Germany, Canada, and France, and headed by the U.S., was fashioned with the aim of subverting the Portuguese revolution.

And covert subversion

Along with these military moves, the imperialist powers have flooded Portugal with a variety of political leaders from the West European social-democratic parties, calculated to bolster up the pro-imperialist stand of the Portuguese Socialist Party (IPSP), as well as that of the more reactionary Popular Democratic Party (PPD). Both parties are in the coalition government and are regarded as the most reliable social supports of the ruling class and of NATO.

Irving Browne of the AFL-CIO has been there to "help" the unions, that is, to subvert them on behalf of the CIA and split them as was done during the 1946-48 period in France and Italy.

It is enough to quote Francisco sa Carneiro, leader of the PPD, whose recent pronouncements of alarm at the growth of revolutionary sentiment among the masses sound more like an open call for imperialist intervention than a description of the political situation.

"An atmosphere of suspicion and hate has been created," said Carneiro, "which has led to permanent disquiet and the impossibility of permanent cooperation. We cannot go on living in a climate of civil war. We can no longer tolerate the escalation of revolutionary language."

Constituent Assembly and imperialist aims

It is in this light that we must see the convocation of the Constituent Assembly. The imperialists are not concerned with legal niceties of bourgeois parliamentarism. They are preparing to strike — a blow, either through a military coup, through open military intervention or some combination of the two.

The false alarm sounded in the New York Times editorial of February 17 — that the CP is planning violence and a Communist takeover before the election to the Constituent Assembly — is a smokescreen, calculated to cover the covert operations of the CIA and the military intervention planned by Washington and its European partners.

The State Department just this last week published documents showing that on Feb. 8, 1948, the National Security Council of the U.S. had before it a plan which "recommended the full use of political, economic, and if necessary, military measures to prevent a communist takeover in Italy." This partial revelation of how the Pentagon and the State Department were working feverishly to preserve the domination of the Italian bourgeoisie and American finance capital does not show what actual measures were taken. But it is clear from subsequent events that the U.S. used everything short of military intervention to defend its imperialist interests.

One need not wonder why the revelation was made at this time. It was meant as a threat to both Portugal and the USSR. In case this was not understood as such, the New York Times editorial referred to above makes it explicit.

"A Communist takeover of Portugal," said the New York Times on February 17, "might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send tremors throughout Western Europe." The Soviet Union is then warned that "detente will be the first casualty."

In the face of brutal frankness and open threats, can there be any doubt that the imperialist powers are preparing the ground for another Chile on the Iberian Peninsula? Do not the working class parties have the right — in fact the sacred duty — to prepare the mass of the people in advance for precisely this eventuality in the kind of manner which would put an end not merely to fascist threats, but to the ruling class and the system of exploitation upon which it rests?

The way Lenin and Trotsky prepared for the Constituent Assembly in 1917 offers an exceptionally instructive lesson. While utilizing all the legal and electoral opportunities offered, the Bolsheviks, knowing full well the counter-revolutionary nature of the bourgeoisie, armed the masses ideologically, politically, and physically for the insurrection. It was thus that they put an end to bourgeois rule and transferred the real power into the hands of the workers and peasants.

Theory of Social Fascism and the MRPP

In his celebrated book, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Marx said that great personalities occasionally appear in history twice, once as tragedy and again as farce. He might have added that the same can also be said of some organizations.

We have in mind the Movement for the Reorganization of the Proletariat (MRPP) and similar but smaller Maoist groupings in Portugal. This is not to deny that they are serious organizations with dedicated cadre and with revolutionary convictions

At the moment, the MRPP is clearly in the ascendant as a result of its leadership in the Oporto and Lisbon demonstrations in recent weeks. Its gains, which are minimal, are mostly at the expense of the CP, whose crass opportunism and class collaborationist policy with the bourgeoisie evoke an easy revulsion in the hearts of all the militants, especially the young.

'Social-fascism' and the German defeat

Nevertheless, the MRPP's relentless advocacy and wild pursuit of the slogan "social-fascists out of the trade unions" (by which they mean the CP) and "revisionism in power means social-fascism in power" clearly marks them out as a farcical or tragicomic version of the German CP of the late 1920s. The latter's fatal policy led to the decimation of the German CP and ushered in the Hitlerite period of horror destruction and catastrophe, unprecedented in history.

The origin of the MRPP's self-defeating policy lies with Stalin's false and spurious approach to the German Social-Democracy, which resulted in catastrophe and defeat.

It was the Stalin-Manuilsky-Thaelmann view that since the Social-Democracy in Germany was only socialist in words while in reality fascist in character, it would therefore be erroneous to offer a united front with them in the struggle against Hitler. This ignored that the Social-Democracy at that time had a tremendous working class following, even larger than that of the CP.

Neglecting a united front tactic with the Social-Democracy left the workers divided and bereft of leadership and objectively eased the road of Hitler to power.

It was this calamitous course which impelled Stalin thereafter to make a 180-degree turn toward full, unprincipled, class-collaborationist united front tactics with the Social-Democracy, the fruits of which are all too visible today in the policies of the French, Italian, and Portuguese CPs.

Bolshevik united front tactics

Basically, Stalin's German policy meant a rejection of Lenin's and Trotsky's victorious united front tactic, in which the Bolsheviks correctly blocked, in a principled manner, with the Mensheviks and Kerensky against Kornilov the leader of the counterrevolution and Russia's equivalent of Hitler and Spinola and thereafter vanquished the Mensheviks and Kerensky in the successful October Revolution.

it is easy to dismiss the MRPP slogans as mere polemical exaggerations or abusive rhetorical invective, born in the heat of struggle, which should not be taken too seriously. Would that that were so.

However, these slogans are the keystone to their fundamental policy and their commitment to them is as dogmatic and blind to the realities of the day as was that of the German CP, but with much, much less justification. For fascism was then a new phenomenon and defiance of Stalin and the Comintern meant virtual isolation from the revolutionary working class movement.

"Theory," Lenin used to frequently remark, quoting from Goethe, "is gray, but the tree of life is green."

The theoretician and architect of the first successful proletarian revolution did not, of course, mean to denigrate the significance of theory in relation to revolutionary practice. On the contrary, his remark was meant to emphasize the need to critically examine the application of Marxist theory to every new, concrete situation.

To dogmatically or mechanically apply a given theoretical proposition without regard to the concrete reality of the situation, Lenin warned, was a sure road to disaster for a revolutionary workers' party. Over and over again, Lenin proved himself to be the giant revolutionary theoretician and practitioner of Marxism by subjecting to the most searching and critical analysis each and every unfolding event during the long course of three Russian revolutions, the Civil War, the imperialist interventions, and the formative years of the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Of course, there cannot always be such a rich and varied succession of world-shaking events as was experienced in Russia. At other times there may be many weeks, months, and years, when divergent theoretical propositions may be debated endlessly without there being any significant events to confirm the validity of a given theory.

The ultimate test for all theory lies in the crucible of experience — experience which the masses themselves go through.

What the Portuguese experience reveals about the CP

What has been the experience of the Portuguese working class since the overthrow of the Salazar-Caetano fascist dictatorship on April 25? Has this experience verified or invalidated the theory of social-fascism as a scientific, Marxist-Leninist appraisal of the Portuguese CP?

The events of September 28 throw a powerful searchlight on the social character of the CP as a working class organization, and at the same time tear to shreds and hopelessly discredit the analysis of the MRPP.

What happened on September 28? On that day, General Spinola attempted a counter-revolutionary coup d'etat. He hoped to mask the coup with popular support by a call to the so-called "silent majority" to converge on Lisbon where he would present to the Portuguese a counter-revolutionary fait accompli. His call for popular support, in reality was a call for a fascist, Mussolini-type march on Lisbon.

But Spinola was stopped in his tracks. He was stopped by a timely giant anti-fascist mobilization. Spinola's fascist supporters were turned back. The, coup proved abortive and collapsed.

Who took the initiative in organizing and mobilizing the workers and students to stop the Mussolini-like march? It was the Portuguese CP. Can this be denied? Can this important initiative by the CP be characterized as the work of social fascists, i.e., socialists in words but fascists in deeds? It would not only be patently false, but absurd in the extreme.

By this mass action alone, the CP raised its prestige tremendously, not only among the workers but among the Portuguese masses as a whole. The CP leadership is still resting on its laurels from the popular support it won as a result of this significant initiative. It was this timely move which not only dealt a blow against a fascist comeback but also weakened the possessing classes in Portugal. It accounts for why the world bourgeoisie was so alarmed in the weeks that followed the Spinolist attempted coup, and still is — even more so today.

Reformist — but not fascist

True, everything the CP did in connection with the mass antifascist mobilization was done in the spirit of class collaboration. All its propaganda centered around and was confined to the narrow limits of the struggle against the resurgent reaction. It limited the struggle then, and has continually done so since then, to merely defending the status quo, defending the democratic rights the masses have gained until now, but severely restricting them to the framework of bourgeois democracy. But then, this has been their line for decades, since the middle '30s and during Stalin's lifetime.

It is avowedly a party without a revolutionary perspective for the overthrow of the bourgeois state. At its recent convention it even eliminated the phrase dictatorship of the proletariat from its program (which is a program in itself). What does this prove? It proves that the CP has degenerated into a reformist party and renounced the revolutionary class struggle. But it has not been converted into a fascist organization and has no kinship to one whatever.

The September 28 events were of enormous significance. They demonstrated that the CP, because it is rooted in the working class movement, has a stake in the struggle against counter-revolution and fascist dictatorship and is even capable of taking a bold initiative in this struggle as a measure of self-defense.

This does not necessarily mean that it can maintain the initiative, but that, as against the danger of a rightist attack, it has a strong material interest in mobilizing the working class against the thrust of the fascist reaction of the bourgeoisie.

The MRPP must have felt this in their bones on September 28, when thousands of CP rank and filers and sympathizers were mounting the barricades and the MRPP, as well as other organizations to the left of the CP, had to join them in a disorderly manner, while the PCP carried the anti-fascist mobilization through in a planned and organized fashion.

No principled united front

True, Alvaro Cunhal, the CP leader, might formally have called the MRPP and other militant organizations to a united front on this crucial event, but that would have been expecting the CP leadership to have acted in a principled, revolutionary, working class manner. The fact that they did not do this hardly transforms them into "social fascists."

The MRPP could scarcely have expected such a call. Its policy towards the CP is so violent, so hostile, and so unreasoning, that it virtually excludes almost any type of working class collaboration, even with kindred organizations, let alone the CP-and even in the face of the greatest danger. Instead of offering a united front to the CP, even if only for the purpose of exposing the CP, it let them off the hook and enabled the CP to justify its policy to its own rank and file.

The MRPP's strategy is the crassest example of that blind, petty-bourgeois fanaticism which cannot even recognize the need to take the most elementary measures for its own self-defense, measures which in moments of great crisis are necessary and without which it will surely end up in the destruction of its organization.

The erroneous position of the MRPP, however, does not absolve the PCP of its own blatant revisionism, which is also the legacy of Stalin. The broad resurgence of the working-class movement, which the Portuguese proletariat is now experiencing, makes it imperative and in the most vital interest of the success of the Portuguese revolution to cleanse the Augean stables of Stalin's terrible legacy.

The Portuguese proletariat has the opportunity and the challenge to see to it that the dead hand of the past should not impede the road to its revolutionary future.

The Republica takeover and freedom of the press: Freedom for which class?

By the time this appears in print, the issue of the seizure of the newspaper Republica by the workers may already have been decided, along with issues more fundamental to the Portuguese revolution.

The lengthy deliberations in the High Council of the Revolution of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM) seem to have ended with a new and more serious crisis in the offing. The statement it issued yesterday, the full text of which has not reached this country yet, seems to have confirmed a shift to the right in the AFM leadership, if extracts in the New York Times of June 22 and the Christian Science Monitor of June 23 are accurate.

What's in workers' interests?

The seizure of the Socialist Party paper Republica, however, which has received such widespread attention and unmitigated condemnation by all of bourgeoisdom, requires elucidation. It is elementary for Marxists that the best interests of the working class require a free and untrammeled press so that the working class can be in the best possible position to propagate its own viewpoint.

Without question, the struggle for democratic rights in a bourgeois society includes above all the right of working class organizations to publish their own newspapers, magazines, etc., without interference from the capitalist government.

The working class has no special interest in condoning suppression of even bourgeois newspapers by the capitalist government, as that tends to put those who are deprived of the right to publish their own newspapers in the role of martyrs — and they are able to garner more support on the basis that they are persecuted.

Nevertheless, Marxist-Leninists are not mere bourgeois civil libertarians. Marxists differ from bourgeois liberals precisely in that they examine the question of freedom of the press from the point of view of the class struggle. Marxist-Leninists must first of all determine how the given issue will affect the independent class interests of the workers. Moreover, behind the cry of "freedom of the press" there often lurk hostile class interests which are not apparent on the surface.

Marxists must ask themselves, "What class forces, what class groups, lie behind the cry for freedom of the press?" For a Marxist to just go along with any and all slogans for freedom of the press regardless of the circumstances or time is his or her' undoing.

The concrete situation

It is one thing to defend freedom of the press in given concrete circumstances with full knowledge of what it entails. It is another matter to espouse it unconditionally regardless of historical circumstances and changing conditions.

Viewed in this light, one must examine the issue of the seizure of Republica first of all in the light of the prevailing political situation in Portugal today.

Portugal is now in the throes of a revolutionary situation. Seizures of plants and capitalist establishments as well as landed property have become widespread. We have alluded to this in previous issues of Workers World. Since then, the seizures and occupations by the workers have taken on more momentum. These have become especially marked since the Portuguese government enacted the nationalization law. The law gives the workers as well as some landless peasants an impetus to go much further than the law permitted. And the government has done nothing to discourage it or has been unable to do so.

We should add, as we said in earlier issues of WW, that many of the capitalists as well as the landlords have fled the country This, of course, has further encouraged the workers to take matters into their own hands. The nationalization law, as enacted, applied only to domestic industries. Nevertheless, the workers have gone beyond that.

Workers taking over shops

A vivid example of how this is done was given by the workers of the Portuguese Otis Elevator Company, which is a subsidiary of Otis Elevator, a multi-national corporation of the U.S.

According to the Wall Street Journal of May 21, "a workers' committee with the tacit consent of the Portuguese government took over the facilities of the Portuguese subsidiary of Otis Elevator." In doing so, the workers of course went beyond the laws which specifically excluded foreign companies from the nationalization program.

Limited workers' control

According to an official of the Otis Elevator Company quoted in the Wall Street Journal, the workers had been exerting more and more control over the management of the subsidiary over the past several weeks and had seized the premises. Then they went further and barred the managing director from his office altogether. Both the Portuguese government and the labor ministry were involved very closely in the discussions between the subsidiary's management and the workers' committee. But management was told, according to the Wall Street Journal, that "it should obey" the instructions of the committee! The multi-national's chairman then said that "the seizure was tantamount to expropriation and that's where the matter stands now."

We quoted this example, one of many, because it went further than the nationalization law permitted. But it also illustrates that in Portugal there is now and has been for some time a growing tendency toward occupation of the plants and large landed estates to the extent that it can be said that there is a limited degree of workers' control of industry which has the potential of expanding to full control. Undoubtedly, this spells out a vital characteristic of a revolutionary situation. What is happening is much more symptomatic than merely an individual plant being seized here or there for a specific purpose and a limited period of time, after which the workers return to work and the bosses are in unquestioned control and authority as before.

The recent seizure of a Lisbon radio station belonging to the Roman Catholic Church is another illuminating example. This has received widespread publicity only because the radio station belonged to the church.

The seizure of Republica by the printers and other employees is merely part and parcel of the general trend of seizures and occupations by the workers. The capitalist press, however, would have us believe that it is really a conspiracy of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) to obliterate freedom of the press in Portugal by singling out the Socialist organ for suspension.

It must be understood that the CP leadership did not, out of a clear blue sky, decide to pounce upon the SP organ, particularly after the SP had received a vote 2-1/2 times that of the CP. If that had been the case, it would have been completely self-defeating and a howling blunder. The fact of the matter is that the CP, according to the Daily World here, has "the grand total of five members" in the entire establishment, although its influence unquestionably goes beyond that.

But does the CP or the military have the right, ipso facto, to try to seize the paper and oust the management?

Revolutionary situation

Under ordinary circumstances the answer would be no. But the situation in Portugal is by no means ordinary. It is in the throes of a revolutionary situation. The workers everywhere are trying to take the reins into their own hand and are forcing management, as with the Otis Elevator Company, to "obey the instructions of the workers committees."

The Republica seizure was started by the workers. According to the New York Times of May 27, when Commander Jorge Correia Jesuino, the Minister of Information, went to Republica the night the printers occupied it, he berated them sharply.

"The Republica belongs to its shareholders," he told them. "These are represented by the management which has the legal right to run the paper. I repeat, the newspaper has the right to publish any kind of information it chooses. Nor do I think it is as one-sided as you gentlemen insist. If any of you disagree with its policies you should work somewhere else. I only wish there were more newspapers like it."

As the reader can see, this is exactly how an indignant boss addresses militant, recalcitrant workers. The workers stood pat. And at this writing, although the government, through the AFM, has been forced to intercede more than once, the workers have not allowed the management to take over again.

Of course, the CP is most anxious to undercut the SP and is vitally concerned in the struggle. But it did not initiate it. It has become an issue in spite of the CP and is due wholly to the momentum of the nationwide struggle and the temper of the moment, which is one of intense revolutionary struggle. Of course, the CP plays an enormous role in the struggle, while at the same time it has frequently tried to restrain and limit the workers' struggle.

One may ask does this nevertheless still justify the takeover of a paper that stands for socialism and represents large sections of the workers?

SP On the workers' dictatorship

Mario Soares, the leader of the SP, summed up most superbly what the SP leadership at this time fundamentally stands for. While the AFM leadership was debating the issue, he was asked what he thought of the communique which was finally issued on June 22.

"Today," he said, "there is more hope for parliamentary democracy than yesterday." Why is he "more hopeful"? The Christian Science Monitor and the Times quoted his answer (June 23 and June 22, respectively). "Because the document was very explicit in rejecting the dictatorship of the proletariat and people's democracy for Portugal."

There you have it in a nutshell. It sums up the program of the Portuguese SP and Mario Soares its leader, superbly: to obstruct the path to a proletarian dictatorship in Portugal. Now, one may say that Soares was merely rejecting that form of a proletarian dictatorship as practiced in Eastern Europe. But that is not so. He is happy that the junta is rejecting the very concept of a proletarian dictatorship. (Of course it sounds fantastic that a bourgeois junta would even entertain such a concept.) What he is really alluding to are radical elements in the AFM, some of whom are to the left of the CP and really do espouse the dictatorship of the proletariat.

But the dictatorship of the proletariat is precisely the emerging issue in the Portuguese Revolution today. There can be no socialism without a transitional phase of proletarian dictatorship as a first stage in the development toward a socialist society. All talk of a classless society without a proletarian dictatorship is nonsense.

Different forms today

It would be one thing if Soares rejected a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. The dictatorship of the proletariat can take on many forms. The Paris Commune was one form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. In Lenin's time the Soviet state presented another form, modeled after the Paris Commune to a large extent. It took on an extremely onerous and repressive form during Stalin's period, and still is repressive today, but less so.

Another form of the dictatorship of the proletariat took place in Cuba, and still another in Vietnam. And, of course, there is the form of the proletarian dictatorship which has taken deep root in China. The models of Eastern Europe, because of the fact that the old capitalist regimes were basically overthrown by the Soviet Red Army, are not the best models by any means, but their class content is nevertheless that of the dictatorship of the proletariat although in a very distorted form.

Nevertheless, no matter how varied the forms taken by the dictatorship of the proletariat, with some more democratic than others they are nonetheless dictatorships of the class of the workers and are a hundred times superior to the best, most popular, most democratic dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.

Mario Soares rejects the dictatorship of the Portuguese proletariat under the guise of rejecting a particular form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. He has thus revealed himself to be for the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. There is no middle ground. Under such circumstances, he, as leader of his party, and the paper which espouses his line are counter-revolutionary. Rejecting the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat at the very time when the Portuguese proletariat is emerging in struggle to exercise and elevate itself to be the ruling class is treacherous.

Those who are sincerely concerned with the fate of the Portuguese proletariat should not shed tears over the seizure of Republica by the workers, even if it was done under the leadership of the Portuguese Communist Party. The bourgeoisie has mobilized world public opinion and international finance capital has made it a principal issue in a united, unrestrained assault against the Portuguese working class under the guise of defending freedom of the press. In reality the real issue is the deprivation of the right of the workers to seize the means of production, transportation, and communication.

It is one thing to criticize the bourgeois character of the AFM top command or to refuse to give it the unqualified endorsement to rule over the workers that the CP does. It is another thing entirely to fall prey to bourgeois propaganda under the guise of "freedom of the press," which is aimed at destroying the progress of the Portuguese Revolution.

Portuguese revolution in danger

The U.S. and its Western allies are preparing a back-door counterrevolution in Portugal. They are using Socialist Party (SP) and Popular Democrat (PD) politicians as their public relations front to carry out this sordid mission. This attempt to reverse the gains of the revolution, unlike the two previous attempts — last September and again in March — has the potential of fomenting the bloodiest civil war in Europe since the Spanish Revolution.

There are, of course, theoretically speaking, other possibilities. The Portuguese Communist Party (CP) and its allies could gracefully withdraw from the government and from influential positions in the army and let the SP and PD run the show in reestablishing the battered and broken-down ruling class of Portugal.

But even if the CP leadership were contemplating this alternative, which we strongly doubt, it would not result in a peaceful democratic solution. It would only end up in a monstrous blood bath for the working class. The reasons for this should be obvious to anyone who has even superficially studied the development in Portugal over the past 14 months.

Fascists still there — in the woodwork

In the first place all the counter-revolutionary forces — the Salazarists, the Caetanoists, the Spinolaists in and out of the army, all the old, rotten, and corrupt elements of the fascist regime, the police, the civil guards, the prison authorities, the court personnel and judges, some elements of the rank-and-file army, not to speak of reactionaries in the officer corps, all the flunkies of the dispossessed landlords, absentee managers, servants and lickspittles of the monopolies, who have long been in hiding and subdued — all these would spring into the open and create a St. Bartholomew's Night of terror for all the working class militants, landless peasants, and progressives.

None of the above counter-revolutionary elements have been destroyed or deeply wounded by the revolution. The revolution has been kind to them. Have not all genuine revolutions of the oppressed in the past always started off by treating their mortal class enemies with kindness — until the night of terror does descend upon them? Only then, and then only, does the vengeance of the revolutionary masses come into existence. It is then that the revolutionary masses are reviled for the use of terror, but the terror of their oppressors is not mentioned.

To this day, the PIDE (the secret police who used to torture all dissidents during the fascist regime) have been treated "leniently, even kindly" (Portuguese CP head Alvaro Cunhal's own words). They could be out of jail on an hour's notice as vengeful, as cruel, and as sadistic as they ever were, if not more so.

Then think also of all those — there are thousands — who have been forced into exile. The landlords plant managers business executives, government officials of the former regime, and their families. Even now, "refugees" from Mozambique and Angola are streaming into the Lisbon airport. The rightists are delighted to welcome them.

Yes, it is theoretically possible for the CP to gracefully withdraw, but the practical aspect is no easy task. It ought to make anyone shudder at the enormous dangers it would entail. The bourgeoisie would soon show what it really means by a "democratic process." This would happen even if the CP withdrew in the best and most principled break with the government.

Right-wing pressure from Italian CP

There is no question that the Italian CP leader Enrico Berlinguer and his colleagues have been urging precisely such a withdrawal Have not the Italian CP leaders been warning Cunhal all along to take his place as a minority in a peaceful, constitutional, "democratic" way and make a Portuguese-style "historic compromise" like the one Berlinguer is so desperately trying to accomplish in Italy?

No wonder Cunhal is now so disdainful and scornful of his Italian and Spanish colleagues. The truth is, as an article by John Paton Davies in the New York Times Magazine of July 13 says, the Italian CP leaders have all along been more favorable to the Portuguese Socialist Party and its approach. That explains a lot about the anger of Cunhal at the advice (or really pressure) he's been getting from Italian and other Western CP leaders.

The current crisis in Portugal arose when the SP ministers and their deputies withdrew from the Cabinet. By the time this is in print, the Popular Democrats will have done so too.

Almost simultaneously, the Confederation of Portuguese Industries — the industrialists' organization — which had been laying low all these many months and at times seemed as servile as flunkies to the government, has made a turnabout. Emboldened by the democratic electoral victory these capitalists have steadily become tougher. At their last meeting they went so far as to hand the government an ultimatum so provocatively worded that even President Costa Gomes, a moderate (a euphemism for a bourgeois), had to decline meeting with them. The smaller shopkeepers too have become even more rambunctious.

And finally, the Assembly of Lawyers, representing the ancient and honorable profession of Portuguese barristers (where have they been all these 50 years in the struggle for civil rights and democratic liberties?) has at last passed a resolution for civil rights and democracy directed against the government and the CP.

To round out the events as they are unfolding in this tense political crisis, the headquarters of the CP in Rio Maior (a small town 25 miles north of Lisbon), has been burned down to the ground by a counter-revolutionary mob to the malicious joy of all the rightists. And none of those who are now suddenly fighting for "democracy" took note of this infraction of democracy.

And what has been the issue which galvanized the SP and the Popular Democratic politicians and caused them to throw down the gauntlet to the armed forces (really meaning it for the CP)?

Freedom of the press! The fact that the workers, led to a very limited extent by the CP, took over the establishment of Republica (which incidentally is privately owned), locked the door, and wouldn't let the publishers in. But this takeover coincided with hundreds of others by Portuguese workers in other areas of the working class struggle, which explains why so much workers' control of industry prevails as of now in Portugal (see WW article, June 27).

Bourgeois "freedom" lovers

Never has an issue such as the closing of the Republica newspaper had such a magical effect on rallying the worldwide bourgeoisie. Offers of financial support "have come from all over the world and things have gone so far that there was a suggestion that Western European and American newspapers might make a direct contribution for a newspaper to be edited by Raul Rego" (the former owner of Republica), says the Washington Post of July 15.

Has there ever been a genuinely socialist publication that could get the support of the Pentagon, the CIA, the White House, Wall Street, and the Bound? Yet even a retired U.S. Chief of Naval Operations is publicly soliciting funds for Republica. Admiral Elmo Zumwalt signed his name to an ad in the New York Times for such purposes (July 13), and Zumwalt was none other than Nixon's Chief of Naval Operations.

Indeed, the U.S. ruling class is working overtime on all cylinders getting everybody to do their bit to reverse the situation in Portugal. Even bankers have been enlisted to act as errand boys for the CIA so that "freedom could prevail." Tad Szulc, the former New York Times Washington Bureau Chief, says in an article in the August Penthouse magazine that "early this year several American bankers were asked by personal friends in the CIA to handle a delivery of special funds in Spain and Portugal." Some, of course, refused. It would violate the tradition that the CIA does the errand boy work for the bankers, and not vice versa. But on this special occasion, some of the bankers agreed to cooperate in the spirit of "national interest."

Money and troops

Why special funds in Spain and Portugal? It was not for nothing that Ford on May 30 condescended to embrace Franco in public. For it is there in Spain that the so-called Portuguese Liberation Army, a band of cutthroats, mercenaries, and scum of the earth, are being trained for a counter-revolutionary invasion. It should not be forgotten that the Mutual Assistance Treaty signed between Franco and Salazar in 1939 had in mind precisely such a situation as exists in Portugal today.

The London Economist of June 28 refers to the PLA as one of the reasons why the "vanishing right has reasons for feeling not entirely powerless."

The other two reasons the magazine gives are the troops expected to return from Mozambique and the former high commissioner there, Admiral Vitor Crespo. It has been widely speculated that the latter is a possible alternative to Premier Goncalves.

The ruling class has put its liberal elements in the vanguard role in garnering support for Republica. Behind them, of course, are the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, such luminaries of the right as William Buckley, a long list of right-wing liberals, and an array of organizations like the anti-communist Social Democrats USA, and others ad nauseam.

Where were they all these many years when the fascist dictatorship was in power? Did they ever raise their voice for any victim of fascist terror in Portugal, or condemn the suppression of democratic newspapers then?

Where were they when Spinola was planning and openly calling for his "silent majority" to come out in a Mussolini-type march and end the Portuguese revolution?

None of them seem to have noticed that at all. Where were they all when the Spinolaists were planning to launch their second coup last March? Were they alerting the public in Portugal to mount the barricades? Were they getting ready to send bundles for the freedom fighters on the barricades who halted the Spinolaist fascist assault?

Did they even deign to write a commendatory editorial on the successful defense and the crushing of the fascist coup-which they said they were against (but only because it failed)?

No, No! Then it was the workers, the revolutionary militants, the PCP, the Portuguese Democratic Movement, and others on the left who were fighting the battle for civil liberties and democratic rights against the fascist assault. It was they who saved whatever democratic rights exist in Portugal today. Arrayed today against these very same revolutionary militants, class-conscious workers, and Progressives is the bourgeois counter-revolution wearing the mask of "freedom of the press" and "democracy."

Soares and his colleagues are merely preparing the groundwork for the counter-revolution. They are transitional, intermediate, and temporary figures to hold the fort until ... ! Soares' bourgeois allies among the Popular Democrats are more conscious of their mission than he is. As are the representatives of U.S. imperialism like C.L. Sulzberger, part of the oligarchy that owns and edits the New York Times. Now in Lisbon, he quotes Soares as telling him, "I think we must use foreign help." (New York Times, July 16.)

CP rejects bourgeois parliament

Cunhal is every bit correct in rejecting the bourgeois democratic system which he calls "freedom and monopolists" — that is a splendid formulation and accurate as well (as quoted in a July 13 New York Times Magazine interview conducted by Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci). The monopolies can always reject "freedom" whenever it becomes inconvenient for them. But the social democrats and liberals, who presumably personify "freedom," have never quite disengaged themselves from the monopolies and have always managed to coexist with and serve them faithfully.

Cunhal is also absolutely correct when he denounces the Popular Front, such as the one Togliatti made with Nenni in 1948 which resulted in the Italian CP disbanding the anti-fascist Partisan organizations and entering a coalition cabinet with the bourgeoisie. Here is a' case where the monopolies could not quite comfortably coexist with freedom as envisioned by Togliatti and he and his colleagues were unceremoniously thrown out of the Cabinet as soon as it became convenient for the U.S. State Department.

Berlinguer's striving for his much beloved "historical compromise" with the Italian bourgeoisie is merely a cruder version of the 1948 coalition.

It should not be assumed that Cunhal is rejecting all compromise with the bourgeoisie and is all out for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as a superficial reading of his interview with Oriana Fallaci would indicate. But he does appear to be utterly uncompromising in the struggle against any bourgeois parliament which would be a screen for a later fascist takeover.

CP reliance on military

The most worrisome aspect of Cunhal's militant, defiant, and confident attitude towards the bourgeoisie is that it comes rather late in the day — hopefully not too late. Cunhal has banked everything on his relationship to the army and particularly to the Armed Forces Movement (AFM). He considers it a singular achievement and believes now that his party is "unexpendable" by the army.

His faith in his alliance with the AFM is wholly unwarranted and objectively a breach of the most elementary Marxist-Leninist principles on the class character of the state. (Incidentally, Lenin's classic State and Revolution is one of the best sellers in Lisbon today.)

Granted that some limited rapprochement with the army in the struggle against the Caetano-Salazar regime was inevitable, given the circumstances that the military had for a considerable period been preparing for the overthrow of the fascist regime.

But taking the responsibility for undeviating collaboration with the army on a practically unlimited scale is quite another matter. It's another form of class collaboration, in principle not qualitatively different from the character of the collaboration which the Italian CP is now carrying out, only theirs is with the civilian bourgeoisie.

The heavy price paid by the Portuguese CP for the collaboration is the loss of confidence of large sections of the workers who have become alienated as a result of the PCP's relentless drive to increase production — capitalist production — against excessive wage demands, all in the name of trying to arrest a consistently deteriorating capitalist economy. Cunhal admits that the economic situation is disastrous. Why is it so? Because the capitalist class is sabotaging production.

Asking the workers to withhold wage increases and the like will not stop capitalist sabotage nor will it in any way militate against inflation No capitalist government has yet been able to stifle inflation except by creating unemployment, and even then the inflation still continues.

Workers' control of the entire economy and the destruction of the capitalists' political power is the answer.

To some degree Cunhal himself gives the answer. As summarized by his interviewer, accurately, we believe, it is "either the dictatorship of the proletariat or fascism, the third force doesn't count, liberal socialism is rubbish."

Yet the CP has not acted upon this from the earliest stages of the revolution and instead tried to police the workers, making it easier for the SP and other elements to utilize and exploit the PCP's false policy. Of course it was pure demagogy on the part of the Socialists and others.

If bourgeois democracy cannot prevail in Portugal, according to Cunhal, what then? Is not a fascist dictatorship inevitable? "We Communists," says Cunhal, "are equipped to prevent it, thanks to our alliance with the military."

Would that that were so. We would like to believe that we are wrong in doubting this and will cheerfully admit it if Cunhal is to be proven true.

However, the first part of his sentence, in our view, is canceled out by the second part.

As matters stand, the facts speak against it. "A fact is a blunt thing," said Lenin.

Who are the leaders of the AFM?

Costa Gomes, the President of the Portuguese government, is, in Cunhal's own words, a moderate (a bourgeois). He was the chief of staff of the fascist government, not a very good recommendation.

Admiral Crespo, the former high commissioner of Mozambique, another moderate, is openly suggested as a replacement for Premier Goncalves, said to be a longtime friend and collaborator of the CP even before the overthrow of the fascist dictatorship.

Foreign Minister Antunes, another moderate, only the other day posed the possibility of calling in the UN in the developing struggle in Angola. He is said to have raised the alternative of sending in more troops to "safeguard" Portuguese lives and property.

If the PCP does not completely and without qualification denounce and disassociate itself from such renewed intervention, it will suffer the most severe setback in the mass movement, evoking utter revulsion from its most militant and class conscious supporters. And if the junta goes through with the projected intervention, then it invites the same fate as the Kerensky government after it resumed the imperialist war with the June 1917 offensive.

It is well known that the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) which considers itself Marxist, is supported by Soviet arms. It is now reported to be in control of Luanda, the Angolan capital. The National Front for the Liberation of Angola (FNMA) is reported to be moving an army against Luanda from Zaire. Assuming the very best motive on the part of the Portuguese junta — that is to help the MPLA defend Luanda against a neo-colonialist maneuver — this still would be a rank error. Any intervention by the troops of a country still legally the colonial power would only discredit the MPLA and confuse the situation. As Engels said, freedom for the colonies cannot be brought in from outside on a sword; that would only boomerang and weaken the real forces of liberation.

General Carvalho, the head of the security forces, is described in the bourgeois press as erratic in his relations with the military groupings and prone to move from left to right, a thin reed to rely upon in a showdown crisis.

As late as July 5th to 7th, General Carvalho, along with Captain Vasco Laurenco and Major Jose de Canto e Castro met with the so-called moderate bourgeois faction headed by Foreign Minister Melo Antunes, Major Vitor Alves and, very significantly, Admiral Vitor Crespo. It was a secret caucus meeting. Premier Goncalves was not there nor were some of the others close to him (New York Times, July 8). Fortunately Goncalves and his supporters along with the CP either reversed or somehow broke up what seemed to be a developing crisis and a split — what the SP and the Popular Democrats had been counting on, and what the CIA and its allied foreign, intelligence in Europe have been feverishly working at.

According to one report, there are no less than a thousand foreign newspaper people of the various wire services, magazines, newspapers, electronic media, etc. in Portugal today. A veritable army of intelligence, most of them not from the U.S. but working on behalf of U.S. intelligence. This is the kind of intelligence the liberal establishment thinks the CIA is properly engaged in. They only object to covert operations — after the fact, naturally.

Workers' commissions

There is absolutely no question that the danger of counterrevolution is real. That and that alone explains why the military finally validated plans to build what are called workers committees and commissions based upon popular support. The bourgeois press was quick to call it a move to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat — when what is really involved is an elementary measure of self-defense.

The PCP, however, necessarily feels the danger to itself, its organization, its mass following, and to the working class, far more keenly than any member of the High Council of the Armed Forces. It took the opportunity to get the High Council to validate its own version of the so-called commissions based on popular support.

These commissions can properly be described as "committees for the defense of the revolution," such as the Cubans developed. Of course they are subject to the approval of the existing military regime. But it does not take a great deal of political acumen to see that these committees can also be the foundation for a broad, popular, mass-based struggle against the counterrevolution.

The fact that the government validated them lends them legality but does not necessarily exclude their independent action during the course of the struggle. Certainly the counter-revolutionary elements who have been observing these developments in the country are not blind to this either. Should these committees at long last be set, up and begin functioning on a mass basis, they will contain the very same soldiers, workers, and neighborhood people in the various communities who were responsible in the main for warding off the counter-revolutionary fascist attempts of last September and March. These were organized by the Portuguese CP, its allies and mass organizations.

One so-called radical weekly here, the Militant, organ of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), has denounced the committees and dismissed them out of hand as being mere minions of the CP and the military. Their choice instead?

The Constituent Assembly. Of course — the same choice as the bourgeoisie. This is the most scoundrelly embellishment of a phony bourgeois parliament that a working class organization can make.

It is one thing for Marxists to seek participation even in the most reactionary bourgeois parliament. But it is another thing to actually prefer this phony bourgeois parliament to working class, broad-based committees which in truth and in fact have proven their mettle by twice defeating the counter-revolution — last September and again in March. The Militant takes advantage of the fact that the CP paper here, the Daily World, does not adequately or correctly defend these committees. But that's another matter. The SWP's defense of the Constituent Assembly is a vulgarized space-age version of Kautsky's defense of the Constituent Assembly when the Bolsheviks dismissed it in Russia.

Cunhal understands perfectly well what the Constituent Assembly means. His problem is how and by what means to conduct the struggle.

Although the Militant article maintains that the SP is just as bad as the CP, it is nevertheless a thousand times more for a corrupt, imperialist-controlled social democracy than for the CP. Jerry Foley writing in a previous installment in the Militant considered the electoral victory of the SP as a real opening for "socialism."

But that election also opened wide the gates for the counterrevolution. That is the lesson of bourgeois parliamentarism. It does not negate the necessity of working class parties to utilize elections when necessary and appropriate, but they must never become captives of parliamentary cretinism, prisoners of bourgeois democratic illusions.

On with the revolution!

While we have consistently criticized the CP for its policies in Portugal, and in no way share the position on the military held by the CP, in the crucial battle that is unfolding we are completely with them and with all the other working class organizations that are sure to take the brunt of the bourgeois counter-revolutionary assault once it is unleashed. We only hope that this time the counter-revolution will not only be thrust back, but that the CP and its allies will break out of the limitations imposed by their alliance with the military and will push through, along with other working class organizations a full-scale proletarian revolution and end slavery to monopoly capitalism once and for all.

Portugal's July Days

The Portuguese Revolution is now going through the agony of its "July days. " Communist Party headquarters in ten cities all across Northern Portugal have either been sacked or burned. Progressive newspapers are being hindered from distribution. Many revolutionary militants and progressive activists have had to take cover against mob violence. Others have gone into hiding. A wild witch hunt is in full progress, fueled by bourgeois reaction and clerical obscurantism. As always, persecution weakens some, strengthens others, and confusion takes a high toll.

It was all set off by a week-long series of demonstrations called under the banner of the Socialist Party (SP) but basically gathering together hundreds of thousands of reactionary elements, many of whom just a few weeks ago would not have dared to take to the streets. Nevertheless, these demonstrations have failed in their principal objective. The aim was to topple the government. They failed to achieve this.

Split in junta

They did, however, bring to the surface the deep split in the governing junta. It was shown without a doubt that President Gomes, Foreign Minister Antunes, Admiral Vitor Crespo, Captain Lourenco, and others constitute a right-wing, bourgeois military grouping. In opposition are the more progressive junior officers in the governing council of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM).

Gomes's readiness to displace Premier Goncalves in a new Cabinet with the Socialists and Popular Democrats, probably to the exclusion of the Portuguese CP and Portuguese Democratic Movement (MDP), constitutes an open breach. This was made clear when Gomes issued a statement saying a new Cabinet would be formed which "would respect the will of the Portuguese people and create the need to give representation to various currents of socialist political thought."

The phrase "respect for the will of the Portuguese people" is a catchword used by the Socialist Party as a rallying slogan for the rightists. Gomes's use of this phrase clearly refers to Mario Soares and his colleagues and does not embrace Marxist or revolutionary "currents of socialist political thought."

The SP is not opposed to the whole military — only to the left wing of it, of which they consider Premier Goncalves to be the principal leader and an exponent of communist ideology.

Struggle over Goncalves

According to today's New York Times, the recent publication of a speech by Goncalves to the Armed Forces General Assembly "has helped to explain why battle lines have been so acutely drawn." Goncalves is quoted as having said that the principal problem of socialism was "the taking of power by the workers." Moreover, he is said to have stated that this entails leadership by a vanguard of the workers. Of course, he meant the CP. But he added that that includes other organizations that fight for real socialism, which he defined as "the domination of the workers over the means of production and over the conditions of their existence."

It is this view that is apparently at the bottom of the crisis that caused the SP to break from the Cabinet along with the PPD, because if acted upon this view would actually mean the dictatorship of the proletariat and a workers government. This explains the furious opposition of the SP and, of course, the PPD, both of whom are really committed to the bourgeois system. This is why Soares has become the darling of international finance capital and is embraced by the entire bourgeoisie. And this explains why Soares has said that Goncalve is the key to the problem.

The pressure of the counter-revolutionary demonstrations brought to the fore a line of political differentiation, long building up in the military, which has now reached the boiling point. Only the intervention of the more progressive military leaders who are concentrated in what is called the Fifth Division, the political arm of the AFM, has momentarily made it possible to paper over the split. A communique from the Fifth Division strongly supported Premier Goncalves and by implication rejected Gomes's move for a new cabinet.

It is widely reported that the so-called moderates (bourgeois elements) have a majority in the High Council of the Revolution. However, in a revolutionary, showdown struggle, this is not at all what counts. What counts is, whom will the rank-and-file soldiers and sailors follow? Will they respond to a revolutionary call to defend the socialist revolution in the struggle against fascism, or will they become pawns of the counter-revolution? This basically is the issue.

About 10 percent of the old military were purged. Percentages alone, however, don't count. It depends on who among them has influence and material forces to rally in the counter-revolution.

SP cover for counter-revolution

The SP demonstrations were understood everywhere in the imperialist world to be not protests against the bourgeois military as such, but against communism.

While the thrust of the demonstrations was against Goncalves, it was clear in the Oporto as well as in the Lisbon demonstrations that these mobilizations were anti-communist and anti-working class in character. They were in fact preparations for a counterrevolution. The fact that they fell short of their projected goal gives the working class and its political organizations the opportunity to resume the initiative, to launch a new revolutionary working class offensive.

It is entirely possible that these demonstrations constitute the high-water mark of the counterrevolution's so-called popular support. It was fortunate that the military did not provoke a street struggle against the demonstrators. It would have been a tragic error that could have unleashed the right-wing military coup for which the SP demonstrations were supposed to be the popular cover.

Undoubtedly, there has been a shift to the right in the military. The military is and has been a bourgeois institution. It faithfully reflects the class stratifications in bourgeois society. By and large the officer corps, such as Gomes, Antunes, Crespo, and others, are the guardians of the bourgeois order, this acute class struggle in the country cannot but result in at least some of the progressive officers responding to the class needs of the workers, peasants, and the poor.

A split in the military is absolutely inevitable. It is just a question as to when and how it takes place and under what circumstances. The political organizations of the workers can and must assert their class independence and utilize such allies within the military as they can find, but above all they must concentrate on the rank-and-file soldiers and sailors.

Still time to stop it

Unless the right-wing in the military acts immediately under the aegis of the U.S. and the Western Allies, there still remains ample opportunity to stop the counter-revolution and regain the political initiative by slowly starting to build the working class defense organizations.

Advantage must be taken of the already existing popular committees composed of workers, organized in the shops the neighborhoods etc. They must be made nationwide in character and draw in all strata of the oppressed. They must be given wide initiative to continue the takeover of all aspects of the economy.

The Socialist Workers Party over here, in its paper The Militant, falls in with world reaction again in characterizing the proposed people's committees as "totalitarian." Instead it calls for a parliamentary coalition of the CP and SP. But there had been a coalition between these two parties all along! It is the SP, which is opposed to the radical measures being taken against the capitalists and landlords, that in effect is demanding that the CP be ousted from the coalition with its attacks on CP headquarters and its slogan of "Goncalves out!"

Bosses continue to sabotage economy

The bourgeoisie is continuing to deliberately sabotage production. The principal economic organizations of the bourgeoisie are defying the government insolently handing it ultimatums, blaming the workers for the economic chaos in the country, calling upon them for more and more sacrifices.

The economic situation will surely pass from the stage of deterioration at the present time to that of collapse if the bourgeoisie is permitted to sabotage industries and the workers are not given full political control of the economy.

Every effort must be made to make arms available to the popular committees and to forge and strengthen fraternal relations with the rank-and-file soldiers and sailors. No form of economic aid from abroad can now appreciably change the character of the economic crisis. The entire struggle is now political in character.

The counter-revolution having made its major political thrust, the arena of the struggle will now shift to other areas. The New York Times of July 19 and the Washington Post of July 20 have now both admitted that a veritable army of thousands of fascist elements is training for intervention from nearby Spain. Elements from among the soldiers and sailors returning from Mozambique are speculated to be possible fertile soil for counter-revolutionary insurgency.

Under these circumstances, the status quo politically economically and militarily is absolutely impossible. A country so sharply divided along class lines and locked in most acute incipient struggle is pregnant either with proletarian revolution or a resurgence of fascist military rule. A bourgeois parliamentary solution, which is feverishly being sought behind the scenes, can only be a brief interval between the two.

Now, in the interim, is the time to build what in reality amounts to a Portuguese form of Soviets, in embryo. Such are the small, modest beginnings of the popular committees. It remains for the Portuguese CP and other left-wing militant political organizations of the workers to block together and carry out this task in this hour of peril.

Remember?

The international capitalist furor over the seizure of the paper Republica by left-wing workers in Portugal was conspicuously absent last summer when a left-wing paper was closed. At that time the rightist forces in the government gathered around General Spinola not only banned a newspaper but arrested its editor Luis Saldanha Sanches, because he had called on Portuguese troops not to fight in Africa.

There was no international "democratic" outcry then. There were no ads in the New York Times. The very reactionary forces who today are rallying under the phony cover of "democracy" and "plurality" were perfectly content to see a critic on the left stifled.

Right-wing offensive grips northern Portugal: Power of workers yet to be felt

The specter of fascist counter-revolution hangs over Portugal. In the North right-wing and fascist lynch mobs have been burning, sacking, and destroying Portuguese CP (Communist Party) and PDM (Portuguese Democratic Movement) headquarters in more than 40 towns. All this has been instigated and carefully orchestrated by the Portuguese bourgeoisie in the service of the U.S. and Western imperialism.

In the North the struggle has all the elements of an incipient civil war. Everywhere there the PCP is fighting with its back to the wall, as are the PDM and all other progressive working class organizations.

The soldiers sent out to defend these working class organizations have, in the main, sided with the fascist lynch mobs. In reality, they have put up only a pretense of defense to make the public record. There are some exceptions, of course, but the conclusion cannot be drawn from this that they represent the sentiment of the rank-and-file soldiers or of the progressive officers in the AFM as a whole.

Counter-revolution now based in North

The soldiers in the North are, by and large, under the command of regional officers who in any case would be counted for the most part with the counter-revolution. By striking in the North first,' the counter-revolution has put forward its strongest foot. It is in that area that the CP and all other working class organizations had only a very thin layer of the rural population, mostly the poor, and some following in the urban areas among the industrial workers.

The PCP has, so far as the rural areas in general go, claimed only 1 percent of the peasantry in its ranks as of its last convention. It appreciably raised its standing with the landless peasants following the wave of land seizures, mostly from absentee landlords. The PCP supported these and on that basis broadened its support among the peasants, but mostly in the South.

If one were to judge the outcome of the impending struggle in Portugal by press reports in this country, particularly by the capitalist electronic media success for the counter-revolution would already be in the bag. It is noteworthy that the burning, sacking, and wanton destruction of working class party headquarters has evoked not a scintilla of sympathy or protest from precisely those bourgeois liberals who were so enraged at the closing by the workers of Republica, the SP newspaper, which incidentally was privately owned.

The last word in the struggle has, however, by no means been said. The broadest section of the working class, particularly in the great industrial areas, and the most advanced and class conscious element of it, has not yet been heard from. It is very true that the PCP, PDM, Intersyndical (the Portuguese Trade Union Federation), and all other working class groups and political organizations are on the defensive. But the struggle has not even begun in the South as yet. The bourgeoisie is banking everything, at least for the moment, on a right-wing military coup — but not in the accepted sense of the word. It is counting on the so-called moderates in the military to come out on top in what has been a developing wide-open split.

The nine 'moderates'

Specifically, the bourgeoisie is counting on the nine so-called dissidents or moderates, a euphemism for right-wing bourgeois, in the military who have been suspended by the High Council of the Revolution. Among their leaders are former Foreign Minister Melo Antunes. It was he who urged the dispatching of some 28,000 troops to Angola for the dubious purpose of "defending lives and property" and he also favored UN intervention, without consulting the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, of course. The other eight are well known rightists who, while they favored the ouster of the Salazar-Caetano regime, have by no means ever favored a revolutionary transformation of Portugal.

Bourgeois speculation is rife and may be well founded that Costa Gomes, the President, and Carvalho, the Security Chief, are either wavering or favor throwing in their lot with the rightist faction. (see Workers World of July 18, 1975.). The military maneuvering at the top may change from day to day or from hour to hour, but the outcome will, in the final analysis, be decided not by them alone but by the broad struggle of the masses.

Is there any reason to believe that such a struggle is possible at this late date?

One must take into account the historical evolution of the present regime and who really saved it on the occasion, for instance, of September 1974 when Spinola launched his attempted coup with his Mussolini-type projected march on Lisbon. It is instructive to examine the basic reason for Spinola's defeat.

People's militia

In an interview given on August 1 and printed in the English edition of Le Monde of August 9, Spinola explained why his attempted coup failed. He was asked, "Was the intervention of the people's militia against a demonstration in your support really enough to make you resign?"

Answer: "I summoned the chief of the armed forces general staff, Gen. Costa Gomes; Prime Minister Vasco Goncalves; and the deputy commander of Copcon, General Otelo de Carvalho, ordered them to take all the necessary measures to remove the barricades that were blocking the entrances to Lisbon and to disperse militia that had been illegally formed."

We see in Spinola's own words a frank admission (and confirmation of our earlier writings) on the existence of the (people's) militia — his own word — and that he had ordered the militia dispersed. "The Prime Minister (Goncalves) issued a communique along those lines. It was read over the national radio by the minister of social communications. General Costa Gomes took full responsibility for putting this decision into force . ... I was therefore very surprised to learn that the soldiers who had been sent to remove the barricades were fraternizing with the people's militia."

Those soldiers fraternizing with the people's militia are still in the Lisbon area and in the South generally. But of far greater significance even than the soldiers fraternizing with the people's militia is the very existence of the people's militia (again, Spinola's own words). It is still there. It has not been dissolved. It has not vanished into thin air. It is highly doubtful that it has become subject to demoralization, although there is plenty of confusion. The greater likelihood is that those who participated in the militia last September have become more galvanized, more ready for struggle. Even beyond that, the AFM has validated the organization of what, for lack of a more formal name, may be called community organizations, neighborhood committees, popular assemblies — in a word, organizations of the workers and the popular masses generally.

This is what really will decide the outcome of the struggle. This is what is decisive. The rank-and-file soldiers will again fraternize with the popular militia. The military officer corps as a whole, however, is as constituted today a bourgeois institution, as we have pointed out time and again. The CP leadership has apparently banked everything on its alliance with the AFM. At the present time it is on the horns of a real dilemma — and in an acutely contradictory position. It can no longer fully support the AFM in the light of the open split within it and the emergence of a right wing — outspokenly anti-CP, and potentially fascist and counter-revolutionary.

On the other hand, the CP cannot easily break away. Procrastination, however, in organizing an independent working class defense of the revolution can only lead to an ignominious and decisive historic defeat of the dimensions of the Spanish or Chilean tragedies.

CIA instigating rightist campaign

Unquestionably, the CIA has made deep inroads into the AFM. Moreover, as is shown elsewhere in this issue of WW, the CIA is financing practically all the opposition parties against the CP, including, of course, the SP. The incipient counter-revolutionary war against the CP and all working class organizations unleashed in the North has of course been instigated by the CIA.

(Of course, other branches of the U.S. imperialist state are doubtless involved. There is no principled difference between the CIA and other arms of the capitalist state's repressive apparatus. And even when they are supposedly under investigation or undergoing a change of personnel, even at the top, this is merely regarded as "continuing to do business during alterations.")

But it would be a howling blunder and a caricature of Marxist sociology to believe that the CIA alone can conjure up a broad counter-revolution in the historical context of the given situation. No, it is not the CIA alone. It is also the eagerness of the possessing classes (or rather those who have already been dispossessed and forced into exile and who are anxious for a restoration of the status quo ante).

Even more important is the international factor. The entire West European bourgeoisie is solidly opposed to the current regime precisely because it is recognized that the impending events will either bring about a proletarian revolutions genuine socialist transformation — or a fascist dictatorship. They have therefore made their choice in accordance with their class interests — and have chosen the latter. This explains why Soares' "comrades" in the Common Market, "comrades" Prime Minister Wilson, Schmidt, Mitterand, etc. have refused financial aid to the Portuguese regime now and have made the existence of a "democratic regime" a condition for any aid — a condition which could only be fulfilled for a brief transitory period and would be only a precursor for a fascist dictatorship.

But it is precisely the existence of these two polar opposite alternatives, fascism or a workers' state, which makes support for the latter by all truly progressive and democratic forces so urgent.

Stop U.S.-made fascist drive in Portugal!

Ever since the overthrow of the Salazar-Caetano fascist dictatorship in April 1974, the U.S. government has been slowly and methodically preparing to ruin the Portuguese revolution, stop what it calls the drift to the far left, and frustrate the aspirations of the working class of Portugal for a revolutionary socialist transformation of their country and an end to their age-old poverty and involvement in colonialist and imperialist wars against the African people.

Very much in the manner in which it gathered the Greek colonels together and forged them into a fascist camarilla to overthrow the Greek government so again today it is following the same pattern in Portugal. It has used every conceivable device to weld together the right-wing, so-called moderate faction of the Portuguese military and is preparing to use them in a counter-revolutionary fascist coup.

The U.S. government is also using the same tested methods it employed in Chile to overthrow the Allende regime. This time, however, it has for many, many months been carrying on a virtual psychological war to prepare public opinion in this country for the eventual fascist coup, which it hopes will be successful — but which still remains to be seen.

U.S. tactics for counter-revolution

The Ford-Rockefeller-Kissinger administration has today a virtual army of CIA agents and military personnel operating in Portugal. It has spent practically unlimited amounts of money to bribe, corrupt, or otherwise ensnare the Socialist Party, the Popular Democratic Party, the right-wing Christian Centrist Party, and the Catholic hierarchy. In addition, all along it has virtually had in its pocket all the dispossessed elements of the Portuguese bourgeoisie and absentee landlords. All this is part and parcel of a broad plan for what is called in CIA jargon "destabilization" of the government. A part of this plan goes under the name of disinformation which means to mount a campaign of lies and deception.

In its public form it has taken the route of instigating wild rumors of Soviet intervention and Soviet financial support to the Portuguese CP. The truth of the matter is that far from interfering in Portugal, the Soviet Union is going out of its way to merely give platonic, rhetorical support. Its call on August 19 for "mass solidarity" is merely a pro-forma statement expressing solidarity and urging working class and progressive support. But considering the vast political, diplomatic, as well as economic and financial resources the Soviet Union could be utilizing, this can scarcely be called a threat to dominate Portuguese developments.

The U.S. capitalist press, on the other hand, is deliberately trying to conjure up the specter of a military confrontation with the USSR over Portugal. This is nothing but a smokescreen for U.S. interventionist schemes in the event the fascist coup which the U.S. is preparing founders.

Even the New York Times, which has led the capitalist press in lying and vilifying the struggle of the Portuguese people, has had to assure its readers that the "geopolitical situation of Portugal rules out ... Soviet intervention." And it adds, "the logistics of trying to move a sizable Soviet army into Portugal by sea or air must daunt even the most hawkish of Soviet generals."

This, however, is just another way — a crude and cynical way — of saying that there is no possibility of Soviet intervention, that it is a figment of the capitalist media's inflamed imagination. The real threat to the Portuguese revolution comes from the desperate efforts of the dispossessed ruling class elements of Portugal and their masters in Washington.

The last 10 days have seen Kissinger mount the platform in Birmingham. Ala., as the guest of the ultra-rightist, violently racist Alabama Senator Allen to warn the Portuguese people that the U.S. government is supporting the so-called moderates in the army, that cabal of military officers, whom the U.S., in collaboration with its Western imperialist allies, is counting on to carry out the counter-revolutionary blood bath.

As though that were inadequate, President Ford utilized the convention of the American Legion, itself a jingoist, racist, war-mongering sounding board, to launch a virtual threat against the Soviet Union for its supposed aid to the Portuguese CP.

But the purpose of the Ford-Kissinger threats was not only to mobilize public opinion in the United States but to solidly line up the Western imperialist allies and to threaten Portugal with NATO intervention. We have on more than one occasion alluded to the fact that General Haig the commander of NATO instigated and carried out last winter NATO exercises which were clearly calculated to threaten the Portuguese government. He also subsequently visited Portugal and was in contact with right-wing military leaders.

The U.S., through its ambassador to Lisbon Frank Carlucci, threatened a naval blockade of Portugal in the event that the imperialist powers in the NATO alliance feel it necessary. This was obliquely brought out in a significant column by William Buckley, ultra-rightist ally of Nixon and Ford. It is also well known that former Portuguese President Spinola visited Western Europe only a fortnight ago and met with other right-wing politicians as well as with Portuguese "socialist" leaders. His call for another fascist coup attempt under the label of the "Portuguese Democratic Liberation Movement" has deliberately been given wide publicity by the Western European imperialist press and here too, as well as by his adherents in Portugal and by elements of the Portuguese press which are pledged to bourgeois reaction and restoration.

Danger comes from U.S.

It is high time that the radical, working class, and progressive elements in the United States recognize that the true, the real and fundamental danger to the Portuguese revolution emanates from the center of world imperialism — from Washington. It is imperialism which sustained the 50-year-old fascist dictatorship in Portugal. It is imperialism that has needed Portugal as a satellite to plunder the African people, especially in Mozambique, Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and other areas. The fruits of the plunder have in a large measure gone to the multi-national corporations of Western imperialism, mostly the U.S. The Portuguese working class has been bled dry for years in a fruitless endeavor to hold in bondage through war and monstrous oppression the peoples of Southern Africa so that the imperialist monopolies will retain their hold on the oppressed peoples there.

The U.S. in particular needs to retain Portugal as a satellite, as a threat to all the Mediterranean peoples, as a dagger at the heart of the Arab people, and as a threat to the Western proletariat in its struggle against the European bourgeoisie.

No, the danger does not lie in Portugal becoming a satellite of the USSR, the danger lies in Portugal remaining a sub-imperialist satellite of American imperialism and a base for counter-revolutionary struggle against all the Mediterranean countries and Africa.

The attention of the American workers must be drawn to the true role of U.S. monopoly capitalism in Portugal. And every effort must be made to stop U.S. intervention, both overt and covert, in Portugal and to aid the Portuguese working class in its struggle against the counter-revolution.

It is the rule of principled class politics that a working class party never make a bloc with the right against the center on fundamental class issues. Whoever in this hour of supreme crisis for the Portuguese working class fails to see the true role of U.S. imperialism and subordinates the struggle against it, making a bloc with rightist elements in the name of the so-called struggle against "Soviet social imperialism" or "Stalinism," is betraying the masses and in fact diverting them from their principal task, which is the struggle against the imminent fascist counter-revolution.

On the popular assemblies

We have indicated on a number of occasions, especially in the July 16 Workers World, that the popular assemblies composed of organizations of workers, peasants, and soldiers are a progressive, revolutionary alternative to a bourgeois constituent assembly — such as the one that was elected this spring and is promoted here on the left by the SWP.

They could be organs of working class power and are the embryo of a workers' state, especially if they broaden their popular mass base.

We also made the point that if the AFM validated them, which it has, that could strengthen the legal basis for the popular assemblies and open the road to action independent of the military. This would be a most favorable development.

However, if they are restricted in their popular support and have no decision-making power, and do not seek it, they would only be a rubber stamp for a military grouping. (This is only hypothetical.) We have stated again and again that the military is a bourgeois institution trained over many years in the suppression of oppressed peoples in Africa and is hardly the best instrument for guiding the popular assemblies.

We by no means contest that there are progressive and even revolutionary officers, especially in the junior ranks, but they must be responsible to the popular assemblies and not the other way around. Nor should the working class parties stake their existence on ephemeral moods in the politics of the AFM. The popular assemblies must continue to develop their own people's militia of the type that crushed the first attempted coup of Spinola. [SM]

Analysis of roles of Gomes, Carvalho: As the crisis in Portugal continues

The cause of the Portuguese revolution seems to be drifting from day to day without a rudder. But this is due in large measure to the great reliance that has been placed on the outcome of the split in the military. This, in turn, has made President Costa Gomes appear to carry a great deal more social, political, and military weight than is actually the case.

At the present time he is playing the role of arbiter, not merely between the military groupings but between revolution and counterrevolution historically an utterly untenable position.

It is scarcely possible at this late date for him to assume a Bonapartist role, as the New York Times of August 27 in its news dispatch seems to indicate might happen when it mentions the possibility of the President "taking over also as Premier."

Gomes has no independent strength

A Bonapartist, in bourgeois society, can assume the position of straddling the classes or military factions only if he can afford to be independent of them on the basis of having his own independent military or police force. That at the moment does not appear to be at all the case. What has given Costa Gomes his preeminent position is the preponderant reliance that the left has accorded him. In an interview with syndicated columnists Evans and Novak, Costa Gomes was quoted as saying that the burning, sacking, and wanton destruction of Communist Party headquarters "was the work of small groups" that were "organized from the outside." He further stated that he "could arrest all these groups and imprison them" and the "Portuguese people would be educated" accordingly by this action.

This statement should come as a big surprise, both in Portugal and abroad, for in all these many weeks in which the counter-revolutionary mobs have been attacking the CP headquarters, the President has been demonstratively passive if not altogether silent.

At any rate, this statement seemed to put Costa Gomes once again on a tack to the left. But it did not take long for the President to veer right back again with another of his deliberately ambiguous statements regarding the replacement of Premier Goncalves.

It was followed on the weekend by more confusing statements. One of them, however, seemed to clearly indicate that Prime Minister Goncalves should remain in power until the present crisis is resolved. But this again was suspended or withdrawn from circulation, whichever way one wishes to interpret Gomes' statements.

But the fact that Costa Gomes has not yielded to the ultimatums which have been delivered more openly and more insolently from day to day by the right-wing military camarilla, headed by Melo Antunes, indicates that Costa Gomes is fearful of taking the plunge to the right.

This, however, is not at all due to any newfound sympathy for the cause of the revolution, socialism, or elementary democratic rights. It must not be forgotten that Costa Gomes was the former chief of staff under the Caetano regime. If he has not moved to the right where his sympathies really lie, it can only be accounted for by objective developments which compel him to stay, at least for now, where he is.

Carvalho and Antunes

One of the most important factors which Costa Gomes has had to reckon with has been the apparent collapse of the bloc between the Antunes right-wing and chief of the security forces Carvalho. This bloc between the right and what has been described as the extreme left was an utterly unprincipled one from the point of view of working class politics and foolish and adventuristic in the extreme on the part of Carvalho. The fact that the bloc seems to have collapsed is in all probability due to the realization on the part of Carvalho that the right-wing was using him as a left cover for what would have surely been a right-wing coup. And he would have ended up as a captive within it.

If one disregards his political program, the bloc with the right could only be understood as an attempt at naked military power politics, in which case, Carvalho could not have played the lead role anyway. Given the vicissitudes of bourgeois military politics, however, repeated maneuvers of this kind cannot be ruled out for the future.

It should be noted that the bloc collapsed after the marines, originally under the jurisdiction of Copcon and therefore under Carvalho's command, had been shifted away from him, according to the Christian Science Monitor of August 26 back to their pro-Goncalves commanders. How and by what means this was accomplished is not known but it has been accepted as an accomplished fact.

Still within the framework of military politics, Goncalves received the backing of what the bourgeois press calls "a sergeants' group," but which is more properly called the non-commissioned officers' council of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM). They could be a lot more significant in the impending struggle than some of the generals and admirals, who may find themselves, once the struggle breaks out, without any support of the rank-and-file.

Goncalves stronger than admitted

The imperialist press here now admits, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor (Aug. 26), "It is a mistake to think that General Vasco Goncalves is isolated. He has the backing of the navy, the marines, and many of the rank and file in the army and enough of the air force to neutralize the other moderate half."

That certainly makes his strength far more impressive than the capitalist media have led the American public to believe.

Two important and seemingly contradictory moves made this Monday have just appeared in the press. Acting in his role as arbiter, Costa Gomes apparently approved the reinstatement of General Carvalho as commander of Portugal's northern military region. Carvalho had been dismissed because of right-wing pressure, and would presumably take a much tougher stand against the right-wing attacks.

At the same time, however, the Revolutionary Council of the Armed Forces Movement decided to suspend the activities of the Fifth Division of the General Staff. This is an ambiguous but potentially very dangerous move. The Fifth Division in charge of internal propaganda and the "dynamization" campaign, had been under the command of a navy officer generally considered pro-Goncalves. This could turn out to be a far more significant move than the reinstatement of Carvalho.

The fact that Copcon security forces under General Carvalho's command have been ordered to guard the headquarters of the Fifth Division is even more ominous.

However, all of this is in the framework of military politics, where the class struggle can only be refracted in a distorted way. The true test of class forces, of course, will only come in the course of the impending struggle.

United front against reaction

All the more welcome is the announcement that eight working class political organizations in Portugal have formed a United Front Against Reaction. These include with the CP organizations far to its left who have maintained a position for armed defense of the revolution as well as for workers' councils or popular assemblies. Indeed, this is the most significant development and should far outweigh the military maneuvering at the top. It lays the basis for a class alliance against the bourgeoisie, the landlords, and the capitalists.

(Workers World has so far been able to find out the names of six of the groups in the United Front. They are: the Communist Party (CP), the Portuguese Democratic Movement (MPD), the Movement of the Socialist Left (MES), the Popular Socialist Front (FSP), the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP) and the International Communist League (LCI).)

This has struck terror into the heart of Mario Soares who characterized the united front as "an unnatural alliance of the insurrectional type." No not at all unnatural. From a class point of view, the alliance of the PCP with these revolutionary organizations ought to be quite natural, that is, proper from the point of view of organizations which may have fundamental differences among themselves but are united in the struggle against the counterrevolution. Were Mario Soares responsive merely to the very name of his organization — socialist — he should be in this alliance instead of in the embrace of reactionary forces he thinks he is leading but who in reality are leading him.

As in all unfinished revolutions, the question of legitimacy, of legality, assumes dimensions which nowhere correspond to reality. Costa Gomes was accorded the symbol of the legitimacy of the revolution when he became President following the defeat of the Spinola coup.

But the only real legitimacy in a revolutionary situation is the authoritative intervention of the broad mass of the workers and peasants. However, their organs of power have only begun to be formed. They alone can validate or legitimate the representatives of the new regime. That is why the recently formed United Front is a genuinely hopeful sign in that direction.

As in all unfinished revolutions, Can the Azevedo government rule? The quasi-coup in Portugal

The Azevedo government in Portugal, formed September 19, has now been in power 12 days. In normal times of slow, gradual, so-called peaceful capitalist development, 12 days is very brief, a fleeting moment in history.

However, 12 days in a period of tremendous revolutionary upsurge in a period truly characterized by an historic crisis of the social system, is the equivalent of 12 months, perhaps even 12 years!

For in these few days are compressed the experiences of many months and years. All the great Marxists, beginning with Marx himself, have attested to the correctness of this historical generalization.

The Azevedo government has been in power only 12 days, but in these 12 days, Vice Admiral Azevedo, who is the premier and also the acting president while General Costa Gomes is conveniently out of the country has by his deeds thoroughly exposed himself and his government as implacable enemies of the working class and of the revolution.

What he has done

He has ordered troops to disperse the revolutionary demonstration against the hated Spanish regime, he has disrupted by force of arms the demonstration of wounded veterans, and finally he has tried, also by military force, to muzzle the press which he promised to keep free. None of this should really have come as a surprise to any of the advanced elements in the working class movement of Portugal at this late date.

The ascendancy of the Azevedo-Antunes-Vitor Alves military grouping is the nearest thing to a cold counter-revolutionary takeover. In one sense it may be properly characterized as a quasi-coup. However, in the context of the present political situation in Portugal, it can only be a shaky transitional regime like its predecessors. It has the unanimous support of the world bourgeoisie in Europe and America, but as the capitalist press makes crystal clear, it is uncertain whether the Azevedo government can exert any authority over the masses or over the rank and file of the armed forces.

Gap widens between officers and ranks

Witness what happened the other day, when even the distorted press accounts in this country showed that the troops Azevedo sent to take over the press and radio networks fraternized instead, at least to a large measure, with the workers — the printers and editorial staffs and broadcasters. The troops were in flagrant and in open disobedience of Azevedo's orders. It was his first true test, which fortunately he has failed.

It was for this reason that the bourgeois press has given the Azevedo regime only qualified support. Unquestionably the U.S. and its imperialist allies in Europe are still searching around for a firm and thoroughgoing counter-revolutionary grouping from the military, with or without Spinola, which can, in their reckoning, deliver the coup de grace to the Portuguese working class and the revolution. Azevedo and Co., may not be able to do this.

But as of now, the installation of this new coalition government merely reflects the shift to the right that has taken place in the officer corps of the armed forces and in the higher councils of the AFM (Armed Forces Movement). This is not to be confused with the rank and file of the enlisted men. As early as September 16 an article in the Chicago Daily News, one of many in the world capitalist press about the Portuguese army, flatly stated that the "army — as a military structure — simply does not exist. What you have now is a coalition of individual units, some of them less bad [translated: less revolutionary — SM] than others. If the revolution has failed to establish democracy in Portugal," the writer says, "it has created a good bit of it in the army. There are almost countless accounts of units refusing to obey orders or to accept some officer or other as their commander."

Isn't the refusal of the units Azevedo ordered to suppress the radio network and the press the most eloquent testimony to the sharp division between the rightist military camarilla and the rank-and-file soldiers?

All this proves that the successive provisional governments, the shuffling and reshuffling on the top by the military hierarchy, does not reflect what is happening below, either among the soldiers or among the workers and the oppressed.

The quasi-coup engineered by the Antunes military forces is a development on top and has its origins in the severe and unremitting external pressures from world imperialism, particularly the U.S. and in the inability of successive coalition governments to in any way solve the acute economic problems, or resolve the sharpening class struggle raging throughout the country.

The most important point to emerge during the 12-day period in which the Azevedo government has been in power is that in spite of the fact that there has been a quasi-takeover, it has in no way been able to substantially modify the correlation of class forces in the country. The shift to the right has been confined to the ruling class circles only. There is not a scintilla of evidence to indicate that the decisive class forces of the oppressed of the workers of the poor and landless peasants, and of the impoverished petty bourgeoisie have in any way been affected by the shift to the right on top.

The decisive working class forces are basically intact as of now. The PCP (Portuguese Communist Party) as well as other working class organizations have retained all of their cadres, or most of them. There has been no diminution of working class strength in the large industrial centers. There may have been shifts politically from the PCP to other more revolutionary, working class organizations or to so-called Maoist groups. But there has been no shift to the right of measurable significance.

No decisive struggle yet

The fact of the matter is that there has been, thus far, no real test of strength, there has been no struggle of a decisive character. The class struggle of the workers, poor peasants, and oppressed sections of the petty bourgeoisie may have been muffled to a degree, confused, but there has been, no mass shift to the right. Even the bourgeois press with all its lies and distortions has steered clear of making such a generalization.

The basic question which the working class parties face particularly the PCP is on their attitude to the Azevedo government.

It seems that the most elementary of all elementary questions for a Marxist-Leninist, working class party to face up to, the day after the formation of the Azevedo government, is to define for itself and for the working class the class character of the new provisional regime.

Just what is the class character of the Azevedo government? On this question should hinge whether or not any working class party should support it. Let us forget (but only for the moment) about the previous five governments since the overthrow of the Salazar-Caetano fascist regime. Let's not argue whether the Spinola regime or the others that succeeded him were bourgeois governments or not. Let us just concentrate on the question of today's government.

What is its class character? Is it a bourgeois government or not? If so, then support for it, such as the Portuguese CP is now giving in a backhanded way, is utterly opportunist, self-defeating, and destructive of working class interests and the revolution.

On the one hand, the PCP says it will carry on a struggle against reaction, against all who try to turn back the gains of the revolution, and that it will struggle for socialism. On the other hand it has taken a post in the cabinet. Oh, no, not officially. Its cabinet minister will only act as an individual ... and so on and so forth.

PCP keeps a foot in both camps

It was precisely by pursuing such a course that the Mensheviks in the Russian Revolution would have surely ruined all the hopes of the workers, had not the Bolsheviks posed a revolutionary alternative. The Mensheviks, the compromisers, wanted to be in the bourgeois cabinet and at the same time, like the Portuguese CP, wanted to build and maintain the Soviets. The PCP too is trying to build popular assemblies, neighborhood committees, commissions, in other words a true working class parliament outside of the framework of the bourgeois state.

But the PCP is also saying, just like the compromisers of 1917 were saying, that yes, we want to be in the bourgeois government together with the ten capitalist ministers, while we also want to retain a foot in the Soviets. The Bolsheviks, however, resolutely denounced such evasion, equivocation, and double dealing or any attempt to have their representative in the cabinet of either Kerensky or his predecessor. They knew this invariably meant acting as a left cover for the capitalist government while it prepared to deliver a counter-revolutionary blow against the workers. They knew too that it also meant reducing the popular assemblies to mere appendages of the bourgeois government — which, in Portugal's case, means appendages of a military camarilla. They were solidly for the Soviets and for a complete break with the bourgeois government.

This is precisely what Cunhal and the PCP must face up to, as must other working class organizations. It is the only hope for a genuine socialist transformation in Portugal. It is the only way to guarantee the victory of the proletarian revolution.

Portugal: class war in the barracks

At last, at last, the class struggle has broken out in Portugal in the most sensitive and most decisive area of bourgeois society — the military establishment. With almost lightning speed, the rank-and-file soldiers in Portugal are asserting themselves against the officer corps. The demand for what is now called in the armed forces "internal democracy" is sweeping all the military garrisons and bases in the country — north and south.

The New York Times of October 4 ruefully admits that the military rank and file are demanding and exercising the right "to discuss and determine every military decision" and this "has been asserted in all the country's major regions during the last 24 hours." A truly stupendous development! It's a real breakthrough for the revolution. It opens wide the gates to a working class transformation of Portuguese society.

Began in response to government moves

As almost always in previous revolutions, it was the whip of the counter-revolution that urged the revolution forward in Portugal. It was the ill-fated moves to assert the authority of the Sixth Provisional Government, headed by Admiral Azevedo, which provoked the revolutionary storm among the rank-and-file soldiers.

When he sent military units to take over the Lisbon radio stations, the soldiers refused to dislodge the workers on the staffs and editorial boards and instead fraternized with them.

This sent a revolutionary tremor throughout the entire military establishment. It was the first open break with the military hierarchy.

The ferment of the rank and file is not confined to the Lisbon area alone, as the capitalist press claimed earlier when it railed against a "small minority" in some units on the outskirts of Lisbon. It is true, of course, that the Ralis light artillery regiment is on the outskirts of Lisbon and it is the Ralis regiment that set up the big anti-tank guns and mounted soldiers with automatic rifles right outside its barracks on October 5. Of course, this was occasioned by a deliberate fabrication by Socialist Party leaders that extreme left-wing elements and Communists were plotting a coup. In reality, it was the SP leaders and the right-wing military camarilla in the government who were seeking to dissolve the revolutionary military units.

Giving arms to workers

The "military dissidence," as the New York Times calls it, is deep and widespread. It has struck fear into the hearts of the Antunes Azevedo-Gomes government Now the government is even more worried about the flow of arms into civilian working-class hands, handed out by friendly units in the armed forces. Virtually thousands of guns, particularly G machine guns plus ammunition, have been distributed by the soldiers to the workers.

The demand by the rank-and-file troops for the right to virtually make their own military decisions has split the military along class lines. Of course, not all the soldiers, sailors, and marines have moved over to the left — to the revolutionary, working class side. Nor has every military commander moved over to the right. But on the whole, the so-called "military dissidence" has opened wide a class struggle in the barracks which was previously muffled.

False "unity" discarded

As far as appearances went, the military was seen as a paragon of unity. Military commanders and rank and file were one, and the Armed Forces Movement (AFM) was its organized political expression. The AFM was passed off as virtually a non-class or supra-class social phenomenon.

This was never really true. And the ascendancy of the Antunes Azevedo-Gomes military clique tore the mask of false unity off the face of the governing officer corps, which had utilized the AFM as a screen until they were able to discard it.

The awakening of the rank-and-file soldiers and the inability of the Azevedo government to enforce its orders have exposed it as being isolated from the popular masses, who regard the government as their class enemy. Such is the revolutionary ferment among the troops that, no less than President Gomes himself is forced to use the language of the class struggle in order to try to foist upon the soldiers the reactionary discipline of his military clique. But to no avail.

Only 2 weeks ago, the Azevedo government seemed to have the country in its hands. Today, it appears shorn of authority indecisive and incapable of enforcing its authority Most of all it is fearful of the wrath of the masses.

Break from the government

It is precisely at such a time of a confluence of auspicious circumstances for a working class seizure of power that the traditional parties of the working class are showing more clearly than ever their reluctance to cut the umbilical cord which binds them to the capitalist government.

The Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) still holds a cabinet post in the Azevedo government. It matters not that it is only one cabinet minister sitting unofficially or that the PCP puts up a struggle here and there against the Azevedo government, The main thing is that it continues to support the government precisely at a time when it is most urgent to cut its ties with it completely and throw in its lot with the masses.

General Otelo Carvalho too, although shorn of some military authority, proclaims that he is for the revolution and the masses — but nevertheless says he still supports the Sixth Provisional Government.

"Make a class choice, Otelo," shouted the masses to him at a demonstration last week. But Otelo to this day is still part and parcel of the provisional government. Some of the Maoists, too, such as the PCP (Marxist-Leninist), support Antunes and hence the Sixth Provisional Government.

In these decisive days, there is only one over-riding issue — are you for or against the provisional government? Support for the provisional government, no matter how qualified, no matter how tenuous, aids and abets the cause of the bourgeoisie and helps wittingly or unwittingly , consciously or unconsciously, bring about the fascist coup Washington and its imperialist allies are plotting.

Time, however, is the essence of the matter. Only a few weeks ago when the counter-revolution seemed to be growing by leaps and bounds with the burnings, wreckings, and wanton destruction of the PCP headquarters, some hand-picked units selected by the military camarilla seemed to standby while mercenaries of the counter-revolution did their wrecking and burning.

Now the situation has radically changed. It is clear that the soldiers, sailors, and marines are not the easy minions of the right-wing military that the ruling class press thought they would be. The situation cries out for a drastic re-alliance of working class forces to reach out to the soldiers and make a wide, united class front to overthrow the reactionary landlord and monopolist servants of imperialism and bring about the socialist transformation of Portugal.

Lesson from Commune

In one of his last introductions to The Civil War in France, Engels said something about the Proudhonists and the Blanquists which is apropos to present-day Portugal. In the interests of the revolution and of the Commune, said Engels, the Proudhonists abandoned the dogma of "free association" and an antipathy to all centralism. The Blanquists, on the other hand, were forced by the course of events to abandon their total reliance on conspiratorial methods and were obliged to take into account the role of the masses in the struggle for the revolution.

In like fashion, it is time for the PCP to abandon its class collaborationist policy, as it is time for the Maoists to junk their social-fascism and false "superpower" theory. But these dogmas are no less of an ideological obstruction to the victory of the revolution than were Proudhonism and Blanquism during the Paris Commune.

Portugal: There is still time

There is no longer any doubt about it.

The Portuguese working class, in particular the revolutionary vanguard elements have suffered a very heavy defeat. The essential question now is whether the defeat is of such dimensions as to be decisive.

A decisive defeat is that kind of crushing blow against the working class that took place in Germany and brought Hitler to power. Like the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War, it means the uncontested rule of the most reactionary forces for many years to come. Such a defeat was suffered in Indonesia in 1965 and led to the decimation of the progressive forces — from which the revolutionary elements are only now beginning to revive.

And most recent and vivid was the tragic and brutal counterrevolution by the rightist military in Chile. All these were decisive, historic defeats for the workers' movement.

A decisive defeat is one after which it is absolutely impossible for the working class to achieve a swift recovery and go on to take the revolutionary offensive. It usually takes many years for the movement to recover. Even in the case of Chile, where the objective conditions — utterly unbelievable inflation and extreme deterioration in living conditions — are the most favorable for revolutionary agitation and propaganda and where the regime is weakened by lack of any strong social base of support and must completely rely on U.S. imperialism, even there a recovery is slow.

No mere 'purge' — but not yet decisive

Certainly the reactionary onslaught by the Costa Gomes-Azevedo military camarilla goes far deeper than a mere "military purge," which is how the Daily World, newspaper of the CP-USA, has characterized it.

But has the offensive by the rightist Portuguese military reached the same proportions as the decisive struggles in Germany, Spain, Indonesia, and Chile?

As of today, the answer is no.

However, it unquestionably has the potential for turning into a full-scale fascist military takeover, with the aim of annihilating all the working class organizations and reducing the workers' movement to complete subjection.

At the moment the Gomes-Azevedo regime has been unable to unleash a full-scale terrorist offensive against all working class organizations and impose a fascist totalitarian solution on the Portuguese people. The central question at the moment is whether the working class organizations can in sufficient time reorient themselves, regroup, and refashion the united front which they reached in late August and which for a brief period showed considerable promise.

The Unitary Front

That united front — often called the Unitary Front — was composed of the Communist Party, the Portuguese Democratic Movement (which is closely allied with the CP), and six other organizations which have generally been known as the extreme left. These are: the League of Revolutionary Unity and Action (LUAR), the Popular Socialist Front (FSP), the International Communist League (LCI), the Proletarian Revolutionary Party (PRP), the Left Socialist Movement (MES), and the May 1st Group.

It will be remembered that a part of the agreement for the Unitary Front was to support Premier Goncalves, who at that time had not yet been forced to resign. That, however, was not the main point about the front.

The main point, regardless of the wording of the agreement, was that the CP had joined with revolutionary elements in a common front to combat the reaction. Unquestionably there was disagreement on just how to combat the reaction, but at least there was a get-together of the basic working class organizations which could, on the basis of the then existing conditions, forge the beginning of a mighty working class united front. This in and of itself was a considerable achievement in the light of the sharp political disagreements and disarray of the working class movement.

Mario Soares of the SP is quoted in the December 1 New York Times as saying, "The failure of last week's rebellion is a major defeat for Alvaro Cunhal and the Communist Party's hard line which aimed to repeat the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia."

Unfortunately, it is not true that the Communist Party aimed at repeating the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Portugal. Had this been the case, the Revolution would not be in the sad state that it is today.

CP Reliance on military

There is nonetheless a grain of truth in that the CP had begun belatedly to retreat from its complete and disastrous reliance upon the military. There might have been some reason for the CP to block with the military, and in particular with the progressive officers, in the very early stages during and immediately after the April 1974 coup. But its abject submission to them long after it became obvious that the military had become a drag on the Revolution and an instrument for maintaining bourgeois rule and domination of the working class, led to a slow but steady decline of CP influence in the ranks of the working class and progressive movement.

This was clearly and most visibly illustrated by the energetic anti-strike campaign of the CP among the workers and constant exhortations to them to maintain and increase production.

Now, it would be one thing if the CP had said, "Let the workers take the factories, and the peasants the land, and expropriate the landlords and the bourgeoisie," and on that basis with these prior conditions, urged the workers to increase production and not engage in strikes that would disrupt the organization of production. That would have been another matter.

But to ask the workers to abstain from the struggle while the bourgeoisie is still in command of the land and factories is an altogether different matter.

This certainly was not a repeat of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. It is the very opposite and in part explains why a party which had earned tremendous prestige among the masses over the long and difficult period of fascism dissipated its basic capital — on the altar of class collaboration.

Development this summer

Be that as it may, when the bourgeois reaction raised its ugly head last summer with the burning ransacking and wanton destruction of CP headquarters all across the North, it did appear that the CP might be orienting in a revolutionary direction Cunhal himself had on a number of occasions particularly in his interview with Oriana Fallaci the Italian journalist, said (and did not repudiate) that he was opposed to a "Western-style bourgeois democracy." By inference he favored a proletarian dictatorship with the CP, of course, as the vanguard party, in a coalition which would effectuate a revolutionary socialist transformation. Now, of course, he didn't say that in so many words.

Nevertheless, the subsequent formation of the Unitary Front to which the CP was a party lent credence to the possibility that the CP was orienting in a revolutionary direction.

There were two hitches to this development. In the first place, the CP made it clear that it would not leave the Azevedo government. Second, it either broke away from the Unitary Front for that reason or was ousted from it, it is not absolutely clear to this day just how the break came about, so far as available material here goes.

The key point as far as revolutionary Marxist strategy goes was the failure of the CP to break with the Azevedo government and withdraw its minister from the cabinet. It can be claimed that the minister was in the cabinet solely for the purpose of serving as a lookout, and keeping the Azevedo government in a state of confusion and imbalance. This interpretation, however, would give the CP an enormous amount of revolutionary credit which, on the basis of its objective politics, it does not merit.

Cabinet post crucial test

By agreeing to take a cabinet post in the reactionary bourgeois Azevedo government, the CP had in reality hoisted a flag on which it was written, "We are opposed to a proletarian insurrection. We are opposed to the seizure of power. We will continue a course of zigzagging and trying to work through existing bourgeois institutions."

It follows from this that the CP did not encourage, let alone plan, any rebellion.

The CP, however, was vigorously attacking the Azevedo government but in a purely defensive manner not calculated to retaliate, in case of need, with revolutionary working class force. (Of course it may also be questioned whether at this late date the CP had or believed it had the necessary wherewithal to strike at the Azevedo government.)

It was inevitable under the circumstances, given the fact that class warfare had broken out in the barracks that the on Costa Gomes-Azevedo forces could plan a timely assault using this or that revolutionary initiative by the soldiers as a pretext for unleashing a counter-revolutionary assault.

It is quite obvious, even from the sketchy reports received thus far, that there was "no coordination, no liaison and no plan of action" which involved the leadership of the CP as the Daily World of December 2 states.

The blow fell most heavily on the revolutionary elements in the armed forces and to a more limited extent on the revolutionary organizations which now compose the Revolutionary United Front (FUR). The CP has, of course, disassociated itself from any responsibility for the events which the rightist military calls a rebellion.

It now seems that the CP will steer a course (assuming it is permitted to legally exist) of "moderation" and obedience to bourgeois legality. This, would surely deepen revolutionary resentment against the CP for betraying the Revolution. The revolutionary left plus the working class as a whole, have good and sufficient reason to reject the CP policy as the cause for the ensuing disaster.

Not all critics really to the left

It must be borne in mind however that not all who attack the CP have any right to do so.

The Maoists would not even join the Unitary Front, which was the most progressive aspect of CP politics. And the reason they rejected the Unitary Front was based on the false theory of "social-fascism," which Stalin originated and which Mao reinvigorated. Naturally the Chinese CP won't take any direct responsibility for the Maoists in Portugal. But they nonetheless are responsible in the sense that such a mendacious theory could not have been revived without the CCP leadership having embraced the theory of social-imperialism and social-fascism.

One of the Maoist groups, the MRPP, in its conduct in relation to the CP as well as other tendencies seems to us to be stark mad and little better than the NCLC (National Caucus of Labor Committees) in the United States.

Another Maoist grouping supported the Antunes military rightists against Premier Goncalves. No, these Maoists in Portugal cannot claim to be one whit better than the CP, but in fact are a great deal worse.

Shortcomings of left during anti-CP witch hunt

With respect to the revolutionary groupings in the Unitary Front, the CP could not altogether regard them as principled opponents. When the wild witch hunt broke out against the CP (engineered by the bourgeois reaction), almost all the elements that stood to the left of the CP, with few exceptions, seemed to fold their arms and watch the burnings, ransackings, and destruction of CP headquarters.

In a way there was even malicious delight and a feeling of vengefulness for the CP's failure to act as a revolutionary vanguard.

But it should never be forgotten that in all this, red-baiting has gone a long, long way — especially in a country with a history of over 40 years of fascism. The class enemy knows how to use the mistakes of the CP for its own highly reactionary purposes.

This doesn't serve to excuse the CP for its false policies, but must be understood as an element in the struggle.

Time to rebuild revolutionary united front

None of this, however, ought to foreclose the possibility of refashioning a united revolutionary front while it is still time.

The ruling military camarilla is not at all sure of its ground at the present time. It has not forgotten how isolated it was just a bare 2 weeks ago, and still is today, from the vital sections of the working class, and from the broad mass of peasants and urban poor. It is still far from consolidating its position. The basic cadres in the working class parties are, as of today, still intact.

Above all, the deteriorating economic situation does not lend itself at all to an easy, let alone quick, solution. If it is true, as the New York Times reported last week that Foreign Minister Antunes (the ringleader of the so-called nine and one of the chief plotters in the current struggle) said that "the support of the Communist Party is indispensable ," then it means that the Gomes-Azevedo government has only the thinnest social base and is fearful of embarking on a new course without CP support. Antunes is saying that CP support is "indispensable" to bourgeois rule, that the ruling group can't stay in power without social and political support from the CP.

But if that is true, it means that the CP is still an enormous political factor; if its weight and influence were thrown in a revolutionary direction against the government and toward reconstituting the Unitary Front, this could be of decisive significance.

Above all, it means that there is still precious time left for the working class organizations which formed the August Unitary Front, including the CP, to reorient themselves, gather their forces together, and prepare to take the revolutionary offensive.

Of course even the most revolutionary policy is not necessarily a guarantee of a revolutionary outcome. But without it, the revolution is virtually impossible. The other way would lead almost inevitably to a decisive working class defeat.

Chronology of events in Portugal: 1974–75

1974

April

Portuguese guerrillas bomb troop ship bound for Guinea-Bissau (April 9). Inflation and unemployment high as fascist regime fights losing colonial wars in Africa. Caetano fascist regime overthrown by military (April 25). Thousands of workers take to the streets during struggle, demanding "Down with colonial war! Freedom for political prisoners!" General Antonio Spinola emerges at head of Armed Forces Movement. Top officials of Caetano regime allowed to leave the country. Leaders of left parties return to Portugal from exile. SP and CP join with Armed Forces in coalition government. Workers round up fascist police in the streets, begin purge of administration of state-run institutions.

May

Huge May Day demonstration in Libson. Strikes in food production, transportation, and manufacturing industries sweep Portugal. Spinola attacks the strikers; CP calls some strikes "fascist inspired." Revolutionary movements fighting in Portugal's African colonies reject Spinola's appeal to disarm. Spinola becomes president (May 16), receives first diplomatic visit from U.S. ambassador. Demonstration of 6,000 in Lisbon demands Portuguese troops out of Africa (May 25). Air Force General Carlos Galvao de Melo threatens military will "not tolerate massive strikes."

June

Government censorship reimposed. Left-wing editor Luis Saidanha Sanches arrested for advocating desertion of Portuguese troops in Africa. Armed forces assume full control of state-run radio and TV (June 19). Cabinet (including SP and CP) issues decree making it illegal to incite military disobedience, strikes, unauthorized demonstrations, or to offend the president, members of the Council of State, or the cabinet. SP leader and foreign minister, Mario Soares, attends NATO conference in Ottawa. Nixon visits Spinola in the Azores.

July

Spinola appoints former fascist cabinet member as ambassador to UN, provoking large street demonstrations. Spinola confines leftists troops to barracks (July 6-7), sends troops considered right-wing to break up leftist demonstration. "Economic reform" law issued (July 6) that limits right to strike, strengthens private property, encourages foreign investment. Thousands of civil servants demonstrate against law (July 8).

August

Spinola announces Portual is ready to "grant" independence to African colonies, but insists guerrillas lay down their arms. Guerrilla groups continue struggle; Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique make plans for independence with Portugal unable to mount any offensive there.

September

Rightist rally called by President Spinola in name of "silent majority" is canceled after armed workers, peasants, and soldiers together set up roadblocks in Lisbon (September 27). Spinola resigns (Spetember 30).

1975

January

Bourgeoisie, with support of SP, campaigns against law to unite unions in one labor federation. Government agrees on political independence for Angola, dropping demands that Angolans disarm before negotiation (January 15). Agreement provides for three Angolan Movements — MPLA, FNLA and Unita — sharing the power after official independence on November 11, 1975. Portuguese troops to remain in Angola for three months after that. Neo-fascist convention in Oporto broken up by leftists (January 25).

March

Attempted fascist coup by rightist officers is thwarted by an all-out mobilization of the workers and progressive military, with the CP playing a leading role in calling out the workers (March 11). Spinola flees to Spain. Almost all banks are nationalized (March 15). Premier Goncalves assures businessmen that government doesn't intend to nationalize whole economy. Workers and soldiers join in huge demonstration to honor soldier killed in the aborted coup. Junta bans two left and one rightist party from upcoming election (March 18). U.S. embassy, Ford, Kissinger all make threats against Portugal. Five NATO countries warn Portuguese President da Costa Gomes against "making Portugal a communist country."

April

Elections to Constituent Assembly give SP 38 percent, Popular Democrats 26 percent, CP 13 percent. Parties of center (SP and PD) had gained from government ban on right-wing Christian Democrats. Catholic Church campaigned against left, threatening to excommunicate those voting communist.

May

U.S. imperialism steps up campaign against Portugal. Ford attacks "swing to communism" at NATO meeting, then visits Franco in Spain. West Germany offers "aid" to Portugal if it keeps "democracy." Portuguese junta arrests hundreds of members of Maoist MRPP.