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WORKER INSURGENCY AND STATIST CONTAINMENT IN PORTUGAL AND SPAIN, 1974–1977Queequeg Publications
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Copyright Loren Goldner
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CONTENTS
PART ONE: CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE MODERNIZATION OF CAPITAL IN PORTUGAL, 1974-1975
Preface: 1975 and the End of the Era of the "Progressive" State Civil Servant p.4
1. The Beginning of a New Era of Global Revolution p. 14
2. Archaic Corporatism and Its Modern Protagonists p. 16
3. Historical Development of Salazarism, 1945-74 p. 21
4. Dissolution of Salazarist Hegemony and Left-Wing Regroupment, 1961- 74 p. 25
5. The Revolution of Illusions p. 27
6. The International Impasse of Stalinism p. 30
7. The Nature of the MFA and Its Factional Situation p.37
8. The Demise of Spinola p. 40
9. Neo-Corporatist Restructuring or Socialist Revolution:
Autogestao vs. Soviets p. 43
10. Three Documents Against the Revolution p. 46
11. The Fall of Vasco Goncalves and the PCP p. 48
12. The Left, the Extreme Left and the Political Crisis of the MFA p. 50
13. The Denouement of the Revolutionary Crisis p. 54
14. In the Aftermath of Nov. 25 p. 58
15. Assessment and Limits of the Revolutionary Crisis p. 60
16. Generality and Specificity in the Constitution of the Class-for- Itself p. 62
PART TWO: FORMAL AND REAL DOMINATION OF CAPITAL IN SPANISH WORKING-CLASS HISTORY; FROM CLANDESTINE CORPORATISM TO THE MONCLOA PACTS, 1939-1977
I. Introduction p. 67
II.The Suppressed Past:Proto-Renaissance Bourgeois Culture and Its Extension in the Millenarian Dimension of Spanish Working-Class History p. 72
III. The Subterranean Relationship Between Spanish and Russian Working-Class History p. 76
IV. Formal and Real Domination of Capital In Spanish Economic Development p.84
V. Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Transition to the Real Domination of Capital in Spanish Working-Class History p. 90
VI. The Drift to Clandestine Corporatism: the Road to Moncloa, 1939-1977 p.97
VII: Conclusion: Toward a Non-Statist Working-Class Realignment? p. 107
Preface: 1975 and the End of the Era of the "Progressive" State Civil Servant
Who, today, cares about the mid-1970's transitions in Portugal and Spain? And why, in the year 2000, publish two texts, each written shortly after the events they describe, that is (in terms of the practical demands of the new "globalized" conjuncture) in what seem like antediluvian times, and moreover with little revision or attention to subsequent developments? The text on Portugal (1976) was written as an immediate contribution to revolutionary strategy and tactics, with a wildly over-optimistic assessment of impending working-class prospects, at least in southern Europe. The text on Spain (1983) was written just after Felipe Gonzalez and the PSOE took power with an absolute parliamentary majority, in the flush of the "Euro-socialist Renaissance" (Mitterand in France, Papandreou in Greece); over the next 13 years, it often seemed they had done so with the express purpose of demonstrating-- once again-- the inanity of the (mainly Trotskyist) characterization of contemporary Social Democracies as "workers' parties".
The text on Portugal, rather foolishly, calls the events of 1974-75, (at the very onset of the longest period of rollback in international working-class history), the "beginning of a new era of global revolution". The formulation was, to be fair, half right. It was the beginning of a new era. The end of the Salazar and Franco regimes on the Iberian peninsula was, in fact, a key moment in the beginning of a period in which literally dozens of dictatorships disappeared, a period in which the soft cop took over from the tough cop, and democracy, world-wide, sold austerity. Jeffrey Sachs and the Eastern bloc "dissidents" looked to post-Franco Spain, long before their hour struck in 1989, as the model for the transition out of dictatorship and autarchy, though they will be waiting a while for the kind of massive foreign investment (in the 1960's and early 1970's) which made Spain, for a time, the 10th industrial power in the world. In 1975, most of Latin America was under some form of military dictatorship, and by the end of the "lost decade" of the 1980's, most of these countries as well had had their democratic transition. The IMF teams seemed always to arrive on the same plane with the returning democratic exiles (the former had, of course, hardly been unwelcome with the earlier authoritarian regimes), and Western banks are still pestering Russia about Tsarist-era debts. After Iberia and Latin America, it was the turn of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Asia, in the 80's and 90's, Taiwan, South Korea, and even Indonesia saw the end of dictatorships. The individual and collective Ubus of the post-World War II era--Salazar, Franco, Trujillo, Duvalier, Somoza, the Argentine junta, Pinochet, Stroessner, the Brazilian generals, South African apartheid, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Haile Selassie, Stalin, Ceauscescu, the Shah of Iran, Suharto, Mao, Pol Pot, Chiang kai-shek, Park chung hee--have mainly disappeared, and slick teams of faceless neo-liberal technicians, chattering about "civil society", have mainly replaced them, including (long ago) in Portugal and Spain.
It is equally important to recall the world political conjuncture of the years 1973-1975, to understand how Portugal, a country of 10 million people, could, for a few months, become the lightning rod of global superpower rivalry. The postwar expansion--the fastest era of growth, on a world scale, in capitalist history-- was ending, in runaway inflation, the oil crisis, and the deepest world recession since the 1930's. World accumulation was changing gears. Military dictatorship had checkmated the working class in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay (and was about to do so in Argentina), Israel won the Yom Kippur war, and the subsequent quadrupling of oil prices in the fall of 1973 had dealt a body blow to the oil-importing countries of the Third World, accelerating the debt crisis which has only deepened since.
But these realities faded, at least momentarily, into the backdrop of what seemed to be a series of grave setbacks for U.S. world hegemony: the threat of revolution in Portugal and Spain, the humiliating military debacle in Indochina, the imminent triumph of "anti-imperialist" national liberation fronts in the Portuguese ex-colonies (and the impact of that development on apartheid South Africa), the advance of "Euro-communism" in western Europe, and a pro-Soviet coup in Ethiopia and the subsequent crisis in the Horn of Africa. Civil war broke out in Lebanon. The U.S.-backed Greek junta was overthrown, and Greece and Turkey, both members of NATO, threatened to go to war over Cyprus. More diffusely, but also increasing the atmosphere of U.S. disarray in the midst of Watergate, was the emergence of the Third World "Group of 77" at the United Nations, pushing for debt, oil and food relief. Indira Ghandi imposed martial law in India and moved closer to the Soviet camp, and the Shah of Iran, beneficiary of decades of U.S. military aid, lectured the West about its decadent affluence. Nixon capitulated to Congress, Heath fell to the British miners' strike, Willy Brandt fell to the Guillaume spy scandal, and some fifteen other major countries, within a few months, changed governments in what seemed to many as a fatal disarray of Western world hegemony. Everywhere, including Iberia, state bureaucrats, mainly of Stalinist and Third Worldist hue, seemed to be on the march.
By the late 1970's, a sea change had occurred, routing the currents that seemed ascendant only a few years before, perhaps best embodied by the virtual military alliance between the U.S. and China against the Soviet Union and its allies. It was not merely a reversal of the statist trends of the post-World War II period; it was the end of the era of the 1875 Gotha Program of the German SPD, its "people's state" (Volkstaat), and its 20th century progeny, welfare-statist, Stalinist, or Third Worldist. It was, in a word, the end of the era of Ferdinand Lassalle, the (little-remembered) shadow of all "progressive" state bureaucrats of the 20th century. Not only were all the fires of 1975 put out, but the U.S.- centered counter-offensive did not stop short of the liquidation of the Soviet bloc, and an elaborate "engagement" over the terms of China's full-blown entry into the world market. A workers' movement with a heavy dose of clerical nationalism ruined Stalinism in Poland; Islamic fundamentalism replaced "socialism with an Islamic face" as the main form of "anti-imperialism" throughout the Moslem world; the right-wing populist revolt in the Anglo-American world produced Thatcher and Reagan, and 20 years later, the world working class is still attempting to regroup and return to the offensive.
The transition crises in Portugal and Spain were, further, the last major working class upsurges in the West in the era of the big factory. But their history, 25 years later, is also useful as a benchmark from which to better grasp the break represented by the subsequent period. In Portugal, in particular, the "disconnect" between all "working class political parties" and self-appointed vanguards, Social Democratic, Stalinist, Maoist or Trotskyist, and the social movement of the working class (both industrial and agrarian) and peasants was, by the late summer of 1975, total. This was itself was a new phenomenon of the first order. It is hardly the aim of these texts to herald the Iberian transitions as the first expressions of the loathsome "post-modern" ideology of "new social movements" that took hold in the post-1975 world Thermidor. But they do show the crisis of the "political" that opened the door to such ideologies. One must never forget the romance of the New Left middle classes in Berkeley, Paris, Berlin and Milan (and Lisbon and Madrid) in 1968 with Che, Mao, Ho and and countless lesser Third World "anti-imperialist" guerrillas and their bureaucratic-peasant state formations; only then can one fully grasp the depth of disillusionment that set in by 1978 when the front-line "anti-imperialists"--the Soviet Union, China, Vietnam and Cambodia-- were all about to go to war...with each other.
The mid-1970's upsurges in Portugal and Spain were also the last worker revolts in the West which could be understood, and understood themselves, in terms of what might be called "Eurocentric" Marxism. Such a term, used advisedly, has nothing to do with the stupid idea, widely current today (above all in the U.S.), that because Karl Marx was a "white European male", his thought was necessarily "Eurocentric". Marx's own evolution was complex, and in particular the recent unearthing of the true "late Marx" of his final decade (not the sclerotic "scientific" phantom conjured up by Althusser) who became fascinated with the Russian peasant commune and who studied various "peoples without the state" lays to rest any question of his alleged "Eurocentrism".
The term "Eurocentrism" applies rather to the world hegemony, from 1875 to 1975, of the "Lassallean" "people's state", the national-populist bureaucratic development regime of progressive state civil servants that first consolidated itself in Bismarckian Germany and which was generalized to the world in different welfare statist, Stalinist and Third World nationalist regimes over the next century. It was in the German SPD, which co-evolved with and ultimately integrated itself into the German state, that the work of Marx was first transformed into an ideology of backward development regimes, recapitulating the linear progressive world outlook of the bourgeois Enlightenment of the 18th century, to promote industrialization in largely agrarian societies. These German beginnings were taken over and further refined by the early Russian "Marxists" (whom Marx himself attacked as apologists for capitalism), passed into the origins of Bolshevism, and acquired a world dimension through the triumph and defeat of the Russian Revolution after 1917. From Lassalle to Lenin to Stalin to Mao to Pol Pot there is degeneration, but also continuity.
The following two texts, therefore, are somewhat in contradiction with one another, because I only began to understand the thrust of the preceding paragraph in the early 1980's. There is, so to speak, an "epistemological break" between the Portugal and the Spain texts, which I have not taken the trouble to conceal or correct. This break can be summarized concisely as the reconceptualization of capitalist history, and hence of the workers' movement, in terms of the "extensive" and "intensive" phases of accumulation, based on the famous "Unpublished Sixth Chapter" of vol. 1 of Marx's Capital. When I wrote the text on Portugal, I had only partially broken with certain elements of Trotskyism, inherited from my Schactmanite beginnings, although I was already influenced by Luxemburg, Bordiga, council communism, the Situationists, and the French "neo-Bordigist" (and other) ultra-left currents: Camatte, Barrot-Dauvˇ, the early Castoriadis, the Negation group, and the International Communist Current. (I was, neverthless, unfortunately largely ignorant at the time of the Portuguese group Contra a Corriente and its newspaper Combate.) I felt (and feel) that the Portugal text suffered little or nothing from its willful bracketing of the question of whether the Soviet Union was a degenerated workers' state, state capitalist, bureaucratic collectivist, simply capitalist (in Bordiga's sense) or, (last but not least), Ticktin's Unnamable Object, none of the above.
The question here is obviously not the evolution of one individual's outlook. Useful as it may be for readers today (particularly those of a later generation who did not live through the period) to see the terms in which these questions were fought out in the mid-1970's, many people encountering this text may consider it odd to find an argument, at the culmination of the Portuguese crisis, for the application, more or less unvarnished, of a close approximation of Trotsky's "united front from below" strategy, aimed at superceding the left wing of the Socialist Party, the base of the Communist Party, and the extreme left groupings into soviet formations independent of, and against, the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) and the state. From a purely empirical viewpoint, had a civil war in fact erupted, these three forces would have found themselves on the same side, although hardly disentangled from the left MFA. Twenty five years later, with the benefit of hindsight and awareness of all that has happened, I still don't think it was a bad perspective for the time. No one in Portugal, to my knowledge, advocated it, because the virtual entirety of the "extreme left" (as the following text shows), including the Mandelite LCI (the most openly "Trotskyist" group active there), was in fact politically aligned with the Carvalho-COPCON wing of the MFA, and never dared openly question the populist demagogy of the "MFA-People" alliance. The only coherent ultra-left group on the scene, Contra a Corriente, which had no such illusions, would undoubtedly have considered such an intervention far too focused on the political sphere and far too "Bolshevik" for their tastes.
I am hardly so presumptuous to think that I, writing from some Olympian heights in the U.S., had the "right answer", "if only" it had been applied. An "answer", i.e. a strategy, no matter how appropriate, that does not emerge from the deep necessities of a real movement, is a meaningless formalism. The fact that such a perspective did not emerge in Portugal is a benchmark from which to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the movement there, nothing more or less. But the complex of questions raised here are, properly reformulated for today, hardly "ancient history". Since the mid-1970's, reality has nowhere tested any revolutionary current in a real mass movement moving rapidly leftward toward confrontation with the state, but that hardly means that such a test, and the strategic questions of how such a current relates to the broader movement, are permanently passˇ.
What does it means to say that the old schema of Social Democrat- Communist- Trotskyist- ultra-left , as used, in different ways, in the following texts, are rooted in "Eurocentric" Marxism, particularly since, in the mid-1970's, there were Communists, Maoists and Trotskyists throughout the Third World?
What is means is exactly that all these currents, however much they disagreed amonst themselves, were trapped, almost without exception, in a historical "timetable" fixed by, above all, the Russian Revolution, and therefore an "ontology" ultimately anchored in the early German SPD and the Bismarckian state, i.e. an ideology of Enlightened state civil servants industrializing backward sectors of the world economy.
Bordiga said somewhere that "just because one part of the world (by which he meant of course the West-LG) "has arrived at the next-to-the-last-stage does not mean that what goes on elsewhere is of no interest." By this he hardly meant that there was something "new" in China, North Korea, or North Vietnam, which he considered just as capitalist as the Soviet Union. All of these societies (or, by extension, at the extreme limit, Pol Pot's Cambodia in 1975) were on the same "timetable" and in the same "ontology" of completing the bourgeois revolution, and above all the agrarian revolution, within the framework of the nation-state.
The full ramifications of the "epistemological grid" shared by 99% of all would-be revolutionaries in 1975, in Portugal or anywhere else, cannot be dealt with seriously here. But what all such people (myself included) had in common was a belief that the "philosopher's stone" of world history was to be found in the events of the German-Polish-Russian corridor in the decade after World War I, however interpreted by Social Democrats, Stalinists, Trotskyists and ultra-leftists. World revolution had seemed possible then, and, in 1968-1977, world revolution seemed possible again. And perhaps, in both cases, it was in fact possible, within that part of the world then subsumed by capitalism. But almost no one, in the revolutionary milieu of 1975, gave much thought to the possibility that it would fail, as it had failed in 1917-1927, at least in part because capitalism still had large swaths of the world into which to expand, and because (in the latter case) "le capitalisme sauvage" (as the French call it), unbridled capitalism of the "Dickensian" variety, was about to expand into virtually every part of the world ruled in 1975 by "bureaucracy", whether Social Democratic, Stalinist, Maoist or Third World-Bonapartist. Almost no one in the revolutionary milieu in 1975 imagined, or would have considered possible, China growing through the 1990's, with market mechanisms, at 10-11% per year for years on end, South Korea and Taiwan emerging as mature industrial capitalisms, or other fallout from the "Asian miracle", before the crisis of 1997-98, seriously transforming Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, or finally the 1990's emergence of India and China as serious forces in the world software market. One part of the world had come to the next-to-the-last stage, and what happened elsewhere was (in that sense) of no particular interest. Virtually everyone, locked into the historical timetable of the Russian Revolution and therefore the modernizing "ontology" of the early SPD, however explicitly hostile to Social Democratic, Stalinist, or Third World-Bonapartist "bureaucracy", believed this "bureaucracy" to be something "beyond" private capitalism, whereas events after 1975 have shown it to be mainly something "before" private capitalism. A good swath of the extreme left or ultra-left, however anti-Stalinist, and trapped in fatuous variants of the "state capitalist" analysis of the Soviet phenomenon, thought that the Soviet Union held up the mirror, however primitive and distorted, to the future of capitalism as a whole ("the main tendency in capitalism today is toward state capitalism", as was so widely believed at the time) much as Britain had in the 19th century.
The underdeveloped countries accounted for 5% of world manufacture in 1963, and nearly 20% by 1994. Quite understandably, almost everyone in the revolutionary milieu, including myself (particularly in the 1973-75 atmosphere of world crisis) saw world accumulation, as it affected the Third World, much more in terms of what it had been 1963 than anything like what it would actually be in 1994, or later. It was almost universal common coin that the capitalist world market could never develop any part of the Third World, even if (as some believed) autarchic "state capitalism" could.
That, in sum, was the "Eurocentric" dimension of almost all Marxism, in 1975. We know, today, in contrast to all "Lassallean" statisms, that Enlightened state bureaucrats "laying the foundations of socialism" (i.e. developing the productive forces and abolishing pre-capitalist agriculture) are exactly involved in the tasks of capitalism and the bourgeois revolution. No one will ever write again, as Trotsky wrote in 1936, "that socialism confronts capitalism today in tons of steel and concrete", or, more up to date, of silicon chips and genetically-modified foods. Going beyond "Eurocentric" theories of statist modernization, or even the "anti-bureaucratic" soviets and workers' councils that nonetheless accepted the same historical "timetable" and "ontology", means reconnecting with the "material human community" (Gemeinwesen) that Marx sought in his studies of the Russian agrarian commune or of the Iroquois. In sum, we know today that productivism is not communism.
Obviously, I cannot settle the question here whether or not the post-1975 spread of capitalism, particularly in Asia, represents "merely" a long recomposition of the old capitalist deck of cards, as the remaining exponents of "the epoch of imperialist decay" would have it, or is in fact a new phase of real expansion of the world productive forces. I merely refer to that debate as the inevitable framework through which we look back at the last two working-class upsurges that took place when almost no one foresaw such a development. Whatever happens from now on, the Western working class, such as it existed in 1975 or as it exists today, is being "conjugated" with new working classes in different parts of the world that barely existed, or did not exist, 25 years ago. The Soviet bloc has collapsed, the former mass Stalinist parties in the West have shrunk to little more than large sects, and the large Social Democratic parties which benefited from their demise have, in France, Spain, and Italy come and gone from power without eliciting a yawn from any capitalist, anywhere. The capitalist state is still in place, and still consumes 40% or more of GDP, but it is generally much more involved in privatizing than in nationalizing.
Working-class revolution, obviously, was always conceived of in an internationalist framework. But Social Democracy and Stalinism, the two dominant deformations of worker emancipation in the 20th century, were strictly bound by the nation state. No ferment of the kind that occurred in Portugal and Spain in the mid-1970's will ever recur in a situation in which revolutionaries have to think about anything like the "united from from below" as presented in the Portugal text that follows. Social Democracy and Stalinism are dead as forces capable of mobilizing any working class, anywhere. Looking back to the end of the era in which, particularly in the case of Stalinism, they still seemed capable of doing so, allows us to take the measure of the continuities and discontinuities of where we are today.
One final word on the Spanish text. There was no "Winter Palace"-like situation in Spain (in contrast to mootings thereof in the more "classical" Portuguese crisis and quasi-dual power situation, at least in Lisbon). The transition from Franco to Felipe Gonzalez was more protracted and more diffuse, though hardly less explosive than the Portuguese transition. There is not the same "narrative", from early moderate euphoria to a polarized confrontation to defeat and regroupment. For that reason, and to deepen the conceptual formulation of the new world context discussed above, the Spain text, (unlike the Portugal text's nearly exclusive focus on 1974-75) takes a much longer view of the evolution of the Spanish working-class movement.
PART ONE: CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE MODERNIZATION OF CAPITAL IN PORTUGAL, 1974-1975
LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS
PCP Partido Comunista Portugues (Portuguese Communist Party)
MFA Movimento das Forcas Armadas (Armed Forces Movement)
CIA Central Intelligence Agency
MPLA Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola
PAICG Independence Party of Guinea and Cape Verde
FRELIMO Frente de Liberacao de Mozambique
OECD Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development
PSP Partido Socialista Portugues
CDS Centro Democratico Social
TAP Transportes Aeronaves Portugues
PRP-BR Partido Revolucionario do Proletariado-Brigadas Revolucionarias
MES Movivento da Esquerda Socialista
ELP Ejercito da Liberacao Portugues
PIDE-DGS International State Defense Police (renamed 1969: General Security Department)
LUAR Liga de Uniao de Accao Revolucionaria
NATO North Atlantic Treaty Organization
EEC European Economic Community
IMF International Monetary Fund
CGT Confederation Generale du Travail
PCI Partito Communista Italiano
CGIL Confederazione Generale Italiana del Lavoro
FUR Frente Unido Revolucionario
PSU Parti Socialiste Unifie
COPCON Continental Operations Command
PCF Parti Communiste Francais
MDP-CDE Movimento Democratico Portugues
CRTSM Revolutionary Workers , Soldiers and Sailors Councils
MRPP Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado
CUF Companhia Uniao Fabril
LCI Liga Communista Internacionalista
FSP Frente Socialista Popular
SPD Sozialistische Partei Deutschlands
AOC Alianca Operario-Camponesa
UDP Uniao Denocratica Popular
SUV Soldiers United for Victory
PPD Partido Popular Democratico
POLITICAL TOPOGRAPHY:
Extreme-Left Maoists Official Left Center-Right Extreme-Right
PRP-BR MRPP PCP PPD CDS ELP
MES AOC PSP
LUAR UDP MDP-CDE
LCI
1. The Beginning of a New Era of Global Revolution
What occured in Portugal between April, 1974, and November, 1975, was a cycle of revolutionary confrontation, aborted and intermittently resumed in the subsequent period, which is rich in lessons for the international revolutionary movement. A certain wing of the Portuguese bourgeoisie played the card of reformism, and found itself quickly standing over the abyss of proletarian revolution. A group of military officers, heavily influenced by the widely-debated "Peruvian model" of capitalist modernization, was the major vehicle for this reform effort, and itself later split between different versions of a military-technocratic modernization of capital and an important group which was committed to the Stalinist model of integral bureaucratic consolidation. But everyone making their calculations in the heady atmosphere of April, 1974, had omitted one factor which in turn destroyed the careful plans of the reformist bourgeoisie, forced the military to decisively re-define itself several times, and finally dealt Stalinism its hardest blow in the West since May 1968 in France. This factor was the revolutionary movement of the Portuguese working class. When, in November, 1975, a center-right coalition of the military had definitively mastered the situation, although not without passing through some harrowing moments, there was not a significant force in world politics which had not received an important foretaste of developments looming throughout the advanced capitalist sector for the duration of the decade.
It has become a banality to say it: what happened in Portugal in this nineteen-month period was a modern movement, in which every archaism from fascism to Third Period Stalinism reared its head and was then dispelled against the balance of forces of a new period of class struggle. This is not to say that fascism and Stalinism did not appear as potent forces in the course of the crisis, but merely that they, like all forces committed to preserving some aspect of existing reality, were constantly obliged to rush after that reality in order to master its new contours.
That an unashamedly Stalinist party--the last in Western Europe--could have passed through the metamorphoses undergone by the PCP between April, 1974 and November, 1975, already indicates that an era has passed. In that time, the PCP a) established itself as a legal party after 48 years of underground existence and moved into the offices of the Ministry of Labor, b) consolidated its organizational hegemony in the working class in the first months following the coup, c) revealed itself from the first moment as a party of strikebreakers policing the working class for the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) in the name of "national reconstruction", d) revived a vintage Third Period demagogy which horrified all but the most stoic inhabitants of the Kremlin and the headquarters of the Western European CPs, e) was forced to accept a united front with an array of extreme-left formations threatening to outflank it in the working class itself (without which threat such a united front, the first ever concluded with an extreme-left formation in Stalinist history, would have been unthinkable), f) was excluded from that same united front 72 hours later, g) constituted itself, after the fall of the last Vasco Goncalves government, simultaneously as a minor government party and as the aspiring leader of the opposition to the government, h) permitted its spokesmen to call for an armed insurrection at 5:00 P.M. on Nov. 25, and i) issued a call urging everyone to return home at 10:00 P.M the same day. Taken by themselves, the elements which came into play in the revolutionary cycle in Portugal constituted nothing which had not emerged in different moments of the return of the revolutionary proletarian movement in the previous decade: May 1968 in France, the "hot autumn" of 1969 in Italy, the more dispersed but more ruthless eruptions of class warfare in Spain. What was new, however, was the configuration of these elements in their historical movement, and the fact that a pro-revolutionary current in the working class to the left of the PCP could emerge for a brief moment before the eyes of the entire world as the true gravedigger of capitalism in Portugal, ripping away in an instant the pretensions of the PCP and its international fellow travellers to lead this movement. It is true that the entirety of the organized extreme-left in Portugal succumbed to the game of opportunism, most notably in its abject capitulation to the left-Bonapartist Gen. Otelo Sareiva de Carvalho, and that in its desire to outflank the PCP it came close to falling into even worse illusions. But the ebb and flow of the fortunes of these organizations, far more attuned than the PCP to the realities of the social movement (even as they failed miserably to criticize the inadequacies of that movement) was far lighter on the scales of the counter-revolution than the maneuvers of the PCP as it attempted similtaneously to ingratiate itself with the pro-bureaucratic wing of the MFA and to propitiate its own pro-revolutionary base in the working class and in the agricultural proletariat. If, in the tense hours of Nov. 25-26, the extreme left and the working class currents from which it drew its support could be dispersed without a shot, revealing a certain moment of its earlier rhetoric to have been nothing but bluster and demagogy, the PCP committed far worse crimes, meeting that very night with elements of the MFA to negotiate the details of the repression that would follow, and to ensure that any bloodbath would fall on the extreme-left and not its own members. What Portugal proved to the international revolutionary movement is that the bureaucratic apparatuses of the official "Communist" parties could never again reconstitute themselves as the hegemonic force of pro-revolutionary sentiment in the working class. And that was already its historical achievement.
2. Archaic Corporatism and Its Modern Protagonists
The Portuguese capitalism in which this movement arose was distinguished, aside from the lowest living standards in Europe, only by the particularly decrepit corporatist state and ideology which oversaw its stagnation. Unlike the Franquist regime in Spain, Salazar's government had never seriously come to terms with the demands of "modernization" imposed by contemporary reality, and had allowed a disproportionate political and economic power within Portuguese society to be exercised by a reactionary group of latifundistas with no idea whatsoever of the necessities of running a modern capitalist economy, no matter how primitive. The government bureaucracy and statist economic mechanisms, combined with the unified power of landed interests and the banking oligopoly, kept the country in a state of lingering decay, increasingly colonized by foreign capital and squeezed by an enormous military budget necessary for the colonial wars in Africa. During the same period Spain, using the technocratic forces largely stalemated in Portugal, emerged as the tenth industrial power in the world. If the fascist demagogy and religious facade of the Salazarist regime at times was echoed by the zealots of Francoism across the border, that regime was nonetheless differentiated by a certain literalism of its neo-medieval or corporatist idyll which in Spain found its more realistic and contemporary outlet in the Catholic technocratic grouping Opus Dei. But there were, of course, in the real forces at work which permitted Salazarism an extended period of domination, forces which were ultimately working to destroy that insular state of affairs. The Portuguese economy was subsidized in no small way by invisibles: the remittances of the 1,000,000 Portuguese in emigration, both in flight from the particularly virulent conscription law (48 months required service) and in search of employment in the industrial zones of northern Europe. In addition, there was the cultivation of the small but highly lucrative tourist trade, focused in the south in the Algarve region and specialized, unlike the Spanish Costa Brava and Costa del Sol, in a more elite clientele. It has been noted in the past that if the Spanish revolution erupts once again in the month of July, it will find one to two million tourists present in the country, and similarly in the Portuguese revolution, tourism played its role in the drama. On the side of the counter-revolution, it was expressed in the flight of thousands of unsettled Germans, Britons and Swedes from the normally tranquil Algarve coast; and on the side of the revolutionary surge of the summer of 1975, in the presence of thousands of leftists of all sauces throughout the country, who at times constituted a force in their own right within various mass demonstrations.
In the global hierarchy of exploitation, Portugal was in 1974 a semi-developed country in an intermediary position between the Third World and the advanced capitalist sector, a colonial power itself a semi-colony. Precisely because of this intermediate position, the Portuguese crisis was from the beginning an international one. The country was the volatile mediation of the various contending forces of global power politics: its links to the advanced sector were expressed in the weight of Western European and American capital, NATO, the CIA and in the presence of 1,000,000 Portuguese workers in Northern Europe; the revolt of the colonized peoples of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau made the links to the Third World as a whole. A working class revolution in Portugal, combined with the triumph of the MPIA, PAIGC and FRELIMO in the former colonies would have had potentially explosive effects on the world balance of power, and even in the absence of such a revolution in Portugal, southern Africa was transformed in the space of a few months into a nexus of superpower confrontation.
The relative poverty of Portuguese capitalism, its position as an intermediary country in the international capitalist division of labor, is underlined by a few revealing statistics. It was the sole member country of the OECD whose population actually declined between 1962-72, due to the massive emigration of labor. With roughly one-third of the work force employed in each of the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors, Portugal's expenditure of labor power in agriculture was exceeded only by Greece and Yugoslavia among European countries. Private consumption per capita of $580 in 1971 was also among the lowest on the continent.
This tripartite division of the working population of Portugal had an immediate perceptible influence on political alignments. It is indispensable to note, for clarification of the denouement of the political crisis, that two-thirds of the Portuguese population lived in the northern part of the country, in which a large, impoverished peasantry eked out an existence on tiny plots of privately-owned land. It was in this priest-ridden, illiterate portion of the population, to which the revolutionary movement made no serious programmatic overtures, that the counter-revolution, led by the Church and the right and center parties and at moments assisted by the pathetic Maoists (who saw in this Papist regroupment a "peasant resistance to social fascism") recruited its most stable shock troops.
By contrast, it was in the very concentrated industrial zones --the suburban belt of Lisbon, in Setubal, and to a lesser extent in the northern city of Porto, that the Communist Party and the extreme left had their base of support. To this must be added the agricultural proletariat of the Alentejo region, in an area where the small landed property of the North was almost non-existent , where most cultivation was conducted on large latifundias., and where the apparatus of the PCP exercised hegemony well before 1974. It was no accident that well after Nov. 25, the center-right government made no effort to attack the seizures of the Alentejo latifundias or to dismantle on the agricultural cooperatives which were operating them.
If the Portuguese proletariat, concentrated essentially in two or three urban industrial areas of importance, was dominated in the first year of the crisis by the hegemonic PCP and the extreme-left, the important urban service sector was a far more complex and divided stratum. It was here, among shopkeepers, civil servants, white-collar workers and technicians that the PSP of Mario Soares and the right-wing PPD and CDS found their base of support, to the extent that they were not relying exclusively on Catholic and peasant sentiment. Even within this petty-bourgeois urban base of the PSP (by no means a uniform current of reaction, containing a number of white-collar trade unionists and employees of specialized, capital-intensive modern industries who were in fact pro-socialist) easy generalizations go astray. But in the last instance, excepting certain modern industrial sectors such as the TAP (the nationalized airlines in which the PRP and the MES had effective sway among employees, and which were the scene of important strikes) the real forces of revolution were the industrial working class and the agricultural workers of the Alentejo. It was they, above all, who carried out the land seizures, the factory occupations and the housing seizures without which nothing else of consequence would have occurred. It was additionally a result of this alignment of forces that the revolutionary left, above all concentrated in the Lisbon region, was systematically out of touch with the northern peasantry, who with a program for the cancellation of a heavy farm indebtedness and the transmission of cheap fertilizers could have possibly been won away from the Church hierarchy. Hence the revolutionary currents tended to mistake the balance of forces in Lisbon and the immediate surrounding regions for the balance of forces in the country as a whole, leading to certain periods of misguided euphoria and, at the decisive moment, a grave miscalculation which brought the movement to within an inch of a bloodbath.
Finally, as a demographically significant force which was not at all in evidence in the early months of the revolutionary process, one must cite the infamous retornados from Angola and Mozambique, who began arriving in serious numbers in the fall of 1975 with the impending independence of Angola on Nov. 11. There were, by the spring of 1976, roughly 500,000 retornados in Portugal, the vast majority of them forced onto the heavily burdened government dole, occupying in cramped conditions every available hotel room in Lisbon and producing a severe housing shortage in a country where such accommodations were already in short supply. The retornados, almost all of whom manifested the typical outlook of a dispossessed colon population, weighed heavily on the scales of reaction and made up the bulk of recruits to the underground fascist army, ELP, which was being supplied and directed in liaison with former PIDE elements and other reactionary groups operating across the border in Spain. The retornados whiled away their time on the vast Rossio plaza in the heart of downtown Lisbon, a volatile social force deeply antipathetic to the "forces of revolution" (in which most of them included the PSP of Mario Soares) which they felt had betrayed the ex-colonies. There was some evidence that certain elements of the retornados were being maintained on the dole with funds directly furnished by the U.S. government, which undoubtedly felt the need to maintain a reserve army of fascist cannon fodder.
There was, of course, a sensuous everyday side to the various forces which had shaped postwar Portuguese society and made it what it was, expressed in a thousand small realities which, as in every social process, make the movement of history visible in individual lives and give each movement its unmistakeable and inimitable popular quality. There were experiences engraved in thousands of working-class memories of cold and lonely treks through the Pyrenees with special guides hired, at outrageous fees, for the purpose of slipping them illegally into France, where they made the trip to a job contracted illegally at a Parisian suburban factory or construction site; there was the dramatic passage of the Portuguese border itself, rigorously patrolled by the notorious PIDE-DGS, crossed over the years by revolutionaries, intellectuals, draft dodgers and simply adventurers who found no room for themselves in the slumber of Portugal; finally, within the country itself, the activities of the hated PIDE-DGS, which was estimated to have had 200,000 Portuguese in its service at its height (this in a metropolitan population of 10 million) created a permanent ambiance in the streets, the cafes, and working class neighborhoods where every May 1 the revolutionary movement would attempt some furtive nocturnal manifestation of its presence and where the PIDE would just as ruthlessly swoop down to rip up posters and efface wall slogans before daybreak.
If ever modern history has presented a society in crisis in which all the repressed struggles of fifty years resurfaced under the sign of revolution, it was Portugal. For the first time since the French Communist Party's 1925 campaign against the Rif War, a Western European working class arrived at the rendez-vous with a colonial population in revolt, not under the senile "anti-imperialist" ideology bequeathed by forty years of Popular Frontism and Stalino-pacifist confusionism, but with the lucid intention of overthrowing the entire capitalist edifice. In its simultaneous call for the immediate, unconditional liquidation of the doddering Portuguese empire through the liquidation of capitalism in the metropolis, the Portuguese working class demonstrated the sensuous link between the revolutions of the advanced sector and the movements of the Third World, overturning at a stroke the masochistic and guilt-ridden ideologies of "support" to Third World peasant-bureaucratic formations which had warmed leftist hearts in Western Europe and the U.S. for the previous two decades. But it was not only the resurfacing of a real and not merely spectacular solidarity between sectors of the global movement which revealed the advance of the revolution in the Portuguese crisis. Within the array of capitalist currents themselves, a whole set of options was put into play and shown to be bankrupt. There was of course the archaism of the Salazarist regime, still surrounded by the "ultras" who, after denouncing Caetano for six years for betraying the spirit of the ancien regime , followed him just as quickly into oblivion. Then came various modernizers, their hour struck at last, who hoped to use the military, and later the mass movement, to push through in Portugal what more perspicacious groups such as Opus Dei had developed in Spain over fifteen years under Franquist sponsorship: a modern, technocratic dirigism under joint military control, which could finally propel Portugal into the EEC and win it the respectability which Salazarism could never achieve. Often of rather leftist persuasion, these individuals, having no base of their own, cropped up around the Melo Autunes "Group of the Nine", and were, like their European counter-parts, by no means hostile to trade unions, nationalizations or workers' councils, seeing them quite rightly as the sine qua non of a modern capitalism capable of containing the sole real threat of proletarian revolution. These people, from within the government planning agencies and the nationalized banks, consulting their well-thumbed studies of the Peruvian colonels' movement, understood perhaps better than anyone in the bourgeois camp how much would have to be jettisoned to save the essential, and that lucidity permitted them to play a role all out of proportion to their numbers and social base in the final denouement of the crisis. While this group could in no sense be confused with the Spinolists, they constituted the extreme left of a spectrum of opinion of which Spinola constituted the extreme right, but which agreed on the essential: modernize capital, or disappear.
Counter-revolutions undergo their own combined and uneven development; in the case of Portugal, an indispensable moment of the retooling of capitalism was the creation of a viable bureaucratic stratum within the working class capable of replacing the discredited corporatist unions bequeathed by the old regime. To this end, Socialists and Communists rushed home from exile to take their places. By the spring of 1975, and under the sponsorship of the military, the Stalinists had control of a unified trade union apparatus, the Intersindical, whose creation by military fiat had the Western press weeping for the demise of the corporatist hacks, a demise they had hailed mere months before. The entire left and extreme-left supported the creation of Intersindical precisely to liquidate the old Salazarist burlesque; the complete monopoly of its apparatus by the Stalinists later gave the extreme left pause. But by June, 1975, the whole question had been forgotten, as had Intersindical, for it was henceforth in the tidal wave of workers' councils which sprang up through the industrial belts of the country that everything was being decided.
3. Historical Development of Salazarism, 1945-1974
The stage, of course, had been set for this cast of characters by an entire previous epoch. It was really only from ignorance and the marginal role of Portugal international affairs throughout the postwar era that Salazarism could appear from the outside as a stable monolith; in fact, it had tottered a number of times throughout its existence, and had been obliged, with the exception of its brief halcyon period of l939-1945, between the end of the civil war in Spain and the defeat of the Axis in Europe, to conduct a ruthless repression of an opposition which, however inept and trapped in a backwater, continually regrouped for new assaults on the regime. 1934, 1945, 1958 and l96l-62 all marked periods of upheaval in which the future of the regime was by no means certain, and particularly in the last three cases, it was probably the international situation more than anything else which saved Salazarism.
What was the nature of this regime which ruled Portugal for 48 years? As the second fascist regime to establish itself in Europe in the interwar period (following that of Mussolini in 1922), Salazarism nonetheless, for the first thirty years of its existence, was in reality more an elaboration of interwar corporatism, developing infrastructure (like the Primo de Rivera dictatorship in Spain) and preparing statist forms of management while exercising political hegemony and animated by a vision of a static medieval idyll almost lyrical in its absurdity. Unlike the more streamlined, industrial and expansionist qualities which characterized Italian fascism and German Nazism, the corporatist regime of Salazar was able to hold sway in this mode until the 1960's, when it was forced by converging circumstances, accelerated by the beginning of the colonial wars in 1961, to attempt a certain modernization and to open the door to foreign capital. Prior to 1960, Salazar managed the Portuguese economy with an eye to semi-autarchic industrial development, with retrograde consequences for the Portuguese working class and peasantry, to say nothing of the colonized populations. Salazar avoided the blustering demagogy of a Mussolini, often reiterating that "Portugal is a poor country and will remain so", while carefully maintaining a balanced budget and refusing to engage in any deficit spending or permit serious trade imbalances. He might have pursued a different policy if he had known that the most significant result of his efforts, following his demise, would be to place roughly $3.2 billion in reserves at the disposal of a government in rapid leftward motion, which made possible a remarkable stability of the escudo well into the revolutionary crisis and bankrolled to a certain extent the long political deadlock which, in addition to world economic pressures, seriously contracted production for more than a year.
The l958-6l period constituted the definitive turning point for Salazarism. In the early phase of the Cold War, Salazar had remained loyal to a variant of the old fascist internationalism, refusing to participate in the Marshall Plan, (for which he was reviled by the democratic opposition at home and abroad). But the 1958-61 period presented Salazarism with a series of rude humiliations and setbacks. First, in 1958, the presidential campaign of the popular General Delgado engendered a wave of enthusiasm and mass demonstrations of support which took aback even the PIDE, which had every reason to believe itself well-informed on the contempt in which the regime was held by the populace, unlike the reclusive Salazar himself. May, 1959, saw the biggest illegal May Day demonstrations since the war. Then, in 1961, a series of episodes revealed the depths of the weakness of the regime: in January, the world was treated to the spectacle of the Santa Maria episode, in which a group of adventurers around one Captain Henrique Galvao seized a luxury liner and diverted it toward Brazil, using the incident to draw international attention to the ongoing existence of Salazarist rule in Portugal. This "Operation Dulcinea" of course had no immediate internal effects on the regime, but it achieved its publicity aims and was experienced by Salazar as another humiliation. But it was only the beginning. In March, the beginning of armed conflict in Angola noticeably increased the temperature. This was followed almost immediately by an attempted coup d'etat led by the then-Minister of Defense Botelho Moniz. In November, the limited legal opposition for elections to the powerless parliament timidly raised the issue of de-colonization for the first time. Finally, India overran the tiny colony of Goa without serious resistance, and on the last day of the year, another military coup was attempted in the town of Beja. Salazarism was shaken from its inward-looking stance by the pressures of the outside world, and it entered the web of entanglements, epitomized by the futile military effort in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau, from which it was never to extricate itself.
In the same 1958-61 period, the Portuguese economy entered the phase of attempted adaptation to the new historical circumstances, and began to acquire the contradictory appearances which characterized it at the time of the April 1974 coup. This process was undoubtedly accelerated by the necessity of financing the colonial wars, but it was in motion before they erupted. An initial five-year plan had been pushed through for 1953-58, concentrating on public investments in certain industrial infrastructure; a second five-year plan emphasized an expansion of private industry, particularly in the industrial belt across the Tagus from Lisbon and Setubal. Probably the most significant achievement of this combined state and private sponsorship was the creation of the world-class Lisnave and Setubal shipyards, which by 1973, because of their excellent geographic location at the entrance to the Mediterranean and low labor costs, became an important source of foreign revenue for the regime. The other notable achievement of these programs is summarized in a single, striking statistic: from 1900-1950, the Portuguese working class, as a percentage of the population, grew by 1/2%; from 1950-74, it expanded by 18%. For the first time, foreign capital and currency, long shunned because of bad memories of English domination of the Portuguese economy through the nineteenth century, were actively sought out, and names like IBM, Phillips, GM, ITT, Unilever and Nestle began to make their appearance in the industrial suburban belts of Lisbon, Porto and Setubal. Tourism, equally shunned by the regime as a corrosive moral influence that might upset the equilibrium of repression in which sensuality was confined for the populace, was finally recognized through the Spanish experience as the lucrative source of currency it was, and between 1961 and 1965 this alienation as well was introduced to the residents of the Algarve, although in a restricted fashion aimed above all at an elite stratum of tourists. The regime did not fail to accompany these major policy shifts with its usual brio: in 1965, for example, the walls of the country were plastered with a poster reminding the population that in spite of the ignominious collapse of British and French colonialism, Portugal was continuing its civilizing mission abroad. This quality of incongruity and archaism in the realm of ideology was a serious weakness of the Salazar regime throughout the period, and was one very clear sign of its brittle character; after 1974, propaganda shorts from the period were shown for comic relief between main features in movie theatres, to the universal derision of the audiences. It was also in 1958 that the Portuguese economy began the serious export of a new commodity: labor power, which meant that by 1974 no less than 1,000,000 Portuguese, the majority of them recruited from the countryside, were at work in Western Europe and North America, an extremely important source of remittances for the regime which covered the Portuguese trade deficit and helped to finance the African wars. The structural crisis of Portuguese capitalism in the last years of Salazar and under Caetano expressed the growing importance of the industrial sector of the economy at the expense of agriculture, and the complete inadequacy of the dominant institutional arrangements to accomodate that change. The deadlock between the industrial and latifundista bourgeoisie, which had been maintained in favor of the latter until roughly 1960, began to be broken thereafter in favor of intensified industrial development. The split between industry and agriculture in the metropolitan economy was reflected in a similar split, within the banking structure, in the financing of the two sectors. Hence the agrarian reform pushed through by the MFA in 1974-75, which destroyed the latifundista class and created havoc among the agricultural banks financing it, was greeted with equanimity, not to say promoted by the industrial bourgeoisie and the banks associated with it. It was generally recognized, particularly after 1973 and the shrinkage of export outlets for Portuguese goods, that a restructuring of agriculture to create an important domestic market for machinery would necessarily mean the liquidation of the archaisms of that sector. This restructuring, by increasing output, would also reverse the trend of the previous decade toward import dependency in foodstuffs.
The decline of the agricultural sector, due to the persistence of outmoded methods and social relations at a time of mass emigration and industrial development, meant that while still employing nearly one-third of the work force, agriculture was accounting for less than 20% of the gross domestic product. At the same time, due to the flight from the land, wages in agriculture had by 1970 risen 121.5% above their1963 levels, compared with a 75.6% rise in industry.
This drag on the economy by the primary sector also complicated the country's viability in the world market. By the early 1970's, Portugal became a net importer of foodstuffs for the first time, adding to its chronic deficit in industrial goods and becoming a real burden under the impact of world inflation after 1972. Whereas agricultural produce, along with woods and corks,had constituted 25 and 22% respectively of Portuguese exports in 1960-61, this had fallen off to l8 and 10% by 1969-70. Hence the industrial bourgeoisie and the banking sectors linked to it, which wanted to adapt the Portuguese economy to the realities of the world market, saw the writing on the wall by 1973.
This consciousness could only have been sharpened by the October, 1973 increase in oil prices. There was a growing recognition that the liquidation of the colonial wars, the imminent return of the emigre workers from Western Europe in the wake of deepening recession, increased import costs and reduced export possibilities (greatly enhanced by the imminent loss of the Escudo area made up of the various colonies) would all combine to destroy the balance of payments surpluses which had been possible in an earlier era. The only solution was an expansion of the internal market, and thus agricultural reform, combined with increased state ownership, seemed the only way forward. When, in late 1974, the EEC imposed tariff barriers on textile imports to the Common Market area, the Portuguese economy was dealt another blow in a sector that constituted 26.3% of all exports by 1970. At the end of a year in which production had already fallen 20%, and in which investment was down 17.5% from its 1973 level, the world production collapse of November l974-March 1975 can almost certainly be seen as the backdrop to the structural reform, of a state capitalist nature, which were pushed through in the wake of the events of March 11.
4. Dissolution of Salazarist Hegemony and Left-Wing Regroupment, 1961-74
The serious insertion of the Portuguese economy, occurring in tandem with the growing burden of the African wars , into contemporary capitalism did not fail to have its repercussions among the liberal and leftist opposition to the regime. It was in the direct confrontation with the realities of Portuguese Africa that many people, and not the least of them certain strata of junior officers, began to assess the world-historical situation of Portugal in a new light. The French solution to the crisis of de-colonization, the creation of a streamlined neo-colonial sphere based on "cooperation" projects and a privileged trade relation, and where possible ongoing direct investment, was too much for Salazarism to either conceive or carry out, and it required 13 years of warfare before a tepid version of this solution could be publicly advocated in the metropolis in the book of Antonio Spinola which appeared shortly before the coup, Portugal and the Future. This disaffection of important parts of the professional military, to say nothing of the working class and peasant youth subjected to 48 months of compulsory service, drove an important wedge between the army and the regime for the first time since the army offered power to Salazar in 1926. Similarly, in 1962, with the ferment ensuing from the events of the previous year, and furthered by the important strike of the agricultural workers in the Alentejo region organized by the Communist Party, along with large student demonstrations at the University of Lisbon, the splintering process which was manifesting itself internationally in the "Communist" movement surfaced in Portugal in the first in a series of breakaways from the PCP. While the Sino-Soviet rift was internationally the pretext for these splits, the groups breaking away from the "revisionist" CP were above all animated by a desire for "direct action" against the regime and a break with the underground variety of Popular Frontism which the CP had been practicing since 1934. In the conditions of Salazarism, this generally correct appreciation of the bankruptcy of the CP (although, as articulated, often from equally bankrupt position, such as Maoism) led in the main, for the groups active within the country, to terrorism, the only imaginable "direct action" under police state conditions. These tactics, however sterile in advancing the real movement and invariably conducted in the name of the "people" with a rhetoric that has since come to characterize the terrorist formation of the advanced sector (Weathermen, the Japanese Red Army, or the RAF in West Germany) produced some spectacular bank robberies and other attacks on the regime. The Revolutionary Brigades, formed in 1971, managed in 1973 to steal the strategic plans of the Portuguese High Command for operations in Guinea-Bissau and present them to the liberation movement in that country. While these actions may have had a certain publicity effect in demonstrating the inability of the PIDE to snuff out underground activity in the country (an ability similarly underlined by the escape from prison of Alvaro Cunhal in 1961 or the escape from a Lisbon hospital of the political prisoner Herminio da Palma Inacio in 1969), the ideology in whose name they were carried out, with its inevitable "serve the people" thrust, was a noxious one, and one which in the forms it acquired after legal activity became possible in 1974, showed itself to be reactionary. Nonetheless, around the pseudo-issue of direct action, important groups of pro-revolutionary elements broke out of the corpus of the PCP and created the basis for the extreme left which was to haunt the parent body throughout the revolutionary crisis.
Three further events with ominous portents for the regime occurred in early 1974. The first was the appearance of Spinola's work calling for a neo-colonialist liquidation of the African wars, which immediately became the focus of widespread discussion. The second was an attempted coup carried out on March 16, by officers not immediately involved in the MFA, which foundered for various reasons of coordination and support. On April 9, the Revolutionary Brigades succeeded in blowing up a military transport ship in the Tagus, and the stage was set for the disappearance of Caetano's government.
One further development of interest, with certain implications for the question of the origins of the Armed Forces Movement, received little attention outside of Portugal. On April 24, a large fleet of NATO ships, en route to maneuvers, was anchored in Lisbon harbor. The ships sailed at dawn on April 25, and for those who enjoy such speculation, their timely departure was seen as an explicit refusal to defend the Caetano government and a "go-ahead" signal to at least the immediate group around Spinola. Speculations that NATO, and hence the US government and the CIA, were informed of the coup in advance, were stated most forcefully by a right-wing Spanish newspaper, the Gaceta Illustrada, which complained that NATO was losing confidence in the abilities of the Iberian "ultras" to successfully rule their respective countries, and even went as far as to link the coup in Portugal with the assassination of Spanish Prime Minister Carrero Blanco in December, 1973. It would in fact hardly be surprising that a coup carried out by the highest levels of the Portuguese military, which had had extensive contact with NATO and the CIA through the African wars, would have had the prior approval, or even promotion, of those organizations. The activities of Spinola after being forced into exile in March 1975 confirm that he was the center of a fascist regroupment. But these links in no way clarify the far more obscure connections and motives of the MFA figures who emerged later, particularly Melo Antunes, Vasco Goncalves and Otelo Sareiva de Carvahlo, who played decisive roles in a much more extreme phase of the movement.
5. The Revolution of Illusions
The revolutionary process in Portugal passed through four principal phases: April 25-September 28, 1974, the period of the "revolution of the roses"; September 28, l974-March 1975, in which the masks of cameraderie fell away in the wake of the aborted Spinola coup and in conjunction with international developments; March 11-August 27,1975, characterized simultaneously by the drive for power by the PCP and the pro-CP faction of the MFA around Goncalves, and the offensive of the working class itself; August 27-November 25, 1975 in which the country polarized into a virtual civil war situation until the stalemate was broken by a center-right military coup which broke the back of the revolutionary working class movement without, however, resorting to the anticipated bloodbath. In each period, it was the leftward movement of the proletariat which determined everyone's attitude. After Nov.25, 1975, the situation in Portugal was characterized by the ongoing stagnation of the official left and the extreme-left, with the offensive passing definitively to the center and even more to the right, and a slow but concerted rollback of the gains, such as they were, of the pre-Nov. 25 period. The parliamentary elections of April 25 and the presidential elections of June 27 merely confirmed that the political balance of forces which had already been established in the streets and in the factories in November. Each of these four major periods was characterized by an important shift in the balance of forces between the major contenders for power: the four principal factions of the MFA, the PCP, the PSP, the principal right wing parties PPD and CDS and the various Maoist groups on one side; certain extreme-left currents closer to the realities of the movement (most notably the PRP-BR, the MES and the LUAR), a pro-revolutionary CP rank-and-file, and the autonomous organizations thrown up by the working class on the other.
The atmosphere which was created in the immediate aftermath of the coup was the familiar one which initiates every revolutionary process: the euphoria of illusions. The energies released by the fall of Caetano exploded into the transient "revolution of the roses" where crowds celebrated in the streets, children rode about astride military vehicles on patrol, and where only the rapid intervention of the MFA and the PCP prevented the lampposts of Lisbon from being decorated with the hated scum of the PIDE. The first week of euphoria culminated in the May Day celebrations, the largest in Europe, which were joined by thousands of revolutionaries returned from exile and from across the border in Spain. All but the most compromised "ultras" of Salazarism emerged to proclaim their devotion to democracy and to expound upon their long-felt (if previously unvoiced) hatred for the fallen dictatorship, but few could surpass the costume change of General Antonio Spinola, veteran of the Spanish counter-revolution and the Portuguese volunteer brigades which fought in Hitler's armies on the Eastern front, and who now appeared before the world as the resolute champion of democracy and perhaps even of "socialist revolution". Somewhat in the same genre was the recasting of General Costa Gomes, Commander-in-Chief of the Portuguese forces in Africa, who three weeks earlier had publicly praised the head of the PIDE in Angola, and who throughout the duration of the crisis acquired the nickname of "The Cork" because of his inexplicable survival in power and his ability to ride the most extreme shifts of political tides intact. But in this orgy of praise for democracy, freedom, revolution and socialism from those who understood the uses of such rhetoric, the forces of the real confrontations of tomorrow were already aligning themselves. The newly legalized Communist and Socialist parties and press set up a chorus of acclamation for the Armed Forces Movement and for its alliance with the "People" that would not be disabused by a year's events. The working class, which had already engaged in an impressive wave of strikes in the last five years of Caetano's rule, ran off the last of the bureaucrats from the corporatist unions and launched a new strike wave in May and June which aimed at, and in many cases achieved, an immediate 100% wage increase.
Capitalists large and small, in the face of this offensive, responded with the appropriate price increases, and the Communist Party, at the behest of the MFA, immediately dropped its long-standing call for a minimum monthly wage of $240 a month for a $132 level more in keeping with the exigencies of "national reconstruction"
The May-June strike wave was the explosion of a working class denied legal forms of struggle for five decades, (and undergoing 25% inflation in the year preceding the coup), to make up long-denied wage gains. The lightning quality of the strikes, plus a certain tendency by the MFA to view them with a certain favor after just having begun moves to create a more modern system of labor arbitration, made possible some significant short-term wage increases. It also brought to the fore the personnel of certain enterprises--TAP, Lisnave, Siderurgia, Messa, Timex and C.T.T.--who were to figure prominently in the eighteen months to come.
The official working class parties, for their part, returned from exile in triumph and immediately took up key posts in the cabinet, with the PCP occupying, as mentioned above, the key Ministry of Labor. They would serve it well. Soares and Cunhal, heads of the PSP and PCP respectively, appeared in public together on numerous occasions, warning against "another Chile" precisely as they began to implement the policies which had led directly to the Chilean massacre. It is also important to note that in this period, the PSP was permitting itself a wild-eyed left-wing rhetoric in order to stand it in good stead with the working-class base it sorely needed to win over. In an atmosphere which allowed Antonio Spinola to talk of "socialism" and "revolution", a Mario Soares could only excel at demagogy and revolutionary phrase-mongering.
Thus in the very first weeks of the rule of the MFA, the working class received an object lesson in the balance of forces between itself, the official working class parties who ostensibly "represented" it in the halls of power, and the military. The PCP in particular, took a page from the speeches of Maurice Thorez and Jacques Duclos from the 1944-47 period, put forward the PCP as the "party of the resistance", did not hesitate to denounce strikers as fascists, and called on the working class to join in with other "progressive forces", up to and including Antonio Spinola, to "rebuild the nation". This demagogy, which once again had the virulent ring of a certain strident Popular Front rhetoric that everyone presumed happily buried some thirty years before, was an almost universal language of the early phase of the movement, one to which even the extreme-left groups fell victim. Where Karl Marx some 120 years earlier had lucidly remarked that "when I hear the word 'people' I ask myself what the bourgeoisie is trying to put over on the proletariat" the virtual totality of the left and extreme-left forces in Portugal drowned the working class in this morass of populist sentimentality. The first phase of the revolutionary process, then, from April 25 through September 28, 1974, was characterized by the first head-on collision between the emerging tidal wave of working-class strikes and activity, and the large edifice of mystification which the military, the official left and most of the extreme-left (the shadow of the official left) had prepared for it. The shouting had barely died down from the May Day celebration when the PCP began denouncing strikers for "sabotaging the people's (sic) alliance with the MFA"
It was in this period, then, beyond the smokescreens of revolutionary rhetoric and posturing from the strangest quarters, that everyone began to jockey for position. Within the working class, the Communist Party had a virtual open field in the initial months. As a party which on April 25 had numbered roughly 3,000, it nonetheless had won a deserved reputation over the years as the one organized force which had maintained itself throughout the underground period in the face of a merciless repression. Its Central Committee had spent much of its collective adult life in the prisons of the PIDE, and its clandestine organizations, in the working class suburbs of Lisbon and in the agricultural proletariat of the Alentejo region, gave it an immense advantage over particularly the Socialist Party, which was by comparison a party of lawyers founded only in 1973 and just returned from Parisian and Swedish exile.
6. The International Impasse of Stalinism
The unique conditions of existence of the PCP over decades had produced a party whose monolithism, whose fierce allegiance to the finest vintage of Stalinism and whose tenacity had undergone the buffetings of the postwar era in relative isolation from the forces which had produced Marchais or a Berlinguer. This peculiarity of development, combined with the fact that the virtual entirety of the extreme-left tendencies and individuals in Portugal in 1974 had passed through the puberty rites of the PCP, created a situation in which few individuals or groups were capable of seeing their way clear to an autonomous, revolutionary perspective outside its shadow. The Maoists, of course, achieved this only by the virulent inversion of reality which their entire non-analysis of the degeneration of the international bureaucratic monolith implied, and the primacy of the struggle against "social fascism" and "social imperialism" led them directly into open alliances with right-wing formations. But they, in addition to following the letter of the immediate needs of Beijing's foreign policy, only denounced the Stalinism of the PCP from another Stalinist viewooint. There is precisely nothing in the arsenal of epithets hurled by Maoism at the Soviet Union and the pro-Soviet Communist Parties, which was not an accurate description of the Chinese regime itself and the foreign policy atrocities (Indonesia '65, Ceylon '71, Bangladesh '71, Angola '75, to cite only the most glaring) it had committed over the previous decade. As for the historical rupture which the Maoists wish to hallucinate in the death of Stalin, after which the Soviet regime ostensibly broke with his revolutionary policies, there is little that the current Soviet or Chinese regimes have done in the post-1953 period which Stalin himself did not do over the three decades prior to 1953. To the extent that the fortunes of world working class movement were debated in the terms of the Sino-Soviet conflict, the working class itself was buried in a barrage of abuse in which the indispensable question of bureaucracv, and its origins in the Stalinist counter-revolution set in motion in 1924, is carefully passed over in silence or attributed merely to one pseudo-origin or another. It is the entire edifice of this ideology, in its pro-Soviet or pro-Chinese versions, which had to be jettisoned before the revolutionary movement could recapture its historical consciousness, and hence its future perspective. One of the first signs of the weakness of the Portuguese movement was precisely that it could tolerate the posing of the debate in these terms for as long as it did.
The analysis, most commonly proliferated by contemporary Trotskyism, that insisted on seeing the Communist parties in the advanced capitalist sector as merely "reformist" parties in the style of the old Social Democracies was nothing but a fantasy, and one which had already cost the lives of thousands of revolutionaries wearing the blindfold of Trotskyism in Vietnam, Greece, Czeckoslavakia and elsewhere. There was nothing whatsoever about these parties which keeps them wedded, as is the case of Social Democratic parties, to the existence of private capitalism. Their ideologies and their configuration were predicated on the existence of the bureaucratic stratum which rules the so-called socialist countries, and given the opportunity, the leading strata of these parties would have been perfectly capable of moving to create such a power for themselves.
The maintenance of the guise of "proletarian internationalism" by these parties historically meant nothing other than their subordination to the foreign policy interests of the Soviet ruling stratum, either as a submissive prop or as a militant lever in Soviet negotiations with the Western bourgeoisie. To counterpose the post-1934 Popular Front phase of the international Stalinist parties to the heroic, or vestigially heroic "class against class" demagogy of the so-called Third Period (1928-1934) and to see the turn to the Popular Front as the definitive passage of these organizations to reformism is to ignore the reality that both in that in both full-blown Third Period super-militancy or as docile reformism these political parties represented national fractions of bureaucrats maneuvering for a form of political power separate from and antagonistic to working-class rule. Without going into the details and ambiguities of the early (1919-24) years of the Comintern, we can say without hesitation that after 1924 at the latest, no foreign policy maneuver of either the ruling bureaucracy in the Soviet Union, or of its aspirant fellow-travellers in the potential ruling bureaucracies of the official "Comimmist" parties of the West, had ever coincided with anything except the interests of these strata, however the bureaucracy chose to drape itself in the rhetoric of the working class movement and socialist revolution. The notion of a genuine working-class revolution, whether in the pseudo-socialist bloc or in Western Europe, haunted the international policy of the respective national "Communist" parties like a spectre. In the volatile social atmospheres of Italy, France, Spain and Portugal in the l968-76 period, in particular, these parties have had ample occasion to prove their utility in heading off any independent activity by the working class.
It is clear, as it had been clear for fifty years, that these "Communist" parties could never come to power at the head of a genuine working-class revolution. Their very foundations, and conception of socialism as a bureaucratic rule over the working class, was a negation of the necessary content of such a revolution. The true communization of social relations and power, as briefly realized in the Russian soviets (1905, 1917-21) and in certain moments of the failed German revolution of the 1918-21 period, is simultaneously a negation of the bureaucratic vision which animated the CPs of Western Europe, the ruling strata of Eastern Europe and the rest of the so-called socialist bloc. More importantly, insofar as modern capitalism created the conditions for the merciless proliferation of bureacratism in every aspect of social life, the struggles of the working class to affirm itself as the social power necessarily run. up against bureaucratism within the working-class movement itself, as one of the first enemies to be laid to rest. The May, 1968 revolt in France, the "hot autumn" of 1969 in Italy, the often exemplary wildcat general strikes occurring in Spain in 1974-76, and finally the broad movement of the Portuguese working class in 1974-75 demonstrated again and again that whatever the official representation which the working class tolerates in periods of ebb and inactivity, the creation of class-wide, non-bureaucratic institutions of power is the first order of business which arises when a real struggle erupts. And, moreover, the official representatives of the working class (political parties, unions, or, in the case of Spain, the CP-dominated clandestine workers' commissions) reveal themselves as the first rampart of order against which the struggle has to defend itself. In May, 1968, in France, it was the Communist Party and its trade-union wing the CGT which alone, by the most systematic strike-breaking in history, was able to impose the pitiful Grenelle Accords on the working class and enforce, after a general strike of nearly six weeks, a resumption of production. In Italy, it was the PCI and the CGIL which had to break the backs of the FIAT strike committees. In strike after strike in Spain after 1968, but most notably after 1974, the most exemplary classwide actions, under the most difficult conditions of generalized repression, occurred with the creation of democratically elected strike coninittees and excellent organization, without and often against the clandestine CP and Socialist organizations. At best, these organizations were able to muster their forces only after the struggle, to claim credit for its victory or to lament its defeat (to which, often enough, their abstention or machinations contributed), to once again refurbish their image as the real representatives of working-class power in whatever milieus of governmental or industrial influence they were attempting to ingratiate themselves.
The historical significance of Portugal was multiple in that it revealed new variations in these relationships. These appeared first in the undeniable attempt of the PCP, through its monopoly of the trade union movement, its special relationship to the MFA (in which it could claim a certain real influence) and its systematic takeover of the channels of social power (civil service, mass media, police) to seize power between roughly March and August 1975. Secondly, and parallel but not in tandem to this unprecedented action by a Western European CP, there were constituted in the main industrial zones, and in certain agricultural regions such as the Alentejo, incipient organs of a potential working class power in which the CP was as often as not pushed aside or which it was forced to tolerate as some "new form of popular power", patiently awaiting the moment in which these formations could themselves be definitively contained or reduced to their proper "consultative" role. Finally, the CP was forced to publicly recognize this new balance of forces in the working class by concluding a united front, the first in history by a Stalinist party, with a number of extreme-left groups to defend the fallen Fifth Government on Aug.25, 1975. The Portuguese experience simultaneously showed both the potential of a Western European CP to move seriously for power, and the difficulties it encountered in so doing as the working class itself also moved seriously for power. For a brief but illuminating period, the Portuguese crisis appeared as a contest between the Communist Party, at times apparently congruent but in reality radically opposed to one another, to abolish private capitalism in that country.When, on Nov. 25, 1975, this struggle between the left and the extreme left for two different kinds of social power was revealed to be only a moment of a confrontation with the mounting forces of traditional counter-revolution, the CP and the pro-revolutionary currents once again revealed, in their respective responses to the threat of a right-wing coup, their divergent aims and methods. Whereas the historical experience of Portugal had allowed the PCP to maintain, as if in a forgotten time capsule, many of the markings of its decisive formation in the Stalinist era itself, the movement of modern history had brought the Western European CPs to a virtual impasse. These other, more "modern" currents, moreover, have not failed to surface within the PCP itself, particularly since November, 1975. In Italy, and later in France and in Spain, the Communist Parties were forced to confront the fact that the worldwide disintegration of the old bureaucratic monolith, combined with a new era of class struggle, meant that the Soviet model of socialism simply could not be marketed in the advanced capitalist sector. While these currents of opinion which have fractured the old bureaucratic mold have certain elements which situate them to the "right" of the old Stalinism, namely a virtual recapitulation of Social Democratic reformism, they in fact reflected a double movement within society and within the international working class movement itself: on one hand, the creation of a large "left Social Democratic" current, whether within Socialist or Communist Parties, in which anti-bureaucratic moments of critique mix inextricably with abjectly reformist and parliamentary illusions, attaching themselves to Social Democratic formations because of a certain room the latter permit for internal democracy which, as is well known, was harder to come by within the Stalinist parties; on the other hand, the creation, in every Western European country, of a vague "extreme left", both of"groupuscules" and a much larger current of unorganized sentiment which could nonetheless crystallize in a crisis, as happened in Portugal, to the left of the Communist Party. This double movement to the "right" and to the "left" of the traditional CPs reflected an irreversible historical process: the dissolution of the old ideological hegemony of Stalinism within the world movement, and most importantly, the drawing of actual lessons of the previous (1968-76) eight years of class struggle in Western Europe. Hence, when a Georges Marchais was forced to denounce the Soviet Union for the existence of forced labor camps, it was an entire era which had ended, and a new one which has opened, most notably an era in which the very rank-and-file of the Western European CPs could no longer swallow the grotesqueries of the bureaucratic pseudo-socialist bloc.
If various Trotskyist and other extreme-left currents in Portugal and elsewhere failed to grasp the dynamic of the PCP, the CIA, NATO and the frightened heads of state of Western Europe and the U.S. did not fail to do so. Particularly after March, 1975, with the nationalization of the Por'tuguese banking and insurance sector and the beginning of the massive flight abroad of elements of the financial, industrial and latifundista bourgeoisies, the utterances of Kissinger and Schlesinger (US Secretaries of State and Defense, respectively) on the subject of Portugal left no doubt that the U.S. would respond to an attempted CP takeover in Portugal with all means at its disposal, including a possible nuclear strike against the Soviet Union itself. This imperialist saber-rattling, which served the purpose of confusing working-class revolution in various countries with "CP takeovers", was not something indulged in lightly, but it did served to rechannel the boundaries of class warfare into the pseudo-categories of the Cold War era and preserve the reactionary equation of socialism and Stalinism.
The Western European CPs, for their part, experienced this loss of hegemony in the working class movement as an insoluble dilemma, one whose perameters were brought home by the Portuguese experience. The CPs, by the appeal of parliamentary "successes" tied to participation in capitalist austerity governments such as the one then seemingly in gestation in the Italian crisis, were pulled into a certain "de-Stalinization" of their rhetoric and their overt adaptation in ideology to what was already, for forty years with short exceptions, the established pattern in practice of constituting themselves as the "progressive" wing of a reforming capitalism. On the other hand, their working class base, in exchange for submitting to such a policy, demanded results in the short or medium term, and periodically (May 1968, Fall 1969) has gone into action in its own right to obtain them, coming up against the aspirations of the CPs and their unions to make them acceptable candidates for power. Hence the CPs of Western Europe labored under the fear of the great "debordement" (roughly, "outflanking") by the working class in motion, a fear confirmed again and again by real struggles through that period. Capable of re-establishing themselves as the "hegemonic" tendency in the class after the struggle has subsided (and usually ended in defeat) the CPs necessarily saw their credibility in the working class frayed by each successful "containment" of an explosion. The PCP realized through the summer and fall of 1975 that it was losing control of the Portuguese working class, and were that loss to become manifest, its credibility with the wing of the MFA whose sponsorship it enjoyed would plummet to zero. Thus, throughout the period of the Soares "Noske turn" in the PSP in the offensive against the Fifth (Vasco Goncalves) Government, the PCP had to keep a constant vigil on its left, where it had already lost effective control of the vast movement in the factories and in the rank-and-file of the armed forces, and simultaneously continue its role as a party of the government. This zig-zag policy was accentuated by the expulsion of the PCP from the important government posts in August, 1975, when it began a new phase as a minor government party and the ostensible leader of the opposition. It was at the juncture between the Fifth and Sixth Government, between Aug.25 and 28, that the PCP momentarily accepted the humiliation of turning to six extreme-left groups to constitute the FUR, or Revolutionary United Front, whose sole program consisted of a return to the fallen Fifth Government, despite occasional pretensions to more ambitious aims by the extreme-left groups. Nonetheless, when it was revealed that the PCP was in secret negotiations with the Sixth Government in a new corridor maneuver for ministerial influence, the extreme left expelled the PCP from the FUR.
The Western European CPs, and particularly those of France, Italy and Spain, could not escape this dilemma. To the extent that they participated only in the Italian variety of "historical compromise", they were condemned to unmask themselves before the working class as partners of capitalist austerity. To the extent that they eschewed such a role and attempted to seize power in the style of Cunhal and the PCP in the March-August 1975 period, they were obliged to conjure up forces in the working class itself which consistently revealed themselves inimical to their own bureaucratic vision of power.
There were important strategic lessons for revolutionaries to draw from this situation. Contrary to Trotskyist and other orthodoxy, it was madness for revolutionaries to relate to the Western European CPs as though they were merely "reformist" Social Democracies who could be "unmasked" before the working class by their refusals to "seize power". This in no way implies that revolutionaries should not offer such united fronts to CPs, and to denounce them before their rank-and-file memberships when such fronts are refused. Similarly, situations will inevitably arise in which, on the eve of a civil war situation, revolutionary currents and the Communist Parties might form military alliances. (This is not to be confused with the patchwork attempt of the Portuguese extreme left in the FUR to ally with the CP if the latter agreed to give up its ministerial portfolios.) The extreme significance of the Portuguese crisis was that it presented a pre-revolutionary situation in which the hegemony of the CP in the working class began to crack, and in which the CP was forced to take account of that fact by a recognition of the extreme-left groups which in prior months it had been denouncing as fascists and wreckers. But through all of this, it was an extremely grave error for revolutionaries to commit themselves to a policy of "exposing" the CP as merely reformist by calling upon it to do precisely what, in certain circumstances, it was perfectly capable of doing, i.e. take over the state apparatus. The failure to understand the dual nature of the CPs as both prone to Popular Front reformism and to bureaucratic power-plays when conditions permit, as direct rivals of the revolutionary left and the working class organized in soviet formations, could only have catastrophic results for revolutionaries. Had the CP succeeded in seizing such bureaucratic power for itself, its first target, as in numerous cases in the past, would be precisely the revolutionary left which embodies the consciousness it must root out at all costs, the consciousness of the distinction between separate political power for a stratum of bureaucrats and the direct power of the working class organized in its own institutions of classwide power and democracy, the soviets.
The revolutionary current must therefore negotiate this perilous course between its constitution as the left-cover of Stalinist bureaucratism and a sterile abstentionism in which the real clash between the official CPs and private capital is regarded as a mere spectacular antagonism between "two wings of the bourgeoisie", with the CP as the embryo of a "state capitalist bourgeoisie" with whom all alliances or appeals to the rank-and-file place one on the terrain of counter-revolution.
7. The Nature of the MFA and Its Factional Situation
Contrary to the beliefs of the international Communist parties and the vast bulk of extreme leftists in Portugal and abroad who saw a "progressive force" in at least certain factions of the MFA, the movement was in no way qualitatively distinct from a whole array of similar military formations spawned by the twentieth century. Peronism in Argentina, the Young Turk movement, the "Islamic Socialism" of the Ba'ath Parties or Boumedienne's Algeria, the Peruvian colonels' movement, or finally the military junta which seized power in Ethiopia in 1974, were without exception, whatever their secondary distinctions and whatever phraseology they used to present themselves, movements whose aim was the modernization of capitalism, usually relying heavily on statist modes of gestion and in fact presenting the social formation closest to an actual state capitalism. These regimes, which have never hesitated to carry out repression against their indigenous working class and peasantry, substitute themselves for weak or non-existent national bourgeoisies and can even, in certain limited fashion (such as Nasser during his more militant "anti-imperialist" phase) escape the direct control of the Western bloc. But they cannot escape the control of the world market, and it is all the force of the world market which they impose upon the labor power at their disposal. For revolutionaries to have any illusions about such formations is to offer the working class nothing other than the prospect of supporting "its" local capitalist state in the "anti-imperialist" struggle for "national reconstruction" or similar formulations.
Modernizing military elites in the under-developed or semi-developed sector are contemporary capitalism's response to the crisis of bourgeois perspective outlined in Trotsky's theories of permanent revolution and combined and uneven development. In the decadent phase of capitalism, and even before the system had globally entered the phase of decadence, it was and is impossible for any national capital not already at a certain stage of development to advance without putting itself in the tow of the advanced capitalist sector, or risking working class revolution in the process. But it is possible to modify this problem by the creation of a Bonapartist state apparatus which, in the name of a nationalist ideology liberally served up with "socialism" (i.e. nationalization) can maneuver on the world market and, through unashamed labor-intensive development of the economy, finance a certain technological advance. In global terms, given the potential for such development through the socialist revolution which such regimes inevitably combat at home and abroad, these formations are thoroughly reactionary, imposing upon their respective working populations the burden of economic backwardness defined within the isolated national context.
While perfectly understandable after forty-eight years of the most retrograde of fascisms, the enthusiasm of the Portuguese left and an important part of the international left for the MFA in the first months after the April 25 coup was almost boundless. It is true that the MFA distinguished itself, at least in certain factions, by a certain commitment to the "moderate" path to national reconstruction, and in the case of at least figures such as Melo Antunes, Vasco Goncalves and Carvalho understood the need to enlist the working class in this process, but the equation of such a paternalism with "socialism" was an ideological inversion of the first order. There is nothing socialist about a standing bourgeois army, whose dissolution and replacement by armed working class militias was the first task of every genuine socialist revolution of 20th century. While the PCP probably hoped to use its ties to the important Goncalves faction of the MFA to negotiate its way to power somewhat in the style by which the Cuban Communist Party eased itself into Castro's government, the tailing of the military by the virtual entirety of the extreme left throughout the crisis was a primary weakness of the existing political organizations on the scene, and ultimately of the movement as a whole. It was only in the final months of confrontation, leading up to the fiasco of Nov. 25, that a serious process of dissolution of the army as a whole began to occur, and that certain advanced strata of workers began to denounce the MFA en bloc as a capitalist formation. But even after Nov. 25, groups such as the PRP-BR, which in other domains had lucidly denounced the machinations of various political groups in the mass working class organizations, tailed after Gen. Carvalho and the military police, COPCON.
The MFA, which was never a homogeneous formation, underwent a serious transformation during the period April 1974-November 1975. It was composed of 130 officers in an army of 300,000 men and 10,000 officers. One decisive factor in the Portuguese situation that must always be kept in mind when attempting to generalize its lessons was that, in the 1961-74 period, virtually the entire male population of the country between the ages of 20-40 during the revolutionary crisis received military training and fought in the African wars. Thus, as the country approached a civil war situation in Fall 1975, one very serious consideration in the minds of the center and the right was the unusually high military capacities of the forces in the working class and from the agricultural proletariat of Alentejo who would constitute the bulk of the armed forces of the left and extreme left. This factor completely distinguished Portugal from a country such as Spain, either in 1936-39 or in the mid-1970's.
The MFA, which initially claimed to be above all political parties, began and remained, as elaborated above, a group of officers ranging from the Spinolists to the pro-CP faction of Vasco Goncalves, who were convinced of the necessity of liquidating Salazarism, ending the massive drain on the Portuguese economy constituted by the brush wars in Africa, and modernizing the metropolitan economy for entry into the Common Market sphere. Many of them felt this required some kind of "socialism", in every case a variant of state capitalism. They were unanimous in seeing the military as the main vehicle for this transformation, and all of them were knowledgeable about and impressed by the Peruvian experience. If the masses had never emerged in their own name on the historical arena, the Portuguese military would have inevitably guided the country in that direction. But they had not really reckoned with two decisive factors: the world economic crisis, which was not present for the early phase of the Peruvian development, and the rapidity with which the working class and the agricultural proletariat intervened, often unconsciously, but always in a way that forced the MFA further than it had planned to go.
The MFA was composed of four basic factions by the time of the culmination of the revolutionary process in November, 1975: the Azevedo-Fabiao right wing, or "classical right": roughly Christian Democratic, willing to tinker with parliamentary democracy if it could work in guiding the "modernization" process, desiring a definitive but careful break with Salazarism. This group, which was also distinguished by the absence of any serious leader, was the least effective of the four factions in the public arena. Its importance was mainly, as events came to a head, when all three center-left and left factions were on the verge of losing control of the situation in a swing of the pendulum to the right, one which could easily sweep aside the MFA as a whole and re-open the way for the mass of politically less adept but definitely proto-fascist and fascist military people who wanted a bloodbath in the style of Pinochet. It was the Azevedo faction which emerged on top on Nov. 25.
The second faction of the MFA was the Melo Antunes faction, associated with the so-called "Group of the Nine", whose manifesto in mid-summer 1975 became the rallying point for the counter-revolution attempting to reverse the inexorable move leftward in the military and the society as a whole. Melo Antunes himself was in no sense a figure of the right, but his current, and the solution it proposed (an unashamed technocratic "socialism" with mass participation in the Peruvian mode, i.e. mass participation in austerity) became pivotal because the center and the right seized onto it as the only real force, short of a new fascism, which could stop the left and the extreme left. If Melo Antunes, through the summer of 1975, appeared a likely candidate for a Noske-Scheidemann role in Portugal, this was a content his faction acquired due to the stop-gap role assigned it by others. Melo Antunes was a left Social Democrat, far and away the most theoretically formed and politically astute of the members of the MFA, and whose two most decisive political influences were the Rocard faction of the French PSU (technocratic state capitalism) and the Peruvian colonels (neo-corporatism). In the mid-1970's historical conjuncture, such currents seemed perfectly capable of merging into a streamlined kind of fascism, but Me1o Antunes distinguished himself markedly from such a perspective, and was decisive in preventing a bloodbath against the CP and the extreme left in November 1975.
The third faction of the MFA was the Vasco Goncalves faction, in power through the period from March to August 1975, and essentially associated with the PCP. It was this faction which the hegemonic Me1o Antunes faction took seriously through the crisis of summer and fall 1975. Vasco Goncalves was by formation an engineer, generally considered intellectually and strategically competent but not on the same level as Melo Antunes.
The fourth and final faction, which was considered within the MFA to be a phantom faction, arising very late with no real secondary leadership, was that of Gen. Otelo Sareivo de Carvalho, COPCON, and their allies in the extreme-left formations such as the PRP and the MES. Carvalho's faction, which contained no other officer of significance in the movement, was viewed by the forces of order through the crisis of summer and fall 1975 as a problem to be settled in a few hours of military confrontation, in contrast to the Vasco Goncalves faction. This analysis proved to be amply correct in the events of Nov.25 and thereafter, when the Carvaiho faction and the extreme left associated with him were immobilized in a matter of hours.
The factional situation inside the MFA was accelerated by each mass intervention into the social process going on in Portugal. When the "political truce" of the MFA was declared ended in March, 1975, the de facto situation was merely institutionalized: the Melo Antunes group, though having no formal ties to any party, became the main hope of the PSP, and the Vasco Gencalves group aligned itself with the PCP. It was only at this time that Gen. Carvalho, (a personally honest figure who nonetheless had only a shallow political formation and whose first political alignment, after April 1974, appeared to be the PPD) began to emerge, in tandem with certain extreme-left currents.
8. The Demise of Spinola
The strike wave of May-June 1974, while subsiding somewhat during the summer, confirmed the worst fears of the Spinolist faction of the MFA and of the more timid factions of the financial and industrial bourgeoisie about the ability of the MFA and the official left parties to adequately contain the working class. Already a certain mass ferment had forced the regime to recognize the immediate and unconditional independence of Guinea-Bissau and was threatening to do the same for the much richer Angola and Mozambique. The neo-colonial system envisioned in Spinola's Portugal and the Future had already, after less than three months of MFA rule, been consigned to the past.
This deteriorating situation, undoubtedly spurred by the militancy of the strikes by employees of the TAP (the CP having sat silently by in late August when the government had passed a strike law outlawing factory occupations and providing a 30-day cooling off period) and of Lisnave, led the capitalist factions around Spinola to launch the first of two desperate coup attempts on Sept.28. The immediate response of the working class and the agricultural proletariat,