portugal AGAINST THE AUSTERITY PLAN by A. UDRY November 25 opened a new stage in the revolutionary process" in Portugal, If marked the end of a phase dominated by a semi-conscious and semi-spontaneous rise of the mass movement, a phase that culminated in the autumn of 1975 with the conjunction of several factors: the deep crisis in an army in which an autonomous movement of soldiers was emerging, the broadening and strengthening of the workers commissions; the emergence of vast mobilizations for workers demands on the scale of entire branches of the economy. The victory won by the bourgeoisie on November 25 has not provoked a qualitative change in the relationship of social forces. Nevertheless, the military blow that was dealt and the consequent recovery of political initiative on the part of the government have brought to light the weaknesses and limits of the rise of a mass movement that had not encountered any imposing obstacles, because of the decrepitude of the state apparatus. The essential expressions of the limited ebb in the Portuguese revolution can be seen in the process of recomposition of the workers movement and in the modification of the terms under which future confrontations will occur, because of the process of recomposition of the state apparatus. But the dominant feature remains social and political instability, the decisive battles lie ahead of the Portuguese working class. In the wake of November 25 Immediately after the success of the Amadora commandos on November 25, the Council of the Revolution set reconstitution of the bodies of military leadership as its top priority, especially within the Council of the Revolution itself and within the General Staff. On December 12 the Council of the Revolution issued a decreelaw on the reorganization of the Portuguese Armed Forces, emphasizing the predominant role of the permanent officer corps and the elimination of political debate within the army. According to the decree, the discussions in general assemblies will be replaced by discipline, and the traditional structures of the army will no longer coexist with the ambivalent bodies the MFA had set up after October 1974 in an attempt to channelize the rise of the movement of soldiers. In addition, the decree heavily insisted on the illegality of all popular militias. The only "legal armed forces" are the Portuguese Armed Forces and the "militarized forces, " which means the GNR and the PSP, the police bodies. Although the officer corps is not completely homageneous, although disagreements still exist and have even intensified between the Melo Antuneses and the representatives of the traditional hierarchy, there is no doubt that the cohesion of the career officer corps is now strong. Firm defenders of Spínola are coming back into active service and taking front-rank positions, while supporters of the MFA document of June 1975 are being purged. For example, Lieutenant Colonels Almeida Bruno and Ricardo Durdo and Majors Monge, Nuno Bivar, and Firmino Miguel, who Spínola relied on during the attempted "constitutional coup" launched by Palma Carlos in July 1974, have returned to their posts, In this sphere, the pace at which the previous trend is being turned around is rapid and alarming even to the members of Melo Antunes's "group of nine. " To such an extent that Vasco Lourenço, commander of the Lisbon military region, gave a speech to the Amadora commandos in which he felt compelled to tell them: "Other forces will now in turn try to draw you into their service." (A Capital, January 9, 1976.) It is true that immediately after November 25 the number of commandos was sharply increased, from 400 to 1,500 men. This counterrevolutionary striking force is certainly not very strong, but it is playing an important role in strengthening the most reactionary positions in this phase of transition toward a deeper reorganization of the Portuguese Armed Forces. For the moment, the Pinheiro de Azevedo government is relying mainly on the GNR and the PSP, which have intervened against both demors trations and workers struggles. The government does not want to take the risk of having the army intervene against the workers, which could induce the soldiers to refuse to carry out orders and might result in new rifts in the hierarchal system, which would be fostered by the reappearance of activity among the soldiers themselves. On January 12 the Council of the Revolution discussed a new set of disciplinary regulations for the army. The major concern of the General Staff is to prevent a new resurgence of the autonomous organs of the soldiers. In this sense, new mobilizations of soldiers will once again have to be initiated on the basis of struggles against militarist discipline and for the defense of elementary democratic rights, while assimilating the experiences of the past, experiences that are not only the property of a section of the soldiers, but have also influenced the young workers now entering the ranks of the army. Concurrent with the offensive on the military field, the government has proceeded to a vast reshuffle of the deck in the realm of the written and spoken press. Diario de
PORTUGAL Noticias and O Seculo - Lisbon morning dailies within which the Communist party exercised preponderant influence and used in its sectarian operations - have been bequeathed to the Socialist party and the PPD respectively. (PPD: Partido Popular Democrático — Popular Democratic party, the largest bourgeois party.) Repüblica and O Setabalense, the latter a newspaper in Setübal that had been taken over by the workers, have been muzzled. Radio Renascença has once again become the "Portuguese Catholic Broadcaster"; Radio Clube Português has been "temporarily" fused with Emisora Nacional in order to assure regular publication of official communiqués and long "educational" speeches by ministers and secretaries of state. Thus, the press and the radio, which had been expanding the audience of partial struggles and popularizing the positions of the far left, now express the government positions. In the North, Jornal de Noticias, the newspaper controlled by the Social Democracy, is an exception in the spectrum of the press through which reaction is now speaking out loud. What is now being revealed is the price all the workers must pay for the refusal of the reformist and centrist organizations to forcefully defend the principles of workers democracy in the press, the ability of all currents of the workers movement to express themselves in the newspapers, the freedom of political parties of the working class to command their own press organs, and the ability of the workers commissions to make their points of view known and to oppose articles without having to resort to censorship. The failure to apply such an orientation could only make it easier for the government to gain control of the press and the radio. In the current phase of social offensive by the employers and the government, there is an opportunity for the worker commissions in the press organs to place a struggle for workers control of the written and spoken press on the agenda, a workers control resting on the principles of workers democracy. Reorganization in the two camps In the Portuguese Armed Forces, where the right commands qualitatively greater forces, it is asserting itself more arrogantly. The CDS (Centro Democrático Social - Democratic Social Center) is trying to come forward as the bourgeois opposition party against a PPD that, while clearly moving to the right, appears as tied to all the twists and furns of the various governments. The CDS is trying to gain a social base by relying on and making use of the movement of small and middle-sized landowners; the far-right organizations are making similar efforts. After the November 25 rally in Rio Maior, on January 11 several dozen thousand landowners met in Brago (about thirty miles north of Porto) to launch violent attacks on the decree-law on expropriation and more generally on the agrarian reform. Lopes Cardoso, the Socialist minister of agriculture, was the major target of the harangues of the reactionary leaders. Thus, he was accused of "directing the policy of his ministry, consciously or not, toward communism or a socialism with a pluralist facade, the objective in any case being the collectivization of the land. " (Jornal Novo, Janu10 ary 12, 1976.) On this field also, the SP can measure how reaction is in position to relatively quickly take advantage of the opening it was offered on November 25. The statements of the speakers in Braga who said that the agrarian reform law should be rediscussed by the parties and peasants and promulgated only by the legislative assembly points to one of the overall options now available to the bourgeoisie: rely on a rather prolonged ebb in the mass movement and an electoral victory of the bourgeois parties in April to reestablish a strong regime, a regime commanding an army whose operational units would be worthy of confidence. Obviously, this project does not prevent reaction from also launching intimidation operations in the North -bombings of and physical attacks on the militants and headquarters of the workers parties. To develop a coherent program offering concrete responses to the needs of the smallholding peasantry is thus one of the important tasks of the revolutionaries today. To break down, or at least chip away of, the social bloc that has been constituted by reaction is a necessary condition for making sure that the workers will be victorious in a test of strength with the bourgeoisle. A profound recomposition is going on in the proletarian camp, a recomposition that will determine the pace and scope of the response to the bourgeoisie's attempt to extend its low-cost military and political victory of Noverber 25 to the social sphere. This recomposition is occurring under the shock effects inflicted by the counterblow dealt by the hardcore nucleus of the Council of the Revolution and under the impact of the bourgeois economic offensive. But its dynamic has to be linked once again to a prior evolution of the organs of "popular power. A qualitative difference is emerging between the workers commissions and the moradores (tenants) commissions, the latter of which are tending to shrivel up and even disappear. The workers commissions emerged in the factories in opposition to the reformist apparatuses, even though these apparatuses tried to coopt them. The commissions proved capable not only of unifying the workers and overcoming the divisions introduced by the corporatist trade-union system of the Salazarist regime, but also of offering immediate and partial solutions to the problems facing the workers. The commissions were the major instruments for organizing factory occupations against layoffs, for taking measures of workers control against bourgeois sabotage, and, initially, for engaging in struggles around wages and hours. In face of the deepening of the economic crisis, the commissions, by forming coordinating bodies on a branch or interbranch basis, offered an adequate organizational framework for implementing some of the workers demands. The moradores commissions, on the other hand, drew their spirit from housing occupations. When they were confronted by the deepening of the social crisis and the objective limits of this sort of solution to the structural
problem of housing, it suddenly became impossible to resolve certain questions (supplies, transport, housing) without moving to a qualitatively higher level of centralization. Because of the objective dispersion and heavily uneven development of the moradores commissions, because of the lack of a revolutionary force strong enough to stimulate such a movement of centralization, and because of the sectorian use made of these commissions by the centrist and reformist organizations, this type of transformation could not occur. The limits of the spontaneous movement of the masses came to the fore earlier and more sharply in the moradores commissions than in the workers commissions. This may be explained by the very context in which the two sorb of commissions arose and by the varying functions they fulfilled. Hence, it is not surprising that the moradores commissions should be the first to be hit when a certain ebb in the mass movement set in. As for the workers commissions, most of them still exist, although in some factories in the North they are merely marking fime. The reformist project of subjecting the workers commissions to a trade-union reconversion is gaining increasing weight. But if the commissions play a concrete role in the organization of the workers response to the policy of the regime, revolutionaries will be able to defend the autonomy of the commissions and stimulate their expansion once again. In addition to this accentuated differentiation between the workers commissions and the moradores commissions, the role of the trade-union organizations that were formed parallel to the organizations of the worker themselves is logically increasing during the current defensive phase. There are three combined aspects to the development of the trade-union movement: the unionization of sectors that were not unionized during the Caetano regime (public services, teachers); the broadening of unionization by profession; and the emergence of unions organized by branch and factory (postal system, chemicals, metallurgy, civilian construction). The reformists hold a grip over the majority of the unionized workers, and this grip has been strengthened since November 25. The government's economic attack (wage freeze at a time when prices are rising fast, suspension of contracts until February 29, 1976, for 759,000 workers, 250,000 of them in construction and 250,000 in metallurgy) is thus aimed in this sphere, where the workers response is strongly dependent on the policy of the reformist leaderships. Now, the SP leadership is supporting the measures of the government, within which it holds preponderant positions. This orientation will not be able to be applied without provoking increased tensions within the ranks of the SP, especially since the fact that various unions controlled by members of the SP are in the Intersindical (the trade-union federation, dominated by the CP) acutely poses the question of government policy and the response of the workers. In various SP branches in the Lisbon area (Moscavide, Amadora) and in the trade unions, an emerging opposition to the policy of the Social Democratic leadership is being expressed. As for the CP, while taking its distance from the positions taken by the regime, it is not pointing to any concrete way of routing this attack on the gains of the workers. The CP is again taking up the theme of the "broad antifascist front"; at the same time it is launching attacks on the far left, as it did after the murder of four militants by the GNR during the demonstration in front of Custoias prison. The CP refused to engage in any serious mobilization against this first criminal attack by the old Salazarist police. The demonstration of Saturday, January 17, convoked in May 1 Stadium by the trade unions of the Lisbon region, generally controlled by the CP, reflected the situation very well. More than 40,000 workers mobilized. For two hours the trade-union leaders bombarded them with long speeches without ever saying how to respond to the provocative measures of the government. The workers began walking out in the middle of the speeches. At the end, about 10,000 workers voted for a motion calling for repeal of the suspension of the contracts. While this demonstration did not represent an extremely broad mobilization of the workers of the capital, it nonetheless indicated the significant combativity potential that exists in the ranks of the workers and is being expressed increasingly clearly in certain sectors, such as construction. But after the period of virtually uninterrupted rise of the mass movement, the lack of any leadership is powerfully coming to the fore in face of the workers' need to respond to the austerity plan. In 120 minutes the trade-union leaders never said whether or not it was necessary to launch a strike movement to make the government back down. Now, the relationship of forces and the experiences and instruments commanded by the working class offer the possibility of a determined response to the brutal attack of the sixth government. The priority task of revolutionaries is to put forward unifying slogans that must serve to create, in struggle, the broadest possible united front against economic and political reaction. In this sense, the demonstration of the UDP (União Democrática Popular - Popular Democratic Union, Maoist) of January 16, organized under the cover of the organs of popular will, " represented a criminal policy of division. Its failure — it drew only 3,000 demonstrators - mainly reflects the desire for unity that is growing among the ranks of the workers, a desire which condemns such operations. Any prolongation in the delay in the workers response, even if only in a single important sector, such as construction, threatens to strengthen the grip of the reformists, to empty the autonomous organs of their content, and to deepen the uneven development among the proletariat of the Lisbon industrial belt, the agricultural workers of the Alentejo, and the rest of the working class. The bourgeoisie may try to take another step forward in its offensive by taking advantage of the elections. In coming weeks, the relationship of forces between the two basic classes will be tested. January 17, 1976
11
after the fall of the government
A NEW