In the present period, all our forces must be turned toward open mass work in order to carry out the tasks described above. The main direction of our work today is toward the mass organs of the working class. It is here that we must implant ourselves; in implanting ourselves here we will advance in the construction of the revolutionary worken party. Make the workers commissions the backbone of dual power In the present conjuncture all our mass work must respond to the necessity of stimulating and strengthening a response to the attempt of the government and the employers fo extend the success they achieved on November 25 to the social sphere. Our work in the workers commissions and the trade unions in the present phase must be oriented primarily in this direction. To assure the maintenance and revitalization of the workers commissions so that they fully and as rapidly as possible again assume their function as embryonic organs of dual power in the context of a new workers upsurge, if is necessary that the workers commissions take on concrete functions in the daily struggle to defend the conquests of the workers. To the extent that they accomplish this function, they will be able to assert their role as the backbone of the emergence of a situation of dual power. Thus, today we must carry out mass work aimed at developing the response to the austerity plan, lending the workers commissions a decisive role in this counterattack. This is the basis of the link between our trode-union work and our activity in the autonomous organs. In this perspective, the establishment of a situation of dual power and even the strengthening, extension, and independence of the autonomous organs of the workers vis-à-vis the bourgeois state apparatus requires that priority be placed on the struggle for the development, generalization, and expansion of the workers commissions. The strengthening of the workers commissions means the effective strengthening of the independent organization of the class, the development of workers control, the raising of the consciousness of the proletariat; this implies the development of conditions for proletarian hegemony in the local coordinating bodies of the workers commissions, moradores commissions, etc., in all the organs that permit the alliance of the proletariat with intermediary layers of the population and that prefigure soviets. The strengthening of workers control through workers commissions enables the workers to broach the economic. problems with the perspective of their being resolved by the working class itself through the coordination of 14
OUR MASS WORK the workers commissions of the local branch level and through the coordination of the workers commissions with the moradores commissions. Thus, we can say that the strategic objective of our intervention in the factories is the stimulation, centralization, and extension of the workers commissions and the combination of this work with intervention in the trade unions. Stimulate, extend, and centralize the workers commissions Because of the grave crisis of Portuguese capitalism, the very development of struggles for their demands on he part of the workers pove vies to the merun -commissions that most often went beyond the tasks of mere committees to lead given struggles and took on tasks of permanent workers control. The development of the workers commissions was a factor of fundamental importance for the Portuguese revolution. These commissions paved the way for overcoming the division introduced by the craft unions and for endowing the workers with effective instruments for their struggle. Our intervention must aim at pushing forward the workers commissions as the organized product of mass strug gles in the factories, with the following essential functions:
- to exercise workers control in the enterprises (prices, raw materials, layoffs), to combat sabotage, to plan the economy;
- to organize self-defense, to struggle against capitalist reaction; to fight against the isolation of exemplary struggles and to fight for their generalization to ever broader sectors of workers;
- to lead the struggle for better working conditions, to struggle against restrictions on the democratic rights of the workers. It is nonetheless necessary not to push the workers commissions forward in a vacuum, without the workers' understanding what they are and what their purpose is, because in that event the workers commissions wind up as forms for administering and controlling the workers. This is especially true in the North and Center of the country, where the role and importance of the workers commissions have been less understood. In the cose of the workers commissions in which we have some influence, all opportunities must be seized to pose the problem of sectoral and intersectoral coordination, especially in the sectors in crisis, where the demand for credits for the reconversion of raw materials, for example, enables the workers to more easily understand the necessity of coordinating the workers commissions with other commissions of the same branch or of other sectors. It is here that the proposals for congresses of the workers commissions in industrial sectors or in complementary sectors takes on particular importance; we must take advantage of all opportunities to propel them forward. But such a centralization must be able to be based on all the already existing experiences and to struggle for their fusion, which is the only way to broaden the mass base of the workers commissions and to guarantee proletarian democracy within them. It is in this direction that we must orient the Provisional Secretariat of Workers Commissions of the Lisbon Industrial Belt (SPCTCIL - Secretariado Provisório das Comissões de Trabalhadores da Cintura Industrial de Lisboa), demanding that this body hold local and sectoral congresses to begin preparation of a National Congress of Workers Commissions. Such proposals are intimately linked to the struggle for the formation of a tendency in the SPCTCIL, which must be the prime objective of our intervention, given the Fundamental weight of the layers of workers led by the SPCCIL. At the same time, in order to broaden the mass base of the workers commissions, it is necessary to struggle not only for the broadest democracy in the election and functioning of the commissions, for the right of the various currents of the workers movement to express themselves within the commissions, but also for the presentation by the workers commissions of clear projects to defend the interests of the workers and of overall solutions to the crisis of the system. Concurrently, the formation of a secretariat of the workers commissions of other basic industrial regions would be of major imporfance in preparing a National Congress of Workers Commissions.
The present tactic of the CP is to demobilize the class and paralyze the bodies that it leads, doing this through its policy of government compromise, its propaganda around the imminence of the fascist danger in order to justify its alliances, and its manipula ion of the coordinating bodies that already exist, using them as instruments for pressuring and collaborating with bourgeois institutions. Against this, on the one hand we must stress the importance of the unity in action of revolutionaries in order to increase their weight in launching mass actions for demands and in the coordinating bodles, and, concretely, in order to strengthen their initiatives toward creating genuinely representative regional secretariats; on the other hand we must insist on the necessity for the independence and broadest democracy within the autonomous organs, consolidating the united class front within them and adopting the most appropriate forms of representativity (revocability, control by plenary sessions, election of delegates to the workers commissions from each sector or workshop so th that the commissions will apply the program decided on by the majority). Avoid the isolation of the workers commissions; trade-union work in the factories It is on the basis of understanding the priority of intervention in the factories and the workers commissions that we must measure our trade-union intervention at the present time. Given the lack of centralization of the workers commissions and the fact that there are many factories in which they do not exist, and given the lack of a consolidated trade-union bureaucracy, many trade-union commissions may be able to be used: first, as instruments of the workers commissions in the more backward factories; second, to enable the vanguard workers commissions in this transition phase of the prerevolutionary situation in Portugal to make their weight felt throughout the entire working class, deepening struggles for workers demands and participating in the debates going on in the unions. Third, in the backward sectors, the emergence of factory trade-union commissions through the development of trade-union struggles con serve as a springboard for the emergence of workers commissions with a mass base. Some comrades frequently complain that if is difficult to distinguish between workers commissions and trade-union commissions. This mixture of functions during the present period - during which the trade unions, even those led by the reformists, are most often unable to restrict themselves to mere economic demands and are compelled by the deep crisis of Portuguese capitalism to put forward overall proposals - must be ufilized:
1. To develop, on the national level, the general problems of workers control and to introduce this same discussion among the more backward layers of the proletariat;