Portugal. Its electoral manifesto has just been published; a future issue of INPRECOR will publish extracts of it. The accord below appeared in the March 10 issue of the LCI's weekly, Luta Proletária. 8
LCI/PRT ACCORD The list of candidates presented by the LCI, sympathizing organization of the Fourth International, for the legislative elections of April 25, 1976, will include codidates of the PRT. These legislative elections are of particular importance. The pact defines the manner in which the bourgeoisie is seeking to impose consolidation of its state apparatus and its attack on the conquests of the workers (with the complicity of the reformist leaderships of the Communist and Socialist parties), selecting and then achieving the election of an all powerful president of the republic based on a loyal government and on collaboration with the Legislative Assembly. In the context of the offensive launched by the bourgeoisie, the pact is a central feature which revolufionaries will denounce and combat with all their strength. Conscious of their responsibilities to the workers at a time when the bourgeoisie, its parties, and its civilian and military institutions are preparing an offensive against the working masses;
- animated by the very will to uphold a real alternative worthy of the aspirations expressed by the toilers of the cities and the countryside in the innumerable and tough battles they have waged agains! capital and its state, especially during the past two years;
- convinced, together with an ever growing number of workers, that such an alternative cannot be provided by the leaderships of the SP and the CP (leaderships capable of the worst compromises with the civilian and military institutions of the bourgeoisie, which renounce the defense of the needs and interests of the workers, as they did in the pact between the Council of the Revolution and the parties); The LCI and the PRT will jointly organize an electoral campaign; they call upon the workers to support the common revolutionary candidacy represented by the LCI list, the principal points of whose platform are as follows: I. AGAINST THE OFFENSIVE OF THE EMPLOYERS AND THE GOVERNMENTI FOR THE ORGANIZATION OF THE WORKERS' RESPONSE! The government and the Council of the Revolution, hand in hand with the employers, are affocking the rights and conquests of the workers. The buying power of the workers and their standard of living are being challenged by the galloping price increases,
while at the same time the attempts of the bourgeois state to interfere in t- organization of the workers movement are mounting ceaselessly. The goins that have been extracted from the employers and large landowners by the strength of the popular mobilization, gains such as workers control, the nationalizations, and the Agrarian Reform, are in danger. The government and the Council of the Revolution are sending the GNR and the PSP (the two major police apparatuses) to open fire on the workers and their struggles, while at the same time they are protecting the saboteur employers. They are repressing the rights and organizations of the soldiers, while the leaders of the September 28, 1974, and March 11, 1975, attempted coups are regaining their posts in the officer corps. Antifascist militants and soldiers are being held in prison while the hangmen of the PIDE (the Salazarist secret police) and the main leaders of the Salazar-Caetano regime are being released. Against this planned and concerted offensive of the bourgeoisie in their campaign, the revolutionary condidates will defend the necessity for an Emergency Plan of Struggle, that is, a united platform embodying the response of the workers and their political and mass organizations (trade unions, workers commissions, collective production units, etc.). II. FOR THE UNITY OF THE WORKING CLASS! FOR PROLETARIAN DEMOCRACY! In order to impose its austerity plan today and to try to attack the conquests and struggles of the working masses even more profoundly tomorrow, the bourgeoisie always comes to agreement, regardless of its apparent internal differences. The workers and their organizations must unite against the bourgeoisie, regardless of their differences and regardless of the parties they support. Up to now, regardless of the demagogy they indulge in, the leaderships of the SP and the CP have done everything possible to sabotage this indispensable unityHence, the leadership of both the Communist party and the Socialist party have always lent priority to collaboration with the bourgeoisie, the MFA (Armed Forces Movement), and the bourgeois institutions in general; revealing examples of this are provided by their common participation in the various provisional governments. The leadership of the CP, while chattering about the necessity of democracy and the unity of the workers, has used and is using the most shameful bureaucratic methods to assure its control over the workers movement, the workers organizations, and the Intersindical (the trade-union federation); the leadership of the SP, which cedes nothing to the CP in demagogic defense of unity and democracy, has sanctioned and still sanctions an openly antiworker and counterrevolutionary policy within the sixth provisional government.
But significant sectors of workers are now struggling in their work places for the unity of their class. This is shown by the positions that have been taken by various unions, whether led by SP militants, CP milifants, or militants of other political currents. This unity, this Workers United Front, is thus both possible and necessary, but it requires absolute respect for the right of expression and organization of all tendencies in the workers movement, both inside and outside the workers organizations. It is for this reason that the revolutionary candidates will be intransigent defenders of workers unity and proletarian democracy. And it is thus that today, in order to aid in organizing the workers' response to the bourgeois offensive, the revolutionary candidates will call for the convocation of a Democratic Congress of all trade unions in which all proposals of struggle and differences of opinion can be freely expressed and which will approve an Emergency Plan of Workers Struggle and organize the mobilization of the trade unions and workers commissions in defense and application of that plan. This is the first step that must be taken in the genuine construction of a United Central Trade-Union Federation of the Workers, an Intersindical in which the right to form tendencies will be recognized. III. FOR A GOVERNMENT THAT DEFENDS THE INTERESTS OF THE WORKERS! The Portuguese workers already have a long and sufFicient experience with goverments of class collaboration (with bourgeois parties and the MEA), govemments within which the workers parties, utilizing the confidence still extended to them by the majority of the workers, do nothing but safeguard the essential interests of the bourgeoisie. In defending and extending their conquests, the Portuguese workers, peasants, and toilers can hope for nothing from collaboration with generals and bourgeois politicians. They need a government that, basing itself on and responsible to the democratic and national centralization of the trade-unions and bodTes of struggle of the workers (the workers commissions), applies a program that responds to their aspirations and vital needs and provides the means with which to break the power of capital. This is the meaning of the struggle for a workers and peasants government, which is what the revolutionary candidates will defend in the electoral campaign. Within this perspective, they will do all they can to denounce the policy of capitulation followed by the leaderships of the majority parties of the working class, which have saved the bourgeoisie from defeat in the most difficult moments.
9
PORTUGAL Before all the workers, and especially those of the SP and the CP, they will denounce the signing by the ir leaderships of the pact between the Council of the Revolution and the parties, which is nothing but a weapon for the construction of a state entirely oriented toward defense of the interests of capital and toward silencing the workers, their struggles, and their organizations. They will demand that the leaderships of the CP and the SP, as the majority organizations of the workers movement, break with the bourgeoisie, reject the institutions of the bourgeoisie, especially the Council of the Revolution, repudiate the pact, and assume their responsibilities in the constitution of a government without any civilian or military representatives of the bourgeoisie, a government that applies a program of anticapitalist struggle defined by the mass organizations of the workers (trade unions, workers commissions, collective production units, collective organizations in the countryside, etc.), a government that, in the present phase of the class struggle, would be directly responsible to a Democratic Congress of all the trade unions, the convocation of which must serve as an important step toward the later realization of a National Congress of workers commissions. IV. FOR SOCIALISM! FOR WORKERS' POWER! The Portuguese workers have placed the socialist revolution on the agenda in capitalist Europe in the present period. In their struggles and mobilizations, in the combativity they have demonstrated over nearly two years, and, above all, in the forms of independent organization they have created for themselves in the course of their struggles against capital, the Portuguese working class and laboring masses have initiated a new cycle of workers struggles in Europe and have clearly pointed to the road to follow to take power: To create in each factory, in each work place, organs of proletarian democracy - the workers commissions - to organize the struggle of the exploited masses against the employers and their state. It is these bodies, democratically elected in each factory, that can represent and assert the will of the workers to apply workers control, to struggle against the sabotage and arbitrary acts of the employers in the factories. And it will be then, on the basis of these bodies, of their reinforcement, generalization, and centralization, that the workers will be able to construct their future power, in complete opposition to the power of the bourgeoisie and its state. The workers need to centralize their own will, just as the bourgeoisie has centralized its will in its state. For this reason, the revolutionary candidates will defend the position that only democratic organization in the factories - in the workers commissions - and their coordination in a National Congress that cen10 tralizes workers control and initiates the planning of the economy in the service of the toilers can provide a socialist response to the present crisis. This is the meaning of the struggle for workers power, for socialism, a power that has nothing to do with the bureaucratized workers states like the USSR, China, and Albania. It will be the workers who will exercise their own power. And this power will be able to exist only if the exploited and oppressed masses of the cities and the countryside, after destroying the regime of the bourgeoisie that exploits and oppresses them, take leadership of the economy, political life, and all social life into their own hands. This is the task of the workers councils, on which the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat rest. V. BUILD THE REVOLUTIONARY PARTY| BUILD THE PORTUGUESE SECTION OF THE FOURTH INTERNATIONAL! The central task facing revolutionaries in Portugal continues to be that of building a proletarian leadership of the mass struggle, a revolutionary party. Consistently betrayed by the Stalinist leadership of the Communist party and the Social Democratic leadership of the Socialist party, which prefer to defend their posts in the ministries instead of the interests of the workers, the Portuguese working class has already demonstrated and will now continue to demonstrate that its struggle will not be waged through compromises and collaboration with the bourgeoisie, its parties, and its institutions. The real leaders of the workers, those who in the future will lead the toiling masses in the seizure of power, will be forged and educated in the factory struggles, in the workers strikes and mobilizations. Without the construction of a revolutionary party that organizes the most conscious workers, those capable of leading the revolutionary struggle of the workers, peasants, and soldiers, no victorious socialist revolution is possible. This is shown by the experience of dozens and dozens of years of struggle of the working class throughout the world. The principal objective of all Portuguese revolutionaries is to develop all forces to accomplish this task. The unification of revolutionary Marxist forces is a decisive step in this direction. The united campaign in the legislative elections organized by the LCI and the PRT constitutes a procfical demonstration of the desire of the two organizations to commit themselves to a process of unification for the construction of the Portuguese section of the Fourth International in forms that will later be made public. March 8, 1976
LEBANON The two articles we are publishing below were written before the latest outbreak of fighting in the Lebanese civil war. The first, an overall balance-sheet of the war, concludes by noting that the war is not over, that various sources of conflict remain. Two of these - the situation within the Palestinian Resistance and the feeling of frustration among the Lebanese left - are at the root of the current round of fighting, the most severe yet. As of early March, when the intervention of the Syrian-based Palestine Liberation Army (PLA) brought a temporary end to the fighting, the government Faced a series of crises, First, there was the army rebellion led by Ahmed el-Khatib, the officer who "deserted" and founded the Army of Arab Lebanon, to which nearly 70 percent of the army rank and file has since rallied. The regime was divided on how to respond to the rebellion. Muslim leader Rashid Karameh, the president of the Council of Ministers, favored attempting to coopt the rebellion through offering a general amnesty. Camille Chamoun, the right-wing Christian minister of the interior, demanded that the rebels be brought to trial before military tribunals. Khatib's revolt had the tacit but effective support of Fateh, which saw it as a means of countering the stepped-up Syrian control of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). The problem of the army was compounded by the disastrous economic situation, the sharpening social tensions, and the political intransigence of the Maronite leadership, which continued to refuse to make political concessions. The overall result was a vacuum of leadership. The field was relatively clear for an attempted Bonapartist operation. That operation was set in motion on March 11 by General Azziz Ahdab, who mobilized the troops under his command in Beirut and demanded the resignation of Suleiman Franjieh, the Christian rightist president. By noon of the following day, March 12, Ahdab's pronunciamento appeared to have gained great chance of success. A majority of the political forces in the country had rallied to his support; the Syrian leadership indicated its tacit agreement with the move. Even the majority of the Maronite right did not dare to oppose Ahdab openly. But Ahdab insisted on carrying out his "coup" while remaining within the bounds of "legality." He made no attempt to oust Franjieh by force, but simply continued to demand that he resign; the parliament assembled and sixty-six deputies (a two-third majority) passed a resolution asking Franjieh to step down. Franjieh, however, refused, and Ahdab's temporizing gave the president time to prepare a response. The 2,000 troops under Franjieh's command mobilized to defend the presidential palace and Franjieh took to the airwaves to rally Christian public opinion in his support. This maneuver worked, Rejected by the Maronite right, Ahdab was compelled to move left, practically into the arms of Khatib, which further alienated the right. The Bonapartist operation thus collapsed and the stage was set for a new military confrontation: The Phalangists, the National Liberal party of Chamoun, and the pro-Franjieh elements of the army against the Palestinian Resistance, the Lebanese left, and the Khatib forces. Once this new polarization set in, the Syrian regime found itself in a delicate position and had to change its line, Initially, Damascus had favored the Ahdab operation as a means of ending the army rebellion. The central axis of Syrian policy is to restore "order" in Lebanon as a means of gaining recognifion from imperialism as the leading force in the region. The Syrian leaders thus feared any new confrontation. Moreover, they were concerned that a victory of the left in a new round of fighting would weaken their position. At the same time, because of the potential response of the Syrian masses themselves, the Syrion regime could not afford to move openly against the Lebanese left. Damascus was thus trapped. On March 16 the Syrian leaders announced their opposition to Ahdab's initiative and proposed a compromise: the Karameh cabinet would be "reactivated"; the constitution would be amended to provide for an early election of a new president (Franjieh's term will expire in September), thus providing a face-saving means of getting Franjieh to step down; amnesty would be granted to the army rebels; the parliament would adopt the constitutional document drawn up by Syria to govern postwar Lebanon. Simultaneously, the Syrians sent the PLA to the South to counter Kharib; Saiqa, the Syrian-dominated Palestinian organization, intervened to try to prevent anti-Franjieh demonstrations in Nabala, one of the major Muslim neighborhoods in Beirut.
11
"Confessionalism" is the most adequate English translation of the Arabic to'ifiye, which is derived from taa 'ifa, meaning sect, denomination, or confession. (Other possible renderings - sectarianism, denominationalism - can be too easily confused with different political phenomena.)
In the modern Lebanese context, confessionalism refers to the sharing out of posts in the state apparatus according to religious quotas. In 1943, when Lebanon became an independent state, a
"National Pact" was arrived at which institutionalized confessionalism. At first, the seats in parliament (55 at the time) were divided between Christians and Muslims (the two major religious subdivisions) on the basis of 30 seats for the Christians and 25 for the Muslims (a 6-to-
5 ratio). The proportion has been preserved ever since then, the number of seats in parliament always being a multiple of eleven. Later, however, the system was refined somewhat on the basis of the brood array of sects that exist, no one of which represents a majority of the population. The present parliament, with 99 seats, is divided as follows: 30 Maronites (Christians), 20 Sunni Muslims, 19 Shiite Muslims, 11 Greek Orthodox, 6 Greek Catholics, 6 Druzes, 4 Armenian Orthodox,
1 Protestant, and 1 "miscellaneous" seat, usually held by a Jew or by a member of yet another Christian sect. In addition, the president of the republic is always a Maronite; the president of the Council of Ministers is a Sunni; the president of the Chamber of Deputies is a Shiite, the vice-president of the Council is Greek Orthodox. The distribution of ministers is supposed to roughly follow the same confessional proportions as the parliament, and all posts in
By way of identification, it may be noted that the Maronites are a Catholic sect founded by a Syrthodox" Islam. The Shilites (from Shi'atu-Ali, "Faction of Ali") represent the largest minority grouping of the Muslim world, about 10 percent of all Muslims today (they are a majority in Iraq and
Iran). The roots of the sect go back to the first major civil war in the Muslim world, in the middle of the 600s (Ali was the fourth Caliph, or "successor, " of Muhammed.) The Druzes are a Muslim sect that arose in the early 1000s; they are concentrated exclusively in Lebanon.
It is hardly necessary to stress the reactionary and obscurantist character of the confessional syster, the clearest proof of which is provided by the constant institutional and confessional crises
LEBANON But things had gone too far. The Lebanese left, under the mounting hegemony of Kemal Jumblatt, rejected the Syrian plan. On March 20 the anti-reactionary camp opened a military offensive. On March 21 the Phalangists were ousted from the Holiday Inn, a twenty-six story building from which the Phalangists had been able to direct sniper and mortar fire into Muslim communities at will ever since the beginning of the civil war. The following day Franjien agreed to hold early presidential elections in parliament and accepted amnesty for the army rebels. But he still refused to step down. The anti-reactionary camp rejected the plan. On March 25 Franjieh was driven from the presidential palace and took refuge in Junieh, a Christian village north of Beirut. The current round of fighting has already led to significant changes in the political lineup of the country. In the reac fionary camp, the weight of the Pholangists has been strengthened, for Franjieh's withdrawal from the presidential palace has left Pierre Gemayel, commander of the Phalangists, as the central leader of the reactionary camp. In the anti-reactionary camp, Syria's prestige is declining rapidly. On March 22 the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine issued a communiqué demanding the expulsion of Saiga from the PLO. And in fact, Saiga is fast losing many of the Lebanese it had recruited dur-
1 Armenian Catholic, the state apparatus are alleged to do so as well. ian monk in the fifth century. Sunnis (from sunno, meaning and wars that have marked the history of the country. 12 ing the previous period. The 7, 000-man force commanded by Jumbiatt has entered the fighting on a large scale for the first time, increasing Jumblatt's already significant weight within the anti-reactionary camp. Jumblatt has stated that the present fighting will not end until the Phalangists are driven from the last of their strongholds in the hotel district. Meanwhile, the Syrians are continuing their mediation attempts. It is unlikely, however, that the current military gains of the anti-reactionary camp will result in anything other than a shift in the relationship of forces in preparation for later negotiations with the reoctionary camp, which will continue to occur under Syrian mediation. Neither Jumblatt nor the leaders of the PLO have any overall political or social perspective for basic change. In the absence of an alternative leadership, the current fighting will be only a prelude to the next round of negotiation and. some minor political reforms. But it remains true that the current Syrian role, along with the deepening division in the Palestinian Resistance, alters the relationship of forces to the detriment of the Syrian regime and provides increased opportunities for the revolutionary forces. March 27 - INPRECOR this meant that "trodition") are the adherents of "or-
THE CIVIL WAR IN LEBANON by S. JABER Ten months of clashes; five months of virtually uninterrupted civil war; nearly 13,000 dead (one inhabitant of every 200); several dozen thousand wounded; property damages estimated at 510, 000 million, that is, about twice the yearly national Income of the country, tens of thousands homeless; thousands of families deprived of all their property and resources; one-fourth of the population refugees outside the country. Those are some of the results of the civil war that has recently ended in Lebanon, undoubtedly one of the most atrocious wars of modern history. The violence of the Lebanese conflict, the irrational explosion of instincts of destruction and vengeance, the intensity of which no one hod suspected, the exchanges of collective massacres, the summary executions, sometimes accompanied by indescribable atroc¡ties costing the lives of human beings whose only "crime" in most cases was to have an identity card bearing a confessional designation different from that of the killers - all these facts show the depths human barbarism can reach in a capitalist society that is nevertheless one of the most "civilized" of the third world. But beyond such considerations, a question is posed: What was the reason for this outbreak; or rather, what was the major reason emerging from the tangle of contradiction and confusion presented by the Lebanese civil war, which baffled so many observers? On the most obvious and superficial level, the Lebanese civil war was a "war of religion," a confessional war. In any event, that is the favorite interpretation of the Zionist and pro-Zionist press, which saw in the events in Lebanon both a confirmation of the need for a Jewish state and the refutation of the possibility of peaceful coexistence among religious communities. And it is true, we may note in passing, that the references of Yassir Arafat, central leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), to the "Lebanese model" have been rendered absurd by the civil war. But if the civil war proved the inanity of this model, it also showed, contrary to Zionist allegations, that confessional wars are actually not very religious in character. The first major confessional war in Lebanon goes back to the nineteenth century. In 1860 there was a conflict between the Maronite Christians and the Muslim Druzes, two minority communities which took refuge in the Lebanese mountains. This conflict came just in the nick of time; it interrupted a process of democratic revolution that had been unleashed by an anti-feudal collectivist insurrection of Maronite peasants in 1858, an insurrection that had manifested a tendency to become generalized; in addition, it was used as a pretext for sending French troops of Napoleon III to Lebanon. By stirring up a conflict between two communities that had hitherto coexisted in harmony, the feudal Druzes and Maronites reaffirmed their authority; France found an excuse to bolster its influence in the region, setting itself up as a protector of the Catholic Maronites, while Britain was to cultivate the friendship of the Druzes. Thus, from the very beginning, the, instigation of confessional antagonisms appeared for what it really is: an application of the classical polifical watchword, "Divide and rule." Following the first world war, France took over Syria, under the provisions of the Franco-British accords dividing the territories of the Former Ottoman Empire. The French imperialists divided Syria into five states, one of which was Greater Lebanon, the basis of the division being confessional. The Lebanese state thus created, along with what France carved out of the other Syrian states, was concocted in such a way as to include a thin Christian majority that needed constant foreign protection in order to maintain its preponderant position in the politico-confessional system by which the state was ruled, The independence of Lebanon in 1943 was accompanied by a compromise (under British patronage) between Muslims and Christians - the former abandoning the demand for Syrian and Arab unity, which was supported by the Muslim masses and a section of the Christian masses, the latter declaring that they were placing themselves under foreign protection. The political system based on the confessional division of posts in the regime was confirmed for independent Lebanon. This history of confessional conflict and compromise was to stabilize an ideology, confessionalism, which was henceforth to permeate the political evolution of Lebanon. In 1958 a civil war opposed a pro-imperialist faction of Christians to an anti-imperialist mass movement, which coincided with confessional divisions to a certain extent. The recent civil war falls within the same historical continuity. There is no doubt that confessionalism was the major ideological motivation, one of the major combustible elements in the