reformist workers parties
& prospects for portugal
› de abril 0 250 a Pre by AUDRY & C. MICHALOUX On the night of June 27 a journalist from the Lisbon daily A Capital asked president-elect Ramalho Eanes, "Are you happy with the result?" "No, "Eanes replied, "frankly I am not satisfied." "Why?" the journalist asked. "You hoped for a higher percentage of the vote?" "No, it's not that, " Eanes answered, "but i am not satisfied because of the vote that went to Major Otelo de Carvalho. He represents a factor of instability and agitation that could endanger the pressing work of national reconstruction and the establishment of a real democracy in Portugal." Francisco Sá Carneiro, leader of the Partido Popular Democrático (PPD — Popular Democratic party, the largest bourgeois party), echoed Eanes and rounded the picture out: "I think that the situation, which is already quite complicated, has been aggravated recently with the economic and Financial difficulties and also with the result of the presidential elections, given the prog(ress of the left (Otelo) and the CP taken together and the otelo campaign, given the division of the SP votes. An exclusively SP government will never be able to engage the Portuguese in a project of national reconstruction. " (Diário, July 5, 1976.) These two statements sum up a decisive aspect of social and political reality in Portugal after the presidential elections, even though their alarmist tone is itself part of the offensive of the employers and their state ogainst the working class. Granted, the election of Eanes(]) establishes a "presidential majority" that controdicts the "legislative majority" won by the SP, CP, UDP (União Democrático Popular — Popular Democratic Union) and far left in the April 25 elections this year. In this sense, the bourgeoisie has carried out a part of the political project it had initiated on November 25 last year (and which It had hoped to concretize in the short term after the April 1974 coup): the establishment of a semipresidential re-
3
PORTUGAL gime lending full powers "in time of crisis" to a president of the republic who is himself commanding general of the army. After November 25, 1975, the ruling class had given priority to a plan — a groping one — to restabilize the state apparatus. But President Costa Gomes, along with the sixth provisional government, ceaselessly proclaimed their "lack of authority." After Jure 27, 1976, the resstoration of the bourgeois state apparatus will be able to attain an institutional expression in the concentrated power now commanded by the president of the republic; the state apparatus will thus recover on operational character it has locked up to now. Eanes can centralize the political will of the bourgeoisie on a higher level, In this sense, the class confrontation acquires a new dimension: the enemy the workers have to face is more solid than it was in the past. Nevertheless, the election campaign and its results, as well as the present mobilizations, reveal the precarious character of the social foundations of a bourgeois project that, while it surely has greater coherence, is still far from.commanding adequate means for implementation. First of all, in spite of support from Mario Soares's party, Eanes is not shaping up as a president elected by both the workers and the employers, a president standing above classes, That is a first failure, a first weakness. In addition, in the eyes of broad layers of workers inFlwenced by the far left, the CP, and even the SP, Eanes now appears as the spokesman of "capitalist recuperation. " He cannot claim to occupy a position as arbiter, a position a majority of the workers ceded to Costa Gomes. Instead, Eanes is their enemy. This provides an objective basis for politicization, which will Inevitably be accentuated by Eanes's probable intervention in coming social conflicts. Second, in organizing (with the aid of the SP) a broad front of support to the man of November 25, the bourgeoisie had counted on reducing the vote for the candidate of the CP and the far left to a total that would not exceed the CP vote in the legislative elections. Now, the sum of the vote for Orelo and Pato (24,l percent) was considerably greater than the vote of the CP and the far left in the April legislative elections (17,75 percent). Moreover, in the district of Setúbal (where big industry predominates, with the most concentrated latiFundia and proletariat in the country), as well as in the districts of Beja and Evora (non-urbanized zones, land of the old latifundia and centers of agrarian reform), Pato and Otelo got more votes than Eanes and Pinheiro combined. To this was added the shift of CP votes to Otelo(2), which expressed the combativity potential that has been maintained in these proletarian regions after November 25. This is what Eanes noted and was talking about in the interview quoted above. The shift of SP votes (toward Pinheiro and Otelo) was no less significant. The SP was unable to solidify its voters - or its members - behind the Eanes candidacy. This, in addition to the affirmation of trade-union opposition to the orientation of the Soares government, promises instability for a project that aims at combining "social dialogue" and an "austerity plan. " Whatever his intentions, Sá Carneiro has grasped this difficulty quite well. Finally, both the austerity measures - energy cuts, tax increases on ceitain capital incomes - and the options relating to the nationalized sector and the agrarian reform are generating contradictions and tensions in the bourgeois camp. Although recognized by consensus as an arbiter during the election campaign, the new president will be hard put to maintain unity in the ranks of those who supported him on June 27. April 25 and November 25 One of the most striking elements in the unfolding of these elections was the dynamic of the campaign of Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. The basic reason for this must be sought in the policy followed by the two big reformist workers parties. In the eyes of a brood mass of workers, the SP's alignment behind Eanes and the CP's refusal to wage a real battle against him (after having long hesitated before presenting its own candidate) appeared as an acceptance of the man of the "mil¡tary November 25" and a sanctioning of the plan for a "social November 25. " After the majority obtained during the elections to the Assembly of the Republic, this capitulation by the SP and CP created favorable terrain for a polarization that took the misleading form of a counterposition between "April 25" and "November 25. " This was an "April 25" whose content expressed both the development of the workers commissions, tenants commissions, and experiences in direct democracy and the ambiguous relations of a working class marked by forty-eight years of corporatist dictatorship and led astray by the reformists with an MFA (Armed Forces Movemenf) "protecting" the development of "popular power." It was a "November 25" that not only dealt the final blow to the hopes of those who, after the last assembly of the MFA (in Tancos on July 5, 1975), believed that there would be a new rise of this movement within the bourgeois institution that is the army, but also and above all marked the beginning of the bourgeois counteroffensive, of the assault of which Eanes has made himself the strategist. Hence, whatever the initial form taken by the confrontation, whatever its ambiguities, it embodied a class battle whose contours were to become clear in the course of the election campaign. If one views the election campaign through a deformed prism that reduces this objective reality to the individual trajectory of Carvalho, including his possible future twists and turns, one is unable to grasp the relations among classes, among parties, and between classes and masses that were expressed during this campaign and that will also leave their imprint on the dynamic of relations between the SP government and its austerity plan and the toiling masses. To the extent that one adopts this point of view, one is constrained
to convert a social confrontation into a struggle among "three officers (contending for the voters' allegiance in different ways) and one civilian, a member of a workers party who, claiming allegiance to the MFA even more than any of the "military candidates, " similarly aimed at assembling votes around the slogan of a "left majority" protected by a "united army." There is no question of denying the ambiguities and contradictions that the very form of the confrontation injected into this class conflict, nor of endorsing the choice of candidate made by the far-left organizations. In chosing Carvalho as a spokesman, essentially out of electoral opportunism, the MES, PRP, FSP, and UDP(3) contributed to endowing the social confrontation reflected in the elections with a form that was laden with confusion and illusions. The workers majority manifested on April 25, 1976, made it imperative to present a united workers candidate of class independence. It was only the revolutionary Marxists of the Liga Comunista Internacionalista (LCI - Internationalist Communist League) and the Partido Revolucionário dos Trabalhadores (PRT — Revolutionary Workers party) who fought for this. The Trotskyist candidate, who was withdrawn for reasons that have been explained(4), aimed at asserting this necessity as broadly as possible and at propagating a program of class struggle and independence. (5) Once this alternative was eliminated, it remained to grasp the potentialities and contradictions of the expression of the class conflict in Portugal in the current phase. And there is no doubt that we underestimated various aspects of this complex process.
Self-organization and trade-union organization If such opportunities were available to the Otelo campaign, it was the policy of the CP and SP that generated them. Nevertheless, the impact of this candidacy, as well as its differences from a "revolutionary candidacy" of the type presented in France during the presidential elections of 1974 or by the Democrazia Proletaria slate in Italy, are substantially accounted for by the specific process of emergence of organs of the working class itself and by the unevenness of the level of consciousness of the toiling masses. The emergence of organs of "popular power" was the combined product of the pressure of the activity of the moss movement and the weakness of the permanent and traditional structures of The workers movement, essentially the trade-union organizations. In addition, the space available to these organs resulted from the deep crisis of the state apparatus - provoked largely by the shock of the unexpected coup of April 25-and from the intense crisis of political leadership of the bourgeoisie. The combined process of the emergence of instruments of self-organization and trade-union organizations including various sectors of workers affected a working class that was emerging from forty-eight years of a corporatist regime, with no marked experiences in independent activity and organization during the period preceding the establishment of the dictatorship, with essentially revolutionary syndicalist and anarchist traditions, without experiences similar to those undergone by the working class of the Spanish state in the workers.commissions since 1962.
5
PORTUGAL
GENERAL CANES
Wins prometem. Herice, self-organization developed within the limits imposed by the lack of prior existence of a permanent united Framework recognized by the workers such as would have been constituted, for example, by a trade-union federation. This was reflected in the very strong haterogeneous aspect (even though a clearer dynamic emerged between August and September 1975) of the instruments of self-organization, which often substituted themselves for inadequate trade-union organizations or, on the contrary, functioned as vanguard regroupments not free of sectorionism and finding it difficult to overcome fragmentation, given the absence of a tradition of trade-union centralization and the equal absence of a tradition of united mobilizations of the working class on a national scale, Between these two poles there arose the organs of rank-and-File workers democracy, essentially in the workers commissions, closer to "elassical norms. " Another product of the history and configuration of the Portuguese working class lay in its limited capacity of independent intervention on the political field. This, along with the aid of the reformists, offered the objective and subjective basis for the preponderant role played by the MFA for more than one year. The Carvalho campaign had its roots in this contradictory reality of the formation of the Portuguese workers movement and of the organizational forms with which it endowed itself after April 1974. On the one hand, the campaign attracted the votes and support of linle polificized layers for whom the form taken by the social polarization -the "April 25 versus November 25" antagonism -more or less coincided with their level of consciousness. Against the Eanes austerity plan, ©telo represented on almost providential solution, falling within the compass of the paternalism of the MFA, in whose shodow "popular power" had been born. On the other hand, for significant sectors of the industrial and agricultural proletariat, support to Ofelo crystallized a confused mistrust of the policy of class collaboration, especially after the experience of six provisional coalition goverments. It likewise expressed a will, matured by struggle and by reference to March 11 as well as November 25, to defend and extend workers control, the agrarian reform, and the workers commissions, village councils, and tenants commissions. For these layers, the response to the employers' attack acquires not only the dimension of rejection of the attack on their standard of living, but also the dimension of a new push toward self-organization, toward the struggle for socialism. Thus, the limitations of the expression of the political independence of the working class, a certain disarray as well as radicalization, and the combativity and will for self-organization and independence of sectors of the workers vanguard came to the fore and combined through the Orelo campaign. The very theme of "non-party ism" - which must be uncompromisingly combatted, even if only because if represents an important obstacle to unity in the proletarian ranks — rests on the pressure toward unity within a workers movement possessing its own specific history and experiences. Nonetheless, the "nonpartyism"-unity coupling that exists in Portugal today bears certain similarities to the tendency toward unity explained by Zinoviev in 1922: "It is precisely the new layers of workers whose reformist illusions have begun to be dissipated by the experiences of the past two years and the workers who are not in any party and are now participating in a serious political struggle, perhaps for the first time, who are insisting most heavily on the unity of the workers front. "But all these workers are not clearly aware of what they are looking for. Some would like to melt down all the workers parties and even all the workers organizations into a single party, a single organization. Others, understanding the impossibility of uniting all the workers parties into one, would like to have created common action committees, etc. Finally, others are not aware of what a party is. But they sense instinctively that at all costs some way must be found to achieve the unity of all the workers parties, otherwise it will be impossible to triumph over the enemy, who is becoming ever more heinous and ever stronger." (Bulletin Communiste, No. 6, February 7, 1922.) In the present Portuguese context, the decisive question for revolutionary Marxists consists of grasping the dialectic of these tendencies within the workers movement and taking advantage of the potential of this workers vanguard in order to strengthen the affirmation of the political independence of the working class as a whole and, at the same time, to broaden the break with reformism that has already been begun in practice by some sections of the toiling masses. Among other things, this means to point to the axes of and means for a response to the projects of Eanes-Soares (plan of struggle, workers control, trade-union congress, development and coordination of genuinely representative workers commissions) and to put forward, after the electoral victory of April 25, 1976, and against the offensive of capital, the perspective of an SP-CP government based on the workers majority in the Assembly of the Republic, as well as to uphold the necessity of the united front of the workers organizations and of workers democracy.
The political context in which the campaign of the former Copcon commander unfolded was determined by the contradiction between the workers success during the legislative elections — a success that rested in large part on the defensive capacity manifested by the workers since the end of February and the beginning of March - and the capitulation of the SP and CP to the presidentialist operation of the bourgeoisie. Hence, in the present phase of the Portuguese revolution, it is necessary to characterize the candidacy of Otelo on the basis of the class alignment and the relations between the political parties and these classes. This method of approach cannot be replaced by speculation about the future of the "movement of support" to Otelo(6), nor by a simple personal characterization of the candidate. The social forces this candidacy represented, os well as those that supported it, were rodically opposed to the classes that constitute the social base of the candidacies of Eanes and Azevedo (industrial and banking capitalists, landlords, the merchant and agrarian petty bourgeoisie). In the most politicized districts of Portugal, where the tradition of struggle is most advanced, the Otelo candidacy assembled the majority of the wageearning toilers, as may be established by a comparison between the fotal population in wage-eaming categories(7) (employees, industrial and agricultural workers) and the votes Otelo obtained. In Setübal about 70 percent of the workers rallied to his campaign, in Beja
4 COOPERATIVA AGRICOL ESTRELA VERMELHA about 50 percent, in Evora nearly 65 percent. In these same districts the sum of the votes won by Otel and Pato accounted for more than 90 percent of the votes cast by the proletariat. In its balance-sheet on the campaign the CP was unable to dodge the class significance of a candidacy that, by the end of the campaign, had become the CP's major target: "Independent of the negative significance of the candidacy of Major Otelo, it must be stressed that the electoral results, viewed as a whole and understood in the context of the clear intention of the voters, reflect a shift to the left of more than 200,000 votes, once one observes that the sum of votes for Octávio Pato and Otelo was 200,000 more than the sum of the votes received in the elections to the Assembly of the Republic by the parties and groups that support these candidates." (Statement of the Central Committee of the Portuguese CP, July 5, 1976, published in Avante, July 8, 1976) The "Programmatic Bases for a Candidacy" (platform of the Otelo campaign) in large part corresponded to the efFective needs of the moment against the offensive of "capitalist recuperation." And that, moreover, is what made it a program totally unacceptable to the bourgeoisie as a class. During a press conference held by the CP candidate on the morning of June 28, Pato commented on Otelo's vote in these terms: "In our view it reflects, and this is true for varied reasons, the popular will against the right." The elements of the program that were increasingly emphasized as the campaign went on were the following: "I pledge myself to intransigently assure the defense and deepening of the fundamental gains made by the Portuguese people since April 25:
2. The agrarian reform, which must be carried through to the end, consolidated, and developed with the decisive intervention of the toilers and which must benefit the small and middle-sized peasants as well as the sharecroppers.
- Workers control exercised by the toilers, which will have to be stimulated, developed, and broadened throughout the country.
- Nationalizations of the basic sectors of the economy, which we cannot allow to be placed in the service of the capitalist groups again and which must be developed so as to serve the people and national independence.
- The right to strike, a sacred right of the toilers which cannot be the object of any rules that attack or destroy it.
- Freedom of expression, assembly, and association insofar as it does not stimulate fascist or fascistic ideas and practices. "I pledge myself to:
3. Defend, strengthen, and develop all the forms of organization of the workers and particularly the rank-and-file popular organizations, the workers commissions, tenants commissions, and village councils...
7
PORTUGAL 11 pledge myself to:
4. Guarantee the independent trade-union organization of the workers, independent of the state and the parties, contributing to the creation of conditions that make it possible for the unions to have a united and democratic form. . .. The resolution of the economic crisis will be able to occur only in the framework of a socialist society, through economic planning, based on national independence, the mobilization of the workers, and the creative dynamic of their struggles." (Programmatic Bases for a Candidacy, pages 3,4, and 5.) Otela's "economic program" was published at the end of the campaign. It was entitled "Lines for a Solution to te Economic Crisis in Portugal." After insisting on the necessity of a break with copitalism, the role of the worker and tenants commissions in this process, and the principal objectives of a socialist reorganization of the economy (according to debatable options that bear some similarity to the "Cuban model"), the program afFirms: "For any of these objectives to be attained, it is necessary to invest. To invest implies a choice: What part of the wealth created is to be invested and what part is to be oriented to consumption? What projects will be able to be concretized by the invested wealth? To what sectors will the investments be applied? In all cases, the choices have immediate and long-term consequences which must be properly analyzed from the standpoint of the interests of the toiling classes, for these classes will have to participate effectively and actively.
Cunhal, Soares, Eanes,
"One cannot opt for the alternative of accumulation without very clearly knowing the grand lines of the objectives listed in the earlier points: agriculture and basic industry as the motor force of development, acquisition of the independent means of production, and modification of the conditions of reproduction of the work force. The instrument for rendering all these objectives compatible and harmonious must necessarily reside in the plan, whose fundamental choices should be made in the final analysis by the democratic organization of The workers, after adequate technical preparation by the central planning organ. To arrive af a clear formufation of the essential choices, a brood participation of the representative organs of the working people, at the regional and sectoral level, is necessary. Although If is a decision-making body, the central planning organ will have an essential function in harmonizing and synthesizing the plans worked out by the regions and branches of activity, It will do this effectively and in the interests of the workers only if the workers, through their representative bodies, constitute the center of the decisions. " (Gazeta da Semana, June 1-7, 1976.) Obviously, these programmatic elements constitute the characteristic expression neither of a program of the bourgeoisie of an imperialist country nor of an officer who desires to enlist the masses in a project of "national reconstruction" based on a nationalized sector that acts as the keystone of capitalist accumulation! If is difficult to deny this evidence, even if one tries to place Eanes and Otelo in the same class camp by means of a mythical MEA. The confusions and errors Nevertheless, there must be no confusion between these aspects of the content of the program - to which the toiling masses were sensitive because they responded to the pressing needs felt by the masses — and the weakness, inadequacy, and grave errors concerning the orientation suggested for attaining the proposed goals. In fact, these things eliminated the possibility of offering a real political alternative to the strategy of the reformist parties and of leading the working class to victory. So it is with the theme of "national independence" (a leitmotiv taken up by all components of the Portuguese political spectrum except the revolutionary Marxists), the confusion on the relationship between political parties and workers democracy, the absence of a rigorous definition of the character of the SP (and, on that basis, the inability to forge a coherent united-front factic), and the incomprehension of the exact character of the bourgeois state and its institutions, with all the implications that flow from this on the strategic level. It is within this line that Otelo's programmatic declarations on the constitution must be situated: "I pledge myself to assure the defense of the constitution of the Portuguese republic, a conquest of the people, which must be ploced in the service of the toilers..., not to allow the privileged classes, which continue to hold power,
to destroy what is progressive in our fundamental law. " (Programmatic Bases, p.1.) This "respect for the constitution" (for which the UDP delegate voted, incidentally), along with the theme of "national independence, " constitutes a feature common to all the major organizations claiming allegiance to the working class, from the SP to the CP to the MES, UDP, and PRP! The declarations on the army fall within the same framework: "I pledge myself to place the armed forces and militarized forces (that is, the police - INPREC OR) in the service of the people and the national interest, never allowing repression against the people." (Programmatic Bases, p.8.) "We belong to the MFA, ally of the people, whom it liberated on April 25. We will Fight for an armed forces governed by order and discipline placed at the service of the most humble, as In the Copcon, and not order and discipline that constitute pretexts to repress the workers. " (Declaration of Candidacy, Lisbon, p.7.) These proclamations reflect more a misunderstanding of the functioning and substance of the bourgeois state than the individual destiny of a presidential candidate, an officer in the army out on bail. These were the errors and confusions that were at the root of the Otelo campaign's missing the point on the essential elements of an overall political response centered on the axes of an alternative to the reformists in the post-electoral period: trade-union congress (right of tendency, plan of struggle), an SP-CP government reflecting the workers majority in the Assembly of the Republic and applying a plan of struggle against "capitalist recuperation, " the united front of the workers organizations for the defense and extension of the gains of the revolution (workers commissions, workers control, nationalizations, response to reactionary maneuvers, etc.). The Otelo campaign was a sort of still shot of the weaknesses of development of the class consciousness of the Portuguese toiling masses (initial references to the MFApeople alliance, "non-partyism"). It leaned on these weaknesses, and did not permit the waging of a consistent battle to unify the proletarian ranks and qualitatively raise the consciousness of the most active sectors of the working class. Otelo and the bourgeoisie Nevertheless, the Portuguese bourgeoisie in its totality (and the international bourgeoisie as well), including all its parties, all its associations (from the SEDES, the association of modernist" employers and technocrats, to the CIP, the Confederation of Portuguese Industrialists), correctly paid less attention to all the weaknesses, ambiguities, and confusions of the candidacy of Major Otelo than to the anticapitalist social content and objective function played by the emergence of such a current. Nobody, no capitalist, no bourgeois journalist made any mistake on this. No one saw the Otelo campaign as a means of channeling or diverting the workers combativity that is escaping from the iron vise of the reformist workers parties. This sets the Otelo campaign off from the MFA, which was seen that way, by the SEDES, among others, during 1974. Jornal Novo, owned by the CIP, synthesized the uneasiness of its directors, writing: "If Major Otelo gets 10 percent of the vote we can be sure that Portugal is a state heading for disintegration and perhaps in the process of collapse. ... IF Major Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho gets 3 percent of the vote, we can assert that the civic pathology that has reigned among us is not overly worrisome, for this percentage corresponds to what is current in our democratic societies. " (June 24, 1976.) The columns Type Cia. of the Portuguese press teemed with statements of this type, Class hatred impelled Diário de Notícias to write an editorial promising a glorious future to the supporters of Orelo, qualifying them as follows: "If public enterprise comes out of the present whirlpool, if the employers have a government behind them, if private enterprise survives and prospers, if the agrarian reform is reexamined and comes to the North in a cooperative form, if the streets of this country are cleared of their garbage, if the workers lose their fear and gain security, if the ministries regroup in a rational manner, if Portugal becomes European, then the wild fanatics, incompetents, and mental deficients (70 percent of the workers of Setuball - INPRECOR), along with those who have aristocratically (sic!) taken refuge in ideological sterility, will be reduced to their proper marginal proportions. " (June 23, 1976) Thus, the Portuguese bourgeoisie had no doubt about the character of the class confrontation going on. The bourgeoisie did not allow itself to be led astray by the chimera of a so-called counterposition between three generals and a civilian. As for the officer corps, the
PORTUGAL military hierarchy, at no time did anyone manifest the slightest support to or encouragement of the former general. On this subject, the Communist party declared, with regret and mockery: What we have here is the candidacy of an officer who lacks the slightest real All the elements we have examined (social, political, etc.) enable us to assert that only an extreme schematism bordering on blindness can lead to the claim that the Otelo candidacy was a bourgeois candidacy, a and Eanes. Such schematism amounts to forgetting this principle, invoked by Lenin: * here, as always, the task is to be able to apply the the particularities of the relations between clesses and parties, to the particularities of objective development toward communism, which are proper to each country and which one must be able to study, discover, and lay bare. " (Left-Wing Communism, emphasis in original.) Thus, a call for a vote to Otelo cannot be excluded as a matter of principle. After a coherent battle for a united candidate of the workers movement, a call for a vote to Otel and Pato, who amassed the workers' protest votes against the austerity plan and for defense and extension of their gains, was a tactical choice that in no way contradicts the general and fundamental principles of revolutionary Marxism. Such a call would have to be accompanied by an independent campaign around the central programmatic elements mentioned at various points in this article. Evolution of the campaign A real analysis of the Otelo candidacy must take account of the evolution and reorganization of the central themes of the campaign. This evolution cannot be reduced to the evolution of the candidate or to changes in his political entourage. It has its source in the sharper emergence of the social content in the course of the campaign, the sharper emergence of the class confrontation embodied in and deformed by the "April 25 vs. November 25" polarization and hence of the needs of the masses that this evolution had itself contributed to expressing. At the most immediate level, Orelo's gestures of respect for Eanes as "an honest man who cannot be used by the forces of the right" (O Jornal, June 9, 1976) gave way to statements like this: "Behind his dark glasses, Eanes hides a well-known monacle: Spínola's. " (Diário Popular, June 22, 1976.) Opposition to Eanes led Otelo to take his distance from the initial theme of "national unity" (taken up during his speech in Porto on May 29, 1976), to the point of saying: "1 consider it a mistake ... to talk of national unity. Class conciliation is impossible, It is not possible to conciliate the workers, who have only the strength of their hands, and those who exploit the work10
MARIO SOARES ers. " (Diário Popular, June 22, 1976) This undeniable evolution, the product of the objective dynamic of the campaign (which dynamic it in turn fueled), was most clearly expressed in Orelo's Lisbon speech of June 25, 1976. The ambiguities are far from eliminated, but it is no longer simply a translation of the slogan. "April 25 for president. Moreover, the Central Committee of the CP itself had to recognize this in drawing a balance-sheet of in "relative electoral setback": "The Central Committee notes that the lack of precision of the results achieved by the Communist candidate reflects a deficient appreciation of the state of spirit of the masses, Workers parties draw the balance-sheet Neither of the two big Portuguese workers parties can draw a positive balance-sheet on the presidential elections. The SP saw about 20 percent of its voters (400,000 of them) reject the party's recommendation of support to Eanes and vote for Pinheiro in the North (Porto, Viana de Castelo) and to a lesser extent for Otelo in the South (Lisbon, Setubal, Beja, Evora, Faro). In the case of the CP, about the same number of voters shifted to Otelo and cut Octávio Pato's score in half. Each in their own way, the leaderships of the SP and CP have now had to draw the lessons of their relative failures, for this modifies the line of conduct they envisage for the post-electoral period, at least in the short run. Although this was never alluded to in any public statement, the leadership of the SP nonetheless knows full
well that the partial indiscipline of its voters was caused Fundamentally by the public image of the candidate the party supported, further accentuated by the haste with which the PPD and the CDS (Centro Democrático Social - Social Democratic Center) rushed to support him. It was also the result of the trade-union base the SP has developed during the past year and its recruitment of worker militants. The party leaders had to pay the price for the hostility of these workers to the candidate of the employers of the CIP and the landlords of the CAP (Confederation of Portuguese Farmers). The prime concern of the Soares leadership is thus to associate Eanes's electoral victory to his acceptance of the SP program and government: "Contrary to what is claimed by certain rightist sectors and some left pseudoradicals, who are united by the same spirit of analysis, the victory of General Ramalho Eanes does not represent a triumph for the right and still less for a pseudocoalition of parties that would make anticommunism their banner. . . . The repeated statements of Ramalho Eanes — and especially his electoral manifesto and his press conference in Gulbenkian (after the results were announced) - absolutely set him off from the right and define him as the legitimate representative of the spirit of April 25, a man determined to struggle for a democratic and socialist project openly opposed to all forms of totalitarianism and dictatorship. . . . The victory of General Ramalho Eanes constitutes a singular reinforcement of the democratic authority of the Portuguese state. Moreover, this will be completed on the institufional level by the coming formation of a homogeneous Socialist government with a consistent left program which will lend it a broad base of support capable of matching and surpassing the Influence of the SP itself, " (Statement of the National Secretariat of the SP, June 29, 1976, Diário de Notícias, June 30, 1976.) This timorous attempt at differentiation from the right on the part of the SP leadership in order to regain some of the credibility eroded by the Eanes operation is not easily reconciled with the exercise of government responsibilities, for which Mario Soares is preparing. Neither the measures his government will decree nor the workers struggles that are already taking shape in response to them will leave the SP leaders much room to maneuver in their attempf to recover their lost audience. Although proportionally smaller than those of the CP, the SP's electoral losses are not any easier to recover. Once it occupies the position of government party, responsible for and author of an antiworker policy, the SP leadership will have great difficulty trying to base itself on a "social pact" negotiated with the majority of the trade-union leoders, many members of the SP itself, and will have equally onerous problems with the national leadership of the united central trade-union federation that will emerge from the congress to be held in November. (It may be predicted that the majority of this leadership will be Socialist-oriented.) To this must be added the bourgeoisie's notable lack of eagerness in supporting the experiment of a Soares government, whose term it will do everything to shorten. This is illustrated by the position taken by the PPD leadership: "The consequences of the vote, reinforced by the sensible diminution of SP votes in Madeira and the Azores, also remove much credibility from the thesis of a minority government. Not only can the SP not claim the weight of a candidate that was not its own, but also the lack of verified support reveals a sensible diminution of its social base. " (Primeiro de Janeiro, July 4, 1976) It is in this context, caught between the sabofage of reaction and the resistance of the working class, that the Soares leadership will have to deal with the most Important tensions the SP has faced in two years. These tensions may well be manifested during the coming SP congress in December, through the crystallization of a current or tendency opposed to the government policy of the party's National Secretariat. This opposition, which seems already heralded by the formation on July 5 of a Group for the Defense of the Socialist Program (GDPS), would then reflect the contradiction - up to now masked because of the ultrasectarian attitude of the CP leadership, which enables the SP leodership to pursue a two-sided policy - between the aspirations of a working-class rank and file animated by the Socialist trode-union cadres and the government policy of the National Secretariat. The coming struggles and the trode-union congress this autumn will constitute impartant tests of the maturity of this conflict between antagonistic class interests within the Portuguese Social De"This apparent loss will be won back with interest, " said Alvaro Cunhal on June 28 while flying to the East Berlin conference of European Communist parties. (Diário, June 29, 1976.)
Cunhal True, the low vote won by Octávio Pato runs strongly counter to the project of the CP leadership. The leadership saw this campaign as an instrument in future negotiations with Mario Soares on the composition of a government, or at least on a tacit alliance between the two parties in the. Assembly of the Republic on the basis of a government platform that would satisfy some of the demands of the Cunhal leadership. In order to recover
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PORTUGAL the part of its electoral base that voted for Otelo and left the party members and close sympathizers alone behind Pato, the CP leadership is counting on the difficulties the SP will run into in the government and on the CP's ability to maintain control of the unions and workers commissions in the big factories. To the immediate detriment of its strategy of "left majority, " the CP leadership, at least during the initial months of the Soares government, wants to demonstrate, through struggles that it can stimulate and direct, that "you cannot govern without the CP, and still less against it." The Central Committee statement of July 5 clearly lays out this perspective: "The CP reserves the right, which is conFerred on it by the constitution and is an integral part of democracy, to oppose a government whose policy it condemns and to develop the struggle against such a policy and such a government. " (Avante, July 8, 1976) And for the CP leodership, the "recovery with interest" mentioned in this same document means that the organizational strength of the party, which will be demonstrated in coming struggles, combined with an offensive of political explanation, will once again rally the sympathy of many worker militants who temporarily defected to join the current of support to Otelo. The central Committee even felt the need to explain in regard to these workers: "The CC calls the attention of the regional, local, and rank-and-file organizations to the necessity of not taking any precipitous administrative measures against the comrodes and friends (who voted for Otelo - INPRECOR). The task is to discuss in the organizations, to discuss the situation fraternally with all these comrodes and to draw the indispensable lessons. " (Avante, idem.) The CP's line of action will thus probably bend to the left during coming months in order to capitalize on the Fruits of an increased intervention in the struggles waged against the policy of the bourgeoisie and the Soares government. But the aim remains unchanged: For the CP the point is to recover a position of strength in order to negotiate with a Soares who finds himself in trouble over the composition of the government that will succeed the SP government: "The analysis of the economic, social, and political situation leads to the conclusion that even if o government without Communists is formed in the immediate future, the continuation of the democratic process will put the participation of the CP in the government on the agenda relatively soon in order to be able to resolve the national problems. " (Avante, idem.) Nevertheless, this policy of channeling struggles, while it intensifies the problems of the SP leadership, also entails dangers for the CP leadership. The people who voted for Otelo in the presidential elections but had voted for the CP in April 1975 and 1976 do not automatically escape the political and organizational grip of the CP. But in the coming conflicts they will constitute a current of militant workers who, in the very course of these struggles, may be led to translate the electoral motivations that impelled them to vote for Otelo into a radical practice in terms of demands and modes of organization and leadership of the struggles. Not only because of its bureaucratic and sectarian atti12 tude in the workers movement (as was once again manifested in the CP's frenetic attacks on the Otelo campaign), but also because of the needs of its strategy of class collaboration, the CP is led to try to curb this dynamic at a certain point in arder not to endanger its chances of negotiation within the bourgeois state apparatus. Moreover, this is what is already announced in the statement of the Central Committee: "At the same time that it wars against raising unrealistic and demagogic demands by pseudorevolutionary groups and against inadequate forms of struggle, the CP opposes a policy of aggravation of the living conditions of the working classes and stands and will stand at the head of the struggle of the working class and the popular masses for their just demands. At the same time that it upholds the necessity of a policy of financial austerity, the CP insists that this austerity must begin among the parasitic classes and with superfluous and luxury goods." (Avante, idem.) If the transfer of half of its votes to Otela is not to be "recovered with interest" by the CP during the coming central political conflicts, it is above all necessary that the far-left groups be politically and organizationally capable of presenting an alternative to the most active of the workers, most of whom are influenced by the CP. But these groups are on the contrary embarked on a decidedly triumphalist course, especially the UDP, the largest of them, which is led by the Maoists of the Porfuguese Communist party (Reconstructed). In fact, the UDP-PCP(R) believes that the electoral shift from which Otelo's candidacy benefited constitutes a consolidated victory that now need only be enlarged in order to construct the "antifascist popular front. " According to an editorial published in the organ of the PCP(R): "To construct a vast popular front that regroups and organizes all the people of Portugal is an arduous task that cannot be achieved overnight. Carrying it out requires breaking the masses under bourgeois influence away from that influence. And since "free-floating' masses free of all ideological and political influence do not exist in any class society, a hard struggle must be waged against bourgeois ideas and parties, to break up their ranks, deprive them of their papular base so that the popular front can be established. In this first test we have attracted a mass of workers, corresponding to 800,000 voters, to the revolutionary popular camp. What can one call this if not a victory?" (Bandeira Vermelha, July 1, 1976.) The MES advances a similar evaluation in the June 28 statement of its National Political Commission: "The high score for Otelo has transformed the political panorama of our country overnight, for it represents obvious proof that the current that rejects Social Democracy and reformism exists, is powerful, will get stronger, and that no one will henceforth be able to ignore it. (Diário Popular, June 29, 1976.) The Maoists of the PCP(R) believe that the first stone of the "front" has been set in place by the 800, 000 popular voter-militants for Otelo. It remairs only to complete the job by using the major as a figurehead.
The opportunism that had marked the choice of candidate and the elaboration of the electoral propaganda (Otelo in his general's uniform with the slogans "April 25 for president" and "a friend in the presidency" on the green and red background of the Portuguese flag) are now being extended in the definition of the components of this "front": "If one is to be carefully correct, the votes of Pinheiro must be added to those of Otelo, in spite of the differences between them, as votes for the officers of April 25 against Eanes, " declared Acacio Barreiros, UDP deputy in the Assembly. (Voz do Povo, organ of the UDP, July 6, 1976.) There is not a word in this interview about any other addition, such as the votes of Otelo and the votes of Pato, which should be done by revolutionaries to show the militants of the CP and SP that anticapitalist unity in action can actually be sealed between workers organizations against the Eanes regime. It is true that for the Mao-Stalinists of the PCP(R) Pato is a "diversionist social fascist, " while the prime minister of the sixth provisional government is "an antifascist admiral of April 25. " The objective the UDP assigns to the GDUP (the groups founded to support the Otelo campaign strikingly clarifies this orientation: "A party is necessarily a restricted organization representing certain specific class interests, with its own ideology. Consequently, it cannot unite broad sectors of the people in its ranks. A popular front, on the other hand, has more open objectives and does not represent a particular class but instead materializes the immediate common struggle objectives of several allied classes. It is an organization of this type that will be created on the basis of the GDUP." (Voz do Pavo, July 6, 1976.) The possible dynamic of the GDUP cannot be considered apart from the role that will be played in this process by the various organizations of the far left, especially the UDP-PCP(R) and the MES. The projects they uphold are in large part contradictory. While the UDP aims at the formation of an "antifascist popular front" with immediate and minimum objectives, the MES calls for the formation of an "antifascist and anticapitalist front, a mass organization struggling for socialism. " (Poder Popular, organ of the MES, June 30, 1976) Nevertheless, the two conceptions — one Mao-Stalinist, the other ultraleft - converge on one essential point: Both see the GDUP as organs whose task will be to contribute to the development of the workers commissions, deliberately excluding any recourse to a policy of united front directed toward the reformist parties, which means also toward the leadership of these parties, through proposals for united and nonexclusive action in defense of the toiling masses. In the absence of any tactic of united front toward the SP and CP, for these organizafions the extension of the electoral success of the candidate they supported consists of working around the bulk of the working class and the organizations that influence or structure it in order to construct a sort of alternative workers movement of which the GUP would represent the embryo and of which the "popular unity movement" would be the expression, after the congress of the GDUP. Hence, the tendency toward a substitutionist policy of working around the traditional workers movement, of which the FUR (Front of Revolutionary Unity) had been a first experience and a first failure, has come to the surface again, accentuated by the impact of the Otelo campaign. In the neighborhoods, where the base of the tenants commissions has significantly contracted since November 25, the GDUP, which are actually regroupments of militants and sympathizers of the far left, can find a terrain for propaganda, agitation, and organization of initiatives around the rising cost of living. But this activity is alreody being carried out to the detriment of a possible reactivation of the tenants commissions, for which the GDUP are substituting themselves wherever militants of the MES and UDP have a certain base. In the factories, the same phenomenon may occur in another form. In the great foctories of the Lisbon industrial belt and in Setubal, the far-left militants regrouped in the GDUP may be led to set themselves up as competing organizations to the workers commissions and trade-union sections led by the CP, to appear as a minority introducing additional division in the working class and contributing to isolating the vanguard militants from the majority of the workers in the foctories. In the coming period these workers will have a natural tendency to turn toward their own permanent organizations, especially their unions, in order to provide themselves with an effective and united instrument of struggle against the bourgeois offensive. It is in this area that the sectarian attitude of the MES and UP can cause the greatest damage, especially since this policy is re-
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PORTUGAL Flected in conceptions that run counter to the unitary and democratic aspirations of the workers. An example of this is the position of the PCP(R) on the coming trade-union congress: "To have the GDUP participate in the struggle... for the right of trade-union association and independence against the maneuvers of the parties, for trade-union unity against the right of tendency, which the bourgeoisie wants to introduce into the union movement. " (Statement of the Political Commission of The Central Committee of the PCP(R), A Capital, July 6, 1976.) Thus, the far-left groups, while they may see their audience broaden because of the electoral success of the Otelo campaign after the period of isolation following November 25, are still proceeding in the same logic of sectarian ignorance of the need for a united-front policy toward the reformist workers parties; this reflects the pressure of the rise of a layer of militant but little politicized workers. That is why neither their program nor their initiatives can effectively contribute to strengthening the independence and unity of the workers or to establishing workers democracy in the workers movement. The proliferation of struggles now shaping up can offer these far-left organizations a field of intervention propitious for some extension of their influence and, on this basis, for an extension of the influence of the GDUP. But given the present state of their political development, the central political questions posed by the convening of the trade-union congress and the response to the Soares government limit their ability to intervene in the direction of the majority of workers organized or influenced by the SP and CP. Neither the MES nor the UDP nor the front that may be born of their common efforts will be able to appear to these workers as a real alternative to the collaborationist and bureaucratic policy of the traditional leaderships. For the rest, this contradiction, which arises out of the objective impact of the far left and the limits of its subjective ability to capitalize on that impact, will contribute to stimulating a political discussion of a strategic order among the various components of the far left. Revolutionary. Marxist militants can play an important role in this process through a unitary policy and a clarification of the central themes under discussion in the vanToward a new crisis? If American imperialism and the European bourgeoisies do not come to its rescue, the Mario Soares government will soon find itself in a more or less protracted situation of suspension, depending on the intensity of the workers resistance to the brutal austerity measures and the depth of the consequent capitalist sabotage. Only massive aid in credits would be able to alleviate the lack of investment and give the SP government a certain margin for maneuver in order to attempt, with the aid of some concessions, to divide the workers response, reduce some of the points of resistance, and gain at least the neutrality of the unions led by members of the So141 cialist party. But this hypothesis remains unlikely. The European and North American bourgeoisies must lend priority to their efforts to defuse the explosive potential of the Italian and Spanish situations; Portugal comes only third. Under these conditions, the workers response, which began during the days following the election of Eanes with the strike of the hotel workers and the movement at the petrochemical complex of Sines, will rather tend to amplify in face of the austerity measures, a foretaste of which was offered by the last decrees of the sixth provisional government on price increases. These struggles, which the CP will sharpen for its own reasons, will nevertheless have to overcome the obstacle of the fragmentation inherited from the very organizational and political division of the Portuguese workers movement. In this context the trade-union congress in autumn takes on decisive importance for the organization of a counteroffensive of the working class against the crisis of a Portuguese capitalism managed by the SP government. The Soares leadership will do all it can to blackmail the trode-union militants of the SP with the (real) threat of reaction in order to dissuade them from engaging in the battle against the policy of the SP government and thus to allow that goverment to gain time so as to better divide the potential resistance of the workers. This situation highlights the imperative necessity for revolutionary Marxists to stimulate the battle, offering the workers an alternative on the key questions that will be posed: elaboration of an action program, of a plan of struggle unifying the workers battles around defense of the major gains of the toilers (nationalizations, agrarian reform, workers control) and for the Immediate satisfaction of the demands of the masses of toilers against the attack on their living standards; strengthening, extension, and unification of the trade unions into a single central independent and democratic union Federation and coordination of the independent bodies of the workers through the relaunching of workers contral by means of the centralization of the workers commissions. Next, and this is an essential paint in winning the confidence of militants critical of the big workers parties, against the sectarianism that fosters the Isolation of the vanguard and the division of the ranks of the workers, intransigent defense of the broadest workers democracy in the workers organizations, particularly the right of tendency in the unions. Finally, the indispensable proposal of the unity in struggle of all the workers organizations - political, trade-union, and mass - especially against the rise in activity of the armed gangs of reaction which the accentuated social polarization will stimulate toward antiworker terrorism. Such are the grand lines of a policy that can effectively contribute to solidifying a nascent workers response that otherwise could be channeled by the CP or derailed into vanguordist isolation. In spite of their present organizational weakness, the Trotskyist militants are the only ones capable of carrying forward such a project corresponding to the immediate objective interests of the Portuguese workers. Defended with consistency and perseverence, this line of action could rapidly get a response from a growing number of worker militants in
AWAVE OF REPRESSION
ЕРГАТІКН ПАЛН Е
BL OMAMIATIKO OPFANO TIA THN YEPAINIEH TRN [YM•EPONTON THI EPTATIKHI TAEHI the context of the great political debate that is opening among them as they come out of the presidential elections. As soon as the new rise of partial struggles really takes hold and as soon as the objective possibility arises, they will thus be in position to move to agitation and even to impelling a generalization of these struggles for a national centralization of the workers response. This could then take the form of a general strike against the sabotage of the bourgeoisie, the actions of reaction, and the antiworker measures of the government. Such a perspective would permit workers solutions to the economic crisis to be concretely placed on the agenda. While Eanes and the bourgeoisie are already concocting their plans to replace the discredited SP government with an SP-PPD-CDS government of national unity, if necessary by provoking new legislative elections to put an end to the majority of workers parties in the Assembly, such a workers and people's mobilization would also place a real alternative solution on the agenda: that of an SP-CP government supported by the mobillization of the workers and sarisfying the demands the workers will put forward throughout these months of struggle. Ir is through pursuing such a policy that the Liga Comunista Internacionalista, sympathizing organization of the Fourth International in Portugal, will intervene in the period now opening in Portugal, It is around such