[The following article appeared in the July 18 issue of Rouge, the French Trotskyist weekly. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
Two crises in a little more than two weeks is a lot. Especially when the "guide document" adopted July 8 by the Assembly of the MFA [Movimento das Forças Armadas-Armed Forces Movement] to put an end to the second crisis only opened up a third, the most serious so far—the crisis of the coalition government, set off by the withdrawal of the Socialist ministers and the departure of the PPD.
From the Action Plan to the 'Guide Document'
The Political Action Plan published June 21 by the Revolutionary Council announced that a study of a series of economie measures designed to confront the catastrophic situation in the country would be undertaken. But the study was dragged out, the proposals remained vague, and no deadline was set for their implementation. The growing discontent in the working class was indicated by the struggle of the TAP [the national airline] workers, and of the telephone and postal workers.
In this context, the government clumsily decreed a series of unpopular measures such as the increased railway fares (which brought about an organized boycott by prospective purchasers) and above all the return of Rádio Renascença, which has been occupied since May 25, to its owner, the church. This decision unleashed a wave of workers' solidarity actions to defend the station as "revolutionary radio serving the working class."
On the other hand, the plan called for building a "socialist society by the pluralistic road," implying "recognition of the various political parties and currents of opinion, including those that do not necessarily defend socialist positions." But some of these various parties and currents of opinion, not content with refusing to defend socialist positions, are fighting them.
The well-organized escape of the eighty-seven PIDE agents [Salazarist political police] (loosely) incarcerated in the Alcoentre prison added to the people's exasperation with a "pluralism" that permits sabotage and plots to occur, and lets the reaction reorganize with support from within the state apparatus. This exasperation was given massive expression in the big demonstration organized by the metalworkers of Lisbon calling for "revolutionary justice" and "the purging of the state apparatus."
The Revolutionary Council, meeting in a crisis session July 3, had to repudiate the government by revoking the increased fares, nationalizing Rádio Renascença, and recognizing the extreme seriousness of the escape of the PIDE agents. In addition, under the pressure of the mounting occupations, it had to decree the seizure of the property and companies of bosses who are letting their factories run down as they prepare to go abroad.
A Reflection and an Encouragement
The MFA Assembly meeting July 8 thus faced a crisis that was already under way. The "guide document" adopted by the delegates formalized an already existing situation so as to better control it. The tone of the document is clearly more firm than that of the plan of June 21. The economic measures it envisages tend toward the extension of the nationalizations, agrarian reform, and workers control. The "pluralist society" has disappeared, to be replaced by "committees of workers and neighborhood residents combined with the assemblies of delegates of military units (ADUs2) within Local and Regional People's Assemblies, with the perspective of convening a National People's Assembly to establish a regime "of the working masses," in which "all bodies will be elected and subject to recall by a show of hands."3
The "guide document" incorporates and thereby encourages the development of the self-organization of the workers. But it also seeks to structure it. The People's Assemblies are in effect flanked by their respective ADUs, some of which are elected but the majority of which are composed of representatives of the MFA. And they must be integrated into-and not substituted for — the official state apparatus (municipalities and governmental bodies).
However, the "guide document" of the MFA Assembly is a clear advance in relation to the action plan of the Revolutionary Council. According to the terms of the "guide document" itself, the Revolutionary Council is "the supreme body of national sovereignty," the real government of the Portuguese state. The conflicting currents within it are no doubt confronting each other more and more intensely, but they can find grounds for compromise in the document's preservation of the supremacy of the Revolutionary Council. The MFA Assembly, although bureaucratically appointed, in reality reflects much more the pressure of the external situation.
The MFA Assembly adopted the "guide document" by only a very small majority. The political orientation report by Vasco Gonçalves won the support of an even smaller majority. The radicalized sectors of the MFA-whose leaders are at this time Gen. Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, commander in chief of Copcon;4 Gen. Morais e Silva, commander in chief of the air force; and Adm. Rosa Coutinho, commander in chief of the navy-would have liked to have gone further. They came out against the line advocated by Vasco Gonçalves, who is generally committed to the Communist party's concepts of a "peaceful and gradual transition to socialism."
The probourgeois right wing considered that the document and the report still left too big a role to the mass movement, which "talks too much and doesn't work hard enough," as President Costa Gomes stated during a speech on television. The president, however, had to leave the MFA Assembly before the vote "for health reasons," while his associate Melo Antunes, the minister of foreign affairs, did not even attend the meeting in order "to be able to prepare for his trip to Angola"! Thus they avoided compromising themselves on a document they do not approve of, while agreeing to continue to present in public — and no doubt only for the time being — the image of the united MFA.
The facade is, however, becoming highly transparent. Each public appearance of the MFA sees Costa Gomes or Melo Antunes escorted by Carvalho or Coutinho keeping an eye out for squalls. On Friday, July 11, Carvalho, Coutinho, and Morais e Silva appeared on television to defend their interpretation of people's power. But on Monday night, it was the political commission of the Revolutionary Council that was explaining on the airwaves that it is really "people's participation" rather than "people's power."
The Symptoms of a Chile
While the "guide document" envisages the establishment of a National People's Assembly in an undefined future, it carefully refrains from clarifying the way it will be established and its powers. The essential thing, however, is that despite all its ambiguities and compromises, in the present situation in Portugal, the "guide document" appears to the workers as a general expression of their aspirations and therefore as an encouragement to achieving them as quickly as possible.
The bourgeoisie has not failed to note this. Its parties, the PPD and the CDS,5 and the bosses' confederation, the CIP,6 as well as its bishops have denounced the MFA with one voice-and not only the MFA's "guide document." There is no more bowing and scraping, no more polite civility toward this regime, which has revealed its incapacity to hold the line against the rise of militancy. Now it's war. They are not saying so yet, but in any case it has begun, and the first skirmishes resemble those that occurred in Chile.
In the north of the country, at Aveiro, 8,000 persons gathered on Sunday, July 13, to greet their bishop, who had returned from Rome, with cries of: "Anarchy, no; Order, yes!" and "Who is running Portugal?" The bishop addressed the crowd as follows: "Christians, wake up, we must demonstrate en masse throughout the country."
On the same day at Rio Maior, 60 kilometers from Lisbon, thousands of demonstrators mobilized by the PPD, the CDS, and the local chiefs of the SP, prevented the Peasant League from holding an assembly. Throughout the day they hunted down members of the Communist party and sacked the offices of the CP and the FSP.7 On the following day they seized trucks bringing the daily newspapers from Lisbon and burned their contents in the city square. "That's how we deal with the Communists' lies," some of them said.
At Cascais, they have announced they will hold a meeting of small-shopkeepers on Saturday; the workers and revolutionary organizations are mobilizing against it. The meeting will not be allowed to take place. The employers in the CIP decided to adjourn their convention indefinitely "to demonstrate their concern at the seriousness of the situation."
The Failure of the SP's Blackmail
The leaders of the SP would have liked to take a left stance so as to save face. But they made a poor job out of their exit from the government.
Immediately after the MFA Assembly meeting, the national secretariat of the SP launched its offensive in the form of a public communiqué that Mário Soares was to echo later during his news conference. Here are quotations: "There are many proposals outlined in the 'guide document' that interfere with the powers of the Constituent Assembly, which has the responsibility, for example, of defining the status of the workers commissions and neighborhood committees, the institutions of local, municipal, district, and regional power.... It is really strange to be trying to convert the workers commissions and neighborhood committees into a police body and even self-defense organs. ... But even more shocking is the proposal to establish, alongside the organs of people's power, a people's court to resolve noncriminal problems.... It is inadmissible to be told that we are still living in a private-enterprise economy, dominated by monopoly capitalism, which is said to paralyze the development of production.... Why destroy it, and not proceed to a profound transformation of the state apparatus?"
Citizens, to the ballot boxes! To elect a Constituent Assembly and a legislative assembly every two years, by universal suffrage and secret ballot; and, above all, let's hear nothing about those irresponsible assemblies where votes are held-how shocking!-by a show of hands, in order to know who is defending what and how. "The need for pluralism," that is, the routine of parliamentary combinations, "recently reaffirmed by the Revolutionary Council, has largely disappeared from this document," the national secretary of the SP indignantly exclaims in a veiled appeal to the Revolutionary Council.
It is possible that this latter body would have been willing to make a deal with the SP leadership, and retreat to the June 21 action plan. But who knows how the MFA Assembly would have reacted under the pressure of the probable popular opposition? So, anxious to preserve "the unity of the MFA," the Revolutionary Council accepted the withdrawal of the Socialist ministers without further ado.
With consternation, the SP leadership watched its staged exit become transformed into a real rout. This leadership, which cannot flirt too openly with the right wing of the PPD and the CDS without running the risk of losing its working-class base, is in an impasse. Consequently, it has to hide its real intentions behind an anti-Stalinist-actually, an anticommunist— vocabulary, while trying to push the right wing of the MFA to break away and to establish with it a "pluralist" alternative to these People's Assemblies that inspire such spirited opposition on its part.
In the short run, the SP leadership cannot do much except to show that it exists. This week it is organizing a series of meetings in the big cities throughout the country. At these meetings, Mário Soares will repeat what he stated Monday night at a meeting in Lisbon: "The government has been incapable of confronting the crisis (but wasn't he part of that government for fifteen months?), we must encourage European and American investment to remedy the unemployment problem, but the first condition for doing that is to restore confidence. If there is a political way out, it is through respect for universal suffrage." Soares gets along very well with Schmidt and Wilson, and not badly with Giscard and Ford. The Socialist workers who have joined the workers commissions and neighborhood committees, and who still take the side of their party leadership, should quickly come to understand that.
The withdrawal from the government of the SP, followed soon after by the PPD, shattered the fragile edifice of the coalition. What will it be replaced with? Probably by a more or less military government with the addition of "competent" personalities carefully allocated in accordance with their political allegiance and the relative weight of the CP and perhaps even of the SP, if some pieces can still be pasted together again.
The CP has already indicated its agreement with this type of government "without parties" but "not against the parties." Given its weight in the state apparatus and in the MFA itself, the CP will easily accommodate to a situation that for it has the enormous advantage of preserving the unity of the MFA. The CP is more and more walking a tightrope. On the one hand, this immense aspiration to build a people's power, in which tens of thousands of its members are participating fully, threatens to rapidly put in question the superficial unity of the MFA. It will not be long before the right wing of the present military hierarchy takes the place of the Spinolists, jeopardizing the unity of the MFA to which the CP clings.
But to remain passive would also be dangerous. Forty-eight years of fascism was quite enough, and the CP, which endured the harshest blows, has no desire to return to that. Thus it must find a middle way that mobilizes the workers against the reaction sufficiently to prevent the reaction from launching an offensive, without however pushing it too far. Hence the wild fluetuations that now tend to characterize the CP's strategy of alliance with the MFA, whose prestige as a liberator still provides about the only assurance that the rising tide can be contained.
But this is to ignore the reactionaries' determination to launch a hostile offensive. Not to carry out a coup-that would be suicidal in the present relationship of forces-but to demonstrate their strength by a dazzling blow designed to show their presence, to regroup their forces nationally, to draw on their international support, and to establish a climate of disorganization and division that would facilitate the launching of a real armed counteroffensive by the reaction if the regime hesitated to assert itself.
Birth of a Power
The word is rarely pronounced in speeches or written in the press, but Chile is an increasing obsession in Portugal-both the Portugal of the bourgeoisie and the Portugal of the workers. The power above, that is, the MFA regime, is hesitant to take the economic, political, and social decisions the situation requires. And when decisions are made, they are so delayed that the problems are ten times greater. That is what happened, for example, in the recent seizures of machinery on the big landholdings as part of the agrarian reform that the peasant leagues in the south have consistently been in advance of. That is also what happened with the promised nationalization of the CUF, and the July 10 decree nationalizing the petrochemical industry, along with the ammonia, nitrate, and brewing industries. The regime is running behind events, revealing its indecision to the petty bourgeoisie, which is beginning to lean dangerously to the right.
Nor are the workers any more satisfied. The most exploited are wondering how long they will have to wait to have their most basic demands met. The most politicized and combative are questioning the actual ability of this regime to resolve the crisis that is now hitting them with full force. Occupations and strikes can no longer constitute the only response to the current problems. The only measure that can get Portugal out of the stagnation the international capitalist recession has plunged it into is socialist planning of the economy under workers control.
In face of this failure to take energetic initiatives by a regime that only a few weeks ago they would not have dared to question, the workers are now proceeding to build their own power. This power is not only the workers commissions elected to lead the struggle in a factory or to control its production, but the setting in motion of tens of thousands of workers, who are starting to implement workers control throughout key sectors of industry.
The example of the coordinating committee of the 120,000 CUF workers is already known. On July 14, the workers in the building-trades sector began to form a national council of building workers, and instructed the regional councils in Oporto, Lisbon, Coimbra, Beja, and Faro to prepare for a national congress of that sector. On the agenda: the complete expropriation of the sector, and the reconversion of production under workers control within the framework of industry-wide planning. On the same day, the first national meeting of shipbuilding workers was held in the Lisnave yard. Delegates from the workers commissions of all the maritime construction and repair companies discussed a plan to develop and reconvert the sector "under workers control."
For the first time, the barracks are concretely proceeding to organize meetings to elect assemblies of rank-and-file delegates, based on democratic guidelines that go beyond the tortuous recomendations of the MFA. Last Sunday, general assemblies in two Lisbon barracks passed motions and initiated election procedures, in many instances with the active encouragement of MFA officers. On Saturday and Sunday, People's Assemblies were held in almost all the neighborhoods, districts, and urban centers.
The coordinating committee of all the Lisbon committees tonight issued a call for a demonstration, with the open support of the assembly of the soldiers in the RALis (the former RAL 1).9
In Portugal, the governmental power is vacillating, while the power of the rank and file is taking shape. It already has a name: the People's Assemblies, which will elect a National Assembly of the workers and soldiers. This National Assembly will create a Workers and Peasants Government, which the international solidarity movement must help to defend against the blows that the reaction is already preparing against it. There is no doubt that the coming weeks will be decisive for Portugal and for the socialist revolution in Europe.
Wednesday, July 16, 1975
Notes
1. Partido Popular Democrático-Democratic People's party.-IP
2. Assembleias de Delegados de Unidade-Unit Delegate Assemblies.—IP
3. This appears to be a summary of the following three points in the "guide document": "3.3.1—The leadership of the people's organizations will be elected in plenary sessions by a hand vote. "3.3.2—In grass-roots organizations, the members elected are subject to recall by a plenary session of the same kind as the one that elected them. "3.3.3—In the People's Assemblies the members elected are subject to recall by the assemblies themselves." Other sections of the document make clear, however, that the People's Assemblies will be under the control of the military command. For an English translation of the full text of the document, see Intercontinental Press, July 21, p. 1050. — IP
4. Comando Operacional do Continente- Mainland Portugal Operations Command, the state military security forces. — IP
5. Centro Democrático Social-Social Democratic Center.-IP
6. Confederação da Indústria Portuguesa- Confederation of Portuguese Industry.—IP
7. Frente Socialista Popular-Socialist People's Front.-IP
8. Companhia União Fabril, the holding company that accounts for more than one-tenth of all corporate assets of Portugal.—IP
9. Regimento de Artilharia Ligeira No. 1-Light Artillery Regiment No. 1.-IP