(The following article was printed in the August 29 issue of Rouge, the weekly supported by the Ligue Communiste Révolutionnaire, French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
1. In the present stage of the Portuguese revolution, an agreement between workers organizations must obviously be sought, but it should be sought from the point of view of:
• Organizing the response to the reac tionary offensive by encouraging all forms of self-defense and the linking up of the autonomous workers and soldiers organizations. In this sense an agreement between workers organizations could constitute an important starting point.
• Ensuring the defense of the economic, social, and political gains of the working class.
• Promoting the development, extension, and centralization of the structures of selforganization (workers commissions, neighborhood commissions, people's assemblies) and replying in this way to the divisions in the ranks of the workers.
But the August 25 communiqué does not mention any concrete initiative organized in correspondence with these objectives.
2. One of the major obstacles to the advance of the revolutionary process lies in the division introduced into the working class by the policies of the Stalinist leadership of the PCP and the Social Democratic leadership of the Socialist party. The absence of concrete objectives and the total lack of initiatives toward the SP with the view to engaging in a common struggle around the objectives that are understood and shared by the SP workers amounts in practice to endorsing the sectarian policy of the PCP and cutting oneself off from an audacious policy of building a united front that is both indispensable and possible in Portugal today.
3. The "unity agreement" also implies support to the actions of the fifth provisional government, which proposes an "austerity policy" (point 1-b) in its document ("Lines of Programmatic Action and Tasks of Transition")-while in the streets and factories the workers are putting demands such as expropriation under workers control on the agenda. The government could be confronted with these demands any day.
4. At a time when the MFA is being torn apart under the effects of class polarization, the "unity agreement" calls on the MFA in the same way that it does on the workers September 15, 1975
commissions, neighborhood committees, people's assemblies, etc., and on the revolutionary parties and organizations of the workers movement, to form a "front"!
Here again it can only be interpreted as an endorsement of the PCP's reformist project for creating a "popular, democratic, and socialist front." By supporting the guide document of the people-ME A alliance, the agreement also places the workers commissions, the neighborhood commissions, and the people's assemblies within the framework of a project of integration that is in opposition to the real autonomy of the mass movement in relation to the institutions of the bourgeois state.
5. To be sure, the agreement is an indication of the changed relationship of forces that compels the PCP to look for support on the revolutionary left. In such a context, it is both possible and necessary to bring the PCP to make up its mind on the above-mentioned central objectives. The "unity agreement," however, allows the PCP to use the weight of the revolutionary left to negotiate compromises on the governmental level within the apparatus of the bourgeois state and inside the MFA. In this sense, the absence of concrete objectives together with all the references made to the document of the fifth government represent concessions to the orientation of the PCP leadership.
6. The revolutionary left and the workers vanguard must strive to set their course according to the dynamic of the mass response to the reactionary offensive, revealed by the August 20 demonstration, so as to advance the objectives mentioned in point 1.