[In its June 30 issue, Rouge, the Paris daily that reflects the views of the Ligue Communiste Révolutionaire (LCR- Revolutionary Communist League), opened a public debate on the Portuguese presidential elections. It published three articles signed by leaders of the LCR presenting three different positions on this question.
[The editorial board noted that a debate had been taking place on the Portuguese election in the ranks of the LCR "which interests the entire far left and which we have delayed too long in making public." It was announced that the next plenum of the Central Committee of the LCR would adopt a resolution on this question, and that the leaderships of the United Secretariat of the Fourth International and the Liga Comunista Internacionalista (LCI- Internationalist Communist League, Portuguese sympathizing organization of the Fourth International) would also discuss it and come to a decision.
[The translation of the following articles is by Intercontinental Press.]
The Only Possible Working-Class Vote
By Gérard Filoche
The June 27 presidential election was a trap for the Portuguese working class. The two main parties that the workers gave an absolute majority in the April 25 legislative elections were able to divide and disorient the working class. The plebiscitary 61.5% vote for Banes represents a grave defeat for the vast mass movement that swept Portugal to the brink of revolution. The SP leadership's betrayal pushed hundreds of thousands of workers and poor peasants to cast their ballots for a reactionary candidate. And most of the rest of the workers' vote was divided between the other two military candidates, while the only civilian candidate belonging to the workers movement came in last.
These are the consequences of a revolution betrayed. The responsibility falls on the SP and CP leaderships, which followed a criminal policy of holding back the workers' struggles for the sake of an alliance with the military and with the bourgeois parties.
Heeding the warnings from American imperialism about the need for keeping the CPs out of European governments, the SP, the main workers party, rushed to endorse a military officer, even though last year it tried to give the impression that it was demanding that the military withdraw from power.
Isolated by this concerted maneuver of the SP, the PPD [Partido Popular Democrático-Democratic People's party] and the CDS [Centro Democrático Social- Social Democratic Center], the Communist party was forced by pressure from its ranks to run its own candidate. It could have counted on holding its own and even capturing part of the SP electoral following, if it had not had to pay the price of its long opportunist policy toward the MFA [Movimento das Forças Armadas-Armed Forces Movement] and thus toward the three military officers running. Rather than run a campaign, the CP tried to make guarantees to Eanes and negotiate a withdrawal from the race on honorable terms. The CP policy of "campaigning in retreat" increased the confusion in this election and undermined the enthusiasm that could have been aroused by the only working-class candidate.
The workers who in their great majority had understood the need to cast a class vote in the legislative elections, found it hard to make such a clear choice in the June 27 election. As a result, many of them turned toward the candidate of illusion, Otelo de Carvalho.
The fact that because of a lack of perspectives a large number of workers were dazzled and deceived by his campaign does not give Carvalho's campaign a working-class character. (This is not the first time in history that, betrayed and mocked, the workers have turned toward a leader who served as a surrogate for what they wanted.) The real problem is that extraordinary energies were tapped by the Carvalho campaign. In many cases, it was the most combative and radical sectors that constituted his electoral following. The result is all the more tragic because of this. This movement showed both the combativity and political confusion of all these sectors. The Portuguese centrists have incurred a grave responsibility by diverting all these energies toward a charismatic substitute for accomplishing the necessary and indispensable task of building a revolutionary workers party.
Otelo's success was possible only because of opportunist and ultraleftist policies in the past, sectarian impatience, and the absence of a revolutionary strategy capable of winning the masses away from the influence of the reformist leaderships and the military.
This former general, this former member of a ruling triumvirate, this man who freed Jaime Neves,' this man who endorsed the November 25 state of siege, managed to work effectively into his campaign those themes that have most disoriented the working class and its vanguard: "people- MFA alliance," "unity and discipline of the armed forces," "respect for the constitution," "mass political education by the army," "people's power," and so on. The most pernicious of such themes are "nonmost pernicious ot such themes are nonpartyism" and "people-MFA" supra-class unity, because these go directly against independent organization and political expression by the working class. Carvalho even called on the centrist groups supporting him to subordinate themselves to the GDUP [Grupos de Dinamização da Unidade Popular-Groups to Promote People's Unity] so that he could maneuver more freely over the heads of the parties and in fact against them.
Throughout his campaign, Carvalho stood for a policy of class collaboration that, although different in form, was comparable to those followed by the SP and the CP. It was the same reactionary policy that has kept the workers from drawing the lessons of two years of revolution and which is blocking any clarification.
This is why the thing to do was not to "go through the experience" with the militant and radical workers who were being led astray by their illusions and errors, on the pretext that by so doing we could gain a hearing or link up with some kind of "dynamic" or "potentiality" for "regroupment of the vanguard" (is this supposed to take place on a nonparty or multiclass basis?). In this election, which was rigged against the workers, the revolutionary Marxists could only struggle against the stream, dig their heels in, and struggle to keep the most militant workers from being drawn into the wake of a pettybourgeois candidate pretending to be radical.
This, moreover, was what was signified by the LCI's correct decision to run a Trotskyist candidate. Such a campaign would have been the best forum for opposing the various military candidates, as well as the CP candidate.
Because our attempt to run our own candidate failed, were we put in a position where the only choice was abstention? This is the only serious question.
However, such a position looks at all the candidates as "Tweedledum and Tweedledee." While the program of all the candidates, after two years of revolution, represented a reactionary policy, they nonetheless did not all have the same class position. One of them, Octávio Pato, was organically linked to one of the main workers parties. What was needed was to throw up a roadblock against Eanes. What was needed, in one way or another, was to register a class vote against the common candidate of the CDS, PPD, and SP and against Otelo's supraclass "nonpartyism." This is the only real argument for voting for Pato.
Such a position by no means represents endorsing Pato's program or his campaign. Pato was also for unity of the army, for "people-MFA" unity. His policy was to subordinate working-class independence to the MFA, and he was able to accomplish this only because the workers saw him as the spokesman of a workers party. The assessment of Pato cannot be separated from the class nature of his party. It was in spite of his policy and his noncampaign that 7% of the workers cast their ballots for the only candidate from the workers movement.
We have to seize on everything that can advance the perspective of working-class independence from the bourgeois parties, ministers, and military. To "skirt" this question on the grounds that Carvalho "got more votes" is opportunistic and right wing. Precisely because we do not underestimate the sectors taken in by Carvalho, we should fight all the harder for workingclass unity and independence. And this requires fighting for an SP-CP government without bourgeois ministers and without military officers. It is utopian to think that this fight can be bypassed by following the star of the "leader," Carvalho.
The Portuguese revolution marked a "return" to the "classical schema" of workers revolution. The strength of the working class and its traditional organizations makes it foolish to gamble on Carvalho playing a charismatic and substitutionist role.
Pato-Otelo, Two Working-Class Candidates
By A. Artous, D. Bensaid, F. Lourson, A. Robs, and Y. Salesse
The ballot choice and more broadly the decision about what kind of political fight revolutionists should wage in the Portuguese elections depended on an analysis of the objective significance of the electoral confrontations and thus on a clear characterization of the candidacies of Pato and Otelo.
In choosing to vote for Pato, our comrades of the Liga Comunista Internacionalista said that his was "the only possible class vote," because Pato was the only candidate "organically linked to the workers movement." (Rouge, June 9.) Otelo's candidacy was thus indirectly characterized as one outside the workers movement, without its class content being clearly defined (was it bourgeois or petty bourgeois?). This analysis led logically to a prediction that the workers, and especially those who up till then had placed their confidence in the SP and would refuse to go along with its support for Eanes, would express their rejection of bourgeois candidates by throwing their vote behind the "only working-class candidate," Pato. In order to maintain this analysis, it is necessary to interpret the results of the election as a political defeat, a spectacular drop in the level of consciousness of the workers in a mere two months' time, when no confrontation has occurred to change the relationship of forces between the classes since the April elections.
However, the election results have confirmed what a correct characterization of Otelo's candidacy would have enabled us to foresee. The CP candidate was incapable of becoming the rallying point for such elementary class consciousness. In fact, the CP even saw a large part of its party's own electoral base turn away from it and vote for Otelo. In voting against the bourgeois candidates, the workers issued a warning to the bourgeoisie and to the reformist leaderships of the CP and the SP: They are determined to defend their revolutionary gains and not to give up an inch of ground without a struggle. They are determined to put up a stubborn fight against the process of normalization that is under way and against the threatening advances of the democratic counterrevolution that is being directed by Soares with the willing complicity of Alvaro Cunhal.
It was wrong to see a class difference between Pato and Otelo.
Both candidacies are bourgeois in the program they put forward, and, regardless of Otelo's references to "people's power,' both remain in the framework of respect for bourgeois democracy and its institutions. By his origins and his place in society, Otelo is certainly petty bourgeois.
Is this sufficient to define where he stands in class terms and keep him from joining the camp of the workers?
The criterion for solving this question has to be sought elsewhere, in the political significance of the fight whose standardbearer he has become. Supported by the organizations of the far left alone, he has sought the votes of the workers and of them only. What backing has he gotten from any organized bourgeois or pettybourgeois current, any sector of the state apparatus, of the military hierarchy, or even of the defunct MFA? None.
On the basis of his support, to see in the Otelo phenomenon a new version of Peronism or Nasserism is inadmissible. That Otelo might tomorrow in fact play the role of a left bonaparte is, of course, not excluded, but this is not predestined. And if this happened, the responsibility would have to be placed on the errors and betrayals of the working-class leaderships.
Was the thing to do, then, to call for a vote for Otelo? Unquestionably, by voting for him many workers registered their defiance. They took a stand to the left of the CP and identified, over and above some dangerous ambiguities, with the defense of the organs of people's power and the revolutionary gains whose standard-bearer Otelo became (his final speech in Lisbon is clear testimony to this, see Rouge, June 29).
However, if we want to define the policy put forward by Otelo in terms of the currents in the workers movement, we should talk about left reformism and not centrism. Paradoxically, the breadth of his vote indicates what distinguishes his electoral support from that of the Proletarian Democracy slate in Italy, or even the traditional PSU [Parti Socialiste Unifié- United Socialist party] vote in France. Otelo's candidacy cannot therefore be equated with a united far-left candidacy, no matter how much unity and militancy coalesced around it.
Moreover, as a providential tribune comfortably positioned above the parties, Otelo could only be the momentary spokesman of a refusal and a hope. His success largely reflected the bankruptcy of the reformist workers parties. But it does not offer a start to overcoming this bankruptcy.
Otelo's success only better highlights the power that could have been brought to bear by the candidacy of a workers leader who came out clearly for an anticapitalist program of action and had the united backing of the far left, the workers commissions, and representative tradeunion structures.
Kalidas Barreto, a workers leader and a member of the left-wing of the SP, could have been such a candidate. (See the interview with him in Rouge, May 8. [A translation of the interview was published in Intercontinental Press, May 31, p. 895.])
In the absence of this sort of candidacy, the only thing that this election could clearly register was a class-against-class vote. This in fact was what was expressed by the support the workers gave Pato and Otelo.
The only thing left, then, for revolutionists to do was to put forward their own program, while strongly criticizing the programs of Pato and Otelo and calling on the workers to vote for them rather than the bourgeois candidates. And at the same time, revolutionists should have called on the workers to continue their struggle.
Notes
1. The commander of the Amadora Commandos. A soldiers committee attempted to purge him as a rightist at the start of August. He was rescued by Carvalho. As a result, he was able to crush the soldiers movement in this regiment and make it into the main striking force for the government. This unit played the leading role in crushing the November 25 attempted coup.-IP