It would take nearly two years to defeat the
revolution. With relatively little violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese
bourgeoisie was able to take back power at the expense of a few limited reforms.
The popular front government established by the revolution which contained a
significant Communist Party presence under the leadership of Álvaro Cunhal handed over power without a
murmur from the numerous Pseudo lefts groups.
The coup was started by young military captains in
the national armed forces. Varela goes out of her way to emphasise that these
were only captains as if this made them unconscious socialists.
Rank and file soldiers did indeed come over to the
revolution as experienced by Bob Light who saw at first-hand soldiers' giving
the clenched fist salute and waving red carnations' (p.48). Slogans such as "
the soldiers are sons of the workers", "down with capitalist
exploitation" were also heard on the streets.[1] But
despite these sections of the rank and file soldiers won to the revolution the
army would still be controlled by the Portuguese bourgeoisie.
Varela’s position regarding this revolution is essentially
Pabloite. Pabloism was a tendency that came out of the post-war period, as this
document explains "The complexities of the postwar period found expression
in the form of a revisionist tendency within the Trotskyist movement that
adapted to the bourgeois and petty-bourgeois organisations. The revisionists
came to see the Stalinist and Social-Democratic tendencies, as well as
petty-bourgeois nationalist and radical movements, not as political obstacles
to the independent mobilisation of the working class, but, rather, as
alternative instruments for realising socialism. It was not, therefore, a
matter of opposing to these organisations the independent perspective of the
Fourth International, but rather of transforming the Fourth International into
a pressure group on the existing leadership of the working class and national
movements. The revisionists endowed the Stalinists and bourgeois nationalists
with a historically progressive role, rejecting Trotsky's insistence on their
counter-revolutionary character. This revision of the perspective upon which
the founding of the Fourth International had been based was advanced initially
by two leading figures in the post-war Trotskyist movement in Europe, Michel
Pablo and Ernest Mandel."[2]
As Varela describes in the book, The Portuguese
Revolution became a pole of attraction for Pabloite and Pseudo Left
organisations throughout Europe. Ten thousand foreign pseudo lefts and Stalinists
visited Portugal during and after the revolution.
The Carnation Revolution was the latest of a line of revolutionary
movements that were betrayed by Stalinism and Pabloism. Beginning in May 1968
in Paris, the 1969 'hot autumn' in
Italy, strike waves in Germany and Britain in the early 1970s and the struggle
in Greece against military rule in 1973-4. International Socialist leader Tony
Cliff argued that 'Portugal, the weakest link in the capitalist chain in Europe
can become the launching pad for the socialist revolution in the whole of the
continent' (p.220).
Cliff's remarks were pure bravado as his International
Socialist movement made sure this did not happen. Instead of being 'the launching pad of the socialist
revolution', the defeat of the Portuguese revolution paved the way for various neoliberalism
regimes. Varela’s book is a political amnesty for the betrayals of the Stalinist's
and radical groups such as the IS. Varela also a member of the IS is reticent, to
say the least about pointing out important lessons from the defeat.
Revolution’s
Origin
Although the revolution's origin was in Africa the 1974
revolution was ultimately shaped by Portugal's belated historical development. As Paul Mitchell describes in his 2004 essay "By
1973, there were some 42,000 companies in Portugal—one-third of them employing
fewer than ten workers—but about 150 companies dominated the entire economy.
Most were related to foreign capital but were headed by a few very wealthy
Portuguese families (Espirito Santo, de Melo, de Brito, Champalimaud). The de
Melos' monopoly company Companhia União Fabril (CUF), for example, owned large
parts of Guinea-Bissau and produced 10 per cent of the gross national
product. Despite this
industrialisation, a third of the population still worked as agricultural
labourers, many in large estates or latifundia. An estimated 150,000 people
were living in shantytowns concentrated around the capital, Lisbon. Food
shortages and economic hardship—wages were the lowest in Europe at US$10 a week
in the 1960s—led to the mass emigration of nearly 1 million people to other
European countries, Brazil and the colonies.
The 1960s also saw the emergence of liberation movements in the
Portuguese African colonies of Angola, Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Fighting
three guerrilla movements for more than a decade drained the Portuguese economy
and labour force. Nearly half the budget was spent on maintaining more than 150,000
troops in Africa.
He continues “Compulsory military service lasting for
four years, combined with poor military pay and conditions, laid the basis for
grievances and the development of oppositional movements amongst the troops.
These conscripts became the basis for the emergence of an underground movement
known as the "Movement of the Captains." The continuing economic
drain caused by the military campaigns in Africa was exacerbated by the world
economic crisis that developed in the late 1960s.[3]
In the 1970s, the Portuguese ruling elite confronted
a massive strike wave at home and uprisings in the colonies. Nearly one half of
the national budget was spent keeping 150,000 troops abroad fighting the
national liberation movements in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea Bissau.
Compulsory military service combined with low pay to intensify grievances in
the army and stimulated an oppositional movement amongst the troops known as
the "Movement of the Captains," which later developed into the Armed Forces
Movement (MFA).
The Armed Forces Movement (MFA) or "movement of
the Captains" so glorified by Varela became an important bulwark against
revolution once it was in power alongside the PCP. To stop the revolutionary
mobilisation of the working class, the MFA invited the Communist Party (PCP)
into government.The Communist Party was invited to take part in the
First Provisional Government in May 1974 and took part in all the six
provisional governments. These governments were popular fronts containing trade
unions, the Socialist Party, the Church, and the upper hierarchy of the armed
forces.
The Socialist Party and the Church initially did not
want the Communists in the government, but sections of the military knew the
PCP would be useful in controlling rank and file soldiers and the working class. As Varela, herself points out “'The Portuguese
Communist Party was prepared to abandon its radical army supporters (and a
great many others) in exchange for a continued stake in government. The
military left had become a burden on the Communist Party because its
performance undermined the balance of power with the Nine and peaceful
coexistence agreements between the USA, Western Europe and the USSR. Some 200
soldiers and officers, plus a handful of building workers, were arrested'
(p.246).
Cunhal
and the Early Days of the PCP
Varela has political amnesia regarding the early
history of the PCP and its leader Alvaro Cunhal. Economic instability and an
insurgent working class had produced a right-wing coup in 1926, and by 1933,
influenced by Mussolini's fascism in Italy, the formal declaration of an
authoritarian "New State" by Prime Minister Antonio de Oliveira
Salazar. The fascist National Union (UN) party was made the only legal party,
and independent trade unions and strikes were outlawed. Salazar established
strict censorship and created a vicious secret police force.
The PCP was outlawed and its leadership imprisoned or
driven into exile. The party had been purged in 1929, following the Sixth
Congress of the Comintern, and Bento Gonçalves, who had only joined the
organisation the previous year, was installed as General Secretary.
Cunhal joined the PCP in 1931 whilst studying law at
university and left for the Soviet Union to attend a congress of Communist
youth in September 1935. It was at this time that the Stalinist bureaucracy began
to advance its policy of building "popular fronts" with "democratic"
bourgeois governments and liberal-reformist elements worldwide supposedly to
combat fascism and defend the USSR. Cunhal, who came to epitomise the policy of
popular frontism in Portugal, became the leader of the youth organisation and
joined the Central Committee of the PCP in 1936 at the age of 22.
MFA
One of the most important questions of the revolution
concerned the political nature of the MFA and its "armed intervention"
unit, the Continental Operations Command (COPCON—Comando Operacional do
Continente)
COPCON was composed
of 5,000 elite troops. Its leader was Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho. In order to
cover over its real intentions, the MFA said it was in favour of an "alliance
of the MFA and the people."
The PSP, PCP and Pseudo left groups never challenged
this blatant lie. Instead, the PCP declared the MFA was a "guarantor of
democracy" and developed close relations with Carvalho, General Vasco
Goncalves and other members of the Junta.
SWP
and the Popular Front
The fact that the various popular front governments
could operate with impunity is down to the role played by Psuedo Lefts like the
IS. Readers need to know the history of the IS as Mitchell points out “International
Socialist (IS) organisation (today's Socialist Workers Party in Britain) was
represented by the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP—Partido
Revolucionário do Proletariado). The founders of the International Socialists
had broken from the Fourth International in the 1940s, claiming that the
Stalinist bureaucracy in the Soviet Union and its satellites was a new class in
a new social system (state capitalism). This not only granted the Stalinist
bureaucracy a certain legitimacy, not due to its parasitic character, but
expressed a prostration before the post-war stabilisation of imperialism. The
IS' radical phraseology, its glorification of trade union syndicalism combined
with a semi-anarchist stance, served only to conceal its refusal to challenge
the political domination of the working class by the social democratic and
Stalinist bureaucracies.[4]
The promotion of the popular front by the IS had
nothing in common with orthodox Marxism. The following is its analysis of the
popular front “Poder Popular (popular
power), underpinned by the Aliança Povo-MFA (an alliance of the people and the
MFA), emerged as the ideology for the MFA. It set out to unite the military
with workers, land workers, tenants and slum-dwellers. The military made use of
their prestige acquired through carrying out the coup against the regime.
Popular power was perceived as the living alternative to the bourgeois focus on
parliamentary democracy. This is not to say that army and workers were always
united, but the impact of the people's movement on the armed forces, and vice
versa, came to be an integral part of the Portuguese story. But the slogan "Unity
of the people and the MFA" was double-edged: not only did the people
influence the army, but also the revolutionary movement's reliance upon the
radicals in the army was to be part of its undoing. [5].
The reader should compare the statement above with
the way Leon Trotsky described and evaluated the Popular Front:: "The
question of questions at the moment is the Popular Front. The left centrists
seek to present this question as a tactical or even as a technical manoeuvre,
so as to be able to peddle their wares in the shadow of the Popular Front. In
reality, the Popular Front is the main question of proletarian class strategy
for this epoch. It also offers the best criterion for the difference between
Bolshevism and Menshevism. For it is often forgotten that the greatest
historical example of the Popular Front is the February 1917 revolution. From
February to October the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who
represent a very good parallel to the ‘Communists' [i.e., Stalinists] and the
Social Democrats, were in the closest alliance and were in a permanent
coalition with the bourgeois party of the Cadets, together with whom they
formed a series of coalition governments. Under the sign of this Popular Front
stood the whole mass of the people, including the workers', peasants' and
soldiers' councils. To be sure, the Bolsheviks participated in the councils.
But they did not make the slightest concession to the Popular Front. They
demanded to break this Popular Front, to destroy the alliance with the Cadets,
and to create a genuine workers' and peasants' government."
To conclude, the fact that after 45 years of the
revolution, its “memory” is still in dispute is down to the treacherous role by
the various Pabloite and Pseudo Left groups. Varela’s book continues the collective
amnesia regarding the role of these groups. This book airbrushes them from the
historical record.
Varela’s final analysis of the defeat of the Portuguese
is as lame as her pollical amnesia over the radical groups apparently at her book
launch Varela was heard to say that the Portuguese ruling class was forced
to give up its rings risk losing its fingers.
That the Portuguese bourgeoisie was able to keep its still
vast collection of rings and fingers was down to the betrayal by the PCP and
its radical hangers-on who tied the working class to the bourgeois parties, the
state machine and the MFA.
It is only fitting to leave the last word to the one
organisation that fought for the success of the Portuguese Revolution which in
the words of Paul Mitchell “would have been a mighty blow to international capital
and inspired the movements developing throughout the world in the 1970s. Only
the International Committee of the Fourth International and its Portuguese
supporters, the League for the Construction of the Revolutionary Party (LCRP),
called for the PCP and PSP to break from the bourgeois parties, the state
machine and MFA. It demanded the dissolution of the army and the creation of
workers', peasants' and soldiers' soviets in opposition to the MFA and its
proposals for a Constituent Assembly.”
[1]
https://isj.org.uk/so-much-freedom/
[2]
The
Historical and International Foundations of the Socialist Equality Party—Part 6-
https://www.wsws.org/en/articles/2008/10/hist-o04.html
[3]
Thirty
years since the Portuguese Revolution Part 1
By
Paul Mitchell 15 July 2004- wsws.org
[4]
Thirty
years since the Portuguese Revolution—Part 3
Paul
Mitchell-17 July 2004
[5] https://isj.org.uk/so-much-freedom/
