The Portuguese Workers' Revolution 1974-5 £3.00 by Mark Osborn-2024 -Pamphlet - 44 pages ISBN 978-1-909639-70-6
The Portuguese Workers' Revolution 1974-5 pamphlet by Mark Osborn has been re-published to coincide with the 50
th anniversary of Portugal's Carnation Revolution of 1974-5. The labour movement led by the syndicalist CGT, which belonged to the Portuguese anarchists, FARP, the Socialist-led Portuguese Worker Federation, and the small Inter-Sindical Commission led by the Communist Party entered an unholy alliance to betray the revolution. The Pabloite groups, along with the pseudo-lefts, who covered up this betrayal, acted as secondary agencies of imperialism. While purporting to examine the politics of the Portuguese worker's revolution, this pamphlet covers this betrayal up. Despite playing only a minor role in the betrayal, Workers Liberty has workers' and students' blood on its hands. The betrayal of the revolution is all the more pertinent since, had the revolution succeeded, it would have delivered a mighty blow to the solar plexus of international capital and inspired revolutionary movements worldwide.
On April 25 1974, a coup by lower-ranked army officers overthrew Portugal's fascist Estado Novo government. The coup opened the way for a massive mobilisation of the working class, which had not been seen in Portugal before. It was one of the most important revolutions since the Second World War and caught the international bourgeoisie completely by surprise. It would take nearly two years to defeat the revolution. With relatively little violence or bloodshed, the Portuguese bourgeoisie could 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 left groups.
The coup was started by young military captains in the national armed forces. In her book, Raquel Varela emphasises 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 first-hand soldiers giving the clenched fist salute and waving red carnations. Slogans such as " the soldiers are sons of the workers" and "down with capitalist exploitation" were also heard on the streets. But despite these sections of the rank-and-file soldiers won the revolution, the Portuguese bourgeoisie would still control the army.
The Carnation Revolution was the latest of a line of revolutionary movements 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 continent.'
Cliff's remarks were pure bravado as his International Socialist movement ensured 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 Stalinists and radical groups such as the IS.
Although the revolution originated in Africa, the 1974 revolution was ultimately shaped by Portugal's belated historical development. As Paul Mitchell describes in his 2024 article, "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 wealthy Portuguese families (Espirito Santo, de Melo, de Brito, Champalimaud). For example, the de Melos' monopoly company Companhia União Fabril (CUF) owned 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 lived 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 over a decade drained the Portuguese economy and labour force. Nearly half the budget was spent on maintaining more than 150,000 African troops.
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 African military campaigns was exacerbated by the world financial crisis that developed in the late 1960s.”
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 intensified grievances in the army. It 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", 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 asked to take part in the First Provisional Government in May 1974 and took part in all 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. Still, military sections 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).
The PCP was outlawed, and its leadership was imprisoned or driven into exile. Following the Sixth Congress of the Comintern, the party had been purged in 1929, 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 22.
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. 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 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.
The fact that the various popular front governments could operate with impunity is down to the role played by pseudo-Lefts like the IS. Readers need to know the history of the IS. As Mitchell points out, the “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 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.”
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 the 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 the 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”.
The reader should compare the statement above with how 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 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, destroy the Cadets' alliance, and 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 of the various Pabloite and Pseudo Left groups such as Workers Liberty. As Paul Mitchell points out, the Portuguese Revolution “would have been a mighty blow to international capital and inspired worldwide movements 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 the 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.
Further Reading
The Carnation Revolution: The Day Portugal's Dictatorship Fell Hardcover – 4 April 2024 by Alex Fernandes
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. 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."
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.
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.
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. .
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.”
