By Keith Livesey and Paul Mitchell
Four years saw the death at age 91 of Alvaro Cunhal, leader
of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) for more than 30 years, from 1961 to
1992. This long-serving Stalinist functionary played a crucial role in helping
to save Portuguese capitalism from the revolutionary upheaval known as the
“Carnation Revolution” that followed the collapse of the Salazar-Caetano
dictatorship in 1974.
During the revolutionary upheaval, Cunhal acted as
minister without portfolio in several provisional governments and continued as
a deputy in the Portuguese Assembly of the Republic until 1987.
The death of Cunhal evoked gushing praise from Portuguese
and international leaders who recognised the threat posed to international
capitalism by the 1974-1975 revolution. Portuguese President Jorge Sampaio,
announcing a national day of mourning for Cunhal, called him “a great man whose
life is connected with the history of the twentieth century. He has his place
among us in the fight against the authoritarian regime, in the revolution and
the consolidation of Portuguese democracy.”
Cunhal was born November 10, 1913, in Coimbra, northern
Portugal, during a period of great political and social crisis. The period of
the First Republic between 1910 and 1926 witnessed eight presidents and 45
governments. A radical working class carried out a general strike in 1917 and
provoked two states of siege.
In Russia, the Bolsheviks provided the leadership for a successful revolution in October 1917. It was a powerful vindication of Leon
Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution. In opposition to the Menshevik
conception that Russia was too economically backward for socialism, Trotsky
insisted that the real dynamics of Russian development could be understood only
within the context of the world economy. Consequently, the democratic tasks
once associated with the bourgeois revolution could only be completed under the leadership of the working class, drawing behind it the rural masses, as a
component part of a socialist revolution that must be completed on the global
arena.
The Bolshevik leaders knew that the construction of
socialism in impoverished and war-ravaged Russia was dependent on successful
workers’ revolutions in Germany and other more highly industrialised countries.
It was on this basis and with the help of the Communist International
(Comintern) that the PCP was formed in 1921.
But the subsequent evolution of the PCP and all the
world’s communist parties were shaped by the rise to power of a bureaucratic
caste within the USSR under the leadership of Joseph Stalin. The orientation of
the Comintern changed radically after Lenin’s death. The unveiling of the
theory of “socialism in one country” by Stalin and Bukharin in 1924 provided
the ideological foundation for the abandonment of the programme of world
socialist revolution and the increasing subordination of the international
workers’ movement to the Stalinist bureaucracy’s defence of its own material
interests. This produced massive defeats for the working class: most
catastrophic of all was Hitler’s accession to power in Germany in 1933,
following which Trotsky concluded that the Soviet Communist Party and its
satellite parties in the Comintern could not be reformed and called for the founding of the Fourth International to carry forward the struggle for world
socialist revolution.
Stalinism and the Popular Front
Stalinism’s political disarming of the working class was
also to prove disastrous in Portugal. 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, 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.
That year marked a crucial turning point in European
history. In June, mass strikes brought France to the brink of revolution. In
Spain, in July, fascist military officers led by General Franco attempted a
coup, sparking a workers’ uprising and precipitating civil war. By imposing the
popular front policy and opposing the independent political mobilisation of the
working class against all factions of the bourgeoisie, the Comintern played a
critical role in defending Spanish capitalism, liquidating the Spanish
revolution and making possible the victory of Franco’s fascist forces.
The Portuguese Communist Party adopted the same political
line, helping to block the possibility of the Portuguese workers challenging
the Salazar regime, which was able to survive the Second World War and plagued
the country for another three decades.
Despite the suppression of the PCP—Cunhal spent a total
of 15 years in jail—the party maintained its slavish adherence to the Stalinist
two-stage theory of revolution. According to this false and disastrous
conception, during the “first stage” of the revolution, which had a
national-bourgeois character, the working class had to subordinate itself and
its class interests to supposedly progressive bourgeois forces. The “second
stage,” the socialist revolution, was put off to an ever-more-distant future.
In 1945, as a means of defending his rule in the face of
increasing social agitation, Salazar introduced an amnesty for political
prisoners and a limited relaxation of censorship. In the parliamentary election
that year, the PCP joined the Movement of Democratic Unity (MUD), a coalition
of bourgeois forces from across the political spectrum (including the extreme
right). When the MUD withdrew, claiming the elections were rigged, its
leadership was arrested.
In 1958, the PCP supported General Humberto Delgado, a prominent leader in the “New State,” when he contested the presidency in
opposition to the official National Union candidate who won the election after
widespread ballot rigging. Salazar altered the constitution in order to prevent
further direct elections to the presidency.
Cunhal became secretary general of the PCP in 1961 and
three years later formed the Patriotic Front for National Liberation (FPLN)
with the Socialist Party and liberal bourgeois figures such as Delgado.
In 1970, Cunhal reiterated the Stalinist two-stage
theory. He wrote that “at each stage of the revolution the proletariat must
have a corresponding system of alliances with different classes and layers of
the population... The proletariat’s allies for the socialist revolution are
not the same as for the national democratic revolution.”
This was a wholesale repudiation of Marxism and the
critical lessons of the twentieth century, including, above all, the Russian
Revolution. It was also a forewarning of the role the PCP would play in the
revolution that erupted a few years later.
The early 1970s witnessed a huge international crisis of
the capitalist system. US President Richard Nixon withdrew the dollar from the
gold standard and ended the Bretton Woods agreement that had underpinned the
world economy since 1944, helping precipitate a severe recession.
Although the Salazar regime had done everything in its
power to keep Portugal backwards and isolated, the country could not be
insulated from the world economy. During the 1960s, foreign investment in
Portugal trebled, mainly from the United States. By 1973, 150 companies
dominated the entire economy headed by a few very wealthy Portuguese families.
The PCP and the Junta
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).
On April 25, 1974, the MFA overthrew Salazar’s successor
Marcello Caetano, claiming it was “interpreting the wishes of the people.” A
National Salvation Council or Junta was formed, composed entirely of
high-ranking military officers, with General Antonio de Spinola, the army’s
second in command and a director of two of Portugal’s leading monopolies, as
president.
Spinola intended to limit the coup to a simple
“renovation,” but it immediately brought the masses onto the streets demanding
further change. Workers began taking over factories, offices and shops, and
peasants occupied farmlands. The revolutionary atmosphere spread throughout the
armed forces, with soldiers and sailors marching alongside the workers,
carrying banners calling for socialism.
Previously banned parties emerged from underground or
exile, including the PCP and the Portuguese Socialist Party (PSP) led by Mario
Soares. The more far-sighted members of the ruling elite knew the vital role
these parties would be called upon to play in preventing the development of the social revolution. Cunhal was brought back from exile in Moscow and given a
military welcome at the airport. He was given the second most important
ministerial post in the government, a chauffeur and a bodyguard, and the PCP
was given a five-storey building.
One of the critical questions posed by the revolution
concerned the nature of the officers’ movement, the MFA, which had adopted the
slogan of “the alliance of the MFA and the people”—a slogan never challenged by
the PCP, PSP and various “left” groups. Instead, Cunhal reached a de facto
agreement with the MFA, declaring it “is the motive force and guarantee of our
revolution.... [T]he PCP holds that the alliance between the popular movement
and the MFA is a necessary and decisive factor for the establishment of a
democratic regime, a prime guarantee of the development of the revolutionary
process.” The PCP newspaper Avante condemned those who called for a government
of “socialist option” as “completely unrealistic.”
The MFA, while it postured demagogically, represented the
armed might of the capitalist state and, potentially, at least, represented the
threat of a new dictatorship. It was intent on suppressing any independent
political activity by the working class—particularly when this threatened to
undermine the power of the army. It declared, “No political-military
organisations outside the AFM [MFA] will be permitted in the armed forces,
whether they represent parties or not, since all military personnel must be integrated
into their own movement.”
At the time, the International Committee of the Fourth
International and its Portuguese supporters, the League for the Construction of
the Revolutionary Party, demanded that the PCP and PSP break with the bourgeois
parties, the state machinery and MFA, and fight for the dissolution of the army
and the creation of workers, peasants and soldiers soviets.
Instead, the PCP’s Avelino Gonçalves joined Cunhal in the
First Provisional Government as minister of labour to enforce labour discipline
and implement the austerity programme in the MFA’s “battle for production.” The
PCP exhorted workers to “Save the National Economy” and condemned any
manifestation of independent activity by the working class.
Subsequent provisional governments, which included
Cunhal, introduced anti-strike laws, and workers who refused to obey military
orders were arrested and told they would only be reinstated “on condition they
took no further part in political activity.”
The revolution betrayed
The actions of the social democrats and the Stalinists
gave reaction a second wind and led to two further coup attempts in September
1974 and March 1975.
The government then approved an economic plan endorsed by
the MFA that excluded “the social-democratic control of the management of
capitalism,” but called for partial nationalisations, the takeover of some
large and badly managed estates, and increased foreign investment.
The PCP dutifully declared that business had been
“nationalised in the service of the people,” but the capitalist nationalisation
proposed differed little from that carried out in many Western countries after
World War II, which left economic and state power in the hands of the
bourgeoisie. Nationalisation was also a method of installing state-appointed
managers in enterprises that had been occupied by workers.
Elections were held on April 25, 1975, in which the PSP
won nearly 38 percent of the vote, the semi-fascist Popular Democratic Party
(PPD) took 26.4 percent and the PCP 13 percent. But with no sign of the
promised agrarian reforms, landless agricultural workers joined the urban
insurrectionary movement, seized the large farming estates and started
developing them collectively. The PCP called the occupations “anarchistic” and
proposed that all future occupations be controlled by the unions (which it in
turn controlled).
Between June and August 1975, following the exit of the
PSP and PPD from the fourth provisional government, the PCP and its allies were
left in virtual control of the state and the ministries. The military wing of
the PCP dominated the MFA’s Council of the Revolution.
The MFA and PCP convened a Front of Revolutionary Unity
(FUR) to “institutionalise” the “pact” between the MFA and the people. FUR was
a popular front set-up to betray the revolution at the most critical moment and
received the support of most of the left groups who claimed its so-called
“popular assemblies” were “autonomous organs of popular power” that provided “a
way forward for the revolutionary process.”
These popular assemblies, in fact, functioned to destroy
the independent character of the workers’ committees that had emerged and
prevent moves towards dual power and the creation of soviets or workers’
councils. The assemblies were vetted by the MFA and subject to military control
at all levels to ensure their “independence from all parties.” No political
organisations were to be permitted in the armed forces except the MFA itself.
When these measures proved unable to contain working
class resistance, the PCP-dominated fifth provisional government resigned in
order to avoid a direct revolutionary challenge to bourgeois rule, along with
Prime Minister General Vasco Gonçalves, a leading member of the MFA and a
figure closely associated with the PCP. The PCP, along with the PSP and PPD,
joined a sixth provisional government—headed by Admiral Jose Baptista Pinheiro
de Azevedo—which immediately circulated plans for austerity and repression.
The crisis reached fever pitch. The sixth government and
the Council of the Revolution were opposed by so many sections of society that
a situation of dual power existed. But within days, the army moved in to
dismantle barricades and disarm workers and soldiers with scarcely a shot being
fired. “Rank-and-file” military organisations, which in the previous weeks had
mobilised tens of thousands in demonstrations, dissolved in the face of some
200 commandos.
A new constitution was proclaimed on April 2, 1976, and
elections for a new parliament, the Assembly of the Republic, led to a PSP
victory. Almost immediately, Soares turned to the International Monetary Fund
and implemented a structural adjustment programme at the behest of big
business.
The Portuguese bourgeoisie weathered the revolution
thanks to the betrayal of Cunhal’s PCP and its left hangers-on, who tied the
working class to the bourgeois parties, the state machine and the MFA. Had the
Portuguese revolution triumphed, it would have been a mighty blow to
international capital and inspired social movements developing throughout the
world in the 1970s. A New York Times editorial on February 17, 1975, gives some
indication of the crisis at the time, declaring “a communist takeover of
Portugal might encourage a similar trend in Italy and France, create problems
in Greece and Turkey, affect the succession in Spain and Yugoslavia and send
tremors throughout Western Europe.”
However, neither Cunhal nor the PCP had any intention of
mounting a “communist takeover.” Cunhal’s political conceptions, which were
essentially those of a Portuguese petit-bourgeois nationalist, were made plain
in an interview he gave to Quaderni Comunisti in 1995. He absolved Stalinism
and himself for the betrayals of the working class in the twentieth century. He
thought that “capitalism’s potentialities were underestimated and socialism’s
potentialities overestimated” and that “the way ahead may not lie in attempts
to define a world-wide strategy for communists.” He blamed Mikhail Gorbachev
“as the number one culprit for that great historic disaster which was the
USSR’s collapse and disintegration.” He attacked the European Union from the
right saying, “The major consequences of European integration for Portugal are
very serious. With a policy of national capitulation, the right wing government
sacrifices Portuguese interests to foreign interests.”
Today, the PCP retains its influence within the largest
Portuguese trade union federation, the General Confederation of Portuguese
Workers, which has played an invaluable role in imposing austerity measures
promulgated by one government after another. Such is Cunhal’s real legacy.
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