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[1]
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.[2]
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.
