The Activist

Hal Draper wrote that there has historically been “two souls” of the socialist movement, socialism-from-above and socialism-from-below. Unfortunately, the most powerful forces of the left have historically been those advocating the former. In Portugal during the 1970s, we saw the betrayal of the radical movement by the established parties of the left. Study of failed revolutions are necessary for radicals who still continue to oppose exploitation and oppression in all its forms. Unlike the derailing of the Russian Revolution and the counter-revolution in Spain, the Portuguese Revolution is one rarely studied.

A(nother) Revolution Betrayed

“Capitalism is dead in Portugal,” headlined the Times in 1975, yet within months capitalistic social relations were able to reassert themselves in the Iberian republic. The Portuguese Revolution was able to end decades of fascist rule, but was not able to build institutions able to transcend the confines of liberal democracy. The failure of the Stalinist-led Portuguese Communist Party to wholeheartedly support spontaneous worker occupations and collectivizations, as well as the success of reformist currents within the Portuguese Socialist Party resulted in the establishment of a more progressive, less repressive society, but one that did not meet the egalitarian aspirations of many of the radicals who participated in the military and civil unrest of the mid-1970s. Why progressive forces ended up indemnifying rather than replacing the rule of capital in Portugal is the topic of this brief piece.

Within a few short years during the 1970s, the Portuguese right was pushed from a position of indisputable hegemony to one of desperate opposition. Traditional accounts of the“Carnation Revolution” focus on the efforts of left-wing military elements to dismantle the corporatist state of António de Oliveira Salazar, but these histories largely ignore the revolutionary upsurge among the most dispossessed of Portuguese society. While the parties of the left maneuvered for political power, workers took control of their factories and collectivized their farms in a fashion unseen in the continent since the Spanish Civil War. The failure of the left to build a participatory state molded around this revolutionary billow would have world historic consequences.

Historical Context

The early years of the 20th century saw Portugal marked with instability. The overthrow of the monarchy in 1910 signaled the dawning of the “First Republic” period. A time of political and social liberalization, but also remarkable instability, the 16-year First Republic era saw the rise and fall of no less than 16 governments. The First Republic was brought to an end after a May 1926 coup, which would lead to eventually lead to the erection of the Mussolini-inspired “New State” under the direction of the right-wing despot, António de Oliveira Salazar.

Salazar established a one-party state and banned trade unions and strikes. Salazar’s secret police, the so-called International and State Defense Police (PIDE), attacked activists and intellectuals under the guise of anti-communism and permeated itself throughout the nation, “With the assistance of German and Italian specialists, the secret police developed into a network of information and terror throughout Portuguese society (it was estimated in the 1970s that one in six Portuguese was a PIDE informer)” (Kayman, 19). Salazar, like Franco, garnered the support of much of the Catholic Church and the economic stability his reign ushered in won him friends among Portugal’s capitalist class who welcomed the smashing of working-class trade unionism. Yet development was stiffened by Salazar’s state-interventionist policies that sought to prevents extensive industrial concentration, which Joao Antunes Guimaraes, Salazar’s minister of commerce labeled in 1945 as being, “[Responsible for] destroying family life, weakening morality and being a breeding ground for strikes and other forms of subversion.” Due to Salazar’s agrarian conservatism the development of both the capital and its, in Marx’s words, “gravediggers”, the proletariat was stunted, “…the percentage of the workforce engaged in industrial occupations increased by only 1 to 2 percent between 1920 and 1940” (Gallagher, 76). Any entrepreneurial benefits that were brought on by a market economy were limited by corporatist policies that encouraged the growth of several dominating monopolies. Reforms in subsequent decades would make Portugal more attractive to foreign capital and from 1950 until Salazar’s death the nation yielded an impressive annual GDP per capita rise at an average rate of 5.66%. This economic growth benefited foreign capital and Portuguese elites more than working people, as Portugal sported near third-world levels of infant mortality, poverty and homelessness.

In the early post-war period Portugal saw the support of the West. Portugal was the only authoritarian state among the NATO founders and like Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal was seen as an important bulwark against communism. Additionally, Salazar benefited from Marshall Plan aid despite the fact that his regime had been Axis-leaning throughout the 1930s. Portugal’s relations with the West would evolve overtime however. Salazar, in a testament to the nature of his regime, “[Played] a prominent role in destroying the effects of British sanctions imposed on the rebel Ian Smith regime from 1965 onwards” (Gallagher, 159). Portugal also butted heads with the United States who it saw as attempting to replace its role as the dominate force in many of its colonial holdings.

The bleeding wound that would eventually completely undermine Salazar’s rule would be Portugal’s efforts to maintain its grip on this colonial empire. Portuguese forces were embarrassed by Nehru’s fledgling Indian Army in retaking Goa (a Portuguese colony on the western Indian coast that did not join the rest of the subcontinent in independence in 1947) in 1961 and fifteen years of constant warfare against popular forces, backed by Communist Bloc nations, in Mozambique, Guinea and Angola drained the nation’s coffers and its morale. As early as the 1960s the seams on Salazar’s venerable “New” State were beginning to tear. Undermining the regime’s support amongst social conservatives was the “Ballet Roses” scandal in 1967 that linked members of Salazar’s inner-circle with a prostitution racket that specialized in young girls. Leftist Portuguese students also joined in the international university radicalism of 1968. In 1968 Salazar, in ill-health, would be replaced by Marcelo Caetano, a traditionalist determined to maintain Portugal’s imperialist holdings.

The change in leadership did not improve the situation. To avoid conscription of up to four years in African jungles, conscripts launched a massive campaign of draft dodging and desertion. Domestically, inflation soared to beyond 25 percent encouraging many citizens to emigrate out of the country. Due to emigration and conscription, Portugal lost half its labor force. The deteriorating condition forced the ruling class to submit to some reforms, “Premier Caetano adopted as his slogan ‘Evolution within continuity’, implying change within the broad framework of the Salazarist system. (Gallagher, 166). Some political exiles, including Mario Soares, were allowed to return and censorship laws were relaxed. The reforms, most merely token gestures, came slowly, while the nation was still bleeding (and inflicting enormous bloodshed) across Africa. Due to the limited liberalization in the labor sector however, Communist Party activists were able to expand their influence in the labor movement during this time. The working-class stirred along with the students and the military. Progressive military elements, many of whom were influenced theoretically by the explosion in left-wing thought of the 1960s and by their contacts with Marxist national liberation forces in Africa, formed the Armed Forces Movement (MFA) in 1973 and on the 25th of April, 1974, a radical segment of this movement would start a coup that would spark a revolution.

Military Coup, Worker Revolution

Military insurgents, many of whom, to the media’s delight, sported flowers in their rifle barrels, rushed into key points in Lisbon forcing Caetano’s capitulation. Despite the left-wing composition of the MFA, the movement seeking to avoid bloodshed appointed General Spinola, a conservative elite from a prominent Salazar connected family, as acting president. Caetano told Spinola on the afternoon of the 25th that, “You must take care. You must keep control. I am frightened by the idea of power loose in the streets” (Gallagher, 192). Yet the power of the masses was something that Spinola could not control. The coup marked an immediate end to the PIDE’s repression and sparked immense working class activity that “disrupted a relatively stable pattern of state-class relations” (Logan in Graham & Wheeler, 135). More than a million workers, soldiers and sailors celebrated May Day openly in processions in Lisbon for the first time in a generation. Left-wing exiles poured back into the nation from abroad, political parties and trade unions were able to organize. The Socialist Party (PS) membership rose from a mere 200 in April 1974 to 60,000, mostly white collar workers, middle-class professionals and intellectuals, by early 1975. The Communist Party’s ranks swelled as well, especially among agricultural workers in the south and in the industrial centers, benefiting from its Caetano-era organizing within the Intersindical trade union federation, “…which it effectively controlled [ as] the parties of the far left– whose initial base was the student movement of the 1960s– had only scattered grassroots support before 1974” (ibid., 144). “The Intersindical expanded from a confederation of 22 unions before the coup to more than 200 by August 1974” (ibid., 145).

Long stifled by authoritarian rule, the masses of Portugal showed their enthusiasm to organize, openly debate and assert popular power. Workers called for the Jacobin expulsion of Fascist supporters and held militant strikes and wildcat occupations for not just for increased pay and better working conditions, but for structural changes, challenging the despotic organization of the capitalist workplace. Workers formed councils and “called for the control of production or work organization to pass to worker assemblies” (ibid. 142). Students at Lisbon University refused in mass to take entrance exams, claiming that they were ideologically fascist in nature. Landless farm workers claimed the land they had toiled over for generations. The homeless asserted their right to decent lodging by organizing themselves into committees and occupying empty property. Yet this heartening revolutionary upsurge of Portugal’s marginalized was at many times combated by the leadership of the left-wing parties they had joined and empowered following the April 25th revolution.

In particular the august Communist Party that had sacrificed greatly opposing Salazar throughout the 20th century and had a rich history of labor organization garnered the trust of proletarians, despite the party’s Stalinist line. The Communist Party and Socialist Party acceded to Spinola’s overtures to them and participated in government. Spinola sought to restore order to Portugal’s economy and thus reassert normal capital-labor relations. “The government itself a major employer (through administrators who had retained their positions since the coup) to limit wage demands, to regain normal hierarchical control, and to put an end to purges by worker assemblies” (ibid., 143). The fact that the state wanted to contain labor and restore stability and growth to the economy is firmly grounded within the sphere of logic. What is harder to understand is why radicals within MFA and self-proclaimed “revolutionaries” within the PCP and the PS helped to prop up a capitalist society in turmoil rather than attempt to revolutionize it?

The PCP leaders, not unlike the Italian Communist Party during the 1960s, believed that they could patiently maneuver until they would achieve power with a combination of electoral success and “party-approved” working-class direct actions. As part of their strategy during 1974, the PCP aligned themselves with the left-wing of the MFA. The PCP leadership, like the Italian Communist Party who opposed the actions of far-left autonomous groups, did not see factory and farm occupations as the seedlings for a new society, because they held onto an authoritarian, bureaucracy-driven vision of socialism. In keeping with this conception, the Communist Party during the mid-1970s focused on maintaining its control of the labor movement and the mass media, a totalistic control it desired to spread to the whole of Portuguese society. Since the PCP was content to wage a war for hegemony within Portuguese politics (a war it ultimately lost to the PS) it could not afford to “lose support from the substantial middle-class sector of Portuguese society, which was often alienated by the mass movement” (Ferreira & Marshall, 201). Similarly, for the other non-“ultra left”, left-wing parties the PDP and most importantly, the PS, “The advance of popular power was simply not assimilable to their social democratic models. Throughout the entire process, and especially since their electoral success, these parties had fought against the advance of the movements” (Kayman, 149).

During the corporatist years, workers were encouraged to be meek and cooperate with their natural class enemies for the sake of the good of their “fatherland”. Despite the changes in rhetoric during the 1974 period, “…class relations were heavily marked by the bureaucratic manipulation of the labor movement through means not dissimilar in substance from those used by Caetano’s state” (Logan, 145). The role of the PCP in the manipulation of the labor movement was labeled as “social fascism” by the Portuguese far left. Ironically the timid actions the Marxist-Leninist PCP has little precedent within the context of Leninism’s loftiest moment, the Russian Revolution of 1917. Alvaro Cunhal, leader of the PCP, stated in 1974, “We need a union of all political movements to strengthen democracy in Portugal. United we shall crush the last of fascism and create a free democratic society.” Whereas Lenin, in a less hospitable position, proclaimed in a telegram to the Bolshevik Central Committee after the February Revolution, “Our tactic: no trust in and no support of the new government: Kerensky is especially suspect. Arming of the proletariat is the only guarantee: immediate elections to the Petrograd city council: no rapprochement with other parties.” “Menshevik”, an arcane old left slur, is fitting description for Cunhal’s stance. Cunhal, a Stalinist who supported Soviet repression in Prague in 1968 even while under the knife of totalitarianism in his home country, would prove to be both too hard line to govern with the Socialist Party and too timid to throw his support behind a far-left revolution. In the summer of 1974 until the end of 1975 the political headwinds would blow further left, but the PCP and the rest of the establishment left were unable to take full advantage of this unique political climate.

Within a month Spinola appointed the liberal (not socialist) Adelino da Palma to the position of prime minister. Carlos included the centrist Popular Democrat Party (PPD), as well as the left-wing Socialist Party, the Popular Democratic Movement (MDP) and most surprisingly the PCP. The inclusion of communists in government “deeply alarmed NATO circles, and Portugal was no longer made privy to certain classified information” (Gallagher, 197). Yet Spinola reassured them arguing that Cunhal and the powerful labor interests he commanded were less dangerous in government than outside. For his part, “[Cunhal] was anxious to present the PCP as an essentially moderate force to the nation at large, mindful of elections due to be held in 1975” (ibid.). The cooption tactic of the right-of-center Spinola was used as a tool to derail the revolutionary process, a tactic that Soarles and Cunhal played right into.

Despite the best counterrevolutionary efforts of both Spinola and the PCP, Portugal was lit ablaze by labor unrest throughout the summer of 1974. Workers demanded an increased minimum wage, a forty-hour work week and the purging of employers and managers connected with Salazarism. The PCP leadership preferred to push its cadre into positions of institutional power within the capitalist state rather than help to add more impetus to the popular movements of the oppressed challenging the state. Popular unrest coupled with ideological unrest within the diverse governing coalition led to the resignation of Palma. Spinola hoped to use this opportunity to lurch the country rightward, but he was thwarted by the progressive Armed Forces Movement Council. Pressured by the MFA, Spinola appointed Colonel Vasco Gonçalves to prime minister. Spinola believed that the wealthy, high-ranking Gonçalves would hardly govern as a radical and was shocked when time revealed that he was a committed Marxist and at the very least, a PCP sympathizer (Gallagher, 199). During this time Spinola also blundered by allowing the left-wing Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho to be commander of COPCON, an elite military command that operated in the influential Lisbon area.

Left-wing forces emboldened by popular unrest and the ability of the MFA to challenge Spinola pushed ahead with rapid decolonization. Spinola was active during this time however. Spinola and a coalition of reactionary elements, including returning white colonists from Africa, claimed to represent a “silent majority” and organized a march on Lisbon and a possible counter-coup on the 28th of September. The march was frustrated by road-blocks set up by left-wing elements and was called off. “It was the beginning of the fall of the Spinolists and the rise of the left-wing parties, especially the PCP, which had played an important role in setting up road-blocks and preventing the march on Lisbon” (Ferreira & Marshall, 188).

The defeat of Spinola saw the rise of the ultra-left and the blundering of revolutionary opportunities throughout 1975. The PS was forced left, rhetorically at least, by the political climate, proclaiming themselves to be a Marxist party in their new constitution. Soares told The Times in 1975 that his program “was not meant to correct the most unjust aspects of capitalism but to destroy capitalism” (Gallagher, 209). The MFA came under the control of its radical wing, the PCP enjoyed key positions in national and local government and Gonçalves carried out an extensive nationalization program. The radical left was further emboldened by the failure of an attempted coup by Spinola that forced the disgraced officer into exile. In this climate elections were held on April 25th, 1975, the one-year anniversary of the revolution. The PS won nearly 38% the vote, while the PPD claimed 26.4%. The PCP, which opposed the elections because its leadership expected to do poorly, garnered less than 13% of the vote. The far left won 4 percent.

Yet real revolutionary activity of 1975 occurred outside of the electoral area. During the “hot summer of 1975” landless agricultural workers seized large farms. In the southern Alentejo region, 10,000 square kilometers were collectivized. Radical workers seized the presses of the PS newspaper, República, leading the PS and PPD to withdraw from government in protest of working-class “anti-democratic” actions. Spectators in the West warily eyed the power and position of the far-left and Henry Kissinger told PS leader Soares that, “You are a Kerensky. I believe your sincerity, but you are naïve [about downplaying the prospects of radical takeover]” (673, Isaacson). The last revolutionary opportunity for the far left occurred during the Autumn of 1975 when both radical civilian and military elements were mobilized.

The government had very little control over the country in late 1975. Under conditions without the power of state coercion, radical organizing and direct action militancy, despite a well-funded right-wing terrorist campaign of bombings and assignation, were able to thrive. Huge revolutionary demonstrations occurred in the capital during August and September and there was an attempt to form a short-lived United Revolution Front (FUR) between the far-left parties and the Stalinist PCP. Radical military units known as “Soldiers United Will Overcome” (SUV) with help from elements within COPCON gave away upwards of 20,000 guns to military leftists in the autumn of 1975. The armed radicals burnt and looted the Fascist Spanish embassy in late September following the execution of five political prisoners in that country, in November, 20,000 building workers besieged the constituent assembly in the Sao Bento palace and plans were underway for a Lisbon commune. Portugal seemed set for a fundamental revolutionary takeover from popular forces or perhaps even civil war with radical military units outnumbering professional army forces in the Lisbon area. Yet the revolution fizzled out, paving the way for a shift in the balance of power from the far-left to the center-left. The failure, once again, of the PCP to commit itself on the side of popular forces was one of the major reasons for the failure. “If the PCP had deployed its forces on the side of the ultra-left on 25 November the finale might not have been so anticlimactic.” (Gallagher, 227). Yet the PCP did little, but call a few strikes during this time.

The PCP would never be able to win the battle for state power in the electoral realm. Despite their legacy of, and proficiency in, organizing, Stalinism and the discrediting of the Soviet-model always limited the mass appeal of the PCP. Yet within Portugal there was a popular mandate to move beyond bourgeois democracy. The PS enjoyed popular support by promising a parliamentary road to a socialism that transcended capitalism, while maintaining individual liberty. Yet the utopian, parliamentary socialism of the PS turned into social democracy, which due to the collapse of Keynesianism during the 70s and 80s eventually turned into neoliberalism. The real hope for libertarian socialism lay in the worker and farm occupations, the neighborhood councils and the other organs of popular power that arose during this time period. The failure of the PCP and radical elements of the PS to support the “ultra-leftists” made all these efforts for naught and ultimately would have a major impact on world history.

Legacy

Raphel Samuel said of Portugal that “arguably the best single chance of socialist revolution in Western Europe was spectacularly missed.” A revolution in one of the capitalist countries of the West would, wrote Louis Althusser, spark “A genuinely democratic popular socialism, revealing a different form of socialism from the ‘grey’ form of constraint and even repression exhibited in the Communist countries.” Portugal was vulnerable to revolution theorized British New Left intellectual Perry Anderson, because it was part of a more unsettled southern zone of European capitalism; France, Italy, Spain, Portugal and Greece. In these nations the center-left did not have the loyalty of the working-class and the bourgeoisie’s hold on power was far more tenuous. Events in Portugal coincided with intense unrest against the Papadopoulos dictatorship in Greece and preceded by only months the death of Franco in Spain. France and Italy had very militant left-wing elements that had brought their governments almost to the brink of collapse just a few years earlier. It is very conceivable that a revolutionary regime in Portugal would have at least sparked revolutionary movements throughout these other countries. Bogged down after a taxing war in Vietnam, years of civil unrest at home and the Watergate Crisis, it is hard to believe that the United States could have intervened to stop this push leftward. [Though efforts were being planned by the State Department to push for independence for the Azores and support for a separatist movement in the North in event of left-wing takeover.]

The unrest in Portugal also coincided with the collapse of the Breton Woods system and the failure of social democracy. Inflation and stagnation would soon grip the Western world and with the stagnation of central-planning and welfare capitalism, the world had no where to turn but free-market fundamentalism. Within a decade in the Eastern Bloc the Polish trade union Solidarity and other anti-bureaucratic movements would emerge. The economies of the East Asian tigers would stutter and China would embark on a program of economic liberalization. Yugoslavia would be ripped apart by imperialist-fueled nationalist flames and Gorbachev would emerge and engage in futile attempts to reform state socialism. It is fair to assert that the ultimate fate of these movements, as well as regimes in Nicaragua and Grenada, would have been different if not for the abject failure of the radical left to build a just, egalitarian society in Portugal.

Works Cited

Ferreira, Gil, and Michael W. Marshall. Portugal’s Revolution: ten years on. Cambridge:Cambridge University Press, 1986.
Gallagher, Tom. Portugal: A Twentieth-Century Interpretation. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983.
Kayman, Martin. Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Portugal. London: Merlin Press, 1987.
Logan, John R. Worker Mobilization and Party Politics: Revolutionary Portugal in Perspective. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1983.
Thompson, Duncan. Pessimism of the Intellect? A History of New Left Review. London: Merlin Press, 2007.