Dean Ashenden is an independent marxist who visited Portugal on two occasions last year.

Transcription

1 Where is the Portuguese Revolution heading? by Dean Ashenden Lisbon in Decem ber was a city very different from the one I had visited in August. In the Rossio (the main square) the throngs of revolutionaries and political connoisseurs had been replaced by even larger throngs of u n e m p lo y e d, re s tle s s A n g o la n s. T he Mercedes and BMWs are appearing on the streets again, th e ir ow ners now safe from the cries of Fascist! w hich had put th e ir status sym bols up fo r sale or in the garage fo r a year or more. It may be too soon to m ourn over the dead body of the Portuguese revolution. Yet it is hard to hope that the left in Portugal can recover from its now desperate situation. For m onths the political crisis persisted, an impasse w hich everyone knew w ould last only so long as neither side felt co nfident that it could knock out the o th e r... or w hile neither side made a slip, an error w hich, however slight, w ould allow the opponent to tip the balance, release the deluge and surge to power. The paratroopers made that slip on Novem ber 25 and w ithin hours the MFA was purged of 100, perhaps 200, left w ing officers. In th e ir place have stepped the released prisoners of March 11 - S pinola s mistake. Dean Ashenden is an independent marxist who visited Portugal on two occasions last year. Left wing journalists have been sacked, radical adm inistrators and managers in the state and the nationalised industries replaced, and the leaders of parties left of the PCP seem to have escaped only because the BBC announced their arrests before they were, in fact, secured. The right is m aking the most of its luck, spurring on a backlash w hich threatens to stop well to the rig h t of even the PS. The PCP is cowed, and only 18 m onths after em erging from its long clandestine battle against fascism is talking once again of the construction of an a nti-fascist fro n t as the main task. If the w orking class of P ortugal has been defeated, it w ill be a bitter defeat not only for the Portuguese, but fo r w orking people and the socialist movem ent everywhere. There will be an im m ediate consequence fo r the developing struggle in Spain. In the capitalist west the defeat must increase fears that the econom ic crisis is producing a w orld-w ide swing to the right. One of the most exhilarating things about the events in Portugal was the apparently irresistible speed w ith w hich anti-fascism became a movem ent fo r socialism. Most palpable to the visitor was the radical attack on one of the cruellest consequences of fascism -

2 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW NO the massive inequalities in know ledge and understanding. The revolution was a giant classroom. I was told It used to be football - now it s politics!" I met w orkers w ho were illiterate only three years ago, and w ho are now e le cte d re p re s e n ta tiv e s o f th e ir w orkm ates on the W orkers Com m issions, w ho can discuss and analyse th e ir own situation and its place in the revolution w ith an insight and fluency which w ould put most of us to shame. Fascists were purged from top jobs in governm ent industry and finance. Basic dem ocratic freedom s were im plem ented. A rash of nationalisation rem oved up to 60 per cent (estimates vary) of the most basic e c o n o m ic in s titu tio n s fro m th e d ire c t com m and of capital. The m ost exploited s e c tio n s o f th e w o rk in g cla ss g a in e d considerable increases in th e ir real wage. Wage differentials have been reduced, and intricate job hierarchies have been greatly sim plified. W orkers' assem blies and their com m issions have greatly reduced the untram m elled control of m anagem ent. Trade unions have been unified in Intersindical. In education this attack on structure has gone further than in any other social sphere, w ith b a sic re la tio n s b e tw e e n te a c h e rs and students, student and student, learner and know ledge com ing in fo r radical criticism and in some cases, revision. The m ilita ry went far tow ards changing its class loyalties, and in the process brought into question both its own structure and its role in society. These spectacular gains were made in the wake of the sudden and com prehensive collapse of the old regime. The old regim e paid above all fo r its failure to resolve the African wars. But why could n t the Caetano regim e solve the colonial question? This is no place to try to provide a com prehensive answer, but it can be said that by 1974 Portuguese fascism could not change itself, or Portugal or Portugal's fatal im perial em brace. It had become both internally rigid and badly isolated. It was isolated not ju st from the great bulk of the population, but w ith in its own class and its small elite of educated servants and mendicants. The Caetano regim e had become a clique, and m aintained itself in power only because extensive repression was effective in the political confusion and inertia of a society cloistered fo r 40 years. Unable to reform Caetano and his henchm en were swept away at the last hour by people of their own kind. The insurgents of A pril 25 acted fo r fear that if they d id n t the fate of the Caetano clique w ould be the fate of th e ir entire class. It very nearly was. The Portuguese ruling class - a hybrid of bourgeois and landed aristocracy - was badly discredited. When it abandoned its entrenched m ethods o f fascist rule it had no other to replace it. There was no new program. There were no new men organised to take over. There was only a space, a political vacuum, and into it rushed th e m y ria d (a n d s o m e tim e s c h a rla ta n ) representatives of contenders fo r power: bourgeoisie; petit bourgeoisie; w orking class; peasantry; landow ners; im perialists. When Spinola fled to Spain it seemed that the radical insurgents were perhaps on the eve of becom ing the w orking class in power. But the Portuguese ruling class had enorm ous reserves to fall back upon. The first of these was the m onopoly it had held on the political and social life of the country and the m yriad links w hich this had forged between its members. Portugal is a small country, and Lisbon a small capital. The elite of the country w ent to school together, g o to d in nertogeth er, interm arry, meet in select restaurants, hear of each others movem ents, share business interests and political connections. They are both intim ately organised and effortlessly exclusive, and the com bination produces a bizarre brand of politics. For example, I was at a dinner party in Lisbon three weeks ago where tw o of the eight guests had been in prison under the Caetano regime and another had been im prisoned by Salazar, w hile a fourth was a close personal friend of Caetano w ho had ju st returned from visiting him in Brazil. The hostess was the daughter of a form er President of the Salazarist in dustria lists syndicate and yet had w orked closely w ith the PCP at her workplace. They all knew each other well and got along fam ously. A nother strength is the Church. For a tim e the C hurch seemed in eclipse, overwhelm ed by more m odem ideological apparatuses in the hands of its enemies. But now that the radical left has lost control of the media, the C hurch - an in stitution w hich has remained absolutely untouched by the le ft-is resurgent. The sacking of the PCP offices in the north is

3 16 WHERE IS THE PORTUGUESE REVOLUTION HEADING? only the tip of a vast iceberg of social pow er w hich is undividedly and unhesitatingly dedicated to reaction, and here lies no small part of the reason why the apparent hegem ony of left ideas over the past year or so has now revealed itself as relatively superficial and fragile. The State has rem ained largely intact. Perhaps m ost centrally the armed forces - nearest o f all state instrum ents to going over" - are now returning to the fold. It is hard to see how the MFA can find its way back to even the am biguous ideology and strategy o f a few m onths ago, m uch less to the sig n ifica nt pow er w hich it held w ith in the armed forces. The return of the forces to the barracks is th e ir return to the service of the bourgeoisie - nothing more, nothing less. The civil arms of the State also rem ained relatively unscathed. Of course, there were many changes in the personnel, but it is now clear how transient these changes are when the political clim ate w hich sustained them has gone. O f the old apparatuses, only the param ilitary PIDE was dism antled. The rest stands, and it may be that in some ways the internal coherence of the state m achine has been strengthened. The connections between the political sphere and the bureaucracy, fo r example, are now much more vital than they were in C aetano s last days. It seems likely that nationalisation w ill strengthen relations between the econom y and the State w hile at the same tim e m aintaining a capitalist organisation of production. Finally, the ruling class of Portugal has had a trum p card to play: foreign capital, both actual and potential. The last decade of fascism was open slather fo r the m ultinationals in Portugal. As in Australia they com m and both a significa nt p roportion of the econom y as a w hole and the most crucial sectors of it, ranging from 100 per cent of oil refining to 30 per cent of m anufacturing. This has all been taboo in the w elter of nationalisations, b u tth a t hasn t stopped extensive sabotage ranging from w ithdraw al from Portuguese operations to denial of credit, sales, and spare parts. If this is the stick, there is also the carrot, disguised as econom ic aid fo r dem ocracy and held out by EEC politicians fo r th e ir m ultinationals and m onopolies. So these were the forces arrayed against a rising and, fo r a time, threatening w orkin g class. W hat of the w orking class, its allies, and its organisation? Did the people of Portugal ever have a sporting chance? If so, w hy have they lost? The PCP rem ains at the centre of the organised w orking class. Like a magnet, its pow er of attraction and repulsion has imposed its shape on Portuguese politics. It is im possible to m istake the central place w hich the PCP has occupied in the m inds of the Portuguese w orking class and of its enemies. To understand w hat has happened to the revolution, it is best to begin w ith the PCP. The PCP emerged on A pril 25 as the only organised left political force. Its 5,000 cadres were well trained and placed to conduct the saneamento in the unions, local governm ent and the state machine. It had the prestige and respect earned in 40 years of dedicated and unflinching resistance to fascism. One of the C om m unist P arty s claim s in the run-up to the April 1975 elections, reports A ntonio de Figueiredo, was that th e ir 247 candidates for the C onstituent Assem bly had served between then 440 years behind bars. It was this w hich drew over 90,000 new members into the Party in the flo o d -tid e of Revolution. A m ongst these was Maria Velho da Costa, one of the "three M arias whom I met on each of my visits to Portugal. Da Costa was fiercely proud that the Party had drawn the best of the young workers, intellectuals and w riters into its ranks. But if it attracted the best" it has certainly not retained them. Many of the dozen or so left political groupings in Portugal had their origins in dissent or expulsion from the Party, some dating back to splits o rig in a tin g in the 20th Congress, others m uch m ore recent-. Some of those who joined after A pril 25 are leaving again. T ogether w ith those whose experience of the Party was earlier and longer, th e y are c o n s tru c tin g an in c re a s in g ly system atic and te llin g critique of the Party. It is a critique w hich draws in various degrees and ways on Maoist, T rotskyist and anarchist traditions. Of course, there is nothing like a consensus. N or is there a new, rival centre of gravity fo r the organisation o f the w orking

4 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW NO class. But there are a num ber of them es w hich run consistently through criticism of, and opposition to, the PCP. It is criticised fo r attem pting to dom inate or even m onopolise th e re v o lu tio n and fo r m is c o n c e iv in g revolution as a process w hich can be controlled and directed from above. It has been a tta c k e d as c a u tio u s, d e fe n s iv e, conservative, and as being m anipulative and anti-dem ocratic. Perhaps no part of the PCP practice has drawn quite so much fire as its attitude tow ards the various organs of people s pow er. The Party had been lukew arm tow ards proposals for w ork-site and neighbourhood com m ittees when they were first floated by the left w ing of the MFA. The PC did not come out against the new organs, though many who were in contact w ith it reported that the Party s cadres were hostile to the councils, especially where they seemed to threaten the hegem ony of syndicates and m unicipal governm ent controlled by the PCP. When the C ouncils began to take hold (the critics m aintain) the Party moved in, using its very considerable organisational and political skills to achieve contro l w herever possible, and often in ways w hich attracted h o stility and active opposition from w orkers and residents. It does seem incontestable that office has been the first p rio rity of the PCP. This has not only generated w idespread h o stility and m istrust but denied the Party and the revolution some crucial developm ents. The Party has num bers and energies w ith o u t rival in w orking class politics, or indeed.in Portugal as a whole, yet so far as I could see those energies have been spent in a narrow and eventually stifling way. The PCP has not been prim arily concerned to agitate, organise and educate. Its concern to dom inate and control, to operate from above has had the paradoxical effect of reducing its im pact and restricting its influence. In consequence of its choices it has m a in ta in e d its s tre n g th as a p o litic a l organisation but has failed to spark off a selfgenerating and self-expanding m ovem ent across a wide fro n t. >f the Portuguese revolution. For example, the PCP has not sponsored a w om en s movement. I asked Velho da Costa what her fem inism had brought to the w orking class struggle. N o th in g, she answered. She w ent on to explain that the co n dition of the country both now and when she joined the Party left the w om en s movem ent very low down on her list of priorities. She refuses to discuss the w om en s movem ent. Yet w om en are of quite central im portance in the w orking class itself. Women make up an im portant p ro p o rtion of the "new " w orking class w hich is badly organised and low in consciousness, and w om en are concentrated in some of the most im portant sectors of Portuguese industry, especially in electronics and textiles. They are discrim inated against in their conditions and wages, and oppressed in their lives both inside and outside the factories. The PCP has no policy to deal w ith the special problem s and condition s of women, either in the w orkforce or outside it. It has not been notably purposeful orsucce ssfu l in stim ulating and co-operating w ith struggles fo r better education, health and housing. Perhaps m ost dam agingly, there has been no policy at all to w in over, or at least neutralise, the peasantry in the north of the country. Finally, there are many critics w ho m aintain that the PCP has been the disciplinarian of the labor force, that it has stifled legitim ate struggles, opposed legitim ate strikes - even political strikes - and has thus slowed the developm ent of the consciousness and organisation of the w orking class. The PCP has argued that m any strikes have been the w o rk o f le f t i s t a d v e n tu r e r s, a g e n ts provocateurs, and w orkers in already overprivileged sectors. It has insisted that w orkers lim it their dem ands to those w hich the econom y can bear. It was often more prepared to face up to P ortugal's econom ic p lig h t than some of its critics. B u t in p ra c tic e a p o lic y has been im p le m e n te d b y a p a r ty w h ic h has com prom ised itself in many eyes by holding, fo r the most revolutionary period, the M inistry of Labor. These aim s have been pursued by a party w hich has been seen by many as encouraging o r discouraging strikes, as the case may be, according to its own im m ediate interests; w hich has had an am biguous attitude tow ards o verthrow ing capitalism ; and w hich has often been seen to oppose other form s of w o rkers struggle - such as the w orkers com m issions. This is where one is m ost likely to hear criticism of the PCP over its "M oscow C onnection". The PCP has been vulnerable to the pressure of a great pow er w hich is, in the

5 18 WHERE IS THE PORTUGUESE REVOLUTION HEADING? nature of things, more concerned to fu rth e r its own foreign policy interests than to advance the Portuguese revolution. The PCP has lost heavily from the suspicion that it has tailored its policies, w hether reluctantly or not, to suit the strategies of Brezhnev s detente. This has furthered long-standing fears that the PCP w ould not end foreign dom ination but w ould substitute Russian control fo r western exploitation. In the heat and dust of the day-to-day revolutionary situation there is a tendency to reify the PCP, to see it as a force w ith entirely its own logic, an im petus generated by particular individuals and/or ideologies or ideas. Both its cadres and its critics tend to overlook the ways in w hich the PCP and its policies have been shaped by its history and by the course of events since A pril 25. It is often forgotten that the long years o f underground struggle against fascism required a heavily centralised, tig h tly disciplined party, and that the old regim e collapsed alm ost w ith o u t w arning, w ith o u t a chance fo r the habits and attitudes of 40 years' resistance to be unlearned, and fo r the quite d ifferent skills and capacities of "open p o litics" to be learned. The PCP is not an independent force standing outside or above Portuguese history, but a product and reflection of it. To ask the im portant question C ould the w orking class and its allies have carried through a successful socialist revolution? is, in this discussion, to ask how d ifferent things w ould have been under a different kind of leadership. This is, I think, a sensible and im portant question if we are to learn from the Portuguese experience, but it should not be an excuse fo r m oralistic outbursts, fo r blam ing" the PCP - a now popular pastim e in some m aoist and tro tskyist circles. Q uite aside from anything else, a m oralistic approach usually assumes an answer to the central question - it assumes that, yes, of course there w ould have been a socialist revolution if only it w eren't fo r the PCP. C ertainly the obstacles to a successful socialist revolution were form idable. The Portuguese w orking class has a histo ry of organisation running over most of this century, but it was not strongly placed when Caetano fell. It was organised into syndicates w hich fragm ented the class and integrated it both stru ctu ra lly and ideologically into the S tate. L ong years o f a n ti-c o m m u n is t propaganda and C atholic in d o ctrin atio n left tne w orxing ciass laeoiogicany weax. a considerable proportion of w orkers were firstgeneration members of this class, com ing to the new factories of international capital after boyhood in the countryside and young m anhood in the army. These men were vulnerable to all the reactionary propaganda w hich surrounded them, and even more so were the many w om en w ho have recently left home and village fo r the factories. A nother m ajor advantage fo r capitalism is the huge num ber of Portuguese guest w orkers in W este rn E u ro p e. U p to th re e m illio n Portuguese live outside Portugal, leaving only eight m illion in the country. The guest w orkers" are driven by the poverty at home and the high levels of consum ption around them, and cannot learn as do th e ir fellow s at home from the struggles of the past tw o years. The rural population is still large, and is deeply divided between the rural proletariat of the south and the sm all-holding peasantry of the north. The petit bourgeoisie remains, in an under-developed industrial society, num erous and pow erful, its ranks sw elled by 300,000 refugees from Angola. The sizeable stake, both direct and indirect, of EEC and US capital gives the relatively weak and undeveloped Portuguese bourgeoisie a strength far beyond its own, and the C hurch is strong and well organised. It may seem, then, that the "conservatism of the PCP was, in fact, responsibility, a sober recognition of the possibilities and of the dangers of trying to wish them away. This is the e xplicit claim of the PCP, especially in the wake of the disastrous events of Novem ber 25. I met PCP cadres who were convinced that here above all was the vindication of the leadership s policy; d id n t the paratroopers' disastrous failure prove th a tth e revolution was not yet on the agenda? So far as I can see, this begs the question, namely: how far has the P arty s policies of the preceeding 18 m onths contributed to a situation where the left could be so devastatingly defeated? It seems to me unlikely though not im possible, that a socialist revolution could have been carried through in the im m ediate afterm ath of the collapse of fascism but the possibility was probably greater than the PCP allow ed, and ought to have been discussed m ore w idely and

6 AUSTRALIAN LEFT REVIEW NO seriously than it appears to have been. But the "top dow n approach of the PCP is both unsuited to a real exploration of the potential fo r revolution and to m aking the most of that potential. It is true that a strategy w hich m ight be sum m arised as "revolution from below " runs the risk of populism, of adventurism, of illcoordinated or ill-tim ed actions w hich could cost the w orking class dear. But can the PCP claim that its policies have avoided or prevented precisely these dangers? W hat's more, the Party's policies have, I fear, left the w orking class m arkedly less able to defend itself now that it has lost the initiative, and less able to press on, in the new conditions, w ith attacking capitalism and of creating socialist practice and ideas in that struggle. What w ill happen in Portugal now? It seems unlikely that the w orking class w ill be able to recover its position. Nor do I expect a civil war, though until Novem ber 25 I thought it a d istin ct possibility. Its outcom e probably w ould have been a heavy loss of life and a return to fascism. The real question now seems to be w hether or not there w ill be some form of social dem ocracy, or a return to a m odernised fascism. The right is on the rampage; reports of polls giving the PCP 56 per cent of an electoral vote also claim that the right wing social dem ocratic" PPD has now taken over from the PS as the largest single vote-getter. Soares will pay a heavy price fo r his virulent a n ti-c o m m u n is m. L o o k in g b e y o n d the (rum ored) state of public o p in io n it is obvious that capital in Portugal is banking on an influx of investm ent and state aid from abroad. It is equally obvious that foreign capital w ill want its guarantees: a quiescent and disciplined labor force, a stable political situation". If the w orking class seems clearly unable to carry through a revolution, it is nonetheless fairly well placed to defend itself. Breaking its w ill and organisation could require a return to fascism. On balance, the most likely solution seems to be som ething like Greece - an econom y d e e p ly p e n e tra te d by fo re ig n c a p ita l, especially that associated w ith m ultinationals. A population of low living standards and great inequalities - though not as low and not as great as those before A pril 25. A political re g im e w h ic h re lie s on p o litic a l and ideological dom inance and the threat of force and repression rather than their system atic and consistent use. What are the lessons of Portugal? I am certainly not in a position to give anything like a full answer to the question, and I w ill restrict myself to a few brief points w hich come fa irly directly from my brief experience of Portugal. First, there are some im portant im plications fo r the structure, situation and role of a vanguard party. The Portuguese experience does seem to lend further support to the argum ent that a vanguard party must not become heavily centralised or bureaucratic, and that its leadership must not be protected from the criticism and influence of either members of the Party o r those outside it. A vanguard party must not aspire to dom inate or control the w hole revolutionary process. It must learn to co-operate w ith all possible allies, going out of its way to neutralise or to avoid antagonising groups such as the sm allholders of the Portuguese north. It must encourage active participation by people in workers' and residents organisations and they must remain outside the control of the Party. It must be independent of any control from outside the country. S e co n d, I c a u g h t a g lim p s e o f th e astonishing pow er of a revolutionary situation. No one w ho has been to Portugal could fail to recognise the extraordinary speed with w hich even the most entrenched attitudes change, the most pow erful institu tions quake, the most im possible feats are achieved. H istory does change its speed, and in revolution the dialectic of change attains an extraordinary impetus. Everything comes up fo r grabs. Precisely because this is so, there is, I think, a third lesson. Just as hopes and achievem ent rise to extraordinary heights, so can failure be extraordinarily bitter and costly. R evolution poses questions w hich com e faster and larger than most of us are used to. Bravado and revolutionary m achism o ate poor substitutes fo r a sober po litical ethic.