A-Infos (en) Italy, FDCA, Cantiere #28: Portugal from the end of the dictatorship to the Impossible Revolution: 50 years from 25 April 1974 - M. Ricardo Sousa part 1 (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

An impossible revolution? Yes, some will argue. Impossible within the 
limits of Portugal. Impossible because an island of libertarian 
communism cannot exist in the sea of capitalist production and 
capitalist consciousness[...]But men and women dreamed "impossible". 
They constantly tried to "climb the sky" in search of what they thought 
was right. ---- Maurice Brinton ---- On this date a military coup took 
place, carried out by young officers, mainly captains, lieutenants and 
militia officers (i.e. non-career officers; ed.), to overthrow the 
Portuguese dictatorship, established by another conservative military 
coup perpetrated on 28 May 1926. The so-called captains' movement, which 
from then on would become known as the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), 
began as a corporate mobilization of young officers, but soon acquired a 
political character, with the position that it was necessary to 
overthrow the dictatorship and start negotiations with the African 
guerrillas becoming dominant, with the aim of putting an end to the 
Colonial War that had been going on for more than a decade on three 
fronts: Guinea Bissau, Angola and Mozambique.

The Colonial War was certainly the decisive factor that pushed the young 
Portuguese soldiers to defeat the dictatorship and the element of 
aggregation of different political opinions, ranging from conventional 
conservatism to democratic positions and some, few, characterized by a 
traditional leftist education. By now among the militia officers coming 
from the universities there was a significant number influenced by the 
PCP (Portuguese Communist Party; ed.) and the ideas of the radical left 
that were increasingly present in the student movement.

It is not surprising that the original program of the MFA was 
minimalist. The military action did not even include the imprisonment 
and trial of the main leaders of the dictatorship and the political 
police that supported it and was known for the systematic practice of 
torture; this can be considered one of the most significant omissions, 
which not even the radicalization of the revolution was able to 
overcome. It should be added that the release of all political prisoners 
was not foreseen and only popular pressure and the struggle of the 
prisoners made it possible for all of them to be released from prison in 
the days following the fall of the regime.

On the same day, April 25, 1974, an unpredictable factor entered the 
scene: the people, who, ignoring the MFA's calls systematically repeated 
on radio and television for everyone to stay in their homes, came out 
into the streets and played an important psychological role, both in the 
insubordinate troops and among those in power who thus noted the popular 
support for the overthrow of the dictatorship, thus discouraging resistance.

On this day, the last Prime Minister of the authoritarian government, 
Marcelo Caetano, surrendered and declared that he did so "so that power 
would not fall into the street." His statement was prophetic, as this 
was precisely what, in a certain way, would happen in the following months.

From this moment on, the massive presence of the population in the 
streets of the main cities of the country and the grandiose 
demonstrations of the First of May of that year, made it clear that the 
military coup  had to take into account a new actor, the People. Even 
more so because this presence was spontaneous and did not correspond to 
the call of the small parties of the anti-fascist opposition.

In fact, in the first months of the Revolution, the Communist Party, the 
majority force of resistance to the dictatorship, the small Maoist and 
Trotskyist organizations, the armed struggle organizations such as the 
PRP-BR (Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat-Revolutionary Brigades; 
ed.) and the LUAR (League of Unity and Revolutionary Action; ed.) 
represented no more than a few hundred militants and sympathizers, and 
in the case of the PCP a few thousand. As for the anarchists, who had 
played a significant historical role until the 1930s, both through the 
General Confederation of Labor (CGT), with anarcho-syndicalist roots, 
and through the Portuguese Anarchist Union and the Anarchist Federation 
of the Portuguese Region (FARP), they had practically disappeared in the 
face of the harsh repression of the Salazarist regime. This repression 
reached its peak in the 1930s, after the attempted General Strike of 
January 18, 1934 which led to hundreds of militants being imprisoned, 
many of whom were sent to the Tarrafal Concentration Camp in Cape Verde, 
where some died and the remainder returned to Portugal only after the 
Second World War.

In the following years, there were still some armed actions in 
solidarity with the Spanish Revolution, as well as an attack against the 
dictator Salazar, carried out by a group of anarchists and some 
communists, among them the well-known militant Emidio Santana. From the 
1940s onwards, anarchism had, as a movement, essentially disappeared; 
some militants linked to the cooperative and tenants' movement survived, 
as well as to participation in the anti-fascist opposition. A small 
number of these militants, younger, were at the time linked to the armed 
struggle organizations, LUAR and BR.

In 1974 the anarchists were reduced to a few dozen, perhaps a hundred, 
old militants, survivors of the generation that preceded the 
dictatorship, to whom were added a few dozen young militants in exile, 
mainly in France. Some of these, deserters from the colonial war, were 
integrated by a few hundred even younger students and workers who 
approached the anarchist movement after the fall of the dictatorship. In 
the months following April 25, there was an attempt to reorganize the 
anarcho-syndicalist current that resulted in the creation of ALAS, the 
Anarcho-syndicalist Libertarian Alliance, and the relaunch of the 
historic organ of the CGT, A Batalha; these initiatives received a 
certain support from the SAC, the Swedish revolutionary syndicalist 
organization. Later, the newspaper A Voz Anarquista  (The Anarchist 
Voice; ed.) would be launched, a specific  anarchist organ, and the 
Anarchist Federation of the Portuguese Region (FARP) would be 
reconstituted, which had a short life. At the same time, numerous 
newspapers and papers of groups formed by young people who would later 
be known as anarcas flourished , some with a certain theoretical 
content, but many using the classic language of the anarchist press. 
Magazines such as A Ideia  (The Idea; ed.) and Acção Directa  (Direct 
Action; ed.) would be those that showed the greatest longevity (the 
first, as happens with A Batalha , is still published; ed.), having been 
launched by militants who approached anarchism in France, in the 70s. 
Within the framework of this anti-capitalist press and outside of party 
influence, the newspaper Combate stood out,  founded in June by critical 
Marxist militants who had broken with Leninism. During the following 
months he would reveal himself as the main disseminator of workers' 
autonomous struggles and experiences of self-management.

There were few anti-capitalist militants from different organizations 
and currents in those first months that followed the end of the regime, 
and the mobilization of thousands of workers in the streets was not the 
result of an appeal by organizations and parties, but the product of the 
spontaneity of the workers' movement, which many interpret as the result 
of lifting the lid of the dictatorship's pressure cooker. The 
non-partisanship, brotherhood and sociality that was established, the 
joy, the free debate of ideas, without prejudices of gender, age and 
condition is what characterized these first months following April 25. 
In this spontaneous movement, the first occupations of houses originally 
took place, both for housing and for the creation of new spaces for 
children, popular clinics and cultural centers. The tenants' commissions 
that arose in the popular neighborhoods represent some of the first 
manifestations of self-organization, which were followed by workers' 
commissions in various factories and companies. These commissions, which 
spread throughout the country, would be the main manifestation of 
self-organization throughout the Portuguese revolution.

Some consider the early days of the revolution to have been a period of 
true anarchy, given the absence of the State, since the repressive 
apparatus had largely disappeared, especially due to the extinction of 
the political police, the PIDE-DGS (International and State Defense 
Police-General Directorate of Security; ed.) and the Portuguese Legion, 
but also because the police, PSP (Public Security Police; ed.) and the 
guard, GNR (National Republican Guard; still operational today, like the 
PSP; ed.), were undergoing a purge process of its cadres most closely 
linked to the Salazarist regime , causing the police forces themselves 
to not intervene for fear of further discredit. This broad movement of 
purification of the dictatorship's cadres, which was defined as 
remediation, played an important role in the phase of paralysis of the 
state apparatus, now that the superior and intermediate officials of all 
the services and organs of the State, from the Armed Forces to the 
political ones, the local power, the judicial system, the universities 
and schools, as well as public and private companies, were involved in 
the purification process in progress, capable of removing hundreds of 
responsible people and placing many others under the suspicion of 
connivance with the various governments of the dictatorial period. In 
this way, an environment favorable to assemblyism and collective 
decisions was able to form. A historian, César de Oliveira, would say in 
his memoirs " Between April 25th and mid-May, one could say that, in the 
ultimate meaning of Emidio Santana's utopia, there was no State in 
Portugal. Everything was in the streets and the power was in the streets 
". We can affirm that this was a reality that continued at least 
throughout the course of the

1974. This power vacuum and the alignment of military sectors with 
popular initiatives and struggles explains the accelerated and 
victorious advance of those social and trade union struggles. In this 
context, the PCP and the trade union central controlled by it, the 
Intersindacale , carried out a restraining activity, criticizing strikes 
and occupations, which is not surprising considering the fact that the 
Communist Party moved on to integrate the provisional government and 
thus legitimize itself. But this "moderating" role played by the PCP 
leadership was, throughout the revolutionary phase, rather ambiguous, 
given that its own popular base was willing to go beyond the directives 
coming from above, also due to the fact that the large majority of this 
base was made up of new militants who at the time were still poorly 
supported by the party apparatus.

The new political parties, and from the very beginning, among them, the 
PCP and the PS (Socialist Party; ed.), quickly structured themselves, 
thanks mainly to the support coming from abroad, with, for example, the 
Soviet Union and other countries of the Eastern bloc having placed at 
the disposal of the Communist Party huge resources that allowed it to 
open offices, create publishing houses and newspapers, build a technical 
and entrepreneurial apparatus, thus allowing the communists to have a 
large party machine in the space of a few months. The same can be said 
of the Socialist Party supported by the Socialist International and 
mainly by some Northern European countries, but also by the Federal 
Republic of Germany and the USA, which allowed it to go from a small and 
informal organization made up of a few dozen liberal professionals, to 
that of a powerful party machine, with offices throughout the country, 
publishing houses, newspapers and equipped with a technical apparatus. 
This external intervention will prove decisive for the direction that 
the so-called Portuguese Revolution will take during the period of '74-'75.

Political radicalization would tend to increase in 1975, after two 
attempts, on September 28, 1974 and March 11, 1975, led by conservative 
and far-right sectors, to concentrate power in the hands of General 
António Spinola, thus dispossessing the young officers of the MFA and 
the popular mobilization. This general had not participated in the coup 
of April 25, but had been placed at the center of power by the MFA, in 
order to find a political solution to the question of the colonial war.

And it would be the disjointed attempt of a far-right coup  linked 
precisely to General Spinola, at the origin of significant changes in 
the economic and social terrain of the Portuguese revolution, an 
alteration of the balance of power and a real political radicalization 
that would inaugurate what came to be known as the Ongoing Revolutionary 
Process (PREC), that is, a true revolutionary social crisis.

The defeat of the right-wing coup attempt  , in addition to having 
produced as an immediate result the imprisonment of a significant number 
of military personnel, militants and businessmen from the conservative 
and far-right camp, and led to the flight of many others to Spain and 
Brazil, resulted in the MFA's decision to move forward with the 
nationalization of significant sectors of the Portuguese economy: 
banking, insurance, real estate, transport and large commercial and 
industrial companies. This political decision, practically inevitable, 
given the flight of a significant part of businessmen, large 
shareholders and rural owners, gave rise to a highly nationalized 
economy, consolidating the government project of the left-wing parties, 
primarily  the PCP and its military allies. But as was written in the 
newspaper Combate  at the time: "Private Capitalism or State Capitalism 
is not a choice!"

Of course, geostrategic disputes did not disappear in Portugal, starting 
on April 25, 1974, immediately through the financing of the major 
parties, nor in the context of support for conservative forces and their 
repeated attempts to slow down the revolutionary process, but it was 
after March 11, 1975 that the intervention of the United States and the 
Soviet Union, but also of countries such as Spain, France, the United 
Kingdom and West Germany became clear and strong, aimed as they were at 
strengthening the influence of the MFA among the military and at 
supporting the main parties that were competing for power.

Somewhat on the sidelines of these disputes, the social struggles within 
the companies, but also in the neighborhoods and in the countryside, 
where the occupations of large landed properties in Ribatejo and 
Alentejo (2 Portuguese regions; ed.) had taken place towards the end of 
1974, a movement that would register strong developments during the 
following year, were characterized by a great propensity for spontaneity 
and self-organization. Beyond the concrete objectives, strikes for wage 
increases, occupations of houses, businesses and landed estates, an idea 
was translated, in some ways undefined, of the creation of a grassroots 
socialism, based on the so-called popular power, descending from the 
influence of councilist ideas and the Chilean model, but not completely 
foreign to some reminiscence of libertarian ideas and practices of the past.

 It is evident that in this revolutionary process, as the political 
struggle and the struggle between parties became more acute, the latter 
becoming stronger, the disputes for hegemony within the social struggles 
and grassroots organizations, the workers' commissions, the tenants' 
commissions, the self-managed companies, the rural cooperatives etc., 
led to the accentuation of ideological sectarianism and the weakening of 
the grassroots organizations which, increasingly influenced by the 
parties, made the common struggle impracticable. The same happened 
within the armed forces, both in the MFA and in the soldiers' movement, 
both increasingly aligned in a party sense and involved in the dispute 
for the same political influence.

Second and final part in the October magazine.

Translation by

by Virgilio Caletti

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