sixth government the First defeat by C. MICHALOUX & AUDRY 24 through our class solidarity, through the organization of our national struggles into a single international battle to make sure that any attack by imperialism receives the response it deserves: the indestructible force of the entire international workers and people's movement. Today it is Portugal. Tomorrow it will be Spain, France, Italy, and others. Difficult battles are approachingAgainst the common enemy our common solidarity is urgent and necessary; it is for this that we address you. LONG LIVE MILITANT AND COMBATIVE PROLETARIAN INTERNATIONALISM! PORTUGAL SHALL NOT BE THE CHILE OF EUROPE! WORKERS, PEASANTS, SOLDIERS, AND SAILORS, UNITED WE WILL WIN! Soldados Unidos Vencerão (Soldiers United Will Win) September 12, 1975 The military occupation of the radio and television stations in Lisbon has failed completely. On the military field, the soldiers of the units ordered to carry out the occupation declared their solidarity with the news workers. (See the article "An Army That Says No.") On the political field, after three days the government was compelled to officially rescind its application of censorship and to fall back on the decree-law on the press, which has never been respected before anyway. Thus, the weekly O Jornal could write in its October 3 editorial: "The new government is now approaching the second week of its existence without having yet been able to apply the minimum program it originally announced. The daily newspaper of Raoul Rego (former director of Repüblica) indicated, in its own way, the essential reason for this incapacity: "The soldiers are paid by the people, all the people, both conservative and revolutionary, to give us all a feeling of security (sic). If they are to carry out their duty as citizens and if they are not to simply demand revolutionary rights, then they must carry out the mission that has been assigned them, which is to maintain security. By standing with folded arms during the raging of a fire that dishonors the community (the reference is to the refusal of the Lisbon light artillery regiment to protect the Spanish embassy in Lisbon - INPRECOR), they are defaulting on their obligations as military men and they become counterrevolutionaries (sie), for they are then leaving the community at the mercy of any adventurer or criminal." (Editorial in A Luta, October 2, 1975.) For the moment, all the projects that were announced with great fanfare by the sixth government boil down to a single concern: regain a grip on the army in order to remedy what the reactionary monthly Económia e Finançias calls an "original situation: the soldiers are destroying the army." There are more and more meetings of the general staff. Commanders who have been
thrown out by their soldiers are descending on Lisbon seeking ways to restore the military hierarchy. In two weeks this government has been exposed before broad masses as a rightist government. The stinging defeat inflicted on the government by the soldiers has played a decisive role in throwing its political characsoldiers has trapped the CP on a tightrope because of its policy of critical support to Pinheiro de Azevedo. But although this defiance and opposition exists, the initiotive comparable to the movement of soldiers. largely wait-and-see attitude among the masses. One of these factors has been the capitulation of the Communist party and the Intersindical (the trade-union federation). Another is the inability of the far left to present concrete objectives that would allow the broad vanguard to draw larger sectors into action. But these factors are topped off by a complex phenomenon. The First important initiotive of the government was broken by the response of the soldiers. Hence, the bourgeois offensive is not seen by the masses as a concrete threat that strikes at them directly. Because of that, the bourgeois offensive has not stimulated a counteroffensive enabling the masses to take decisive steps in the realm of self-defense or in the realm of generalized and coordinated mobilizations. Thus, the genuine fermentation that does exist is not leading toward a centralization of the organs of "popular power, * although a tendency in this direction is now appearing in local areas. The reconquest of discipline On September 30, speaking to a demonstration of the Socialist party, the Partido Popular Democratico (PPD - People's Democratic party) and the PCP-ml (Portuguese Communist party-Marxist-Leninist), Prime Minister and Vice-Admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo shouted, "The reconquest of discipline is our major objective." President and General Costa Gomes echoed those thoughts from Moscow, where he was visiting: "Our independence is important, but discipline, order, and respect for authority are even more important today." (Diario de Notícias, October 3.) The vice-admiral and the general are obsessed by their soldien. On the eve of the September 25 Lisbon demonstration of the SUV (Soldados Unidos Vencerão - Soldiers United Will Win), twenty-four commanders of military regions gathered under the leadership of Chief of Staff Fabião. They thought they could still fire up the MFA (Armed Forces Movement) for one more attempt to control the ranks of the army. They decided that "the organs of the MFA on the unit and military-region levels shall be revitalized, amplified, and made more dynamic so as to guarantee the necessary discipline and cohesion of the armed forces and thereby avert the creation of parallel bodies in the barracks. " Since they believe in the miraculous power of false information, they set up a "press cabinet" to initiate "activity clarifying military decisions before public opinion." The officer corps today is trying to recentralize its energies and rediscover its cohesion in order to create the preconditions for a firmer response, apart from the great exhortations about the "dynamization of the MFA, which is supposed to "avert the creation of parallel bodies." Moreover, at least for now, the officer corps is no longer aiming at reconquering the army, but instead wants to separate out the troops that are still under the control of the authorities. On October 2 Pinheiro de Azevedo met with the chiefs of staff of the three branches of the armed forces, the commanders of the AMI (Military Intervention Group), Copcon (Continental Operations Command), the PSP (Public Security Police), and the GNR. The discussion centered around their concern for achieving success in their attempts to regroup the "reliable" units and to work out new tasks for the PSP and GNR in the realm of maintaining order. The Council of the Revolution accepted these measures. That same night, a "general assembly of delegates of officers in the navy" - officers whose "leftist" reputation had seemed well established - approved by a large
PORTUGAL majority a motion supporting the measures of the prime minister. The "considerations" section of the motion stated that: "The recent eruption of excessive demands, parallel to the systematic incitement both to insubordination within the armed forces and to generalized civil disobedience, constitutes a frontal challenge to the ability of the MFA and the government to lead the country toward socialism." The text continued, "The actions decided on up to now by the prime minister and president of the republic, with the approval of the Council of the Revolution and the government, can produce lasting and positive effects only if total support, confidence, and agreement of views among their comrades in arms, regardless of where they stand in the hierarchy, are extended to the higher-ups responsible for these decisions. It is not hard to see how much the growth of independent activity among the soldiers is accelerating the process of recomposition of the hierarchy and how much these professional officers, supposedly "revolutionaries," understand the necessity of taking a homogeneous attitude toward the decisions of the government. The demand of this assembly that this motion be distributed by the news media illustrates he exemplary value that the navy officers, hitherto considered black sheep by the military hierarchy, attach to their position. This movement of recomposition of the hierarchy carries a dynamic that could rapidly escape the control of the supporters of a "socialistic" MA and could thus leave the initiative in the hands of those who have always been advocates of a strict military discipline that roots out all political debate among the ranks of the army. Those people are now moving to the aftack. On October 2 in the Mansanto GDACI (Air Force Detection, Alert, Control, and Interception Group) Captains Sobral Costa and Sousa Fereira were kicked out by the commander. Sobral Costa was a signer of the Melo Antunes document. His purge was correctly understood by the soldiers as a reactionary initiative, In a general assembly they supported these officers and refused to join the AMI, the new repressive military body, of which their unit was supposed to be one of the components. The leadership of the Socialist party, in the midst of its campaign for law and order, went so far as to organize a demonstration in support of the Amadora commandos, the only shock troops on which the government can still rely in Lisbon. The SP declored that the Amadora commander, the reactionary Jaime Neves, was "the victim of an abject slander campaign. ... This campaign is part of the maneuvers aimed at sowing indiscipline and confusion in the armed forces with the objective of destroying certain military units and placing others in the service of a minority group of putschists. The commandos are not reactionary, they are with the people and the revolution. ... It (the revolution) needs disciplined armed forces like the commandos." (A Luta, October 3.) Lef us hope that the militants of the SP will not some day find themselves pondering that sort of stupidity in 26 the Campo Pequeno - under the surveillance of united and disciplined commandos. Long live the fearless admiral! The Socialist party is frightened of the crisis in the army and the impotence of the government. In order to counterbalance the immediate mobilizations of the for left against the military occupations of the radio stations, a demonstration was convoked to support Pinheiro de Azevedo. The PPD, of course, supported the demonstration. So did the CDS (Centro Democrático Social -Democratic Social Center, a rightist party), but the CDS concealed its party insignia, unlike the PCP-ml, whose contingent of 150 militants marched under the banner "Not a single social-fascist in the state apparatus!" The PPD is no longer content simply to participate in the government. Now, for the first time since the Palma Carlos operation in 1974, it is fully supporting the government in the streets as well. One of the slogans chanted by all the demonstrators was "Pinheiro de Azevedo, forward, fearless!" The SP emerged as the force most capable of mobilizing people for this. In fact, however, its ranks were smaller than they had been during the demonstrations called after the resignation of the fourth government: 30,000 people at the most. It is true that these 30,000 were easily transformed into 150,000 for the SP leaders. The petty bourgeoisie and civil service employees accounted for virtually all of the SP troops. For this kind of demonstration the SP finds it difficult to draw in workers, either in Lisbon or Porto. Those workers who voted for the SP or are members of it follow the SP in trade-union activity, where the emphasis is put on "union democracy" against the bureaucratic control of the Intersindical by the CP; but they will not come out to support the viceadmiral. The SP's mobilizing capacity stands out both because the far left has shown itself incapable of utilizing its potential strength, which is significant, in responding concretely to the government measures and because the CP ordered its members not to participate in the September 29 assembly in front of the ministry of information protesting the military occupation of the radio stations. After noting that the admiral had been unable to apply his policies in spite of the support of the "people in struggle" (who were supposedly represented by the SP demonstrators), the Soares leadership sought to turn the tide by creating out of whole cloth a sufficiently dramatic reason for the SP militants, demoralized by the ineffectiveness of their leadership's proposed solutions, to mobilize again. On the night of October 1-2, the SP leaders issued a series of calls for people to block the road, with barricades if necessary, against a mysterious far-left coup d'etat and a fictitious march on Lisbon by the peasants of the Alentejo. That was the SP's own July 18! The workers of Porto and Lisbon did not budge.
The links between a section of the working-class rank and file of the SP and the party leadership are getting very tense at the moment. For many, this government seems prepared to challenge their gains. The government's refusal to meet the demands of the ADFA (the association of wounded veterans - see the article "An Army That Says No") "because that would lead us to having to meet the demands of other sectors of society" (that's how the Socialist minister Almeida Santos put it) has played a role in stirring up doubts among the working-class ranks of the SP about the policy of this government, the majority of whose members are Socialists. Here again the sectarianism of the far left acts to prevent these fissures from being widened. In fact, the major axis of the policy of the FUR (Frente de Unidade Revoluciondria - Front of Revolutionary Unity) consists of asserting that "to crush fascism it is necessary to defeat Social Democracy." The FUR is incapoble of understanding the contradictions that exist between the SP's project of stabilizing a formal bourgeois democracy (along with the repressive tasks that flow from this and along with the rapid outflanking of the SP on the right) and the largely working-class composition of the Socialist party on a national scale. The sectarianism of - the FUR, like the CP militants' ostracizing of SP workers, does not allow for transforming the doubts of these SP workers into a radical defiance of the government and the Social Democratic leadership. Military occupation for democratic order The CP reacted to the occupation of the radio stations by sitting back with folded arms. In a communiqué dated September 29 the CP declared that "measures of such gravity and repercussions on the present complex and dangerous political situation have been taken without any consultation of the CP, which commands influential political strength and holds certain government responsibilities." The CP very quickly backed away from a central test of strength. It scurried to squelch the moves toward a general strike that were brought up by some sectors of the Intersindical on the morning of September 29. The CP raised only one slogan for its militants: "Don't go out!" Although the radio and television workers had obviously not called on the troops to occupy the station, the CP declared in abstract and ambiguous terms: "Measures of military intervention can be justified in the defense of the revolution (the universal theme of Azevedo and Soares) and of the democratic order." The essence of the CP's policy lies in the twofold assertion of the necessity for the unity of the MFA, where the Gonçalvesists have their place, and a redistribution of ministerial posts that would allow for redoubling "the authority of the organs of power" and would lead to "a real broadening of their base of support." An editorial in the CP paper Avante affirmed: "In order to establish real authority and discipline in the armed forces, the structuring of the MEA requires not the consumation of a break between sectors that are all part of the revolutionary process in spite of their differences, not a position of hegemony for this or that tendency and a repudiation of the others accompanied by a purge of the left, but instead the rapprochement and reunification of the major tendencies with a view toward defending liberties and constructing a democratic system, toward fighting together against the danger of fascist counterrevolution." (October 2.) With such a line, it is not surprising that a consensus should be achieved in the general assembly of navy delegates between the right-wing sectors and the expartisans of the Gonçalves government or that the SP should be thrilled with the "progress" that has been made by these sailors. The CP adopted an identical attitude about the creation of the AMI: "An intervention force to guarantee the democratic order must necessarily be a force in the service of democracy; that is the essential characteristic that will enable it to accomplish its mission." The CP does not want to contribute to touching off any central mobilization that would lead to a confrontation with the government, the bourgeoisie, and the military hierarchy - not at any price. Nevertheless, the CP has to take account of the independent movement of soldiers. To respond to this pressure and to answer the SUV, the CP launched the ARPE (Revolutionary Association of Infantry Soldiers), whose first manifesto declared: "What are these gentlemen afraid of? They fear that the revolutionary soldiers and officers will definitively take the degradation of the bourgeois army in hand and create a democratic and revolutionary army in the service of our people." In the Intersindical as well, faced with challenges to its line by left-wing currents, the CP militants are constrained to call for "workers control in all sectors of the economy, the initiation of revolutionary activity which has nothing to do with the measures that have already been taken, but which must be placed in the service and under the control of the soldiers, sailors, and organs of popular power. " At the same time, in his speech to a meeting celebrating the fifth anniversary of the Intersindical, Jaime Macado called for "the broadening of the government toward the popular forces, " which is the dominant orientation of the CP. In the most recent period, the CP has especially raised its voice in the Alentejo, in order to demonstrate its ability to mobilize people and at the same time to avoid taking any risks on the central political field. When the sixth government was formed, the CP leadership had great difficulties pushing to get its line of semi-participation and semi-opposition accepted by many of the members. Some worker militonts had even begun to see an alliance with the FUR as the embryo of an alternative policy in face of the oscillations of the CP leadership.
PORTUGAL But the adventurist policy of some of the organizations of the FUR, which to some extent is also the policy of the FUR itself, allowed the CP leadership to make a counterattack and to seek to reestablish its authority among its own rank and file. Denunciation of the leftists even reappeared in the editorials of Avante: "The counterrevolution and the pseudorevolutionary provocateurs are using mercenaries and adventurers who are setting themselves up in Portugal outside any control." Missed opportunities The FUR reacted immediately on the morning of September 29 when the military occupation of the radio was announced. Unfortunately, it adopted an alarmist position doomed in advance to failure. The leaflet distributed by the FUR described the situation in terms of imminent counterrevolution, of virtual coup d'etat: "Alertl To the working class, to the toilers, the soldiers and sailors! Let us mobilize to crush le counterrevolution! The counterrevolution shall not pass!" In the same leaflet it was announced that "this aggression by reactionary sectors was led by the paratroopers, the CIAAC troops, and the RIOQ"1 The population exhibited quite understandable hesitation, justified by subsequent events (see "An Army That Says No"), when they were asked to believe that such groups were willing to become the driving lance of "counterrevolutionary aggression. " The alarmism of the FUR led to a demonstration of about a thousand people on the Rossio at 1:00 in the afternoon of September 29. It was this group of 1,000 people, according to the FUR, that was supposed to "crush the counterrevolution." This alarmism was topped off by a total absence of any appeal or initiative toward the SP and CP, whose working-class forces are far from useless in defeating conterre volutionary aggression. This is an illustration of the dominant conception of the FUR, which is that the unity of the revolutionary organizations not only amounts to the unity of the broad workers vanguard but is itself a sufficient factor to draw in the heavy battalions of the working class - over the heads of the SP and the CP (that goes without saying). Nevertheless, there was a mass desire to mobilize alongside the soldiers to transform the government-ordered occupation into its opposite. But the leaflet of the FUR did not even allude to this necessary linkup of the workers and soldiers around this precise objective. Furthermore, the September 29 assembly in front of the Ministry of Social Communications expressed the determination of thousands of people - among them the workers of the major factories of the Lisbon industrial zone, who came in contingents - to make the government yield and to actively participate in a different sort of occupation of the radio and television stations, the sort of occupation that the AFA had carried out during Its struggle. (See "An Army That Says No.") In any case, there was a real possibility of acting in 28 an exemplary manner to hand the radio stations over to the workers instead of over to the minister of social communications. Once again the FUR failed. The September 29 press conference given by the third stockholder of Republica, Minister A. Santos, and Otelo Sareiva de Carvalho (held in the Ministry of Social Communications) turned into a real farce. A delegation from the demonstration - composed of workers from Lisnave, Setnave, and ENI - burst into the conference hall. The minister paled; Carvalho began stammering; the demonstrators broke up the chairs and broke down the doors of the library. The leadership of the FUR did not take this opportunity to make Carvalho go out onto the balcony of the Ministry and force him to respond quickly and openly, before everybody, to the one important question: If we occupy the radio and television stations, will you give the order to fire on us? Instead, they gave Carvalho the floor to make a demagogic public confession about the contradictory spiritual state of the "revolutionary" Copcon command, which respected the orders of the president of the republic, and about his own "lack of booklearning" which prevents him "from being the Fidel Castro of Europe." (That's what he said, in his own words.) After a few minutes, the demonstrators started expressing their disdain for Otelo; on the other hand, they greeted the soldiers from the military police regiment with cries of "SUV has won, SUV will win!" Carried away in triumph, the soldiers responded with raised fists. At that very moment, the leadership of the FUR was sitting in the salon of the Ministry engaged in an interminable discussion with the Copcon commanders trying to convince them to march at the head of a demonstration that would skirt the radio stations and wind up at Belem. At midnight, eight hours after the beginning of the assembly, there were only about a thousand people left. Everybody else had headed for the radio stations. At 4:00 in the morning, without Otelo, the secretariat of the FUR met Pinheiro de Azevedo to listen to his claims that the military occupation had been carried out against the counterrevolution. The secretariat of the FUR did not even succeed in compromising Otelo. He understood the limits of the divi-
sion in the military hierarchy better than they did. A third failure. All was not yet lost, however. A series of initiatives were still possible. On September 30 the soldiers stood everywhere at the sides of the workers, occupying the radio stations along with the popular solidarity pickets and passing motions asserting their will to defend the right of the workers to use the radio. The national radio station was the only station where this did not happen. The soldiers of EPAM, who had been sent to occupy the station, declared themselves in solidarity with the workers, but the workers, under the influence of the Communist party, did nothing to broadcast that solidarity over the airwaves, A common initiative with the workers commissions of the other stations and the delegations of soldiers could have changed the situation radically and paved the way for the utilization of the television station to inflict a total defeat on the government. But nothing was done in that direction. Workers democracy and bourgeois democracy It was also possible to launch a vast campaign concretely counterposing the principles of workers democracy to those of formal bourgeois democracy in the realm of news and information. This question was of the most burning importance, and such a campaign would have permitted both reaching the rank-and-file workers of the CP and SP and diffusing a conception different from that of the CP. First of all, it would have been easy to expose the real nature of the campaign about free expression the SP waged around Repüblica, for this time the Zenhas and Soreses were energetically supporting a censorship decree and a military occupation. This was especially true since even Jornal Novo, which is close to the SP, found itself compelled to print bands along its front pages reading "military censorship, day l, day 2, etc." On the basis of the simple reaction of this daily it would have been easy to throw the Social Democratic leadership off balance, Then, on October 1, when Jornal Novo was preparing production of a second edition reproducing the communiqué of the Soares leadership about the imminence of a mysterious far-left coup d'etat, the night-shift workers of the Mirandella printshop refused to print that edition unless they could also print a communiqué of their own about this alleged coup. The Jornal Novo management preferred to forget about their second edition. Concurrently, at Emisora Nacional, there were two lists in an election to the workers commission. One list demanded the right of all currents of the workers movement to express their views on the broadcasts of the radio station. These two workers initiatives could have served as illustrations in a campaign demonstrating that socialist democracy can and must be a democracy that is qualitatively superior to bourgeois democracy and can and must assure greater liberties to the toiling masses. This could have been combined with a campaign in deboth being threatened by the government in the name of private property, which appears to the workers as an institution restrieting their liberties. Moreover, all the workers commissions in the press industry have just met to plan out ways to defend Radio Renascença, which is now gagged. In addition, a small electronics company. Iberonica, where the workers expelled the employer a month ago, has offered its services to the Radio Renoscença workers in establishing a broadcasting station of their own. In spite of these missed opportunities and in spite of the absence of initiatives that could have inflicted on exemplary defeat on the government, the response of the soldiers did halt the offensive of Pinheiro de Azevedo and Costo Gomes. The outcome of this confrontation, which turned out favorably for the working class, is part of a process of step-by-step revolutionary upsurge in which the workers have won victories without meeting any great resistance from the class enemy. This could create the false Impression that the bourgeoisie is politically impotent and that it is definitively incapable of reconstituting o military striking force. This illusion fuels on ultraleftism that is translated into adventurism by the PRP-BR, which claims that "it is now time for the revolutionory forces and the workers to pose the problem of on insurrection" (Diario de Lisboa, September 30). This ultraleftism is reflected in the sectarian and triumphalist positions of virtually the entire for left toward the SP and the CP, which leads to the elimination of any united front tacfic or else reduces such a tactic to frenetic ultimatism. If the far-left groups continue to play this game, they could well be caught in the same trap the German Communists fell into in January 1919. But the development of the political situation, as illustrated by the latest events, con facilitate a process of clarification that would permit a response to the need for unity in action by the workers movement and for the centralization of the organs of "popular power."