The Portuguese Revolution - Socialism 2018

The first question I’m sure many of you have is “what Portuguese Revolution?” In mainstream consciousness and even within the historical memory of the left, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974 remains largely unknown. If remembered for anything, the popular image of the revolution is of the Carnation flower: the bloodless coup in Portugal prompted everyday people to stick carnations in the guns of the military officers who overthrew the dictatorship which had ruled the country for decades.

Despite this lack of recognition, I would like to argue that the Portuguese Revolution is one of the most significant of the late 20th, demonstrating the most recent example of a proletarian revolution. I will recount some of the history of the revolution with the aim of distilling some of the key lessons of this experience. My hope is to contribute, if only in a small way, to the beginning of more serious studies of the revolution in Portugal within our organization and the left more broadly.

To give a brief sketch of the accomplishments of the revolution: in the course of 1 day, a 41 year old dictatorship was overthrown. In a few months, a nearly six century old colonial empire in Africa was dismantled and a decade long colonial war ended. Through the course of the revolution, the potential of working class rule was put on the agenda, with strike upon strike gripping the country, including 158 fierce workplace confrontations, 35 occupations, and attempts to form workers’ councils, one of the key forms of organization of the socialist revolution historically.

The Portuguese Revolution is an important case study on the nature of the class struggle, the centrality of the struggle against imperialism, and the potential of the working class to take the direction of society into its own hands.Despite the outstanding struggle of the Portuguese working class and peasantry, however, they were not able to consolidate and complete the socialist revolution. Thus the lessons of Portugal also include the failures and betrayals of reformism and Stalinism as well as the essential role a vanguard party composed of the most militant layers of the working class is to the struggle for socialism.

To understand the dynamics of the revolution in Portugal and the lessons which it holds for Marxists today, it is necessary to step back and get a basic grasp of the long-view of Portuguese history. The defining process in the formation of modern Portugal was the creation of its vast colonial empire, starting in 1415. Given Portugal’s relative irrelevance in contemporary international politics, their role in the formation of modern imperialism is often forgotten. However, they established one of the largest and longest lasting empires in world history

Along with Spain they divided up the whole of South America, they established colonies in Africa long before the famous Scramble which divided up the whole continent between European imperialist powers, and they established a stronghold in the islands of the Indian and Pacific Oceans. Similarly, they played an outsized role in the creation and expansion of the trade and mass enslavement of Africans, bringing them to the America’s to toil in brutal conditions to ensure the necessary cheap labor supply for resource extraction. At its height the Portuguese empire notably encompassed areas now known as Brazil, Mozambique, Angola, Cape Verde, Guine-Bissau, Macau, and Goa, among many others.

Despite getting a head start in building their colonial empire, the Portuguese did not end up being the primary beneficiaries of the growth of the world imperialist system. Soon after the early imperial excursions of the Portuguese and the other powers, a new economic system ascended in Europe: that is, capitalism. The lion’s share of the wealth produced by the Portuguese empire derived from raw material extraction and the slave trade. This wealth was then in its majority redirected to the expansion of extraction in the colonies or directly into the pockets of a handful of ruling class Portuguese families and the monarchy. Meanwhile, a number of European countries redirected their imperial wealth and resources to jump start the early stages of industrialization, most notably in Britain. The Portuguese continued an old style of imperialism while a new type was developing. Thus, while the Portuguese ruling class enriched themselves, they helped produce even greater riches for the rapidly developing capitalist countries by providing significant amounts of raw materials that were necessary for the primitive accumulation of capital in the industrializing countries.

The loss of their Brazilian colony in 1889 and the Scramble for Africa in the late 19th and early 20th centuries caused a crisis for Portuguese imperialism, leading them to rethink their colonial project. Despite the weakness of Portuguese colonialism in comparison to the other imperial powers, Portugal was able to maintain its colonies in Angola, Mozambique, Guine Bissau, and Cabo Verde in Africa. After the Scramble, the Portuguese government made a concerted effort to integrate these colonies further into the Portuguese empire, subjugating the native populations of these regions and establishing firm military control over their possessions. At the same time, they promoted the growth of settler-colonialism, sending tens of thousands of Portuguese citizens to the colonies to bolster the colonial states and provide a skilled labor force capable of running the expanding colonial economy. Despite this intensification in the colonial project, Portugal remained underdeveloped and decentralized, relying still on the colonies as a source of raw materials for export to the most advanced capitalist countries.

In Portugal itself, the onset of the 20th century proved chaotic and destabilizing. The hundreds year old monarchy in Portugal was overthrown in the October Revolution of 1910, creating the Portuguese First Republic. The ensuing two decades were characterized by political turmoil, a rising working class movement and the growth of reactionary Catholic and militarist elements. Ultimately, this fledgling republic was overthrown in 1933 by a military coup which established the corporatist and authoritarian “Estado Novo” or New State which would rule Portugal and its empire for the period up until the 1974 Carnation Revolution.

The Estado Novo under Antonio de Oliveira Salazar was able to stabilize the country through the crushing of workers’ organizations, unions, and the left as well as exerting an iron fist in the African colonies. The corporatist policies pursued by Salazar jumpstarted the Portuguese economy and lent the regime an air of legitimacy to the Portuguese capitalists and landlords. However this authoritarian state could not resolve some of the key contradictions plaguing the Portuguese imperial project. Still, they pursed raw material extraction and subordinated their industrial development to the advanced capitalist powers, most notably Britain.

By the 1960s, a number of British and American multinationals set up shop in Portugal to exploit their cheap labor force and repressive working conditions. At the same time, the raw materials expropriated from the colonies went towards the further development of industry in these same countries. The small Portuguese capitalist class slowly expanded industry but could not compete with larger multinational capitalist firms in a real sense. These factors left the state of living conditions for working people in Portugal at abysmal levels. Around 30% of the population were workers while another 40% depended on subsistence agriculture or commercial fishing. The majority of Portuguese people survived on poverty wages, while slums dominated the urban landscapes. Most Portuguese families could not afford to send their children to education beyond a fifth grade level at the churches or privatized schools and consequently the majority of the population was functionally illiterate. Portugal was the poorest country in Europe with the lowest life expectancy for its citizens. Additionally, 2.5 million out of 8.5 million Portuguese people emigrated to find work in other countries with better pay and living standards during this period.

To prevent working class unrest, the Estado Novo regime developed a vast system of secret police, known as the Policia Internacional de Defesa do Estado (International Police for the defense of the State or PIDE). Although the size of the secret police was never really known, it is possible that there were at least 3000 full-time agents and probably ten times that number of informants. The secret police practiced techniques such as phone-tapping and bugging and even carried out assassinations and torture against any political opposition in the metropole or its colonies. Thus the conditions for resistance to the dictatorship were extremely harsh. Despite all of this, the Portuguese Communist Party and small groups of Maoists and Trotskyists continued to organize covertly in harsh conditions of illegality.

But the impetus for the revolution in Portugal would not come first from Portugal itself. Instead, we must look to the revolution’s roots in the anti-colonial resistance in Angola, Mozambique and Guine Bissau. Conditions in the colonies were bleak for both indigenous black Africans and the majority of Portuguese settlers who in the main constituted an exploited working class. The same secret police mobilized against all political opposition in Portugal was utilized to break up any inkling of resistance in the colonies.

Despite these extremely difficult odds, a number of nationalist groupings began organizing underground through the 1950s. From the very beginning, links of solidarity were built between the colonized and certain segments of the settlers and Portuguese citizens. Black nationalist leaders from the Portuguese colonies, perhaps moreso than any other colonized peoples, saw the struggle against imperialism as linked to the struggle of Portuguese working people against their own government. Studying in Portugal, leaders like Samora Machel who went on to lead Frelimo, saw the abject poverty of much of the Portuguese population and realized the potential of building links between the Portuguese people’s struggle against dictatorship and the struggle against imperialism at home. In fact, the Angolan Communist Party, which eventually helped to form (Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, MPLA), was a multiracial organization comprised of leftist settlers and black workers and intellectuals.

A nationalist uprising in Angola in 1961 was met with sharp repression from the authorities and hundreds were murdered or imprisoned, temporarily crushing the MPLA and other nationalist forces. Despite this setback, the uprising galvanized a wave of struggle in all of the Portuguese colonies. Soon, three independence movements began armed struggle against colonialism in Angola, while similar guerrilla wars began in Guine Bissau and Mozambique, led by Amilcar Cabral’s PAIGC, and Frelimo, respectively.

Rather than granting independence with the aim of establishing neo-colonialism like some of the other imperialist powers, the Portuguese doubled down and pursued what they called the Guerra Ultramar or Overseas War which lasted over a decade. Dependent economically on the colonies, the Portuguese state desired absolute victory in the war. To imagine the impact on Portugal itself, think of the effects on the United States if it had waged war on three Vietnams simultaneously. Criminal and brutal for the colonies, the war was devastating to Portugal. Nearly half of the state expenditures during these years went to funding the war efforts. 200,000 men were fighting for Portugal in the Colonial War, while thousands deserted the ranks and tens of thousands fled the country or hid to avoid being drafted. One army deserter summed up his reason for leaving the army this way: “Why should we travel to another continent? Why do we have to kill African people, peasants like us?”

As the war dragged on, a number of revolutionary left-wing groups were able to infiltrate the army. Notably, the Revolutionary Brigades established connections with the MPLA and Frelimo, sending them maps, plans of attack, and other information. These acts of resistance went even further, with Revolutionary Brigades members sabotaging military equipment and attacking recruitment centers and bases. Opposition to the war grew both among the Portuguese working class and capitalist class. The bourgeois opposition was epitomized by the military officer Antonio de Spinola, a veteran of World War II on the side of Hitler and the leader of the brutal colonial war in Guine Bissau. He published a controversial book called Portugal and the Future where he outlined his belief that a military solution to the Colonial War was impossible and that it should be solved by diplomacy with the aim of establishing a neo-colonial alternative. This argument resonated with much of the Portuguese capitalist class and the NATO backers of the Portuguese war effort.

At the same time an anti-fascist organization was crystallizing within the military. The Armed Forces Movement (or MFA) comprised more than 400 junior officers in the Army who believed that the only means of ending the war would be to overthrow the dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano. These officers laid the groundwork for the coup. On April 25th, 1974, the MFA moved into action. In Lisbon, one MFA detachment took over the national radio station, playing a political song “Grandola, Vila Morena” as a signal to move into action. The MFA successfully secured key positions in the city without resistance. They broadcast a warning to Portuguese citizens not to go on the streets to avoid getting caught up in the potential violence.

In a taste of what was to come, the Portuguese people did not listen. Hundreds and thousands flooded into the streets in ecstasy at the prospect of the overthrow of the dictatorship. Citizens approached the officers of the MFA and stuck carnations in their guns, signifying their support for the coup and for peace, giving the revolution its main symbol. Quickly the coup transformed from the action of a relatively small section of the army, into a mass popular movement. Within a week, the Portuguese people, emboldened by the rapid fall of the dictatorship, took their destinies into their own hands. Mobs attacked known members of the secret police and mass protests outside of the prisons demanded the release of all political prisoners.

The rapidly formed provisional government spearheaded by the MFA struggled to decide on how to relate to the constantly shifting events. To establish some legitimacy for their new government, they appointed Spinola as the head of the government, while inviting the Socialist and Communist Parties to help lead. Spinola and the Portuguese capitalists, happy with the fall of dictatorship, feared the growing popular momentum which they quickly termed “anarchy.” The Portuguese capitalists had no desire to destroy the repressive apparatus of the Estado Novo, but under mass pressure, they dissolved the much hated secret police. Freeing the political prisoners, the jails refilled with functionaries of the fascist state and the secret police. The Portuguese working class took further action with the process of “Saneamento.” In scores of workplaces, workers kicked out their fascist bosses and managers.

The overthrow of the Estado Novo unleashed a whirlwind of political activity on many fronts. To give a sense, before the coup, only the Communist Party and a handful of small left organizations were able to sustain themselves in conditions of illegality. In the immediate aftermath of the coup, the amount of left groups ballooned to over 55, from Trotskyists, to Maoists, to Stalinists, to social-democrats.

In her talk at this conference a couple of years back, Caterina Principe shared a really revealing anecdote. She explained how, going up and talking to children on the streets of Lisbon, they could recite to you the names of the different parties, their respective slogans and symbols, and explain why they supported one party over another.

The political flourishing from below however was counterposed to the wishes and the aims of Spinola and the ruling class. Forced to include the Socialist Party and the Communist Party within the Provisional government, and weary of growing working class militancy, Spinola felt embattled from the left. He warned that “democracy does not mean anarchy,” and on the topic of the African territories, he maintained that the wars must be concluded through diplomacy leading to the integration of the African colonies into a more “equal” relationship with the empire. Functionally this meant neo-colonialism.

However, without a continuation of the war, Spinola’s solution was impossible. The PAIGC was close to winning the war in Guine Bissau and Cabo Verde, and the fight to subjugate Angola and Mozambique appeared more and more unwinnable. All of the nationalist parties were committed fully to the struggle for independence until the end. By July of 1974, just 3 months after the beginning of the revolution, Spinola, under pressure from the guerrilla war, left-wing MFA members, and popular mobilizations against the war, finally took the first steps to grant independence to the colonies. The longest-running colonial empire was finally coming to an end, and in each country Marxist-Leninist guerrilla groups were set to rule the first post-independence governments.

In Portugal, May marked the first mass strike wave of the revolution. Empowered by new, more open labor laws, the revolutionary atmosphere, and the increase in wages, workers struggled for even better wages, living conditions, and the purging of fascist employers and managers. More than 200,000 workers in key sections of industry went on strike, forming democratic workers’ committees to decide what direction to take the struggle and to ensure the representation of the workers’ in their struggle. After a number of concessions by the provisional government, the strike wave subsided momentarily, but was an omen of later labor struggle.

By September of 1974, the strength of the left was increasing and pressure mounted against Spinola’s conservatism, leaving him embattled. At the same time a prominent slogan among significant sections of the left became “Portugal will not be the Chile of Europe,” referring to the recent coup by Pinochet against the left-wing government of Salvador Allende which crushed the left and set up Chile for decades of repressive and violent right-wing dictatorship. There were real reasons for these fears. Two separate unsuccessful coup attempts showed the real potentials of a reversion to the rule of the right.

The first coup, orchestrated by supporters of General Spinola, started with a call for a mass demonstration in Lisbon representing the “silent majority” which Spinola claimed opposed the anarchy and leftism of this revolutionary period. The demonstration would give Spinola a mandate to wrest power from the hands of the MFA and the parties of the left. The direct intervention of the working class to thwart the demonstration played an essential role in staving off this coup. Transit workers including bus drivers and train conductors coordinated to prevent the right from mobilizing to Lisbon. The working class showed its own independent power clearly on that day.

Spinola could not recover politically from this blunder. On the 30th of September he resigned charging that the creaation of democraxcy in Portugal would be impossible if it was based upon the systematic assault on the nation’s institutions by political groups “whose ideology offends the most elemental concept of liberty.” He claimed that the country was heading towards “new forms of slavery.” Spinola’s resignation strengthened the hand of the Communist Party, Socialist Party, and the Armed Forces Movement.

To understand the second coup and the decline of the revolutionary process, we must first step back and look more closely at the working class movement and the politics of the different left parties. As Joel Geier described in a talk at a previous Socialism Conference describing his own experience in Portugal, “When I first entered Portugal, and was taking a bus in from the airport, I didn’t quite know what to expect; but as we came close to the city, my mouth started to drop because the first modern factory had a huge red flag flying from it, and a huge banner under it that said, ‘this factory, Standard Electrica, Is under the control of the workers’ commissions.’ I was overwhelmed, because from then on, virtually every factory and office building I passed had a red flag flying and a similar banner under it, that it was under worker’s control. I was totally unprepared for it.”

This anecdote demonstrates the level of power the working class movement attained. The Portuguese Revolution was the last proletarian revolution. In fact, for a brief period, a situation of dual power existed in Portugal. Fearing the consolidation of a workers’ revolution, Portuguese and international capitalists attempted to pull their capital out of the country, laying off workers on mass and leaving whole factories abandoned. Instead of accepting this situation, workers’ across the country reopened many factories under workers’ control.

A spokesman for the Nefil Furniture factory workers’ council described the aim of the occupations like this: “We do not have any illusions in workers’ management under capitalism. We are using it as a weapon, as an emergency solution. We started to run the factory because we had to in order to survive after the management had abandoned the factory on 27 December ... We are thinking about demanding that the government nationalise the firm – under workers’ control. We do not want a phoney nationalisation which only helps the bosses.”

The widespread occupations of workplaces, as well as occupations of the land and housing, caused workers to forge new types of organizations to coordinate the struggle across workplaces. In fact, four different sets of workers’ councils, or organizations that link workers from different enterprises emerged: the Inter-Empresas, the Revolutionary Councils of Workers, Soldiers, and Sailors, the Popular Assemblies, and the Comite de Luta de Setubal. The workers’ councils in Portugal had a real potential to form the basis for a workers’ state. These councils have been a significant feature of socialist revolution precisely because they are the key instrument devised by the working class to take power into their own hands. A typical strike shuts down a workplace, stopping the flow of wealth to the capitalist temporarily. Workers’ councils give the working class the ability to coordinate occupations and strike activity to reflect the interest of the class itself. Thus, the workers’ can not only shut down society, but they can reorganize it on their own basis. Unfortunately, these workers’ councils never spread far enough or developed deep enough roots to overturn the capitalist class.

Why was this the case?

Ultimately there were 2 significant factors derived from the problems of the left. Firstly, the most prominent organizations of the left, the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, played objectively counter-revolutionary roles. The Socialist Party, formed by a number of intellectuals with little social backing at the time of the revolution, quickly established itself through its prominent role in the provisional government. At first, it posed to the left of the Communist Party, calling for the end of capitalism. Despite the radical rhetoric, the Socialist Party came to be the strongest opponent of the working class movement, simultaneously coopting its energy and justifying the use of the repressive force of the state to break strikes and other forms of militancy. On the other hand, the Communist Party was a real mass organization with a high reputation in the working class due to their concerted struggle against the Estado Novo in the past decades. After the 25th of April, the Communist Party’s numbers exploded, they gained an important role in the provisional government, and they took a firm hold on the formal labor movement organized in the Intersindicales. Despite the clear potential a party like that could have in the establishment of a workers’ state, the Portuguese Communist Party worked actively to stop the consolidation of the workers’ movement. On the level of theory, the root of the CP’s degeneration was the Stalinist two-stage theory of revolution. The Party held that Portugal must go through a bourgeois revolution before a socialist revolution could happen in some far flung future. The concrete result of this belief was the formation of alliance with the bourgeoisie with the aim of consolidating liberal democracy and staving off the return of fascism. The Communist Party acted as strikebreakers numerous times, denouncing strikes as anarchist and chaotic. More nefariously, the Communist Party made a concerted effort to gain control of the workers’ councils with the aim of redirecting their energy away from militancy and towards concessions to the increasingly right-ward drifting government. The ultimate outcome of the CP’s policy was to fundamentally disorient large layers of the working class.

The second factor resides in the inability of the revolutionary left to form a vanguard party to guide the working class and its organization towards the overthrow of the capitalist state and the construction of a workers’ state. Despite the flourishing of a new revolutionary left in the post-coup period, only two serious revolutionary organizations emerged, the Maoist Uniao Democratica Popular (Popular Democratic Union, UDP) and the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat / Revolutionary Brigades (PRP/BR). The former still maintained the aforementioned two-stage theory of revolution, while the latter put forward the most clear line in favour of an immediate socialist revolution and the construction and expansion of the workers’ councils as the basis of a workers’ state. Ultimately, their key failure which prevented them from leading the working class away from the leadership of the Socialist Party and the Communist Party was not having been built before the revolution itself. At the time of the coup, the PRP only had 80 members, only expanding to 3000 at its height. The party ultimately only had two years to solidify an organization which could lead the working class to the conquest of power. Despite this extreme disadvantage, the PRP participated heroically in the struggle, taking the initative in building the workers’ councils and leading mass demonstrations.

The final chapters of the revolution illustrate many of the lessons I’ve tried to distill. The height of the revolutionary process occurred after the formation of soldiers’ councils and the expansion of the workers’ councils. The feeling among both the left and the right was that there was a real potential for civil war to break out in Portugal. To pre-empt to the coup and prevent Portugal from becoming the next Chile, the PRP believed that it would be necessary to arm the working class and prepare for insurrection. They distributed arms to hundreds of workers and prepared workers’ militias in the workers’ councils it had influence over.

However, the PRP was not large enough to prevent the right from regaining ascendancy. With the auspices of the Socialist Party right-wing elements of the military disarmed the leftist units of the MFA and sent the struggle into a tailspin. The provisional government turned sharply to the right. The parties of the revolutionary left expected that the struggle would rise once again, but the defeat ultimately led to the consolidation of bourgeois democracy and its stabilization. The Portuguese Revolution was over.