Workers’ revolution in Portugal, 1974-5

“The noise ... is still ringing in my ears. The horns tooting in joy, the shouting, the slogans, the singing and dancing. The doors of revolution seem open again, after forty-eight years of repression ... How can words describe 600,000 people demonstrating in a city of a million? Or the effect of carnations everywhere, in the barrels of rifles, on every tank and every ear, in the hands of troops and demonstrators alike? ... Working people have left an indelible mark on the situation. The call is for socialism and masses of ordinary people have been involved in making it.”

So writes Phil Mailer in Portugal: The Impossible Revolution? of May Day 1974 in Portugal. Six days earlier, in the early hours of the morning, disaffected army officers carried out a coup against the country’s ailing fascist regime. The officers called themselves the Armed Forces Movement, or MFA by its Portuguese initials. As British socialist Peter Robinson writes in Revolutionary Rehearsals:

“The coup itself succeeded with remarkable ease. With only a dozen military units mobilised, the radio and TV stations, the airport and the general military headquarters were taken with little resistance. Only four people were killed, shot by terrified secret police agents (the PIDE). A regime that had lasted nearly 50 years crumbled totally in less than a day.”

Hours later, people flooded the streets of Lisbon, Portugal’s capital. This marked the start of nineteen months of revolution and a deep working-class radicalisation. “What started as a military coup is assuming new dimensions ... it is the people who have called the tune, in particular the working class”, Mailer noted.

The road to April

The country’s ruling class had operated for centuries by pillaging its colonies while neglecting to build much industry at home. Portugal was the least developed country in Western Europe; 37 percent of the population couldn’t read or write. As the editorialist in the Lisbon magazine Visão wrote on the 30th anniversary of the revolution, it was a place where:

“[T]he arts were censored, where social communication was muzzled, where many children walked around shoeless, where the majority of the population did not have a refrigerator, telephone or bathtub ... where agriculture was operated by medieval ploughs and animal traction ... where the political police used torture in prisons, where there were no highways nor elections.”

The regime attempted to liberalise in the late 1960s and early 1970s, but it quickly pulled back. It had no strategy for modernising capitalism or extricating itself from colonial wars. Portugal had been the first to colonise Africa and was the last to leave. In an important sense, the revolution started there: Angola’s national liberation movement began in 1961 and was joined within a few years by Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau. Putting down these movements required brutal force and massive resources. Half of the government budget went to these wars.

It also caused social turmoil as the Portuguese army expanded from 10,000 to 220,000 soldiers. Many were conscripts, and more than 200,000 fled the country to avoid the draft (the population was just 9 million). Rank-and-file soldiers were mostly former workers or peasants paid a pittance and treated like dirt. Many of the new officers were recent university graduates, some influenced by 1960s radicalism.

Into this heady mix stepped the MFA. Formed in September 1973, it was a secret movement of a few hundred mid-ranking officers, including some who had been conscripted. Its first program called for “Democracy, Development and Decolonialisation”. The MFA and the army more broadly were to be key players in the Portuguese revolution.

Workers take action

Hundreds of political prisoners were released on the first day of the revolution and were replaced by 100 of the hated secret police. Thousands of people massed in the streets in celebration. Workers sang “The Internationale”, which had previously been banned by the dictatorship. Days later, hundreds of political exiles arrived in Lisbon from Paris on the “freedom train”, greeted by thousands. In these early days, there were marches every day. Newspapers, for decades heavily censored, became full of political manifestos. Posters were up everywhere. Street and bridge names were changed. Salazar Bridge, for example, named after a previous dictator, became known alternatively as Red Bridge, or 25 April Bridge.

The overthrow of the dictatorship spurred political activism. Political slogans were not only spray-painted on walls but also appeared on bus tickets. Even children could recite the names of the myriad left-wing groups, what they stood for and who they supported. The European revolutionary left hired charter planes to view the revolution for themselves; some came from further afield, like Australia. The late Tom O’Lincoln recounted that the tourist information office in Lisbon gave him a complete list of left and revolutionary organisations and their contact details.

A wave of strikes took off. In May alone, dockers, miners, canteen workers, textile workers, oil refinery workers, metalworkers, taxi drivers, merchant seamen, fishermen, workers in the tourist industry and many more took action. Train conductors had a strike on the line from Lisbon to a beach resort called Cascais. The trains were running, but a sign at the train station read: “You don’t have to pay. Go anywhere you like. Have a nice trip. Have a nice day”.

Workers raised both economic demands—for large wage increases and improved conditions—and political ones. Key was the demand for saneomento—the purging (or more literally, cleansing) of fascist managers. This was extended to managers seen as particularly vicious and anti-worker. The newspaper Diario de Lisboa, for example, reported that workers in suburban Lisbon demanded that their company “eliminate all the dictators who always restricted the aspirations of workers in their professional development, imposed unjust punishments ... protected snitches”.

Most of these purges were decided by mass meetings. Saneomento occurred in more than half of the companies employing 500 workers or more. By February 1975, “12,000 people had been removed or suspended from their previous positions by legal or illegal means despite calls for moderation by both the Socialist Party and the Communist Party”, writes social historian Raquel Varela in A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution. Varela cites an example from the textile sector:

“The women had voted that all supervisors—who were men—would have to retrain to get proper management qualifications. In the meantime they would run the factory themselves. I remember them laughing about how easy it was—the sudden realisation you don’t need bosses.”

At another company, two American managers were kidnapped by the workers and kept prisoner until a ransom was paid. “The parent company paid up and lodged a formal protest with the government”, Mailer writes. “The Ministry of Labour replied that, in view of recent wage increases, the amount [demanded by the workers] was due in back pay anyway. The managers fled.”

Workers’ action brought significant and immediate gains. Only a month after 25 April, wages rose an average of 30 percent. Across Portugal, assemblies were convened in which all workers in a workplace would gather to formulate their demands. These assemblies elected factory committees, known as workers’ commissions or Comissao de Trabalhadores (CTs). CTs were core to the exercise of workers’ power. They rapidly burst onto the political scene. By the end of the revolution’s first month, almost all workplaces in the Lisbon region boasted CTs. Workers elected to the CTs were paid a workers’ wage, and were subject to immediate recall. They were usually full-time representatives.

Liberation was not confined to the factory. Thousands of hectares of unused land were simply taken over from landlords. There were also takeovers of houses and apartments in the cities. Robinson describes: “Unemployed workers helped in the countryside. Children taught adults to read. Popular clinics and cultural centres flourished. People’s tribunals were established. A golf course in the Algarve declared that it was now open to all—except the members”.

Varela characterises the “broadest and most visible change of the revolution” as “those affecting women’s lives”. Women won the right to vote. Previously barred career paths were now opened to them. They were granted legal equality. Divorce was liberalised, and the concept of illegitimate children was abolished. Women’s rights activists demonstrated outside the military junta’s headquarters, demanding to be given an old fascist building to organise in, as other political groups had been. The movement for women’s rights and the class struggle were deeply intertwined.

Gays and lesbians had suffered horrendous repression under the old regime. Now they released a manifesto of “The Movement of Revolutionary Homosexuals”, which was published. Education was transformed. Revolutionary groups took over the universities, abolished exams and sacked all the deans, vice-chancellors and fascist collaborators. Students purged their high schools of fascists. They demanded the right to take part in demonstrations, held general assemblies and formed committees made up of students, teachers and other school workers.

Government and political forces

Governmental power was in effect shared between the military and various provisional governments throughout the revolution. These governments were notoriously unstable—there were six in nineteen months.

The two main left-wing parties—the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) and the Socialist Party (SP)—held ministries in various governments. The PCP was by far the larger of the two. It was the only large and well-organised political party at the outbreak of the revolution, when it counted 5,000 members and a substantial working-class base.

The Communists had organised underground. Their bravery and sacrifice, enduring jail and torture to stand up to the dictatorship, brought them prestige. But the party—a hardline, pro-Moscow Stalinist outfit—used this to stymie working-class radicalism. As US revolutionary Joel Geier, who visited Portugal at this time, writes in the Marxist Left Review: “Its sole consistency was to oppose every revolt from below, including strikes, factory occupations, housing takeovers and workers’ control”.

Indeed, it took very little time for the party to disgrace itself. Having taken two ministries in the first provisional government in May 1974, within a fortnight it was organising demonstrations against strikes and slandering strikers as “lackeys of the bosses”. The party disparaged the CTs, describing them as primitive, divisive and ultra-left. Instead, it promoted the trade union federation, the Intersindical, which it could better control.

The theoretical underpinning of all this was the PCP’s argument that Portugal was too underdeveloped for a socialist revolution. Instead, workers should ally with other social classes, including the “progressive” section of the capitalist class. Socialism needed to be introduced in stages, which meant that workers had to subordinate their own interests in the name of a broader democratic unity.

The Socialist Party was a different beast. At the outbreak of the revolution, it had only 200 members and virtually no base among workers. The party had formed only two years earlier and was reformist in orientation and linked to similar organisations in Germany and France. But, during the revolution, the SP grew rapidly. It rhetorically outflanked the PCP to the left—calling, at times, for the destruction of capitalism—thus benefiting from workers’ disillusionment with the Stalinists.

The SP became the favoured party of the capitalist class—its best option for preserving and running capitalism. It was given ministries in all six provisional governments. The SP was also feted by the European and international ruling classes, including getting funding from the CIA.

To the left of the PCP and SP were dozens of small revolutionary groups. The best of these was the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP). Geier describes it as “an organisation that stood uncompromisingly for revolutionary communist ideals; for a proletarian socialist revolution, for a state based on workers’ councils, for workers’ democracy, for workers’ control of production and the state, for opposition to all imperialism, and for an armed insurrection for the seizure of state power”.

Having started the revolution with 80 underground activists, the PRP grew to 3,000 members. Yet the organisation downplayed work within the trade unions, leaving the field open for the PCP and the SP to exert their influence. The PRP also capitulated to the non-partyism that became popular during the revolution, downplaying the importance of revolutionary socialist organisation. It also overemphasised armed struggle.

Another key political force was the army, which had won huge popularity due to the officers’ overthrowing of the old regime. Class divisions ran through the heart of the military. For the first period of the revolution, a junta of high-ranking generals held ultimate power. It clashed frequently with the MFA.

A new body known as the Operational Command of the Continent (COPCON) was set up to repress strikes. But, reflecting the weakness of Portugal’s capitalist class and the strength of the working-class movement, COPCON often refused to do its job and ultimately went over to the left.

One example was the 12 September protest of Lisnave shipyard workers demanding the purging of fascist managers and scrapping of the ant-strike law (a law supported by both the PCP and the SP). The demonstration had been banned by the government and attacked by the PCP. Between 5,000 and 7,000 demonstrators marched to the Ministry of Labour. One banner read simply: “Death to capitalism”. A COPCON soldier who was supposed to attack the marchers recounted:

“The demonstration began and a human torrent advanced with shouts of ‘The soldiers are the sons of the workers!’, ‘Tomorrow the soldiers will be workers!’. The commander soon saw that we were not going to follow his orders, so he shut up. Our arms hung by our side, and some comrades were crying.”

The revolution deepens

By September 1974, many in the capitalist class had had enough. As well as strikes, workers’ commissions and the general unreliability of the state’s repressive apparatus, there was also a mutiny of Portuguese troops in Guinea-Bissau.

General Spinola, a fascist who had fought in the Spanish Civil War, was brought in to head up the new government and attempted a right-wing coup on 28 September. Echoing Mussolini’s March on Rome, he called for the “silent majority” to march on Lisbon. Spinola’s forces, including the far right, took over army bases and the media, and arrested left-wing army officers. Yet, as Geier writes:

“The working class sprang into action to prevent the coup from succeeding. The Communist Party and the trade unions finally took action, calling on railroad workers and bus drivers to halt all transport into Lisbon. Workers, along with the PRP and other armed revolutionaries, built barricades around Lisbon, and COPCON troops joined them to prevent right-wingers from entering the city.”

Workers had defeated the coup attempt. The junta was disbanded. The MFA-dominated Council of the Revolution took its place, indicative of the growing power of the workers’ movement. The failure of the coup opened a second, more radical, phase of the revolution. This involved more class struggle, but also a political shift to the left. Geier again:

“The working class, having broken out of the prison of fascism, now broke with the prison of capitalist politics as well. All the neofascist parties, which comprised the bulk of the capitalist parties, were now banned. Well-dressed people, luxury cars, exclusive shops, and expensive restaurants disappeared from the streets and public view.”

There were factory occupations and the beginnings of workers’ control of production. Capitalists sabotaged production and transferred money out of Portugal. Workers moved from strikes over pay and conditions to the right to work and demanding that company books be opened.

Inter-Empresas were formed—democratic bodies covering workers in several workplaces. These comprised representatives from dozens of workers’ commissions. A young woman assembly worker quoted by Robinson explained their logic:

“Why should we be on our own if other people across the road had the same problems. Then we decided to join, and discuss things in general ... They were a place, a way, for people to meet and discuss. The main purpose of these meetings was to defend the revolution.”

Linking up the organs of workers’ power from different workplaces strengthened workers’ unity. The bodies could offer support for strikes and occupations and call rallies. They provided something of a rival centre of power to the Intersindical trade union federation, which grouped together 200 unions dominated by the Communists. The PRP was central to initiating the Inter-Empresas.

In February 1975, the Inter-Empresas called a demonstration against unemployment and NATO. In a clear threat, NATO had been conducting military exercises off the coast of Lisbon. COPCON and the MFA supported the demonstration. That is, they had broken with the PCP and SP to support the popular movement. Thirty thousand people came out despite a government ban and condemnation from the PCP.

Vacant houses, mansions and luxury hotels began to be turned into medical clinics, childcare centres, libraries, workers’ clubs and the like. Another botched right-wing coup took place on 11 March. As in the previous September, workers responded magnificently and saved their revolution. Geier writes:

“On the day of the coup, militant bank workers and their unions occupied the banks, arrested the managers and prevented all attempts to withdraw money or transfer it abroad. They opened the books and exposed how the banks, owned by the six great monopolies, had been subsidising the right wing, organising economic sabotage and stealing from the people and the government ... The bank workers declared they would occupy the banks until they were nationalised under workers’ control. The next day, the government nationalised all of the nation’s domestic banks and insurance companies.”

This put 60 percent of the economy in public hands. Moreover, these were nationalised without compensation. Domestic and international capital, including the European Union’s predecessor organisation, united to crush the revolution, aiming to create hunger and chaos.

Hundreds of factories were placed under workers’ control, with workers’ commissions supervising the administration. In hundreds more, workers took over ownership and ran them as cooperatives. In the large and politically advanced factories, workers and workers’ commissions organised production, including deciding the speed of the line, setting hours of work and pay and managing safety. In some workplaces they reduced pay differentials by increasing wages for the lowest paid and freezing those of the higher, as well as moving towards equal pay for women.

Workers at Republica, an SP newspaper, took over their workplace in May and controlled the editorial line of the newspaper. They declared: “We struggle to ensure working-class control over information ...We are only 150 workers but in a sense we are representatives of our class, of millions like us. What is at stake is political power and knowing in whose hands it is”. The editorial line of Republica shifted overnight to the left of the SP. The government tried to get COPCON to return the paper to its owner, but the soldiers refused to cooperate and gave the keys back to the workers!

Workers also took over the Catholic radio station Radio Renascensa. They hung a radio outside of the station, in one of Lisbon’s main streets, so that whenever demonstrations were going past the station, they would be broadcast live. Geier writes:

“It was an inspiration for every visiting socialist to experience workers’ control—the hallmark of every great proletarian revolution—alive in 400 factories in Portugal. Now working for themselves, the workers humanised working conditions, and simultaneously raised productivity by drawing upon the organising genius that exists in the working class. Workers understood the productive process better than foremen and administrators; they knew how to increase production if the ends would benefit them, not the bosses.”

Yet kicking out the bosses also raised difficulties, such as distribution. Where a factory produced consumer goods, workers could sell them directly to other workers easily enough. Workers at a watch factory, for example, sold the watches they made in the street. But what if your factory didn’t? Or, if, as was the case in many larger firms, you produced only a small component of the final product. So, in many large and militant workplaces, the workers decided not to take over completely.

The capitalist market still regulated the factories under workers’ control. Many factory commissions did not want to be in the position of exploiting themselves, seeing the need instead for state planning under workers’ control. This was an inherently unstable situation, which had to be resolved one way or the other. The question of state power was put on the revolution’s agenda. Who was going to run the state—the workers or the bosses?

The question was avidly studied and debated in Portugal. Russian revolutionary leader Vladimir Lenin’s The State and Revolution was number two or three on the bestseller list during the revolution. Ultimately, however, no political bodies were strong enough or broad enough to pose an alternative to the capitalist state.

Workers’ commissions in the small city of Marinha Grande—which had set up a soviet republic in the fight against fascism in 1934—issued a call for a state based on revolutionary councils of workers, soldiers and sailors. This pointed the way forward but was not taken up nationally.

From hot summer to fizzle

The revolution reached a crescendo in the “hot summer” of 1975. The MFA split into three political tendencies. The SP’s line was for parliamentary (capitalist) democracy, the PCP was for a Cuban-style state, while COPCON and the revolutionary left agitated for popular power. Over the hot summer, these three tendencies battled it out.

Soldiers United for Victory was formed by the far left, the “largest rank-and-file solders’ organisation since the Russian Revolution”, according to Geier. Soon, it was organising nationally, addressing the bread-and-butter demands of the soldiers. That is, it carried out the class struggle within the army.

Robinson writes that “the struggle of rank-and-file soldiers was interlinked with, and conditioned by, the general class struggle”. The military is an instrument of class rule. Ultimately, therefore, “the development of the class struggle in the army depended on whether the workers’ movement could offer an alternative authority to that of the capitalist state, a potential workers’ state”. Even the best of the Portuguese revolutionaries did not understand this, according to Robinson.

Yet opportunities existed very late in the piece. Building workers, who hadn’t played much of a role to that point, called a national strike for 12 November, held a mass demonstration, armed themselves and held the parliamentarians hostage until their demands were met!

A coalition of far-left groups formed a United Revolutionary Front. While this was a step forward and could play something of a coordinating role, it was no substitute for a revolutionary party. And, crucially, without workers’ councils or soviets on a national scale, the revolution could go only so far.

When the working class and the capitalists are facing off, as in the Portuguese revolution, one must eventually win out. At the end of November 1975, the right in the army moved against the left, sacking a left-wing commander. The government declared a state of emergency and sent in hand-picked commandos. None of the left groups called for strikes and occupations to defeat the right. It was all over.

The same month as the Whitlam social democratic government in Australia was overthrown in a constitutional coup, Portugal’s workers’ revolution was defeated by a social democratic coup. Far from the socialist society—a world without bosses or bureaucrats—that many workers were fighting for, capitalist liberal democracy was brought to Portugal.

Legacy

Portugal’s revolution left a lasting legacy. Democracy was brought back—albeit in its limited, parliamentary form under capitalism—after 48 years of dictatorship. Portugal’s welfare state was established, with gains lasting for generations. For instance, the nationalised health care service, with hospitals taken over from the Catholic Church, became one of the best in world. Education was made free and run by democratically elected boards rather than principals, which continued until 2008. Yet perhaps the most important legacy is the example of workers’ ability to run society. As one strike bulletin said:

“Our struggles are just and if we strike we shall be heard. This is why we must organise not only against this or that boss, in this or that factory, but against the capitalist system as a whole. Comrades often ask: ‘If there were no bosses, who would give us work?’ We all know that to work we need a factory, machines, and raw materials. We also know that the factory and machines were made by other workers, just as it was other workers who sowed the cotton, worked the wool, or dug up the iron ore. It therefore isn’t the boss who gives us work, but the miner, the metalworker, the farmer ... Since it is workers like us who run the factory, why are bosses needed?”