Last week 25,000 people marched through the streets of London. They were all - women and men - insisting that women must have the right to choose whether or not to have an abortion.
All over me word women are nanting to throw off the chains of capitalism and demanding the right to control their own lives. The message is clear and sim ple.
The fight for the emancipation of woclass. It can either take it up as its own struggle or it can consign it to some fardistance Tuture. if it adopts the latter course it will fail ignomimiously to unite all the forces which can tear down capitalism.
In the priest-ridden 26 counties of the south of Ireland the tocsin of womens libcranon is souname our us message. m Limerick - one of Ireland's biggest industrial and housing estates - residents are SeE UD The local Limerick Tenants' Association, representing 1,200 houses, say: It is a matter of immediate urgency that a family-planning clinic be opened in the city' JacK Callon. a wen-own local trade unionist, endorses this, arguing: "Our society encourages women to have large families on moral grounds (but) does not explain how women are going to feed and clothe their children.
Such support from trade union members is welcome. But it is not just a matter of ensuring that women can *clothe and feed their children.' The women of Limerick are demanding the right to be more than just 'good mothers'. They are insisting on the right to exercise their own sexuality. They are insisting that freedom is something more that being chained to the home.
In the British concentration camps of the Six Counties Irish women are incarcer and fought valiantly against British iman movements to ugat tor a social pro gramme that can offer women a way out of their exploitation. But that can only be done if the Republican movement listens to the voice of the women and learns from their needs.
Sut degradation and humiliation. The women in Limerick are flashing a warn ing signal to the Republican movement. The fight against Catholicism, reaction and backwardness means the mobilisation of the entire working class.
lican movement can show that the fight for a united Ireland offers a social and socialst solution for all une working class It can harness the creativity and energy of Irish working class women - a powerful force for irish iberation perialism. These women are the vanguard of the struggle. The task of the RepublicCapitalism can offer women nothing By taking up that struggle the Repub: portugal E3
One of the main aspects of the revolutionary process which has unfolded in Portugal since the downfall of the Caetano dictatorship is the continuous advance and deepening of that process. This stands in striking opposition to most of the incipient proletarian revolutions we have witnessed in Europe since the Russian revolution. Both in the German revolution of 1918-1923 or in the Spanish revolution of 1936-37, just to take these two examples, the culminating point of the revolution seems to come a couple of weeks or even days right after its start. The revolution then loses ground nearly immediately, and while new upturns and rebounds occur, the initial culminating gains are never again recovered In Portugal the opposite has occurred. In the beginning the process started rather slowly and on a low key. It gathered momentum in a contradictory and often confusing way. But since December 1974, and especially since March 1975, the revolutionary mass movement has made tremendous steps forward, generally in response to provocations and attacks by the class enemy. It has now reached the point where the question of the struggle for power by the working class is put on the agenda. In their own biased and indirect way, the results of the election for the Constituent Assembly confirm this. The parties claiming to speak for the working class, and presenting the aim of building a socialist Portugal as an immediate or short-term perspective, polled nearly 60 percent of the popular vote. This is the highest percentage ever attained in Europe under universal franchise outside of the elections for the Russian constituent assembly, which coincided with the conquest of power by the soviets. • ADVANCE FALTERING • Since the beginning of May 1975, however, signs that this continuous progress of the revolutionary process is coming to an end have begun to multiply. If we want to avoid impressionistic interpretations of this threatening turning point, we have to try to understand it as a function of the basic social and political forces at play in Portugal today.
In the first place, the economic situation has seriously deteriorated. Capitalists have reacted to the massive conquests of the working class, which threaten the very basis of their system, with a massive investment strike and capital flight. They are sabotaging production as they did during the Russian revolution, as they always do when the workers challenge their "right" to gear production and distribution to the search for profit and the accumulation of capital. As a result, the cost of living is skyrocketing. Unemployment is rapidly spreading. All the material gains the workers made after the downfall of the dictatorship are being wiped out. Several sectors of the working class are even worse off than under the dictatorship. This cannot but have a demoralizing effect on parts of the proletariat.
In the second place, the powerful unity in action of the toiling masses, which was decisive in beating back the putschist attempts of the would-be bonaparte, Spinola (and the would-be Pinochets hiding behind his back), is now seriously threatened. Both in the incidents around the May 1 demonstration in Lisbon, and in the incidents around. the República newspaper, large sectors of the masses were set against each other. A rapidly widening split inside the working class would endanger all the gains of the revolution, and open a breach through which a successful counteroffensive of reaction and counterrevolution could make serious headway.
In the third place, the next step forward is unclear to the mass of the proletariat. The revolutionary process unfolded up to now according to an internal logic of its own. It went from the conquest of immediate material and democratic demands and the ending of the colonial war to the purge of the most hated representatives of the dictatorship from the state apparatus and the enterprises, to the nationalization of banks, finance groups, and key industries, and to the spread of workers control. Now, however, this spontaneous process has run into an impasse. Big confusion reigns as to what should be dene next. Should it be the "battle for production," as most of the leaders of the MFA [Movimento das Forças Armadas-Armed Forces Movement| and the Communist party propose? Should it be "the battle for freedom," as the Social Democrats and their bourgeois allies suggest? Should it be "the fight against indiscipline and anarchy," as nearly all political parties and officers claim? Should it be the "struggle against social fascism," as the irresponsible Maoists contend? Confronted with this cacophony of conflicting proposals—which all have little mass appeal given the appalling economic situation, and which all seem to imply that the revolutionary process should somehow be halted-confusion disunity, and disarray could rapidly throw the mass movement back.
CP leader Alvaro Cunhal (left)
It is in the light of these developments that the incidents occurring at the newspaper República should be analyzed and understood. We are very skeptical, to say the least, whether what was really involved in that incident was a serious attempt to prevent the Socialist party from having its own newspaper, i. e., a serious attempt to destroy the freedom of action of the largest political party in Portugal today.
If this was really the case, only. two interpretations would be possible.
Either one would have to assume that in Portugal we are on the eve of a power grab by the Soviet bureaucracy and its Portuguese satellites, i.e., on the eve of a Prague coup like the one of February 1948. This was the way in which the Social Democratic leader Soares himself, and practically the whole Portuguese and international bourgeois press, not without active support from the Maoists, interpreted the República incident. Needless to say, this implies the grotesque thesis that Portugal's bourgeois officer corps has become a tool of the Soviet bureaucracy, for some mysterious reasons of an essentially ideological nature (the "power of attraction" of the Kremlin's ideas, one would presume, being really unlimited).
• NOT EVE OF COUP • Or one would have to assume that in Portugal we are on the eve of the establishment of a bloody bourgeois-military dictatorship, which is ready to crush the strongest political party of the country, having just polled 38 percent of the popular vote and captured nearly half the seats of the Constituent Assembly. Apart from the fact that such a move would imply the elimination of the CP too, and that it isn't obvious why the CP leadership would actively (not only as an objective long-term result of its policies but actively) support such a move for its own dissolution, such interpretation conflicts with the whole objective analysis of the present relationship of forces in Portugal.
The army is divided not only between pro- and anti-MA forces, and between a pro- and an anti-Spinola wing inside the MFA, but also between different warring factions inside the "pro-socialist" wing of the MFA as well. The soldiers are politically awakened and are becoming active, departing independently from army discipline. Working-class political currents are beginning to capture influence inside a wing of the MFA itself the mass movement is powerful and in ascendance. Under such circumstances the capitalists are in no position to immediately crush the proletariat. They don't have either the strength or an adequate instrument to do this. Their immediate aim is not to strangle all democratic liberties for the masses as a whole, not to speak of their most moderate reformist party strongly in favor of class collaboration. Their immediate aim is to divide and confuse the mass movement, in order to stop the revolutionary process at a level compatible with the survival of capitalist production relations, and prudently start repression against small isolated sectors. Only after they have achieved these goals could theymore quickly than some optimists believe, of course-plan to take a more general counteroffensive and crush the anticapitalist potential of the Portuguese working class. • 'REPUBLICA' EXPLAINED • Now when we study what really happened at the República printing plant, we understand how these incidents dovetail with the fundamental plans of Portuguese and international capital. For, contrary to the version of these incidents spread by the bourgeois press, the initiative did not come from the CP, and even red week ERNEST MANDEL EXAMINES THE CURRENI less from the MFA officers, but from the workers of that plan themselves among whom CP supporters are actually in minority. They are faced with a rapidly decreasing circulation o the newspaper, and heavy financial losses at the printshop. They are threatened with layoffs and redundancies. And they reacte exactly in the same way in which workers have been reacting ir hundreds of other factories and offices throughout Portugal to such threats-by removing the manager and requesting a new administrative structure under workers control, whatever may be the exact scheme proposed, which differs from case to case.
• INTRIGUES • That these motivations became intertwined with all kinds o political intrigues is obvious. That the CP bureaucrats tried to us the workers' initiative in order to strike a blow against thei Social Democratic rivals and associates, who had just given then such a beating in the elections, is undoubted. That the stronges left-wing workers group inside the printing plant, the Maoist UDF [União Democrática do Povo-Democratic People's Union], trie to utilize its influence in order to bar publicity for a rival Maois grouping "critically supported" by the Social Democratic editor also played a role. That some military leaders of the MFA confronted with this confusing picture, tried to whip up hostilits against "warring political parties," which has been one of thei main propaganda themes for many months, is likewise undisput ed. But the outcome of the whole intrigue never was in doubt. The whole logic of the bourgeois class pressure, both nationally ano internationally, plays today in favor of the Socialist parts recuperating its newspaper. The bourgeois leadership of the MFA cannot but go along with that pressure. The losers will be th workers of the República printing plant.
We are staunch and principled supporters of freedom of the press. We are convinced that this should be a basic principle no only under bourgeois democracy but in a workers state as well. We are absolutely in favor of the Portuguese Socialist party having a its disposal a daily paper of its own. We believe that the worker: of the República printing plant made a serious error by creating the impression that they wanted to challenge that right.
• WORKERS AS WHOLE • Workers control does not mean and cannot mean that a sma sector of the working class-the typographical workers of on plant, or even the typographical workers of the whole country have the right to decide what political currents should have acces to mass media and what currents shouldn't. In a workers state that decision should be taken democratically by a nationa congress. of workers councils, i.e., by the working class as a whole And we Trotskyists will strongly fight in such a congress for th right to such access to mass media for all those currents which irrespective of their political program and ideology, in practic respect the socialist constitution and socialist legality, i.e., are no engaged in armed actions against workers power As we do not yet have a workers state in Portugal, but still bourgeois state, with strong power in the hands of an offic corps, which, whatever may be its political divisions, is sociall tied in its majority to defending the bourgeois order, the defense o freedom of the press for the Socialist party as a working-clas party (be it with a reformist and class-collaborationist leadership is all the more important for us.
But we are consistent and not partial defenders of the princip of freedom of the press. We do not accept any limitations on (
That Threaten It any monopoly of the right of access to the mass media, a monopoly neither for the proprietors of printshops, nor for the owners of large sums of money, nor for political parties. Real and generalized freedom of the press means that every group of workers, including the typographical workers of the República plant, have the right to make their opinions known in print, regardless of whether they "own" a printing press or not. Whether this should be done in a special newspaper, published precisely for such a purpose, or whether it should be in the columns of each individual newspaper, is a secondary têchnical question.
Finally, we would strongly oppose any attempt to play the correct principle of freedom of the press against the no less correct principle of workers control, in the sense of control over the livelihood and the working conditions of the working class. The Socialist party has the right to have its own newspaper. But it has no right to lay off printing workers, or to reduce their wages, or to make their working conditions harsher, under the pretext that they are "undisciplined" and in disagreement with the political line of that Party. All printshops should become collective property with wages and working conditions nationally guaranPARTICE SOCIALSTA Soldier guards Republica offices teed by agreement between the government and the printers union (tomorrow: between national workers power and the printing workers councils, together with the printers union). Only under condition that all questions of material pressure, privileges, threats of reprisals, and fear of losing one's job will be eliminated from the realm of expressing opinions and fighting for them will there be real, substantial, and not only formal and partial freedom of the press for the toiling masses. And this goes for the printing worKers LOO.
So, far from there being any contradiction between freedom of the press and workers control, the two principles complement each other once they are interpreted in the correct way we just sketched.
The ominous implications of the República incident are sought them. They could open the beginning of a concerted attack against the manifold attempts at workers control that have dominated the revolutionary process in Portugal during the last months That the pressure of Portuguese and international capital goes in that direction is self-evident. The European capitalists are called upon to bail out the Portuguese economy from its greatest crisis. They are ready to make a gesture, provided they can wring the maximum concessions from the Portuguese government. And the No. I concession they call for is reestablishment of discipline in the plants! Otherwise, they indicate, they would be just throwing money into a bottomless pit.
That an important sector of the MFA leadership wants to act in the same direction is no less obvious. "Restore discipline" has been one of its main propaganda slogans for a long time. Some of them believe it to be particularly clever to cover such a move by a proposal to create some kind of plant committees, but under military control and geared essentially to increasing production."
That the CP bureaucracy would be willing to go along with this demand, although its "left turn" implies now some propaganda in favor of workers control too, is made possible by the fact that Cunhal's line of "promoting production" has trapped him into a position in which he finds it very difficult to oppose the bourgeois campaign along the above lines.
•SOARES' MANOEUVRES• A new element in the situation is the turn of the SP leadership on this question. Before the elections, Soares cleverly tried to exploit the growing resentment of the workers against the bureaucratic practices of the CP leadership by appearing to support shop-level workers democracy and workers control (e.g., on its May 1 posters). While the CP violently opposed wildcat strikes, the SP gave some occasional cover to them, and was accused by Cunhal of "left opportunism." During the election campaign and even on May 1, 1975, the SP had posters in favor of "workers control."
As a matter of fact, the electoral victory of the SP expressed a combination of two phenomena: On the one hand, the less politicized and radicalized workers voted for that party as the best-known proponent of "socialism" in a general way, exactly as they voted for the Mensheviks in Russia immediately after the February 1917 Revolution. On the other hand, sectors of more radicalized workers voted for the SP out of disgust with the strikebreaking and bureaucratic practices of the CP • 'RULE OF LAW' • Now, however, the situation is changing. The CP is talking about "workers control" and playing down its attacks on militant workers' initiatives. And it is the Social Democrats who now shout for "an end to anarchy," a "restoration of order," "the rule of law," a "digesting period" for nationalizations (i.e., a stop to the extension of nationalized enterprises), and other slogans of a clearly counterrevolutionary content. They now try to oppose the process of consolidating bourgeois-democratic state institutions and bourgeois law against a further unfolding of the revolution, centering their attacks upon initiatives of workers control, under the demagogic cloak of "defending freedom." This risks being the main objective result of the República incident. It is obviously the main threat to further progress of the Portuguese revolution.
If we analyze this threat; if wé understand the objective social, economic, and political pressures which support that threat; then we can also understand the essential countermove that Portuguese revolutionists should propose today: The democratic election, on a united-front basis, of workers, peasants, and soldiers councils in all factories, city neighborhoods, villages, and barracks, and their coordination and centralization on a local, regional, and national scale in a Toilers Assembly.
Such a countermove would be an effective answer to, all the dangers that threaten the way forward for the Portuguese • GENERALIZED CONTROL • Against the incipient economic catastrophe and the growing sabotage of the economy, a system of haphazard workers control, on a factory-by-factory basis, becomes increasingly futile. The moment has come for a generalized system of workers control. But this means a generalized system of workers councils in the factories, which can not only stop layoffs, halt removals of machinery and funds, uncover stocks of raw materials, and prevent current output from being hoarded, but which can also start drawing up an emergency economic plan for guaranteeing full employment and satisfying the masses' most burning needs, by taking over the whole of industry without compensation and running it in the interest of the toilers, by the toilers themselves.
Against the threat of division and disarray inside the working class, agreements among the top leaders of the working-class parties, although necessary, are absolutely insufficient. After all however much Cunhal and Soares insult each other in public, we should never forget that they have been sitting in the same coalition government with the bourgeoisie for more than a year that they have together supported and voted censorship laws and laws restricting the right to strike, that they share equal responsibility for the present dangerous divisions inside the working class. In order to reestablish the full and enthusiastic unity in action of the working class, it is necessary to guarantee to the Social Democratic workers full political freedom for their party, and an end to bureaucratic maneuvers in the unions and the mass media. It is likewise necessary to guarantee to communist and revolutionary workers full unfolding revolutionary process going beyond the bonds of bourgeois democracy and capitalist relations of production. And what organs would be more adequate to achieve these guarantees than democratically elected workers councils which would be more clearly united-front organs from top to bottom than ever before in any country?
The Constituent Assembly is impotent from the start, tied as it is by the "pact" between the political parties and the MFA. The MFA leaders assert that they want these ties in order to further the revolutionary process. Some even say that they want direct power organs of the people. Let us take their assertions at face value, and call for a democratic election of workers councils which wouldn't be tied by any preliminary pact with the military, which would be wholly sovereign. Even those who believe that to destroy the illusions in the MFA among the masses is an important task today would have to admit that there is no better way to reach that goal than to agitate for democratically elected and sovereign Fi councils today.
All those who fear the unfolding proletarian revolution in Portugal talk about "restoring discipline," attack "anarchy" and "grass roots direct democracy." But no revolutionary process is possible in a capitalist country without an explosion of such "anarchy," "indiscipline," and "grass roots direct democracy." All revolutions of the twentieth century have taught us that basic truth. What is threatening the revolution is not "anarchy," but repression against direct mass initiatives. A generalized system of workers councils would be the best protection of the masses against such repression, the best weapon for consolidating and spreading workers control, the best way for linking up the workers with the soldiers and the sailors, for protecting and extending the forms of democratic self-organization in the army and navy. which are the first targets for repression if the bourgeoisie wants to restore some effective power instrument. Such councils will also be the best guarantee for workers-soldiers common action, against any attempt at a new reactionary putsch, the natural framework for the armament of the toilers linked to the democratically organized soldiers and sailors.
The struggle for democratically elected and centralized workers, peasants, tenants, and soldiers committees is today the decisive campaign which can turn the situation in Portugal again in favor of the revolution. It is the main means for restoring the unity in action of the toiling masses, which was their essential source of strength in the last nine months. We are convinced that the comrades of the LCI [Liga Comunista InternacionalistaInternationalist Communist League, the Portuguese sympathiz ing group of the Fourth International] will be the audacious initiators of that campaign and that they will constantly remain in its forefront. Thereby they will show that they fight in a principled way both for the immediate and the historical interests of the working class, and for a victorious breakthrough towards a socialist revolution in their country.
red weekly 3 july 1975 to read the front pages.
The response of the military, in fact their policy, can be summed up in two words: teror and cynicism.
To take the terror first. Although no organised force constitutes a serious short-term threat to the regime, the repression - widespread and at the same time selective - - continues with the same intensity. There is a curfew each night throughout the country; areas are sealed off and systematically searched while helicopters circle above, enormous publicity is given to police operations and to arrests.
TERRORISE
The aim of all this activity is very clear. Beyond their immediate effectiveness, such operations carried out systematically and daily are designed to bring home concretely to the mass of the population the weight and the realhopes to scare off all forms of opposition, no matter how modest or limited politically.
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se Revolution TATE OF THE PORTUGUESE REVOLUTION