ARMADA tuguese working class.
LISBON- The general situation in Portugal today is dominated by two major features. First, the revolutionary upsurge that has been accelerating and deepening since September 1974 has not run up against a bourgeois state apparatus capable of containing or crushing it during the current phase. On the other hand, neither has it attained a scale of self-organisation (that is, a situation in which organs of workers power are more or less generalised), a level of consciousness, or a working class revolutionary leadership that would make possible the conquest of power by the proletariat in alliance with the poor peasants and revolutionary soldiers as an immediate outcome of the revolutionary process.
The result is a more or less permanent political and social tension, a feeling of crisis that permeates all the politicised sectors of society, and a succession of dramatic events: ministerial crises theatrical political coups, and violent clashes between political forces and the major social classes, each of which is trying to modify the relationship of forces before a decision can be imposed in one direction or the other.
workers movement that has erupted these past days and that could trag ically threaten the future of the PorThe leaders of the CP have tried to transform a necessary mobilisation against reaction into a manoeuvre aimed at isolating the SP. They have sought to take advantage of the very lively and widespread senti ment among the workers about the necessity of barring the path of an increasingly arrogant fascism to cynically push the Socialist Party-and not only its leadership-to link its own fate to that of the right, that is, to that of the PPD, the CDS (Centro Democratico Social-Social Democratic Center), and all the reactionary On the night of Friday, July 18, communiques released by the CP and the Intersindical called for the erection of barricades to prevent an imaginary march on Lisbon', which in reality was the meeting of the SP.
If a march on Lisbon had really been in preparation, the first thing to do would have been to launch an offensive toward the SP-its militants and leadership-demanding that it join in the organisation of workers self-defence aimed at blocking the path of the march. To do that would have required first assuring the militants of the SP that their right as a workers party to hold meetings and demonstrations would be recognised That would have forced the SP leadership to make its position clear, and its possible or probable lack of response to such appeals would have at least helped a large number of Socialist militants who are already beginning to assert themselves to get a clear idea of the real orientation of their leadership and to join with the Communist and revolutionary workers in the organisation of a common response to reaction ADVENTURIST But the adventurist and sectarian folly of the CP on the contrary contributed to helping the SP leadership harden up its rank and file by invoking the threat of the CP. The reflex of party patriotism, obviously intermixed with reactionary and anti-communist prejudices, was thus able to come fully into play to assure the success of the SP meetings, which were presented by the Social Democratic leadership as 'a great victory against the attempt at Stalinist repression.' In any case, only about 2,000 people participated in the Lisbon "barricades", which were quickly