In the present phase of the Portuguese revolution, an agreement between workers' organisations should clearly be sought, but in the following perspective:
of organising a response to the reactionary offensive, in stimulating all forms of self-defence, and establishing links between the autonomous organs of workers and soldiers; in this sense an agreement between workers organisations can constitute an important point of departure. - of ensuring the defence of the economic, social and political gains of the working class; - of promoting the development, extension and centralisation of the structures of self-organisation (workers' commissions, neighbourhood conmissions, popular assemblies), and thus responding to the divisions within the workers' ranks.
But the communique of 25 August does not mention the organisation of a single concrete initiative corresponding to these objectives.
• One of the major obstacles to the advances of the revolutionary process lies in the divisions introduced within the working class by the policies of the Stalinist leadership of the Communist Party and the social democratic leadership of the Socialist Party. The absence of concrete objectives, and the lack of initiatives directed towards the SP in order to promote a common struggle for understandable objectives whose need is felt by the workers of the SP, implies an endorsement of the sectarian policies of the CP and rules out a bold offensive around the question of the united front, which is both vital and possible today in Portugal.
The 'unitary agreement' moreover implies support for the actions of the Fifth Provisional Government which proposes in its document ('Line of programmatic action and tasks of the transition') a 'policy of austerity' (point 1-b) - at the very time when the workers in the streets and in the factories have put on the order of the day demands for expropriation under workers' control, etc, demands with which the Government will be faced tomorrow. the workers' commissions, neighbourhood commissions, popular assemblies, etc....and to the parties and revolutionary organisations of the workers' movement, for the creation of a "Front"!
Here again, it can only be a question of endorsing the reformist project of the CP for the creation of a popular, democratic and socialist front. Moreover, with the guiding document's appeal to the alliance of leadership of the CP. the People-FA, the agreement poses the integration of the workers comnissions, the neighbourhood commissions and the popular assemblies rather than asserting the real independence of the mass movement from the institutions of the bourgeois state.