tion itself if it is not to be crushed.
day the fight is on for the ranks.
The central task of the Sixth Provisional Government, headed by Adniral Pinheiro de Azevedo, is to break the movement in the ranks of the armed forces - to restore authority and discipline Nothing illustrates better the growing class polarisation in Portugal than the attitude of the different parties to the Provisional Government and this central task.
The right wing Centre Democratic Social Party (CDS) accepts the present Government - save for the Communist Party's presence in it - because, in the words of its leader Diogo Freitas do Amaral, it knows that for the moment: 'Few people would support any attempt to overthrow the present Government by violence [i.e. from the right] and....any attempt could give the final victory to the left."
ALLEGIANCE
The Popular Democratic Party (PPD) is in the Government, and is the party to which the most important sections of the bourgeoisie have transferred their allegiance. It also has a strong base in the Northern peasantry and other petty bourgeois layers. Its central aim is the stabilisation of the capitalist state, first of all inside the barracks - a task, they say, which must be accomplished "within a month'.
By comparison, the Socialist Party leadership is not above a little but its JOHN WEAL reports from Lisbon Everyone talks of "The Revolution' in Portugal today. But as in all revolttionary processes taere are titose for whom the revolution has been made, and must now be 'defended (i.e. halted); and others for whom it has reached a turning point, and must now be carried through to the proletarian revoluThis division between the "two revolutions' is tne class divide between capital ana labour. Today this division is finding its sharpest expression inside the armed forces. Most officers have already chosen their side; torevolution it defends, and from whom. Soares says: The main enemy is the right which plots and waits. Yet this anti-fascist fighter sanctions the use of the COPCON commandos, led by the notorious rightist Jaime Neves, against the 'Soldiers United Will Win' (SUV) demonstrators outside the Trafaria prison; against the soldiers supporting the workers at Radio Renascenca; and against the Armed Forces Handicapped Association.
DISBANDED The Government in which the SP plays a leading role has now started to disband unreliable regiments and transfer leftist officers and men. The Transport Regiment in Oporto has been disbanded after the soldiers voted - by 313 votes, with six abstentions and none against - to oppose the transfer of five soldiers and two officers. So much for the SP's concern for demостасу!
At the same time the Sixth Provisional Government has not lifted a finger against a single rightist officer - an excellent way to deal with 'the main danger'.
Yes, this Government is surely *defending the revolution': with one arm, begging bowl in hand, stretched out towards the Common Market of the capitalists; and the other arm busily creating a new military intervention force to re blace the 'less reliable' COPCON tendency to link up with workers and tenants' commissions and boot out their reactionary officers.
must be saved today not from a rightist offensive against the Sixth Provisional Government but from the stabilisation project of the Government itself. The forces aligned against this project are to be found amongst the workers' and tenants' committees, amongst the peasants of the Alentejo, and amongst the rank and file of the armed forces egate from Setubal barracks who tion was all flowers and peace. But be bloody, but I'm not afraid to die.
The SUV continues to grow This Tuesday's demonstration in an unambiguous alliance with the working class very different trom the time when the ranks were still res of the AFM and its so-called 'AFM-people' alliance.
join SUV being more under the control of the Communist Party, which has little influence in SUV. But recently the Navy officers came out for Antunes (they were formerly Goncalvists), while the ranks withdrew their support for ide is widening.
break with all past ambiguities. It is the mass expression of the immovement itself.
Ine truth is that tue revoration They are those like the soldiers' deltold me: 'I used to think the revoluto live it's necessary to fight. It will Glascow (041.323 0318 Coimbra follows their historic demonstration in Lisbon on 25 September. When they chant Soldiers will always be with the people' it is not a new slogan. But now it expresses enmeshed in the shifting manoeuvCLASS DIVIDE The sailors were at first slow to Women's Year and Peter Main.
the Prime Minister. The class div(tel:01-2789526 The AFM is a fiction now. The SUV is a conscious can only be built by means of a non-exclusive united front of workers, tenants and peasants and their organDOUBLE-GAME But there is a problem other than the attitude of the SP leadership in carrying out this simple and necessary strategy - the policy of the Portuguese Communist Party. The PCP is playing a treacherous double-game which will result either in its demise as a mass working class party, or in the death of the mass Instead of mobilising the whote of the working class around the slogan, Out with the PPD and AFM Ministers; For a Workers' Governtake decisive action on a national level while their own party is in the Government are leaving the party in increasing numbers. is happening even in towns like Barreiro, the centre of the CUF monopoly, where for years the PCP was alone in heroically resisting the fascist regime The task of the revolutionary left is to galvanise all the committees at the base to involve the PCP and SP rank-and-file in a united movement to defend the soldiers. Unless they can succeed in this task, the radicalised soldiers will become demoralised, desperate and isolated. This is what the battle for the army is all about. It is a life and death question for the Portuguese Socialist revolution.