Portugal continues to be wracked by political turmoil centring around disputes over control of the mass media. While the Portuguese Socialist Party - backed paign over the dispute between the workers and editors of the newspaper Repubascenca workers.
These two disputes have made 'Freedom of the media' the latest rallying cry for reactionary forces both inside and outside the country. So much slander has appeared in the British press about the Republica issue that it is necessary to clear up a number of BOULES.
1. Republica is not, and never has been, a paper of the Socialist Party (the SP has a regular weekly - as does the Communist Party); it is a capitalist concern that has a history of. liberal opposition under the fascist regime. After 25 April the top editorial staff lined up politically with the Socialist Party (its editor, Raul Rego, was a Socialist Minister in the first 2. These pro-SP views were far from unanimous even among the paper's editorial staff. An important minority with different sympathies was systematically purged by the top editors. Over the past 11 months fourteen members of the editorial staff (which now numbers 22) were edged out of their jobs - including a chief editor and two of his assistants.
3. There is no evidence that the dispute was masterminded by the Communist Party. Indeed, there is good reason to believe that the CP is embarrassed by the whole affair. Certainly the CP paper Avante has carried almost nothing on the struggle.
4. The decision to challenge the sectarian way in which the paper was being edited came from the democratically-elected Workers Coordinating Committee of the paper. This committee is supported by the overwhelming majority of Republica workers. A recent general assembly which endorsed the Workers Committee stand was attended by 146 out of the paper's 175 employees.
5. The Workers Committee is far from being controlled by the Communist Party. Only two of the Committee's 13 workers are members of the CP; both the maoist UDP and the revolutionary group LUAR havę more members on the Committee. The convenor of the Workers Committee is actually a member of the Socialist Party. The Committee recently supported a demonstration called by the Revolutionary Councils movement, which the Communist Party vehemently denounced. by the international capitalists - continues to wage an hysterical red-baiting camlica another struggle has broken out between the workers and management of the Catholic-owned Radio Renascenca. This second fight has resulted in violent clashes between reactionary Catholic groups and left-wing supporters of the Radio Ren6. The struggle of the Republica workers has the support of all the most class-conscious sections of the Lisbon working class. All the city's newspaper workers have backed it, and the workers on the Jornal do Comercio blacked an attempt by the Republica editorial staff to bring out a scab paper. These workers are far from being puppets of the Communist Party Party: the Jornal do Comercio workers led an important struggle for the purging of their editors last year, in the course of which they vigorously attacked the CP's obstructionist attitude. This culminated in a 24 hour general strike of Lisbon newspaper workers which the CP tried to scab on. 7. The demana of the Workers Committee and file organisation begin to assert itself? is simply for a newspaper which is not the sectarian organ of a single political party.
The outbreak of a similar struggle at Radio Renascenca has given SP leader Soares a golden opportunity. He has been cuddling up to reactionary Catholic opinion for some time.
One of the main charges that he recently levelled against the so-called 'Communist-controlled press' was that it devoted more space to the mass funeral of a CP militant murdered by fascists than to the Festival of Fatima (a particularly obscurantist Catholic rite with mass influence among pious Portuguese Catholics)!
Given the continuing influence of the Catholic church among many of the more backward sections of the Portuguese working class - an important factor in the big Socialist Party vote - this is a very dangerous situation. It threatens to open up a serious split inside the working class, with a numerically big section being won over to the reactionary politics being promoted by Soares and his cohorts, at a time when the task facing the workers move ment is to build working class unity around demands for carrying the struggle forward.
The main root of the political problems that the Republica affair' has produced is the absence of an independent working class power. The dispute looks like one between different factions in the workers' movement Copcon troops-will they follow Carvalho's lead in swinging behind MFA majority, or will independent rank- one represented by the editorial workers and another by the production workers.
But if there existed a body with sufficient authority in the working class that could step in and ensure that the decisions concerning the paper were made in the interests of the working class as a whole, and on the basis of workers' democracy, then the dispute could be easily resolved and the reactionary manoeuvres of Rego, Soares and company would fall flat. General Carvalho-commander or tne key copcon mill tary force, he at first encouraged Revolutionary Coun cjls movement, but now seems to have swung behind MFA majority to condemn it as an 'opportunist manoeuvre". the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat (PRP).
Last week, on 16 June, a key group of workers - at the Lisbon Lisnave shipyards -held a mass meeting attended by half of the yards 8,000 workers. They voted to set up a revolutionary council in the yards, elected 400 delegates to it, and decided to support the mass demonstration called for the following day by the Revolutionary Councils movement WORKERS' POWER A solid column of 2,000 Lisnave workers. joined by colleagues from the Setenave yards just outside Lisbon who had also voted to establish a revolutionary council, and thousands of other workers from the Lisbon region, marched through the city calling for the dissolu tion of the Constituent Assembly, workers' power, and the immediate establishment of a "revolutionary Government'.
This mass sentiment among the most class-conscious workers for the creation of their own organs of class power is a sure sign that the country is moving towards the very brink of socialist revolution. But there is also a serious danger in this situation. The task of revolutionaries is to reinforce the links between the most advanced workers and the more backward, fighting the reformist misleaders for leadership over the latter. The struggle for genuine mass, democratic bodies of the working class will be a central means of achieving But the demands of the Revolutionary Councils movement try to ignore the present state of consciousness of the mass of Portuguese workers, who have just voted for the Communist or Socialist Parties in the Constituent Assembly election. They attempt to slip over the mass workers' parties, who have political influence over far more workers at present than do the various rank-and-file bodies out of which Revolutionary Councils would be built.
WORKERS' COUNCILS In the present circumstances the demand for revolutionary councils or other bodies of workers power must be put forward as part of a set of demands for the independent organisations of the workers movement to take the reins of political power. They must be tied to the demand for a workers' Government - to include the Socialist and Communist Parties, as well as the Intersindical trade union federation and new mass bodies of developing workers' power - and the demand that this Government bases its policies and its actions on the development of workers' power through the promotion and extension of such workers' councis Only in this way can the vanguard section of the working class actually fight to win the allegiance of the mass of Portuguese workers away from all forms of class collaborationism - that of the Socialist Party, the Communist Party, and the MFA leaders - and build the kind of fighting unity necessary to forge genuine workers' power and carry out the socialist revolution.