Comrades Jones, McCrae and Harper raise some important points on one of the key problems facing the revolutionary vanguard in Portugal today.
However, the comrades make some important factual errors which must be cleared up first:
1. The SP leaders do not demand representation in the Government, based on the Constituent Assembly. Even they cannot easily slide over the fact that they signed a pact with the Armed Forces Movement before the elections limiting the Assembly's role to the drawing up of a constitution, and recognising the AFM's overriding authority (a pact which only the revolutionary left groups participating in the elections refused to sign).
Nor is there any indication that 'many workers look to' the Constituent Assembly as such. What both they and the SP leaders argue (and it is an argument which has to be faced), is that having won 38 per cent of the votes in the Assembly elections, the Socialist Party must be recognised as an important factor in the present political situation.
2. It is not entirely true that the popular assemblies and similar bodvolvement of democratically elected regimental delegates in a number of the assemblies, for instance, goes directly against the terms of the cannot be denied is that the movement for popular assemblies has a dangerously ambiguous attitude to the AFM, and in particular to that wing led by General Carvalho.
LARGE SECTIONS peasants who voted for the SP away from the reactionary policies 3. Nor is it true that this mov- the bourgeoisie.
The inproject laid down by the AFM. What that army.
How, then, will it be possible to win the large sections of workers and isations independent of all ties with This is why the question of the AFM is so important, and why the acceptance of its leading role by both the CP and the SP (even if they place their confidence in different sectors within it) is so criminal. The Portuguese Army remains a bourgeois army, and the AFM represents (despite a token representation of NCOs and soldiers) the officers of While a few of the latter are undoubtedly sincerely committed to the revolutionary interests of the working class, the majority are simply riding the storm. As the Economist (23 August) so astutely comments: Many serving officers, never wholly won over to the slogans of the left, are now reverting to ágainst the reactionary threatincluding the establishment of united workers militias - that would have placed the SP leaders on the spot, and drawn the line quite clearly between their reactionary policies and the revolutionary aspirations of many of their rank-and-file adherents.
A third emphasis, however, must obviously be on the elaboration of a workers' programme to resolve the economic crisis. Inflation is spiralling and thousands of workers are losing their jobs each week as a result of capitalist sabotage from within and without combined with the general effects of the worldwide recession. It is no accident that the document circulated by the Antunes group laid great stress on this aspect of the situation. Yet all the Goncalves Government can come up with is the re-opening of the stock exchange and a new code for