In April millions of workers and peasants voted for the Portuguese Socialist Party. Since then, demonstrations of tens of thousands have turned out to support the Socialists' demand for representation in the Government, based on the Constituent Assembly elected in April.
Whatever the intentions of the Socialist Party leadership, it seems true that large sections of Portuguese workers back this demand. In doing so, they are dragged in behind the SP leaders' right-wing strategy.
Is it possible to break these workers from the hold of the SP just by holding out to them the promise of workers' democracy through popular assemblies, when these assemblies at the moment have no mass implantation in the working class? Isn't it necessary to have some position on the Constituent Assembly, which so many workers still look to?
Obviously the creation of workers' councils is absolutely central to the success of the revolution. But in practice, isn't the movement for workers' councils under the sway of the Armed Forces Movement? And don't many workers distrust it for that reason!
How should revolutionaries handle this situation? What has the Fourth International got to lose if it's precisely through the experience of the SP in government carrying out reactionary policies that will get rid of this misplaced trust from numbers of workers, and if it's in the fight against these reactionary policies that a united front of CP/SP and revolutionary workers will be formed. A united front that can give an immense boost to the movement for workers' councils. - KEN JONES (NUT), ROBERT McCRAE (AUEW Ford's Dagenham), STEVE HARPER (AUEW, Ford's Dagenham). working class'. While they are clearly still for the most part in an embryonic stage of formation, and limited to the area around Lisbon, those that have already emerged undoubtedly have a mass base. The first meeting of the Pontinha assembly, for example, was attended by bourhood commissions, themselves elected by mass meetings of workers and residents, as well as delegates from the RE 1 regiment - also democratically elected. implantation was the huge size (estimated at up to 50,000) of the demonstration in Lisbon on 20 August called by the adherents of the assemblies.
ment is 'under the sway of the Armed Forces Movement'. delegates from 45 workers' and neighCommunist violence.
General Fabiao and General Carvalho discuss Goncalves' uncertain future Another sign of their developing make is that it will not be through an abstract demand for SP represen; tation in the Government - not merely because this implies acceptance of the pro-imperialist conditions laid down by Soares & Co. for such participation, but because emphasis on such a demand in practice coincides with the project of the openly reactionary forces which have been using the SP as a cover for the present wave of antiWhat is correct, however, is to demand the participation of the SP leaders - allegedly so concerned for the interests of the workers and peasants who voted for them - in a government of the workers organperiod of "discipline" to put it Any perspective to win the rank-and-file of the SP away from the reactionary leaders must therefore have a clear position of no reliance on any section of the AFM. Apart from anything else, this would rapidly expose the demagogy of Soares's warnings against a 'military dictatorship' as he hurries to fall in behind the Antunes group of officers This must obviously be coupled with a strong emphasis on the organisation of the soldiers, sailors and airmen at the base. Destroy the hierarchy of the bourgeois army and replace it with the authority of the workers and peasants in uniform! With the soldiers but not the AFM!
A second important emphasis must obviously be on the need for a united workers response to the present wave of reactionary violence. Here again the policy of the Communist Party has been the opposite of that which would have been adopted by any revolutionary workers party JOINT CAMPAIGN If the CP, instead of indulging in a series of sectarian manoeuvres had issued a clear-cut call to the SP along with all other workers organisations for a joint campaign