Democratic rights and the struggle for socialism

SWP convention: issues in Portuguese revolution

By Caroline Lund 

In the recent period the events in Portugal have been at the center of world politics. They were also a centerpiece of the deliberations of the twenty-sixth national convention of the Socialist Workers party, held last August in Ohio.

A full one-third of the convention time was devoted to grappling with the life-and-death issues of the Portuguese revolution.

In these discussions, convention delegates and guests had the benefit of hearing the views of revolutionists from other countries as well. Of the1600 convention participants, 265 were international guests from eighteen different countries, including two revolutionists from Portugal.

In preparation for the convention, Socialist Workers party branches held discussions on Portugal in which all members could participate. To supplement the extensive weekly coverage available to SWP members in the Militant, Intercontinental Press, and other sources, the party's national office published a special bulletin containing translations of some of the key articles on the recent events in Portugal from the press of other socialist organizations around the world. SWP conventions usually open with a report and discussion on the world political situation as a whole. At this convention, however, the international reports focused on the issues in the Portuguese revolution.

The first reporter, SWP Organization Secretary Barry Sheppard, explained that this centering of the discussion was because of the extreme confusion and sharp differences on the left over these events and the crucial importance of the lessons involved, not only for the success or failure of the Portuguese revolution but also for building the Socialist Workers party and the international revolutionary socialist organization, the Fourth International.

The SWP is prevented by reactionary legislation in the United States from belonging to the Fourth International, but lends it its fraternal support and solidarity, and actively participates in the political debates within the world organization.

The discussion on Portugal continued in a second report by SWP National Secretary Jack Barnes, who took up the impact of the Portuguese events on the political debates within the Fourth International and the organizations sympathetic to it. Among the highlights of these sessions were the greetings to the convention from representatives of the LCI (Liga Comunista InternacionalistaInternationalist Communist League) and the PRT(Partido Revolucionario dos TrabalhadoresRevolutionary Workers party), the two groups supporting the Fourth International in Portugal.

Both received prolonged ovations from the assembly.

Greetings from the United Secretariat of the Fourth International, brought by Alan Jones, a leader of the British International Marxist Group, were also warmly received. Jones recalled the central role played by the Socialist Workers party in the mass antiwar mobilizations that helped inflict a historic defeat on American imperialism in Indochina. He saluted the gathering as truly "a victory convention" -for the Vietnamese and for the American working class.

Main lines of report

The report by Sheppard for the SWP Political Committee centered on the analysis of events in Portugal since the fall of the Salazar-Caetano dictatorship in April 1974. The main political conclusions outlined in his report could be summarized as follows:

1. The April 25, 1974, coup in Portugal "was the result of a conclusion reached by the ruling class of Portugal that it could no longer control its colonial empire, or dominate its own working class, primarily through Salazarist repression." It decided to reorganize its forms of rule, to modernize its economy, and switch over to neocolonialist methods of domination in Africa. This reorganization was carried through by violent means in the April1974coup. The capitalists hoped to maintain their rule through the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), the political arm of the military hierarchy, which, because of the coup against the fascist-like old regime, was initially identified by the masses with their aspirations for democracy, an end to the colonial wars, and improved living conditions.

2. Since the coup, Sheppard continued, "the objective of the MFA has continued to be to modernize and strengthen Portuguese capitalism-not to overturn it. . . . The MFA has used socialist phrasemongering to put capitalist needs in a better light as a first step toward restoring the dominance of bourgeois ideology and of bourgeois law and order and repression."

3. Portugal is an imperialist country, dominated by indigenous monopolies and finance capital.

Therefore the pro-Portuguese nationalist demagogy of the MFA, which claims to be fighting for Portuguese "national liberation" from other imperialist powers, is at bottom reactionary and for Portuguese imperialism. The MFA has used this nationalist demagogy to aid its attempts to maintain a neo-colonial grip on its colonies and former colonies, especially the richest, Angola.

The response of revolutionists must be to demand immediate and unconditional withdrawal of Portugal.

The 1974 coup opened the floodgates to a mass upsurge and radicalization of the Portuguese people. Hundreds of thousands joined trade unions and the Communist and Socialist parties. Anticommunism was discredited and all leftist groups were given a hearing.

"After the decades of dictatorial rule," Sheppard stated, "the masses of Portugal have made it clear, through their actions, that they want complete democracy-the opposite of totalitarianism. They view democracy in quite a practical way-as an assurance of their right to struggle for a better standard of living and to form a society offering increasing opportunities and abundance. And they swiftly came to the conclusion that the correct name for what they wanted was socialism."

When elections to the Constituent Assembly were held in April 1975, voters gave a majority to the main working-class parties, the Communist and Socialist parties, giving them a mandate to form a workers and peasants government.·

5. In the face of this upsurge, the Portuguese capitalist class has set out to · wear down and demoralize the masses and restrict their rights. The main instrument for this task has been the MFA, aided by the leaderships of the Communist and Socialist parties, who were both ready to politically endorse the MFA and subordinate the aspirations of the masses to the bourgeois military rulers. This popular-frontist, class-collaborationist policy of the CP and SP, said Sheppard, "represents the most important obstacle to the Portuguese revolution."

Since the fall of the Salazarist regime, the Communist party has played the more direct role as henchman of the MFA, as its cops within the labor movement, helping to divide the working class and tighten control by the military. This was seen in the Stalinists' role in closing down the newspaper Republica, which reflected the views of the SP, as well as in the CP's denunciation of the SP as "social fascist" and the main enemy of the working class.

The Stalinists also joined in with the MFA's demagogic campaign against the rights of "political parties and to hobble the Constituent Assembly in the name of "direct democracy" and "people's assemblies" to be controlled by the military.

The Republica take-over, said Sheppard was not an example of workers' control, as the CP and MFA claimed. "Real workers' control has nothing whatever to do with censorship," he stated. "This was not workers' control but bourgeois repression, utilizing the slogan of workers' control to sucker the gullible. "By acting as a cat's-paw for "repressive government moves, Sheppard stated, the CP paved the way for a resurgence of anticommunism-on a mass scale. "They have succeeded in arousing one of the fundamental props of bourgeois rule-the fear among the masses that socialism means an end to their democratic rights and subjugation to a tyrannical machine."

6. While the fundamental policy of class collaboration of the SP leadership is the same as that of the CP, the SP was forced into opposition last summer, especially following the Republica affair, simply to defend its democratic rights.

7. The role of the various centrist groups to the left of the CP and SP had at the time of the report become one of strident supporters of the military regime, echoing the CP line on major questions, although from their own ultraleft and anarchist type orientation. Their policy of emphasizing "rank-and-file organizing," and downplaying the big political questions facing the masses, led them to fall for the MFA's "direct democracy" plan as well as for the take-over of Republica.

8. Sheppard also discussed the line taken by many of the newspapers of sections and sympathizing groups inside the Fourth International in their coverage of events in Portugal. He pointed out that unfortunately some of the world Trotskyist press had been taken in by the MFA's demagogy concerning "people's power," and had supported the ultraleft, pro-government demonstrations in July.

Broad discussion

The discussion following Sheppard's report brought to the fore a number of key issues. The delegates voted to grant extensive discussion time under both international reports to leaders of sections and sympathizing organizations of the Fourth International to express their points of view. Equal time was given to the two major organized groupings within the Fourth International, the International Majority Tendency, and the Leninist Trotskyist Faction. The contributions enriched the discussion and the delegates' understanding of the key issues involved.

These two political currents inside the world Trotskyist movement did not arise from differences concerning the events in Portugal. They originated in a debate that began in the late 1960s over the place of guerrilla warfare in revolutionary strategy in Latin America.

However, many similar and closely related political issues have been raised by the unfolding revolution in Portugal, and the debate over these questions has become a public one, reflected in the pages of the world Trotskyist press.

Readers of the Militant who are interested in following this discussion are urged to subscribe to Intercontinental Press, the weekly newsmagazine of the world Trotskyist movement, where they can read and study the different points of view, as well as follow the rapidly unfolding developments in Portugal.

At the SWP convention, the reports by Barry Sheppard and Jack Barnes on behalf of the SWP Political Committee also reflected the point of view of one of the two currents in the Fourth International, the Leninist Trotskyist Faction. Alan Jones of the British section of the international presented the point of view of the other current, the International Majority Tendency.

A main area of difference was on the question of democratic rights and their relevance to the struggle for socialism, as raised in the Republic take-over and in the MFA's attempt to hamstring the Constituent Assembly.

Another point of disagreement was whether revolutionists should today call for a government based on the elected CP-SP majority in the Constituent Assembly and counterpose this to rule by the military.

Sheppard stressed that the fight for workers'

democracy and soviets cannot be counterposed to the fight for democratic rights under capitalism, as some of the ultraleft groups in Portugal project. The point was emphasized later by Jack Barnes that it is impossible to make an absolute division between supporting democratic rights and defending bourgeois democratic institutions that are under attack.

"Democratic rights do not just float around in the air," he noted; they are either institutionalized, or they don't exist. For example, he said, "the Bill of Rights is part of the American capitalist constitution. But it lays down fundamental democratic rights which will probably be lifted right out and put into the constitution of a workers state in this country when one is created. The SWP has always advocated this since our founding."

United front tactic

Another difference centered on how to forge a united front between the CP, ·the SP, and the smaller parties that are part of the workers movement. The united front is a tactic elaborated by the Third International under Lenin and Trotsky. The idea is that when the revolutionary party does not yet have the support of a majority of the working class, it can still spearhead the struggle for the needs of the oppressed, and thereby prove its program most correct, through calling for and building united class-struggle actions by all the workers parties around issues they can agree on. The goal is to win a majority of the masses to the revolutionary party.

The CP and most of its ultraleft hangers-on were at that time campaigning against united-front action with the SP, which they characterized as the spearhead of imperialist reaction in Portugal. Sheppard denied that the SP was the main danger to the Portuguese revolution. "To say so cuts across the necessity of building an urgent united front defense of the needs of the masses," he said, citing the problems of unemployment and skyrocketing inflation. "If this is not done, no amount of rhetoric about socialism and soviets will win the masses to actually struggle for socialism."

Since the SWP convention, the views of the International Majority Tendency that were developed by Alan Jones have been explained at length in an article by three of the tendency's leaders, Pierre Frank, Livio Maitan, and Ernest Mandel, entitled "In Defense of the Portuguese Revolution," which was published in the September 8, 1975, issue of Intercontinental Press.

In his report on the world Trotskyist movement Jack Barnes placed the differences on Portugal in the context of the seven-year debate that has taken place inside the Fourth International. This debate has been a rich one, covering the whole range of issues facing revolutionary militants today.

Barnes noted that the new state of the discussion on Portugal involves political differences, as opposed to theoretical or organizational ones. That is, they concern questions of what to do next in a fast-moving revolutionary process. With this test of the living class struggle, the discussion has acquired greater urgency and the need for clarity has become more imperative. Demagogic arguments lose their effectiveness; what counts most is what you do, not what you say. The test of Portugal, he said, can be the occasion for drawing a balance sheet on the past years of discussion in the international and lifting the debate to a new level.

Barnes emphasized two key points of difference: First, revolutionary Marxists must never forget, he stated, that "no revolution can be made without a majority, or in spite of and in opposition to the struggle by workers to defend their democratic rights."

Secondly, events in Portugal have shed new light on a longstanding debate within the international over minority actions and an orientation to what has been labeled the "new mass vanguard." The "new mass vanguard" in Portugal has primarily been the various ultraleft centrist groups.

"Adaptation to the 'new mass vanguard,'" said. Barnes, "and the substitution of minority action for the need to win the majority of the working class, has led not to outflanking the traditional workers parties and constructing a new Marxist vanguard, but to the disorientation of the vanguard and to their tail-ending after the CP and even the capitalist government. "The main question, to which all the others are related, remains how to construct a Leninist party capable of leading the Portuguese revolution, said Barnes. "That is our central task."

Strengthen the international

Barnes concluded on the meaning of the Portuguese debate for the Fourth International. Although the political character of the discussion makes it especially sharp, he said, if the debate is carried forward correctly it can add to the prestige of the Fourth International among militants throughout the world. If the international can continue to carry out a democratic discussion, subordinating organizational frictions to political clarity, "it can be a chance for major regroupments and strengthening of the forces of the revolutionary international."

The struggle in Portugal is by no means over, and the Portuguese Trotskyists still face a historic opportunity, he continued. "We're convinced that new forces, revolutionary forces, who are learning from their mistakes, will be attracted toward the international around the tests in Portugal just as they were around the tests of the Spanish civil war, the Cuban revolution, and other big revolutionary events."

He stressed that the Fourth International "cannot let any routinism, sectarianism, or dead-end factionalism stand in the way of extending a hand to any forces that show motion toward Trotskyist positions on the Portuguese events."

Barnes ended his report with some remarks about the importance of the weekly newsmagazine Intercontinental Press, which was one of the main achievements of the reunification of the Fourth International that took place in 1963 after a ten year split. Intercontinental Press has become a key organizer and educator for the international revolutionary socialist movement. Barnes noted that one of the main contributions of Intercontinental Press is simply to provide all sided, accurate translations and information about world events. Such information is "the first condition of party democracy," he said. It provides the basis for the membership to make up their own minds on the issues.

The general line of the reports by Sheppard and Barnes were approved by the delegates after nearly two days of searching discussion.

International concerns were not limited to the conventions sessions. During the week, workshops were held on the defense of political prisoners in Latin America, in Iran, and in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Discussions were organized on the Puerto Rican struggle in the United States and Puerto Rico, as well as on cooperation with Mexican militants in defending the struggles of farmworkers along the Mexican border.

Jack Barnes summarized the attitude of the delegates when he stated that "there is no party that needs international collaboration and understanding of the lessons of the international class struggle more than does the SWP. We need this to help equip ourselves for the massive tasks that we are determined to accomplish." 

THE MILITANT/OCTOBER 10, 1975

http://themilitant.com/1975/3937/MIL3937.pdf