MFA (the radical Armed Forces Movement) overthrew the fascist regime in Portugal. An intense period of revolutionary upheaval followed. DAVE PACKER looks back at these events suggesting lessons for today. THE OVERTHROW of the Caetano dictatorship ushered in far more than a period of political and economic struggle; it opened the door to a vast movement that brought Portugal to the brink of revolution. Streets filled with hundreds of thousands of people demanding radical change, even a socialist Portugal.
But the Socialist and Communist paraxis such as: break with the bourgeois ministers; campaign for a united front of the workers' organisations; for a workers Assembly - of factory and popular committees, trade unions and workers' parties - to prepare the ground for a workers' government and the mass movement This was the context of the fateful events of 25 November, 1975. What exactly happened is unclear, but it appears that forces around the CP and Carvalhowho, that morning had been sacked from his Lisbon military command - launched a minority military action to pressure Costa Gomes into dissolving the Sixth Provisional Government and call in Carvalho and the CP to form the governerstwhile 'allies'. Action floundered and commandos were sent to crush the left wing units before the working class of Lisbon and Setubal had the opportunity to mobilise. Where the workers took up arms they were quickly demobilised for lack of a political response. The revolutionary process was at an end; the elements of dual power were soon to The failure of the Portuguese revolution has important lessons for socialists. The absence of a well established revolutionary party that knew how to unite the masses in struggle independently from the bourgeoisie and the officers, and how to fight the mis-leadership of the reforA second lesson, a product of the dominant ultra-left sectarianism, was the failure of the revolutionary vanguard itself to understand how to combat the treacherous role of the two mass reformist workers' parties. Instead of using the United Front tactic they thought -wrongly - they could simply by-pass or