Ubu Saved from Drowning: Worker Insurgency and Statist Containment in Portugal and Spain, 1974–1977

UBU SAVED FROM DROWNING: WORKER INSURGENCY AND STATIST CONTAINMENT IN PORTUGAL AND SPAIN, 1974–1977 ISBN 0-970-03080- 0 Library of Congress No: Copyright Loren Goldner This book or any part of it may be freely reproduced by any tendency in the revolutionary movement. Copyright protects it from being pirated by hostile currents and bourgeois publishers. If, after reading it, you are still in doubt where you stand, write to the author. CONTENTS PART ONE: CLASS STRUGGLE AND THE MODERNIZATION OF CAPITAL IN PORTUGAL, 1974-1975 Preface: 1975 and the End of the Era of the "Progressive" State Civil Servant p. 4 1. The Beginning of a New Era of Global Revolution p. 14 2. Archaic Corporatism and Its Modern Protagonists p. 15 3. Historical Development of Salazarism, 1945-74 p. 20 4. Dissolution of Salazarist Hegemony and Left-Wing Regroupment, 1961- 74 p. 24 5. The Revolution of Illusions p. 26 6. The International Impasse of Stalinism p. 29 7. The Nature of the MFA and Its Factional Situation p. 35 8. The Demise of Spinola p. 38 9. Neo-Corporatist Restructuring or Socialist Revolution: Autogestao vs. Soviets p. 41 10. Three Documents Against the Revolution p. 43 11. The Fall of Vasco Goncalves and the PCP p. 46 12. The Left, the Extreme Left and the Political Crisis of the MFA p. 47 13. The Denouement of the Revolutionary Crisis p. 53 14. In the Aftermath of Nov. 25 p. 55 15. Assessment and Limits of the Revolutionary Crisis p. 56 16. Generality and Specificity in the Constitution of the Class-for- Itself p. 58 PART TWO: FORMAL AND REAL DOMINATION OF CAPITAL IN SPANISH WORKING-CLASS HISTORY; FROM CLANDESTINE CORPORATISM TO THE MONCLOA PACTS, 1939-1977 I. Introduction p. 63 II.The Suppressed Past:Proto-Renaissance Bourgeois Culture and Its Extension in the Millenarian Dimension of Spanish Working-Class History p. 68 III. The Subterranean Relationship Between Spanish and Russian Working-Class History p. 72 IV. Formal and Real Domination of Capital In Spanish Economic Development p.79 V. Anarcho-Syndicalism and the Transition to the Real Domination of Capital in Spanish Working-Class History p. 85 VI. The Drift to Clandestine Corporatism: the Road to Moncloa, 1939-1977 p. 92 VII: Conclusion: Toward a Non-Statist Working-Class Realignment? p. 101 Preface: 1975 and the End of the Era of the "Progressive" State Civil Servant Who, today, cares about the mid-1970's transitions in Portugal and Spain? And why, in the year 2000, publish two texts, each written shortly after the events they describe, that is (in terms of the practical demands of the new "globalized" conjuncture) in what seem like antediluvian times, and moreover with little revision or attention to subsequent developments? The text on Portugal (1976) was written as an immediate contribution to revolutionary strategy and tactics, with a wildly over-optimistic assessment of impending working-class prospects, at least in southern Europe. The text on Spain (1983) was written just after Felipe Gonzalez and the PSOE took power with an absolute parliamentary majority, in the flush of the "Euro-socialist Renaissance" (Mitterand in France, Papandreou in Greece); over the next 13 years, it often seemed they had done so with the express purpose of demonstrating-- once again-- the inanity of the (mainly Trotskyist) characterization of contemporary Social Democracies as "workers' parties". The text on Portugal, rather foolishly, calls the events of 1974-75, (at the very onset of the longest period of rollback in international working-class history), the "beginning of a new era of global revolution". The formulation was, to be fair, half right. It was the beginning of a new era. The end of the Salazar and Franco regimes on the Iberian peninsula was, in fact, a key moment in the beginning of a period in which literally dozens of dictatorships disappeared, a period in which the soft cop took over from the tough cop, and democracy, world-wide, sold austerity. Jeffrey Sachs and the Eastern bloc "dissidents" looked to post-Franco Spain, long before their hour struck in 1989, as the model for the transition out of dictatorship and autarchy, though they will be waiting a while for the kind of massive foreign investment (in the 1960's and early 1970's) which made Spain, for a time, the 10th industrial power in the world. In 1975, most of Latin America was under some form of military dictatorship, and by the end of the "lost decade" of the 1980's, most of these countries as well had had their democratic transition. The IMF teams seemed always to arrive on the same plane with the returning democratic exiles (the former had, of course, hardly been unwelcome with the earlier authoritarian regimes), and Western banks are still pestering Russia about Tsarist-era debts. After Iberia and Latin America, it was the turn of Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. In Asia, in the 80's and 90's, Taiwan, South Korea, and even Indonesia saw the end of dictatorships. The individual and collective Ubus of the post-World War II era--Salazar, Franco, Trujillo, Duvalier, Somoza, the Argentine junta, Pinochet, Stroessner, the Brazilian generals, South African apartheid, Mobutu, Idi Amin, Haile Selassie, Stalin, Ceauscescu, the Shah of Iran, Suharto, Mao, Pol Pot, Chiang kai-shek, Park chung hee-- have mainly disappeared, and slick teams of faceless neo-liberal technicians, chattering about "civil society", have mainly replaced them, including (long ago) in Portugal and Spain. It is equally important to recall the world political conjuncture of the years 1973-1975, to understand how Portugal, a country of 10 million people, could, for a few months, become the lightning rod of global superpower rivalry. The postwar expansion--the fastest era of growth, on a world scale, in capitalist history-- was ending, in runaway inflation, the oil crisis, and the deepest world recession since the 1930's. World accumulation was changing gears. Military dictatorship had checkmated the working class in Brazil, Chile and Uruguay (and was about to do so in Argentina), Israel won the Yom Kippur war, and the subsequent quadrupling of oil prices in the fall of 1973 had dealt a body blow to the oil-importing countries of the Third World, accelerating the debt crisis which has only deepened since. But these realities faded, at least momentarily, into the backdrop of what seemed to be a series of grave setbacks for U.S. world hegemony: the threat of revolution in Portugal and Spain, the humiliating military debacle in Indochina, the imminent triumph of "anti- imperialist" national liberation fronts in the Portuguese ex-colonies (and the impact of that development on apartheid South Africa), the advance of "Euro-communism" in western Europe, and a pro-Soviet coup in Ethiopia and the subsequent crisis in the Horn of Africa. Civil war broke out in Lebanon. The U.S.-backed Greek junta was overthrown, and Greece and Turkey, both members of NATO, threatened to go to war over Cyprus. More diffusely, but also increasing the atmosphere of U.S. disarray in the midst of Watergate, was the emergence of the Third World "Group of 77" at the United Nations, pushing for debt, oil and food relief. Indira Ghandi imposed martial law in India and moved closer to the Soviet camp, and the Shah of Iran, beneficiary of decades of U.S. military aid, lectured the West about its decadent affluence. Nixon capitulated to Congress, Heath fell to the British miners' strike, Willy Brandt fell to the Guillaume spy scandal, and some fifteen other major countries, within a few months, changed governments in what seemed to many as a fatal disarray of Western world hegemony. Everywhere, including Iberia, state bureaucrats, mainly of Stalinist and Third Worldist hue, seemed to be on the march. By the late 1970's, a sea change had occurred, routing the currents that seemed ascendant only a few years before, perhaps best embodied by the virtual military alliance between the U.S. and China against the Soviet Union and its allies. It was not merely a reversal of the statist trends of the post-World War II period; it was the end of the era of the 1875 Gotha Program of the German SPD, its "people's state" (Volkstaat), and its 20th century progeny, welfare-statist, Stalinist, or Third Worldist. It was, in a word, the end of the era of Ferdinand Lassalle1, the (little-remembered) shadow of all "progressive" state bureaucrats of the 20th century. Not only were all the fires of 1975 put out, but the U.S.- centered counter-offensive did not stop short of the liquidation of the Soviet bloc, and an elaborate "engagement" over the terms of China's full-blown entry into the world market. A workers' movement with a heavy dose of clerical nationalism ruined Stalinism in Poland; Islamic fundamentalism replaced "socialism with an Islamic face" as the main form of "anti-imperialism" throughout the Moslem world; the right-wing populist revolt 1 Cf. the quirky, eccentrically brilliant book of M. Agursky, The Third Rome: National Bolshevism in the U.S.S.R. (Boulder 1987), on the impact of Lassalle: “The real founder of German political socialism was neither Marx nor Engels, but Ferdinand Lassalle” (p. 31) “There is also interesting evidence of Lassalle’s impact on the Stalinists (p. 32) “What was missed by both Pokrovsky and Venturi was Tkatchev’s debt to Lassalle” (p. 33). Cf. also, naturally, K. Marx “Critique of the Gotha Program” (1875) in the Anglo-American world produced Thatcher and Reagan, and 20 years later, the world working class is still attempting to regroup and return to the offensive.

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