From Anti-Colonial Revolutions to Revolution in the Metropolis
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Critique Journal of Socialist Theory ISSN: 0301-7605 (Print) 1748-8605 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcso20 From Anti-Colonial Revolutions to Revolution in the Metropolis Raquel Varela To cite this article: Raquel Varela (2015) From Anti-Colonial Revolutions to Revolution in the Metropolis, Critique, 43:2, 145-171, DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2015.1051791 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2015.1051791 Published online: 07 Aug 2015. Submit your article to this journal Article views: 225 View related articles View Crossmark data Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=rcso20 Download by: [the Bodleian Libraries of the University of Oxford] Date: 24 April 2017, At: 04:57 Critique, 2015 Vol. 43, No. 2, 145–171, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2015.1051791 From Anti-Colonial Revolutions to Revolution in the Metropolis Raquel Varela This article both describes and theorises the origins and course of the Portuguese revolution of 1974. It argues that it was intimately related to the anti-colonial revolution in the Portuguese African colonies of Guinea–Bissau, Angola and Mozambique both because the Portuguese Imperial structure that constituted a unity that once undermined in the colonies was rocked in the metropolis, and because of the military experience of a 13 year war. The primitive accumulation in the colonies required a dictatorial regime in the heartlands of the empire. The super-exploitation of the colonies needed the Salazar regime in Portugal itself. The latter slowly provided access to the basic elements of a contemporary existence but saw to it that working class and opposition organisations like unions were avoided or incorporated. When the revolution broke out on 25 April 1974, the moderating role of the unions was correspondingly absent. The article describes the unfolding of the revolution itself and shows the importance of control from below with workers’ commissions, and other forms of workers control, as well as the conjuncture of the global capitalist turning point with the defeat of the regular army in the colonies. It describes the course of the revolutionary years to the point of counter-revolution, bringing in the radical reforms in agriculture and industry. Keywords: Dual Power; Social Revolution; Workers’ Commissions; Forced Labour; Stalinism; Counter-revolution ‘This is the people, this is the people, this is the people!’ Saint Benedict Square, 13 November 1975. It was here that the Constituent Assembly and the government were held hostage, surrounded by a mass of almost 100,000 people, the majority construction workers. The scenario is almost unreal: it was Europe, in sunny Lisbon, the disproportionately large capital of Portugal, the last colonial empire in history. If it were not for the helicopters, the hostages in the Saint Benedict palace, including the Prime Minister, would not even have received food or blankets. Outside there was a © 2015 Critique 146 R. Varela gigantic demonstration of workers who elbowed each other and literally stood on top of each other on the palace steps with red flags and banners, yelling slogans. Suddenly, a cement truck entered the square and crossed the mass of demonstra- tors who surrounded the Assembly and, with smiles and raised fists, they moved aside to let it pass. On top, there were two men. One of them wore jeans and an open shirt, had a cigarette in his mouth and smiled triumphantly for the crowd. With one hand on the cement mixer and the other raised, he yelled along with the other demonstrators: ‘This is the people! This is the people! This is the people!’1 When he decided to suspend government functions on 20 November 1975 one week after the siege of the Constituent Assembly, Admiral Pinheiro de Azevedo, the Prime Minister of the VI Provisional Government—a government of class collab- oration—(at the end of 16 months of revolution, five governments had already fallen), in his forthright and indiscrete style, confessed that the very state had been destabilised. Visibly irritated, he responded to a journalist’s question on the military situation: ‘The situation, as far as I know, is the same: first, [democratic] plenaries [of the soldiers] are held and afterwards orders are followed!’2 This was a classic situation of dual power—those at the top ‘could no longer continue as before’ and those below ‘no longer wanted to’. Indeed, the undermining of state and political power was symbolised by the physical besiegement of the government buildings. This was probably the moment at which the Portuguese Revolution came closest to insurrection, that is, the moment in revolutions in which the conquest of the state, under the leadership of workers, is possible.3 Go to Pidjiguiti, Guinea–Bissau, a Portuguese colony on the coast of West Africa, 16 years earlier. The colony was served by the merchant marine in the port of Bissau and alongside the port of Pidjiguiti for fishing boats and navigation within Guinea. On 3 August 1959 workers in the General Workshops began a strike that spread throughout the docks of Pidjiguiti. Among others, sailors who worked in cabotage services, such as those in the Casa Gouveia company, linked to the powerful CUF group (Companhia União Febril), the largest Portuguese industrial conglomerate, participated in the strike. The Portuguese authorities responded to the strike with brutal repression, as the Franciscan priest Pinto Rema reported: Those revolting had paddles, sticks, iron bars, stones and spears. The two sides in confrontation did not cede, did not talk. In the first encounter, the two police chiefs, Assunção and Dimas, were savagely attacked after they had fired in the air. 17 guards were wounded in this skirmish. The police lost their self-control and began to shoot to kill in force without any consideration. In the end there were 13 to 15 dead spread out on the docks of Pidjiguiti. More bodies of sailors and 1 ‘Scenes from the Class Struggle in Portugal’, Directed by Robert Kramer, 1977. 2 RTP Archives, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6DB42QUJYSM (accessed 19 January 2015). 3 Valério Arcary, As Esquinas Perigosas da História. Situações Revolucionárias em Perspetiva Marxista (São Paulo: Xamã, 2004). Critique 147 stevedores were dragged away by the waters of the Geba river, we don’t know how many.4 The historian Dalila Cabrita Mateus recounts that this was the strike that influenced the PAIGC (the African Party for the Independence of Guinea and Cape Verde) in an important party meeting to adopt an armed struggle strategy based on the peasantry: A confidential report from this meeting, the ‘most decisive’ in the history of the PAIGC according to Cabral [a key guerilla leader], shows that the passage from nationalist agitation to a strategy of struggle for national liberation was prepared here, adopting three important deliberations: first, the shift of activity to the country, mobilizing the peasants; second, preparation for the armed struggle; third, the transfer of a part of the party leadership to the exterior.5 The occupation of Saint Benedict Square in Lisbon was recorded by Robert Kramer for the film, Scenes of the Class Struggle. Member of an American Trotskyist political group, Kramer came to Portugal in 1975 to experience the Revolution as did thousands of young activists from all leftist political tendencies, including Maoists and followers of Che Guevara, who were known at the time as ‘Third Worldists’.6 The Revolution would be done without deaths in the metropolis and for this reason it infatuated the world. ‘I know that you are partying, man’, sang Chico Buarque, one of the most famous artists of MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) in a Brazil that still lived under the boots of a military dictatorship.7 This ‘party’ led many, precipitously, to speak with hindsight of a ‘revolution without deaths’, forgetting that the party in the metropolis came at the price of 13 years of horror in the colonies. Portugal was the empire that most used various forms of forced labour in the most systematic way and for the longest time. Widely denounced in the press and by international agencies,8 forced labour brought with it all the ailments of the society of which it was part: poverty, non-existence of social mobility, family break-ups, mere subsistence agriculture, extreme income inequality (see Table 1) and a racist political police. As Dalila Cabrita Mateus exclaimed: ‘The PIDE [political police] in the colonies did not hassle whites, it only hassled blacks’.9 This polarisation contributed to transforming the majority of the peasant population into fearless supporters of the liberation movements. 4 Henrique Pinto Rema, História das Missões Católicas da Guiné (Braga: Franciscana, 1982), p. 856 cited in Dalila Mateus, ‘Conflitos Sociais na Base da Eclosão das Guerras Coloniais’ in Raquel Varela et al., Greves e Conflitos Sociais em Portugal no Século XX (Lisboa: Colibri, 2012), p. 180. 5 Basil Davidson, Révolution en Afrique: la Libération de la Guinée Portugaise (Paris : Seuil, 1969), pp. 36/37 cited in Mateus, ‘Conflitos Sociais na Base da Eclosão das Guerras Coloniais’, op. cit., p. 181. 6 That is, linked to the anti-colonial revolutions. 7 Chico Buarque, ‘Tanto Mar’ (Song), 1975. The Brazilian military dictatorship governed the country from 1 April 1964 to March 1985. 8 ‘Forced labour system in Portuguese Africa’, London, 25 October s/d, Reuter, in Anticolonialismo internacional, 1961–1963 (CIDAC), H34–35. 9 Dalila Cabrita Mateus, A PIDE/DGS e a Guerra Colonial (Lisboa: Terramar, 2004), p. 396. 148 R. Varela Table 1 Mozambique: Salaries in 1969 Industrial salaries (daily) Agricultural salaries (anual) Whites: 100 escudos minimum Whites: 47,723 escudos Mulattos: 70 escudos maximum Mulattos: 23,269 escudos Africans (semi-skilled): 30 escudos Africans (citizens): 5,478 escudos Africans (unskilled): 5 escudos Africans (non-citizens): 1,404 escudos Source: Anuário Estatístico, vol.