Chronology of the Portuguese Revolution (1974-1975)

After the Second World War, the far-right dictatorship continued in Portugal, crushing the working class and the entire population and imposing a backward regime and great misery on the population, who were forced to emigrate. The prospect of becoming part of a rapidly expanding bourgeois Europe was not enough for the bourgeoisie to take the plunge. There was a problem : what would the working class do once the struggle to overthrow the regime began ? It was not the bourgeoisie, nor even its left-wing faction, whose political representatives were the Socialist Party and the Communist Party, that took the risk of embarking on change. The movement came from the African colonies, where the struggle of the peoples of Guinea-Bissau, Mozambique, Angola, Sao Tome and Principe, and Cape Verde destabilized the army, the first pillar of Portugal’s dictatorship. The bitter military failures in the colonial war created a climate of crisis in Portugal, mobilizing the youth, the working class, and the rank and file of the army. Instead of allowing these movements to lead a revolutionary uprising capable of overthrowing the dictatorship, the army hierarchy preferred to lead the movement. This is the origin of the Armed Forces Movement. As a result, a climate of national and class unity prevailed at the beginning of the "Carnation Revolution," since all social forces seemed to consider the regime dead. In fact, this was not the case. The working class offered many other perspectives than the military hierarchy or the so-called democratic bourgeoisie. It was the Socialist Party, influential among the urban petty bourgeoisie, and the Communist Party, influential among the working class and poor peasants, who acted as brakes, preventing the proletarians from realizing their indispensable role in the course of events.

CHRONOLOGY

1926 : Authoritarian regime of the "Estado Novo", a conservative and nationalist dictatorship which relies on the army, the Catholic Church and the secret and military police (the PIDE).

1930 : Establishment of the fascist dictatorship of Salazar in Portugal

1968 : Military failure of Portugal in its African colonies, notably Angola and Mozambique

1970 : Salazar is replaced by Caetano, and the regime continues to operate, with the political police, the PIDE, carrying the greatest weight, as it tortures and terrorizes. Even if the power changes hands, it is incapable of bringing Portugal into the modernity of Western Europe, and in particular of freeing the country from its dirty colonial war, which is nothing but a dead weight for the economy and the social and political climate, and can only lead to defeat.

1973 : Beginning of the revolt of Portuguese soldiers of the African army, mostly conscripts.

An opposition of officers, initially more of a corporatist than political nature, was organised around the rejection by career officers of two decree-laws (nos. 353/73 and 409/73) intended to facilitate the recruitment of officers needed on the African front by including civilians who had already done their service.

From November 1973 to April 1974 : there were 54 factory strikes in Portugal, tough, often with occupations, all organized outside the unions and the Stalinist PCP.

1974 : Formation of a military leadership of the uprising : the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). Its program : all power to a military junta that imposes the end of the colonial war and modern development of Portugal.

April 25, 1974 : The military coup, led by the reactionary General Spinola, former colonial governor of Guinea, diverts to its own advantage the explosive discontent of the Portuguese army, overthrows the fascist dictatorship of Marcelo Caetano, replacing it with the so-called "National Salvation" military Junta, hoping in this way to preserve the foundations of fascism destabilized by the enormous defeat of the colonial wars in Africa (Angola, Mozambique, Guinea, Cape Verde).

The Armed Forces Movement announces the overthrow of the regime and calls on the population to remain calm and remain immobile.

Despite regular radio calls from the MFA’s "April Captains" urging people to stay at home, thousands of Portuguese took to the streets, mingling with the insurgent military.

Caetano agreed to hand over power to General Spinola to prevent it from falling into the hands of the rebels. Spinola immediately established a new government headed by a military junta, known as the "National Salvation Junta," to prevent any bourgeois power vacuum. Far from immediately granting independence to the African colonies, the MFA and the junta negotiated hard with the nationalists. These military powers attempted to put in place all possible barriers to popular demands and unrest and to find civilian relays for this policy. The Communist Party and the Socialist Party would help them with all their might.

Spinola, far from immediately affirming that he would go as far as the independence of the African colonies, declared that it was too early "for the peoples themselves to be able to decide on their future." He did not envisage independence but a gradual path towards... "self-determination."

Spinola in no way represents the immense aspirations of the Portuguese people for peace, land, democracy, well-being, an end to exploitation and oppression, and not even the aspirations of the Portuguese soldiers. Tanks are in the streets, but they do not prevent the masses from attacking the barracks of the PIDE, the torturing political police, mortally hated by the Portuguese people. From the first day of the coup, the masses will take the initiative for actions that demonstrate that they will far exceed the hopes of the military staff and all the bourgeois forces, those who still believe in a patching up of fascism and even those who believe themselves to be democratic. The workers of Mague (Alverca) launch the first workers’ strike with a sit-down that launches an entire movement. The soldiers do not wait for orders and begin to leave the barracks, to fraternize with the working people, to take to the streets with them. The democratic and left-wing parties (especially PCP and PS, and also SEDES and CDE) support Spinola.

Creation of the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), which claims to unite the military leaders trying to extricate Portugal from the hopeless colonial war. It is a contradictory institution, combining reactionary senior officials with radical captains and petty-bourgeois democratic aspirations without real power, incapable of developing a real perspective but only of sowing illusions, a deception fully supported by the Stalinist party and certain elements of the extreme left. The MFA, by polarizing democratic aspirations under its name, actually aims to confine them, to curb them, to impose its military domination on them. The "MFA-Parties Pact" gives dominance to the MFA, self-proclaimed "Guide of the Revolution." The party most attached to the MFA is the Stalinist PCP.

May 1, 1974 : Large mass demonstration. It’s a celebration. There is apparent unanimity for democracy... The clashes will come later. The left-wing parties (PCP, CDE, PS, etc.) make the popular demonstration the banner of the alliance of all classes, of the people-army alliance, and of national unity. They fully support the MFA and even Spinola. However, the far left demonstrates independently of the bourgeois and petty bourgeois "democratic" forces.

May 5, 1974 : Alvaro Cunhal, leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, explains to the newspaper "L’Humanité" that "The alliance of popular forces and the military movement is the fundamental condition for the victory of democracy." The country’s main workers’ party therefore sets out a perfectly bourgeois perspective : safeguarding the state apparatus, the army, class power and, as a reward for this wisdom, only "democracy."

May 6, 1974 : Returning from a trip to Angola, General Gomes offers only a ceasefire in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea. Mr. Soares is chosen as the chief negotiator for the Portuguese bourgeoisie.

May to September 1974 : Workers’ strikes swept across the country (Barreiro steelworks, CUF group workers, Lisnave workers, etc.), strikes that developed despite the anti-strike law, despite opposition to strikes from the Stalinist party and the unions that followed it. The PCP acted as a strikebreaker under the pretext of "safeguarding the national economy." Soldier movements and mass demonstrations took place against the army’s attempts to continue shipping Portuguese soldiers to Angola.

June 20, 1974 : At the Mutualité, Georges Marchais and Vitoriano accuse leftist groups of threatening the return to democracy through irresponsible actions.

June 21, 1974 : A government decree limits freedom of the press.

July 12, 1974 : Creation of COPCON led by Otello de Carvalho. Created as a "military force for the defense of the MFA," it will be presented by many leftists as a revolutionary instrument alongside the proletariat !

June-July 1974 : Second wave of strikes (bakery workers, fishermen, Carris, etc.) Eruption of the poor peasants’ revolt movement.

July 15, 1974 : Vasco Gonçalves heads the new government.

July-August 1974 : Newspapers are suspended for reporting far-left demonstrations in support of African independence activists. There is no support from the Communist Party (PCP) or the left for the newspapers attacked or for the far-left protesters threatened or arrested.

August 12, 1974 : The army violently represses a popular demonstration against the political police, the PIDE, and in support of the mutinous prisoners of Caxias prison.

August 15, 1974 : Police fire on a peaceful demonstration in support of the MPLA and colonial independence. One dead.

August 28, 1974 : The government requisitions TAP employees to break their strike. The workers ignore the order and continue the strike.

September 1974 : Two regiments demonstrate, organize, and cancel their embarkation for the colonies. In the working class, the mass movement imposes on reformist parties and unions the coordination of Workers’ Commissions. The Portuguese Communist Party (Stalinist) is forced to join them, but it will not cease, as will the Intersyndicale, to militate against them, to seek to isolate them, to discredit them. However, until September 28, 1975, it is the Workers’ Commissions that will lead the battles for wage increases, already a fundamental point that opposes them to the Intersyndicale and the PCP. They mobilize to drive the fascists from the factories, the second point of disagreement with them. They will mobilize against the operations of the military power, notably by mobilizing on September 28, 1974 against the so-called "silent demonstration" of General Spinola. Or March 11, 1975, against the Lisbon paratroopers. But the Workers’ Commissions suffer from the absence of a class-based political perspective. Spontaneity isn’t everything... The mass organization of the proletariat had to become a dual power, challenging bourgeois and military state power. No revolutionary political party, nor any far-left group, has pursued such a policy within the Workers’ Commissions. The question of the character of the state power that the workers want has not been raised within the Workers’ Commissions.

September 10, 1974 : Independence of Guinea-Bissau. General Spinola calls for counter-revolution.

September 12, 1974 : Demonstration of Lisnave workers.

September 28, 1974 : Revolutionary barricades in Lisbon.

This was the beginning of the end of illusions about the new government. A new test of strength took place : barricades were erected on the night of September 27-28 on the outskirts of Lisbon by the working people, supported by the revolutionaries. The army would not intervene until the morning of the 28th. Spinola intervened directly, taking full powers. It was also necessary to cancel a planned "demonstration of the silent minority" !

General Spinola resigns and hands over power to General Costa Gomes.

October 6, 1974 : Stalinist leader Alvaro Cunhal asserts that the role of the MFA military will not end with elections. The PCP thus presents itself as the main defender of the political role of the armed forces. On the role of autonomous action by workers, it does not say a word, of course ! For the PCP, only the armed forces, state institutions such as bourgeois elections, and trade union apparatuses exist ! No trace of the Soviet conception of Lenin’s advice in Cunhal’s work !!!

October 29, 1974 : The MFA acquires a political leadership, the “High Council.”

November 1974 : Numerous strikes take place in companies to purge fascists. The PCP and the Intersyndicale (remember that it brings together pro-Stalinist unions, democratic unions, and former fascist unions) attempt to oppose them.

January 14, 1975 : PCP, MDP and MES demonstrate in favor of the "single union" which becomes for them an essential objective in order to effectively supervise the proletariat in movement. This flag of "proletarian unity" allows the PCP to place the division within the so-called progressive forces between it and the PS, claiming sole control of the unions. From now on, the struggle between PCP and PS is presented by both of them as the central point of the struggle !!!

January 19, 1975 : The MFA officially declares its support for the single trade union demanded by the Stalinist party. The law will be passed three days later. It is not only necessary for the Stalinists to control the organized labor movement, but also for the government to prevent radical movements in the working class and poor peasantry.

January 1975 : The government sends paratroopers to defend right-wing and far-right parties under attack from the far left. The MFA bans the demonstrations, and the PCP and PS comply. The far left, however, does not, demonstrating against NATO on January 25, January 31, and February 7.

February 7, 1975 : Twenty to thirty thousand demonstrators march in Lisbon at the initiative of the Workers’ Commissions of 38 factories in the region, against both unemployment and NATO. The demonstration is denounced by the Portuguese Communist Party (Stalinist). The far left denounces "The PCP invading the inter-union to control the working class."

February 26, 1975 : An MFA-Political Parties commission studies the modalities of a process of institutionalization of the MFA.

March 5, 1975 : Alavaro Cunhal attacks revolutionaries, calling them "leftists, who call themselves revolutionaries, and can only strengthen the position of reaction in the elections." He denounces "reactionary actions, intended to worsen the economic situation" through... workers’ strikes !!!

March 7-8, 1975 : Police fire on far-left protesters against a PPD rally in Setubal. Army and COPCON units support the police, leaving two dead and twenty wounded.

March 11, 1975 : Failed right-wing pro-Spinola coup attempt. Popular mobilization against an attempted putsch. Creation of a military body, the Council of the Revolution, which seizes total power. The Armed Forces Movement signs an agreement with the so-called democratic parties. It attempts to deceive the working class by launching nationalizations.

Alvaro Cunhal declared : "The nationalized sector is already freed from capitalist exploitation, and it has been placed at the service of an economic dynamic in favor of the people and socialism." The PCP immediately infiltrated its men into the management bodies of the nationalized companies. The working class, on the other hand, has no control over the management of these companies. In fact, the PCP and MDP-CDE share real power in the localities and companies.

March 12, 1975 : The MFA constitutes itself as the highest organ of power, which it of course calls the "organ of the revolution." It proclaims : "All power to the MFA !" It is necessary to "make the revolution" to prevent the working people from making it and giving it a completely different meaning. Spinola and 18 senior officers take refuge in Spain.

March 13, 1975 : Nationalization of banks.

March 15, 1975 : Nationalization of insurance. Far-left activists are arrested for "distributing offensive leaflets against the MFA."

March 18, 1975 : The Maoist MRPP and the AOC (far left) are banned from political activity during the entire election campaign of April 25.

March 26, 1975 : The government decrees a ban on all public political activity against the MRPP. The PCP supports this measure. The next day, Cunhal (PCP) declares that "Parties that conspire against freedom must be banned and their leaders severely punished" !!!

March 27, 1975 : Generalization of occupations of empty houses.

April 2, 1975 : A platform of understanding between the MFA and political parties is signed by the PCP, PS, CDS, FSP, MDP and PPD.

April 22, 1975 : The PCP announces that the PS is Spinola’s hidden center ! Pushed aside by the extreme left, placing itself entirely under the control of the MFA, it seeks, in order to make people believe that it is the radical wing of the popular movement, to present the PCP-PS opposition as the central point of the political struggle...

April 25, 1975 : Election campaign organized by the military to channel the eruption into a bourgeois institutional framework. The elections do not favor the PCP (PS 38%, PPD 26%, PCP 13%).

April 29, 1975 : Costa Martins, Minister of Labor close to the Portuguese Communist Party, declared : "In the difficult times Portugal is going through, we can generally consider the strike as counter-revolutionary." He added that, as long as the unions are not well established, it will be "difficult to oppose a certain political current that is pushing for the occupation of factories."

End of April 1975 : Vasco Gonçalves threatens the working class if it does not engage in the "battle of production" to rebuild the national economy. The PCP, however, continues to assert that "The MFA is an avant-garde, alongside other democratic forces."

May 1, 1975 : PCP and Intersyndicale organize a pro-government May Day rally, in which Mario Soares is banned from speaking at the podium. The PCP’s only "radicalism" is against the Socialist Party !

May 15, 1975 : The MRPP highlights the existence of far-right putschists within the MFA.

May 19, 1975 : The PCP accuses the PS of “polarizing reactionary and conservative forces, starting with pseudo-revolutionary leftist groups.”

May 25, 1975 : Russian Pravda denounces the Portuguese far left and supports the MFA with which the Russian state has entered into military and commercial agreements.

June 3, 1975 : COPCON opens fire on far-left protesters outside Caxias Prison against the detention of far-left and anti-fascist activists.

June 5, 1975 : Cunhal declares : "A military government does not necessarily mean dictatorship. It can be a government protecting threatened freedoms."

The MFA appoints a military official, responsible for prohibiting "wild purges" against fascists, putschists, the CIA and other extreme right-wingers accused by the far left.

June 6, 1975 : Nationalization of Lisbon transport.

June 8, 1975 : Mutiny of around sixty soldiers refusing to embark for Angola.

June 17, 1975 : Far-left workers’ demonstration for Revolutionary Councils of Workers, Soldiers and Sailors, with 2,000 Lisnave workers.

Radio-Renaissance is occupied by workers.

June 28, 1975 : The MFA increases military control over state power.

June 29, 1975 : 89 ex-PIDE torturers escape from their prison…

July 3, 1975 : The "Revolutionary Council" decides to take control of telephone exchanges and radio stations. The army is ready to occupy postal sorting centers.

July 5, 1975 : The army places Radio-Renaissance under its control.

July 11, 1975 : Socialist ministers withdraw from the government. Six days later, the PPD ministers also withdraw. The MFA-bourgeois parties coalition is broken.

July 1975 : 200,000 demonstrators behind the Socialist Party, then... nothing ! The Socialist Party had electoral success and sowed passive illusions, but it was not an active, militant force. And its conception of bourgeois democracy prevented it from going beyond the bourgeois order. The Socialist Party’s sole aim was to oust the Communist Party from government and take charge of relations with the armed forces.

July 18, 1975 : Facing the PS meeting in Porto, the PCP organizes roadblocks to prohibit it !

July 19, 1975 : Faced with a PS rally, the PCP and the Intersyndicale organize roadblocks to ban it !

July 26, 1975 : A military triumvirate takes power (Costa Gomes, Vasco Gonçalves and Otello de Carvalho).

July-August 1975 : Massive eruption of peasants into the working people’s movement. It was a proletarian movement that would nevertheless be exploited by the fascists and all anti-communists, particularly in the north of the country. The most mobilized peasants were those in the regions of Famalicao, Povoa de Lanhoso, Braga, Santo Tirso, and Aveiro and Bombarral. PCP and MDP-CDE activists were violently attacked. The blame lay with the policies pursued by the government supported by these parties, which had in no way addressed peasant poverty. Peasants, no longer having money to buy food for their animals, were forced to slaughter and sell them. Instead of dissolving the former organizations of the fascist exploiters, these parties positioned their activists there. Communism, in the eyes of the peasants of northern Portugal, appeared as a dictatorial armed force that imposed itself by force and increased the misery of the people.

August 1, 1975 : Large demonstration of Workers’, neighborhood, and student commissions highlighting the worker-peasant alliance.

On August 4, the PCP headquarters in Povoa de Lanhoso was stormed and ransacked by 300 peasants. On August 6, the headquarters of the PCP, MDP, and CDE were devastated in Santo Tirso. The nature of this revolt was not fundamentally anti-communist. The peasants and other protesters distinguished between the PCP and the revolutionaries, generally not attacking the latter. The revolting peasants did not identify with any political party and did not put forward any clear social or political program. They were only truly manipulated by the fascist far right at the margins and not for long. The main beneficiaries were a few large landowners who had managed to take advantage of the MFA’s refusal to carry out radical land reform benefiting poor peasants. The PCP and parts of the far left spread the thesis of a northern region handed over to fascist peasants ! The government’s policy towards poor peasants, especially those in the north, remains unchanged ! The PCP will never defend a policy of the type "land to those who work it" ! This would have meant the expropriation of large landowners, massive increases in agricultural wages, the abolition of feudal forms in the countryside, the restitution to the peasants of the commons occupied since fascism by large landowners, state aid for irrigation works, fertilizers, agricultural machinery, cancellation of debts of small farmers, tax abolition, etc.

The MFA program, supported by the PCP, only provides for the "dynamization of agriculture" and a gradual reform of the agricultural structure which has not even been implemented yet...

The radical and rapid reform will take place... in the south where it is implemented by force by the peasants who, without waiting for the government, the MFA or the PCP, occupy all the land of the large estates. The PCP will be content, in regions which, unlike the north, are favorable to it, to demand the legalization by the MFA of land occupations. It has mobilized above all to prevent the spontaneous movement of occupation from leading to the autonomous organization of the peasants, by having them supervised by the IRA and CRRA unions and the latter being content to ask for state aid. And above all, the PCP’s policy isolates the poor peasants of the north, where they are proportionally much more numerous.

August 10-11, 1975 : Nationalization of breweries and shipyards.

August 19, 1975 : The anti-peasant strike of the Intersyndicale, supposedly against the reaction, and of the PCP is boycotted by the workers and opposed by a demonstration of the Workers’ Commissions in Lisbon.

In August 1975, in many companies, revolutionary union lists beat the lists of the PCP and the Intersyndicale.

August 24, 1975 : A "Revolutionary Unitary Front" (FUR) is formed between the PCP and certain Trotskyist groups (PRP, BR, LCI, LUAR) in support of Gonçalves, who was opposed within the military by Melo Antunes and Carvalho. Five days later, Gonçalves will be appointed head of the Council of the Revolution. Many thanks to the Stalinists and the pseudo-revolutionaries and pseudo-Trotskyists !

September 6, 1975 : Gonçalves is ousted from the new Revolutionary Council.

September 9, 1975 : A military opposition called "United Soldiers Will Win" or SUV, organized among pro-COPCON officers, forms a tendency front supported by so-called "Trotskyists" to defend Corvacho (PCP).

From September to November 1975, the PCP used the FUR and SUV to control mass movements and subject them to its own dependence on military and bourgeois power. The far left, which sowed illusions about these organizations, was completely manipulated by the PCP.

September 17, 1975 : Three hundred companies are occupied by workers.

September 19, 1975 : Sixth provisional government led by the PS and the PPD.

September 30, 1975 : Armed forces occupy Lisbon radio and television stations.

October 1, 1975 : Soares supports the military occupation of radio and television stations "which aims to liberate the media" !

October 3, 1975 : The Socialist Party calls for a demonstration "against the far-left plot" and to defend the government.

SUVs occupy Porto barracks against the dissolution of a regiment.

October 16, 1975 : The Revolutionary Council takes measures to "restore discipline" in the army.

October 22, 1975 : The Workers’ Commission regains control of Radio Renaissance, which was occupied by the army. SUV protests in Lisbon.

October 29, 1975 : Carvalho declares that "What would be dangerous is if an extreme left were to carry out an adventurist type of coup, which would be immediately used by the forces of the right."

November 13, 1975 : Construction workers’ demonstration heralds the reappearance of the revolutionary workers’ movement on the political scene. The PCP will attempt to take advantage of the fears that this workers’ uprising will arouse to promote its own role in supervising the working masses and to strengthen its alliance with a section of the army... but, even if it highlights the fear of putschist, fascist, and pro-capitalist military personnel, this is fundamentally against the proletariat.

PCP and MDP defend, as a perspective against the PS, against the right, against the extreme right, against the military putschists, to maintain the armed forces in power ! They continue to affirm that the army is the main democratic and progressive force in the country !!! Of course, never, ever, even at the height of the putschist threats from the army, will these so-called democratic parties demand that the rank and file of the soldiers organize themselves independently of the hierarchy and cease to obey the leadership in the event of a putsch...

November 16, 1975 : Demonstration of 100,000 people organized by the secretariat of the Workers’ Commissions of the Lisbon Working Belt and supported by PCP, SUV and FUR.

November 23, 1975 : PS demonstrations against the PCP.

November 24-25, 1975 : Large landowners block roads in Rio Major to protest against "illegal occupations" of poor peasants.

November 25, 1975 : A coup attempt by the military, presenting itself as far-left, fails. Numerous movements in all directions within the armed forces. In particular, Tancos’ paratroopers occupy military bases. Costa Gomes declares a state of emergency. RTV is occupied by the army. The metalworkers’ union calls for a paralysis of the economy and for gatherings in front of the barracks. A state of siege is declared.

November 26, 1975 : Unions call for a general strike. The Socialist Party calls for calm and support for Costa Gomes.

November 27, 1975 : Martial law. Searches. Censorship. Arrests. Curfew. Arrest of officers linked to the Tancos coup. The PCP declares : "We must seek a political and negotiated solution to the crisis."

April 2, 1976 : Promulgation of a new constitution providing for a President of the Republic elected by universal suffrage but with only limited powers.

April 25, 1976 : Legislative elections : 35% of the vote for the Socialists, 24% for the PPD, 16% for the center-right CDS, 14.4% for the PC. Mario Soares becomes head of government.