Source: This article is from the Marxism-Leninism Today website.
The old ideological battles of the left seem insignificant today after the fall of the Soviet Union. Understandably, the nature, direction, and role of the Soviet Union played a key role in defining and animating various positions on the left from the Bolshevik revolution until the Soviet Union's demise. Bitter struggles were waged between those who saw Leon Trotsky as the principal ideologue of revolution and those who followed the thinking of V. I. Lenin. But with the urgent task of rebuilding a militant, revolutionary movement for socialism, revisiting these differences seems of little priority.
Unfortunately, the flaws of Trotskyism continue to intrude into this process, diverting many — especially those new to revolutionary struggle — away from a proper understanding of Marxist-Leninism.
A striking example of the flaws in Trotskyist thinking was presented by a recent article posted on the World Socialist Web Site by Keith Lee and Paul Mitchell entitled "Obituary: Alvaro Cunhal — leading betrayer of Portugal's 1974 revolution."[*] Even those ignorant of the Portuguese people's long struggle against the Caetano and Salazar fascist dictatorships would be surprised at the vitriol in the title's charge against Cunhal, a man who, in death, drew the homage of hundreds of thousands of workers and peasants.
Alvaro Cunhal, long a leader of the Portuguese Communist Party, led the underground movement against fascism for decades, including 11 years in prison and 12 years in exile. At the time of liberation, the other members of the PCP Central Committee counted a total of 240 years in prison and 700 years in the underground. Betrayers? The words seem embarrassing from the mouths of writers who have not known one minute of underground activity or a day under fascist rule.
And this remains a feature of Trotskyism: its leadership calculatedly occupies a position to the left of existing left and worker's movement, preferring the purity of revolutionary rhetoric to an engagement with the consciousness of actual workers and peasants. For this reason, Trotskyism has never taken root in the working class movement; there have never been Trotskyist parties or movements of more than marginal influence.
Another constant of Trotskyist thought is a voluntarism that emerges from neglecting to assess the balance of forces in political struggle. A revolution occurs, not solely because of revolutionary zeal, exceptional courage, or fidelity (the opposite of "betrayal"), but because the balance swings decisively in favor of carrying a revolution forward. One does not organize for decades, risking life and limb for a cause, to see that cause defeated in a blaze of romantic, quixotic glory. Not only is it foolishness, but it also dishonors the tens of thousands of others who have sacrificed their lives for the cause.
Portugal on April 25, 1974 was not a country on the verge of giving birth to a socialist revolution, as Lee and Mitchell would suggest. Certainly the defeats of the Portuguese military in the colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau had weakened the dictatorship. Turmoil in the military proved to be an important element that, coupled with domestic struggles, changed the balance of forces dramatically, forcing the Portuguese ruling class to jettison the naked, fascist dictatorship for a bourgeois democracy.
At the same time it would be a wild flight of fancy to believe that the PCP and other revolutionary forces had deeply planted the idea of socialism in the working masses. While such an achievement would be highly flattering to the PCP, it would also be nearly impossible given a membership of well under 10,000 operating under the watchful eyes of the Portuguese Gestapo, the PIDE.
In fact, under the leadership of the PCP and the left forces in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA), 245 firms had been nationalized, the state established over 50% ownership of another 200 firms, and another 261 firms were reshaped by state intervention by July 30, 1976. According to Paul Fauvet, author of probably the most thorough account of this period ("Four Years On: The Portuguese Revolution," Marxism Today, April 1978), 787 working-class cooperatives had been established by May of 1976 and 1,100,000 hectares of agricultural land had been seized and grouped into 450 cooperatives and Collective Production Movements. Fauvet concludes: "Portuguese monopoly capitalism had been destroyed (though by and large foreign capital had by and large been untouched)."
But reluctance to organize a socialist economy — as Lee and Mitchell bray — was not the cause of the demise of the revolution as the above figures demonstrate. Instead, the revolution was subverted by three forces: foreign intervention and influence on the process, social-democratic anti-Communism fostered by the Socialist Party (PS), and ultra-leftism in the military.
Social Democracy had no history in Portugal — the PS was founded in 1973 with a membership of 130 at the moment of the overthrow of Caetano in 1974. This "couple of streets of Lisbon lawyers" grew to a membership of 93,000 by December of 1976, thanks to foreign monies and resources including huge subsidies from the German SPD. The PS served as a magnet for forces who felt compelled to exhibit the "left" rhetoric of the revolution while practicing virulent anti-Communism. The paper, Republica, for example, appeared uncensored for 48 years during the Fascist dictatorship, yet threw its support to the PS after the overthrow of Caetano. The PS leader, Mario Soares, posed as an opponent of the dictatorship when he, in fact, openly supported a "liberalized" Caetano in 1968. The PS picked up some credibility when it absorbed the Popular Socialist Movement led by a genuine anti-fascist, though he left in disgust. The PS worked hard and long to undermine the influence of the PCP, the left in the trade union movement and the unity of the MFA.
The other factor, the military, was complicated by its origins in the middle and lower officer class. The PCP worked to expand the movement to the lower ranks and democratize the MFA. Nonetheless, the military remained a tenuous and delicate balance of right and left. The 'moderates" under Melo Antunes and the Amadora Commandos — led by the butcher of Mozambique — bolstered the right along with the paramilitary National Republican Guard. Even with this balance, the process of consolidating the revolution continued only to be disrupted by the bizarre ultra-leftism of General Otelo de Carvalho and others in the officer corps. As Fauvet explains it:
Ultra-leftism was widespread among COPCON (Continental Operations Command) officers. Indeed, this seemed to be part of a more general phenomenon whereby a radicalized stratum of lower and middle ranking officers are prone to leftist positions, often displaying intense impatience at the alleged "backwardness" of the masses, and the trying to impose their own pace on the revolutionary process? The ultra-left, quite logically given their analysis, tried to drive the split [in the military] to a definitive conclusion. In succeeding in this they paved the way for the eventual destruction of the military left and of the MFA itself.
These developments in the military are either unknown or unacknowledged by Lee and Mitchell. They blithely dismiss the MFA as "the armed might of the capitalist state" despite the fact that the military rising paved the way for the very possibility of revolutionary change. One wonders if they hold the same low opinion of the military in today's revolutionary Venezuela.
Lee and Mitchell share with us the pompous, high-sounding directive of the high court of Trotskyist theory, the International Committee of the Fourth International, which demanded that "the PCP and the PSP break with the bourgeois parties, the state machinery and MFA, and fight for the dissolution of the army and the creation of workers, peasants and soldiers soviets."
It was the "back to the barracks position" — the dissolution of the MFA — advocated by the right and Soares that marked the beginning of the end for the revolutionary process. When the military was decisively split and the left's formidable support in the Lisbon Military Region destroyed, the movement had lost the initiative.
Prior to the MFA split and the coup in the Lisbon Military Region on November 25, 1975, the government, led by the PCP, had nationalized the "banks, insurance companies, the steel industry, the main brewing concerns, the major transport companies, the giant CUF monopoly, the Setenave shipyards, and many other enterprises," and passed "the Agrarian Reform Law of July 29, 1975" (Fauvet), a time when Lee and Mitchell charge that the PCP was betraying the revolution.
Like the Paris Communards, the failed Bavarian and Hungarian Soviets, many anti-colonial rebellions, and the Chilean experiment with Popular Unity, the revolution in Portugal failed. Perhaps it was an impossible task for a small revolutionary party and a defeated, inexperienced and ideologically immature military movement to wrest power for the people in a poor country while facing a powerful Catholic Church (unmentioned by Lee and Mitchell) and the intervention of great capitalist powers (a story largely untold), but they tried. Alvaro Cunhal's place in this epic will be forever honored in spite of the contempt of his Eurocommunist "friends" and the scorn of the far-removed ultra-left.
We remind our Trotskyist friends — Lee and Mitchell — that Marx critically analyzed the tactics of the Paris Commune; he knew that there was much to learn from a failed, even flawed, attempt. But he never demeaned the participants. He insisted upon honoring their effort one and all.
We remind Lee and Mitchell that Lenin (and Trotsky) never meant for the Bolshevik Revolution to be a blueprint for the working class to be followed scrupulously and rigidly, but an inspiration to workers everywhere.
Lastly, we remind the authors that Lenin had body guards (though perhaps too few) and a chauffeur, too. To pillory Cunhal for having them, as they do in their article, is just plain silly.
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* In general, I find many articles posted daily to be informed and useful, though the constant theological blaming of every setback, every failed tactic, every disappointment upon "Stalinism" to be immature and painfully annoying.
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