The Brooklyn Rail

1. April 1974: Day of Revolution

From military revolt to popular insurrection

The revolutionary events that followed the military revolt of April 25, 1974 in Portugal are rather misunderstood today. However, at the time they aroused strong interest and influenced the political strategies of left forces throughout Europe and even in the United States. Today it is important to remember the key role—neglected by those who write history—played by the popular insurrection and by the insubordination of rank-and-file soldiers.

In Portugal, the official story of the Carnation Revolution tells of a process of transition from a dictatorial regime, fascist by nature, towards a democratic one. The period of social agitation is often presented as a “leftist” incongruity, a momentary deviation from the “natural” march of society towards the inevitable political horizon of our epoch: the system of parliamentary representation. The dominant idea is that the democratic transition was the work of the military, with the popular intervention relegated to marginal “excesses.”

Quite recently, a number of writings returned to this question in a more subtle manner: the Portuguese revolution is supposed to have constituted a special case of “peaceful transition by break” of a dictatorial regime towards a representative-democratic one, a transition accomplished without negotiations with the old regime nor with an agreement to forget the responsibilities for the past. If it now seems certain that negotiation (particularly over the preservation of the colonial system) and an agreement to forget were envisaged by the military putschists, the ineluctability of a rupture with the past did not appear as events unfolded until the moment when popular participation became an autonomous factor. The call for another future that manifested itself in the street from the first hours of the military putsch would open the way to another possibility: a social movement, revolutionary in nature, going beyond a simple ”transition to representative democracy.”

In this first section we will discuss neither the events of the revolutionary period nor the richness of collective action which, for more than a year, continually impeded political normalization. Instead we will try, first, to bring out the way in which, from the start of the putsch, two factors influenced the course of events: the insubordination of the soldiers and the popular uprising.

Military revolt

We know that the regime was aware of the seditious plans of a group of young professional soldiers, organized in the Armed Forces Movement (MFA). A month earlier, on March 16, a first revolt broke out in the garrison stationed in a city to the north of Lisbon. The column which marched towards the capital was blocked by military forces loyal to the regime, and the officers were arrested. The omnipresence of the political police of the fascist regime (the PIDE) and its network of informers made it difficult to keep the plans for the action secret. This was especially true because the unstable social situation had the regime strongly worried. One large strike movement followed another in the larger enterprises, agitation was strong in the universities, the opposition to the colonial wars spread, and clandestine armed groups began to carry out acts of sabotage. The soldiers of the MFA themselves were looking anxiously to the demonstrations scheduled for May 1, 1974. Finally, young people fled the appeal to the colors. On occasion only half of an age class presented themselves to the conscription offices, while deserters and dissidents exiled in Europe numbered in the thousands. In the three colonies (Angola, Guinea-Bissau, and Mozambique) where the liberation movements had been fighting for thirteen years, acts of rebellion and refusals to obey, even refusals to fight, developed among the draftees.

Early in the morning of April 25, 1974, a few young officers in a barracks in Santarem, a city to the northeast of Lisbon, assembled the troops and proposed to march on Lisbon to put an end to “the sad state of affairs in which we live.” The plan of the MFA was to arrest the government and replace it with a military regime. The soldiers immediately and completely agreed, which surprised the officers. The rebels rushed towards Lisbon in a few military vehicles. They paid almost no attention to traffic lights on the way—at one point, the lead vehicle respectfully stopped at a red light, frustrating Salgueiro Maia, the young captain heading the column, who would later say, “The revolution doesn’t stop for red lights!” They arrived early in the morning at the great square facing the Tagus, the Terreiro do Paço, where the chief ministries were located; the situation rapidly became complex. The regime reacted quickly: significant equipment was sent to the spot, notably tanks commanded by officers loyal to the regime. These forces had been moved to Lisbon after the rebellion of March 16, showing that the government expected some follow-up. At that moment much of the military hierarchy remained loyal to the dictatorship of which it was the backbone. The great majority of the officers of these elite units kept their distance from the rebellious officers of the MFA. The situation evolved following a dynamic unexpected by neither of the military camps on the scene, the rebellious minority or the defenders of the dictatorship, the majority.

Birth of an insurrection

One unexpected element was the scale of popular participation. The Terreiro do Paço was at that time the place where the ferries disembarked travelers from the great working-class suburbs on the other side of the Tagus estuary. These were combative neighborhoods, stirring with activity, hostile to the government. It was an entire people that thus surged, in the early morning, onto the great square, to find themselves face to face with the troops, who clumsily blocked the streets and access of the workers to public transportation. The soldiers openly showed their hostility to the government. To proletarians who addressed him, Captain Maia replied, “Today, nobody works. Nor on the April 25 of the years to come, which will be vacation days!” Meanwhile, the ferries continued to disembark thousands of workers, who remained stuck there. The streets adjacent to the square were black with people. If at first there was any doubt about the political orientation of the rebellious soldiers, little by little the atmosphere relaxed, people mixed and discussed with the soldiers, shouted their hatred of the dictatorship, and were ready to take it apart. Excitement mounted into joy: the phrase “It’s a revolution!” was in every mouth.

At the same moment, on the other side of the square, things were more strained with the forces of the regime, who threatened to fire on the rebels and on the people who surrounded them. The rebellious officers attempted to discuss with their colleagues, who first talked down to them, then became more hesitant. The hierarchy understood that it had to act quickly. A superior officer climbed on a tank and ordered the gunner to fire on the rebels. The soldier said he didn’t think he could do it… the officer replied: “Shoot or you’ll get a bullet in the head.” Another refusal; the crews closed the access doors to the turrets; then several soldiers came out of the tanks and passed to the rebel side. Insubordination turned into mutiny. The situation hung in the balance. Some high officers vanished, others gave in to the rebels, badly concealing their humiliation.

A Portuguese navy ship that was taking part in NATO maneuvers on the coast was brought back to the Tagus. It was ordered to fire on the rebels. It did not. The crew made it clear to the commander that it was sympathetic to the rebellion. A massacre was avoided. The presence of people on the square weighed on the evolution of events. The thousands of workers from the other side of the Tagus now mixed with people from the working-class districts of Lisbon—many young people, women, and kids—the classic composition of every developing revolutionary situation.

One factor played a role in the hesitation of the military officers involved in this confrontation, and reassured the soldiers in their insubordination: the MFA had the support of a handful of high-rank officers. But it was above all the solidarity of the street and the popular mobilization that favored the mutiny, which in turn helped a minority of officers to defy the hierarchy.

This tipping-point came at the moment when the hatred for the dictatorship by the working people blew up in a spontaneous fashion, adding to a spirit of insubordination that had been building up in society for a few years, and which found expression in the young rank-and-file soldiers. Later, Captain Maia would say: “It was at this moment that April 25 won its victory!” We can say that this point marked a decisive turning from which was born a situation of insurrection.

Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho, one of the young officer strategists of the MFA, is very clear about the events of this “revolutionary day.” He recognized that the rebels’ plan, which counted on the neutralization of the military leaders close to the regime, had generally failed, either because of poor preparation or because the hierarchy was able to counter their plans. He understood also that the great majority of the officers, indecisive and conformist by nature, joined the MFA only when the balance of forces had shifted in favor of the putschists. He grasped that the massive adhesion of the troops to the revolt, and above all the mutiny of the soldiers in the elite forces on which the regime was counting, had been underestimated by the strategists of the MFA. These attitudes were stimulated, as he saw it, by the popular uprising.

The conflagration

If the rebellion of a minority of army officers was not a surprise for the regime, neither was it unexpected by the organizations of the clandestine political opposition. We can leave aside the Socialist Party, a mini-group without real existence at the time. The Communist Party, whose importance and especially image was large among the working classes, had links with a number of officers in the MFA. It was thus aware of their plans. But it was apprehensive of a possible military coup that would harden the regime. Thus it was more preoccupied with protecting its underground organization than with direct participation in events of uncertain outcome. No slogan, no order had been given in advance, when a number of Communist sympathizers took to the streets spontaneously the morning of April 25. Only later did the party leadership try to regain control over events. The same was true for the Maoist groups very active in Lisbon, among students but also among radicalizing workers, irritated by the timorous positions of the Communist Party.

While these events were going on in the city center, the regime’s propaganda facilities—radio and television—fell easily into the hands of the rebels. People continued to go out massively on the streets, even while the radio repeated a message from the MFA asking the population to wait quietly at home for the situation to be brought under control. The broadcast by those same stations of forbidden songs by the singer José Afonso finally eliminated any doubts about the political orientation of the military revolt.¹ The crowds in the neighborhoods continued to grow in support of the soldiers. The unequal balance of forces within the army at the beginning was finally reversed thanks to popular participation: “The coup d’etat changed, little by little, into a joyous and victorious action through which the people united fraternally with the MFA.” ²

Once the balance of forces had tipped, the popular mobilization became a force to be reckoned with. When the rebellious soldiers, surrounded by people, left the square on the Tagus and moved to the city center, they found themselves face to face with new units loyal to the regime. “What are you doing?” asked the rebels. An officer came towards them: “I’ve been ordered to prevent your passage, but I and my men are with you.”

Above the old city, while the rebellious soldiers attempted to secure the surrender of the government, which had taken refuge in a barracks, the crowd demanded the heads of the leaders of the oldest dictatorship in Europe. When a minister sent for discussions asked Captain Maia, “Who is in command? Who has the highest rank?” he answered, “We’re all in command,” adding, “We are all captains.” Only a few hours after his minions had attempted to drown the rebellion in blood, Prime Minister Caetano begged to be “treated with dignity.” He added: “I engage to transfer power to a general officer. I don’t want power falling into the street.” Terrified, the man of the ruling class recognized the existence of an insurrectional situation. The people were at the gates of power. They expressed their sovereignty—they must be channeled, limited by a form of representation.

Then everything went very quickly. Contacted by the old regime, aware of his prestige, General Spínola offered his services and rushed on site. He was applauded by the crowd. In a few hours, he moved “from being a fascist that morning to being a ‘liberator’ that evening.”³ Not without difficulty, he succeeded in imposing himself on the rebel soldiers, who were suspicious of his real intentions, and in exfiltrating the leaders of the regime from the barracks. Later, they fled to Brazil. The compromise between the two factions of the military institution was sealed with this rescue, the first act of a new regime that allowed the bourgeoisie to remain in control.

But for the moment we had not reached that point. The detestation of the regime stirred up the effervescence of the people. In the city, groups sacked government offices, attacked the police, and chased off supporters of the regime. The crowd surrounded the PIDE headquarters, calling for justice. The regime’s killers fired on them, killing four and wounding dozens. The situation further radicalized. It was only on the next day that navy commandos intervened and arrested a hundred functionaries of terror. By doing this they protected these criminals from a “last judgment” which would have certainly turned into a massacre. The offices were ransacked, but the officers succeeded in getting their hands on a part of the archives that were later fought over by different political forces. In the Caxias prison, the “PIDEs” replaced the political prisoners freed under the pressure of the people massed outside it—here too, against the hesitation of the military.

The day came to an end. The city of Lisbon was boiling over. Already in the course of the day, jubilation spread to the streets of Porto, and throughout the country, even in the smallest hamlets, women and men celebrated freedom by rising into movement. During the following days, agitation spread from the streets to businesses, schools, large landed properties, and occupied factories whose managers, having run away or being simply absent, were replaced by committees of workers elected by general assemblies. A new power, based on popular sovereignty, created itself, in addition to those of the military and the political forces. It would be decisive as the situation evolved. The clash between bureaucratic socialism, strongly represented by the Portuguese Communist Party, and market democracy had to deal with the practice of direct democracy and the affirmation of forms of autonomous “people’s power.” Debates about the construction of a different society, once forgotten, were revived. The age-old model of colonialism was called into question. Its days were numbered. The limits of thought were pushed back, and new questions were discovered with an elan that had been repressed for half a century. Suddenly, everything was up for discussion; the impossible hid itself behind the possible.

In another historical moment, Jean-Paul Marat, the revolutionary of the great French Revolution of 1789, had spoken of the “revolutionary day” as a time when “nonstop energy” was carried by the crowd. April 25, 1974 in Lisbon was also a day when “nonstop energy” irrigated the city and people’s lives.

The adventure of the Portuguese revolution began that day. The wave of revolutionary energy would shake the capitalist order for more than a year. Until the gray day of November 25, 1975, when the soldiers rediscovered their “natural” mission: to beat down social agitation, re-establish the order of parliamentary democracy, protect the interests of private capital, local and European, its law of profit. Then the alienated march of commercial progress could once again find its way.

2. November 1975: the end of the revolution

A powerful movement of social revolt

For two years, new problems were posed for the militants and political forces who had thrown themselves into the “conquest of heaven,” attempting to subvert a European society entering modernity with difficulty. The historical conditions in which the social movement of opposition had taken root were very particular. In 1975, Portuguese society dragged behind it the ball and chain of a backwardness consolidated by its recent history, by the conservative orientation of an authoritarian regime in place for nearly half a century. This was a regime that cultivated immobility as a force for survival and as a project for the future. Against this backwardness, Portuguese society was also strongly affected by two recent developments whose causes and consequences upset economic and social equilibrium: massive emigration towards the countries of Europe north of the Pyrenees and the economic and human cost of a violent colonial war on three African fronts (Guinea-Bissau, Angola, and Mozambique). These two factors of destabilization, with hidden links between them, could be seen at work in the rise of urban social struggles, in the student milieu, and in the new working-class areas. If we can say, retrospectively, that Portugal was already, on the evening of April 25, at the gates of Europe and looking to integration into its market, we can also argue that the effects of the shock wave of May 1968, its spirit and desires, had contaminated the most combative and rebellious sectors of the Portuguese workers and young people. It is impossible to understand the Portuguese revolution without putting it into the perspective of these historical circumstances.

For a year and a half, starting in April 1974, a powerful social movement, fundamentally anti-capitalist in spirit, took form and ripened within struggles. And the prime objective of the military putsch of November 25, 1975 was to put an end to it.

This outcome, predictable but not inevitable, had a strong effect at the time on those many people who had followed, from near or far, the revolutionary events in the little country in the south of Europe. These people suddenly found themselves looking with stupor and vertigo at the ease with which a new military putsch succeeded in reversing the order of things and rapidly stifling the intense desires for a new society. In one sense, analysis of the events of November 25 enriches the lessons of the social movement that was defeated, and supplies elements to answer the questions it raises.

The three currents of the Portuguese revolution

In retrospect, two aspects deserve to be examined more closely: the role of the extreme left and that of the Portuguese Communist Party.

The role played by the extreme left in the radicalization of the social revolt is today presented by most observers and analysts, in official and officious discourse, in a scornful and dismissive way. This radicalization is described as a parenthesis of excitement, infantile and utopian, even incoherent, in the ineluctable transition towards democracy, the only possible and viable goal. Especially because most of the specialists in realism who create opinions learned at the school of authoritarian ideas, mostly Stalinist, before changing camp and swearing fealty to economic liberalism. On the other hand, interpretations stemming from extreme-left currents prefer to stress the errors of the leaderships of the Communist Party and the parties of the extreme left, even their lack of preparedness, suggesting the need for their reconstruction.

Another approach is nevertheless possible—that of the partisans of antiauthoritarian principles of organization and action, who supported independent action in the social movement in Portugal. This is also the viewpoint of this article.

This approach puts the emphasis on a project that began, in a confused way, to emerge from the social revolt in Portugal in the course of 1975, a project inherent in the struggle for self-management and the so-called non-party mobilizations, a happy formula born from the resistance of the exploited to the manipulations of the left parties. The project of a self-managed and self-governed society, opposed to the visions of statist collectivism, antagonistic as they are to the desires for emancipation from exploitation.

In the course of the period from April 1974 to November 1975, we saw the spread of occupations of workplaces and empty apartments, and later of the large landed properties in the south of the country, with the formation of committees of workers, inhabitants, and even soldiers. These rank-and-file organizations very quickly attempted to coordinate with each other locally and nationally, horizontally and independently of the union strictures that had been rapidly taken over by the Communist Party, just emerged from clandestinity. Not without some relation to this surge of self-organization came the first experiments in the collective management of enterprises, the self-managed construction of housing, the formation of agricultural cooperatives by rural workers, the experiments with self-management of factories and workshops abandoned by their fleeing owners. A whole new world of creative, concrete struggles and actions, which moved offensively to take the place of the old social order that was collapsing. In short, we witnessed the collective search for new rules of social functioning, of a new life, of new social relations.

There was a third political current that came into existence and distinguished itself at once from the social-democratic project of capitalist restoration—which supported the putsch of November 25—and that of a state capitalism supported by the Communist Party and most of the Marxist-Leninist and Maoist organizations. It must be stressed that it was the existence of this third, autonomous, “non-party” current, under the name of “people’s power,” that above all characterized the Portuguese revolution. This was a current that brought a dimension of rupture to that period. Everything else was just the traditional political struggle, of no interest for the future.

The rout of the Communist Party

If the military putsch of November 25, 1975 was above all the defeat of the Leninist vanguard tendencies, it had tragic consequences for the experiments in self-management of “people’s power.” Those swept away by the putsch of November 25 carried with them in their defeat those whom they had stifled, the minority tendencies which had fought to give form and life to practices of self-organization, to the experiments in self-management. November 25 made impossible what April 25 had made possible: the material construction of this collective desire for a new, different life, a human life. But its success was possible because the political struggles for power had exhausted the most generous and combative militants and had distanced the great mass of workers from action.

With regard to the role of the Portuguese Communist Party on November 25, the conclusions to be drawn today seem obvious. The Party found itself prisoner of stakes beyond its control, above all internationally. Stakes that finally limited the revolutionary dimension of the Portuguese experiment and sealed its isolation. The role of the Communist Party went back to the place taken by the Portuguese revolution in the framework of relations between the global blocs during these last years of the Cold War. The Portuguese experience, because of the energy of its spontaneity, its unpredictable radical developments, had at first escaped from the strategies of the dominant global powers and the principal forces that represented them in Portugal, the Socialist Party for western capitalism and the Communist Party for the Eastern bloc. In a historical situation where the process of democratic transition in the countries of southern Europe (Greece and Spain) was still fragile and undecided, the weakness of the Soviet bloc limited the aid Moscow could give the Communist forces and any evolution towards state-capitalist economies. The prudence of Italian Eurocommunism and the Spanish transition, managed by the alliance between the forces of the left and Francoism, were determinant for the conclusion of the Portuguese situation. We know today that the representatives of the Russian state always insisted that there was no question of abandoning the line of “peaceful coexistence,” that Portugal should remain in the sphere of market capitalism and that its membership in NATO should not be questioned. The perspectives for creating a state-run economy were quickly foreclosed. On this question, in the course of the revolutionary process itself, the PREC, the Communist Party—with its leader Álvaro Cunhal, no doubt the most gifted politician of the period—was caught between its real power in society and the state and the constant danger of being outflanked on the left. The political contortions of the party leadership in response to the social agitation and the balance of political forces expressed this situation. After the putsch of November 25, the Communist Party attacked the “adventurism” of the extreme left, going so far as to claim that its crushing created new conditions for the development of democracy and revolutionary action—always seeking the good in the politics of the worse! Then, twenty years later, it returned to this position to integrate the putsch into a “counterrevolutionary process.” Even on the question of nationalizations, the party most often followed the course of events that made them inevitable, rather than instituting its own program. Globally, one can say that on November 25 the Communist Party chose the path of survival in the framework of a parliamentary market democracy.

The failure of Leninism

Fifty years later, what can we learn from this experience, its failure, and the forms that failure took?

In the face of the tragic consequences of the barbaric evolution of capitalism, wars and the destruction of the very conditions of survival on Earth, the weakness of a collective response, and the sense of powerlessness are once again feeding the illusion of the effectiveness of enlightened minorities, awakening an attraction for new forms of the old vanguardism, with praise for Leninist methods and practices. From this point of view too, the failure of the recent “Portuguese experiment” is clarifying. Even in a situation where the state is weakened and the forces of social opposition are powerful, the confidence placed in the principle of authority quickly exhausted the emancipatory dynamic of the movement.

November 25, 1975 thus confirms that the goals of the statists pull social movements towards a continuity with the relations of exploitation. The state-capitalist project, the solutions resting on statist measures, are always part of the old world, feeding the forces of the counter-revolution, for they promote the delegation of power, creating bureaucratic disorganization and collective paralysis.

The failure of the Portuguese revolution reminds us of the lesson that the German revolutionaries of the 1920s learned from their defeat. If the attempt to subvert the complex capitalist society is difficult and arduous, it certainly cannot be a party affair. Or, to put it another way, it is certainly not the presence of organizations of wise leaders and obedient masses that can make it more easily achievable. In the Portuguese case, the myriad of parties and self-proclaimed revolutionary organizations, each possessing the revolutionary truth, was a fog over, a brake on, rather than an aid to the spreading construction of new social relations, of new relations of production.

And November 25, 1975?

To conclude, let us return briefly to the events of November 25. On the pretext of an imminent coup d’état to be carried out by the military left with the support of the organizations of the extreme left and their mass organizations, the traditionalist forces of the army, organized around a group of officers close to the social democrats and the parliamentary right, supported more or less openly by the NATO apparatus and the North-American government, seized the upper hand. They destroyed the left of the MFA and created the military conditions required for an effective social normalization. Not only did the military putsch encounter a weak reaction among the “progressive officers” and extreme-left groups—though they had been announcing “civil war” for more than a year—but the popular mobilization itself was very weak, especially if we remember the importance attributed at the time to the famous “people’s power.” Raids, arrests, and imprisonment of militants of the extreme left, military takeover of selected media that those forces had still under their control, the firing of the most active militants in the workplaces, and the calling into question of collective contracts… who would have thought it possible? The very people who had distinguished themselves by their triumphalism were overthrown. Silence fell on their euphoric scenarios.

At the root of these military putsches lies the social question: the urgent need for the Portuguese ruling class and the international bourgeoisie to set a limit to the combativity, the revolt, and power of the workers. To re-establish order is to re-establish discipline in wage labor, a necessary condition to restart capitalist accumulation, restore the bases of the economy, unleash “national reconstruction,” as the Socialist Party, allied to the putschists, said at the time. Facilitated by the very structure of the military apparatus, the ”normalization” was rapid and efficient. A few dozen officers and non-coms were imprisoned, “red” regiments were demobilized, barracks in urban areas were occupied by units from the countryside… and presto, the hand was played!

But if an army can be demobilized, the soldiers then enlarging the great “army of the unemployed,” one can’t do the same with the mass of workers. The problem was to re-establish their productivity and their exploitation at a profitable level. For those who, since April 25, had kept a critical attitude towards the supposed “motor” role of the MFA in the Portuguese revolution, the situation was unfortunately predictable, in the absence of renewed autonomous action by workers on the terrain of production.

The putsch of November 25, 1975 made visible the tragic consequences for the workers of the putschist and militarist conception of the social revolution. The idea that the capture of the state apparatus could be accomplished by using the military institution had for two years guided the action and tactics of extreme-left groups. It had ended by winning the most combative elements of the workers’ movement itself. In this way bourgeois principles were integrated into the social movement: submission to leaders; waiting for events; delegation of powers and aims; recognition of the state power. Every investment of militant energy in such a project was doomed to failure and that failure came. The consequences finally affected more the worker militants than those—officer and political groups—who had spread these ideas.

1. José Afonso (1929–1987) was a well-known composer and protest singer who was persecuted by the fascist regime. He had a clear communist spirit but was an independent mind and opposed to any party organization. Later on, during the revolutionary process, he supported the autonomous struggles and actions. He is still very popular and his songs are played by the new generations, even in the rap scene.
2. So wrote the young officer strategist of the MFA, Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho years later in his book, Alvorada em Abril (II) (Lisbon: Alfa editores, 1991), page 132.
3. Phil Mailer, Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?, (Oakland: PM Press, 2012).This is the best book on the first period of the revolution, by someone who was present and lived through it. Mailer, a radical, was living and working as an English teacher in Lisbon at that moment.