The singularity of Portugal’s revolutionary period is evident in one of its many anecdotal episodes. The late January 1975 NATO “Locked Gate” exercises off the coast of Lisbon had been planned ever since early 1974, just before the revolution on April 25th, but were increasingly seen as a blatant provocation against the ongoing revolutionary process. The USS Saratoga stationed in the Tagus River and the shore leave of its soldiers worried everyone. US ambassador Frank Carlucci, just arrived from helping organize Lumumba’s murder in Congo and the military coup in Brazil, tried to reassure the government and the media that the exercises had been planned well beforehand and concerned mostly submarine warfare, and hence had little to do with the countries recent political upheaval, but diplomatic cables also show his concerns regarding the presence of US navy personnel in a city that was all but a lawless revolutionary commune. His worries were mirrored by the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP). NATO’s presence was a clear provocation and hence everyone was to refrain from protesting, lest any conflicts be used as an excuse for repression. Tension was rampant: mere days before, in Oporto, a huge crowd had laid siege to the congress of a newly formed right-wing party, burning their cars and fighting the police for almost twelve hours. The ruling military government charged with democratic transition heeded both calls: demonstration were banned for the duration of the exercises and leave.
A recently formed assembly of factory and company autonomous committees, Inter-empresas,1 decided to protest anyway, defying the ban. Around ten thousand people, mostly industrial workers and leftist militants, went up Avenida da Liberdade, shouting slogans against NATO and for workers’ rights, marching up to the military blockade. Against all expectations, the protest decided to force the barriers and the army let them all through. The march followed on to the ministry of labour, where it was kettled by the soldiers. The soldiers, however, turned their backs on the protestors and effectively joined them in some of the chants. They were now part of the protest.2 This was but a whiff of what was coming in the following months: the complicity between significant parts of the military and proletarian spontaneity meant that everything was up for grabs.
This was all vividly described by Eduardo Pires, one of the organizers of the demo, at a recent presentation, in a series of talks about the revolution organized by the VIVA O PREC collective.3 The revolutionary cycle lasted from April 25th 1974 until November 25th 1975, but the period known as the “ongoing revolutionary process”, Processo Revolucionário em Curso (PREC), generally refers to its later part, from March 1975 onwards, when state power was so fragmented that a civil war seemed imminent. The session’s Q&A was quite revealing. Questions from a younger audience, politicized in an era of mass protests and social movements, concerned the seemingly obvious political tasks succeeding such an event: had the protesters thought of any sort of defensive or offensive tactics should the soldiers refuse to let the march through? What sort of connections did they try to establish with the soldiers? How did inter-empresas discuss the steps to follow?
The answers were disarmingly honest. There had been no plan for that day, nor for the day after: only a “let’s see what happens”. An autonomous assembly of industrial workers had just successfully called for a massive demo that openly challenged a state ban and managed to garner the support of the military, but they just went back to work the following day. They were mostly quite young, some not even twenty, coming out of a dictatorship, with little political or organizational knowledge. Some leftist groups had developed impressive underground structures, but their experience consisted in underground organization and resilience, not the unpredictable dynamic and temporality of street protests and mass movements.
This general affect of a disarming bewilderment with the intensity of the events surfaces again and again throughout the period’s anecdotes, such as the one portrayed in Thomas Harlan’s Torrebela (1975),4 a documentary about the rural occupation of a large estate abandoned by its fleeing owners. The peasants play dress up with the masters’ expensive clothes, mimicking their fanciness and petulance, in a delightful and childlike expression of revolutionary joy. The revolution was a seemingly impossible alignment of mass popular movements with parts of the army against the backdrop of of a collapse of state power. However, it seemed to go by so fast that little time was left for any revolutionary scheming or politicking. And yet, nowhere did the period’s revolutionary movements come so close to revolution proper. As the filmmaker Robert Kramer said, “for a few months, Portugal was the freest country in the world.”5
Although often understood as an oddly democratic military coup, undertaken by war-sick mid-level officers, the actual destitution of the 48-year-old authoritarian regime only occured when a massive street presence turned it into a revolution. This shows that the Carnation Revolution was indeed part of a global cycle of struggles that spanned the 1960s and 1970s, and not just an army adventure. Its political composition, repertoire and terminology were aligned with contemporary social movements of the era, even if the country had very specific traits: a colonial and insular regime in a liberal continent. At once so modern and so atavistic.
Even so, the revolution’s postscript differs vastly from its counterparts. In most situations, once defeated, the period’s movements were hypostatized into political, cultural and theoretical tendencies which sought to understand what had been at stake in such ruptures. Italy’s post-autonomia movements, France’s ultra-left, Germany’s autonomen, Greece’s insurrectional anarchism, etc. all sought to reenact and reflect – with different strengths and limits – on the antagonist gestures of the period.
In Portugal, on the contrary, there was no post-revolutionary autonomists or ultra left to speak of. The hundreds of episodes of wild popular revolt simply failed to leave any common organizational legacy and were mostly purged from any collective political memory. At the same time, a consistent conceptual attempt to understand what had happened on its own terms never really came forth. There was never any PRECism. The emergence of subjective forces capable of turning a coup into a revolution, the radical exceptional period and the messianic temporality of popular upheaval were never the subject of a conceptual effort – they were simply considered an excessive interval in the troubled succession of power structures or, alternatively, as residual anecdotes saturated in the period’s vulgar ideological jargon. This text gathers some briefs notes and thoughts on these exceptionalities.
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From the 60s onwards, national liberation struggles in Portuguese colonies started to undermine the metropolitan consensus around the regime’s policies and increasingly isolate the country in the international diplomatic arena. Liberation struggles were not defeatable and the mandatory military service and political oppression were highly unpopular. The political imaginary of the emerging middles classes, with modern and cosmopolitan aspirations in line with the rest of Europe, was agitated by both the anti-colonial third-worldism and the cultural revolutions happening beyond the Pyrenees. At the same time, a significant rural exodus to Lisbon’s industrial belt had been taking place since the 50s. This new urban industrial proletariat came mostly from Alentejo, a wide and sparsely populated region south of the Tagus river, whose large estates had historically been the site of fierce struggles and social banditry.
Salazar’s death in 1968 meant high hopes that his successor, Marcelo Caetano, would apply the awaited and promised democratic reforms. A “Marcelist Spring” did ensue, but it was short lived and failed to deliver the promised changes. Frustration with the failed transition took a toll on the regime. Widening fissures in the ruling party created a “liberal wing”, in favor of regime change and colonial independence, but workers' dissent also reached a peak, with more than 300 strikes between 1968 and 1973.
The disaffected mid-level military officers who took power at dawn on April 25th sought to stop the colonial wars and destitute Marcelo Caetano, but they did not have a cohesive political goal that fully implied colonial independences or a complete regime upheaval. PIDE/DGS, the vicious political police, was somewhat aware of the possibility of a coup and considered it a way to toughen up the regime, standing ready to pledge allegiance to its new masters.
The population’s refusal to heed the orders to stay home while military operations were underway changed everything. Ten of thousands flooded the streets of Lisbon, mostly celebrating the regime’s collapse and cheering the soldiers, offering them the celebrated carnations, turning the tense confrontation into an effusive feast. The crowds surrounded the barracks where Caetano had taken refuge and the DGS office downtown, burning their cars and breaking some windows. The DGS fired from the upper floors killing five and wounding around fifty. This forced the military to update their immediate objectives and intervene, effectively sieging the building, forcing the heavily armed agents inside to eventually surrender. Impromptu “PIDE hunts” were setup all through the city in the following days6. The PIDE/DGS siege is generally seen as the spontaneous action that forced the military to turn the coup into a revolution. The DGS had to abandon its neutrality to the coup and hence the military was forced to act against it, even if it wasn’t in their immediate plans.7 The plan for a smooth and simple handover of the untainted state apparatuses to a new power crumbled before it even started. Popular support for the captain’s coup had been one of the main unpredictable elements in their plan, but it had so overwhelmed expectations they were forced to update their plans. Even if driven by corporative interests, once power was in their hands, the officers believed time had come for political rupture, not just for a regime reform.
Power was transferred to the Movimento das Forças Armadas (MFA) – Armed Forces Movement – a military junta led by a newly appointed president, António Spinola, a well-respected conservative general who had been sidelined by the regime after proposing an end to the war and the creation of a Lusophone commonwealth. The ensuing months, however, saw a formidable wave of strikes, occupations, and protests which fostered an ever-increasing tension between the revolution unfolding in the streets and Spinola’s attempts to curtail popular initiatives. This forced the MFA’s state council to challenge Spinola’s cabinet, choosing Vasco Gonçalves8 to replace his prime-minister and Otelo Saraiva de Carvalho9 to lead COPCON (Comando Operacional do Continente – Continental operational command), a newly formed military command charged with defending the revolution and assuring democratic transition.
Spinola reacted in late September 1974 by calling for the “silent majority” to take the streets of Lisbon and demand an end to the “chaos”. Fearing a countercoup, the entire left (including the Socialist Party) and COPCON blocked all major entrances to the capital, effectively preventing the protest from happening. Spinola quit, raising some international concerns: would the outcome of the revolution be a western liberal democracy or a socialist experiment in the heart of NATO?
The appointment of Frank Carlucci as new US ambassador reframed the question: Can the US control the revolution through a legitimate agent or is a Portuguese Pinochet in order? Connections were made with Mário Soares, the Socialist Party’s charismatic leader, seen as the only figure capable of delivering a smooth transition and avoiding the geopolitical nightmare of a European Cuba.10 Soares’ alignment with NATO and the US meant the beginning of a transformation in the revolution’s playing field: no longer revolutionaries versus fascists, but social-democrats versus communists and the far-left.
Increasingly isolated, a few scattered units still faithful to Spinola attempted a countercoup on March 11th 1975. Their efforts were easily subdued, and Spinola fled to Spain and then to Brazil. Their crisis was an opportunity for further radicalization of the whole process. Prime-minister Vasco Gonçalves, secured by Otelo’s COPCON, pressured by the expanding newly formed factory and local committees, ordered the nationalization of most of the Portuguese banking and insurance system, along with more than 1,300 companies, including the bank-owned newspapers, arguing that financial power was funding the revanchist extreme-right and sabotaging the economy.11
The controversial nationalizations turned the ongoing popular revolutionary spontaneity into an institutional affair, opening the period that became known as PREC, the Ongoing revolutionary process. Political and military power were in the hands of revolutionary forces, however ideologically fragmented they were between the communist party and the extreme left. The PREC unfolded as a succession of increasingly intense episodes of proletarian appropriation. The state's monopoly on violence was shattered. Hundreds of companies and factories fell under workers’ control. In the south, a third of all arable land was occupied and self-managed. Entire neighborhoods were squatted, others were built from scratch with state help. Some of the remaining private newspapers were taken over by workers’ committees. Daily demonstrations demanded everything. Spain’s consulate and embassy were ransacked by hundreds of protesters after Franco executed five anti-fascist militants. People squatted, occupied and appropriated. Police threatened the people. COPCON threatened the police.
A complicated puzzle of forces moved on the playing field throughout the spring and summer of 1975. The far-left was a confusing array of small parties, some bigger than others, with relative proximity to the COPCON, within which small underground assemblies of soldiers were also forming. The Socialist Party, “the only game in town” according to Kissinger, sought to curtail PREC’s wilder antics and slowly recuperate the idea of a democratic silent majority upon the imminent threat of Portugal’s “Sovietization”, effectively becoming the front for a broad anti-communist coalition of interests. The Communist party had a very wide support base and oscillated between revolutionary impetus, institutional common-sense, and geopolitical fidelity. Beyond this formal or informal institutional field were hundreds of factory, company, and local committees, which struggled for autonomy from the far left and the PCP’s attempts to control them.
The April 25, 1975 elections for a new constituent assembly revealed a weaker PCP than its street popularity would suggest. The Socialist Party got 37% of the vote and the Social Democrats (center-right) got 26%.12 The PCP came third with a mere 12.5%. This undermined Gonçalves' legitimacy and increased tensions within the MFA, which by then was beginning to split between its moderate, communist and far-left factions. Most parties felt the Gonçalves-led transitional government didn’t accurately translate the people’s will and hence refused to form any type of cabinet, effectively isolating it. In the conservative north, PCP’s local offices were ransacked, bombed and set ablaze. Gonçalves abandoned the government by the end of August, and tension came to a boiling point some weeks later when striking construction workers decided to lay siege to the parliament. Tens of thousands of people stood their ground. For two days, the deputies of the constituent assembly were sequestered inside the governmental palace, with the PCP mediating between the deputies and the workers. Legend says the only people allowed to leave the governmental palace were those with calloused hands. The “Lisbon Commune” seemed a breath away, but so did civil war. A new Pinochet and/or Castro loomed behind every corner. In Madrid, Franco and Kissinger discussed whether to invade and where to bomb first.
The far left was, however, incapable of calling for the commune. In the days following the siege, rumors of an ongoing communist coup led to quick action against the military left on November 25, 1975. COPCON was extinguished without much resistance. Otelo, the would-be Castro, the only person capable of reacting, was nowhere to be found. Some people gathered in front of the barracks demanding weapons, ready to defend the revolution, but no consistent answer came. The PCP watched the events unfold idly, even if some of its militants stood by, waiting for the final push. Thousands waited for the call to arms, but it never came. Political tension would fizzle out over the following years, but the revolution had ended, not with a bang but with a whimper.
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This shortened historical description suggests that the toppling of a crippled regime had opened a power vacuum. Opposing forces struggled for control of state fragments, risking its disintegration. Victory went to the side capable of doing the right thing in the right moment. Within this general perspective, the Left was indeed a likely candidate for a short-lived revolutionary triumph. It had the guns and the numbers. What it didn’t have, leftist common-sense would claim, was someone or something capable of deciding on when and how to act. But this revolutionary decisionism obscures the fact that, no matter how widespread and sincere, the ongoing revolution was still a trembling affair.
Speculation abounds concerning the PCP’s hesitancy upon the revolutionary moment and its alignment with Moscow's directives. It had unsurprisingly kept a certain distance from the most radical and spontaneous revolutionary activity, not only because of ideological distrust of such spontaneity, but also because its legalization and institutionalization – at this time, far from assured – might be a sounder political goal than any insurrectional adventure led by an unreliable Otelo.
Many felt that such hesitancy meant that “popular power”, as the rural and industrial occupations were then called, was left an orphan. Without a political vanguard such spontaneity of the base would never really coalesce into a classic “dual power” pre-revolutionary situation. Otelo’s inconsistency and the PCP’s cold feet had been the revolution’s death knell. The expression “popular power” was most likely borrowed from Chile’s MIR (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) and its slogan “To struggle, to create popular power”. All throughout pre-Pinochet Chile an impressive network of communal distribution of commodities had challenged the monopolist grip on prices. While the COPCON did sporadically intervene on price disputes, and the rural and industrial occupations did attempt self-managed production, they were never capable of establishing the networks of cooperation and exchange that would properly constitute a “new type of socialist experience”.
More so, such “popular power” was only a power because it unfolded under COPCON’s protective hand. Its folk spontaneity and charisma did determine the transformation of a military coup into a revolution, and its concrete intelligence surpassed that of any bureaucratic cadre, but the occupations could only stand if COPCON stood behind them. This protective guise meant that “popular power” never really faced its own limits. It never posed the question of violence, of organization, of composition, of its inner contradictions, of the difference between the moral legitimacy sought by the name it had chosen and the actual political questions it faced.13
This ambiguity is laid out in the “document of the People/MFA alliance,”14 written by the military and far-left as an answer to the moderate factions of the MFA, a programmatic draft of the ensuing revolutionary steps towards a new socialist experience. In it, the military assumes the main agency in fostering the constitution of local popular assemblies and committees, with increasing levels of revokable representation up until a national popular assembly. Its naïve sincerity is somewhat endearing, but it also quite explicitly portrays the PREC’s limits: the military clearly substitutes itself for the inherent unfolding of the revolutionary situation. It does so not through force, but through an extremely paternalistic understanding of the process, common to the entire left. The carnation’s “popular” element isn’t the same as the eurocommunist “people” criticized by Tronti and others. Rather, they were seen as the revolution’s plebeian spiritual essence, its mythical legitimation, a force of divine simplicity and untainted morality, in dire need of earthly materialization. Its power is a moral power, an ethical call, to be answered by all. The military left, the far-left, and the PCP all answered this call, in what truly seemed the right gesture, but in doing so prevented any spontaneity from coalescing into a self-reflexive movement. “Popular power” could never really exist by itself, only through some exterior force.15
When the November countercoup revealed that neither “popular power” nor the many candidates for its materialization had that much real power, and that there was no “dual power” burgeoning within it, “popular power” began its process of nostalgic mythification. It would forever stand as a kernel of revolutionary purity to be eternally mourned as capital ravaged its every remembrance.
Perhaps the nineteen months of wild proletarian appropriation of the Portuguese revolution would be more aptly described as the actions of an “invisible party”. Romano Alquati’s sociology of post-war industrial workers struggles in northern Italy witnessed how informal proletarian conviviality fostered a political consciousness that was broader, deeper and fiercer than that of the workers’ official institutions. Rural exodus and the new organization of the metropolis had produced an invisible party, an informal but extremely agile network of political and tactical complicity.
PREC’s strengths and faults become clearer when read, precisely, as the actions of an insurrectional agency determining and being determined by the ongoing events. The transference of a rural and unruly plebeian class to the industrial periphery had created the subjective forces which would in time garner the mass street presence needed to push the political aspirations unleashed in the coup towards evermore radical demands. PREC’s invisible party forced institutional agents to act in one way or the other. A situated common intelligence saw the political vacuum as an opportunity and took what it could. It developed and organized according to the unfolding of an extremely complex and volatile situation of political exception. The invisible party wasn’t the expression of any folk authenticity, rather it had the cynical slyness of the long oppressed: take as much as you can while you can as fast as you can.
Yet the Italian comparison begs a question: why couldn’t this invisible party overcome the old problematic of “dual” and “popular power” and the vanguard party? To put it in other terms, why did this invisible party fail to produce its own forms of organization and its own conceptual categories?
Two answers seem obvious, but they only partially resolve the question. The first is that “popular power” was sabotaged by the petty squabbling over how it should be run.16 The ideological fixation on the creation of a true vanguard party led hundreds of militants into dozens of self-referential micro-bureaucracies, all fighting the communist Party, whose capacity to suffocate spontaneous action was all too real. The tasks necessary for the intensification of the revolutionary rupture were neglected in the name of a sterile competition between acronyms that were relatively indistinct in their vulgar Leninism. This competition flooded and saturated most factory and neighborhood committees, quickly emptying them of all non-cadre participation.
The second was that the regime’s five decades of censorship and repression had obviously played a decisive role in shaping the political forces that led the ongoing revolution. Censorship wasn’t only aimed at preventing the circulation of information but above all at preventing the emergence of an autonomous public sphere. Unlike the French or Italian autonomists and ultra-left, whose rupture with the rich experiences of mass organisations had nevertheless absorbed a sense of public participation, Portugal’s pre-revolutionary militancy had no instruments for common debate, prolonged theoretical analysis or fruitful discussion, nor any collective intelligence concerning the unfolding of mass movements.
But while factory and neighbourhood committees were saturated with bureaucratic cadre, and the political education one received in a peripheral underground organization was substantially different than the one received in a mass organization, these explanations have their own obvious problems. They don't explain why thousands of people who had risen up simply decided to accept the call to order and embrace institutional representation. So perhaps the true problem emerging from the experience of the carnation revolution is not why it didn’t assume ideologically presupposed forms – be it the committee or the commune, the invisible or the visible party, etc – but rather why it didn’t have to assume them.
If there is indeed a class autonomy and intelligence that can exploit a situation of political rupture, then this intelligence must also be taken into account when it decides not to do so. Proletarian intelligence is not only revealed in its victories. Faced with a civil war that would oppose a fractured army and worker-peasant militias to NATO, what would be the most rational choice? To call for the “Lisbon Commune” and rush towards a Chilean-style suppression that would obliterate all substantial conquests made after the collapse of the regime? To rely on the imbibed leftism of the various Leninist groups? Only one solution was seemingly left: to accept a compromise in which this workers' autonomy was subsumed into the new democratic and liberal state, through an institutional left, acquiring limited but concrete material and political gains, turning the political exception of the Portuguese revolution into the historical exception of the Portuguese left, which, up until recently, had arguably the strongest representation in Europe, if not in all liberal democracies. Portugal didn’t have any autonomous or ultra left milieu because it simply didn’t need any revolutionary residue spicing up the left.
This closed off and sealed the insurrectional experience of the revolution, leaving no open threads. “Popular power” was great, but a strong welfare state was even better. Unlike what happened elsewhere, once the party was over there was no retreat into social centers or reading groups or radical milieus of one type or another. Autonomous and extra-parliamentary movements were residual for the following decades. The Portuguese revolutionary experience had ventured much farther than all others, had stood on the brink of civil war, and had retreated. Once orphaned, “popular power” became nothing but nostalgic fodder.
But this only partially explains why the revolutionary process was so subsumed into sterile nostalgia. Here again we find another exception. The informal complicity between industrial and intellectual work, mostly within culture and education, was a common element of the struggles of the 60s and 70s. The expansion of the service sector, mass education and the explosion of the entertainment industry meant the proletarianization of professional and cultural classes which had, until then, a relatively high social status. This post war economic and spiritual exhaustion of the intelligentsia produced the revolutionaries that Weber once claimed emerge from classes on the verge of extinction and the decadents that Nietzsche once noted are the only people capable of doing serious intellectual work. Part of this cursed intelligentsia found a point of escape from this civilizational collapse in the new expressions of proletarian refusal.17 The insurrectionary intelligence of this rude pagan race was the only piece on the board capable of overcoming the hecatomb called capitalism.
The Portuguese context is again particular. Up until the revolution, there was no real public sphere for the emerging cosmopolitan and progressive middles classes to express and assert themselves. The spiritual essence of the regime was fundamentally chauvinist, conservative and anti-intellectual. The proletarianization of intellectual work did not take place: rather, it was promoted, not demoted, by the new regime. The creation of a modern, liberal, democratic subject was in order. The expansion of social services and the development of an information and entertainment industry absorbed the desires of a new and nascent intelligentsia, whatever its class origins.
This new intelligentsia assumed the education of Portugal’s brutes as its historical role. The country’s peripheral isolation was reified into the figure of the backward and illiterate masses in dire need of democratic enlightenment. The idea that a proletarian and non-elitist intelligence had been at work during the revolution seemed not only unthinkable, it was also unpalatable. The new middle-class intelligentsia loved the revolution, even “popular power”, as long as the experience remained within a crude and caricatural nostalgia, as long as it could nurture such a “popular” element into liberal maturity. April could only be remembered as the democratically elected constituent assembly, not as the construction workers laying siege to it. No “PRECism” emerged because the post-revolutionary intellectual task at hand was the legitimation and institutionalization of a new regime, producing a deeply idiosyncratic and sterile state culture, totally subservient to power.
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And thus, everyone lived happily ever after. The urban and rural proletariat abandoned its insurrectionary temptations and gained a mass party and the strongest left in Europe. They would never be rich, but they would be much better off than before, with money and time to enjoy the slow pace of life, the sunny beaches, the grilled sardines and the fine wines the country would become famous for decades later. The middle classes sighed with relief. Their sons would have better jobs. They would be Europeans. Moderates could finally enjoy the simulacrum of a civil society. The left could do their yearly PREC cosplay parade on the revolution’s anniversary and the right could maintain its political and economic power if it abandoned its totalitarian temptations.
Even so, some say that if you walk along the streets of downtown Lisbon alone at dawn, when the winterly dew meets the early spring sun, you can still sometimes hear a faint and ghostly roar, the unsung plebeian might of the last revolutionaries of the 20th century, the wailing spectre of the impossible revolution.