Dear Comrades,
The latest comment of Red Weekly on the Republica affair, which appeared under the headline, 'Leon Trotsky on "Press Freedom"', is the worst reflection yet of the muddled and equivocal position Red Weekly has adopted on the issue.
Red Weekly of 26 June, in an article headed 'Portugal — the Road to Workers' Power', gave uncritical support to the actions and demands of the Republica workers' Coordinating Committee: 'The demand of the Workers' Committee is simply for a newspaper which is not the sectarian organ of a single political party.' (Perhaps we should demand that Red Weekly be taken out of the control of the IMG and its columns opened to Stalinists and Labourites so that it would not be the 'sectarian organ of a single party!')
Principle
Your issue of 3 July carried an article by Ernest Mandel which, after outlining the origins of the struggle of the Republica workers, went on: 'We are staunch and principled supporters of freedom of the press. We are convinced that this should be a basic principle not only under bourgeois democracy but in a workers' state as well. We are absolutely in favour of the Portuguese Socialist Party having at its disposal a daily paper of its own. We believe that the workers of the Republica printing plant made a serious error by creating the impression that they wanted to challenge that right.'
Mandel goes on to distinguish real from merely formal press freedom, and to explain how workers' control in this field can only be exercised by a centralised representative organisation based on workers' [text lost at the foot of the column in the scan] in a single plant.
But your comment in Red Weekly of 14 August appears to imply that you think that the suppression of Republica as an organ of PSP opinion by the print workers supported by COPCON can be seen in the same terms as the suppression by the Petrograd Soviet of the monarchist press in February 1917.
For a start, the method of debate used by Red Weekly is bankrupt. It is a mockery of the Marxist approach to political judgement to cite quotations from the classic writings of Lenin or Trotsky as if these constituted some sort of timeless holy scripture. Yet Red Weekly parades 'Trotsky on "press freedom"' without any reference to the specific circumstances it refers to — ironically, a method which Trotsky attacks in the very passage quoted.
No comparison
A moments' attention to the circumstances of Trotsky's polemic against Sukhanov shows that there can be no direct comparison with the Republica affair.
— Trotsky is speaking of the suppression of the Monarchist press in the circumstances of a life and death struggle against czarist reaction. The only comparable situation in Portugal now might be the suppres- [text lost at the foot of the column in the scan] serving as a focus for the preparation of armed counter-revolution, which certainly would be justifiable in the terms used by Trotsky about February 1917. But Republica was the de facto organ of a party that commands the votes and the active support of the majority of of the working class in Portugal, and not just the more backward sections at that.
— Trotsky argues for the control of the press and the suppression of one of the weapons of czarist reac- [text lost at the foot of the column in the scan] is to say, by the centralised, democratically constituted, representative organisation of the working class of the entire city, not by the press workers, far less the workers in particular plants, who 'took orders from the Soviet.' As Red Weekly has often and correctly pointed out, such centralised, representative organisations do not yet exist in Portugal, though the elements of such a structure are starting to be established in an embryonic form, in the workers', soldiers' and neigh- [text lost at the foot of the column in the scan]
To say that, despite their justified grievances, the action of the Republica workers was wrong is in no way to endorse the way Soares and the PSP leadership exploited the issue to launch an anti-communist campaign, which has helped to give open reaction a new confidence in Portugal, with the consequences we have seen in recent weeks. But it is impossible to understand how the PSP was able to mobilise tens of thousands of workers on the Republica issue, unless we see that the majority of these workers saw themselves as defending the elementary right of the party they voted for and support to express its views freely in a daily, mass circulation newspaper, in a situation where the rest of the mass circulation papers form a chorus of uncritical support for the leadership of the Armed Forces Movement.
Contradictory
If the revolutionaries fail to grasp the contradictory character of the PSP mobilisations and depict them as the hordes of reaction trying to stifle workers' control, they will not be able to find a road to the thousands of militant workers who are at present taken in by the demagogy of the Soares leadership.