the Copcon con nanders, trying to convince them to march at the head of a demonstration that would skirt the radio stations and wind up at the Belem Palace. At midnight, eight hours after the beginning of the assembly, there were only about a thousand people left. Everybody else had headed for the radio stations. At 4 am, without Otelo, the secretariat of the FUR met Pinheiro de Azevedo to listen to his claims that the military occupation had been carried out against the counterThe secretariat of the FUR did not even succeed in compromising Otelo. He understood the limits of the division in the military hierarchy better than they did. A third failure.
All was not yet lost, however. A series of initiatives were still possible. On 30 September the soldiers stood everywhere at the sides SOCIALISMO • SIM • METAL A BARRER of the workers, occupying the radio stations along with the popular solidarity pickets, and passing motions asserting their will to defend the right of the workers to use the radio.
The national radio station was the only station where this did not happen. diers of EPAM, who had been sent to occupy the station, declared themselves in solidarity with the workers; but the workers, under the influence of the Communist Party, did nothing to broadcast that solidarity over the airwaves A common initiative with the workers commissions of the other stations and the delegations of soldiers could have changed the situation radically and paved the way for the utilisation of the television station to inflict a total defeat on the Government. ing was done in that direction.
It was also possible to launch a vast cam•PROVI The sol- ship, day 1, day 2, etc."
leadership off balance.
But nothforget about their second edition. masses. lica, for this time its leaders were energetic. ally supporting a censorship decree and a military occupation. This was especially true since èven Jornal Novo, which is close to the SP, found itself compelled to print bands along its front pages reading 'military censorOn the basis of the simple reaction of this daily, it would have been easy to throw the Social Democratic Then, on 1 October, when Jornal Novo was preparing production of a second edition reproducing the communique of the Soares leadership about the imminence of a mysterious far-left coup d'etat, the night-shift workers of the ivirandella printshop refused to print that edition unless they could also print a communique of their own about this alleged coup. The Jornal Novo management preferred to SOCIALIST DEMOCRACY Concurrently, at Emisora Nacional, there were two lists in an election to the workers commission. One list demanded the right of all currents of the workers movement to express their views on the broadcasts of the radio station. These two workers' initiatives could have served as illustrations in a campaign demonstrating that socialist democracy can and must be a democracy that is qualitatively superior to bourgeois democracy and can and must assure greater liberties to the toiling This could have been combined with a campaign in defence of Republica and Radio Renascenca, which are both being threatened by the Government in the name of private property, which appears to the workers as an in•stitution restricting their liberties. Moreover, all the workers commissions in the press industry have just met to plan out ways to The outcome of this confrontation, which turned out favourably for the working class, is part of a process of step-by-step revolutionary upsurge in which the workers have won victories without meeting any great resistance from the class enemy. This could create the false impression that the bourgeoisie is politically impotent and that it is definitively incapable of reconstituting a military striking force. This illusion fuels an ultra-leftism that is translated into adventurism by the PRP-BR, which claims that 'it is now time for the revolutionary forces and the workers to pose the problem of an insurrection' (Diario de Lisboa, 30 September). This ultra-leftism is reflected in the sectarian and triumphalist positions of virtually the entire far left toward the SP and the CP, which leads to the elimination of any united front tactic or else reduces such a tactic to frenetic ultimatism.
If the far-left groups continue to play this game, they could well be caught in the same trap the German Communists fell inte in January 1919. But the development of the political situation, as illustrated by the latest events, can facilitate a process of clarication that would permit a response to the need for unity in action by the workers movement and for the centralisation of the organs of popular THE MORNING STAR -AN APOLOGY It has been pointed out to us that the copyright to the photograph captioned Portuguese soldiers - with the photograpner provounary disagree, ve apolo number 115 is heid by the Morning Star, and that this photo was used without their permission to illustrate an article with whose contents they and gise for any inconvenience or possible mis-represendevolucionária? P
ente snidade _ red weekly 23 october 1975 LUAR PRP-BR