As the days go by, the Sixth Provisional Government appears more and more fragile. Its two key operations - to re-establish order, authority and discipline' in both the media and the army -seem to be turning sour.
The occupation of the Buraca radio transmitter on Tuesday 21 October by 10,000 demonstrators (including a thousand soldiers) means that Radio Renascenca can now broadcast music again; a full service will depend on completion of the repairs necessary after the sabotage caused by the Amadora commandos, who had muzzled this revolutionary station since 30 September.
The Government, unable to realise its broad project for an immediate return to order inside the army and the media, so that it could then go onto the offensive against the workers' struggle, is now guarding against the most pressing threat by trying to launch a new repressive force at the service of law and order'. Since the army has shown little taste for maintaining order, the Government has decided - even while the top brass still have their plans for turning it into a professional rather than a conscript army - to construct alongside it a second army more thoroughly devoted to the capitalist cause.
MERCENARIES
The military units who were originially seconded to join the AMI (Military Intervention Group) refused to co-operate, so now it is recruiting mercenaries, for the most part veterans of Angola, for 8,000 escudos (about £145) a month. This compares with the ordinary soldier's pay of 250 escudos (about £4.50) a monta.
The PSP (Public Security Police) and the GNR (National Republican Guard) have once again been equipped with G3 sub-machine guns, and their command has been entrusted to officers who fully agree on the need to reestablish authority and the hierarchy'. General Pinto Fereira, appointed after the failed coup of 11 March, has been removed from his responsibilities at the head of these two bodies which he was supposed to be "democratising' But if the workers and popular militancy still continues to block the plans of the bourgeoisie, there can be no doubt that a third army will then come to reinforce the second. The ELP (Portuguese Liberation Army) and Spinola's MDLP are already recruiting their first detachments under the watchful eye of the reactionary brass, who no longer even bother to make a secret of their assistance. General Pires Veloso, the northern military commander, has even unblocked the bank accounts of some bosses involved in sabotage and fascist attacks, so that they have the resources to continue plotting on the other side of the border.
But not all the military hierarchy have their Charais, the commander of the central military region, now speak openly of an 'armed confrontation to finish off disorder. But others - more "political' - understand that a new 11 March, given the present relationship of civil and military forces, would probably end in catastrophe for what remains of the Armed Forces Movement; while at the same time provoking, like its predecessor, a new step forward for the mass movement- which this time could result in the generalised arming of CARROT NOT STICK This latter section of the hierarchy (Fabiao, Carvalho, and some the the "Nine') still prefers to brandish the carrot rather than the stick. Faced with the massive development of SUVs (groups of "Soldiers United Will Win'), they have begun to suggest that they should be legalised. In this way they hope gradually to reintegrate the soldiers movement within the framework of the bourgeois army, and thus to use it as a pressure group to reinforce their own position in the amy hierarchy and the AFM.
It is this which explains Fabiao's trip to Oporto to meet the struggle commission of the soldiers from the RASP regiment, and his declarations in favour of legalising the SUVs. At the RASP headquarters he was playing to keep his position as Army Chiefof-Staff. With the SUVs legalised and integrated, he reckons that he could avoid being kicked off the Revolutionary Council, where places are rather hard to come by.
'AFM-PEOPLE'
On 20 October, the SUVs held a press conference to make clear their rejection of these advances by Faciao, Carvalho and others of the same ilk - to whom the Communist Party is giving strong backing with its demand for *the return of the revolutionary officers to the Revolutionary Council'. This stand by the SUVs was the more important in that the CP, after many hesitations, has been trying to turn the SUVs to its own advantage by organising its own demonstrations in the southern towns where it is most influential (Faro, Beja, Evora) - called by the 'SUVs', on the national slogans of the SUVs, but discreetly adding references to the 'AFM-People' Masked Portuguese soldiers who helped to win back Radio Renascenca for the use of the working class 1 alliance and other such things.
The SUVs have reacted by intensifying the campaign for soldiers' commissions elected and recallable in all the barracks, independently of any hierarchical structures of the army or eggs in the same basket. Reactionary officers like AFM (such as the Assemblies of Unit Delegates). Today their audience is larger than ever; and the CP and the Maoists of the UDP, who previously stood aside, have now been pulled in behind them.
At the press conference, the representatives of the SUV secretariat put out a document which stated: Our platform is a clear platform of class struggle, which seeks to unite all the soldiers around the defence of their class interests, against reaction in the barracks, and against the militarist discipline constituting the framework of an army which was used in the colonial war and which, in most of its aspects, has not changed. We will never be drawn into the game played by clique interests or sections of the professional army. But we are always ready to welcome into our ranks all revolutionary soldiers, sergeants and officers."
The Government is in rather a bad way. The right has withdrawn its confidence and is regrouping around radical solutions, for which Sa Carneiro, the secretary-general of the PPD, is the current spokesman; and the civilian workers and those in uniform are not sparing their blows agaiast the Government. However, it still exists, at least for the time being, because the forces opposed to the Government and the bourgeoisie are as yet dispersed. STAY OF EXECUTION Certainly the popular assemblies are still multiplying, the co-ordination between the workers' commissions and the neighbourhood commissions is being strengthened, and the first soldiers' commissions have issued a joint appeal for support for Radio Renascenca. But a real centralisation of the organs of workers' and popular power is still far from existing.
The absence of this has given the bourgeoisie a stay of execution, and allows the reformist apparatuses to manoeuvre in order the better to control the workers' and neighbourhood commissions to their own political advantage. The CP, for example, is promoting a coordinating committee of commissions from the industrial belt of Lisbon which called the demonstration on 23 October; while the MES (Movement of the Socialist Left) has responded to this co-ordinating committee by setting up its own, limited to 24 commissions in the capital, under the title TUV (Workers United Will Win).
This dispersal of forces, which militants de Azevedo E must do everything in their power to overcome, is a real danger. It divides the forces of the workers' and popular movement, spreads sectarianism among the advanced workers towards the sectarian initiatives of others, and in the last instance eases the way for bourgeois and reformist manoeuvres to recompose a stable State power. To the latter the industrial and agricultural workers' commissions, the neighbourhood and soldiers commissions, and the village councils do not yet provide any mass, united and centralised alternative ALTERNATIVE To the manoeuvres and discussions around the possible formation of a Seventh Provisional Government must be counterposed an alternative perspective: the calling of a National Popular Assembly composed of delegates from these commissions throughout the country, to defend the conquests of the workers, to protect them through the arming of the proletar iat, and to extend them so that they become irreversible.
It will be up to us to do everything possible so that such a first government of the workers in Western Europe is not provisional, but opens the way to others in Spain, Italy, France.......