Portugal 1974-5: The Carnation Revolution: Workers' Liberty 3/46

Portugal’s revolution began on 25 April 1974, set in motion by a military coup against the country’s nearly-50-year-old fascist regime. It was effectively ended by another coup on 25 November 1975. Portugal started 1974 as a backward, isolated colonial power run by an authoritarian regime, and began 1976 as a state without colonies, on its way to becoming a stable bourgeois democracy, integrated into European capitalism. Mark Osborn tells the story. Click here to download the whole of WL 3/46 as a pdf. Portugal’s unstable democracy was overthrown in 1926 and a period of right-wing military...

The ferment in Portugal reached its peak in summer 1975. The old top military command had been marginalised by the failure of its attempted coups on 28 September 1974 and 11 March 1975. Power was in the hands of the loose-knit Armed Forces Movement (AFM), middle-rank officers, some close to the Socialist Party, some close to the Communist Party. The Fifth Provisional Government, in office from 8 August to 19 September, was close to the CP. Swathes of industry had been nationalised, and some was under workers’ control. Workers’ commissions and neighbourhood commissions flourished in the Lisbon...

Text edited from International-Communist League pamphlet, The Revolutionary Left in Portugal (1977). Portuguese Trotskyism entered the country via Paris after a couple of Portuguese students had been influenced by the ideas of the USFI [mainstream orthodox Trotskyists led by Ernest Mandel] in 1968. At the time Caetano was overthrown there were nine Trotskyists in Portugal. Now [1975] the number is probably 6-700. Of these 4-500 are in the LCI, the “official” sympathising section of the USFI, and the remainder are in the PRT. The PRT originally split from the other Portuguese Trotskyists...