Post by Stallit 2 de Halfo on Jan 18, 2008 2:06:15 GMT
18th January 1934 - the aborted general strike - was the "final stand" of independent class-oriented, anarchist-inspired syndicalism in Portugal.
Portugal had been governed by a fascist dictatorship since the 28th May 1926 coup. This military coup put Salazar in power, first as finance minister, but very soon he took control of the whole government, becoming President of the Council of Ministers (Prime Minister) till his accidental fall from a reclining chair in his residence in the Summer 1968.
Inspired by Catholic church doctrines (he was a very close friend of the Primate of Portugal, Archbishop Cerejeira, who blessed the regime and put the Catholic church at the service of the dictatorship) and by the most reactionary anti-democratic trends in Europe, such as Charles Maurras, Salazar aimed at a corporative regime, one where the bosses and workers collaborated in a "Corporations Chamber", under the paternalistic supervision of the government. This model is more or less the one we have nowadays with class conciliation mandatory in a "permanent board for social partnership", where leaders of the employers' federation, trade union leaders and government officials sit and discuss matters ranging from labour legislation to the fixing of minimum salaries, without any input from the rank-and-file of these unions, and generally to "implement" new laws and regulations that simply diminish or destroy the collective guarantees concerning labour contracts and workers' social rights.
But in 1934, after forcing through the approval by a "parliament" made up only of the National Union (the sole, official party, all devoted fascists!) of a new constitution (in 1933), which conceded some liberties but in fact allowed their indefinite suspension, permitted all the exceptions by government (just as the Patriot Act and its European copies do today!), he decided to implement the corporative (fascistic) architecture of the regime.
For this he needed new laws to have the unions submit to political power, devoid of any independence from the State, politically controlled, with "apolitical leaders", meaning they would be faithful servants of the new order and could even denounce "communists" infiltrated into their ranks in case of need.
The aim of the attack was to destroy the remnants of the CGT, a member of the IWA, made up of a majority of anarcho-syndicalist members, though with socialist and communist minorities (this provoked a split in the later years, founding a mini-confederation with a few communist controlled unions). The CGT itself was declared illegal since it had participated in an ill-prepared and bloody insurrection in February 1927, but the unions which were part of the previous confederation were not made illegal initially. These still had the possibility to have public meetings inside their locals, but only in the presence of the political police, who attended all the discussions. Therefore, it was not very easy for any unionist to come forward and present his position to the others, as he would be singled out and registered in the police files as a leader.
The government decree that sparked off the 18th January general strike implied that all the independent unions (those that were not government creations) would lose their recognition as workers' associations, becoming in practice legally extinct, as they were forbidden to bargain and to represent the workers of their respective professional branch. The "option" was to integrate the recently-created "Corporation Chamber", to become an appendix of the regime.
The insurrectional general strike was prepared in conditions of total clandestinity and these are well described in the Memoirs of Emídio Santana, a syndicalist and anarchist who was a contemporary of the events, and in Edgar Rodrigues' histories, written and edited in his Brazilian exile. Although some recent translations and essays in English, French and Italian have come to light, much information available in Portuguese is ignored by historians, partially due to misconceptions about the importance of the Portuguese labour movement in Iberia in the years before the Spanish revolution.
The causes of the failures are the theme of some discussions and polemics, with some anarchists accusing the communist party of a plot to act in a separate way and give signals that alerted the political police, causing some worker leaders such as Mário Castelhano and many others to be framed on the eve of the scheduled day for the strike.
Whatever the reasons for the failure, the fact is that this general strike would not have had the strength to overthrow a consolidated regime, as the military and other repressive forces were all on the side of the government and many (bourgeois) political opposition figures were in prison, exile, or under strict surveillance. The localities where visible attempts where made for such a strike, like Barreiro (an industrial town near Lisbon), some Alentejo towns (a southern region with many large farms and an agricultural proletariat with a tradition of fighting), and Lisbon industrial quarters (Alcântara and Beato, both near the docks) were flooded by police and the GNR, the "guarda nacional republicana" (a sort of militarized police corps).
The only place that made a serious insurrectional attempt was the glass-industry town of Marinha Grande, where insurgent workers took the GNR barracks and held it for some hours.
The CGT had no vocation for clandestine action and no means for it (no clandestine shelters, no money coming from abroad). The Communist Party, on the contrary, did. It was this that caused the predominance of Communist Stalinism in the ranks of the workers in Portugal, not any superior capacity in organising the fight. Before the 1926 military coup, Communist Party members were a handful of people, mostly from anarchist ranks. The libertarian communist tradition was very vivid in the industrial worker class. The socialists (of the Second International) had some influence among civil servants, in commerce and services and the very few Bolsheviks were mostly from anarcho-syndicalist ranks. But the UON Confederation ( "National Union of Workers”) , a precursor of the CGT ( "General Confederation of Labour”) in 1919, was already dominated by anarchists. They adopted the Charter of Amiens as their own, preferred direct action methods, and had many reservations concerning party propaganda inside unions, etc. They did not exclude anyone on the basis of their belonging to a party. The UON and the CGT Central Committees had some non-anarchist minorities, made up of socialist and communist militants.
After the fall of the fascist regime in 1974, contrary to the Spain of 1977-78, the Portuguese transition did not see the organisation of a revolutionary syndicalist union, or the re-proclamation of the CGT (it dissolved itself in the '50s during a clandestine meeting). This is because the Marxist-Leninist trends (and mainly the USSR-dependent CP) had a tremendous hegemony in the industrial worker class ranks, while the anarcho-syndicalists from the old CGT were very few and far between and most had already retired. The only building effort was directed towards publishing the ex-CGT central organ "A Batalha" again, which became the best-known Portuguese anarchist paper and published contributions by people from various trends, well beyond the traditional syndicalist ranks of anarchism.
Manuel Baptista