It may be correct for trotsky st to forget nothing in relation to their past history, but this does not mean we should learn nothing from unexpected developments and see everything new as a re-run of some old battle fought Did vote for Carvalho deny blank cheque to reformism ... by Lenin or Trotsky.That, however, is the tendency in the letter trom com rades Gray, Jordan and Camiller.
It is impossible to abstract the recent presidential elections from the developing political situation in Portugal ing the comrades that the overthrow of the fascist regime of Salazar was carried out not, unfortunately, by a general strike called by the Communist Part and Socialist Party and supported by an impatient working class, but by the MFA within the army That further to this, the attempt by Spinola to impose a Bonapartist dictatorship was defeated by the refusal of large sectors of the army to obey orders plus mass mobilisations. That the post-Spinola phase saw a further differentiation within the MFA between social democrats (Antunes), Stalinists (Goncalves) and centrists (Carvalho). This differentiation led to the creation of the SUV (Soldiers United Will Win), and saw an unprecedented (in a capitalist country in peacetime) radicalisation on the level of the rank-and-file of the army - a radicalisation which ran well beyond the consciousness of the mass of the Portuguese working class and provided the narrow objective basis for the debacle of 25 November.
In these debates within the army. which reflected in a sharpened way the divisions in civil society, it would have been impermissible for revolutionaries to stand aside and say: 'A plague on all your houses.' And the bulk of revolutionaries in Portugal did not do that. They gave varying Pato -etc. ional/critical) to the Carvalho wing of the MFA as against the Stalinists and social democrats, and they were correct.
Or would comrades Gray, Jordan and Camiller have preferred backing the Stalinists as the representatives of a mass party in the army? I would doubt it.
What was the key priority or revolu tionaries in the recent election? It was to try to stimulate the candidature of a class struggle candidate who could be supported by the whole Tar lett and currents within the mass organisations. This was attempted by the LCI, but without success. In this situation an attempt should have been made to establish a new FUR to put up a candidate for the elections and unite the far left. This too wasn't done.
The choice, therefore, was between - a notoriously right-wing Stalin ist, who had argued within the CP leadership for backing Eanes and whose campaign was conducted in an extremely low-key note - and Carvalho. Now the latter is a confused centrist of petty-bourgeois origin. But abusing his personality is precisely to ignore the fact that he was seen as the candidate of the far left, and he accurately reflected the confusions of the majority of the far left ('soviets without parties, Critical support should have been obstacle' cannot be defeated by voting Pato and ignoring the very real force: of the predominanty centrist mas vanguard in Portugal What would have been the position of the comrades it there nad been ar official SP candidate in addition to Pato? Would they have then argued for vot ing for the SP candidate as opposed to Pato and of course Carvalho? The main danger in the approach of the comrades to events in Portugal is an abstract propagandism, the logic of which in Italy would be to reject voting for the far left slate. After all, is not the Italian far left as (if not more) confused than Carvalho, and would not a vote for the CP help towards making it the largest single party and thereby The comrades are for class indep endence. Good! So are we all. But if class independence is defined so narrowly as to make a principle of voting for the workers parties in all bourgeois elections in all situations, it become a joke and a somewhat bankrupt Joke at that Furthermore, it leaves out of the picture the working out of tactics to deal with reformism (especially of the Allende variety) and implies that the central problem in Europe today is the fight against popular frontism - some thing which is clearly not the case. Which section of the European bourge oisie is today for governmental bloc with the CPs as was the case in the Thirties?
In reality, what the recent election results indicate is the resilience of the mass vanguard in Portugal. Or could it be that comrades Gray, Jordan and Camiller regard the high vote for Otelo in working class strongholds such as Setubal and Lisnave as a regression, a step backwards from voting for the Stalinists? That is the logic of their For me, the Carvalho vote demonstrates that reformism in Portu gal has been denied a blank cheque by a section of the masses which in itself creates a favourable situation for the revolutionary movement as a whole.
-ARIU ALI newton