“In A People’s History of Portugal, written with Roberto della Santa and not yet translated into English, we develop the idea that Portuguese capitalism was dependent on British capitalism, in the sense of Ellen Wood’s notion of capitalism being exported by the British Empire to the periphery and semi periphery.
The Portuguese bourgeoisie started to make their own revolution to establish capitalism and overthrow the monarchy in the 1820s. But they could only finish it as a counter-revolutionary process, under a fascist regime, in the 1930s. It is the last attempt of the bourgeoisie to create a nation state. The dictatorship was based on a rural, peasant society, where women had to provide kids for the labour force to support the process of industrialisation. Portugal had had one of the strongest anarcho-syndicalist movements in all Europe in the late 19th century and beginning of the 20th century. Under the fascist regime strikes and political parties were forbidden and brutally repressed.
The third part of this dictatorship was the use of forced labour on a massive scale in the Portuguese colonies, which directly connected with apartheid and South African capital accumulation. So again, very connected with British capitalism.
There was also a fourth pillar of the regime. It was the so-called industrial ‘conditioning’. The state allowed the bourgeoisie to create their own monopolies so there would be no competition in certain areas. So, it was a typical Bonapartist state that managed the bourgeoisie’s business. But during the Spanish Civil War (1936-39) there was an Iberian revolutionary process, and we argue in A People’s History of Portugal that this produced a directly fascist regime in Portugal. As a result, in the late sixties, less than 20% of the population had access to a proper water supply orproper houses; 30% were illiterate and there was the highest rate of child mortality in Europe. At that time there was a huge strike of forced labourers in Baixa do Cassangein Angola. The strikers were smashed by the Portuguese army, 5,000 were killed, maybe 10,000, nobody really knows the right figures. This is the beginning of the colonial wars from the perspective of the Portuguese state, and it’s the beginning of the anti-colonial wars from a socialist perspective. The colonial war is the name used by the Portuguese state. We talk about anti-colonial revolution. The anti-colonial revolution started a colonial war. Over the next thirteen years the Portuguese army recruited 1.1 million to fight the war in Africa. This from a population of almost ten million. There was only one more militarised society at that time, which was Israel.
To avoid accommodating the higher pay and conditions demanded by strong unions in core countries after the Second World War, and in the face of the decline of profits in the sixties, investment flowed from core countries to Portugal. Many industrial areas of foreign capital were concentrated around Lisbon, Setubal and Oporto. In addition, 1.5 million workers were recruited from Portugal to go to Luxembourg, Switzerland, France, Britain and Germany to work. This led to a situation where objectively workers were in a strong position, because the labour force inside Portugal had shrunk because of the colonial war and migration. And then on top of this we had the oil shock, the so-called oil shock crisis, which is the crisis of the end of the reconstruction after the second world war.
In Portugal the bourgeoisie split because at the time 40% of the national budget was for the colonial war. People didn’t have clean water, but 40% of the budget went to the colonial war. All these contradictions developed intensively after May 1968 in France and the civil rights movements in US. A huge number of students were inspired to rise up against the war. In Portugal we call it the ‘academic crisis’. And there werea huge number of strikes. My hypothesis, which I develop in the new book with Roberto della Santa, is that Portugal was a kind of 21st century revolution. A huge proportion of the people that took part were engaged in the service sector and in intellectual work. Doctors, nurses, teachers, public servants, journalists; all these sectors were involved in dual power organisations, in workers commissions and in the self-management organisation of hospitals and schools.”https://www.rs21.org.uk/2024/04/25/remembering-the-portuguese-revolution/?link_id=5&can_id=4baefe34b378fd195d877e750a1a4a9f&source=email-anti-militarism-congo-neurodiversity-palestine-pay-revolution-theatre&email_referrer=email_2297578&email_subject=cass-review-political-tradition-portugal-at-50-snp-crisis-1974-and-more
Raquel Varela 