Portugal: A Revolução Impossível?

by Phil Mailer, Maurice Brinton (Posfácio), João Alves (Ilustração)

Após a data que, da noite para o dia, derrubou quase cinquenta anos de ditadura, seguiram-se dezoito meses de convulsões profundas que trouxeram à tona as forças e fragilidades da sociedade portuguesa. Um povo pobre e deprimido, uma massa de gente ignorante e ignorada, habituada a não ter voz, revelou uma consciência política que parecia adormecida – a consciência da sua própria miséria e a crença de que era possível acabar com ela.

Mas estes dezoito meses foram também de desencanto: partidos sem vontade de provocar uma mudança real na vida das pessoas; jornais «entusiasmados com o seu poder de criar acontecimentos» e agarrados aos mitos que fabricavam; e vanguardas supérfluas que instrumentalizavam os desejos dos deserdados à medida de cada ismo, sabotando qualquer tentativa de auto-organização. Portugal: A Revolução Impossível?, editado agora com um novo prefácio do autor, é um mergulho nas águas agitadas do PREC, longe dos comícios, ao lado de gente comum; uma crónica minuciosa e apaixonada de um povo em alvoroço, pelos olhos de um irlandês libertário a viver em Portugal.

Genres: History, Portugal, Politics, Nonfiction, Portuguese Literature, European History

400 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1996

About the author

Phil Mailer (aka Phil Meyler) was born in Dublin Ireland in 1946 and is resident in both Ireland and Portugal. He has been a teacher in Portugal, the US (New York City) and Ireland for many years. After living in London, where he was on the fringes of the King Mob group in the late 60s, and in the US, he went to Portugal in late 1973 to teach English. There, he actively participated in the events following the Revolution of April '74, become an editor of the newspaper Combate and managed a bookshop, Contra A Corrente, in Lisbon with other Portuguese revolutionaries. Married to a Portuguese woman, he maintains a residence in Lisbon but has been teaching disadvantaged youth in inner city Dublin for fifteen years, a job from which he finally retired in 2010. He has been a long-time translator from Portuguese and has translated the song-lyrics and poems of José Afonso (whose song Grandola was a signal for the 1974 revolution).

He is currently in the process of translating the work (including the detective novels) of the late Portuguese writer, Denis Machado, into English. He is the editor of Livewire Publications which has published Misfit, a Revolutionary Life, the autobiography of the enigmatic aristocrat Captain Jack White, one of the founders in 1913 of the Irish Citizen Army who went onto Spain in 1936 and became a supporter of the anarchists in the Spanish Civil war. Two other books, Science and Capital, Radical Essays on Science & Technology and a novel Kiss of the Chicken King were published by the same company in early 2011.

Reviews

[Elle · Rating 3 out of 5]

An engaging first-hand account of Portugal's 'Carnation revolution'; which began when the 'Movement of the Armed Forces' launched a military coup against the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar and replaced it with a 'National Salvation Junta' under the leadership of António de Spínola. At the time, colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea were consuming over 40% of GDP whilst leaving much of Portugal's working and peasant classes in dire poverty, underdevelopment and abysmal slum conditions. The Junta brought in all parties, from the Far Left (PCP), PS (social-democracy) to the Conservative right (PPD) etc to 'stabilise the transition to democracy'.

But with the coup, a vibrant wave of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist social struggle was unleashed. Over the next 18 months there were peace negotiations and decolonisation, purges of fascists, strikes, land occupations, housing struggles, experiments across hundreds of industries in workers control/co-operatives and, in among all this chaos, 6 provisional governments. Pushback came from the fascist remnants of the old regime and conservative elements of the new one, with CIA skulduggery lying just below the surface...

The 'Movement of the Armed Forces' would eventually splinter. From the start the movement always had factions within it, but contradictions sharpened and relations broke down. With loyalties in flux and the sureness of military authority questionable, there was a real risk of a 'Chile in Europe'. Something had to give, and on November 25th 1974 'The Nine', a group of reactionary officers, struck; took control of the radio, press and TV stations, disarmed the Leftist battalions, rolled back some of the socialist programmes/starved them of credit, halted land-reform, freed PIDE members responsible for torture and murder under Salazar and reinstituted strict military discipline. There was little bloodshed. It went out on a whimper, not a bang. The revolution officially 'ended' with Portugal's transition to a bourgeois liberal democracy with a new constitution in April 25th 1976, 2 years after it had begun.

Despite Mailer's own libertarian communism (and an insistent emphasis that socialism needed to be 'from below'), he does manage to provide a reasonably sober analysis as to why the revolution was defeated. The working class themselves were not entirely sold on a deeper socialist transition, or at least, on many of the parties who were promising to carry it out. The PCP and other established leftist groups were often fairly conservative, not wanting to risk encouraging reaction. The firm grip of landed interests and the Catholic Church on the peasant classes in the North was a barrier to connecting the struggles in the Southern countryside to the ones in the North. Many soldiers returning from colonial wars had little knowledge or deep engagement with the movement that had brought them home and fell into line. More besides, NATO was in the background and wouldn't have been too keen on a member going 'red'. It was impossible to go it alone.

Still, an interesting portrait of an important revolutionary moment.

-1 star for calling the USSR and Cuba 'state-capitalist' and various ultra-left sneers at National Liberation movements #Tankie #Sectarian.

[Diogo Carvalho]

leitura obrigatória para pcpers

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sometimes the anti-Leninist critique feels more exaggerated than is useful, but overall an incredibly good overview of the Portuguese Revolution that places importance on working-class self-organisation and that doesn’t shy away from the difficulties faced in achieving a communist reorganisation of production.

[Rui Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Ler sobre o PREC tem sempre um efeito diferente em mim, e este livro entranhou-me esse efeito até ao tutano.

É um bom resumo de muitos dos conflitos que foram ocorrendo após o 25 de Abril, até ao 25 de Novembro, de um ponto de vista diferente do habitual.

Recomendo, estive perto de dar 4 estrelas, mas não consegui mesmo dar (primeiro, não me vejo a reler este livro num futuro próximo - retirei o que tinha a retirar -, embora possa estar errado sobre isso, e segundo, li o livro todo desformatado, o que tirou algum encanto à leitura. Sei que não é culpa do livro, mas não posso fazer nada).

[Valdemar Gomes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Seria cruel não dar 5 estrelas a um relato honesto e tão bem trabalhado quanto a fontes e análises político-jurídicas. De facto, o autor priva-se de fazer muitos comentários sociais, e infelizmente, porque para mim foram os mais divertidos.

Excelente desconstrução de vários momentos-chave da revolução portuguesa e o seu período posterior. Boa análise estatística precedente a cada tema (na reforma agrária fala da ocupação do território e a quem pertence; no tema do MFA menciona a quantidade de inscritos no exército e etc.)

Odiei o posfácio, clássica chamada às armas de um libertário que faz sumário tão breve quanto desinteressante do que o livro já tinha explicitado demasiado bem, mas isso já não foi ele a escrever logo não o culpo.

[Pedro Costa · Rating 5 out of 5]

Uma leitura essencial, mas um grande balde de água fria sobre o nado-morto do 25 de abril, o PREC (sempre na minha mente), e a transformação de uma revolução em golpe palaciano.

Abril ficou por cumprir

[Marty · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book took me a long time to finish but was worth reading to be sure. For one its one of the few books in English on contemporay Portugese history and probably the ONLY one on the social revolution and its recuperation that occurred there between 1974-1976.

This case study is a flurry of facts, figures, accronyms and names. Honestly these are only important in terms of his thorough scholarship. i think that the lessons drawn from the whole experience are much much more important. Mailer details how the Left parties served as the "midwives of State capitalism," feeding the Portugese people's desires for change and autonomy into channels which the parties could control. Ultimately this led to a strengthening of capitalism. This book is quite a chronicle of a massive social/political and economic upheaval in Portugal.

[David Christian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mailer, an Irish socialist, was fortunate to be living and working in Portugal when the last fascist government in Europe fell under the double blows of a military coup and a massive civilian uprising spearheaded by the working class. The uprising was characterized by a socialism that was distrustful at best and often contemptuous of the traditional parties of The Left, large and small. "A-partisan" assemblies flourished in communities and work places across the country even as Communist and Socialist militants flooded back from exile. Mailer was there through all of it, as a participant and insightful observer.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating and relevant case study in revolutionary tactics. This presents a comprehensive timeline with urgency, and the ongoing complaints of citizens are told empathetically by someone who was along for the fight. That being said, although ultimately ineffective for a variety of reasons, I'm not sure presenting leftist control of government as a lost cause in the struggle for power in the country was the right takeaway. The author seems to believe all the same principles within local communities, but deems them impractical at the highest level. In this case, the ubiquity of capitalism in the rest of the modern world likely had too much of a strong hold to break free from.

MS: The author details the first day hour by hour with a sense of tepid exuberance.

[Ben Lear · Rating 3 out of 5]

I wanted to like it but found it quite dull. The anti-Leninist critique is a bit heavy and, I feel, bears little relevance to the political context an uprising in Europe would find itself in now. Despite all the exciting moments of self-organisation and resistance that didn't transmit well in the book. Perhaps because it just feels that the author was not involved with anything concrete on the ground and was just watching from the sidelines (the classic critique of left-communist politics embodied in the author). The acronym soup was hard to keep with up on a kindle and I needed wikipedia at several points. Overall v. meh.

[Ines Moreira · Rating 5 out of 5]

fuck estava mesmo betting na UDP e na LUAR..

fora de brincadeiras - grande livro, uma análise mesmo profunda, perspicaz e até divertida do PREC, com muito material pra further anaylisis e um grande ataque aos tecnocratas revolucionários desta vida (cof cof eu). e porra quando é que se volta a pegar fogo a embaixadas, crros da policia e do CDS e a convocar manifs com milhares de pessoas pq há suspeitas de haver um comicio fascista..

irei reler eventualmente

[Rui Coelho · Rating 4 out of 5]

Um relato do PREC em primeira pessoa, "Portugal: A Revolução Impossível?" conta muitos fenómenos políticos que não fazem parte da mitologia oficial do regime português (autonomia de classe, o papel ambíguo do PCP e do COPCON, a infiltração dos grupos esquerdistas...), mas que são importantes para perceber o que se passou naqueles anos.

[Bruno Borges · Rating 4 out of 5]

Essencial para compreender as lutas políticas nos últimos 50 anos em Portugal. Apesar de nascido em 1976, estas pareceram-me as discrições mais pertinentes que li sobre acções movidas pelos trabalhadores, após o golpe militar que derrubou a ditadura.

[Cassidy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read it in my youth, rediscovered it on here today

[Baki · Rating 5 out of 5]

Livro imprescindível para qualquer pessoa que queira entender o que foi a revolução de 25 de Abril e o consequente Processo Revolucionário em Curso.

[Mafalda Borges · Rating 5 out of 5]

um maravilhoso retrato/relato em primeira mão da visão de um "estrangeiro" que deu por si no meio da Revolução

[Nuno Santos · Rating 5 out of 5]

Um livro que nos dá um ponto de vista de alguém que vinha de fora e que dessa forma independente do seu viés político consegue uma análise isenta de preferências

[tiago · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.25/5
https://app.thestorygraph.com/reviews...

[ATR · Rating 3 out of 5]

Did not realize how densely academic this was… never seen so many acronyms in my life. So many acronyms, in fact, that it quickly became difficult to follow what the hell was going on in every chapter. Repetitive and dry, wished this was more engaging, considering the material and relevance to modern day.