The Revolutions in Portugal

...At the Communist-managed "Red Star Collective Farm," one hears, everybody receives the same wages, which go into a common fund...

...One group, the "Soldiers United Victorious," has been brazen enough to give a press conference—with masks covering their faces—to announce they would go underground to oppose the newly formed sixth government...

...Although their old master's large house lay vacant, they had not bothered to occupy it...

...The only thing that has saved them up to now is the polarization of the country...

...In other cases, the moradores have become battlegrounds for the political parties...

...Every assembly elects delegates to a larger assembly for its branch—the Navy, the Air Force, the Army, or copcon, the security police...

...We foreign journalists go looking for "the" revolution...

...The one decision-making session I witnessed, though, was organized from outside...

...In the factories, for instance, radicalism seems to vary inversely with the distance from Lisbon...

...These days, when unpopular commands are given, they simply are not obeyed...

...You are wrong," Elena said...

...At the Bachlite Plastics factory in Leiria, 70 miles north of Lisbon, and the Marco de Pereira shoe factory near Coimbra, in western Portugal, organizers who are having Bonnie Potter, a new NL contributor, is a free-lance writer who worked in Lisbon the summer before the coup, and recently returned from a second visit to Portugal...

...problems setting up committees told me the owners had raised wages immediately after the April coup...

...This led one observer to remark: "Democratization is fine...

...Your ideas are too clear," said Elena, an educational technician...

...Of course, a Maoist at the Law Faculty in Lisbon could always switch his course to the Maoist-dominated Law Faculty at the University of Coimbra...

...Thus, at tap, the Portuguese national airline, workers already had a committee when the new government was established, and it is not surprising that they have been in the forefront of the strikes that have disrupted the country...

...Thus in the small village of Casal Santo Amaro in central Portugal, an independent Catholic group succeeded in forming an aldeia around the goal of building a fountain...

...Their replacements, in many cases, have no teaching experience...

...Students have been running the school since the beginning of the revolution...

...There is a refreshing spontaneity here, with people developing institutions to fit their own needs...

...Due to a system of small landhold-ings, the rural sections in the North have not been touched at all by the revolution—only the fear of it...

...At present, every barracks has its own assembly...

...It was one of the first to burn down a Communist party headquarters...

...But outside of the capital, workers' groups are scarce...

...Most small villages have no water of their own, and inhabitants must fetch their drinking and washing water from nearby rivers...

...It does happen, though, that in some areas, usually the more isolated villages, the councils actually come to fulfill the ideal they were purported to have been set up for: to teach citizens how to participate in and take responsibility for solving their own community problems...

...The truth is, there are many...

...But on the independent cooperative I visited in southern Portugal, not much appeared to have changed from before...

...As a result, there has been no set pattern for running the farms, and organization seems to depend mostly on whether the peasants are Communists or independents...

...If generalizations fail to capture the reality of the farm cooperatives, they are no more useful for the moradore and aldeia, Portugal's city and village councils...

...After its demands for better wages and hours were met, it called for a share in the management—at which point the owner gave the committee a "full" share, and walked out...

...North of Coimbra, at another shoe factory, the recently created workers' committee got carried away with its newly won freedom...

...Such was the case when a team of government technicians went to the city council of Por-talegre, near the Spanish border, to seek assistance in implementing a literacy program for the region...

...At the urging of a Socialist agronomist working closely with the cooperative's elders, a meeting was called to discuss equal pay for women...

...Besides, the industrial proletariat in these places is a rural proletariat as well, returning to farm small plots of land at night after nine hours in the factory...

...People seemed very gentle and apolitical, more interested in simple ownership than in exploring complex productivity schemes...

...The military, the political parties and independent groups immediately set out to organize—and control—the councils...

...Discussion at the lowest levels has been encouraged to the point where the soldiers seem to have gotten carried away with their power...

...While the shoe factory in Leiria gets more radical and workers become more class conscious, the city itself remains a bastion of conservatism...

...The military encouraged us and gave us vehicles,' a spokesman said, "to use in reconverting the warehouse after we had taken it...

...While Communists and Maoists rule the universities, the other students are starting to resent such required courses as "Historical Materialism" in Lisbon's Faculty of Law...

...Now meetings are held on a weekly basis to deal with other problems...

...The idea caught on, at least at the local level...

...For another, their isolation makes them easy targets for repression should that day come...

...It is obvious you don't understand anything.'' When I left two weeks ago, Elena asked me what I had learned during my stay...

...For example, when the moradore of Lisbon's Angola barrio, or ward, occupied a large furniture warehouse in the district last month to turn it into a school, members told the now extreme Left newspaper Republica that help from "the soldiers" enabled them to occupy the warehouse...

...The tap workers now demand a role in the management of their state-owned industry...

...Most troubling are the tensions caused by the disparateness of the country's social arrangements...

...One must travel widely through Portugal to really get a feel for the diversity of these experiences...

...You understand a lot...

...These originated in a program sponsored by General Carvalho's faction of the Armed Forces Movement (AFM...

...In fact, one course?The Economic Crisis and the Taking of Power"—is being taught by workers...

...I really don't understand anything...

...I was told that wages are put in a common fund, and that decisions are arrived at collectively...

...The workers had taken the land more by default than desire after the former owner fled with his money following Caetano's ouster...

...Late that evening a delegation of workers arrived at the owner's house and begged him to return...

...As somebody who knew Portugal under Fascism, when people were afraid to discuss politics, afraid to express themselves or take a stand for anything, afraid to organize themselves, afraid to talk to strangers, I cannot help but see the positive features of Portugal's simultaneous revolutions...

...The seizures started around last December, yet the government did not announce a land reform law until this July...

...While peasants in the South take over large estates, small landholders in the North are growing concerned about their own possessions...

...They met every day for two weeks until the fountain was built...

...Everything is so confused here," I said...

...Each factory, each farm, each village and city, each faculty in the country's three main universities, and each branch of the military is undergoing its own revolution...

...Decisions are made communally, and technical help is pouring in from Lisbon's Agrarian Institute, the Russians and the East Europeans...

...The plan called for neighborhood councils to be organized in every community to deal with local problems...

...In others, they function as little more than grievance committees, or mere debating societies (although getting people to say what they think can be a revolutionary feat in itself...

...There is no coordination, no integration...

...Most full professors left over from the Caetano regime have been fired...

...All are moving in their own directions, and very much at their own pace...

...One hundred people came to the first meeting, and 25 continued to take an active role afterward...

...Their homes were in a nearby village, and they came to farm during the day...

...The committees organized stoppages and slow-downs on an average of about 10 a month, according to one U.S...

...The unreality of the whole situation is heightened by the machinations of the military and the politicians...

...Student committees decide on instructors and curriculum...

...For many this defused the need for committees, and the more combative workers were bought off in other ways...

...Members were to be elected by the people, and they in turn were eventually supposed to choose representatives to a "National People's Assembly" that was to replace the National Assembly elected by the political parties...

...Those without the time or the opportunity, however, might go to the University of Lisbon for a more microcosmic view...

...Since it was clear to the different factions on the council that "he who controlled the education of the peasants controlled the peasants," they promptly set about bickering?while the government team made haste back to Lisbon, literacy program in hand...

...The Socialist did most of the talking...

...The incident, among others, pushed the Council of the Revolution to create a special elite force, "the military intervention force," to restore order...

...In the South the large latifundia have been taken over by landless peasants...

...But if the military is no longer a force of authority, why have a military...

...And every branch then elects representatives to the overall AFM Assembly...

...As in the factories, the Communists and Maoists were organized well before the coup, and they each head various university faculties...

...Jockeying for power in an unfinished revolution, they seem oblivious to the profound economic and social changes exploding all around them...

...There is no single force strong enough to seize power, and those that try seem only to exhaust and weaken themselves in the process...

...The revolutionary experience on the farms has been equally diverse...

...Yet even this outfit refused to protect the Spanish Embassy last month after the execution of five Spanish terrorists, with the result that the Embassy and Consulate were sacked and burned...

...Within 15 minutes a motion carried, and the women—who were not present—won the right to equal wages...

...The negative side, however, outweighs the positive...

...And while young soldiers turn increasingly to the extreme Left, the officers are becoming traumatized by their loss of authority, and may move to the Right...

...CHAOS AFTER THE COUP The Revolutions Portugal BY BONNIE POTTER When i returned to Lisbon a month ago after an absence of almost two years, my friends were eager to know my impressions of their "new Portugal.' I quickly blurted out all my theories, culled from a year and a half's intensive reading of the American press...

...The more people one talks to in Portugal, the more villages, the more cities, the more factories and farms one visits, the sharper the confusion becomes...

...That body, finally, elects delegates to the Council of the Revolution...

...Embassy estimate...

...As one man put it, "Who has time for politics...

...The Communists control the Faculty of Law, the Maoists the Faculties of Medicine and Letters...

...Long before the bloodless coup that toppled Premier Marcello Caetano on April 25, 1974, workers in many Lisbon plants had set up clandestine committees as an alternative to the handpicked leaders of the Fascist regime...

...For one thing, the individual processes add up to chaos for the total system...

...everyone else appeared too shy or embarrassed to say anything...

...As an undergraduate explained, "We are all learning together.'' This revolution is unfortunate or promising or harmless, depending on your point of view, but Portugal's most dangerous revolution is taking place in the military—for the Armed Forces will ultimately determine the success of the other revolutions...

...In some areas they don't exist at all, or are just being formed...