Over the past few months we have on several occasions criticised both the International Socialists and the organisation in Portugal with which you have established fraternal links - the Revolutionary Party of the Proletariat- Revolutionary Brigades (PRP-BR). This has been part of a vitally necessary discussion on the revolutionary left about developments in the Now, however, events have taken a qualitative turn. What occurred in Lisbon last week necessitates more man a raema poemic.
What occurred in Lisbon was not a desperate rearguard action against a ferocious right-wing assault. On the contrary, until then the political situation was evolving entirely against the capitalists.
The mobilisations around the construction workers'strike and the CP/workers commissions' demonstration on 16 November were amongst the most powerful in the whole period since 25 April 1974. The Government was on the brink of falling. The pretext for the events - the dismissal of Carvalho as the military governor of Lisbon - did not strengthen the Government's position because no-one mold have obeved his successor anyway: indoco. the struggle against Lourenco would have further undermined ine autonty or the whole omeet No, what occurred in Lisbon was an insane adventure carried through by ultra-left political groups and lett wing oracers, walch received no support from any section of the masses and has imposed a very severe defeat on the Portuguese revolution. Overnight the whole political, and even more the military situation in Portugal has moved against the working class. This concerns the IS in particular 'It is now time for later the Fifth Government was succeeded by the reactionary administration of Azevedo. Similarly, last week's criminal adventure in Lisbon was greeted with the banner 'Portugal: Everything at Stake. The only thing that can be said on that is - thank goodness it wasn't true! If everything was at stake then presumably not merely is everything lost -and with ridiculous ease - but the consciousnes of the Portuguese workers is so low that at the decisive moment not one single section of the masses acted.
Fortunately the Portuguese working class is far from being so backward. The IS leadership mus have known that what was involved, far from being the decisive test, was an adventure perpetratco by the PRP, MES etc. and a handful of their supporters. To use Trotsky's famous phrase, what happened in Lisbon was an attempt to rape the working class having failed to persuade it. The tragedy is that it will not merely be the militants of the PRP, MES etc but the mass of the Portuguese workers who will have to pay the price for this insane adventure Socialist Worker and the IS leadership have also followed the PRP in their ridiculous estimates of the degree to which the domination of the reformist parties over the working class has been broken. Тоду Cliff even goes so far as to claim in his pamphlet (page 19) that the Socialist Party has no base in the working class - wicH Laus to ca saunow the SP has still won union elections in Lisbon despite its general loss of working class support there while in Oporto and the North the majority of the workers support the Socialist Party.
More recently, however, the IS leadership has begun to extend this type of idiocy even to the Communist Party. In the October issue of International Socialism (No. 83) Chris Harman informs us that 'while the Communists retain some [sic] influence in the workers movement, nevertheless *with the SUV the revolutionary left has emerged as a major contender in the national struggle for
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the revolutionary forces and the workers to pose