In the face of this sort of pressure, the strike was a success in every respect. Between a million and a half and two million workers went on strike. The strike was be-
THE GENERAL STRIKE of March 28, 1988, was the biggest working-class and popular action in Portugal since 1975. For the first time, the major union confederations - the CGTP
(the biggest one, influenced by the Communist Party) and the
UGT (smaller but growing, up till now influenced by the
Socialist Party and the right-wing parties) — joined forces in a form of struggle against the government.
FRANCISCO LOUÇA
HE STRIKE'S central objective
T was to defeat the "labor package," the new labor laws that the government has submitted to parliament. Given the absolute majority held by the ruling party, the PSD, they could be approved.
The debate is centered on trade-union freedoms in the workplaces and "flexibility" for layoffs, an old demand of the employers' associations. In fact, the law would have little impact in private industry, where some years ago the bosses won a very favorable relationship of forces and imposed "short-term contracts" as a general rule. These are informal contracts of a few months' duration. The "package" is directed mainly toward the needs of an overall reconversion of the public sector.
The basic reasons for these laws are the prospect of privatizing a major part of the profitable public enterprises and of a single
European market in 1992. It is in these areas also that the ideological battles are being waged between the supporters and adversaries of the strike. For example, the myth of an Eldorado over the horizon of high wages for some and fat profits for others features in all the propaganda. It can be said, from that point of view, that the strike was the first mass action against the Euro-
The severity of the proposed new laws and the wage ceiling that the government tried to impose on contracts touched off a wave of strikes in the transport sector. This followed two years of distinct prosperity for wage earners and especially for the
"middle classes" (a prosperity, moreover, not unrelated to the volume of EEC credits, large in relation to the size of the country and the source of spectacular cases of corruption). The transport strikes led the tion under a mitigated torm of a state o
International Viewpoint #139 • April 18, 1988 siege, which impedes exercise of the right
It was this situation that led to the radicalization of the trade-union confederation, the UGT. The UGT has always followed a policy of collaboration with the bosses. Up until two years ago, it had a political conciliation procedure that gives a good picture of this confederation. The Socialists, who are the majority in the unions, infallibly accepted parity with the representatives
Internal conflict within the UGT
However, through the 1988 struggles, in which it played a predominant role, the UGT opposed the government's project head-on, and decided to take the initiative of the general strike.
At first, even the right-wing sectors of the UGT supported this strike. two days before it was to start, as a result of direct pressure from the government, they decided to dissociate themselves from it. This set off a process of internal conflict in the UGT that will have important consequences in the future.
In the run up to the strike, the country's "underlying forces" went into action. The archbishop of Braga declared that general strikes "usually have revolutionary aims." In the public enterprises, the chiefs and department heads circulated lists for all the workers to write down whether they were supporting the strike or not, and if so why.
In the countryside, the Rural Guard went around the parishes trying to find out who was promoting the strike. A trade-union leader and a well-known leader of the PSR (Revolutionary Socialist Party, Portuguese section of the Fourth International), Manuel Graça, was stabbed by a boss when he tween 80% and 100% effective in transportation and industry. It extended throughout the country, and the private sector was significantly affected.
Crushing electoral victory for the right
However, the action was mainly a passive strike, with symbolic pickets, and the workers stayed away from their workplaces. There were some exceptions. In the Feira area and in Aveiro, thousands of workers stopped all traffic and went into the small factories calling on workers there to come out on strike. In some cases they confronted the bosses — for example, an administrator of a German transnational company, who threatened them with a shotgun.
This strike occurred only six months after a crushing electoral victory for the PSD, the main right-wing party, which for the first time got a comfortable parliamentary majority. Those elections were the culmination of an ebb in social struggles, of division of the left parties and unions and of the incapacity of the reformist left to offer a political alternative, after two austerity governments headed by Socialist Party leader Mário Soares.
Despite the erosion of confidence it has suffered, the government may still retain strong electoral and social support. The petty bourgeoisie had a very mixed reaction to this strike. A large section did not participate or opposed it. Thus, the privatization of the public sector — which the bourgeoisie calls the "end of March 11 in the enterprises": - and the new labor laws may be imposed by a parliament in which a disciplined majority supports the government.
What has changed - and this change is a radical one — is the fighting spirit, a will to unity, that took hold, increasing confidence in the possibility of organizing palpable struggles against the government and not just symbolic protests.
The process is tending to change the national political panorama. The UGT is 1. March 11, 1975, was the date of the failed rightwing coup led by the head of the military govemment, General Spinola. The coup was launched to stop the radicalization of the political and social situation after the toppling of the Salazarist dictatorship in April 1974. After the failure of the right-wing move, the radicalization speeded up dramatically and many radical measures were adopted: nationalizations of banking, industries and land. Most of the big capitalists left the country.
being shaken by the conflict between the Socialist majority and the progovernmental minority. In the confederation's biggest union, the Southern Portugal Bank Workers, a united SP-CP slate could win the elections and thereby marginalize the right, which has predominated in this sector.
On the other hand, within the CGTP, the consequences are less obvious but no less important. The general strike turned unity with the UGT, which up until now has been taboo, into a key question for conducting protests against the government's policy. Forms of united action are being consolidated, like general assemblies of factory workforces led not by the unions but by the Workers' Commissions, local united-front organs, as a means of achieving more representativeness and overcoming trade-union divisions.
However, the most profound and longterm consequence is that a large section of the trade-union leaders are taking their distance from the Communist Party's traditional conceptions for the trade-unions, Portuguese Communist Party leader Alvaro Cunhal is presiding over a profound crisis inside the party (DR)
which have favored self-affirmation and propagandistic sectarianism. These ideas stem from the "third-period" education of the central cadres of the Portuguese Communist Party. Opposition currents inside the Communist Party
In the context of the crisis pervading the CP today, this trade-union angle is undoubtedly the most important in the thinking of Communist Party members.
Until now, only two opposition currents have expressed themselves within the party. One of them functions underground. It publishes a bulletin that parodies the party's official publication. It calls itself SIPTransperencia ("Information ServiceOpeness"). According to the press, it is made up of veteran CP cadres who criticize the party's strategy on the basis of Leninist principles and radical opposition to Brezhnevism.
The other more outspoken current, the "Group of Six," is made up of very well-known Communist cadres, including one former member of the Central Committee. They have publicly issued projects for a party congress, specifically as regards its statutory functioning. And they claim they are presenting a draft program.
PORTUGAL
The emergence of these currents has aroused a lively internal debate, despite a very harsh response from the leadership, which has attributed the whole development of criticism to the influence of the bourgeois press.
The CP's impasse, which has been reflected in a decline of its activity and even its electoral work, is the result of the exhaustion of a strategy that had its moment of glory in 1974 and the first half of 1975 — the conquest of positions of influence in the state apparatus as the fundamental instrument for participation, in no matter how indirect a way, in the state administration. This period ended.
However, re-adaptation is very difficult, if not impossible, in the framework of the mythology of the CP's old program of "national democratic revolution,' " which the CP leadership claims should be carried further. In fact, the objective of this revolution is a government of the democratic bourgeoisie. That clearly has been established. And it is obviously antagonistic to CP influence in the society as well as to the left as a whole.
Although the answer of the Group of Six seems to follow the lines of the Italian CP, and has had a big impact on the intellectual elements in the party, many intermediary or leading cadres have stood apart from the conflict, waiting for natural laws to change the top echelons, given the age of the CP leaders. The party's trade union leaders are probably in this category.
CP leaders hostile to perestroika
However, the CP's worst problem is that this crisis is being aggravated by the fact that all the opposition currents are associating themselves with perestroika, toward which Alvaro Cunhal and his leadership are not hiding their reservations and objections.
In the internal investigation carried out against the Group of Six, it was even insinuated that the latter might have been promoted or financed by the Kremlin. For a party whose political culture has always centered around the USSR, that is quite a change. We are seeing a tumultuous opening of this process, but it has a long way to go yet.
Haunted by the specter of a Carrillo on one side and the threat of a Juquin on the other?, the CP leadership rightly feels very insecure.
In all its ramifications, the general strike and the change in the climate for working-class mobilizations that it involved will have a fundamental importance for the future of the left. * 2. Santiago Carrillo, the leader of the Eurocommunist turn of the Spanish Communist Party, which opened the Juguin, leader of the rénovateur current that has emerged out of the French CP, a current breaking from traditional Stalinism toward the left (sce /V 138). 13 April 18, 1988 • #139 International Viewpoint
AUSTRIA
N AUSTRIA, EEC fever seems to have broken out. All the "pillars of society"
are for the quickest possible entry into the European Community. Poll results are being passed around that are supposed to support such a course. In the business magazine Gewinn ("Profit"), managers could calculate what "EEC membership would offer them personally." The left is still asleep on the EEC question. We don't think that this should continue, and so we are opening up a discussion with the following contribution.
THE EEC is a supernational imperialist institution. Its aim is to bring capitalist Europe economically, politically and eventually militarily under a single roof. Then, alongside the USA and Japan, there would be a third Western "center."
The central decisions in the EEC are made in the top bureaucratic bodies (for example in the EEC Commission). The European parliament leads a shadow existence. Despite all the myths, the EEC is a profoundly political construction. Among other things, there is an EEC standpoint on the Middle East problem, on the situation in Central America and on the situation in South East Asia. There is a plethora of plans for "European strike forces" (including atomic weapons). As early as 1983, a resolution was passed aiming at a common EEC arms industry.
Robert "Bobby" Graf himself, the People's Party [OVP, the main bourgeois party] economics minister, could not get away from the close intertwining of the political and the military. "What did NATO do in the Falklands war? In this case, I have to equate the EEC with NATO."