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PARTISAN REVIEW
depression had cut exports, reduced tourism, diminished remittances from the
millions of Portuguese working in France and Germany. Workers who had
expropriated industries gave themselves sizeable wage increases , and even
those fIrms which remained in private hands were in difficulties. Utopia, the
Portuguese revolution insisted, was now.
Perhaps-but revolutions which seek instant utopias court great dangers ,
above all in countries in which the legacy of domination has immunized large
parts of the population to revolutionary thought. The justifIed appropriation
of the southern larifundia had evoked (groundless) fears of appropriation
among the petty proprietors of the north. The seizure of large scale industry
(by workers ignoring the Communist Parry's directives for production and
stability) has frightened the entire middle class. The rhetoric of the Commu–
nist Party and the Armed Forces Movement does not help .
It
is absurd to claim
that these groups were disguising their aims. The trouble was, they were pro–
claiming them all too openly . The Lisbon workers were certainly in a revolu–
tionary mood, but they were (and are) disinclined to accept almost any kind of
discipline-not least, the Stalinist kind promised by Cunha!. Meanwhile,
cultural conflict has spread. Families and schools are disturbed. A half century
of repressiveness has disappeared-to be replaced by bewilderment, dogma–
tism, and anarchy. The way to produce large scale disorder, it seems, is to
oppress a society so hard and for so long that when oppression disappears,
everything seems possible.
One day of my visit was especially memorable. In the morning, I had a
long talk with Admiral Rosa Coutinho, one of the left Bonapartists in the
Movement of the Armed Forces. He was robust, intelligent, not the sort of
man given to many doubts. The Armed Forces Movement had just issued an
equivocal document: the revolution would rest on parliamentary forms and
on a "popular power" to be organized in enterprises and neighborhoods.
It
was meant to reassure left, right, and center-and alarmed everyone .
Coutinho denounced the ultraleftists as provocateurs, regretted the lack of
support from the Western European socialists, and dwelt on Portugal's posi–
tion between worlds.
It
was underdeveloped but European, had to become
democratic and socialist but not necessarily in either an Eastern or Western
European way . Bearded younger offIcers in blue jeans wandered in and out of
his offIce.
It
was in the Ministry of Overseas Affairs: down below, disheart–
ened and shabby refugees from Angola waited upon the bureaucracy . I came
away with the impression that Coutinho and his friends had no specifIc pro–
gram, but did have a very general revolutionary ideology they found difficult
to apply to Portugal's realities. Political experience counts for something.
Theirs consisted of the making of a revolution, not of carrying it through .
They seem to have discovered their beliefs after the seizure of power-and
