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PARTISAN REVIEW
moderates. The Communists have seized positions of strength in the unions ,
the media, administration-but these are now being contested in the name of
fair apportionment after the election . The Communists , their ally Goncalves
evicted as Prime Minister, are now badly shaken . They have reason
to
be.
Their claim to represent revolutionary purity is contested , with real force , by
the leftist groups who are so active among the armed forces, the workers, and
the intelligentsia.
What accounts for this sort of revolutionary effervescence where it might
least have been expected ? Years of Stalinism in Eastern Europe and Social
Democracy in Western Europe have convinced thousands of Portuguese that
there must be a more authentic and effective path to revolution . Revolution is
as revolution does : it ought
to
begin at the bottom and transform society
immediately. I have said that the revolutionary officers lacked political ex-
perience . The old constraints gone, thousands of Portuguese with socialist
sympathies find themselves without a formed national tradition of social-
ism-there is not even one to rebel against. The very small numerical strength
of the ultraleftists, then, is entirely disproportionate to their ideological
power. Through their pressure on the Socialist and Communist Parties ,
through their adherents in the ranks (and sometimes the officers' corps) of the
armed forces , they substitute for the missing conscience of a revolution which
has as yet to find itself. They are , last but not least , a continuous presence in
Lisbon's streets .
Since my visit, the lack of cohesion of the revolutionary alliance and of
the military , the incapacity of the Communists
to
alter a course set for disaster ,
the incompetence of the government, and the economic sanctions applied by
the Common Market have done their work. The eruptions in the north
threatened a counterrevolution. The Communists and the left formed an
ephemeral alliance
to
defend the government of Goncalves, but that fell
apart. The leftists and the moderates then united long enough to push
Goncalves out , but not firmly enough
to
make sure that
his
successors can stay
in . The left and the Communists are allied, again, in resisting the new gov–
ernment's efforts to impose its authority . They may succeed only in provoking
the counterrevolution they so fear . The struggle for the control of the media
has had the unintended but positive consequence of assuring a diversity of
news and opinion. Reports of a Communist stranglehold on the press were in
any case exaggerated . The Socialists and the moderates always had their
papers, much more widely read and trusted than those edited by Cunhal's
cadres. The Communists did dominate radio and television, but the new
government has wisely set out to weaken their hold .
It
is, quite simply, impossible to predict the outcome of the Portuguese
revolution . For the time being, the moderates and their allies in the armed
