Out Now!
Socialist Press1979 1979-12-12Read it in the scan (PDF), scan page 3 →
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Second edition of the opposition documents presented inside the WRP by the present leadership of the Workers Socialist League Price £2.50 plus 20p postage and package from Workers Socialist League, 31 Dartmouth Park Hill devised for their own benefit) for the fact that the AD has won a majority of seats with a minority of votes.
Undermined
But the results show that Mario Soares' reputation today as a "socialist" or a defender of the working class in Portugal has been deeply undermined-indeed almost totally destroyed.
His party's catastrophic performance was very largely the result of voters in working class areas throughout the country deserting the SP and voting instead for the CP The CP's share of the poll increased dramatically from 14% to 19%, which now certainly makes the CP the majority party of the Portuguese working class, given the large petty-bourgeois vote still going to Soares.
Just as Soares' losses are the result of his support for anti-working class policies, so the Stalinist gains result from a very agile combination of verbal "opposition" to these policies-coupled, however, with a complete failure to mobilise the full strength of the working class against them.
In particular the Stalinists have been scrupulously careful to combat Socialists for preparing the way to power of the new reactionary regime.
Only now, with the workers' parties safely in a rel minority, has the CP started calling for an alliance with the SP against reaction.
The Stalinist-dominated trade union federation, too, the CGTP (Intersindical), whose leaders have stood by paralysed for over three years as the real wages of workers have tumbled and unemployment has grown, has now started saying darkly (but deliberatley vaguely) that "the Portuguese workers will know what to do" against the new reactionary threat.
Combat reaction But all the workers' leaders refuse as adamantly as ever to take up a programme of demands which will meet the needs of the working class and peasants and combat the daily growth of reaction. • Such a programme and a With a new introduction revolutionary Trotskyist party to fight for it are, in the aftermath of the elecLondon NW5 1HR tions, more urgently needed than ever.
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Page.4 Inside the occupied plant