Cunhal calls for

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A series of bomb explosions in Lisbon and regional centres of Portugal has inflicted a setback on the efforts of the Socialist Party minority government to reverse many of the gains made in the wake of the April 1974 overthrow of The explosions, all in Land Reform Offices destroyed archives and files on co-operative farms, collectives and expropriated property.

They follow a number of struggles between rural workers and police as government bureaucrats have measured off areas to be forcibly returned to their former capitalist owners under the Soares government's Agrarian Reform Billwhich is still completing its final stages.

The desperation which lies behind this last-ditch attempt to delay and prevent the implementation of this reactionary legislation flows from the complete absence of an independent leadership for the Portuguese working class.

The Soares SP government has just completed its first year of consistently anti-working class policies. In the course of that year it has become enmeshed in an increasingly intimate parliamentary alliance with the two main capitalist parties-the Social Democratic Party and the Social and Democratic Centre.

Most glaringly, while farmland is to be taken from occupying workers, 400 nationalised firms are to be returned to their old capitalist owners-and other owners are to be compensated.

These political attacks, combined with the increasing bite of the savage economic austerity measures taken in February, have placed the Stalinists of the Communist Party in an embarassing position.

As always the Stalinists have been unwilling to mobilise any independent action of workers and peasants against Soares' policies.

But for fear of being isolated by the mass movement the CP forced to shift its stand slightly.

The decision of Soares three weeks ago to introduce a new package of austerity measures (further devaluation, price rises, and wage cuts in the public sector) has therefore provoked CP leader Cunhal to offer two possible solutions to the crisis.

On the one hand, as set out in a recent CP document (called The Communist Party and the New and Dangerous Phase of Portuguese Democracy), the Stalinists suggest the dissolving of the Assembly and fresh elections which, they say, would form the basis of CP-Socialist Party government.

Soares Cunhal of course only proposes this because he knows that the SP leadership-now engaged in a new hysterical anti-communist witch hunt-will never spontaneously agree to such a policy, while the Stalinist leaders themselves have no intention of leading action to force a change.

Or, on the other hand, Cunhal suggests the tormation of a new coalition government including the major parties represented in Parliament-in other words a popular front government combining the and thee Social Sod Democrats It is significant that Cunhalregarded as one of Moscow's most loyal servants among the leaders of W.European CPs-now advocates a policy indistinguishable from the so-called "Eurocommunist" leaders in France, Italy and Spain.

For the Portuguese masses the problem of leadership is acute. The necessity is for a break both from the reactionary line of the SP and from the passive acceptance of the Stalinists-and for an all-out mobilisation of workers and peasants against the reactionary policies of the Soares/Eanos government.