Portugal
Amilcar Cabral's theory of class suicide and revolutionary socialism - Tom Meisenhelder
"The notion of 'class suicide' by the petty-bourgeois leadership at first glance may sound unrealistic but it is much less so than the most popular competing images of socialist revolution in the Third World..."
This is a most difficult time for revolutionary socialists. The rapid collapse and disintegration of the Soviet Union, the electoral defeat of the Sandinistas, the many problems of Cuba, and the demise of revolutionary Marxism-Leninism in Africa all force a serious questioning of basic ideas and strategies. It is a time when global capital seems to rule nearly unchallenged throughout the world.
Portugal: 1,200 wildcat at General Motors plant
A mass walkout at the soon-to-close Azambuja plant has entered it’s third day in a dispute over severance terms.
General Motors (GM) announced in July that it would close the Azambuja plant in December in order to shift production to a larger plant in Spain.
1974-1975: The Portuguese Revolution
A short history of the Revolution in Portugal in which an army rebellion overthrew the fascist dictatorship.
The real revolution was in the urban workers took control of their workplaces and farm workers took control of their farms and organised production themselves while the parties of the left merely jockeyed for positions of power, eventually killing the revolution.
Portugal: Pupils and workers oppose school closure
Students, teachers and school employees have been protesting against the closure of D. João de Castro Secondary School in Lisbon.
The self-organised students of the D. João de Castro Secondary School locked the gates of the school today - not for the first time - and gathered outside shouting slogans and chanting against the closure of the school ordered by the Ministry (supposedly to be merged with the Fonseca Benevides Secondary School).
Portugal: The Impossible Revolution?
Phil Mailer of Solidarity's excellent history and analysis of the Portuguese Revolution from 1974-1976.
Worker Insurgency and Statist Containment in Portugal and Spain, 1974-1977 - Loren Goldner
An analysis of the end of the Salazar and Franco regimes and the transition crises that marked " the last major working class upsurges in the West in the era of the big factory".
Castelhano, Mario, 1896-1940
A short biography of Portuguese rail worker and anarchist Mario Castelhano, who died in a fascist concentration camp.
Mario Castelhano, the Portuguese anarcho-syndicalist militant who had been director of the CGT newspaper A Batalha when its presses were destroyed by the fascists and its publication suspended, died in the Tarrafal concentration camp on 12 October 1940, as a result of a stomach complaint.
