Portugal: Thinking today about 25th April 1974

We need to have done with parliamentary illusions

The path of revolution in this country is not the continuation of the bourgeois "revolution" of 25th April 1974!!! The only democracy is one which actually allows you to make decisions that concern your life yourself. This is called direct democracy.

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Thinking today about 25th April 1974

We need to have done with parliamentary illusions

Parliamentary democracy does not exist.

The only democracy is one which actually allows you to make decisions that concern your life yourself. This is called direct democracy, invented long ago by the workers' movement, but which has so far not been experienced for any great length of time or over a large area, as no libertarian social revolution has ever triumphed in a stable way.

However, this true democracy, direct democracy, allied to federalism, is regularly practised by thousands of anarchist, anarcho-syndicalist, libertarian communist and libertarian socialist collectives worldwide. It is not, then, a utopia. It only needs to be put into practice on the larger scale of a whole society.

One of the most serious mistakes "politicians" make is to attribute any kind of legitimacy to the regime currently in power. This regime does not have the slightest legitimacy. Those in power are there as a result of trickery, fraud and lies. Nor can they be said to be representatives of the feelings of one or other sector of the population! The great majority of people who voted in the last elections did so with a genuine feeling for socialism (in the broad sense of the term) - they did not do so in order to give carte blanche to the leadership of the Socialist Party made up of neo-liberalist lackeys, a leadership that knew well in advance what the government's real programme would be and kept it hidden, the only way it could ensure it kept its hands on the power.

The 25th April is not coming back - what we need is a new revolutionary wind, one that features questions of present importance dealing with:

• job precarity
• power within the workplace and within society
• self-organization
• horizontality
• the extinction of capitalism
• safeguards to the ecosystem
• an end to discrimination; etc.

The 25th April was about the end of the colonial wars, the end of a Fascist dictatorship, the need for free expression, the rupture with capitalist protectionism, the end of political and diplomatic isolation, etc.

The "socialist" element was only window-dressing, necessary if the people were to support this essentially bourgeois "revolution", the last bourgeois revolution to take place in Europe before the collapse of the USSR and the Eastern-European totalitarian regimes in the late '80s and early '90s.

Let no-one be tricked (or trick themselves)!

The path of revolution in this country is not the continuation of the bourgeois "revolution" of 25th April 1974!!!

Manuel Baptista

Translation by www.anarkismo.net

From the forthcoming issue of "Luta Social" (No.14), journal of the Colectivo "Luta Social"