On The 40^th Anniversary Of The Start of Still-Born Portuguese Revolution

 

Peter Paul Markin comment:  

As every leftist militant knows, or should know, and knows to our sorrow deep-going revolutions, or potential revolutions, social revolutions in this epoch, occur rather less frequently than we would like. But they do occur, or conditions are such that they can occur. In my lifetime I have seen many such promising opportunities go by the wayside. Portugal in 1974 after the overthrown of the longtime dictator and when I will nothing but a neophyte Marxist is a strong case in point. Certainly conditions were ripe and fluid enough for a social revolution there and the army was split. But those conditions, as the great Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky commented on in many of his works, most notably The History Of The Russian Revolution and Lessons of October, don’t last forever. Nor can the right revolutionary strategy be promulgated by plucking it from one’s thumb. So yes, forty years later we can attest to the fact of far and few revolutionary upheavals but we can also learn some lessons too. Be ready.