Last Saturday, on October 15^th, in Lisbon and Porto, the largest mobilization of people in two years in Portugal took place. The protest was organized and led by the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP), the old Stalinist Comintern party, as well as the trade union confederation which it controls, the CGTP, by far the biggest in Portugal, organizing around 80% or so of organized workers in Portugal.

The protest was against the almost entirely stagnant (even “frozen”) wages of Portuguese workers while the prices of every single essential need, above all gas, reach ludicrous hikes, against rent and speculation (Lisbon was rated the 3^rd most unlivable city in the world – worse than New York, which alone really says it all!) and the fact that while this increasing immiseration of the proletariat goes on, companies have been scoring record profits all across the board.

Thousands upon thousands of people attended, and we saw the presence of many CGTP unions, carrying their banners, of many sectors of workers. The demonstrators were overwhelmingly proletarian, poor and impoverished workers, as well as some students, not distinguished by class. The age of the demonstrators included both the youth and average aged worker, as well as some pensioners and retirees. There was not much of a middle class presence.

One of the speakers, belonging to the PCP, said that “the last two years show that the Portuguese workers do not accept the degradation of wages and pensions, the attack on public services, at the same time as the economic groups and multinational corporations accumulate thousands of millions of euros in profits shares that for the most part, exit the country [!], and that just as the workers don’t accept, neither does the PCP”.

No anti-militarism at all, not of the petit-bourgeois hypocritical sort, the only talk of war was one of the slogans that was shouted: “No to war, yes to peace”.

First, let’s note this right off the bat: the fact that a PCP demonstration is the largest mobilization in the country in two years is of significance, because while it does point to the fact that class struggle is incredibly slow and weak in Portugal despite the poverty of the workers here, the famous “people of mild manners” (povo de brandos costumes) as the national saying goes, it also points out that its labor movement at the moment has some peculiarities: namely that one of the still ongoing, rotten Stalinist parties of the old Comintern can still manage such a mobilization of workers in the first place.

In almost no other country would such a thing happen.

The PCP has a trick that it plays on the workers and that it hasn’t failed them yet. It’s very simple: it will support the ruling PS (Socialist Party – a Labourite type party, and the main party of the Portuguese bourgeoisie, after the fall of the fascist regime, since it’s very birth) in parliamentary coalitions with the most rotten and ancient excuse of the Stalinists’, the “danger from the Right”.

Thus in Portugal, in the near total absence of militant unions (there exists one for dockers, historically a militant section of workers, which staged a large, real strike in 2019 and even won, against the PCP and its unions, it should be noted), with the working class still trusting the old Communist Party to some extent, which is an entirely regime organ, fully integrated into the State machinery, and which thus will never attack the State of which it is a part of or the capitalist economy that that State serves. Class struggle finds itself in a “frozen” state, with no combative strikes at all and no revolts.

This was not a strike: it was not even pretending to be one, nor did it call itself one. It was a mobilization, purposefully marked on a weekend and lasting one day, only in two major urban centers (and indeed the PCP never organizes mobilizations other than on May 1^st where they are a pure formality that lasts some 45 minutes), to pretend to compel parliament to allow those reformist programs to go through.

There was obviously no talk of revolution, and of course we wouldn’t expect such a thing by any opportunist parliamentary party like this, but there was not even talk of striking.

The workers were very receptive to this message, there was no visible discontent with the assertion that all the workers must do is show their discontent for the government to ease the burdens of the workers at the expense of some of the profits of the bourgeoisie and the entire mobilization and march was held with the usual servile obedience to parliamentary party discipline, with no assemblies for workers to discuss things, merely allowing their “representatives” to talk for them and shouting their pre-made slogans.

The fact that the PCP was compelled to organize such a mobilization, however, is itself proof of the growing discontent of the working masses, which the PCP decided to use for its own bourgeois purposes – though likely less because it could explode into something out of its control and more likely to maintain the duped workers’ trust in it.

Needless to say that this demonstration will not change the attitude of the whole parliament who will no doubt turn down the incoming PCP reforms, just as they have done the last few years. How the workers will react to this is what is decisive, but with such a lack of militant trade-unionism, prospects remain rather pessimistic. We can certainly say that the Portuguese workers should learn from the example of their proletarian brothers across the border: loss of faith in democracy, and an at least substantial presence of the militant unions (as seen in the Cadiz strike of December last year).