• 1974: The Portuguese Revolution
    https://libcom.org/history/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.

    On April 25th, 1974, a radical faction within the Portuguese Armed Forces, the MFA, revolted against the government. Until that day Portugal had been under a fascist dictatorship for over half a century. Whether the MFA was left or right wing inclined was unclear at the time. The military revolt created a space where people could effect change in their lives and the opportunity was grasped eagerly.

    Left-wing activists began returning from exile, and new political parties sprouted up. The parties all used the situation to gain political power in the government. Ordinary people, in contrast, used the situation to improve social conditions in their communities and workplaces through new autonomous organisations. It was here that the true revolution was fought and is of most interest to us.

    Workers’ struggles
    Portugal was the most underdeveloped country in Europe. At the time 400,000 people were unemployed. 150,000 people lived in shanty towns, one million had emigrated and infant mortality was nearly 8.5%. After the revolution workers immediately began struggling against the harsh economic conditions. Strikes had been met by brutal force under the fascist regime but lack of experience proved no deterrent to the Portuguese working class. During the summer of 1974 over 400 companies registered disputes.

    One of the most significant of the strikes was within TAP, the semi-state airline. It showed whose side the supposedly radical government was on. TAP workers had a history of militancy. In 1973 three workers had been murdered by the paramilitary police force during a strike.

    On May 2, 1974 an assembly of TAP workers demanded the purging of all fascists in the company and the election of union representatives to the administration council, which was in effect a council for the bosses. When it was discovered that some of the representatives had raised their salaries the union came under a lot of criticism. In August an assembly of maintenance workers reduced their 44-hour week to 40 hours by refusing to work the extra four hours.

    Another assembly, held without union officials, drew up a list of demands including the purging of staff who showed “anti-working class attitudes”, wage increases and the right to reconsider collective contracts whenever the workers pleased. The demands were not accepted by the government, so in response the workers declared a strike, elected a strike committee and posted pickets. All international flights were halted. The new Minister for Labour, a Communist Party member, called on the workers to resume work while CP rank and filers opposed the strike within TAP.

    The TAP workers stood fast and eventually the government sent the military to occupy the airport and arrest the strike committee. Two hundred workers were sacked but were reinstated after mass demonstrations and threats of further strikes. The 40-hour week was gradually introduced. The first provisional government introduced anti-strike laws around this time.

    This government was a coalition that included the Socialist Party and the Communist Party. The TAP strike was the first large-scale strike after April 25th and the government’s response was an indicator of how any of the ’post-fascist’ governments would treat workers’ struggles. The working class however was unperturbed by this. In October another 400 companies registered disturbances.

    The trade unions were relics of the fascist era and were considred treactionary by many. Workers found the need for more democratic and independent ways of organising. It had become common for assemblies of workers to elect delegates to the committees. These committees were normally elected annually and were subject to recall. Though most of them were not revolutionary they were an expression of people’s distrust of the ’left parties’, the government and the military. By the end of October 1974 there was about 2,000 of these committees.

    In the summer of 1975 the movement began to develop further. Frequently, when demands were ignored by management, workers would occupy their places of employment and in many cases set up systems of self-management. Anywhere from a dozen to several hundred workers would take to running the businesses themselves. In Unhais de Serra 1,100 textile workers rid themselves of the management and elected a workers’ committee to run the factory.

    It is estimated that about 380 factories self-managed and 500 co-ops were in operation by the summer of 1975. Like the workers’ councils, the co-ops were not revolutionary. They still had to contend with the constraints of capitalism. They had to make a profit and members received different wages. Despite many co-ops being able to reduce the prices for goods or services, this inevitably led to competition between different co-ops.

    Amidst the growing culture of self-management the Proletarian Revolutionary Party started a campaign to launch workers’ councils. Delegates from major industries, and soldiers’ and sailors’ committees, met with a large contingent of PRP members. The idea was to have councils based on workplace, boroughs and barracks; and from these local, regional and then a national council would be elected.

    It sounded good, sadly the PRP were more concerned with creating bodies they could dominate rather than councils capable of representing the working class. “Working class parties” were invited to join. This showed their very limited idea of what workers are capable of.

    Giving places to political parties as well as to directly elected workers’ delegates not only diluted democracy but also implied the ’need’ for some sort of elite to lead the masses. If the self-proclaimed ’revolutionary parties’ could not win enough support to get their members chosen as delegates by their workmates, they were to get seats as of right just because they called themselves “workers parties”. A strange notion of democracy!

    Housing struggles
    After April 25th people began occupying empty property, unwilling to wait for governmental action. The government, afraid of people’s anger, decreed a rent freeze and allocated money and tax exemptions to builders. The increase in homes built was inadequate and more and more people occupied empty buildings. 260 families from a shantytown in Lisbon moved into an empty apartment block near the city. The military ordered them out but were forced to back down when the families refused.

    In response to the housing crisis people began to organise collectively. In older working-class and lower-middle-class areas Autonomous Revolutionary Neighbourhood Committees were set up. The committees were elected from general assemblies of local residents. They arranged occupations of property for use as free crèches, workers’ centres and for other community services.

    In Lisbon one local Neighbourhood Committee organised for some 400 empty houses to be taken over. A “social rent” was paid that went towards improvements. Another organisation set up was the Federation of Shanty Town Committees. It was independent of political parties and came to represent 150,000 shanty town dwellers. It called for new housing estates to be built in place of the shantytowns, for expropriation of land and for rent controls.

    The housing organisations faced some of the same problems experienced by the workers’ organisations. Neighbourhood and shanty town committee meetings were seen as opportunities for party building by left parties. Party members, often times well practised at public speaking and debating, got elected to key positions on the committees and then used them as a platform for their own particular political propaganda.

    A lot of ordinary residents stopped attending meetings when they felt they were dominated by a particular group. All in all, the “workers parties” seemed to be more a hindrance than a help to these committees. By trying to run things in ways compatible with their ideologies they stifled the spontaneous organisational methods of ordinary folk.

    Land Occupations
    At the same time one third of Portugal’s population worked as agricultural labourers. They worked for half of the year and were unemployed for the rest of it. When the rural workers saw their opportunity for change they seized it wholeheartedly and began taking over farms, ranches and unused land. At the beginning the government rarely intervened.

    There was much positive co-operation between agricultural and industrial workers, and the various workers’ organisations. In Cabanas an abandoned farm was occupied with the help of a local neighbourhood committee. Machines were taken from a nearby factory to help clear the land. In Santarem a meeting of 354 farm workers declared that a massive amount of land was to be occupied. Other workers, armed with pickaxes, arrived in trucks to aid the agricultural labourers and at the end of it over ten major farms were collectivised.

    Socialism seemed natural to the labourers and there was never talk of dividing up the land. The land was worked collectively and owned by the village as a whole. By August 1975 official statistics reported that over 330 different land collectives were in operation.

    All these struggles happened against a backdrop of six provisional governments, a few coup attempts and rumours of NATO and right-wing conspiracies. Where the armed forces had created a space for radical social development by workers it quickly re-invaded the space with programs for government and the economy that had little to do with the revolution. Any independent initiatives were generally stifled by the left and centre “workers parties”.

    The capitalist system itself was never truly tackled en masse and co-ops, collectives and workers’ committees had to negotiate on capitalist terms for the price of their labour. Even the workers’ committees were little more than workers’ self-management of their own exploitation. One Trotskyist paper blamed the lack of revolutionary progress on the fact that there was not a “workers party”. In fact there were at least fifteen!

    Written by the Workers’ Solidarity Movement

    #Portugal #révolution

  • Debunking the myth of “Irish slaves”
    https://libcom.org/history/debunking-myth-irish-slaves

    A detailed, seven part series of articles by Irish historian Liam Hogan systematically demolishing the white supremacist myth of there being Irish slaves in the Caribbean or Americas, and that these “slaves” were treated worse than enslaved Africans.

    Attached are PDFs of each part:
    1: Debunking the imagery of the “Irish slaves” meme
    2: How the African victims of the Zong Massacre were replaced with “Irish slaves”
    3: The “Forced Breeding” myth in the “Irish slaves” meme
    4: A review of the numbers in the “Irish slaves” meme
    5: Exaggeration and the appropriation of the torture of enslaved Africans in the “Irish slaves” meme
    6: The Myth of Colonel William Brayne and the “Irish slaves”
    7: The myth that Goodwife Glover, the Irish woman executed for witchcraft in Boston in 1688, was an “Irish slave”

  • The Kaiser goes : the generals remain - Theodor Plivier
    https://libcom.org/history/kaiser-goes-generals-remain-theodor-plivier-1932

    Text entier en anglais : https://libcom.org/files/TheKaiserGoesTheGeneralsRemain.pdf https://libcom.org/files/TheKaiserGoesTheGeneralsRemain.mobi

    Du même auteur : Stalingrad (1945), Moskau (1952), Berlin (1954), une trilogie sur la guerre contre les nazis. Je n’ai pas encore trouvé de version en ligne.

    This is an amazing novel about the German Revolution, written by a participant. Republished here in PDF and Kindle formats.

    I’m republishing a novel about the German Revolution called The Kaiser Goes: the Generals Remain, written by a participant in the naval mutinies which kicked the whole thing off. But the novel doesn’t just concern rebellion in the armed forces, there’s all kinds of other exciting events covered too!

    I first became aware of the novel when I noticed some quotations from it in Working Class Politics in the German Revolution1, Ralf Hoffrogge’s wonderful book about the revolutionary shop stewards’ movement in Germany during and just after World War I.

    I set about finding a copy of The Kaiser goes..., read it, and immediately wanted to make it more widely available by scanning it. The results are here.

    Below I’ve gathered together all the most readily accessible information about the novel’s author, Theodor Plivier, that I can find. Hopefully, the sources referenced will provide a useful basis for anybody who wants to do further research.

    Dan Radnika

    October 2015

    THEODOR Otto Richard PLIVIER – Some biographical details

    Theodor Plivier (called Plievier after 1933) was born on 12 February 1892 in Berlin and died on 12 March 1955 in Tessin, Switzerland.

    Since his death Plivier/Plievier has been mostly known in his native Germany as a novelist, particularly for his trilogy of novels about the fighting on the Eastern Front in WWII, made up of the works Moscow, Stalingrad and Berlin.

    He was the son of an artisan file-maker (Feilenhauer in German) and spent his childhood in the Gesundbrunnen district in Berlin. There is still a plaque dedicated to him on the house where he was born at 29 Wiesenstraße. He was interested in literature from an early age. He began an apprenticeship at 17 with a plasterer and left his family home shortly after. For his apprenticeship he traveled across the German Empire, in Austria-Hungary and in the Netherlands. After briefly returning to his parents, he joined up as a sailor in the merchant navy. He first visited South America in 1910, and worked in the sodium nitrate (saltpetre) mines in 1913 in Chile. This period of his life seems to have provided much of the material for the novel The World’s Last Corner (see below).

    He returned to Germany, Hamburg, in 1914, when he was still only 22. He was arrested by the police for a brawl in a sailors’ pub, and was thus “recruited” into the imperial navy just as the First World War broke out. He spent his time in service on the auxiliary cruiser SMS Wolf, commanded by the famous Commander Karl August Nerger. It was he who led a victorious war of patriotic piracy in the Atlantic, the Indian Ocean and the Pacific, seizing enemy ships and their cargo, taking their crews prisoner, and returning in glory to Kiel in February 1918. The activities of SMS Wolf are described in fictional form in the final chapter of Plivier’s The Kaiser’s Coolies (see below). The young Plivier didn’t set foot on land for 451 days, but while at sea he became converted to revolutionary ideas, like thousands of other German sailors. Nevertheless, he never joined a political party. In November 1918, he was in Wilhelmshaven and participated in the strikes, uprisings and revolts accompanying the fall of the German Empire, including the Kiel Mutiny. He also played a small role in the November Revolution in Berlin.

    He left the navy after the armistice (11 November 1918) and, with Karl Raichle and Gregor Gog (both sailor veterans of the Wilmhelmshaven revolt), founded the “Green Way Commune”, near Bad Urach. It was a sort of commune of revolutionaries, artists, poets, proto-hippies, and whoever turned up. Two early participants were the anarchist Erich Mühsam and Johannes Becher (see below), who was a member of the German Communist Party (KPD). At this time several communes were set up around Germany, with Urach being one of three vegetarian communes set up in the Swabia region2.

    It was the beginning of the anarchist-oriented “Edition of the 12” publishing house. Plivier was certainly influenced by the ideas of Bakunin, but also Nietzsche. Later he took on some kind of “individualist anarchism”, ensuring that he didn’t join any party or formal political organisation.

    In Berlin in 1920 he married the actress Maria Stoz3. He belonged to the circle of friends of Käthe Kollwitz4, the radical painter and sculptor, who painted his portrait. On Christmas Day 1920 he showed a delegation from the American IWW to the grave of Karl Liebknecht5. In the early ‘20s he seems to have associated with the anarcho-syndicalist union, the FAUD (Free Workers’ Union of Germany), and addressed its public meetings6.

    Plivier underwent a “personal crisis” and began to follow the example of the “back to nature” poet Gusto Gräser7, another regular resident of “Green Way” and a man seen as the leading figure in the subculture of poets and wandering mystics known (disparagingly at the time) as the “Inflation Saints” (Inflationsheilige)8. In the words of the historian Ulrich Linse, “When the revolutionaries were killed, were in prison or had given up, the hour of the wandering prophets came. As the outer revolution had fizzled out, they found its continuation in the consciousness-being-revolution, in a spiritual change”9. Plivier began wearing sandals and robes…10 According to the Mountain of Truth book (see footnote), in 1922, in Weimar, Plivier was preaching a neo-Tolstoyan gospel of peace and anarchism, much influenced by Gräser. That year he published Anarchy, advocating a “masterless order, built up out of the moral power of free individuals”. Supposedly, “he was a religious anarchist, frequently quoting from the Bible”11. This was not unusual amongst the Inflationsheilige.

    His son Peter and his daughter Thora died from malnutrition during the terrible times of crisis and hyper-inflation in 1923. A year later he began to find work as a journalist and translator. He then worked for some time in South America as a cattle trader and as secretary to the German consul in Pisagua, Chile. On his return to Germany he wrote Des Kaisers Kulis (“The Kaiser’s Coolies”) in 1929, which was published the following year. It was a story based on his days in the Imperial Navy, denouncing the imperialist war in no uncertain terms. At the front of the book is a dedication to two sailors who were executed for participation in a strike and demonstration by hundreds of sailors from the Prinzregent Luitpold12. Erwin Piscator put on a play of his novel at the Lessingtheater in Berlin, with the first showing on 30 August 1930. Der Kaiser ging, die Generälen blieben (“The Kaiser Goes: The Generals Remain”) was published in 1932. In both novels Plivier did an enormous amount of research, as well as drawing on his own memories of important historical events. In the original edition of Der Kaiser ging… there is a citations section at the end with fifty book titles and a list of newspapers and magazines consulted. This attention to historical fact was to become a hallmark of Plivier’s method as a novelist. The postscript to Der Kaiser ging… clearly states what he was trying to do:

    “I have cast this history in the form of a novel, because it is my belief that events which are brought about not by any exchange of diplomatic notes, but by the sudden collision of opposed forces, do not lend themselves to a purely scientific treatment. By that method one can merely assemble a selection of facts belonging to any particular period – only artistic re-fashioning can yield a living picture of the whole. As in my former book, The Kaiser’s Coolies, so I have tried here to preserve strict historic truth, and in so far as exact material was available I have used it as the basis of my work. All the events described, all the persons introduced, are drawn to the life and their words reproduced verbatim. Occasional statements which the sources preserve only in indirect speech are here given direct form. But in no instance has the sense been altered.”

    His second marriage (which didn’t produce any children) was to the Jewish actress Hildegard Piscator in 1931. When Hitler came to power as Chancellor in 1933, his books were banned and publically burnt. He changed his name to Plievier. That year he decided to emigrate, and at the end of a long journey which led him to Prague, Zurich, Paris and Oslo, he ended up in the Soviet Union.

    He was initially not subject to much censorship in Moscow and published accounts of his adventures and political commentaries. When Operation Barbarossa was launched he was evacuated to Tashkent along with other foreigners. Here, for example, he met up (again?) with Johannes Robert Becher, the future Culture Minister of the DDR! In September 1943 he became a member of the National Committee for a Free Germany (NKFD), which gathered anti-Nazi German exiles living in the USSR – not just Communist Party members, although there were a fair number of them involved. In 1945 he wrote Stalingrad, based on testimonies which he collected, with official permission, from German prisoners of war in camps around Moscow. This novel was initially published in occupied Berlin and Mexico, but ended up being translated into 14 languages and being adapted for the theatre and TV13. It describes in unflinching and pitiless detail the German military defeat and its roots in the megalomania of Hitler and the incompetence of the High Command. It is the only novel by Plievier that was written specifically as a work of state propaganda. It is certainly “defeatist”, but only on the German side – it is certainly not “revolutionary defeatist” like Plievier’s writings about WWI. The French writer Pierre Vaydat (in the French-language magazine of German culture, Germanica14) even suggests that it was clearly aimed at “the new military class which was the officer corps of the Wehrmacht” in an effort to encourage them to rise up against Hitler and save the honour of the German military. The novel nevertheless only appeared in a censored form in the USSR.

    He returned to Weimar at the end of 1945, as an official of the Red Army! For two years he worked as a delegate of the regional assembly, as director of publications and had a leading position in the “Cultural Association [Kulturbund] for German Democratic Renewal” which was a Soviet organisation devoted to changing attitudes in Germany and preparing its inclusion into the USSR’s economic and political empire. As with so much else in Plievier’s life, this episode was partly fictionalised in a novel, in this case his last ever novel, Berlin.

    Plievier ended up breaking with the Soviet system in 1948, and made an announcement to this effect to a gathering of German writers in Frankfurt in May of that year15. However, Plievier had taken a long and tortuous political path since his days as a revolutionary sailor in 1918… He clearly ended up supporting the Cold War – seeing the struggle against “Communist” totalitarianism as a continuation of the struggle against fascism (logically enough). What’s more, his views had taken on a somewhat religious tinge, talking of a “spiritual rebirth” whose foundations “begin with the Ten Commandments from Mount Sinai and end with the theses of the Atlantic Charter”! Although it can be read as a denunciation of the horrors of war in general, it’s clear that Berlin, his description of the collapse of Nazi Germany in 1945, is far more of a denunciation of Soviet Russia than anything else. The character Colonel Zecke, obviously a mouthpiece for Plievier’s views, even claims that Churchill and Roosevelt only bombed Dresden because they wanted to please Stalin. If you say so, Theo…! One virtue of Plievier’s single-minded attack on the Russian side is that he draws attention to the mass rape of German women by Russian soldiers. This was a war crime which it was not at all fashionable to mention at the time he was writing, despite the existence of perhaps as many as two million victims16.

    Berlin ends with one of the recurring characters in Plievier’s war novels being killed while participating in the East German worker’s revolt in 195317. Despite his conservative turn, Plievier obviously still has some of the spirit of Wilhelmshaven and can’t restrain himself from giving the rebellious workers some advice about how to organise a proletarian insurrection – seize the means of production! Another character says:

    “What use was it raising one’s fists against tanks, fighting with the Vopos [Volkspolizei – People’s Police], trampling down propaganda posters – one has to get into the vital works, to get busy at the waterworks, the power stations, the metropolitan railway! But the workers are without organisation, without leadership or a plan –the revolt has broken out like a steppes fire and is flickering away uncoordinated, in all directions at once.”

    He went to live in the British Zone of Occupation. He got married for a third time, in 1950, to Margarete Grote, and went to live next to Lake Constance. He published Moscow (Moskau) in 1952 and Berlin in 1954. He moved to Tessin in Switzerland in 1953, and died from a heart attack there in 1955, at the age of 63.

    His works – particularly the pro-revolutionary ones – are almost unknown in the English-speaking world (or anywhere else) today. The republication of The Kaiser Goes: The Generals Remain in electronic form is a modest attempt to remedy this!

    Finally, please read Plivier’s novels! Even the reactionary ones…

    #Allemagne #histoire #révolution #littérature

  • The Kaiser goes: the generals remain - Theodor Plivier
    https://libcom.org/history/kaiser-goes-generals-remain-theodor-plivier-1932

    This is an amazing novel about the German Revolution, written by a participant. Republished here in PDF and Kindle formats.

    I’m republishing a novel about the German Revolution called The Kaiser Goes: the Generals Remain, written by a participant in the naval mutinies which kicked the whole thing off. But the novel doesn’t just concern rebellion in the armed forces, there’s all kinds of other exciting events covered too!

    I first became aware of the novel when I noticed some quotations from it in Working Class Politics in the German Revolution1, Ralf Hoffrogge’s wonderful book about the revolutionary shop stewards’ movement in Germany during and just after World War I.

    I set about finding a copy of The Kaiser goes..., read it, and immediately wanted to make it more widely available by scanning it. The results are here.

    Below I’ve gathered together all the most readily accessible information about the novel’s author, Theodor Plivier, that I can find. Hopefully, the sources referenced will provide a useful basis for anybody who wants to do further research.

    Dan Radnika

    October 2015

    https://libcom.org/files/TheKaiserGoesTheGeneralsRemain.pdf

    Theodor Plievier, romancier-reporter des deux guerres mondiales
    Theodor Plieviers Zeitromane der beiden Weltkriege
    http://germanica.revues.org/2242

    Dans ses romans de la Première Guerre mondiale, Plievier présente le peuple allemand comme victime de sa caste de maîtres, puis il décrit sa révolte justifiée contre le régime des militaristes et des Junkers. « Les galériens du Kaiser » et « Le Kaiser est parti, mais les généraux sont restés » sont des romans de guerre et d’après-guerre d’une vigueur impressionnante, appartenant à l’évidence à la littérature émancipatrice et même socialiste (au sens large, humanitaire plutôt que strictement politique). Il est moins facile de définir l’esprit de la trilogie romanesque consacrée au front russe durant la Deuxième Guerre mondiale (Moscou, Stalingrad, Berlin). Ici, Plievier montre comment non seulement les élites, mais le peuple lui-même se sont rendu coupables, et leur recommande d’accepter leur défaite en lui donnant un sens expiatoire. De plus, la condamnation de la guerre n’est plus un appel à la révolution ; car la deuxième expérience essentielle vécue par Plievier pendant les années 30 et 40 est l’effondrement de l’utopie socialiste et communiste, l’affrontement mortel des totalitarismes nazi et soviétique, mais aussi la parenté profonde unissant au niveau de la praxis les deux régimes de terreur. C’est pourquoi l’anarchiste que fut Plievier se rallie après 1945 à la démocratie occidentale teintée de christianisme et se situe désormais en fait du côté d’Adenauer et des USA, puissance tutélaire.

    #histoire #révolution #Allemagne #1918