Marcela Uchôa

In ‘A Brief history of Portugal’, Raquel Varela and Roberto Della Santa analyse the last 200 years of Portuguese history through the lens of class struggles. The work is like Varela’s previous books, A People’s History of Europe (Pluto Press 2021) and A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution (Pluto Press 2019), an excellent example of what E. P. Thompson called History from Below. It is very fluently written, and despite its volume of over 400 pages, is very accessible for a broad non-academic audience.

Whereas much of the focus of contemporary leftwing writings on Portuguese political history have been focussed on the Portuguese revolution and the Estado Novo dictatorship, this book has a wider scope. It contextualises these events and historical developments in earlier history, which is often underexposed in academic production, but also in Portuguese popular knowledge.

The first part of the book discusses how, despite a long history of relative stability and the existence of a unified language, the process of nation-formation occurred relatively late in Portugal. The authors use a Marxian–Trotskyist lens focused on the constitution of social classes, unequal and combined development and international dynamics. They argue that the modern state-formation—traditionally associated with the ‘bourgeois revolution’—only finishes under the Thermidorian Estado Novo dictatorship, and the subsequent revolutionary process that would lead to a relatively stable liberal representative democracy in the European periphery.

The scope of the historical analysis starts in the era following the French Revolution, and the subsequent Napoleonic wars. It analyses the constitution of the modern urban working class in the context of Iberian liberalism. Much attention is given to the ‘freeing’ of labour through the processes of primitive accumulation, which included the dismantling of guilds, expropriation of religious orders and privatization of the commons. These processes provoked massive migrations from towns to cities, particularly Lisbon, Setubal and Porto, as well as further away, to northern Europe, Brazil, the USA and the Portuguese colonies.

The history of Portugal is anchored around popular struggles and workers’ organization: the struggle for freedom of assembly in 1838 which cost the lives of 100 workers at Lisbon’s Rossio Square, the 1846 Maria Da Fonte uprising of rural women, the 1848 revolutionary wave that led to the organization of workers’ associations, workers’ newspapers and the presence of the first International, the turmoil provoked by diplomatic defeats of the ruling classes in the colonies, the success of anarcho-syndicalism, and the assassination of the king that would lead to the proclamation of the Portuguese republic in the early twentieth century. The republic proved unable to provide stability and the authors explain how the Portuguese debacle in the First World War, the fear of contamination by the Russian Revolution, permanent political crises, increasing numbers of strikes and eventually the crash of Wall Street would lead the country into dictatorship and fascism.

Varela and Della Santa analyse the affinities of the Estado Novo regime with the fascist dictatorships in Italy, Germany and Spain in establishing a new order to control Labour, to stabilize and control the Portuguese state and economy. The regime would be based on forced corporativism on the mainland, a new period of primary accumulation by forced labour in the colonies and the harsh suppression of any form of independently organized labour. Previously existing political movements on the left, such as the Portuguese Socialist Party and the anarcho-syndicalist movements, were obliterated by political repression and censorship. The only organization able to maintain its activity—mostly underground—was the increasingly centralist Portuguese Communist Party that had been formed in the 1920s by anarcho-syndicalist workers.

The Estado Novo regime would eventually withstand for 48 years – partially owing to the support of Western ‘democracies’ who integrated the dictatorship into the UN, NATO and the EFTA. The authors show how it was brought down by internal divisions, the anti-colonial movements in the African colonies and the emergence of a new left among workers and students.

A whole chapter is then dedicated to the the Portuguese revolution of 25 of April 1974 and the subsequent ‘PREC’—the ongoing revolutionary period that finished with the counter-revolution of 25 November 1975. In this period of dual power, the ruling class and working class were engaged in a stalemate which at the same time enabled extensive forms of prefiguration and social experimentation that included the foundation of cooperatives, land reform, nationalizations, workers and citizens councils, etc. The authors of the book argue that the democratic ‘countercoup’ of 1975, meant a de-facto democratic counter-revolution, in which the emancipatory struggles were halted, where the preponderance of active participative council democracy was replaced by liberal representative democracy. This process opened the way for the integration and stabilization of Portugal in the European Union, which eventually would open the way for neoliberalism, privatizations, emigration, austerity and the new struggles of the Portuguese working class today.

The book fills some important gaps in Portuguese contemporary literature. The Marxist–Trotskyist political and political economic analysis employed describes in a very convincing way how the class dynamics, economic dependency relations and issues of political leadership influenced the origin and the development of specific political events. It bring the agents of change—the workers’s movements, but also popular women’s movements—often silenced by mainstream history into the centre of analysis. The book also contextualizes the work of some important public intelectuals and historical figures like Eça de Queiroz and Saramago, whose engagement is often depoliticized. An important element of this work is that it goes further than the remembering of history, and narrative creation—which by itself is an important element for the creation of a class identity. By linking up historical developments with contemporary workers’s struggles, it also provides an important inspiration for the reorganization of the left and socialists today.

Silva Uchôa, Marcela; Van Vossole, Jonas. “Raquel Varela and Roberto Della Santa: Uma breve historia de Portugal, A Era Contemporânea (1807-2020)”. Revisão de Uma breve historia de Portugal, A Era Contemporânea (1807-2020), Critique, 52, 1 (2024): 165-169. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03017605.2024.2343561