A People's History of Europe: From World War I to Today 0745341357, 9780745341354

Citation preview

A People’s History of Europe

People’s History History tends to be viewed from the perspective of the rich and powerful, where the actions of small numbers are seen to dictate the course of world affairs. But this perspective conceals the role of ordinary women and men, as individuals or as parts of collective organisations, in shaping the course of history. The People’s History series puts ordinary people and mass movements centre stage and looks at the great moments of the past from the bottom up. The People’s History series was founded and edited by William A. Pelz (1951–2017). Also available: A People’s History of Tennis David Berry Long Road to Harpers Ferry The Rise of the First American Left Mark A. Lause A People’s History of the German Revolution 1918–19 William A. Pelz Foreword by Mario Kessler A People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution Raquel Varela

A People’s History of Europe From World War I to Today

Raquel Varela Foreword by Kevin Murphy Translated by António Simões do Paço

First published by Bertrand Editora as Breve História da Europa – Da Grande Guerra aos Nossos Dias English language edition first published 2021 by Pluto Press 345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA www.plutobooks.com Copyright © Bertrand Editora and Raquel Varela 2021 Translated by António Simões do Paço The English translation was funded by Portuguese national funds through FCT (Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, I.P.) under the projects UID/04209/2019.

The right of Raquel Varela to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN ISBN

978 0 7453 4134 7 978 0 7453 4135 4 978 1 7868 0653 6 978 1 7868 0655 0 978 1 7868 0654 3

Hardback Paperback PDF eBook Kindle eBook EPUB eBook

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

Contents Foreword by Kevin Murphyvi Prefacex 1. The War of Wars, the Revolution of Revolutions, 1917 1 2. ‘Man, Controller of the Universe’: The Crisis of 1929, the Revolutions of the 1930s and Nazism 42 3. Midnight in the Century: The Second World War 67 4. The 1945 European Social Pact 83 5. Anti-Colonial Revolutions 118 6. Crisis and Revolution: From May 68 to the Carnation Revolution134 7. The End of the Social Pact (1981–2018) 178 Conclusion203 Notes218 Index247

v

Foreword Kevin Murphy

The volume in your hands is in the very best radical tradition of history. It is a modern social history of Europe ‘from below’, written not only about, but also for those people often neglected from standard academic texts. Raquel Varela’s avowed intellectual debt to the outstanding social historians, Edward Palmer Thompson and Howard Zinn, is hardly accidental. The author is an unabashed advocate of writing history ‘against the grain’, from the perspective of the ‘oppressed and combative ’ classes. Having written the seminal study of the Portuguese Revolution and as activist in many contemporary social movements, Varela is eminently qualified to survey recent history from the vantage point of those who have dedicated their lives to transforming the world in which we live. Her fabulous People’s History of the Portuguese Revolution details one of the most important and often neglected rebellions of the latter half of the twentieth century – the Carnation Revolution – a coalition of working-class and social movements, which also incited struggles for independence in Portugal’s African colonies, the rebellion of the young military captains in the national armed forces and the uprising of Portugal’s long-oppressed proletarian masses. It was through the organising power of these diverse movements that a popular-front government was instituted and Portugal withdrew from its overseas colonies. Cutting against the grain of mainstream accounts, Raquel Cardeira Varela explores the role of trade unions, women, and even artists in the rebellion, providing a rich account of the challenges faced and the victories gained through revolutionary means. Varela has an impressive list of publications, leadership positions in labour and social history projects and awards as author and editor of some 32 volumes on labour history, social movements, the welfare state, and European and global history. Among her many awards is the prestigious Santander Prize for Internationalization of Scientific Production in 2013 and Public Intellectual of the Year Prize (Mais Alentejo) in 2014. vi

foreword

Varela has also led many social history and labour projects, including the European Social Science History Conference and the Network for Global Labor Studies. Varela’s vast experience and expertise places her in a unique position to write this historical text. The study illuminates the main events and processes in Europe between 1914 and 2018, with a vivid analysis on the structure and dynamics of the twentieth century. Understandably, the two world wars and those who resisted imperialism receive special attention. Starting with the rising militarism and first Great War and the subsequent rebellions that it fostered in ‘The War of Wars, The Revolution of Revolutions, 1917’, Varela devotes particular attention to the Russian Revolution and its eventual defeat, admirably placing the revolution in its European wide context. The historic defeat of the world revolution on the European continent, particularly in Germany, Italy and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, helps to explain the context for the rise of Stalinism. The essay then turns to the tumultuous 1930s in ‘The Crisis of 1929, the Revolutions of the 1930s and Nazism’. Varela deftly explains the causes of world economic crisis of 1929, the ensuing depression, and the rise of the fascist ‘solution’, particularly the Nazi movement in Germany. The most important popular challenge to fascism during the Spanish Revolution merits special attention. In ‘Midnight in the Century’, Varela shows that this was indeed a global confrontation and insists that ordinary people not only defeated the fascists but also pointed to an alternative when the popular resistance emerged near the end of the war. In ‘The 1945 European Social Pact’, Varela posits a provocative argument about the post-war European social contract. This was not some construction benevolently handed down from above by the European powers, but was forged because workers were armed in 1945–47 and the ruling class feared revolution. The author also discusses the new Cold War, including the Warsaw Pact, the erection of the Berlin Wall and the missile crisis. The focus then shifts to the ‘Anti-Colonial Revolutions’ and how these rebellions not only challenged and often defeated imperialist powers in Southeast Asia, Africa and the Middle East. In ‘Crisis and Revolution: From May 68 to the Carnation Revolution’, Varela illustrates the connections between the anti-colonial revolutions and the spectacular May 1968 revolts and how the spirit of rebellion even crossed over to the vii

a people’s history of europe

Soviet bloc during the Prague Spring. Varela provocatively traces the impact of the Carnation Revolution as it spread to the ‘Red Mediterranean’ in Spain and Greece, and then helped set the parameters for all of Western Europe. These movements helped delay the imposition of neoliberal policies during the 1980s. Once again, workers are the transformative agents in each of the European revolts. Finally, in ‘The End of the Social Pact’, Varela traces the dismantling of the social contract and the implementation of neoliberal policies. Trade unions largely accepted the labour restructuring process in the core centres of industrial production in Europe and the dismantling of welfare states. What connects all these seemingly disparate events is Varela’s Marxism. Her emphasis on ordinary workers – their political and social relations – is at the centre of the great changes that have occurred in the last 100 years. This is a book that raises provocative questions and gives serious and rigorous answers. Was the apocalypse of the Second World War – the most brutal episode in human history, with the loss of 80 million people – the political response of a suicide class to the crisis of 1929? And did the twentieth century, which began – although not officially – in 1914–17, end in 1989, with the fall of the Berlin Wall? Or in 2008, with the financial crisis and the imposition of austerity finally signalling the end of the European social contract? The timing of this European ‘history from below’ could not be more imperative. We are writing these lines in an unprecedented social emergency and catastrophe not seen in over 70 years; we are witnessing a new people’s history of contemporary Europe in the making. The crisis in Europe and the entire world caused by the COVID-19 global pandemic does not allow for any simple parallels with anything we have ever seen before, but the general contours with earlier world crises that Varela describes are striking. On the one hand, political states and prime ministers have proven incapable of responding to the epical proportion of the catastrophe. We do know that Trump, Wall Street and some European politicians have openly stated their preference for maintaining profits over human lives and that the ‘optimistic’ variant gives a death toll in even the richest country in the world at 200,000 lives lost with tens of thousands in New York City alone. We can only imagine the impending scale of horror in cities such as Mumbai where social distancing is simply impossible for all but the tiny minority of the most wealthy. viii

foreword

And yet, on the other hand, we have also seen fantastic reports of bravery, self-sacrifice and camaraderie, especially by health care workers in Europe and around the world. We have also witnessed workers in many industries, utilising their collective strength to insist on better safety conditions and protective gear and, in some places, risking their jobs by refusing to work and endangering themselves and others. Ordinary workers in every sector are showing bold class consciousness about their own vital importance to the system. This contrast between the interests of capital and those with the collective power to change the world is why this book is so vital during this tumultuous era. Thank you to Raquel Varela for providing so many reminders that there is indeed hope in desperate times, and we can surely use the lessons from the past to guide our praxis today and in the coming battles before us.

ix

Preface In 1870, a report on the Condition of the Industrial Classes of Foreign Countries1 was presented to the British parliament, by order of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria. A group of consular and diplomatic agents sent a detailed report from around the world on the working conditions that British capitalists would encounter in each country, from Portugal to the Ottoman Empire, from the USA to Greece. One can read there the number of people available to work, their average formation, family size, eating habits, housing, hygiene and which jobs could be done by women or children. In the Ottoman Empire, there is a detailed description of the organisations of artisans and how much they earn by category. The report from the Valencia region, in Spain, explains, in addition to the number, that they earn more in summer than in winter, probably due to scarcity of the available workforce, since many would be working on their own crops and gardens. The report on Portugal recommends Portuguese workers because they do not drink a lot on Sunday and therefore can work on Monday – and because ‘they are content with little’. What today would be a modern human resources management system, probably carried out by an international consultant, was already very detailed in industrialised Europe in the nineteenth century. It is a vision of the European continent as a simple labour market. How many are there, how much do they earn, what do they know, how do they live, how much do you need to pay them? And how much can you not pay.2 In 1880, La Revue Socialiste published another survey, ‘A Workers’ Inquiry’, this one more famous (it is the precursor to many academic sociological surveys of the world of labour), carried out by a man who would soon be known worldwide: Karl Marx.3 The inquiry was conducted by the magazine itself and contained 100 questions about the ‘physical, intellectual and moral conditions of the lives of working men and women’ and was meant to be part of a scientific inquiry into the living conditions of the working class, in this case, French. Because, they argued, governments and official entities made inquiries about every-

preface

thing – agriculture, finance, trade – without any interest in knowing in what conditions those who worked lived: When Queen Victoria died at the very outset of the twentieth century one person in five could expect to come to this, a solitary burial from the workhouse, the poor-law hospital, the lunatic asylum … something like a quarter of the whole population was in poverty…4 In London alone, 30 per cent of the population was unable to sustain themselves. In 1900, in Balkan Europe and the Iberian Peninsula, the average life expectancy at birth was 35 years.5 In Europe, social classes were not, at the turn of the twenty-first century, like castes (without social mobility, as in the feudal world), but society was clearly divided into classes: working classes, the poor, the peasants, a minority middle class, the aristocracy and the financialindustrial upper class. As the American historian, Robert O. Paxton, put it, ‘most Europeans could expect to end their lives in exactly the same social position in which they started’.6 There were only effective reductions in working time as concessions to workers after the Russian Revolution in 1917, and after the struggles of the 1960s. And only after the strikes of 1945–47 and the death of 80 million people in the Second World War, did Europe go through a unique period of guaranteeing universal social rights. During the post-war years, a significant proportion of Europeans experienced job security, protection in health and old age, and access to knowledge. The degree of self-determination has increased. But by the beginning of the twenty-first century, social mobility was already a mirage – the proletarianisation of large chunks of the middle classes marked Europe ’s entry into the new millennium. This book is a brief history of these social dynamics, of Europe’s advances and retreats. In other words, it concerns the measures taken by the rich and powerful to secure accumulation by businesses, as expressed in Her Majesty’s reports, and the struggle to improve the living conditions of the working classes, which has in Marx its main theoretical-political father. This has been the history of Europe, from the First World War to the present day.

xi

1 The War of Wars, the Revolution of Revolutions, 1917

aquí encaja la ejecución de mi oficio: deshacer tuertos y socorrer y acudir a los miserables [here fits the execution of my trade: to mend wrongs and help the miserable] Don Quijote de la Mancha1

The war of wars (1914–18) In 1914, England had an empire 114 times its size; Belgium, 80 times its size; The Netherlands, 60 times its size; France, 20 times its size; and Portugal, more than 20 times its size. In today’s Portugal, the older generation still remember being taught during the dictatorship with a famous map hanging on the walls of their primary schools that showed Portugal with its colonies projected over the entire European continent. ‘Portugal is not a small country’, the caption said. Between 1850 and 1911, the whole world was virtually conquered by the European empires. In Africa, only Liberia and Ethiopia were left out of division by the central powers. If we look at the map of Africa, we find the borders drawn by the great powers at the 1884–85 Berlin Congress with long straight lines, crossing rivers, cutting mountains and suppressing the livelihood of shepherds and farmers who were left without access to their means of production.2 In China and Indochina, the dispute began over spheres of influence, in a regime of protectorate and/or conquest.3 In these years, ‘the broad current of human history flowed through a narrow channel designed by a few European countries.’4 Central and Balkan Europe were under the boots of empires, Western Europe was fighting for colonies and markets. The European scenario was, therefore, of a crisis that would lead to ‘revolution or barbarism’; the 1

a people’s history of europe

dichotomy was equated by the socialists at the beginning of the century.5 The Austro-Hungarian Empire disputed territories with Serbia. And, on its way, it crushed several oppressed nationalities: Serbs, Croats, Slovenes, Czechs, Slovaks and Bulgarians. In 25 years, France had lost its population supremacy to Germany and demanded the fertile territories of Alsace and Lorraine, which had been lost in the Franco-Prussian War of 1871, the outcome of which had then propelled the first working-class government in history, the Paris Commune.6 British capitalism could not survive with a strong Germany that defeated France in the mainland. The bulk of the wealth in dispute between Austria-Hungary and the Russian Empire laid in Poland, Ukraine, the Baltic States and Finland. But, for Germany, a strong Russia was a threat. Russia competed with the Austro-Hungarian Empire for its western territories, which were the most industrialised and the source of taxes for the empire. The Hermitage Palace would symbolically concentrate the spaces of war and revolution – there we find the rooms filled with semiprecious stones, gold, floors made of noble woods and chandeliers, all accumulated over 400 years of serfdom that, still in 1914, kept 40 per cent of the peasants on the edge of survival. Besides this, led by the Bolsheviks, Russian workers seized power in October 1917, storming the Winter Palace, a scene immortalised by the filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein in the film October (1928). In one word, imperialism, that is, the phase of capitalist accumulation in which no single capitalist entity could survive without trying to expand at the expense of others.7 We will see that during a short period of post-war 1945, the ‘golden years’ in Europe would allow for an unusual balance between imperialisms without wars in their territories (until the 1992–95 Bosnian War and the Ukrainian war since 2014). The nineteenth century begins with a crisis of colonialism – of the old empires – and ends with the ‘victory of colonial imperialism, which leads to a division of the world among the European powers – joined later by the United States and Japan – the intensification of international tensions, and finally the First World War.’8 As the historian Eric Hobsbawm points out, ‘the most striking consequence ’ of the ‘dual revolution’ – the French Revolution of 1789 and the contemporaneous (British) Industrial Revolution – ‘was to establish a domination of the globe by a few western regimes (and especially by the British) which has no parallel in history.’9 We can relativise this statement if we think that 2

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

the rule of the Roman Empire was only over one part of the world, but it was the essential world at the time and it was more stable and lasting. John Reed, a journalist and revolutionary, author of the sublime book on the Russian Revolution, Ten Days that Shook the World,10 is also the writer of a series of reports on the Balkans, shortly before the revolution, in the midst of the First World War (1915). In one passage, chaos stands out when a Russian ‘captain Martinev’ describes the apocalyptic carnage. They are called to Poland, where they arrive five days later because of the lack of trains, supplies and organisation: We went in at ten in the morning and stood particularly heavy fire all day so heavy that the cook-wagons couldn’t reach us until midnight, so there was nothing to eat. The Germans attacked twice in the night, so there was no sleep. Next morning heavy artillery bombarded us. The men reeled as if they were drunk, forgot to take any precautions, and went to sleep while they were shooting. The officers, with blazing eyes, muttering things like men walking in their sleep, went up and down beating the soldiers with the flat of their swords … I forgot what I was doing, and so did everybody, I think; indeed, I can’t remember what followed at all but we were in there for four days and four nights. Once a night the cook-wagons brought soup and bread. At least three times a night the Germans attacked at the point of the bayonet. We retired from trench to trench, turning like beasts at bay though we were all out of our heads … Finally on the fifth morning they relieved us. Out of eight thousand men two thousand came back, and twelve hundred of those went to the hospital.11 On 2 January 1916, the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg12 wrote: Business thrives in the ruins. Cities become piles of ruins; villages become cemeteries; countries, deserts; populations are beggared; churches, horse stalls. International law, treaties and alliances, the most sacred words and the highest authority have been torn in shreds. Every sovereign ‘by the grace of God’ is called a rogue and lying scoundrel by his cousin on the other side. Every diplomat is a cunning rascal to his colleagues in the other party. Every government sees every other as dooming its own people and worthy only of universal 3

a people’s history of europe

contempt. There are food riots in Venice, in Lisbon, Moscow, Singapore. There is plague in Russia, and misery and despair everywhere.13 The First World War began on 28 July 1914. In that month of 1914, everyone was talking about a quick war: ‘It will all be over by Christmas!’, people said.14 It was the most ‘popular’ of the imperialist wars. Victor Serge was a revolutionary and a writer born in Belgium to a couple of Russian exiles; he was arrested in France at the beginning of the war and wrote: Vehement Marseillaises were heard in prison, sung by crowds accompanying the convoys of soldiers. We also heard: ‘To Berlin! To Berlin!’ This delusion, incomprehensible to us, was the consummation of the height of the imminent social catastrophe.15 War was not that popular. The French socialists even hypothesised a general strike against a European war in July 1914;16 in Germany, strikers were sent to the front as punishment; historical sources show that the working class of the powerful Ruhr region – still today the strongest and most unionised region of the European industrial working class – was not keen on patriotic demonstrations.17 Across the Atlantic, in the USA, the government called for the voluntary recruitment of 1 million troops – but in the first six weeks after the declaration of war, only 70,000 had been enlisted.18 Recruitment for the First World War was relatively easy, however, because the peasants lived in isolated villages and because the experience of such a war was hitherto unknown. There is a geographical and social isolation in the rural world, even in the already industrialised England, Germany and France, which makes organised resistance very difficult. In fact, the peasants become resistants, deserters, only after being incorporated into a collective organisation – the army, and at war. Nationalism thrives rapidly as an ideology. Novelists such as H.G. Wells called for support to ‘a war to end war’, Anatole France made ‘little speeches to the soldiers’.19 However, the main support came from the organised labour movement. The war was supported by the majority of German social democracy, Austrian social democracy, the English Labour Party, the French Socialists, the large unions, the Russian anarchist Peter Kropotkin and the Indian pacifist Mahatma Gandhi. The 4

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

‘unity of the nation’, the ‘sacred union’, the appeal of the national bourgeoisies to the leaders of the popular strata was magnetic – and catastrophic: 10 million dead according to some sources,20 20–22 million dead including civilians according to different sources. Those who were against the war were only a few: the Bolsheviks and the Serbian socialists. And there were many individual heroes – Jean Jaurès, the French socialist leader who opposed the war, was assassinated by a French nationalist on 31 July 1914. War has revolved the bowels of society: women have entered the labour market en masse. It was this shift from isolated housework to concentrated factory work, from unpaid housework to wage labour, and the Russian Revolution – the achievement of broad social rights – that allowed for the first breath of gender equality in contemporary history. Although female suffrage was on the agenda in the early twentieth century, having already been conquered in Australia in 1902 and Finland in 1906, for example, only the First World War would break down the first major barrier to gender equality in England and Germany.21 And, in the case of Italy and France, this would only happen after the Second World War. In the southern countries, which became urbanised in the 1960s, the major change in gender relations occurred only with the Portuguese revolution of 1974 and 1975. An economic cataclysm, the war and a social revolution, the Russian Revolution, are the factors that drove one of the most important social changes of the twentieth century – the increasing of gender equality and the gradual path to free union.22 Later, with the rise of fascism and Stalinism, many of these rights would be reversed until the victory of the resistance, both socialist and democratic, post-1945. The middle classes join the ranks of those discontent with governments; there is hunger, deprivation and a shortage of supplies because production is aimed at serving war, and because many workers leave the factories and join the belligerent armies. Production turns to weapons of destruction. There is no bread because there are no bakers. There are soldiers. In Germany, only two-thirds of the calories needed to stay alive were guaranteed and there were 750,000 deaths due to malnutrition.23 Vienna was probably the hardest hit city: ‘by 1917, a quarter of million people stood daily in one of 800 food lines spread throughout the city.’24 The black market expands, fuelled by inflation. 5

a people’s history of europe

This was the irrational but predictable conclusion of the first total war in history. The war wasn’t over by Christmas and it was devastating. It spread to Mesopotamia, Greece and Turkey with the break-up of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Although the number of cities with more than 100,000 inhabitants in Northern and Western Europe increased from 22 to 120 between 1800 and 1900,25 the massification of urban life, the exponential growth of the population, is a phenomenon that changes Europe only in the twentieth century. It is the century of population increase. Europe went from 279 million people in 1850 to 408 million in 1900 and then to 740 million in 2012. This would become one of the most important features of the last 100 years: the consolidation, even in southern countries, of the transition from rural to urban societies. This event radically changed life in society. Family unity was definitely swept away by industrialisation and war (though different, the family has nonetheless held a high place to this day, as Therborn has shown in his monumental global family history).26 Next to it, two other units evolve, which will play a central role in the European twentieth century: the political, conscious and organised collective; and the masses.27 Gramsci, the intellectual leader of the Italian Communist Party, reflects on the masses and parties, in the first case about the 1919–20 Italian workers’ uprising in the light of the Bolshevik socialist victory of 1917, and in the second about the Spanish historical defeat. In both cases, the relationships between leadership / consciousness / party and movement / spontaneity / masses are historically approached from a political horizon whose strategic focus is the constitution of a collective subject of social transformation.28 The experience of bureaucratisation (of separation between base and leadership) was also (more pessimistically) analysed by Robert Michels.29 It remains today as one of the most challenging aspects of society: how to avoid the bureaucratisation of the structures of social organisation? Let’s get back to war. At the time, even with villages separated by only a few miles, the peasants had little contact with one another – the absence of roads, transport and communications could mean that what is today a small journey would then take hours. Far more distant was the contact with central power – with the state – which they only met in the form of the tax collector, or forced recruitment for wars, or looting during conflicts. During the storm of war, these peasants would expe6

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

rience the first sense of belonging to a larger collective of their lives. Moreover, in 1917, they would defect en masse in many of the belligerent armies, and support the revolution in Russia – because they wanted to return to their plot, because their families could not survive without their work. The masses and the factory: the twentieth century would be the century of Fordism.30 There is an extraordinary expansion of the company/factory over these 120 years – including the service sector after the privatisation of the social functions of the state started in the 1980s, which created the ‘service industry’, with the transfer to hospitals, schools and public services of the working methods, time control, wages, etc. practised in the big factories.31 Gramsci writes in 1934 that: Taylor expresses with brutal cynicism the purpose of American society – developing in the worker to the highest degree automatic and mechanical attitudes, breaking up the old psycho-physical nexus of qualified professional work, which demands a certain active participation of intelligence, fantasy and initiative on the part of the worker, and reducing productive operations to the mechanical physical aspect.32 And on the other side of the ‘masses’, there is the anonymous society,33 whose origins date back to the seventeenth century. Not by chance, this is the name par excellence of the contemporary commercial society. But the name is not the thing. Companies might be anonymous societies, but they have an ID card, a bank account. Property, the supreme value of capitalist societies after the French Revolution, remains nevertheless a limited right (there is no unlimited right to property); although it is the most important right of Western legal systems, superposed to the right to life, since the right to the remuneration of capital overlaps with the right to employment on various occasions during the twentieth century.34 Access to property – land, communications, food, factories, machinery, raw materials – has been at the centre of Europe ’s most important conflicts ever since. Men mediated by stock titles that hide their social relationship, which do not appear as a relationship of dispute over what essential items are produced (and surplus, which allows them to expand the accumulation, the ‘investment’), but have appeared as a 7

a people’s history of europe

relationship mediated by abstract titles on distant stock exchanges since the modern age. Work appears today to many as an abstraction – but it is not. This is impossible in peasant societies, where the sense of collective production is concrete – ‘food does not fall on anyone’s table’. It is produced there, in front of the house. In village life, it is impossible not to understand that maintaining society depends on work and that if it is not fulfilled, vital needs will not be met. The same is not true in the city where the centrality of work is overshadowed by a complexification of social relations in which various forms of non-work such as rents, profits, family and state welfare (family or state aid via taxes) play a central role in European societies. Devalued in this way, labour only becomes central when, by virtue of its political and trade union organisations, this centrality is disputed in the field of political awareness – the awareness that nothing is as important to ensure the existence of humanity as labour. Everything is born and perishes from labour as man’s activity of mastery over nature, of creation35 – and from labour as a social relationship. This awareness – that workers have a decisive role to play in history – acquired an unusual dimension in Europe between the late nineteenth century and the first three decades of the twentieth century. If the revolutions of 1848 had already set in motion the workers of France and Germany, if the Paris Commune had shown the way for a non-proprietary class to seize power, at the dawn of the twentieth century, ‘working men and (to a much lesser extent) women made their presence felt in the public arena of most European countries’:36 in the first Russian Revolution of 1905; in the anarchist revolt of Barcelona in 1909, which became known as the ‘tragic week’; in Italy’s ‘red week’ in June 1914; and in the widespread strikes in France, Germany and England (there were 500 industrial conflicts in France between 1900 and 1915). In England, there was an unprecedented wave of strikes in 1911, and in Germany, 1 million workers took part in strikes in 1912. In 1914, the English and German unions had more than 2 million members, which would then correspond to 30 per cent of the male working force.37 In Portugal, the vigour of the workers’ press at the end of the monarchy and the beginning of the republic is unique in the country’s history, with hundreds of regular worker’s newspapers and magazines being published throughout this period. The French Socialist Party, first constituted as the French 8

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

Section of the Worker’s International to highlight the party’s internationalism, had 1.5 million votes in 1914. However, the entire labour movement was not all socialist. On the eve of the war, there was a battle in Europe between a reformist way, based on parliamentary institutions and the state, and the revolutionary way, driven by parties strongly influenced by Marxism, with the defence of the insurrectionary way based on organisations independent from the state.38

Resistance to war On 4 August 1914, Hugo Haase, the representative of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) – which just two months earlier, in June, had paraded in anti-war rallies – bowing to party discipline, spoke in parliament on behalf of the SPD, defending his party’s vote for the war loans. ‘We won’t abandon the Fatherland in the hour of danger’,39 he said, putting his party in the shadow of the Kaiser. It was the moral collapse of the socialists. The psychological impact of this action on millions of workers and the party that had grown uninterruptedly over 50 years, and its effect across Europe is devastating. Karl Liebknecht, a labour lawyer and revolutionary militant, is the only SPD MP to vote against the war loans. In the wake of the party’s crisis, he founded the Spartacist League with Rosa Luxemburg, which would later merge with the Independent Social Democratic Party of Germany (USPD). Later, they would found the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). The declaration of war is in stark contrast to the internationalist and solidary determination that had given rise to the first attempt to overcome nationalist pressures and organise workers internationally: the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), known as the First International, founded in 1864; and whose main promoter was Karl Marx, author of its inaugural speech: If the emancipation of the working classes requires their fraternal concurrence, how are they to fulfil that great mission with a foreign policy in pursuit of criminal designs, playing upon national prejudices, and squandering in piratical wars the people’s blood and treasure? … the immense and unresisted encroachments of that barbarous power 9

a people’s history of europe

… have taught the working classes the duty to master themselves the mysteries of international politics; to watch the diplomatic acts of their respective governments; to counteract them, if necessary, by all means in their power; when unable to prevent, to combine in simultaneous denunciations, and to vindicate the simple laws or morals and justice, which ought to govern the relations of private individuals, as the rules paramount of the intercourse of nations. The fight for such a foreign policy forms part of the general struggle for the emancipation of the working classes. Proletarians of all countries unite!40 The First International would fail only a few years later, in the 1870s, mainly because of the divisions regarding the strategy to be developed in relation to political power and the state,41 in a struggle between anarchism and socialism starring Bakunin and Marx. The Second International, also known as the Socialist International, follows this, and its most prominent driver would be Marx’s intellectual companion and comrade in arms, Friedrich Engels, the ‘general’. It would be founded – now that the proletariat objectively has grown – based on labour and socialist parties. The German SPD would be its strongest party at the dawn of the twentieth century. The adherence of the SPD and most socialist parties to First World War and national patriotism would crush the socialist world. It is the collapse of a giant. However, if war accelerates barbarism, it also boosts resistance. Almost all revolutions in the twentieth century (but not all)42 originated directly or indirectly in war – because they mobilise the whole of society and raises class tensions to the maximum. Therefore, if the Second International had yielded to nationalist and militaristic pressures, the same war generated, under the aegis of Bolshevik Russia, a leadership, a hope, with a worldwide vigour that did not exist until then in history. Countries were torn apart, but the labour movement had strengthened, among other reasons already mentioned, because millions of peasants at the front (where sometimes, by way of recruitment by village, whole regiments died!) became transformed from isolated farmers into a collective force, the army. The ‘sack of potatoes’, a metaphor used by Marx in a famous passage from The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, in which he charac10

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

terised the peasants as being together ‘much as potatoes in a sack of potatoes’, unable to assume a unified, prominent role in revolution, had been transformed into cohesive ‘mashed potatoes’ – the most interdependent collective in history, an army at war – where the life of each one depends on their collective action. To this, a number of leading cadres was added, organised in the strongest Socialist Party known to history, the Bolshevik Party: ‘for the first time in party history, one of them would be victorious.’43 The most profound and coherent historian of the Bolshevik Party, Pierre Broué, a Frenchman who died in 2005, insisted in his work that, in what concerns the Russian Revolution, we have to come out of a ‘historiography whose feelings oscillate between blind admiration and systematic slander.’44 He reminds us of the vitality, the dissension, the controversy, the democracy within the Party and also the individual role of its men, a number of rare and brilliant characters in contemporary political life who, although headed by Lenin, cannot be reduced to Lenin; Broué also reminds us of a party exceptionally rooted in the masses – the Pravda, created shortly before the war, which published in just one year 11,114 letters from workers’ correspondents. Out of a total of 2,770 issues in the daily, 110 will be the subject of legal proceedings; in total, its writers are sentenced to 472 months in prison and the fines amount to double the funds collected by the newspaper.45 This happened before the war, under the tsarist dictatorship. It was already a mass party, and the relationship with the avant-garde – later discredited by Stalinist ‘cult of personality’ – was only that of the inseparable and necessary relationship between intellectuals and workers,46 not the replacement of the basic social force by an enlightened leader, as it will be after 1927–28. In 1915, in the small village of Zimmerwald, Switzerland, a group of leaders who oppose the war gather and try to make communism into an international movement. On 5–8 September 1915, 36 delegates from 19 countries declared their readiness to fight for social revolution against war, for the defeat of their own countries and against pacifism. They could fit in four taxis. The manifesto is written by Leon Trotsky and defines the basis of the struggle against the ‘Sacred Union’. Another prominent leader, Christian Rakovsky, speaks at the end of the conference in favour of a Third International, assuming the death of 11

a people’s history of europe

the Second International, for having led the parties of its sister countries to take up arms against each other. The idea of a new International was initially unwelcome. Rakovsky would be slandered as a German agent, however, just two years later, the war fronts internationalise with the mass riots raised in the armies. The historian William Pelz argues that even using technology, the First World War may not have been the deadliest, but what ‘might not have been matched was the level of collective opposition to it.’47 In the USA, Eugene Debbs, one of the founders of America’s most egalitarian union, the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW), affectionately known as the Wobblies, with miners, farm wage earners, dockworkers, sailors who founded an internationalist union on 27 June 1905, speaks at his trial against the war. The IWW were at the origin of the song ‘Solidarity Forever’, the best-known working-class music after ‘The International’. Arrested, accused of violating the Espionage Act, which prohibited any public demonstration against the war, Debbs refuses to defend himself or have witnesses at the trial: I have been accused of obstructing the war. I admit it. Gentlemen, I abhor war. I would oppose war if I stood alone … I have sympathy with the suffering, struggling people everywhere. It does not make any difference under what flag they were born, or where they live…48 At Christmas 1914, French and German troops fraternise in the trenches, and are penalised. But it was not until April 1917 that the first mass ‘farewell to arms’49 of the First World War – 68 divisions, no less than half of the French army, refused to return to the front: death, agony, lice, tuberculosis – workers, peasants (now soldiers) were burying themselves alive in the mud and blood of the trenches. The response of the state was overwhelming: 500 death sentences and 49 executions. Some units rose with the red flag singing ‘The International’. They wanted to march on Paris, they shouted, ‘Long live the Revolution’, ‘Long live the Russians!’ They sang ‘The Song of Craonne’: ‘It’ll be your turn, you fat cats, / To go up onto the plateau. / ’Cause if you want to make war, / Then pay for it with your own skins.’50 Near Boulogne-sur-Mer, in Étaples, a rebellion of 100,000 English soldiers lasts five days. British officers used the ‘carrot-and-stick’ policy: they made concessions and executed the leaders to end the rebellion. 12

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

After the Caporetto military disaster on 24 October 1917 there was a ‘military strike’, Italian soldiers mutinied en masse. Spain was neutral but had a general strike on 15–18 August 1917, following which the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party’s historical leader Francisco Largo Caballero would be sentenced to life imprisonment. Mass defections in the armies in 1916 started undermining the reactionary nationalist basis of the leaderships of the labour movement, and forced it to evolve into pacifist, and in some cases, revolutionary positions. People were exhausted from the war – in the third year of war ‘appearances’, charlatanism, superstitions multiply and ‘religion emerges powerfully as an instrument of consolation’,51 and as an instrument of ‘national unity’. Marian movements would emerge or develop in numerous regions of Europe, linked to alleged ‘apparitions’, such as Fatima in Portugal or Lourdes in Southern France. More than 70 years later, Marx’s saying about religion echoed throughout Europe: ‘Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.’52 However, in the struggle against the war of wars stands the revolution of revolutions. The equation ‘nation equals state and state equals people’, which for the historian Eric Hobsbawm was the centre of the constitution of bourgeois nationalism after the French Revolution,53 would collapse here. The war would no longer be between nations, but instead be between the internationally united working class against the bourgeoisie of their nations – class struggle against the imperialist war.

Russia: the revolution of revolutions (1917) In Russia, a ‘de facto established armistice at the front’ was on the march.54 The Russian Revolution – daughter of the war – had begun in February 1917, at the hands of the St Petersburg textile workers demanding ‘bread’. While it is true that this was a time where the protagonists were mostly a male industrial workers’ movement, it is symbolic that the greatest social revolution in history, and the first victorious one, was begun with a female working-class section as the protagonists. Russia had about 170 million inhabitants, a declining rural aristocracy and church, and almost no middle sectors, making the state less able and resilient to resolve social conflicts. This absence of middle sectors caused a separation – without a damping social cushion – between the 13

a people’s history of europe

big landowners and the workers and peasants. A very concentrated industry numbered about 3 million workers, and only 5 per cent of the peasants owned their land; 12 per cent were considered wealthy (the kulak), but 40 per cent had no means to survive. This broth of contradictions would turn a peasant mass revolt calling for the end of the war and for access to land into the first proletarian uprising in history to seize power in an entire country.55 But what turned out to be central and which put an end to war was a revolution and a party, the Bolshevik: Unlike in Western Europe, there was an organized revolutionary party in Russia, the ‘Bolshevik’ POSDR, contrary to a ‘revolution in stages’, limited to parliamentary democracy; it was also the only Russian party that had faced the ‘Sacred Union’ of 1914. In the empire of the tsars, if the effect of war had been disastrous to the combative and revolutionary tendency of the working class revealed in the years before it, from the end of 1916 war itself became a factor of radicalization and acceleration of the pace of strikes. Industrialists were increasingly refusing to make concessions to workers, and the government continued to respond to every strike with a strong crackdown, prompting the proletariat to revive the idea of a general strike to end an increasingly unbearable social situation. The process of political radicalization of the working masses was convincingly expressed by the growing statistics of strikes and their nature: in the first two months of 1917, political strikes comprised six times more workers than economic strikes. Russia was once again the largest European and world center for struggle and working class activism. The greatest revolutionary storm of the age of capitalism was announced on the horizon of Asia, of Europe, of the world.56 Russia was the weakest link in the imperialist chain. Without the Russian Revolution, it is impossible to understand either the contemporary history of Europe or the history of the world from October 1917 to our day. In January 1917, Lenin declared, ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution.’57 On 18 February, two months later, the workers of the most important metal 14

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

factory in Petrograd – the city of Peter the Great – went on strike, which a week later turned into a general strike. As on the Bloody Sunday of the 1905 revolution – the ‘dress rehearsal’ for what lay ahead, the first Russian Revolution in the aftermath of the country’s defeat in the war against Japan – the tsar gives orders to shoot the protesters, but this time the troops refuse. The tsar-ordered massacre on 22 January 1905 that had killed in the square of the Winter Palace hundreds of workers who, led by Father Gapon, demanded a reduction in working hours and overtime, was not repeated. On the contrary, the soldiers now joined the protesters. ‘Russia finds itself in a dual power situation: the Provisional Government, emerging from the Empire Duma, and the Workers and Soldiers’ Committees (Soviets) that were formed during the strikes and the aborted repression.’58 A revolutionary process has as its essential characteristic the entry of the masses into the historical scene; and ‘the masses go into a revolution not with a prepared plan of social reconstruction, but with a sharp feeling that they cannot endure the old regime.’59 Classes are in conflict, and ‘the dynamic of revolutionary events is directly determined by swift, intense and passionate changes in the psychology of classes which have already formed themselves before the revolution.’60 The hope of the Russian Revolution – the subjective belief that change is possible – has no parallel in contemporary history. And perhaps no one has written it as clearly as the poet Mayakovsky, the most unpredictable and thunderous of artists, who wanted to bring ‘joy to the future ’. In his ‘Order No. 2 to the Army of the Arts’, he wrote, ‘There are no fools today / to crowd, open-mouthed, round a “maestro” / and await his pronouncement.’61 The future came from backwardness. ‘The fundamental and most stable feature of Russian history is the slow tempo of her development.’62 Unlike the western peoples, who when they were locked in natural boundaries created cities, economically and culturally dynamic poles, the peoples of the eastern plains, when they were blocked, migrated and conquered forests and steppes. Instead of prosperous merchants on their own initiative, they became mainly border guards or settlers. Russia’s economic, technical and military dependence on the West strengthened Tsarism and stagnation and this, in turn, acted as a brake on the development of the country. The fact that its state absorbed a greater amount of public wealth than in the West has condemned the masses to greater 15

a people’s history of europe

misery and deprived the strongly bureaucratised privileged classes of strength.63 Leon Trotsky exposes his theory of uneven and combined development,64 central to all his work and which will be one of the most important influences on Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system theory,65 trying to answer the question: how did the proletariat come to power in such a backward country? Backward countries ‘assimilate the material and ideological achievements of the advanced countries’ and ‘skip’ stages. Capitalism that ‘accomplished the universality of the development of mankind’ excludes the repetition of forms of development in backward countries. This theory makes it possible to understand why it was in backward Russia that the first workers’ state that humankind has known was created, skipping the democratic stage, led by the bourgeoisie: The privilege of historic backwardness – and such a privilege exists – permits, or rather compels, the adoption of whatever is ready in advance of any specified date, skipping a whole series of intermediate stages. Savages throw away their bows and arrows for rifles all at once, without travelling the road which lay between those two weapons in the past.66 But this privilege, Trotsky points out, is limited by the country’s economic and cultural conditions. The American intellectual George Novack, in a systematisation of Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, claims that the ‘great backwardness that had strengthened the revolution and propelled the Russian masses to the head of the rest of the world then became the starting point of the political reaction and the bureaucratic counterrevolution’67 – that is, since the rise of Stalinism from the late 1920s. Despite the efforts of liberal historiography to equate Lenin with Stalin, this does not pass the test of fact – Lenin’s last fight in his life is a one-year political struggle to oust Stalin from power.68 But it is also fact that the backwardness of Russia – together with the frustration of the German Revolution69 – made the country succumb in the 1930s to a Thermidor70 to the Moscow Trials and to make it impossible for the USSR to make a decisive contribution to preventing the Second World War by expanding the revolution to Germany, Spain and France in the 1920s and 1930s.71 16

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

However, let us get back to the jump from ‘arrow to the rifle ’: in 1914, companies with over 1,000 workers occupied 17.8 per cent of all workers in the USA and 41.4 per cent in Russia (44.4 per cent in Petrograd and 57.3 per cent in Moscow). This highly concentrated working class comes from the countryside abruptly, violently breaking with what existed before, without passing a phase of gradual transformations as in England or France, the two countries that inaugurated the era of bourgeois revolutions and initiated capitalist economic modernisation, pari passu with the gradual modernisation of the state. Russia had the most backward of political regimes. On the eve of its fall, oracles, magicians, mystics and saints surrounded the tsar and tsarina, the most famous of whom was Rasputin, a charlatan who had gained status as a state councillor until he was assassinated in 1916. In the turbulence of war and revolution that knocked him down, Nicholas drinks tea, walks, rides a horse, rows a boat on the lake … In the tsar’s diary, in the days preceding the opening of the State Duma, he wrote: ‘Took a walk in a thin shirt and took up paddling again. Had tea in a balcony.’72 Months later, when the same body was dissolved, the comments do not differ: July 9. Sunday. It has happened! The Duma was closed today. At breakfast after Mass long faces were noticeable among many … The weather was fine. On our walk we met Uncle Misha who came over yesterday from Gatchina. Was quietly busy until dinner and all evening. Went padding in a canoe.73 On the tsarina’s side, politics seems to be less festive. She tells the tsar: ‘Russia loves to feel the whip. That is their nature!’74 War initially had a role in retarding the revolution, but a moment later, it strengthened the revolutionary elements. Between 1903 and 1917, the number of political strikers ranged from 4,000 in 1910 to 600,000 in 1906, but with two major peaks of 1,843,000 in 1905 (the year of the revolution) and 1,059,000 in 1914. The workers went on strike. Between them and the soldiers, there began to be a mutual trust. By this time, the Bolshevik leadership still followed behind the events – and so it would remain until April 1917. In the first week of April, 8,000 soldiers defected from the northern and western fronts, mostly mujiks, who wanted land … to live on before 17

a people’s history of europe

perishing on the war front. The driving force of the process is the Soviets. The tsar abdicates and forms a provisional government headed by Prince Lvov. But it is one thing to form government, and another to be able to govern. In Russia, there was the memory, the know-how, of the organisation of committees or councils, the Soviets, since the 1905 revolution. The Petrograd Soviet had been particularly important because its leaders had participated in the War Industries Committee. The Petrograd Soviet, after the February democratic revolution, becomes a grass-roots parliament where there is non-stop, day-and-night political debate and non-stop delegations from all over Russia are welcomed.75 When the Congress of Soviets from all over Russia met in April 1917, there were delegates from 138 local soviets, seven from the army, and 26 from the war front units.76 In this period, the Soviets multiply (the bases are more radical than the Bolsheviks themselves, demanding, from the Vyborg district of St Petersburg, the removal of the liberal bourgeoisie representatives from the Provisional Government). There is a situation of duality of powers. The duality of powers is: a situation in which the class which is called to realise the new social system, although not yet master of the country, has actually concentrated in its hands a significant share of the state power, while the official apparatus of the government is still in the hands of the old lords.77 This fractionation of power has a time limit that foreshadows civil war or revolutionary defeat. Recalling the difficulty that all revolutionary processes raise in theorising a definition common to these moments of social transformation and the diversity of factors that characterise a revolutionary situation, Charles Tilly chose to use the existence of dual power as the defining element of revolution.78 Trotsky, in his study of the Russian Revolution, highlighted three elements that characterise a situation as revolutionary: entrance into the scene of millions of mobilised workers; the attraction of the intermediate sectors of society by the organisations and methods of struggle of the working classes; and a national crisis (Trotsky would later add to this definition the existence of a revolutionary party). 18

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

In short, a revolutionary situation would be a political process characterised by the emergence of vast sectors of the population (the workers and middle classes) that alter the relationship of forces between social classes, within a framework of national crisis (decay). Valério Arcary, in his investigation of twentieth-century revolutions, proposes the distinction of two types of revolutions: political revolutions and social revolutions. In the former, political power changes; in the second, economic power changes hands, that is, private property is questioned. By analogy with the Russian Revolution, he classifies these political revolutions as ‘February revolutions’; and the social ones as ‘October revolutions’. According to this criterion, most of the revolutions of the twentieth century – the century of human history in which there have been the most revolutions – are political revolutions, objectively (but not subjectively) anti-capitalist, which came to a halt in the ‘February’ phase, that is, they could not undermine the private ownership of the means of production, among other factors, due to the weakness of their political leaderships.79 Against the wishes of the younger and working-class party bases, their leaders, especially Kamenev and Stalin, still did not question the Provisional Government. Lenin returns to Russia at the beginning of April 1917 and stands against these leaders. He presents the document that became known as the ‘April Theses’, which opposed the government and the war. But the Theses went further. The revolution was not limited to democratic tasks. On 4 April, Lenin addressed the Bolshevik Party Congress. Following the April Theses, Lenin is treated by the Bolshevik leaders, the Provisional Government and Pravda as a ‘disorientated’ leader who had been long outside Russia and did not understand that it was not possible to go beyond a democratic revolution. But Lenin eventually, supported mainly by the younger sector, won the party for his policy at the conference held in Petrograd on 24–29 April. From April to July, the Bolshevik Party grows with the radicalisation of the revolution: in Petrograd in June, it counts 15,000 members. On 2 July 1917, several spontaneous demonstrations began in Petrograd, which on 3–4 July gathered more than 500,000 soldiers and workers. The Bolshevik Party argued that it was too early for an insurrection. The problem was not so much that of seizing power – the real problem was having the social strength to preserve it. 19

a people’s history of europe

The demonstrations of those early days of July were defeated. This was followed by a series of repressive measures on the workers and soldiers and on the Bolshevik Party, which although initially against the demonstrations, when they took place, led them. Pravda’s headquarters were destroyed, Lenin was slandered as a German agent and forced to go underground, and Trotsky himself, who was formally not yet a member of the Bolshevik Party, was arrested. Despite the defeat, the party lost no cadres and eventually strengthened itself. From the July Days to the October uprising, almost four months elapse – a short time in history, if we were not talking about a revolution, because in a revolutionary process four months is a long time. It was time enough for the bourgeoisie to prepare its last attempt to halt the revolutionary process by trying a coup led by General Kornilov, which was defeated by the workers and the soldiers. Once again, the Bolshevik Party comes out reinforced from this struggle. Revolutionary socialists and Mensheviks are losing ground. They try to channel the revolution into a pre-parliament. The Bolshevik Party even approves of participating in this pre-parliament, but under pressure from Trotsky, Lenin, Sverdlov and Stalin himself, they retreat and refuse to participate. The Bolshevik Party had now over 170,000 members; in Petrograd alone, there were over 40,000 militants. In September and October, the peasant war against the landlords radicalises. According to Lenin and Trotsky, the conditions for the insurrection were met: the peasants had lost confidence in the revolutionary socialists – who at the time of confiscating land to the nobles had tried to restrict the peasant movement – and the Bolsheviks were now the majority in the Soviets. There are political differences within the Bolshevik Party (Kamenev and Zinoviev oppose the insurrection). Lenin calls for the insurrection to be ‘now, now’; military preparations for the insurrection are made. A few days later, the Bolshevik-led seizure of power takes place. The seizure of power was symbolised by the assault on the Winter Palace, by the Neva River in Petrograd. Across the river is the Peter and Paul Fortress. In the semicircle that today is used by millions of tourists to visit the Hermitage Museum, housed in this sumptuous palace, more than 50 workers were machine-gunned by the Tsar’s troops on Bloody Sunday. A bomb had exploded there, this time in an attack by a cabinetmaker in 1881. In 1879, a student, Soloviev, shot Tsar Alexander II here. 20

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

Kerensky was there, in October 1917, when on 25 October at dawn, he was deposed. The fabulous theory of the coup d’état cannot be sustained – this was a mass-determined process, perhaps the most mass-determined that history has known.80 A few days before the seizure of power, Kerensky had recognised: ‘The Russian people,’ he said bitterly, ‘are suffering from exhaustion and disappointment with regard to the Allies. The world thinks the revolution has come to an end. Do not believe this: the Russian Revolution has barely begun.’81 People do not make revolution eagerly any more than they do war. There is this difference, however, that in war compulsion plays the decisive rôle, in revolution there is no compulsion except that of circumstances. A revolution takes place only when there is no other way out.82

The Russian Revolution ‘went as far as it could’ For a little over five years, political figures of historic projection and worldwide reach have emerged in revolutionary France that in other times the whole world would have taken a century or more to produce. Only the Russian Revolution, between 1917 and 1923, achieved a similar feat (but without equaling it). The Revolution went as far as it could in the historical conditions in which it happened.83 Peace, Land, Bread, Freedom – the peace decree, even though Russia lost vast areas of territory, land for peasants, the decree on workers’ control and the expropriation/nationalisation of banking and the financial sector. By direct action, workers immediately instituted the eight-hour day, firing the managers who had persecuted them during the iron dictatorship backed by the tsar’s political police, the Okhrana. Wages rose several times until 1927, and they assumed control of production.84 What the revolution has given to the world, the sacrifice of these workers, peasants and leaders, is great. The burden was borne more by the Russian workers than by the Western workers. Although the workers of the West were also not without struggles and suffering, in both the First World War or the Second World War, however, the Russians paid a heavier price. In a study on the evolution of working hours in Europe 21

a people’s history of europe

during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Pietro Basso recalls that in Europe only for two moments was there a real reduction in working hours. We add that these were after the Russian Revolution in 1917– 1919 and the fights of the 1960s, and after the Carnation Revolution in the 1970s in southern Europe.85 None of the works that made use of the USSR archives opened after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989–90 sustains the liberal view that equates the period of revolution with Stalinism: ‘It was workers’ trust and involvement in workplace institutions that gave the factory regime an essential degree of legitimacy’86 and led them to join the Bolshevik Party en masse – the same workers who left the party after 1928. The Land Code and the Family Code, while scarcely enforced in reality due to extreme poverty, extended women’s rights as never before; as did free union, the end of persecution of homosexuals, care of children socialised with day-care centres, public laundries, protection of single mothers and the right to abortion.87 Leon Trotsky was not only a general, nor mainly a general, but was a political leader who led the troops mobilising their enthusiastic commitment to a strategic political project. On board an armored convoy, he headed an army rebuilt on the occasion that defeated 14 invading armies, the ‘white armies’. At the height of the civil war, the Red Army had as many as 5 million men and women – willing to fight for socialism after having deserted, by the thousands, the imperialist war. But this was compounded by objective factors of the enemies’ weakness: the ‘whites’ did not carry out agrarian reform in the territories under their jurisdiction, and did not question the hierarchy of the clergy and the old generals. They therefore had little support among the peasants, who supported the Bolsheviks. Why did the most important social revolution in the history of mankind, which gained the most rights, inside and outside Russia, end in the bloodbath of the forced collectivisation of the 1930s, the Moscow processes and the physical annihilation of the Bolshevik Party’s Central Committee and the emergence of hundreds of thousands of forced labourers? Charles Tilly’s studies gave much importance to the relationship between revolutions and macrostructural factors. This author argues that understanding the causes and outcome of revolutions should not be isolated ‘from the (country’s) position in the system of relations between 22

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

states.’88 The isolation of the Russian Revolution, the solidarity of the capitalist countries in coordinating a common invasion of Russia and, above all, the defeat of the German Revolution led to the creation of a monster – bureaucratism, embodied in Stalin’s figure, but far beyond it (even to 1989).89 All works of history of the Russian Revolution written before 1937 were removed from circulation and the mere fact of reading or having them at home was punishable by law in 1947.90 In the USSR, [d]uring the 17th Congress, Kaganovich will offer unquestionable proof of this, by stating that the Moscow wagon factory has 601 managers, of which 367 are divided into fourteen head offices and the remaining 234 are employed in the different workshops, all of which is inherent in a company employing 3,832 workers…91 Lenin often said about the Russian Revolution of 1917, which he himself led, that it was ‘a terrible misfortune that the honour of beginning the first Socialist revolution should have befallen to the most backward people in Europe.’92 At the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth century, peasant Russia produced almost one-third less than German agriculture and almost one-quarter less than English agriculture.93 Writing about the civil war, one of the leaders of the Communist International, Victor Serge, recalls that it was not the 14 foreign armies that demoralised them most, but ‘typhus and famine’.94 Capitalism allowed, by breaking down the barriers of the closed feudal or semi-feudal system, to introduce competition, the internal market, wage labour, driving the greatest leap in the development of the productive forces of all mankind.95 However, in the final third of the nineteenth century, the first great depression (1870) was already showing signs of a clutched engine: ‘By showing the existence of an absolute surplus of capital without objective conditions to feed the valuation circuit, the burning of wealth becomes an imperative of capital metabolism,’96 that is, war and barbarism, production for destruction will be the main and most catastrophic fact of the twentieth century – two world wars killed 70 to 80 million people, in a violent political process of ‘liquidation of value’ – ‘the destruction of wealth is the only means of restoring the conditions for the resumption of the accumulation process’.97 As Chris Harman reminds us, imperialism is not just a stage in history in which 23

a people’s history of europe

there is a dispute for colonies, it is ‘a system whose logic was total militarisation and total war, regardless of the social dislocation this caused.’98 The twentieth century will still be marked by three major depressions: 1929, when world capitalism succumbed and sought salvation in the Second World War; 1970–73, with the end of Bretton Woods; and 2008, when state intervention saved the world’s largest banks and industries of major countries, including the USA, England, Germany and France, leading to a real wage drop of between 25 per cent in the USA and 30–40 per cent in southern Europe.99 But this economic characteristic of the capitalist mode of accumulation in the twentieth century – the inevitable and successive crises – will go hand in hand with the political and social revolutions. The twentieth century was the most revolutionary century in all of human history: Russian Revolution of 1905, Republican Revolution in Portugal, 1910, Mexican Revolution of 1910, Irish Revolution of 1916, Russian Revolution of 1917, ‘Bolshevik Triennium’, Spain 1917–20, Red Biennium, Italy 1919–20, Hungarian Revolution of 1919, German Revolution of 1919, German Revolution of 1923, Austrian Revolution of 1934, Spanish Revolution of 1934–36, Indonesian Revolution of 1946–49, Chinese Revolution of 1949, Bolivian Revolution of 1952, 1953 uprising in the German Democratic Republic, Hungarian Revolution of 1956, Cuban Revolution of 1959, all anti-colonial revolutions, most importantly Vietnam, France’s May 68, the Prague Spring of 1968, the Hot Autumn of 1969 in Italy, the Portuguese Revolution of 1974–75, the Nicaraguan Revolution of 1979, the Iranian Revolution of 1979… The twentieth century is the century of the greatest number of revolutions and counter-revolutions in the whole of human history, as Karl Marx had predicted in the pamphlet he wrote with Friedrich Engels for the founding of the International, The Communist Manifesto100 – never had a century seen so many revolutions happen, democratic and social, as the twentieth century.101 But the twentieth century had more ‘February’ revolutions (that changed political regimes) than ‘Octobers’ (revolutions that questioned the bourgeois state).102 There were many revolutionary crises after the ‘Februarys’ that were similar in dimension to the Russian October, with divisions within the military, dual power with the creation of workers’ councils, occupation of factories and expropriations – but in most of them, the workers did not seize power. And in the countries where they 24

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

did, class struggle receded and gave way to new forms of hierarchy or, in isolated cases, scarcity incompatible with socialism, as was the case in Cuba. Valerio Arcary argues that: the revolutionary processes that triumphed and went to expropriation of the bourgeoisie (Yugoslavia, Albania, China, Korea, Vietnam, Cuba) contradicted three predictions of classical Marxism: 1) the proletariat was not their main social subject; agrarian revolutions were predominant, with strong peasant protagonism; 2) plural self-organization or direct democracy did not exist, the form of dual territorial power predominated, through revolutionary armies or militarily centralized guerrillas, and after the conquest of power, a uniform evolution towards one-party dictatorial regimes; 3) the internationalist strategy had no greater importance; on the contrary, intense nationalism prevailed, except for the Cuban revolution in its early years.103 But revolutions, the author goes on, are crucial in explaining the reforms: Only when seriously threatened by the revolutionary danger – as the Paris Commune or the two revolutionary waves following the October Revolution in Russia – did the capitalists agree to compromise … The historical project of capitalist reform has failed again and again and again.104 This statement is particularly brutal today when 1 per cent of the population has the same wealth as the remaining 99 per cent.105 The Russian Revolution succumbed to the Stalinist Thermidor, but one cannot mix revolution – until 1927 – with counter-revolution. All was open in the 1920s Europe, the germs of the dictatorship that consolidated, the restoration of capitalism that followed – but also the seed of an equal and free society. It remains open, that is, historical today.

The empire where ‘the sun never set and the blood never dried’ However, the first of the imperialist countries to go into crisis on the brink of war-weariness was not Russia, but the United Kingdom, with the Easter revolt in Ireland – the dawn of contemporary anti-colonial 25

a people’s history of europe

revolutions.106 The Indian National Movement would follow. And the first Chinese revolution, started with the student revolt and the boycott of Japanese products. The colonial world also rose in Mexico, North Africa and the Middle East – global war also meant global resistance. Countries hitherto linked by feeble ties were inextricably linked together in barbarism and in the struggle against it.107 The Indian National Movement, like all anti-colonial movements of this period, is characterised by the emergence of a local bourgeoisie seeking an independent state that can protect its interests against foreigners or, as has become more common, split the share of local riches between a foreign bourgeoisie and a native bourgeoisie submitted to it. But in India, as well as in China, the local bourgeoisie was not prepared to support its struggle in a revolution whose social base was the workers. That is why they seek bridges of negotiation with the dominant metropolises. Gandhi, for example, perhaps the most cited pacifist in the world, would support Indian participation in the First World War … because patriotism and negotiation with British elites spoke louder than the fear of the poor taking power. It is important to remember what Asia was then – in absolute terms, the East could already count on 2.6 million urban workers in India and 1.5 million in China.108 They were more afraid of these workers than of the outcome of agreements with British colonialism, which would always leave local elites in a subordinate position. Threatened, the English empire, ‘where the sun never sets and the blood never dries’, in the ironic expression of Ernest Jones, the leader of English Chartism,109 faced the strongest resistance in India. Admittedly, it also learned there to negotiate with the local bourgeois factions, demonstrating an elasticity of the British state to negotiate perhaps without parallel in contemporary history – that is, to this day, no contemporary central country has managed the struggles between its fractions of power as well as the British. France was driven to brutal wars in Algeria and Indochina. Portugal prolonged a war against the colonial peoples for 13 years (1961–1974).110 Even after the transition in 1978, Spain failed to hold its local bourgeoisie together, expressed in the nationalism of its peoples that would assert itself vigorously with the Catalan crisis of late 2017. England succeeded, from India in 1920 to Scotland in 2017, in maintaining an unusual internal balance of power, in the words of historian Perry Anderson: ‘The power structure of 26

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

English society today can be most accurately described as an immensely elastic and all-embracing hegemonic order.’111 Let’s go back to 1917–19. Nothing was easy in India, even with state elasticity. As John Newsinger, author of The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire, recalls: Here the war had ‘meant misery and a fall in living standards for the majority of the Indian people’, although inevitably some businessmen and industrialists had made ‘fabulous profits’. This led to an explosion of trade union militancy and social unrest that the viceroy, Lord Chelmsford, was to describe as ‘a sort of epidemic strike fever’. In March 1918 there was a textile strike in Ahmedabad and in January 1919 over 100,000 textile workers struck in Bombay with many other workers, from clerks to dockers also coming out.112 In 1920–21, 1.5 million workers took part in over 200 strikes. The crisis of colonialism in post-war European nations had a particular dimension in the Middle East and North Africa. T.E. Lawrence, ‘Lawrence of Arabia’, a British diplomat and spy immortalised in David Lean’s 1962 film, would write in 1920: ‘The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour.’113 The alternative was for the colonised peoples to lose their dignity and honour. That is how, after the control of Iraq was confirmed by the League of Nations in 1920, and after great clashes in Kurdistan in 1919, the British found themselves in what some considered to be the greatest military campaign of the inter-war period, a war of guerrilla that England crushed and ended in 1921 with almost 2,000 British dead and wounded and more than 10,000 of the resistance. The Hashemite leader, ‘Faisal, was installed as king, after a rigged referendum, in August 1921. The British controlled the country by means of this client regime until 1958.’114 China, internally dominated by large landowners and externally by a form of protectorate of the Western powers and Japan, will have its first great uprising in 1919. The May 4 Movement, formed in that year at Peking University, will broaden from students to Shanghai workers in 1921, starting a boycott of Japanese products – the longest in memory. The foreign policy of the USSR would push a national 27

a people’s history of europe

front alliance between the newly created Communist Party of China, to which Mao Zedong already belonged; he would be the leader of the Chinese post-war revolution in 1949, and the nationalist Kuomintang, led by Chiang Kai-shek. But, in 1927, the Kuomintang help to crush the communist uprising of Shanghai, sealing the divide between them. Mao would react to the ‘Chinanisation’ of the Chinese Communist Party, that is, by adopting a progressive policy of support for the peasant guerrilla, and by building local structures with a social dynamic, providing services and organising collective life, which allowed them to recruit dedicated military support from the peasants to fight. In Mexico, the revolution stands against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz, linked to US interests. The revolt has its best-known and most caricatural expression when Emiliano Zapata and Pancho Villa seize power, allowing themselves to be photographed sitting on the chair of power at the Palace on 6 December 1914 and … leaving it immediately. They had no political strategy to match their social and military might. This was portrayed by filmmaker Elia Kazan in Viva Zapata! (1952). Of course, the caricature referred to the backwardness of the country. Let us look at what John Reed wrote about this: It was amusing to speculate what the Mexican Renaissance would have been if it had not come so late. But already around the narrow shores of the Mexican Middle Ages beat the great seas of modern life – machinery, scientific thought, and political theory. Mexico will have to skip for a time her Golden Age of Drama.115 Reed interviewed Pancho Villa in Mexico. Villa eventually treated Reed as a ‘bore’ because he kept asking him over whether he could or could not be president of Mexico. He said: I am a fighter, not a statesman. I am not educated enough to be President. I only learned to read and write two years ago. How could I, who never went to school, hope to be able to talk with the foreign ambassadors and the cultivated gentlemen of the Congress? It would be bad for Mexico if an uneducated man were to be President. There is one thing that I will not do, and that is to take a position for which I am not fitted.116 28

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

The Mexican Revolution has achieved important reforms, such as the right to reduce the working day to eight hours, the right to strike and the expropriation of land to distribute to hitherto miserable peasants. In Ireland, India, China, Mexico – formally independent of Spain since 1820 but dependent on the USA now, in Egypt, colonial peoples rose. The war had transformed the class composition of these countries. The middle sectors, the students and the intellectuals now had a powerful ally – the industrial working class swelled by war production, and the peasants turned into soldiers – concentrated in large conglomerates like Shanghai, Calcutta or Bombay and, of course, Moscow and St Petersburg.

The failed German Revolution (1919–23) The Soviet revolution and its repercussions on the European socialist revolutions (German, Hungarian and later Spanish), the great depression that begins in 1929, the counter-revolution and rise of fascism, the Spanish Revolution and the Spanish Civil War, the unsuccessful popular front policies in France (1936–39) and the New Deal and the war economy, on the eve of Second World War … shows how history speeds up. Transformation, the binomial crisis and revolution, seems to emerge around every corner. This swift acceleration of class struggle, which changes social relations sometimes in days, as opposed to the long and slow time period of stability – of non-change – has led some historians to classify this period as a long ‘European civil war’. Eric Hobsbawm117 and Paul Preston,118 two of the foremost contemporary British historians, defended, albeit with different analytical eyes, this historical approach of this period. It might have been seen as pertinent for Preston and Hobsbawm to include in the same historical-analytical process the events that began with the Russian Revolution and the end of the First World War (1917–18) and the beginning of the Spanish Civil War and the beginning of the Second World War (1936–39). We believe this is a mistaken view because it assumes a line of continuity between 1914 and 1945, which never really existed. Between the First World War and the Second World War, there were profound ruptures that could have prevented the rise of Nazism. Moreover, is it pertinent to compare the 10 million deaths from the First 29

a people’s history of europe

World War to the 60 million of the Second World War? Fifty per cent of those killed in the Second World War were civilians, compared to 5 per cent in the First World War – is this comparable?119 Can one compare deaths in the trenches with the industrialisation of death in Nazi death camps? Quantity becomes quality – nothing in human history is comparable to the Second World War. It is controversial whether or not a historian can risk saying what could have happened – that is called a ‘counterfactual’ exercise. But no one questions the fact that history is the result of a non-teleological process, that is, complex situations that result in various hypotheses among a series of plausible hypotheses. We do not know what the world would have been like without the Second World War but we may wonder if the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s or the French popular front of 1936 had brought the proletariat to power in both countries and if had there not been the ‘war games’ between 1936 and 1939 that paved the way for Nazism and that in 1939 and 1940 caused the working class to watch paralysed its military advance, whether the Second World War could have been avoided. How would the USSR, already bureaucratised under the Stalinist dictatorship, have reacted to a workers’ seizure of power in Western Europe? We cannot risk saying what would have happened, but hypotheses can be put on the table: if revolutionary Spain and France had won, or Austria in 1934, would Hitler have marched on Poland and Czechoslovakia? Would the French workers, who did not react and trusted the Maginot Line, have watched the German threats unabashedly if their parties were in power with a programme of expropriations and collective control of the means of production? We do not know. However, we do know that what happened was not inevitable. It would be just as wrong to say that socialism is inevitable as it would be to assume that it is impossible. It would be wrong to claim that the Second World War was the natural course of history, when history is unnatural – it is historical. How would the German proletariat, with the largest communist party in the world, who were incarcerated in 1933, have reacted if it had seen a new revolutionary impulse with a chance of winning? Let us look at the words of the historian Osvaldo Coggiola in this regard: 30

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

The Second World War, as well as the First, was inscribed in the international economic and political relations of the period, but it was not (neither was the first one) inevitable. Its outbreak depended on political factors, first of all the political capacity of the working masses to oppose it, making internationalist solidarity prevail against the belligerent nationalism of the ruling classes in each country. The political leaderships of the working class, however, failed again (the revolutionary nuclei, such as the IV International (Trotskyist) failed to overcome the embryonic or very minority stage).120 What is certain is that the one who today appears as a hero of the defeat of Nazi-fascism, Stalin, after 26 million deaths in the territories of the USSR, or the leaders of the state resistance in liberal democracies – Churchill, Roosevelt, De Gaulle (and to none of these leaders can be denied their efforts in conducting the war against Hitler) – would have another name. A hero called ‘revolution’ who would have avoided war? And those who died – 80 million if we count those who died from cold and hunger – would have survived. But it did not happen. It can be said, looking at the agreements between the Nazi state and the allies, and the USSR and the allies, between 1938 and 1939, that Hitler was defeated not by them, but in spite of them. Let us recall here the words of the George Orwell, who fought in the Spanish Civil War: To win over the working class permanently, the Fascists would have to raise the general standard of living, which they are unable and probably unwilling to do. The struggle of the working class is like the growth of a plant. The plant is blind and stupid, but it knows enough to keep pushing upwards towards the light, and it will do this in the face of endless discouragements. What are the workers struggling for? Simply for the decent life which they are more and more aware is now technically possible. … When one thinks of the cruelty, squalor and futility of war – and in this particular case of the intrigues, the persecutions, the lies and the misunderstandings – there is always the temptation to say: ‘One side is as bad as the other. I am neutral’. In practice, however, one cannot be neutral, and there is hardly such a thing as a war in which it makes no difference who wins. Nearly always one stands more or less for 31

a people’s history of europe

progress, the other side more or less for reaction. The hatred which the Spanish Republic excited in millionaires, dukes, cardinals, playboys, Blimps, and what-not would in itself be enough to show one how the land lay. In essence it was a class war. If it had been won, the cause of the common people everywhere would have been strengthened. It was lost, and the dividend-drawers all over the world rubbed their hands. That was the real issue; all else was froth on its surface … The outcome of the Spanish war was settled in London, Paris, Rome, Berlin – at any rate not in Spain.121 As throughout Europe, workers’ unrest is growing at the end of the war. In Italy, a series of factory committees have been created, elected at the base, with revocable terms. In 1918, these committees became central to Italian politics. In 1919, a revolutionary situation opened in Italy, the Red Biennium (Biennio Rosso), the Italian revolution, was marked by a wave of strikes and demonstrations that would be organised by these councils. In 1920, half a million workers controlled the factories in Italy. Analysing worker control in the revolutionary Red Biennium of 1920–21 in Italy, when Giolitti, the head of government, faced with the occupation of factories in September 1920, presented a draft worker control bill to the Chamber of Deputies, Antonio Gramsci wrote: For the communists, tackling the problem of control means … tackling the problem of workers’ power over the means of production, and hence that of conquering State power. … Any law in this respect which emanates from bourgeois power has just one significance and just one value: it means that in reality, and not just in words, the terrain of the class struggle has changed. And insofar as the bourgeoisie is compelled to make concessions and create new juridical institutions on the new terrain, it has the real value of demonstrating an organic weakness of the ruling class.122 Staggeringly, the socialists would open space for reaction, by not supporting a power parallel to the state born from these councils. The State – all states are more or less coercive – has the essential elements of the organisation of collective life, the management of society, which were exercised by these councils, the only ones with the strength and capacity to provide basic needs, organise labour and pro32

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

duction, ensure essential biological reproduction (canteens, nurseries, etc.), supplies, their distribution in cities, etc. Either the State, disputed by various sectors, was strengthened, or an alternative power was created. The illusion of negotiating with various interests led the socialists to drain the workers’ movement of the councils. The balance between classes failed, it was a chimera, because in the post-war economic crisis, the fascists were willing to take power without compromise. The dominant sectors of the Italian, and then the German, bourgeoisie would rather be ruled by ‘madmen’ than lose ownership of the means of production. Italy was the first to organise fasci di combattimento – well-prepared militias, with technical knowledge acquired in the war – to harass, frighten and assassinate labour leaders along the industrialised valley of the Po. Italian fascism was born – led by Benito Mussolini. After the March on Rome on 28 October 1922, where they arrived by train, there was no march (it all boiled down to a theatrical staging without resistance from the socialists), the first European totalitarian government came to power.123 The fate of the Russian Revolution cannot be understood without understanding the defeat of the German Revolution and European revolutions in the early 1920s. But these fundamentally political defeats cannot be understood either without understanding that alongside this lack of political strategy of the labour movement of the central countries was the economic boom of the 1920s. The ‘orgy of profits’ of the 1920s – the total value of shares went from 27 to 67 billion between 1925 and 1929 – came to an end with the largest economic crisis in memory, the 1929 crisis. In the USA, 200 companies owned 50 per cent of commercial and industrial capital and 2,000 people controlled all these investments. Taylorism – the division, simplification of tasks and standardisation of production – increased productivity by up to 30 per cent, increasing credit and consumption. In order to increase consumption, advertising developed against the previous ‘consumer puritanism’.124 Being a citizen or a citizen consumer appeared to be – although they are not – equivalent. In this decade of post-war expansion, not coincidentally called the ‘roaring twenties’ (in some countries, the ‘crazy twenties’), coal production rose by 20 per cent, electricity by 100 per cent and US industrial output rose from an 33

a people’s history of europe

index of 58 in 1921 to 99 in 1928. ‘GDP increases by 23%, but capital income by 62%’.125 The Church was another powerful ally of social stability in the 1920s. At the roots of the social doctrine that called for the rejection of class struggle was the social theory of the church, inspired by Pope Leo XIII’s encyclical Rerum Novarum of 1891. It deserves a long quote because it will become sort of a ‘bible’ to this day for those who, in defence of the ruling order, want to distance themselves from class struggle: In any case we clearly see, and on this there is general agreement, that some opportune remedy must be found quickly for the misery and wretchedness pressing so unjustly on the majority of the working class: for the ancient workingmen’s guilds were abolished in the last century, and no other protective organization took their place. Public institutions and the laws set aside the ancient religion. Hence, by degrees, it has come to pass that workingmen have been surrendered, isolated and helpless, to the hardheartedness of employers and the greed of unchecked competition. The mischief has been increased by rapacious usury, which, although more than once condemned by the Church, is nevertheless, under a different guise, but with like injustice, still practiced by covetous and grasping men. To this must be added that the hiring of labor and the conduct of trade are concentrated in the hands of comparatively few; so that a small number of very rich men have been able to lay upon the teeming masses of the laboring poor a yoke little better than that of slavery itself. To remedy these wrongs the socialists, working on the poor man’s envy of the rich, are striving to do away with private property, and contend that individual possessions should become the common property of all, to be administered by the State or by municipal bodies. They hold that by thus transferring property from private individuals to the community, the present mischievous state of things will be set to rights, inasmuch as each citizen will then get his fair share of whatever there is to enjoy. But their contentions are so clearly powerless to end the controversy that were they carried into effect the working man himself would be among the first to suffer. They are, moreover, emphatically unjust, for they would rob the lawful possessor, distort the functions of the State, and create utter confusion in the community.126 34

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

While the Catholic Church’s Social Doctrine and the recognition of a new ‘social question’ by State apparatuses are nonetheless answers to what would be the development of the workers’ social movement and the very fundamental contradictions of the capitalist society, in the social sciences, the emergence of the theoretical canon around Vilfredo Pareto, Maximilian Weber and Émile Durkheim can be read as a kind of epistemological reflection of the same structural changes. The Church and the State, on the one hand, science and the university, on the other hand, both felt the need to offer an alternative worldview to the one presented by the introduction of this brand new character, the labour movement, and the work of Karl Marx. Social rhetoric failed, however, in the face of the crisis. Successively throughout the twentieth century, the crisis returns. It soon began to fail in Italy in the 1920s. The fascists relied not on the goodwill of the wealthy towards the poor, but on repression and bureaucracy, an army of more than 100,000 state officials, and shortly afterwards, they went from anti-capitalist discourse to explicit support for state-protected heavy industry, large concentration of capital ensured by laws that prevented or limited internal competition. The low consumption of the working classes was the corollary. Italian society was striding towards the militarisation and centralisation of production to protect private property. In Hungary, the revolution lasts 131 days (close by, in Slovakia, there will be a similar experience in June 1919, the Soviet Republic of Slovakia, even more fragile than the Hungarian one). Lenin celebrated in Russia when the Bolsheviks outnumbered the Paris Commune, the 70 days of the first working-class government in history.127 In Hungary, the same did not happen. The Budapest Commune would have the same quick end as that of the Paris Commune. Hungary is proclaimed an independent state at the end of the war – a war that had wiped out four of the empires that caused it – the Austro-Hungarian, Russian, German and Ottoman (strengthening, however, the American empire, and in a way even the English, French, Portuguese and Dutch, which intensified their colonies). Socialists dominated the country. The Communist Béla Kun, who was of Jewish origin, presided over the Budapest Commune until 9 January 1919, when he was deposed. One of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, György Lukács, outstanding in the debates 35

a people’s history of europe

about class consciousness128 and above all about the centrality of work in the development of man (man through non-alienated work becomes humanised, separates himself from the animal condition),129 will be the Minister of Culture of the Commune. But this was a workers’ revolution surrounded by the countryside, which did not support it. And this would be decisive for the success of the counter-revolutionary foreign military intervention carried out from Romania and Czechoslovakia – and for the establishment of a white terror regime headed by Miklós Horthy, later an ally of Adolf Hitler. Hungary would return to the history of revolutions in 1956, when the workers seized power in the factories against the Soviet bureaucracy, and, in 1989, when the people took to the streets against the dictatorship imposed by the USSR. In Germany, a spontaneous revolutionary uprising, when the military defeat in 1918 becomes clear, is met by the absence of a strong revolutionary party, such as the Bolshevik – and with a divided socialist movement after the war. Lenin and Trotsky believed that the fate of the Russian Revolution depended heavily on the German Revolution, because only there was the economic potential to avert poverty, and there could be no socialism without abundance. They guided the entire Communist International in that sense, considering that it was easier to seize power in backward Russia than to build socialism there due to the scarcity of means. But since it was more difficult to seize power in Germany, it would be easier to retain power there, because the abundance and economic development allowed for a better distribution of wealth, unlike in Russia, where backwardness condemned the country, if isolated, to misery. However, Germany had a strongly state-dependent social democracy, which had been largely subordinated to nationalism. And nationalism was thriving. Not even had military defeat destroyed it, although it did shake it. In two moments – 1918–19 and 1923 – Soviet-like councils were formed and the Soviet Republic of Bavaria (1919) was proclaimed. In November 1918, the Kiel sailors on the Baltic shore took up arms in a revolutionary action that extended to several military units, especially in the navy, and also to factories.130 The Socialists did not have a majority in the Constituent Assembly and the government would use the repression of the Soviets, appealing to inter-class nationalism, which defended a unified position of 36

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

the bourgeoisie, the decaying aristocracy, the army hierarchy and the German labour movement to negotiate in the Treaty of Versailles. The treaty, a continuation of the November 1918 armistice, took six months to negotiate and imposed defeat on Germany with a loss of territory and payment of high compensation. It was ratified by the League of Nations (1920–46), the forerunner of the United Nations. The Freikorps, proto-Nazi paramilitary groups used to exterminate opponents, would assassinate Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, leaders of the German revolution, with the complicity of Social Democratic Party Defence Minister Noske. They were also used to raze the Sovietisation of Bavaria.131 Rosa Luxemburg’s last letter before her assassination is to Clara Zetkin, the revolutionary German feminist social democrat leader whom many know because she proposed that 8 March be honoured as a day in memory of working women, the International Women’s Day, which is still celebrated. Rose was Clara’s close friend, and a lover of her son. Her last letter is not about this unexpected relationship, which Rosa noted in the past and which did not undermine their friendship, but about the revolution in Berlin. The letter demonstrates Rosa’s enthusiasm for popular and workers’ movements and also her uneasiness, in some way, the ambiguity that characterises her entire journey in the face of democratic centralism and the Leninist concept of a vanguard party. After mentioning ‘the tumult and turmoil, the constant changing of living quarters, the never-ending reports filled with alarm’, she and her comrades have been living with for weeks,132 Rosa conveys, without hiding the force and drama of the spontaneity of the masses, what the absence of a party means: The severe political crises that we’ve experienced here in Berlin during all of the past two weeks or even longer have blocked the way to the systematic organizational work of training our recruits, but at the same time these events are a tremendous school for the masses. And finally, one must take history as it comes, whatever course it takes. – The fact that you are receiving Rote Fahne so infrequently is disastrous! I will see to it that I personally send it to you every day. – At this moment in Berlin the battles are continuing. Many of our 37

a people’s history of europe

brave lads have fallen. Meyer, Ledebour, and (we fear) Leo [Jogiches] have been arrested. For today, I have to close. I embrace you a thousand times, your R.133 The letter is dated 11 January 1919. On 15 January, she is murdered – beheaded. Her body is thrown into the river. The German Revolution had been beheaded of its greatest leader, and the world was losing a great, outstanding woman. A woman who was never a feminist but was a leader of the socialists as a whole; who, despite being Jewish, always refused to belong to a group of Jews, who wanted to form their own sector in the party; who was born in Poland and did not support Poland’s independence in the name of internationalism. Her work is a breath of humanism and freedom.

The Stalinist Thermidor (1928) The writer John Steinbeck and the photographer Robert Capa went together on a trip to Russia and, in 1948, published their Russian Journal, a purely factual, non-passionate description of the daily life beyond the Iron Curtain. It is impossible, they explain, to walk in Russia without stumbling on Stalin: Nothing in the Soviet Union goes on outside the vision of the plaster, bronze, painted or embroidered eye of Stalin. His portrait hangs not only in every museum, but in every room of every museum. His statue marches in front of all public buildings. His bust is in front of all airports, railroad stations, bus stations. His bust is also in all schoolrooms, and his portrait is often directly behind his bust. In parks he sits on a plaster bench, discussing problems with Lenin. His picture in needlework is undertaken by the students of schools … He is everywhere, he sees everything.134 They wanted to know from the people – this was before the Khrushchev Report that would denounce Stalin’s crimes and reduce, but not eliminate, the deification of the leader – why the Russians had this connection with Stalin. Some replied that they needed something to replace the tsar’s pictures; others said that they were used to icons; others confessed 38

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

that they loved Stalin so much that they wanted him to be ever-present; still others said that Stalin himself did not like this and had asked that it be discontinued. Steinbeck commented: ‘It seemed to us that Stalin’s dislike for anything else causes its removal.’135 The internal purges regime of the 1930s has no equation with the Bolshevik’s ‘red terror’. Victor Serge described the forced collectivisation of the 1930s in a novel, which the British intellectual Christopher Hitchens classified as being central to understanding the involution of the USSR – The Case of Comrade Tulayev: So began the black years. First expropriated, then deported, some seven per cent of the farmers left the region in cattle cars amid the cries, tears, and curses of urchins and dishevelled women and old men mad with rage. Fields lay fallow, cattle disappeared, people ate the oil cake intended for the stock, there was no more sugar or gasoline, leather or shoes, cloth or clothes, everywhere there was hunger on impenetrable white faces, everywhere pilfering, collusion, sickness; in vain did Security decimate the bureaus of animal husbandry, agriculture, transport, food control, sugar production, distribution … The C.C. recommended raising rabbits. Makeyev had placards posted: ‘The rabbit shall be the cornerstone of proletarian diet.’ And the local government rabbits – his own – were the only ones in the district which did not die at the outset, because they were the only ones which were fed. ‘Even rabbits have to eat before they are eaten,’ Makeyev observed ironically.136 Let us hear a voice with no ideological affinities with the revolution, because she led the second generation of revisionist Russophile historians against what they considered ‘political sympathies for history’, Sheila Fitzpatrick: The full dimension of the purges is now known due to the opening of the archives of the Stalinist political police (NKVD). ‘The number of convicts in Gulag labour camps was half a million in two years from 1 January 1937 to 1.3 million on 1 January 1939. In this last year, 40% of Gulag prisoners had been convicted of ‘counterrevolutionary’ crimes, 22% were classified as ‘socially harmful or socially dangerous elements’, and the rest were mostly ordinary criminals. Many victims 39

a people’s history of europe

of the Purges were executed in prison not even reaching the Gulag. The NKVD recorded more than 680,000 executions in 1937–1938 … In Lenin’s time a clear distinction was drawn between the methods allowed for dealing with opposition outside the party and those that could be used with internal dissidents. The old Bolsheviks respected the principle that internal partisan quarrels were outside the purview of the secret police.137 As the British historian Chris Harman recalls, ‘there were only 30,000 prisoners in prisons in the camps until 1928 and they were not compelled to work.’138 The regime of forced labour, which is known today as the essence of how Stalin promoted industrialisation and dealt with demographic anaemia in the USSR, is part of the regime ’s totalitarianism, and in no way resembles what existed in 1928, where this kind of forced labour simply did not exist. Kevin Murphy studied the archives of Moscow’s largest metal factory, from the time of the tsar to the 1930s. His monumental empirical study was awarded the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. Among other findings, between 1925 and 1927, workers who fought for wage increases at the ‘Sickle and Hammer’ factory were not laid off; not a single striker was ever arrested nor was any member of the opposition expelled. Disputes at the factory were settled by collective bargaining. By 1928, the factory committee and other workers’ bodies had lost their authority. The party was discredited; they fired the strike leaders and repeatedly cut wages.139 October was not the seizure of power by the socialists alone, it was the practical response to very serious, concrete social and political problems endured by the working classes – famine and war.140 The Soviets, who were born in the 1905 Revolution, did not resurface in 1917 with a revolutionary project. The Bolsheviks were the minority within the Soviets. And even the Bolshevik Party was divided, as the Canadian historian David Mandel recalls. The Soviets are reborn to secure the elements necessary for social life, which had collapsed with the war-focused state: the security of the population, the distribution of food, energy, transportation, all the essential services that Kerensky’s government, to keep the war effort, was unable to solve. The Bolshevik Revolution was not the interruption of a capitalist liberal democracy – no one today can say that there were democratic 40

war of wars, the revolution of revolutions, 1917

forces in the country, and the few that existed kept the country at war – but the prevention of a violent counter-revolution, which had already been announced with the Kornilov coup in August 1917. When Lenin disrespects almost the entire central committee and proposes the Soviet-based insurrection on the eve of the seizure of power, he calculated that he would either seize power or a new coup led by Kornilov (a bloody counter-revolution) would take place. David Mandel, a student of the Russian Revolution, even states that: The immediate and the main goal of the October insurrection was to forestall a counterrevolution, supported by the bourgeoisie’s policy of economic sabotage, which would have wiped out the democratic gains and promises of the February Revolution and kept Russia involved in the imperialist slaughter of the world war. A victorious counterrevolution – and that was the only real alternative to October – would likely have given the world its first experience of a fascist state, anticipating by several years the somewhat belated responses of the Italian and German bourgeoisies to similarly failed revolutionary upsurges.141

41

2 ‘Man, Controller of the Universe’:1 The Crisis of 1929, the Revolutions of the 1930s and Nazism ‘For the ruling class of Germany, their support for fascism was not merely a response to crisis, it was rather a way of utilizing the crisis. Big business, the army and other remnants of the German Empire gave the Nazis power and a job to do. The problem was the German fascists got carried away, started a war and then lost it.’ William Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe2

The crisis of 1929 Sixty years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, capitalists literally fell off Wall Street buildings. They were suicidal, throwing themselves off from the buildings where the stock exchange activity of New York is concentrated. This image is still part of the memory that remained of the crisis of 1929. Following the crash of 2008, protesters wielded a poster that read, ‘Jump you Fuckers!’ And the same slogan would be adopted by the anarchist musician Gene Burnett in the Occupy Wall Street Movement against the global financial system, which mimicked the occupations of hundreds of thousands of people for several months in Tahrir Square in January 2011, following the Egyptian democratic revolution against Hosni Mubarak. On 24 October 1929, New York Stock Exchange shares fell by 50 per cent in just one day.3 In the 1920s, the USA had become the lenders of the world. In 1925, more than half of the gold stocks were held by them, thus stealing the top spot from England, which eventually suspended debt repayments following the 1929 crash, when the USA withdrew its credit to Europe. 42

‘man, controller of the universe’

Shortly before, England had experienced the most important strike in its history. In 1926, the labour movement rose with a force unheard of since the Chartist struggles in a major general strike. The ruling classes were forced to accept, albeit reluctantly, an alliance between the Labour Party and the local bourgeoisie to deal with the effects of the general strike of 1926, which began with the demand for wage increases among the miners, but took insurrectional proportions by reaching 1.7 million workers across the country and involving dockers, transport workers, etc.4 The economic cycles of capitalist production, described in Marx’s Capital,5 which occurred in the nineteenth century roughly every ten years6 (they are mapped by the US Department of Commerce),7 can be described as follows: crisis, expansion, peak of accumulation, new crisis. The origin of cyclical crises is the tendency of the rate of profit to fall due to the need to increase constant capital (capital invested in plant, equipment and materials) vis-à-vis the variable capital (wages).8 Simply put, in the competitive struggle of capitalism – which is opposed to a planned economy – all capitalists must increase their investment in technology, machinery, etc. That represents a cost. The origin of value is work. The profit, following this ratio between investment and wages, tends to fall. There is deflation in prices. There comes a time when capitalists put their goods in the market below the desired average profit rate – or even with losses. The expression of this is the fall in the real value of property in general. A fall in the value of companies on the stock market is not the source of the crisis, but is a symptom of it. Shares fall when stockholders withdraw their investments because they consider that they do not have an acceptable average rate of return. In the capitalist mode of production, crises are due to overproduction of capital rather than scarcity, as they were in the Middle Ages, when due to bad weather, agricultural plagues, diseases, etc., societies were sometimes ruined, without the means to react. In capitalist crises post-1820, when the cost of labour, the only source of value, rises against constant capital, there is an increasing devaluation of property, the average rate of profit drops. That is the crisis – of excess, not of scarcity. Part of the society, workers, small entrepreneurs, peasants, are called to pay the ‘way out of the crisis’ with brutal measures that imply reduction of wages, unemployment and concentration of capital by elimination of the most fragile competitors. 43

a people’s history of europe

In 1929, shares fell by up to 80 per cent. Between 1929 and 1932, workers’ income in the USA fell by half. Governments abandoned the gold standard, many betting on the devaluation of the currency and, in the early years, on protectionism. All these measures only worsened the crisis. It quickly spread to Europe – in 1932, world production had fallen by 33 per cent and world trade by 60 per cent. Moreover, there were more than 30 million officially acknowledged unemployed people, a figure far behind the reality. In 1933, automotive production had been cut by 80 per cent and a total of almost 107,000 companies in the United States had failed – not including the banks, which actually did fail later. With the new wave of strikes, protests and demonstrations having an epicentre in the USA, Britain, Austria and Spain, there was a radical shift from these protectionist policies to Keynesian policies, the New Deal – the capitalist state became a ‘hoarder, banker and producer’.9 The Keynesian proposals focused not only on social protection, which was largely unknown until then, but also and mostly in fixing prices, in the mandatory allocation of labour power to some sectors and national agreements on conditions of production – it was a planned capitalist economy. This was associated with public works, which in turn were based on a controlled deficit. However, contrary to what is commonly and mistakenly mentioned, these measures did not solve the crisis. By 1937, the decline in the average rate of profit had returned. The 1929 unemployment rates were only reversed when the United States entered the Second World War in 1941. It was the war economy, which turned unemployed people into soldiers and productive forces in factories for the production of destruction machines that reversed the crisis of accumulation. Both Keynesian and monetarist theories failed: In 1937, however, the economy was under the threat of a new sinking, the New Deal became, in the words of Art Preis, the War Deal, with the amputation, in 1938, of US$800 million for social security and public works, and an increase in defence spending ($200 million more in 1938, $400 million more in 1939). Since 1939 the European states bought arms from the United States – and the USA also armed. The war economy was actually the way out of the crisis.10 44

‘man, controller of the universe’

Howard Zinn also recalls the limited impact of the New Deal measures. The new political agreements were decisive. With the change from the Communist International’s 1935 policy of class against class to the ‘popular front’, the US Communist Party supported Roosevelt in the second election and helped to appease the greater confrontational situation with the workers the ruling classes had experienced, sit-down strikes in the automotive industry.11 The New Deal succeeded only in reducing unemployment from 13 million to 9 million, but managed to involve the main unions – during the war, the CIO and AFL pledged to call no strikes, thus ‘weaken[ing] the old labour militancy of the thirties because the war economy created millions of new jobs at higher wages.’12 Everything seemed to have been invented at the turn of the century: transatlantic crossings became faster due to new steamships, the Wrights took to the air in 1903; Henry Ford invented and democratised the automobile. The war, however, exposed the harsh reality of the limits of this optimism and, for the first time, questioned whether industrial development would always be synonymous with progress. The fact is that, for all the propaganda that was made to the ‘God of consumerism’, accumulation tended to absolute pauperisation, that is, to the inability of the working class to consume. It would be Walter Benjamin, a German philosopher, unlike Marx, who would conceive of revolution not as a locomotive of history, but as its emergency brake,13 to stop the history of capitalism, claiming the idea that progress is not synonymous with well-being. We can walk forward towards a cliff. However, until 1914, it would have been unthinkable to question this Enlightenment notion. Man seemed capable of controlling nature, owing to the unusual scientific impulse brought about by the Industrial Revolution. The crisis of 1929 shook, as never before, not only the belief in progress but also in capitalism itself. Marx was reborn due to the strength of this reality – ranks of starving people in countries that dumped production to avoid falling profits, oranges being thrown away to avoid the fall of its price. In Brazil, coffee was used as fuel for the locomotives. Maintaining profit meant the destruction of wealth. In 1932, American businessmen commissioned the Mexican painter Diego Rivera14 to paint a mural, which would be installed at the Rockefeller Foundation, to show the capacity of technique and science to overcome the problems that were posed to humankind. Jack London in 45

a people’s history of europe

The Iron Heel, published in 1908, anticipated the emergence of a tyrannical oligarchy against the revolutionary socialists.15 For the Rockefellers, technology was the answer to the problems that arose at the crossroads of 1929. But Rivera painted the mural as a response to the crisis of 1929 … with class struggle. The mural shows on its right side, below, the figure of headless fascism, severed by the workers. Today, it is among the main works of art of the twentieth century, exhibited in the Museum of Fine Arts in Mexico City, but at the time the Foundation had it destroyed because, although in the centre of the mural was the atom, science, technique, alongside were the Bolshevik leaders – Lenin, Trotsky and a white and a black worker holding hands, representing class struggle. Crises do not give rise to revolutions, but they open up that possibility. Without crises, there are no revolutions.16 They are the most critical point in the history of capitalism. In the words of Fernand Braudel: In the clock of the European world the fateful chimes sounded five times, and every time they sounded the displacements took place through consecutive struggles, confrontations and strong economic crises. In general, it is an economic storm that finally destroys the old centre, already threatened before, and confirms the emergence of a new one.17 Tom Joad, the main character in John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath,18 is a young peasant who, due to land dispossession, becomes a proletarian (under-employed or unemployed). Along the mythical Route 66 in the USA, in the midst of the crisis of 1929, he transforms himself from Okie (a derogatory nickname for the peasants from Oklahoma) into an immigrant in California, from common criminal into political prisoner, from peasant into wage earner. Beliefs die, doubts awaken. Expropriation, unemployment, dehumanisation … each day the Joad family lives the capitalist march and gradually becomes aware of it. One of the key parts of this path to class-consciousness is the role of the state throughout this journey. The Joad family, on the brink of misery, expropriated by bankers, deceived by labour recruiters, exploited by bosses, humiliated, runs into the state exclusively as the police: inspecting labour migration, infiltrating workers’ camps, arresting ‘agitators’, provoking riots in order to intervene without a warrant and finally trying to arrest 46

‘man, controller of the universe’

Joad because he killed a policeman who, in front of him, had just killed a former preacher and trade unionist who was leading a strike. When Joad leaves the Rooseveltian camp where his family is, he metaphorically goes in search of ‘something’. Ford expresses the quest for socialism as an alternative for an important sector of the working classes: A fellow ain’t got a soul of his own, just little piece of a big soul, the one big soul that belongs to everybody … I’ll be all around in the dark – I’ll be everywhere. Wherever you can look – wherever there ’s a fight, so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there ’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready, and when the people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build – I’ll be there, too.19

Nazism One day before the inauguration of the 1940 Portuguese World Exhibition in Belém, where Salazar built an image of a single nation undivided by social classes,20 a depiction allowed by the interdiction of workers’ organisations achieved using state violence, the world saw France succumb to Hitler – in the very same place where Germany had surrendered 21 years before, after the First World War. Today, it is clear to historiography that Nazism did not advance only by the force of military technique, where there were obvious failures,21 but also through the political demoralisation of its opponents. One of Hitler’s most potent tanks was the defeat of the Spanish Revolution, the end of hope on the French popular front, the faltering German social democracy, the disastrous policy of the third period of the Communist International – a psychological environment that cannot be measured quantitatively. However, there is no historical dignity without measuring the psychological impact, on the scale of millions, of political victories and defeats.22 The Second World War, like almost all historical facts that are politically central to societies, has been the subject of intense historiographical controversy, which rarely passes on to the general public. Excluding recent works, such as Apocalypse: The Second World War,23 (not by accident a co-production of the major countries involved in the 47

a people’s history of europe

war in different trenches and that in a rare way comes to break a mythological vision of the war), in general, the disclosure of historical facts is made against the science produced. It was utilitarian to the division of powers between the USA and the USSR during the Cold War. And it is now necessary to maintain the status quo as well as the balance of powers of the regimes and nations of the central countries. However, memory is not history. Germany became a militarised society with a war economy, after having defeated its labour movement. Their labour leaders were the first to be imprisoned. Dachau, near Munich, was the first Nazi prison in 1933. Not by chance – the first Soviet republic (Räterepublik) had been founded there in April 1919, crushed by the Freikorps in May 1919, as we have mentioned. Hitler, a soldier wounded in war who even won an Iron Cross, was described as a frustrated student who failed access to art school – and, shortly after, joined the ranks of the far right. In just one decade, he had risen to command one of the world’s leading countries. However, Nazism was not the work of one man. The idea of Nazism as an act of madness is closely linked to the revisionism of the 1950s, to the social pact, which sought to dissociate it from the crisis of capitalism, from the explicit support of the German bourgeoisie to the Nazi expansionist project24 – and the inability of both the West and the USSR to prevent the war. Munich, the Bavarian capital – which today is most easily identified with the Oktoberfest, a beer festival created by King Ludwig of Bavaria in 1810, or its famous football club, Bayern – is a symbol of Germany in the 1930s. It represents the class tensions that foreshadowed the war: on the one hand, a powerful labour movement, one of the most important in the world, and the threat of revolution; on the other hand, an agrarian and traditionalist world surrounding the city. However, it was not only in the countryside that Nazism had support. The German industrial bourgeoisie feared that – after the Ruhr strikes and attempts to take power by the workers in 1919 and 1923 – a new crisis (1929) would bring the proletariat to power as in Soviet Russia. Years of economic stability in the Weimar Republic were dramatically left behind during the crisis, millions being unable to find work, and famine became widespread. There was deflation of production prices (falling prices in production) that combined with a gigantic inflation in 48

‘man, controller of the universe’

distribution, in consumption. All this led to a miserable situation of the German proletariat, about two-fifths of whom were unemployed. In Britain, one-quarter couldn’t find a job. The Weimar Republic had been marked in its final period by the crisis of the constitutional regime and the growth of National Socialism. In 1933, the Nazi Party (NSDAP) came to power. The absence of democratic consensus, the humiliation in the Treaty of Versailles, loss of territories and heavy damages – the defeat in the war, along with the German Revolution of 1919–23, created panic in the German ruling classes, the petty bourgeois masses or the lower middle class, and drove them to despair. That despair came to light in the country’s suicide in 1939 – when these layers decided to support Hitler and militarism as a way out of the crisis of 1929 and the threat of revolution. Two questions emerge, however, from these facts: what was the social basis of fascism? Did the economic crisis and the depression explain their rise? The deterministic temptation is strong. There is, however, no automatic translation between this economic chaos and the speed and breadth of support that the Nazi Party has gathered in German society. The issue is very complex. Many sought the roots of Nazism in the cultural depths of the German and French ‘souls’, the nature of men comfortably outside parliament, or in the ‘entrancing refusal of democracy’25 of French philosophical currents who hated the ‘vote craze ’.26 Thomas Mann, born in Germany, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, seeks these roots further, in Luther, who defines ‘the true German character’, the man who began by criticising nobles and peasants and ended ‘and with the most indomitable fury, simply condemning the peasantry’.27 The fact is that not all fascisms ‘did work’.28 Not all fascisms went from cutting-edge cultural currents to mass parties that seized state power. The origin of the Nazi vote doesn’t lay mainly in the working classes or in the transfer of the Social Democrat vote to Nazism. German society’s degree of support and commitment with National Socialism is more complex, as revealed by a few dozen investigations in this area.29 Before this, however, a reminder: throughout the Nazi regime, 300,000 Germans were arrested, persecuted or killed for opposing 49

a people’s history of europe

Hitler. It is true that Nazism was defeated from the outside by allied forces but there was also internal opposition. Another central debate, which does not fit here but must be remembered, is whether the German society that adhered to Nazism did so out of fear or ideological commitment. No one took this controversy as far as Primo Levi in his masterwork The Drowned and the Saved.30 For him, a survivor of Auschwitz, German society has the historical burden of extermination camps because the fear they could have had does not justify the absence of action against the suffering in the work camps and in the extermination camps, where nothing could be done and there was no chance of resistance. Bertolt Brecht, a socialist poet and revolutionary resistant to Nazism in his 15-year exile (an ‘ambassador of doom’, as he described himself ), even wrote, reflecting on history and addressing the future: ‘You who will emerge from the flood in which we have gone under … Think of us with forbearance.’31 Brecht was not forgiving the Germans, nor necessarily referring to them in these verses, but recognising that the dimension of defeat was at that time unrecoverable. In 1939, the German labour movement, which had the potential force to organise itself to resist, was defeated, and its main leaders were dead or exiled.32 Few were spared from Nazi terror – not even the Nazis in the end. Let us get back to the Nazi Party and its electoral support. Still with another note: there is no automatic correspondence between social and electoral support in history. The two phenomena may be in disarray: a party can have much electoral support and little social support, and vice versa.33 That is, elections are a measure of reality that must be viewed with a critical eye – they are not exempt from mediations: The reductionist conclusion that every people has the government it deserves is not Marxist. Nor is it a Marxist claim that each class, particularly the working class, has the direction that corresponds to their interests. This type of determinism is foreign to the theory that argues dialectically that political representation is the result of a struggle in which all classes influence each other, but the working classes are more vulnerable to the dominant ideology of their day. Governments come to power as a result of a battle between interests in society, in which some interests are winners and others are losers, being there50

‘man, controller of the universe’

fore the product of a social and political relationship of forces … Every struggle contains uncertainty and indecisiveness. Marxism is not fatalism.34 The NSDAP mobilises votes but also organised social support – and military might; and in Protestant rural districts, more so than in the Catholic ones; in small towns, more than in big ones; among rural workers more than among industrial workers; and among bosses and white collars (about 20 per cent of the workforce then)35 more than among industrial workers. It gathered support among the wealthy and proprietary classes. When in July 1932 its nationwide vote was 37.4 per cent, in the big cities it was 10 per cent lower.36 In Berlin and Hamburg, the NSDAP incurred considerable losses. It is true that a number of polls show support among some sectors of the working class, but these, which represented 54 per cent of the German labour force, were under-represented in the NSDAP. The majority of the unemployed did not support the Nazi Party. Areas where there was a high concentration of workers and unemployed, such as in the Ruhr region, saw the Communist Party obtain 60–70 per cent of the vote. According to Geary, the overall result of the factory council elections in 1931 elected only 710 representatives of the Nazi Organization of Industrial Cells (NSBO) against 115,671 free trade unionists (SPD-oriented) and 10,956 seats for Christian unions, predominantly Catholic. By January 1933, the NSBO had about 300,000 members, compared with one million Christian trade unionists and more than four million free trade unionists.37 Pelz goes further in the argument, and recalls that if in July 1932 the Nazis had 37.3 per cent of the vote, in the November elections they had lost more than 4 per cent and 34 seats in parliament. That they used terror – the Reichstag fire – to regain influence, and that at that time the reaction of the leftist parties was nil. Shortly afterwards, their vote goes up. Yet, if all other parties had joined against Hitler, they would have prevented his victory. But, as the American historian underlines, Hitler had generous financial backing from Krupp and I.G. Farben, the big companies that would be at the basis of war production: 51

a people’s history of europe

For the ruling class of Germany, their support for fascism was not merely a response to crisis, it was rather a way of utilizing the crisis. Big business, the army and other remnants of the German Empire gave the Nazis power and a job to do. The problem was the German fascists got carried away, started the war and then lost it.38 Dick Geary’s conclusion is similar. We also share it because it refers to the centrality of politics – in other words, the existence of organisations and their leaders is decisive: ‘The NSDAP was more successful where it did not have to deal with strong pre-existing ideological and organizational loyalties.’39 In the words of Pierre Broué, it was a ‘gigantic defeat without a fight’.40 But if these loyalties were so strong and widespread in Germany, even though concentrated in large mining regions, working-class areas or larger cities, among a hostile rural environment, why was the Nazi path so fast, and, in a sense, easy? Because of three factors: Nazism benefited from the lack of support by the USSR and social democracy to the revolutionary projects of the 1930s; it benefited from the active support of the German industrial and financial sector to its projects; and from the inaction, if not active complicity, of social democracy and its alliances with semi-Bonapartist powers before Hitler’s rise to power. Nazism counted among its supporters some of the biggest German capitalists, referred to above. They dominated the economy and bet on the war economy and territorial expansion through war.41 Nazism was not a conservative and retrograde excrescence, a kind of feudal return, as the Third International already isolated in its ‘socialism in one country’ policy (that is, with the International transformed into a foreign policy instrument for Stalinism and not a for socialist revolutions),42 has initially characterised, but a suicidal act of one of the most advanced world capitalisms. Even Robert O. Paxton, who does not share Trotsky’s thesis that Nazism was ‘the civil war against the proletariat’ writes that Nazism was not tout court anti-modern, but an ‘alternative modernity’,43 which was based on the most developed technique and science. The Nazi state, observe this macabre example, was the first regime in the world to recognise the rights of dogs – in 1933. In the year Hitler opened Dachau for Communist, Trotskyist and Social Democrat prisoners and trade union leaders, he made inflammatory public speeches 52

‘man, controller of the universe’

against cruelty towards animals, and in 1934, he banned hunting. In 1937, he regulated the transport of animals by road and, in 1938, by train, so that the animals should be transported in decent conditions – the same wagons where the Jews would be shipped as pigs on their way to death. Hitler also banned scientific experiments with animals, but his regime made experiments with Jews accused of being non-humans for … practising a medicine that used animals for experiments. The destinies of man were not therefore solved with the instruments of progress, as the Illuminists dreamed, because the central question of economics and society was: who is to use these instruments? What, how, who and for whom do we produce? For this reason, during the last, declining phase of the Weimar constitutional regime, reactionary Bonapartist (semi-dictatorial) regimes ruled under the presidential government of Hindenburg (Brüning, Von Papen, Von Schleicher), which while negotiating with traditional bourgeois elites did contribute to the persecution of the labour movement, mostly by not suppressing the fascist gangs connected with Hitler, such as the Freikorps and the SA, the storm troopers led by Ernst Rohm and mobilised against the trade unions. But let’s get back to the first argument. If fascism results from a series of complex factors – defeat in the war, Weimar crisis and despair of the bourgeoisie facing the crisis of 1929 – no one questions today the disastrous role of the policy of the Communist International known as the ‘Third Period’. Those who ‘could be saved’ indulged in a delusional policy that likened social democracy with fascism. As Felipe Demier, a historian of fascism, points out, the force of Nazism also came from the bewilderment of the pro-Soviet communist left and the German social democracy: Until the last moment the Stalinist leadership of the German Communist Party (KPD), intoxicated by its ‘third period’ sectarianism, dogmatically refused to close ranks in any area of the anti-fascist struggle (in trade unions, parliament, any kind of organisation) with the reformist leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), which not only kept it away from the bulk of the working-class bases of social democracy, as it dangerously divided the forces of the German working class in a conjuncture in which fascism spread rapidly among the pettybourgeois masses of the country. Regrettably, Trotsky’s gloomy predictions about how ephemeral and unstable German Bonapartism was proved to be right and the German 53

a people’s history of europe

proletariat, including its Communist and Social-Democratic leaders, would learn the hard way what were the differences between Bonapartism and fascism,44 the differences between dictatorship and civil war, between a state that fought against the labour movement and another that sought to physically annihilate it. What was this so-called policy of the Third Period? In the absence of a united front against Nazism, The leadership of the Communist International considered that the balance of power regarding the possibilities of a world revolution entered its ‘third period’ after the Russian Revolution … meaning the final agony of capitalism that would inevitably lead to a new revolutionary rise of the masses … Given this characterization, the Comintern made an ‘ultra-leftist’ turn and directed its parties towards a policy of ‘class against class’. In Stalin’s words, Social Democracy, with its petty-bourgeois ideology, was branded as the ‘twin brother’ of fascism. This ‘ultra-leftist’ turn approved in 1928 was related to the reorientation of Soviet internal politics adopted in the same year. Breaking with Bukharin’s line of ‘socialism at a tortoise pace ’, Stalin abandoned the alliance with the Kulaks (considered as the bourgeois of the countryside, but who in fact were just relatively wealthy peasants), initiating the violent process of forced collectivization of agriculture.45 The German proletariat, led by two powerful mass organisations, the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD), became disoriented due to the policy of the Third Period: In the interpretive view of the German Stalinists, practically devoid of political nuances, an eventual victory of Hitler would only entail another fascist government which, like the preceding ones, would seek to save the crumbling capitalism of the country. This vulgar characterization of the national political reality, in which ‘all cats were grey’, led to an absolutely sectarian antifascist strategy, which rejected the possibility of building a united front with the SPD, labelled as ‘social-fascist’.46 The united front, which had its origins in the decisions of the Communist International’s Sixth Congress in 1928, implying a front with other 54

‘man, controller of the universe’

currents of the labour movement, was replaced in the Seventh Congress with the famous report presented by Dimitrov, where a policy of broad alliance between the working class and some sectors of the bourgeoisie is endorsed. As historian Carlos Zacarias Sena Jr. puts it, ‘the popular front policy that foresaw broad alliances with sectors of the bourgeoisie considered progressive became the privileged tactic of the communist parties in the conjuncture of rising fascist or philofascist dictatorships throughout the world in the 1930s.’47 The popular front was first tested in Blum’s France with the Socialists and then with the Radical Party. Spain followed and after that it was generalised. The aim was, as Pierre Broué in the History of the Communist International (2007) states, to mobilise the communists for a policy of alliances with sectors of the bourgeoisie for the coming war.48 The popular front policy was generalised and strengthened far beyond the end of the war, through the ‘peaceful transition to socialism’, the ‘détente’, the ‘peaceful coexistence’, and becoming an ‘old Soviet project of pan-European agreement for peaceful coexistence’,49 culminating in Helsinki in 1975. In colonial or semi-peripheral countries, the popular front tactic was broadened to a ‘national front’ encompassing all ‘sincere democrats’, or ‘honest Portuguese’, in a local version, whether they were Social Democrats, Liberals, Republicans or even Monarchists. Back to 1928, it was not only the communists loyal to the USSR who had a disastrous policy. The SPD, seeking an intermediary route between Nazism and Bolshevism, wanted to defend the Weimar Republic, and at the same time, it supported Brüning’s deflationary policy and his Bonapartist governance by decrees. They also supported Hindenburg, who appointed Hitler as chancellor, for the presidency of the Republic. Again, nationalism had spoken louder. Hard Bonapartist or overtly fascist regimes did not seek political conciliation in the face of the economic disaster brought about by private property. This is how Hitler rises to power and performs the German miracle with massive public investment and stimuli to production, nationalisation of part of production, control of inflation and currency, and social protection. In 1938, the investment in armaments represented 21 per cent of the GDP. Putting the war economy to work, while maintaining democratic regimes in their homelands (not in the colonial territories, where dictatorships were cherished) was also the path of Great Britain and the USA. Unemployment in the USA only returns to the figures of 1927, 55

a people’s history of europe

when in 1941 the inactive factories are reconverted for the production destined to war. The substantial difference was that the United States had emerged from the First World War as winners and creditors, and Britain and France had reserves because they had colonies. Preparation for war, carrying out nationalisations, controlling wages and even militarising the labour force were possible while maintaining democratic regimes. But in Germany, to put it in a brutal and simple manner, there was no money either to contain the struggles between fractions of the bourgeoisie or to calm the working class – so the German war industry miracle comes with the massacre of the workers’ parties and trade unions, the expropriation of Jews and others, while maintaining private property. The cartelisation of factories promoted by Hitler was not obtained through the expropriation of goods, but through its organisation by the State while keeping profits private. This is how the labour and concentration camps were specialised in different sectors of production. In Mauthausen, for example, whose complex comprised 40 more subcamps, there was not only a large quarry, munitions factories, mines, arms factories, but also a market for selling disinfection products for prisoners. It was barbarism.

‘A las barricadas’: The revolution again It’s 22 November 1936. Half a million people have marched on the streets of Barcelona in what is considered the greatest funeral in Spanish history – compact lines of people looking sad, singing songs. ‘A las barricadas!’ ‘To the barricades for the triumph of the Confederation!’ – the anthem of anarchist National Confederation of Labour (CNT). It was not the king who was being veiled, but the most famous anarchist of the country, Buenaventura Durruti. A romantic revolutionary born into a family of nine, this worker, an anarcho-syndicalist militant of the National Confederation of Labour (CNT) had been sacked during the ‘Bolshevik triennium’ (the strikes of 1917–19, which occurred in Spain influenced by the October Revolution) and had immigrated to France in the early 1920s and then to Latin America. He was part of the group Los Justicieros (The Avengers) to fight Pistolerismo, the hiring of assassins by bosses, clerics and landowners to persecute and assassinate trade unionists, mostly anarchists. As in Italy 56

‘man, controller of the universe’

during the Biennio Rosso (Red Biennium), gangs of fascists or militias whose modus operandi was the assassination of union leaders spreads. Durruti will be one of the organisers of resistance to these methods of terror against the labour movement. With the Spanish Civil War and the Spanish Revolution (how many times do historians forget the revolution, referring only to the civil war?), Durruti became a leading figure in the barricades of Barcelona. He would be assassinated in Madrid, shot in the back in November 1936, in circumstances which have never been clarified. His decisive role lies not only in the romanticism of the anarchist bank robber – which Brecht expressed so well when he asked: ‘What is the robbing of a bank compared to the founding of a bank?’50 Durruti defends the workers, but from a strategic conception that isolates him even within the anarchist movement, a polemic that will mark the whole Spanish Revolution and the Spanish Civil War and that can be summed up in this idea: we make the revolution to win the war, or we must win the war first? The contradictions of an unstable regime between 1933 and 1936 set the framework of the Spanish Civil War that started in 1936, with the military pronouncement of 18 July. The Spanish Civil War would end in April 1939 with the victory of Francoism and 1 million dead. The Portuguese Estado Novo was also one of the protagonists in this event, helping Franco during the Civil War.51 Anarchists and Trotskyists argued that the war could only be won if revolution were to take place – with land distribution and control of the factories; the USSR, Communists and Republicans did not want to question private property in order to have moderate republicans as allies. This strategy prevailed during the war – and it lost the war. In 1933, Casas Viejas main square was the centre of the village and the centre of power, a reflecting mirror of Spain: a church, a barracks and the large dwellings of the landowners. In the upper part of the village, the old houses that baptised the village were home to workers, day labourers and shepherds. Spain was a country where, in the 1920s, after the First World War, capitalism had had a strong impulse; by 1930, those engaged in agriculture had dropped to under half the working population.52 Proletarianisation was accelerated; peasants were moving to the cities, which became concentrations of industrial workers, those who would become, together with rural day labourers, the basis of the Spanish Revolution – one of the most romantic conflicts of the twentieth 57

a people’s history of europe

century, immortalised by the photographer Robert Capa, the writers George Orwell, André Malraux, Ernest Hemingway and many others. But ‘Spain did not experience a classic bourgeois revolution in which the structures of the ancien régime were shattered.’53 In Casas Viejas, peasants lived as in most of southern Spain, where 2 million landless day labourers, the braceros, worked on average only half of the year in the large landed estates, the latifundia. Women also worked in agriculture, with lower salaries, but also as seamstresses or raising chickens. Boys did not go to school, they had to keep cattle from when they were little; and girls served in the farms (fincas and cortizos) of the landowners. The family wage provided food – it was a subsistence wage, which meant that at times of unemployment, which were not uncommon in agricultural work, very much conditioned by the moods of the seasons, families went hungry. To give an idea, in December 1933, there were 1,437,000 agricultural and forestry wage earners in Spain and almost 300,000 were unemployed. In the municipality of Medina Sidonia, 42 landowners possessed more than 61 per cent of the wealth. The inhabitants of Casas Viejas had the same level of education as the rest of Spain – almost none. They had old peasant traditions and religious dogmas. According to the 1931 Population Census, there were 113,290 members of the clergy in a population of 23 million.54 Most children and youngsters did not learn to read unless they entered an anarchist-libertarian group and there, of course, they read the libertarian press. In Andalusia, the average life expectancy was ten years lower than among the urban workers, which was already low.55 Between 1814 and 1923, there were 43 pronunciamientos, or military coups, some not victorious, and most to preserve the monarchy in agony – the last of which was led by Captain General Miguel Primo de Rivera in 1923 to rescue Alfonso XIII. In an interview with a French journalist on 16 November 1937, Franco, the caudillo, declared: our war is not a civil war … but a Crusade … Yes, our war is a religious war. We who fight, whether Christians or Muslims, are soldiers of God and we are not fighting against men but against atheism and materialism.56 58

‘man, controller of the universe’

Even today, some Spanish bishops express themselves in these terms referring to the ‘crusade of 1936’. Anarchists had a very strong presence among the industrial and rural workers – a fact that was evident in Andalusia. Small villages such as Casas Viejas, among many others that experienced insurrections, had a local organisation of the CNT (National Confederation of Labour) or the FAI (Iberian Anarchist Federation). Already in 1874, there was a local federation of the International Workingmen’s Association (IWA) in Medina Sidonia, which took a stand for Bakunin’s ideas and broke with the Marxist sector of the First International. Some of these workers, led by the anarchists, would even oppose the agrarian reform: after all, they were for the collectivisation of the land, not for its distribution. Anarchists are an embarrassing presence in the republican government, because it is they who led the majority of the very strong social movement of Spain in the 1930s. The misery of this period, the worsening unemployment and the failed Republican promises are the breeding ground for countless movements that burst throughout Spain in the form of insurrections, general strikes and occupations. In January 1933, the CNT called for a general strike of the railways, which was to spread through Spain and take on an insurrectional character throughout the territory. The CNT at the time might have had about 1 million members. The anarchists of Casas Viejas were prepared to seize power and so they did in the night of 10 January 1933. The next day, they went to the village alcalde (mayor) and reported that the civil guard was to be dismissed and marched through the village carrying the red and black flag of the CNT. In the ensuing hours, three civil guards were killed in a confrontation with the anarchists. Reinforcements were called in. The family of an anarchist involved in the clashes, known by the nickname ‘Six Fingers’, took refuge in his house. At night, 90 assault guards, at the orders of the Republican government, shot the rioters and burnt the rest of the family by spraying the house with gasoline. La Mañana daily newspaper, in its edition of 11 January 1933, states ‘the Council of Ministers examined in detail the public order situation in Spain, subverted in these days by the anarchist plot.’ The newspaper, siding with the Republican government, which had ordered the summary firing of the anarchists, writes that this plot did not have the support of the majority of the working class and that public order was promptly restored. La Mañana leaves a warning, which is already a clear 59

a people’s history of europe

demonstration of the class war that would extend to the whole of Spain in 1936: ‘The government will be inexorable and will make sure that all state institutions are as well.’ This critical tone is common to almost the entire Republican press in the days that follow. But news slowly begins to reveal the police brutality and injustice of the shootings, until it becomes a national issue that would contribute to Manuel Azaña’s fall in late 1933. The Republicans, victorious in the elections, had as their fundamental objective the institutionalisation of a liberal democracy that would carry out some social reforms. It was a matter of avoiding the discontent of the workers and peasants. But the regime was beset by its own contradictions: the economic depression that led to the revolutionary uprising of the Spanish popular strata in 1930 was the same that prevented Republicans from making reforms and social concessions that might appease the popular movement. On the other hand, the Republican regime had very little support among the working class and the peasantry, which was heavily influenced by anarchism. Republican support laid in the urban sectors and among some of the intellectualised middle class. But not all of it: important sectors of the middle class of that time adhered to communist and anarchist ideas. Let us not forget that Europe of 1933 is the Europe in which Hitler rises to power and that more than ever it is when the option between social revolution and fascism is present. The Republic could only have survived with the support of the people, but to win it, would take much more than good words. The political right, aggrieved by the possibility of an agrarian reform, even if shy, does not wait for what it considers to be Republican inefficiency and reinforces its structures. In 1933, José Antonio Primo de Rivera founds the Spanish Phalanx, the party that will support Franco’s regime. The Spanish Phalanx (Falange Española) was founded at the Teatro da Comédia in Madrid on 29 October 1933 by the Madrid lawyer José Antonio Primo de Rivera y Sáenz de Heredia. The son of Miguel Primo de Rivera, the dictator who ruled Spain in 1923–30, José Antonio, Marquis de Estella, was an aristocrat, linked to the landowners and the most conservative military circles. Shortly after the fall of his father’s dictatorship, José António became deputy secretary of the National Monarchical Union party, an organisation where some of the fascist principles of the 60

‘man, controller of the universe’

Falange are already clear: exaltation of national identity; creation and maintenance of a military corps who pledge to maintain the prestige of Spain ‘one and indivisible’; and the preservation of discipline, order and conservative values. Shortly after an unsuccessful run for the 1931 elections, he is arrested in 1932 and accused of supporting General Sanjurjo’s attempted coup d’état. He doesn’t spend much time in prison though, and in 1933 he founds the Spanish Falange, that in 1934 will join the JONS (Juntas de Ofensiva Nacional Sindicalista), a fascist party created in 1931 by Onésimo Redondo Ortega and Ramiro Ledesma Ramos, to form the Falange Española Tradicionalista y de las JONS. The Spanish Civil War is one of the major events of the twentieth century. It is the symbol of the political and social contradictions of the world between the wars, which emerges from the rubble of the crisis of 1929; in Spain some of the most important political projects were in confrontation: democratic Republicans, revolutionaries, nationalist and fascist movement. It is also a war of great international impact. In it, thousands of international volunteers fought to defend the Republic, mostly in the International Brigades. A few thousand Portuguese also fought on both sides. The Spanish Revolution and the defeat in the Spanish Civil War were the antechamber of the Second World War, painted by Picasso in Guernica. The Spanish Revolution’s importance ran the world due to the militant international involvement in this war and the scale of the revolution in Aragon and Catalonia, where workers controlled the production; and due to the external interference of the Axis and the USSR and the ambiguous relationship of France and England, it was interpreted as the first conflict of the Second World War. This is not a unanimous opinion among historians. Did the Second World War begin in Poland in 1939 or before, in the Spanish Revolution? Nor is it unanimous among the allies. They reject, in a struggle for memory, the fact that as they did not help the Spanish Republic, they opened the doors to Nazism. Franco told Adolf Hitler in 1941, during the Second World War, ‘the first battle was won here in Spain’. An American anti-fascist volunteer wrote the same: ‘To me, World War Two started on July 18, 1936. That’s when the first shot was fired in Madrid.’57 Less well known but equally vital to the destinies of Europe was the revolutionary situation that opened in France between 1934 and 1937, during the ‘popular front’. For Pierre Broué,58 a Marxist historian and a 61

a people’s history of europe

Trotskyist militant with a remarkable work, a revolution was under way, slowed down by the ‘popular front’ with the complicity of the communists under the pressure of the USSR and its policy of ‘socialist in one country’ – meaning that the foreign policy for the communist parties outside the USSR should be in the first place the defence of the USSR, avoiding conflicts with the national bourgeoisies of each state where they were inserted. For Serge Wolikow, historian of the Communist International and a member of the French Communist Party, the ‘popular front’ was responsible for important social achievements but was doomed to failure because the Communist Party was caught between the mobilisation of the working masses and the middle classes, who supported the government of Léon Blum and feared social radicalisation.59 In 1934, Paris was experiencing an intense conflict with the threat of the organised extreme right, moralised by Hitler’s victory the preceding year in Germany. In February 1934, they summon large demonstrations against the left and centre, the bourgeois government of Edouard Daladier’s Radical Party. Still in line with the ‘third period’ politics, on 5 February 1934, the Communist paper L’Humanité declared that the choice between the fascists and the government was between ‘plague and cholera’.60 The General Confederation of Labour (CGT) calls a general strike in response to the far right demonstrations for 12 February, the Socialist Party joins in a separate demonstration and later the Communist Party also joins, with yet another separate protest. Although many feared that everything would end in a confrontation among factions, when the demonstrations meet the population, many thousands, rejoice shouting: ‘Unity! Unity!’ From here, the political situation evolves at the speed of light. Unitary antifascist committees are created, electoral agreements are under debate. The USSR takes a turn refusing to support any social-democratic party and defending alliances even with the bourgeois Radical Party. In May 1936, the general elections give a majority to the Radical Party, the Communists and the Socialists. The Communist Party remains outside the Government but supporting it. Paris is effervescent, commemorating the Paris Commune (1871) with half a million people on the streets to pay tribute to those who fell defending the Commune. In May, the Renault plant at Billancourt, Paris, struck and occupied. By the end of the month, 70,000 workers were involved61 (the same year the automotive industry sit-down strikes 62

‘man, controller of the universe’

started in the USA,62 the largest ever in the history of the country). There were almost 700,000 workers on strike in France these days. Then they were joined by the dockers of the port of Le Havre – the commercial outlet of the most powerful industrial zones of France. In the Nord département alone, 1,144 workplaces were occupied, involving 254,000 workers.63 There is, in fact, a situation of workers’ control in many factories, which are under the direction of the workers. Fearful businessmen sign an agreement for salary increases, paid vacations, reduction of the working week to 40 hours, they accept collective bargaining and the election of workers’ representatives in the factories with more than ten workers. Communist Party membership increased from 29,000 in 1933 to 90,000 in February 1936 and 288,000 in December 1936. The Socialist Party grew from 131,000 in 1933 to 202,000 in 1936, and the CGT union federation from 785,700 in 1935 to around four million in 1937.64 Léon Blum had said in 1926 that it is dangerous to confuse the exercise of power with the conquest of power.65 Ten years later, in 1936, his Government will face an insurmountable contradiction – it was not possible in the context of the crisis of the thirties to reassure business and landowners, guaranteeing the accumulation of capital, and at the same time allowing workers’ control and the maintenance of broad social rights for workers. The Communist leader Maurice Thorez had declared that it was not time to seize power. Léon Blum’s France declares non-intervention in the Spanish Civil War in 1937, disappointing the social basis of his government. In 1937, the crisis is back and the illusions of distribution of wealth, after all just a small interlude in the chaos of capitalist production, perish. But the chaos was there, with the fall of production in 1937 (which had also led the United States to backslide on New Deal policies). The government falls after a fiscal crisis still in that year. Workers are persecuted; some are killed during demonstrations with the complacency of the government that reacts to the 1938 strikes against rising prices of essential goods, with brute force. In 1938, there are mass sackings and the law limiting the working week to 40 hours is reversed. In 1940, the Nazis occupy France. On the one hand, there is the collaboration of the right, fearful of the labour movement – the Vichy Government. On the other hand, the paralysis of the PCF tied to the 1939 non-aggression pact between Hitler and Stalin. And the initial 63

a people’s history of europe

apathy of the population, who had seen their rights recede and hope in the popular front government fail. Léon Blum will be imprisoned by the Vichy Government and incarcerated in Dachau and Buchenwald.66 The government’s class reconciliation policies failed and cleared the way for the defeat of the nation in face of the Nazi invasion and occupation in 1940. This is not Hobsbawm’s opinion as enunciated in a famous text published in Marxism Today, the theoretical journal of the Communist Party of Great Britain: The point I wish to make here is that the Popular Front strategy now adopted was more than a temporary defensive tactic, or even a strategy for eventually turning retreat into offensive. It was also a carefully considered strategy of advancing to socialism. It was, in my view, the first, and so far still the only, such strategy evolved for countries in which the classical insurrectionary situations of the type of the October revolution or of other types were not to be expected, though not necessarily impossible. This does not mean that it was bound to succeed. … The search for the magic pill, certified by white-coated or red-flagged scientists, and absolutely guaranteed to cure cancer, cholera, rheumatism and the common cold or their political equivalents, belongs to the field of self-delusion and advertisement rather than to the field of politics.67 Pierre Broué has a different opinion: ‘The party puts into circulation the following formula: “The popular front is not the revolution.” Indeed, it was something else: in France in June 1936, it was the brake of the revolution, after having helped open its locks.’ A few months later, when the military-civilian plot of the French Francoists christened ‘cagoulards’ by those who want to minimise the case, is it not the strong man of the Popular Front, the radical Édouard Daladier, who decides to benefit all the military with total impunity, thus marking another point against the revolution? It is also the Spanish government of the Popular Front that refuses to proclaim the independence of Spanish Morocco – something that might have destroyed Franco’s shock troops, the moors. French militants such as Louzon and Rousset offered to act as intermediaries between the Spanish republican government and the Moroccans. The British 64

‘man, controller of the universe’

and French governments voiced their opposition: that would mean the beginning of the collapse of the colonial empires. ‘As they bowed to this, socialists and communists of the Popular Front became the defenders of property and order, even of colonial order. How, in such conditions, to win the war of the poor and the oppressed?’68 In the same year of 1934, when Asturias rose in revolution and the popular front begins in France, Austria saw its short revolution crushed – in only two days, but it was an event that would remain in the memory of the country, with consequences to this day. The dislocation of the Austro-Hungarian Empire following the First World War implied a demographic, political and territorial rearrangement of the city of Vienna. In a climate of penury and devastation, the Social Democratic Party, more progressive and radical than most of the European Social Democratic formations of the Second International, but still rejecting a revolution like those that had happened in Russia, Germany and Hungary, assumed power in the city. The Social Democrats institutionalised, promoted and financed a type of neighbourhood that the workers themselves had illegally built during and after the war and extended to the outskirts of the city, inspired by the garden-city model, with partly productive vegetable gardens as a strategy to escape penury. The social housing programme of ‘Red Vienna’ was one of aid to housing and social rights of the working class. The neighbourhoods of Red Vienna had day-care centres, health services, collective laundries, cultural activities (cinemas, theatres, etc.), sports centres as well as community centres. Even today one of these neighbourhoods, the Karl Marx Hof, one of the largest, more than a kilometre in length, has gardens and Laundromats. Between 1923 and 1934, 64,000 dwellings were built, housing 200,000 residents in a universe of 2 million inhabitants, the population of the city at that time. On 12 February 1934 begins the Austrian civil war. The fighting begins in the industrial heart, in Linz (which Hitler will have among his favourite cities), following the opposition of the Socialists to a series of indiscriminate prisons. But the most dramatic moments are experienced at the Karl Marx Hof, where thousands of workers barricaded themselves to fight against the army, police and paramilitaries loyal to conservative and fascist politicians. They are definitely defeated four days later, on 16 February. The government suspends the parliament 65

a people’s history of europe

and outlaws the socialists. More than 200 people die. A Bonapartist corporative state is born. The Nazi Party ascended to power, the workers fell under the boots of fascism, and Social Democrats were persecuted. Austria had its Anschluß (annexation/connection) on 13 March 1938, with large sections of the population celebrating on the streets the entrance of the Nazi troops into the territory, unopposed – the opposition had been defeated four years earlier. Today, the central square of the Karl Marx Hof in Vienna is called 12th February Square. In the name of the memory of 12th February, and unlike the majority of the European left that adopted anti-militarist positions, even today the Austrian Left, including the Social Democrats, is in favour of the conscription, because it considers that the army must not be made up of professionals, so that it cannot turn against the workers, or at least to favour its crisis and division when there is a revolution. This subject came back to the pages of European newspapers after the crisis of 2008, in response to the growing American protectionism after Trump’s election.69

66

3 Midnight in the Century:1 The Second World War ‘In short, Germany was moribund, but the Germans didn’t notice. After the attempt on Hitler in July, the country lived in a state of terror: a denunciation, an absence from work, an incautious word were sufficient to land you in the hands of the Gestapo as a defeatist. Therefore both soldiers and civilians fulfilled their tasks as usual, driven at once by fear and an innate sense of discipline. A fanatical and suicidal Germany terrorized a Germany that was by now discouraged and profoundly defeated.’ Primo Levi, Last Christmas of the War2

Global War On 10 May 1940, Germany invaded France and the Netherlands. The British and the French advanced to the North to try to fight German troops there. Hitler’s blitzkrieg, inspired by the rapid war techniques of the French invasions (1792–1815) and the American civil war (1861–1865), seemed unstoppable in those days: the Führer troops enter the French Ardennes. Then Operation Dynamo begins, one of the largest evacuations of troops ever – 300,000 English and French soldiers are evacuated through the port of Dunkirk. Winston Churchill and Charles de Gaulle take command of England and France against Hitler. France collapses. To the south, the allies had the Maginot Line, a rigid defensive line that falls within a few days into the hands of the Germans: Paris and two-thirds of France are occupied by the Germans who established, with the connivance of large sectors of the French right, a pro-Nazi puppet regime led by Marshal Pétain, known as Vichy France. The war became global in 1941 with the Japanese invasion of Pearl Harbour and the invasion of the USSR by Germany in Operation 67

a people’s history of europe

Barbarossa, also in 1941. As early as 1931, the Japanese had invaded Manchuria and used that territory to occupy China from 1937. And, in 1935, there was the invasion of Abyssinia (Ethiopia) by Italy. De Gaulle won the support of most European countries when he proposed to lead resistance to Nazism from England. The coalition against Nazism – USSR, USA, Great Britain and Free France – only later, in 1944, made the Anglo-French-American landing in Normandy. Stalin had also postponed the response to Nazism by signing the Ribbentrop–Molotov pact in 1939, a pact of non-aggression between Germany and the USSR and for dividing Poland between them. The effect of this pact on organised communists was devastating – take the example of Czechoslovakia. In September 1938, Daladier, from France, and Chamberlain, from Britain, signed the Munich Agreement with Hitler and Mussolini, which traced the fate of Czechoslovakia. In 1938, the Nazis invaded and annexed the region of Sudetes, Czech territory where an important German community lived. The reaction is one of complacency on the part of France and Britain, and the USSR as well. The real politik that dominated diplomacy in the international system of states was increasingly opening the way for Hitler. Jirˇí Pelikán, then a leader of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia recalls: The Nazi/Soviet pact, of course, came as a great shock to us. … For example, I remember clearly a friend’s case. He was much older, had been a Communist since his university studies in 1933 and was one of the leading members of the party in our city in Moravia. When he received instructions from the Comintern after the Nazi occupation he was extremely shaken. Even messages signed by Gottwald himself stated that the German soldiers who had invaded Czechoslovakia were, in fact, proletarians in soldiers’ uniforms and therefore in no way class enemies! The real enemies were the Czech bourgeoisie headed by Beneš, and the American and British plutocrats. This was the Comintern line at the time. … When the German/Russian pact was signed at the end of August, this was a further shock [… but] when the war between the Soviet Union and Germany started. After that, of course, the situation changed completely; the Moscow Party 68

midnight in the century

leaders now gave full support to the Resistance and cooperation with other anti-fascist forces began.3 On the other side, cynicism was no less. In 1941, the then US senator Harry Truman said: If we see that Germany is winning the war, we ought to help Russia; and if that Russia is winning, we ought to help Germany, and in that way let them kill as many as possible.4 The Soviets were the ones who suffered the most losses, 20 to 30 million dead, it is not known for certain. In the Atlantic, North Africa and the Pacific, the war was also devastating. In the 900-day siege of Leningrad, in the battles of Guadalcanal, El Alamein, Iwo Jima, in Tokyo, Dresden, Warsaw, Hiroshima, Nagasaki. At the Battle of Kursk, a town located 450 km south-west of Moscow, the scene of the largest tank battle in history, between the Nazi and the Soviet army in July and August 1943. In Monte Cassino … But it was in 1942 and 1943, in Stalingrad, a crossing of routes and a vital node for Russia that gave access to the oil of the Caspian Sea, that the real turning point in the war occurred. With the German defeat to the east, and the Final Solution against the Jews and Gypsies, the allies will be forced to devise a common strategy. First in Casablanca and then at the Tehran conference in November 1943, the Allies decide to land in the South and North of France in May 1944. D-Day will be on 6 June 1944, with rapid success, and it allows the allied troops to move forward to free Paris. In addition to the landing in Normandy, less known but fundamental, in the south of France tens of thousands of Maghrebians defeated in 14 days, in August 1944 (Operation Dragoon), the Nazi troops to the south, isolating them in the Alps. Later, in Yalta and Potsdam, the allies will define the division of the world, with the imminent defeat of Germany and Japan, after the massive aerial bombardments of Dresden and Tokyo and the use, for the first time in history, of the atomic bomb. The first Soviet atomic bomb would only be tested in 1949. The Nazi persecution of Jews, Gypsies and other groups has as its first reason the need to fill the camps with forced labourers who would make the Nazi war economy work. Although the persecutions against the Jews are centuries old: the Dutch, who forcibly conquered the commercial 69

a people’s history of europe

routes to the Portuguese, unprotected during the Philippine dynasty, will also have incorporated some of the cartographic and mathematical knowledge of Jews expelled from the Peninsula at the end of the fifteenth century. Even today, next to the Portuguese Synagogue in Amsterdam is the statue of the dockworker, erected to commemorate the biggest strike against Nazism in Holland in 1941, when a compulsory work decree forced the Jews of the port of Amsterdam and port workers from Rotterdam to be recruited to Nazi war factories. The strike extended to all of North Amsterdam, but was eventually defeated. Along with the Warsaw Ghetto uprising (1943), this 1941 strike is among the few organised mass responses in this sector. The world has turned its back on it. Interpol was founded in Vienna in 1923 and, in 1938, Reinhard Heydrich, one of the SS generals, becomes the head of European Interpol, and all files are transferred from Vienna to Berlin. Intriguingly enough, most states did not stop their collaboration with Interpol during World War II. The Swiss continued to co-operate with the Germans and the fact that the Jews had a ‘J’ stamped on their passports (for Jude, Jew) has to do with Interpol – the Swiss insisted that German Jews have the ‘J’ in their passport so that they could refuse Jewish refugees who tried to enter Switzerland.5 But why will the Jews be killed and not continue working in the camps? The decision to kill them (‘The Final Solution’) was made at the Wannsee conference on 20 January 1942. At this conference, the Nazis calculated that it was impossible to feed the entire Nazi empire with protein (they would only eat potatoes) because after the defeat to the east, where the most fertile lands were, in Ukraine, they had no access to essential production fields. To get that portion of protein for their own, the Nazis concluded that it was necessary to stop feeding 6 to 7 million people, albeit poorly. At the 1st Wannsee Conference, the ‘final solution’, death by gas, against Jews was decided. At the 5th Wannsee Conference, it was applied to the Roma. A group of Austrian researchers who study forced labour in concentration camps published the first results on the problematic of Nazism as a ‘gigantic labour camp’, which is now known to have hosted hundreds of camps and sub camps across occupied Europe, including some Por70

midnight in the century

tuguese workers.6 The sick, children, old people were killed, but the healthy ones, after being stripped of any identity (hair cut, identical clothes) were put to work in private companies dependent on the planned and financed state economy. The historic memorial of the Mauthausen labour camp in Austria is an example of this production chain and contradicts the thesis of a regime primarily based on racism because if in this camp Jews were the most badly treated (staying in a warehouse with even worse conditions than the other prisoners) since its opening Mauthausen has been a quarry company, a factory, using compulsory and free labour. And where revolutionary political leaders, Jewish or not, were the first to be killed, pushed, in a line, by their comrades, into an abyss – the Nazis sordidly called them ‘parachutists’. The theme is important for the future because in this as in many other historical events, emphasis is placed on underlining fragmentary cultural phenomena – gender identity, ethnicity, etc. – whereas what is essential to the capitalist accumulation regime is put in second place.7 We insist: Nazism was not the product of a madman, a pervert, but the militarisation of society to save capitalism from its destructive essence, destroying even more. According to Gerhard Baumgartner, historian and director of the Austrian Resistance Documentation Centre: The SS create concentration camps and large factories within them, making them function as a self-sustaining system. … It is possible to see that in the first deportations, of 1938–39, it was the young and strong (gypsies) who were sent to Germany to work; in 1941–1943, it was the turn of children and the elderly to be deported to Poland to be killed. … There were not enough workers on the Nazi war machine. With rearmament, the job market in Germany has been completely emptied. The Roma were being deported to the concentration camps, because the SS needed a workforce. Not all were unemployed and taken from their workplaces and dragged to concentration camps, because the SS had established companies in the camps and needed people to work there. Later, the Nazis would kill all those who had to be fed, when they realized that there was not enough food for the entire population of the Reich in 1942–43. … There are two theories about the Holocaust: one is the intentionalist theory, which says that 71

a people’s history of europe

the Nazis always intended to kill every Jew; the other is a kind of functionalist view of the Holocaust. The decision to kill Jews in large numbers is made at the moment the Nazis are informed by their economists that it is necessary to kill several million people in order to guarantee the distribution and consumption of meat by the Germans. The decision is made at the famous Wannsee Conference, where the conclusion they reach is that if someone has to die, then let it be the Jews. From that moment on, it no longer matters whether they produced a million things for the German army … There were too many mouths to feed.8 On 7 and 8 May 1945, the horror will end. The instruments of unconditional German surrender are signed. Paris had already been freed in August 1944 with the Republican brigadists at the forefront. Their tanks had names like ‘Teruel’ and ‘Guernica’, because the Basque gudaris and the Catalan were essential to organise the resistance, with their mountain training (Pyrenees) and were in the front line in the liberation of Paris. However, on the other side, to the east, barbarism was still on the way: A temperature comparable to that caused by a star occurred when the atomic bomb exploded in the heart of Hiroshima, where fires continue to burn … A radio broadcast from Tokyo picked up in New York says that the atomic bomb killed all living things, human and non human, in Hiroshima. The radio added that the dead are so charred that they cannot be recognized. The authorities are unable to ascertain the final number of victims. The city has become a mountain of ruins. Tokyo radio added: ‘The effects were tremendous. Those on the streets and in city squares were burned alive and those at home died due to the air pressure and heat. With the destruction that has occurred, including hospitals and pharmacies, the authorities are unable to act.’9 The tone of one of the worse criminal events in the history of the world has the honour of sharing the cover of the daily newspaper Diário de Lisboa with a lavish lunch that Prime Minister Oliveira Salazar offers to the missions of the Brazilian and Portuguese Academy. The photo caption is, of course, from the banquet. But right next to the banquet, in which fine crystal glasses and bouquets of flowers are recognised, are 72

midnight in the century

the statements of Captain William Parsons, of the American Squadron who was in the B-29 Superfortress that dropped the atomic bomb: ‘Everything that happened,’ he said, ‘was tremendous and encouraging. After the bomb was dropped, we still felt the shock that made us shudder. The men who met me exclaimed: “My God!” Hiroshima was transformed into a mountain of smoke.’ The bomb referred to by the American captain was the most powerful used so far, dropped on a city, something that was prohibited by all laws and conventions that governed the war, including the Hague Convention.10 But what was prohibited in paper was inscribed in the laws of war. In the east, Americans wanted to have the last say. On the other hand, dropping the bomb was a warning to all other empires that the United States now had nuclear superiority. Japan surrendered, but surrendered to the Americans. The US army chose the Alamogordo base in New Mexico as an experimental platform for its nuclear programme. There were about 3,000 workers set to build the atomic bomb, starting in 1943. Many of the physicists who belonged to the project led by Oppenheimer did so in the name of preventing Hitler’s Germany from developing such a bomb. Two of them, as soon as they recognise that this danger no longer exists, in 1944, withdraw from the project: Józef Rotblat and Edward Condon. In June 1945, after the German surrender, a group of scientists led by James Franck asked the US government that the bomb not be used in Japan, but on a desert island. Some Japanese government officials and military should be invited to watch the bomb explode and thus, these physicists thought, the calamity of Hiroshima and Nagasaki might be prevented. The Franck Report was forwarded to President Truman, who rejected the proposal. At 8.15 on 6 August 1945, a B-29, baptised as Enola Gay, dropped an atomic bomb, nicknamed ‘Little Boy’, over the city of Hiroshima, Japan. Three days later, Nagasaki was also bombed. A Japanese report described Nagasaki after the bombing as ‘a cemetery without a single standing headstone’. Japan, through Switzerland and Sweden, reported on 10 August that it was surrendering without conditions. Hiroshima was never ‘necessary to win the war’. In Yalta, in February 1945, it was agreed that the USSR would go to war against Japan three 73

a people’s history of europe

months after German surrender. This took place on May 8, 1945, so the Russians would enter, and in fact went to war against Japan on 8 August 1945. But the USA, by dropping the bomb on Hiroshima on August 6 and on Nagasaki on 9 August forced Japan’s unconditional surrender. On 15 August, the Japanese emperor Hirohito announced to his subjects the surrender, which was signed in Tokyo Bay on 2 September 1945, on board the American battleship Missouri. Thus, and contrarily to what happened in Germany, the USA did not have to share Japanese territory with the Russians. More than 200,000 dead perished under the two atomic bombs. Ninety per cent of these were civilians. It is not known how many died or became deformed and/or ill from the effects of radiation in the following years. But political rhetoric is different. When on 8 August, as agreed in Yalta, the USSR goes to war with Japan, the USA makes public statements to welcome this. US Secretary of State James Byrnes, in a statement celebrating Russia’s declaration of war on Japan, says: This act by the Soviet government is of a nature to shorten the war and save many lives. I am happy that the Allied powers that cooperated in Europe to defeat an enemy continue to cooperate in the Far East and will bring peace to the world. I hope that the Japanese people now understand that any resistance to United Nations forces to compel them to accept law and justice will be entirely futile.11 On 10 August, US President Truman speaks to the American people about the problems of war and peace, publicly affirming the United States as the most powerful nation in the world at the end of the war. Western Europe would remain in the sphere of influence of the USA, Eastern Europe, in the sphere of influence of the USSR. The Far East would be American. Europe was defined by the new ‘Tordesillas meridian’ negotiated by Roosevelt, Churchill and Stalin at the end of the Second World War. The policy of the USSR has always been, from here on, not to interfere in the area of influence of the Western powers defined in the Yalta and Potsdam agreements. Latin America, like Africa and Asia, was not the object of sharing at the conferences between the powers in 1945. They remained an area of contention, where both the Western powers and the USSR could try to exert influence – many of the states of these three continents did not even exist in 1945. 74

midnight in the century

Resistance After the Second World War ended, there were hundreds of thousands of armed workers across Europe. How to disarm them? How to reduce the conflict to the struggle between democracy and fascism, between political regimes, purging the revolution, keeping the capitalist state in Western Europe unquestionable? In two ways: negotiating with the USSR and convincing communist parties to deliver their weapons;12 and building the welfare state, the European social pact, in which capitalism would put a brake on itself – the guarantee of job security.13 The resistance could not, according to De Gaulle, remain in the hands of the communists and anarchists who by the thousands fought in its ranks, populating the maquis of France, blowing up German trains circulating in occupied France, creating a web of thousands of men and women in Europe who made a unique contribution to the defeat of Germany. In Albania, Greece and Yugoslavia, it was clear that resistance had not only played a fundamental role in the defeat of fascism, more than Russian or Western troops, but was therefore in control of power. Already losing the war, the Germans ordered their soldiers to concentrate in Normandy. From the south and centre of France, they leave towards the North. Among them is a battalion, led by Commander Adolf Dieckman, who orders the soldiers to carry out an exemplary action during the retreat: sweeping the village of Oradour sur Glane, on the outskirts of Limoges, from the face of the earth. At 2pm, the Germans arrive, place the men inside three houses and the women and children in the Church. They are all watered with kerosene and set fire to the entire village. By 6pm, the village had disappeared and 642 people had died in the horror. Six manage to escape, one is shot in the back. One woman manages to run away from the Church. At the end of the war, the French would decide that Oradour would not be rebuilt. It was going to stay as it is today – an entire village, protected by a wall and a large iron gate with a sign ‘Souviens-toi’, remember: ruins of the houses, each with a sign with the names and occupations of those who lived there, in all of them pieces of twisted iron, cars, bicycles, work tools, agricultural implements are preserved. At the blacksmith’s house, a lathe and a piece that he never finished, some tiles. 75

a people’s history of europe

No one was held responsible for the massacre then. Dieckman was charged 13 years after the massacre, but in the meantime, he had conveniently died in 1944. The German generals claimed at the trial that Dieckman had exceeded orders. Oradour was chosen, it is thought, because in addition to being on the way, it was a village with almost no resistance activity, relatively unaware of the war, and that would not suspect anything when people saw the Germans arriving. What does a village ‘without resistance activity’ mean? Was the resistance that weak? It depends – on countries and the year. Resistance in Germany was quickly decimated. Still, at the end of the war, 300,000 members of the German Communist Party had been incarcerated and at least 20,000 killed.14 The spies were also part of the resistance – the Red Orchestra, an exceptional group of pro-Soviet spies, some infiltrated among the highest positions in the Nazi state, led by Leopold Trepper, a Polish Jew, in close connection with the USSR and the French resistance.15 Although it is difficult to evaluate its results, this network is thought to have prevented the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. In France, resistance begins without the communists, mobilising the fringes of anarchists and Trotskyists, many of whom are exiles from Francoist Spain. Poles living in France were also among the first in the Resistance. The PCF only joined the resistance after the Soviet invasion in 1941, and the majority of the Socialist Party had voted in favour of Pétain’s government. The bourgeois resistance begins with a colonel, Charles de Gaulle – promoted during the war to the rank of brigadier general – exiled to England. However, with the Soviet invasion in 1941, and especially after the forced labour decree (1942–43), which forced hundreds of thousands of workers to compulsorily go to Germany, resistance grows fast. Between going to Germany to work forcibly on the Nazi war machine, or climbing the mountain maquis and going down to the tunnels and railways where attacks on German trains were made, thousands chose to join the organised anti-fascist struggle. The same will happen in Italy where the resistance from 1943 onwards will join with massive strikes in the industrial zone of the North of the country. On 5 March 1943, 21,000 workers went on strike against the war at Fiat Mirafiori,16 the industrial town that was the pride of Mussolini, and by the end of the month, virtually all of Piedmont’s factories were closed. 76

midnight in the century

In Italy, the resistance mobilised 300,000 partigiani and in France half a million. Resistance will also be very important in Norway and Belgium, Albania and the Netherlands. The resistance is young, but it is mainly working class. Only 1 per cent of Brittany’s population are railway workers, but 7 per cent support the resistance.17 It brings women to the backstage of war, clandestinity – in such a way that in countries where it was massive, such as France, democratic rights that until then did not exist, such as the right to vote for women, are expanded. Resistance is increasingly socialist, but above all communist, loyal to the USSR. However, there were other sectors, such as the aforementioned exiles from the Spanish Civil War, socialists, Poles living in France, anarchists, Trotskyists, who maintained their independence until the end. Their methods are disciplined but democratic, unlike the Nazi army, where recruitment from the successive defeats of 1943 and 1944 resorted to terror against their own troops. Resistance is voluntary and ideologically compromised. The insertion of democratic methods is fundamental to the success of the undertaking – when they expel the Nazis from the north of Italy, in some villages administration councils are formed because the state was non-existent; in Leningrad, during the 900-day siege, democratic committees are formed – the only place where Stalin will not oppose them – as the only way to manage the increasingly meagre ration and prevent cannibalism, which is known today, has been reduced. A socialist-like structure takes shape in the resistance, which begins to breach the unanimous idea of a ‘good war’. That is, between Nazism and democracy there was another struggle, that of the revolution against imperialism. This reflection is made by the historian Howard Zinn, himself a combatant in the war on the side of the allies, who wonders if this was a ‘people’s war’. Yes and no. It was a war between regimes, democracy and fascism. No doubt. But it was also an imperialist war. Barbarism is not exclusive to the Nazis. How can we not recall, says the historian, the massive support for indiscriminate bombing of civilians in German and Japanese cities?18 And we must add the massive rapes of German women by Soviet troops; and allied troops of Western democracies, how many violations did they commit? And the humiliating treatment of Japanese prisoners after the surrender? And Roosevelt’s incarceration of 200,000 Japanese Americans in the USA during the 77

a people’s history of europe

war? The cynicism of the trials of the guilty at the end of the war, with the authorised ‘escape’ of so many? Gluckstein answers the question of whether this war was a ‘good war’ or an imperialist war by saying: ‘it was both’.19 The Second World War was unlike any other war. It brought unimaginable horrors – the Holocaust, nuclear annihilation, great famines, and civilian death on an enormous scale; but it is also remembered as the ‘good war’ that destroyed Nazism and fascism. As Clausewitz showed, warfare is not just a technical matter but reflects deeper political currents, and so these dual characteristics of the Second World War persisted after 1945. If we can reverse his aphorism for a moment: in peace times politics was a continuation of war, a carrying out the same by other means.20 In Novecento (meaning the twentieth century), director Bernardo Bertolucci portrays the dilemma of the end of the war. One of the characters tries to convince the peasants, partigiani and workers to hand over the weapons because ‘the war is over’ and one of them refuses and tells him that the war is over, but the boss is not. The struggle is between democracy and fascism, but also between capitalism and revolution. In Italy, part of the resistance will even refuse, after fighting the fascist Republic of Salò, in the North, to hand over weapons and three months of civil war will follow. But where this dilemma will be strongest is where the resistance, after defeating fascism, disputes power with liberal, pro-Western forces: in Yugoslavia and Greece. In April 1941, the Germans bombed Belgrade. In Croatia, next to it, a pro-Nazi puppet regime had been set up, which included the Ustacha, a fascist wing of a right-wing party. However, a few days after Operation Barbarossa the Yugoslavian resistance rises en masse against the invader. Josip Tito directed it from a military committee linked to the communists. At the head of the guerrillas are the partisans, who fight against the invader – now mainly Mussolini’s troops – but also against the Ustachas and the Chetniks, the Serbian nationalist monarchists, supported by the United Kingdom. The partisans managed to win the war gradually and in the liberated zones, they formed popular committees. A federation for the southern Slavs began to take shape, much under pressure from Tito. After the 78

midnight in the century

victory of the partisans in the Second World War, Tito became the leader of Yugoslavia and an army that at the time was the fifth largest in Europe. Yugoslavia will be outside the Warsaw Pact, the military alliance built by the USSR in the post-war period. Despite being one of the most important allies of the USSR against Nazi Germany – almost half of the population was involved in the communist guerrillas – Yugoslavia decides not to follow the USSR. Tito chooses to join the ‘non-aligned’ countries. Relations between the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia ended in 1948. Yugoslavia is expelled from Cominform (the successor to Comintern), which was based in Belgrade, the capital of Yugoslavia. At the time, Tito and his allies expelled pro-Soviet Communist Party leaders and surrounded themselves with the reformists, to build a model of socialism that they dubbed ‘Marxist humanism and workers’ self-management’. Then a series of economic reforms began, always focusing on industry and not agriculture, and with some executive decentralisation. The USSR responds with an economic and political blockade to Yugoslavia. It was intolerable, to have at its ‘feet’ – both geographically and politically speaking – a rebel regime, especially when it was through this country that the USSR had its main access to the Mediterranean Sea. Economic asphyxiation threatens Tito’s regime in such a way that it decides to ask the capitalist countries for help. It then asks the United States for a $105 million loan to address food shortages. This dissent irritates Moscow. The USSR and its satellites revoke the friendship treaties they had with Yugoslavia and prevent them from entering the Comecon (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance), a Soviet response to the American Marshall Plan. In response, Yugoslavia supports the arms embargo on North Korea and China during the Korean War. In 1953, relations between the USSR and Yugoslavia began to be resumed and in 1955 the Soviet leaders Bulganin and Khrushchev visited Belgrade for the first time. Tito, despite the reconciliation, maintains his relationship with the West. Yugoslavia did not survive the economic crisis, the fall of the Soviet Union and pressure from Western countries to ‘divide and rule ’. A strong and large state in the centre of Europe had to be prevented. Nationalisms and the economic crisis, German economic expansionism to the east, post-reunification, were the broth that fuelled the disintegra79

a people’s history of europe

tion that broke out in the 1990s with the war in Slovenia, Croatia and Bosnia.21 The formation of the modern Greek state will only be completed – like all violent bourgeois revolutions – in the Greek–Turkish war of 1918–22. A tragedy that still marks the country vividly, because it ended with the massive deportation of populations: 1 million Greeks are expelled from Asia Minor to Attica and all of Greece, and 400,000 Turks from what is today Greece to Turkey. The same coffee – boiled with a fine powder, which, when cooled, sits on the base of the copper coffee pot with a wooden handle – is called ‘Greek coffee’ in Greece and ‘Turkish coffee’ in Turkey. But it’s the same. The formation of modern capitalism can only be accomplished through the combination of some factors: a national state, conquered in violent bourgeois revolutions, that creates a single market. The existence of a proletariat, that is, people that have nothing to sell but their labour power, is achieved through the expropriation of religious orders, national goods and communal lands, the lands of peasants, private or communal, with taxes, laws, etc. – England’s iconic enclosures of the industrial revolution. It is also necessary, for capitalism, to accumulate ‘investment’ from an initial capital. Which, as it is initial, did not come from the exploitation of the labour force – there is no labour force yet, we are at the beginning of the formation of the production mode. It comes from theft, piracy, usury, expropriation of religious and national patrimony, etc. This primitive accumulation plays in Political Economy about the same part as original sin in theology. Adam bit the apple, and thereupon sin fell on the human race. Its origin is supposed to be explained when it is told as an anecdote of the past. In times long gone by there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living. The legend of theological original sin tells us certainly how man came to be condemned to eat his bread in the sweat of his brow; but the history of economic original sin reveals to us that there are people to whom this is by no means essential. Never mind! … In actual history it is notorious that conquest, enslavement, robbery, murder, briefly force, play the great part. In the tender 80

midnight in the century

annals of Political Economy, the idyllic reigns from time immemorial. Right and ‘labour’ were from all time the sole means of enrichment, the present year of course always excepted. As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic.22 In Greece, the proletarians have a different origin, because of this tragic event, the expulsion of a million people, who arrive in the cities with nothing, willing to sell their labour force for anything, and this is how Greece makes a leap in the accumulation, in the modernisation, when the whole world in 1929 goes into crisis and the textile companies, tobacco companies, etc. flourish in Greece, looking for this new cheap labour. That’s when Athens starts to become a big modern city. The Greek bourgeoisie has historically accumulated capital in a regime of dependence, as traders and intermediaries between Europe and Asia, and as black market merchants in the Second World War. Greek resistance to Italian and Nazi occupation forces was largely led by the Communists. In 1945, the Greeks were all armed, there was a government in the mountains that was elected in a clandestine vote. There were 100,000 partisans and 200,000 in the resistance support networks. During the Nazi occupation the Greek armed resistance organised a vote that collected, under the noses of the Nazi army, 2 million votes. This is not the example currently evoked to speak of the origins of Greek democracy – after the country’s crisis in 2008 – but an ancient slave society. Yet, the first time women were allowed to vote in Greece was in that vote, in 1944, when workers were armed.23 But when the country was liberated, in a sharing agreement between Churchill and Stalin, the right was withdrawn and women in Greece did not vote again until the end of 1950. In 1945, the British were reduced to a hotel, the Grande Bretagne, in the centre of Athens (it still exists) and all weapons were in the hands of the population who had built, alongside the official state, a parallel state that guaranteed the distribution of food, health care, etc. A group of partisans will enter the hotel’s sewers to make it explode, but they died from inhaling the toxic gases. History has these accidents. It was not for this reason, however, that the Greeks were disarmed and placed in the western sphere, later as part of NATO. Churchill and Stalin, in the Yalta and Potsdam agreements, divided Greece and convinced peasants and workers to hand over the weapons. Thousands did not deliver them and the civil war began.24 The Greek 81

a people’s history of europe

Communists were abandoned by Stalin’s USSR to their fate. Until 1949, they fought a civil war against part of the divided left, the Greek right and the British Army. The regime that emerged from this civil war was an authoritarian one, but, at least formally, democratic, in the sphere of Western influence. On 21 April 1967, the day the election campaign for legislative elections in Greece was inaugurated, a group of army officers, led by Colonel Georgios Papadopoulos, made a coup d’état and seized power, initiating a period of dictatorship marked by the persecution of the oppositions, numerous arrests and deportations.

82

4 The 1945 European Social Pact When I was going old, I saw their heads filled with sorrow, a turmoil of fuzzy thoughts, absolute certainties; an assumption of heroes set to survive – oh, such unfortunate kids, their hands so close to a wonderful victory that did not exist.1 Pier Paolo Pasolini It is common to relate the enactment of the European Social Pact – the welfare state – with the European Union. It is an anachronism. In other words, it erects a past that never was based on what we are today, by projecting contemporary feelings and experiences, institutions and social structures on a past that has never experienced them as such. It is, actually, the greatest danger faced by professional historians, our most common ‘occupational hazard’. The different welfare states are established in Europe in 1945, in an unprecedented social pact between capital and labour. By 1947/48, this pact was fully implemented and consolidated, and the State was mandatorily providing a wide range of universal rights as had never been seen before. The European project starts in 1947 and will develop slowly. Its first act took place in 1951, but it only consolidated during the 1980s, in the aftermath of the 1970–73 and 1981–84 crises. Another major distinction between welfare state and European Union (EU) lies in the fact that, historically, the European Union arises out of a deal between the ruling classes of the wealthiest nations: first of all, the USA, joined, in Europe, by the key industrial driving forces, France and Germany. It is a complex economic project, also unprecedented within the historical process, but its driving force is economic and institutional. Plus, its social dimension is consolidated, from the 1980s onwards, as assistance-based, which was pivotal in overturning the welfare state universal status, replaced by increasingly wider assistance programmes. All in all, the European Union must not be taken for 83

a people’s history of europe

the welfare state. Indeed, its evolution since the 1990s has brought about the collapse of the latter, replaced by an Assistance State – closely linked to the European project. We shall get back to this topic in the final chapter. For now, let’s focus on the welfare state, established in 1945–47.

The European Welfare State In 1945 and the post-war years, workers were armed; the resistance had infiltrated society organisational structures (in several places, it acted as an alternative power to the State) and was in charge of whole villages, cities, factories. Propriety was wrecked, devastated. Finally, in 1947–48, non union-based industrial action led to a wave of ‘wildcat strikes’. The first package of universal labour and social rights in Europe derives from this context. It is called European Welfare State. According to Tony Judt, by 1947 France, like Italy, was threatened with strikes, violent demonstrations and a steady increase in support for the Communist Party and its trade unions. Deliberate neglect of the consumer goods sector and the diversion of scarce national resources to a handful of key industrial sectors made long-term economic sense: but it was a highrisk strategy.2 The USA also faced what became known as ‘the post-war wave of strikes’.3 The war effort had implied a deal between workers and companies against a common external enemy, which explains, for instance, why the unions agreed not to exercise the right to strike. As soon as the war was over, the capital versus labour struggle resumed in major factories. Thereafter came McCarthyism, radical anti-communism, and the subsequent union division in the USA and Canada, which we shall not dwell into here, but is paramount to fully understand the political line adopted by main trade unions worldwide. This includes current key European trade unions, such as the Global Industrial Union and the ITF (International Transport Federation). Until 1945–1947, some social protection mechanisms were in place in Europe, based on those that had been employed to alleviate poverty among the working classes in the transition from the nineteenth century 84

the 1945 european social pact

to the twentieth. They were not universal, meaning they did not target the whole population: welfare insurance in Bismarck’s Germany, between 1883 and 1889; the seeds of a national insurance and retirement income from the English liberal government in the 1910s; the first health ministries in France and England on the aftermath of the First World War; and even the social planning carried out by the Nazi State in the 1930s. In Portugal, the first compulsory insurance schemes were drawn during the Republic (1910–1926), but were scarcely de facto accomplished.4 Compulsory unemployment insurance was also in place in England in 1911, in Austria in 1920, and in Norway by 1928. It must be underscored that all these allowances were targeted, rather than universal. They were also ad hoc measures, as highlighted by historian Tony Judt.5 In other words, they had not been planned at national level as a State policy pillar. It took the end of the Second World War, for which armed workers were instrumental, together with a real workforce shortage (the war effort led to the annihilation of a share of the population), for a new body of unprecedented reforms to come to life. Albeit different from country to country, such reforms amounted to a wide set of measures providing protection for anyone who worked, from childhood until death. This means the State was present from cradle to grave, leaving behind times of family dependence, the uncertainty of unemployment or begging for arbitrary assistance. Except in Southern Europe States (which will have to wait for the Portuguese revolution and Spanish transition to have its social welfare, in 1974–1978), the European Welfare State comprised education, housing, health care, urban recreation and leisure, and subsidised public transportation, culture and art. The most famous ‘welfare state’ plan was signed by a Conservative British politician, Baron William Beveridge, and published in November 1942 – Report on Social Insurance and Allied Services. Notwithstanding, despite small differences, all universal social plans were based on the idea of retribution with progressive taxation: the more you earn, the more you pay. Another fact we have already mentioned is the physical wrecking of property. In order to rebuild it, an internal deal was needed with those who were going to do it: the working classes. But it took something else too: a planned economy. Road networks, railways, factories, power grid, water supplies, health and education provision, etc. were impossible to 85

a people’s history of europe

rebuild as infrastructures without a planned economy. The director Ken Loach named these social struggles and the planned effort to build the economy and the welfare state The Spirit of ’45.6 The film, which in 2013 was nominated for best documentary award in Great Britain, was produced among the effects of the 2008 crisis and the debate on the – alleged, but never proven7 – non-sustainability of the European Welfare State. In 1945, all European governments, with no exception, embarked on nationalisations. It was only when, thanks to a planned economy, all networks were built and nationally established (in the 1970s) that privatisations began. Nationalising does not mean socialist economics, because it will only be so whenever companies are under workers’ control, besides nationalised. Margaret Thatcher’s and European governments’ privatisations in the 1980s meant the unions who had signed the social pact were defeated – starting with the strongest link, the miners. Still, privatisations were only cost-efficient because the State had assured the economic viability of companies to be privatised, via taxation. Can you imagine the outcome of each company building, according to its own criteria, a section of the railway, under a capitalist competitive economy? In order to survive, capitalism resorted to planned economy. Once again, we highlight this: economic planning is not a synonymous for socialist economics. Likewise, it was not the cause for USSR’s downfall, as claimed by the neoliberals. The USSR’s decline is linked to a persistent lack of freedom and innovation, which obstructed scientific and technologic development.8 For instance, in the first years after 1975 nationalisations in Portugal, State-Owned Enterprises employed around 300,000 workers, circa 8 per cent of the working population, generating a gross value added of 20 to 25 per cent of GDP. As mentioned by economist José Silva Lopes, Portugal ended up with one of the largest business sectors in Western Europe, even if not so different from those of France, Italy, the United Kingdom or Germany. In those countries, on average, the pubic sector employed 10 per cent of the workforce.9 Among those who are critical of neoliberalism, prevailing explanations have highlighted that, from the 1970s onwards, there was an increasing deregulation of the labour market, as well as a weakening of the State’s role in the economy. Nonetheless, on the aftermath of the 86

the 1945 european social pact

war, the State’s role loomed, both as an investor, supporting a social wage (the welfare state), and, later, after the 1970s, as a financial backer, with the explosion in public debt.10 The State is an extremely complex topic within society – nor statistics nor the current legal framework are enough to depict all types and complexity of the State’s direct and indirect intervention on the framing of the economy, labour relations/ conditions and way of life. This is not the time or place to discuss it, but it is one of the main outcomes of the Second World War: the State rises and consolidates, namely, in terms of maintaining the workforce (health care), training it (education and professional training); tax policies; public debt and budgets; public areas and transportation management, etc. Furthermore, working classes were incorporated into production, against a backdrop of workforce scarcity. The first migratory waves aimed at reconstruction began, mostly coming from southern Europe and Turkey, and direct wages were substantively frozen by the social pact for employment security. The major ideological call will not come from the European idea (ECSC, EEC and the upcoming European Union), a ruling classes’ project, but from the need to ‘rebuild the nation’ on the aftermath of the war – in other words, a ‘national call’. Where in power, Communist and Socialist parties, above all France ’s PCF and English Labour, played a key role in that process. In Japan and Germany, both under American occupation, it was even easier to subdue workers, because both the Nazis and the Japanese empire had wrecked workers’ organisations. In addition, the USA’s occupation meant that Americanism-Fordism played a direct role in management, resources allocation, the workforce and even in the organisation (and curtailment) of trade unions. It was up to the USA to decide who was going to work, how and where – and what they were going to produce. In Tony Judt’s words: The prospects for political stability and social reform in post-World War Two Europe all depended, in the first place, on the recovery of the continent’s economy. No amount of state planning or political leadership could conjure away the Himalayan task facing Europeans in 1945. The most obvious economic impact of the war was on housing stock. The damage to London, where three and a half million homes in the metropolitan area were destroyed, was greater than that wrought by the Great Fire of 1666. Ninety per cent of all homes in 87

a people’s history of europe

Warsaw were destroyed. Only 27 per cent of the residential buildings in Budapest in 1945 were habitable. Forty per cent of German housing stock was gone, 30 per cent of British, 20 per cent of French. In Italy, 1.2 million homes were destroyed, mostly in cities of 50,000 or more people … The housing shortage would last well into the mid-1950s. As one middle-class woman expressed it, upon emerging from a Post-War Homes Exhibition in London: ‘I’m so desperate for a house I’d like anything. Four walls and a roof is the height of my ambition.’11 At the same time, labour rights are imposed, circumscribing – but not abolishing – profit accumulation. They are as relevant as social rights. Humanitarian principles objecting to the degrading conditions the working classes lived in – upheld by the International Labour Organization, established in the Treaty of Versailles after the First World War – were not enough to prevent workers from threatening the order and hierarchy created by capitalist accumulation. They demanded employment security. Within democratic regimes, employment security means partial workers’ control over the price of wages. As for capitalism, if no dictatorship is in place (under dictatorships, wages are regulated by forbidding trade unions and workers’ parties), what regulates wages is unemployment and its threat – which was limited in The Spirit of ’45, namely, by a body of laws and pacts with trade unions and parties representing the workers, outlawing dismissals or linking them to expensive compensations, which discouraged discharges. After the war, as Donald Sassoon, the author of One Hundred Years of Socialism, claims, the eight-hour day had been adopted everywhere, if not de jure, at least de facto. This was no minor reform: Marx himself had called the legal restriction on the length of the working day ‘an all-powerful social barrier’ and ‘a modest Magna Carta … which shall make more clear when the time the worker sells is ended, and when his own begins’. … Leisure time, the authentic basis of freedom and the necessary precondition for political activity, was now protected by law.12 88

the 1945 european social pact

Judt, ‘a universalist social democrat’ historian according to himself, mentions (here ironically) that: ‘this was not the spiritual and social revolution for which many in the wartime Resistance had dreamed, but it was a first step away from the hopelessness and cynicism of the pre-war years.’13 Charles Maier asserts that the call for ‘national reconstruction’ was pivotal. Even in France, where the resistance against the occupation was also a resistance against bosses (either occupants or Nazi collaborators), strikes in 1948 and 1974 succumbed to the economic boom that followed and the pact between State, bosses and trade unions to bring social stability to the country14 – nothing but ‘productivity politics’,15 embraced by workers’ leaders, who ‘believed in the assumption of welfare state capitalism’s organised growth’.16 The author also highlights the disciplining, by previous dictatorships, of German and Japanese working classes, which we have mentioned above. It is a gross simplification to insist that there were only two conflicting forces: democracy and Nazism. It was not just a political regime dispute, because there were other camps, such as revolution, and therefore the dispute was about States and accumulation modes, capitalism and socialism. Nazism was fought by liberal democratic powers, but also by millions of revolutionaries. In some countries, such as Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy and France, they had quite some power. Even in Siberian fields – such as the famous Vorkuta, where a forced labour rising took place, forcing the liberation of 90 per cent of its workers afterwards – forced workers made themselves available to the army fighting Nazism. There was more than a democracy vs. racism struggle taking place; it was also one between State and revolutionary power. The establishment of the welfare state and full employment precisely illustrates that the revolution was more than a dream, as mentioned by Judt. It was a real possibility for those who supported it – and an eminent hazard for those who feared it.

Cold War In 1958, Gabriel Garcia Márquez visited Eastern Europe. He then published several hilarious articles. The first begins like this: 89

a people’s history of europe

The ‘iron curtain’ is not a curtain, nor is it made of iron. It is actually a red and white roadblock made of wood, resembling a barbershop sign. After spending three months inside it, I realise how foolish it was to expect the ‘iron wall’ to be an iron wall as such. Yet twelve years of staunch propaganda are more powerfully persuasive than the whole philosophical system. 24 hours a day of journalistic prose will crush your common sense to the point of taking metaphors literally.17 On 5 March 1946, Churchill delivered the most important speech from the onset of the Cold War. In a famous quote, he claimed an iron curtain had descended on Europe, partitioning the continent. Actually, the Cold War had already started in 1944, when Hitler’s defeat had become clear, and the struggle for political control over Europe began: when Harry S. Truman announced his support for the anti-communist forces in Turkey and Greece (1946), the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) helped the conservatives defeat the popular Communist in the Italian and French elections of 1947, the USSR forced the Eastern European states into its orbit, and the animosity attained dramatic proportions during the First World’s blockade of Berlin in June 1948. In the melee, an adviser to Truman (Bernard Baruch) used the term ‘Cold War’ to describe the conflict, and a columnist (Walter Lippmann) made the phrase widely known.18 The USSR – the most instrumental country for Hitler’s military defeat – came out of the war with a higher status. Churchill, Stalin and Roosevelt met in Yalta in 1945, and it was then the curtain was forged. But Western Europe and USA leaders feared the huge acclaim socialist ideas had achieved for millions of Europeans, giving new electoral and social impetus to communist parties and workers’ organisations. Churchill’s speech is thus the onset of a rather uphill ideological struggle to curtail the influence of socialist ideas – lasting until the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. The speech focuses on the lack of political freedom in the USSR and the areas under its direct influence. Ever since that speech was delivered in Fulton, the USSR is regarded as a totalitarian State, whereas the West is seen as a stronghold for freedom. In 1949, George Orwell published 1984,19 a dystopian novel about totalitarian States. 90

the 1945 european social pact

On that 5 March 1946, Winston Churchill travelled to Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri (USA), in order to be graduated honoris causa. It was meant to be a private ceremony, but turned into an outstanding moment. The conservatives had lost the elections in England on the aftermath of the war, so Churchill was no longer the prime minister. Still, Harry Truman, the POTUS, went to Fulton. It was obviously more than just a personal speech, but rather a high level meeting to sound a war cry – the cold war cry. The speech’s impact was immediately felt worldwide. One day later, on 6 March 1946, Diário de Lisboa transcribes the Fulton speech: It would nevertheless be wrong and imprudent to entrust the secret knowledge or experience of the atomic bomb, which the United States, Great Britain, and Canada now share, to the world organisation, while it is still in its infancy. It would be criminal madness to cast it adrift in this still agitated and un-united world. No one in any country has slept less well in their beds because this knowledge and the method and the raw materials to apply it, are at present largely retained in American hands. I do not believe we should all have slept so soundly had the positions been reversed and if some Communist or neo-Fascist State monopolised for the time being these dread agencies. The fear of them alone might easily have been used to enforce totalitarian systems upon the free democratic world, with consequences appalling to human imagination. God has willed that this shall not be and we have at least a breathing space to set our house in order before this peril has to be encountered: and even then, if no effort is spared, we should still possess so formidable a superiority as to impose effective deterrents upon its employment, or threat of employment, by others. Ultimately, when the essential brotherhood of man is truly embodied and expressed in a world organisation with all the necessary practical safeguards to make it effective, these powers would naturally be confided to that world organisation … Now I come to the second danger of these two marauders, which threatens the cottage, the home, and the ordinary people – namely, tyranny. We cannot be blind to the fact that the liberties enjoyed by individual citizens throughout the British Empire are not valid in a considerable number of countries, some of which are very powerful 91

a people’s history of europe

… Nobody knows what Soviet Russia and its Communist international organisation intends to do in the immediate future, or what are the limits, if any, to their expansive and proselytising tendencies. I have a strong admiration and regard for the valiant Russian people and for my wartime comrade, Marshal Stalin. There is deep sympathy and goodwill in Britain – and I doubt not here also – towards the peoples of all the Russias … We understand the Russian need to be secure on her western frontiers by the removal of all possibility of German aggression. We welcome Russia to her rightful place among the leading nations of the world. We welcome her flag upon the seas. Above all, we welcome constant, frequent and growing contacts between the Russian people and our own people on both sides of the Atlantic. It is my duty however, for I am sure you would wish me to state the facts as I see them to you, to place before you certain facts about the present position in Europe. From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across the Continent. Behind that line lie all the capitals of the ancient states of Central and Eastern Europe. Warsaw, Berlin, Prague, Vienna, Budapest, Belgrade, Bucharest and Sofia, all these famous cities and the populations around them lie in what I must call the Soviet sphere, and all are subject in one form or another, not only to Soviet influence but to a very high and, in many cases, increasing measure of control from Moscow.20 On 12 March 1947, Truman addresses the Congress, and asks for 400 million dollars to fight against Communist influence in Greece and Turkey. This money will be instrumental in defeating the Communists in the Greek civil war (1946–49). Besides, it marks the announcement of the Truman Doctrine: all the money in the world is not enough to counter the influence of the USSR. From then on, the American public is called to endorse that the USA has a mission to ‘help the peoples’ subject to the communist threat and to support them in economic, political and military terms. The Truman Doctrine guided US foreign policy until the defeat in Vietnam and the ‘democratic transitions’ (1974–83) on the aftermath of the Portuguese revolution. It assumed the world was divided into free democratic nations on the one side, and totalitarian Communist ones on the other. And that the USA should do everything to eliminate the 92

the 1945 european social pact

communist threat In Europe, this translated into massive cash injections; in the rest of the world, it meant mostly military invasions – such as the ones in Korea and Vietnam – or support for military dictatorship regimes in Latin America and Asia in the 1960s and 1970s. Diário de Lisboa’s front cover as soon as 13 March claimed, ‘Truman’s speech to the Congress caused a deep impression due to his crudeness in assessing the international situation.’ In an excerpt quoting The Times, it says: No one can turn a blind eye to the nature of the challenge deliberately launched by the President or assume that the new phase he is inaugurating is quiet or easy. When he says totalitarianism, he means communism; when he speaks of coercion, he means coercion from governments aligned with Russia. His challenge is launched in the name of western democracy and should not be left unanswered. The first armed conflict in the Cold War was the Korean War. The war lasted from June 1950 to July 1953, and once it was over Korea was divided in two states, partitioned along parallel 38, and so it remains today. The USA and the UK joined the war on the side of South Korea, whilst China and the USSR assisted North Korea.

From ECSC to the European Union On 18 April 1951, representatives from Western Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands and Luxembourg signed, in Paris, the treaty setting up the European Coal and Steel Community, the forerunner to the EEC and current EU. Julius Caesar, Charlemagne, Napoleon and Hitler had tried to achieve it by force, the Catholic Church by faith, internationalist Bolsheviks by ideology and organising the working classes. Jean Monnet and Konrad Adenauer started with the free circulation of coal and steel. In spite of several crises, their project for a European Union is still thriving. Or is it not? The European Union does not arise out of class negotiations on the aftermath of the war – regulated capitalism – but from the outside. The USA realised that the only means to save its own market was some sort of European common market, regardless of competition. Besides, it could keep Socialist influences away. The project entailed some difficult 93

a people’s history of europe

agreements – with several crises and even setbacks – between the ruling classes of central European countries, who regarded this as the only way to succeed as capitalist countries and preserve private ownership. France and Germany played pivotal roles. They still do. The role of the USA is also clear.21 Jean Monnet,22 a Frenchman born in 1888 in Cognac, France, who had been in charge of economic and war production ties between Great Britain (whom he was working for) and the USA.23 He was Roosevelt’s trusted advisor and one of the men behind the French economy’s recovery, while a member of the French Committee of National Liberation. ‘There will be no peace in Europe, if the states are reconstituted on the basis of national sovereignty,24 he said on 5 August 1953. In Germany alone, 40 per cent of the housing stock had been destroyed – 30 per cent in England, as mentioned above. There was not a sole intact bridge on the whole River Seine between Paris and France’s most important Atlantic harbour, Le Havre. In the Rhine, there was only one bridge standing. Fleets, railways, canals and roads had been destroyed. 1947 had the coldest winter since 1890, and hunger spread everywhere. Eastern Europe, Western Europe’s granary, was under Soviet control – and even more devastated than the West. Moreover, there had been no land reform in Southern Europe. Farmers were required to increase production and keep prices stable, thus remaining themselves in miserable living conditions. They were the labour drive of central Europe’s post-war reconstruction: in the 1960s, massive waves of emigrants fled from Southern Europe, only by then fully urbanised. Josué de Castro, a doctor and former president of FAO,25 which was established in the aftermath of the Second World War precisely to tackle the hunger issue, writes that: Even though war wreckage was much more severe in Eastern Europe countries than in the West, it was in the latter that malnutrition proved harder to overcome. This was due to higher population density and Western Europe’s perpetual dependency situation. … Cereal production had fallen to a half in 1945–46, in comparison to 1934–1938, while there was a decrease in meat and butter production of 36 per cent and 30 per cent respectively. … From an early stage, it became clear Eastern Europe countries were not available to provide for 94

the 1945 european social pact

some of the most alarming cases, since the interests of the two world powers – The USA and The USSR – objected to trade between both worlds under their influence.26 Capitalism did not offer much choice, in a Europe devastated by high food costs, coal rationing, wretched by war. England bought half of its products from the USA, but had ran out of dollars by the end of the war; France was the world’s leading coal importer, and its deficit towards the USA reached $2,049 million. Several European countries did not even have access to trading currency, because inflation reached insane levels. In Germany, ‘there was no functioning currency’ and the black market was the accepted value.27 In short, the four key common sense reasons for the establishment of the common market (USSR’s power after the Second World War, USA’s response to it, the emergence of underdeveloped countries in the aftermath of anti-colonial revolutions and domestic developments in Europe28) are a coarsely abridged approach for assessing the European Union, because they leave aside the historical context of its birth and development. The notion of a Europe as summoned by Churchill in Zurich in 1946,29 had, so far, been an exclusively socialist and revolutionary intent. The ‘Socialist United States of Europe’ was a project discussed in Zimmervald during the First World War, later cherished by Trotsky’s Left Opposition.30 Stalin-dominated Communist International boycotted it in the name of ‘safeguarding USSR’s defence’, which, as mentioned above, implied leaving alone the domestic bureaucratic caste in power after 1928. Perry Anderson assesses that the bourgeoisie’s biggest achievement in the twentieth century was building a united Europe ‘top–down’31 – something rather unfathomable until then, since the EU comes to life as an odd hybrid. As it turned out, one imperialism did not have to defeat the other in order to survive! In July 1947, Foreign Affairs published an article signed Mister X (George Kennan, a State Department official stationed in Moscow), outlining the US ‘containment’ foreign policy objectives.32 To abide by them from a military perspective, NATO was founded in 1949 (the other side followed with the Warsaw Pact in 1955). In political and economic terms, the idea of keeping Germany in a state of underdevelopment was abandoned. It is not likely the idea had truly prevailed among allies at all, 95

a people’s history of europe

since they spared 80 per cent of factories from their bombs, whilst devastating whole cities. American, English and French occupation areas were progressively integrated, until the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) was created on 23 May 1949. A few months later, on 7 October, the Soviet occupied area became the German Democratic Republic (GDR). Simultaneously, the Marshall Plan and the military aid plans that followed channelled resources ($13,000 million) that were instrumental for the economic reconstruction of Western Europe between April 1948 and September 1951.33 The historian David Reynolds recalls: America had been neither bombed or occupied and had lost only 300,000 lives (about 0.25 per cent of the population). In fact, the war boom had pulled the country out of depression to produce half the world’s industrial output by 1945.34 In June 1948, the London recommendations outlined the Schumann declaration on coal and steel, proclaiming a ‘European revolution’ that would lead to ‘The United States of Europe’.35 The Plan was put forward in 1950. The Berlin crisis in 1948 and the onset of the Korean War in 1950 prompted the USA to push for a European integration encompassing military incorporation. This being so, the Marshall Plan for economic reconstruction aid was quickly surpassed by the Mutual Security Aid. In June 1952–53, from a total of nearly $5,000 million, $3.5 million were deployed in Direct Military Aid and $1.2 million in Defence Aid.36 Gradually, the economic boom gave the Christian Democrats more and more votes, on the one hand, and created a friendly environment to constrict the resistance popular front. The end of party unity precipitates the end of trade union federations’ and associations’ unity too, and the major union families split into Communist, Social-democratic and Christian unions. In Germany, where the economic boom was the most stunning, the capital/labour social dialogue model emerges. Workers are now allowed representation in companies’ boards – albeit always in a minority. In 1951, six countries set up the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC): Western Germany, Belgium, France, Italy, Luxembourg and The Netherlands. The treaty established that decision-making regarding coal and steel industries on the member-states was now in the hands 96

the 1945 european social pact

of a supranational body, the High Authority. Its first president was Jean Monnet. The Treaty of Rome was signed in 1957, setting up the European Atomic Energy Community (EURATOM) and the European Economic Community (EEC). Member-states decided to build a ‘common market’. The most important aspects in these treaties were the agreements on productive restructuring and product specialisation, together with common law, management and taxation formats for the sector. While these institutions were being erected, management methods in the most thriving areas (Northern France and Italy, the Ruhr) became increasingly Americanised, assisted by an expansionist economic boom. By the end of 1952, West Germany was using something like 22 per cent of its GDP on investment. The economy grew faster and most impressively on those countries where fascism/tyranny had been defeated: Germany and Japan. All evidence points towards what we have said above: the workforce had been disciplined for/by the war, and American management methods, which did not allow for questioning the hierarchies of capitalism production, increased productivity. Plus, trade unions and parties representing workers’ rights had been annihilated, so there was no revolutionary counterweight against the ‘national reconstruction’ ideology. This ideology, upholding national reconstruction efforts that kept the capitalist order untouched, because ‘it was time to build the country’, and never challenged the productive framework for that process was particularly strong in France, where PCF, lead by Maurice Thorez, was in power until 1947. French resistance spirit against business hierarchy will rise on the aftermath of May ’68 strikes, and not after Germany’s defeat in 1945 because PCF’s ‘national call’ was so compelling. Yet another factor – a nearly terrifying one – will be pivotal: war had destroyed civilian life, but not factories. In Primo Levi’s words, in Auschwitz, At any rate, there was no real need of news from far away to find out how the war was going. At night, when all the noises of the Camp had died down, we heard the thunder of the artillery coming closer and closer. The front was no more than a hundred kilometres away; a rumour spread that the Red Army was already in the Beskids.37 The enormous factory in which we worked had been bombed from 97

a people’s history of europe

the air several times with vicious and scientific precision: one bomb, only one, on the central power plant, putting it out of commission for two weeks; as soon as the damage was repaired and the stack began belching smoke again, another bomb and so on. It was clear that the Russians, or the Allies in concert with the Russians, intended to stop production but not destroy the plants. These they wanted to capture intact at the end of the war, as indeed they did; today that is Poland’s largest synthetic rubber factory.38 On his history of Europe after ’45, Tony Judt is caustic: ‘war is not always an economic disaster – on the contrary, it can be a powerful stimulus to rapid growth in some sectors.’ As already mentioned, 50 per cent of the Second World War victims were civilians, while the First World War only had 5 per cent civilian casualties. Yet, according to Judt, such a devastating war in terms of people and places spared factories and companies: Little more than 20 per cent of German industrial plants had been destroyed by May 1945; even in the Ruhr, where much Allied bombing had been concentrated, two thirds of all plant and machinery had survived intact. … The UK, the USSR, France, Italy and Germany (as well as Japan and the USA) all emerged with a larger stock of machine tools than they started with.39 In 1967, a sole Commission and Cabinet were established, as well as the European Parliament, whose members have been elected independently since 1979. Those first years were marked by the frustration associated with building common steps – state-members successively rejected any moves forward –, but it was by then that a common agricultural policy and the European Court were set up (1952). Panagiotis Sotiris argues that one of the key explanations for what the EU is – not a federation – lies in the increasing political relevance of the idea of integration, whose major milestone is the rise in bureaucracy, which can not be boiled down to technocracy. He further claims that functionalism, federalism and inter-governmental cooperation, the ideological cornerstones of the project (for marketing purposes only, for, according to Sotiris, none of them exists as such), are supranational 98

the 1945 european social pact

institutions that, despite of a high level of contradiction, do work and are pivotal in decision-making.40 On 22 January 1972, Great Britain, Ireland, Denmark and Norway sign the agreement to join the European Economic Community (EEC). Nonetheless, in Norway a popular referendum rejects the country’s accession. It is the first enlargement in the history of the organisation, whose member-states were, until then, West Germany, Belgium, Holland, Luxembourg and Italy. Both newcomers and founding members were happy: the EEC’s economic power and influence in global monetary relations increased categorically. Some of the key figures for the establishment of the EEC attended the enlargement ceremony in Brussels: Jean Monnet, Spaak and Hallstein. This newly founded common market was economically rather impressive: it represented 41 per cent of world trade. In 1986, at a time when the neoliberal project takes hold within the EU and its supporters, the European Single Act was adopted. It promoted the removal of all obstacles to the free circulation of capitals and goods and encouraged privatisations and the flexibilisation of the labour market. The European federative project had failed (it could only succeed in a context of progressive equality, which meant richer countries transferring knowledge, patents and training to poorer ones), and the single market and free circulation would necessarily pave the way for more inequality. For instance, Germany’s productivity is twice that of Portugal. The corollary of this policy is obvious – more work for less. The chosen route was to demand the extraction of surplus, not via the transfer of scientific resources that would bring southern countries closer to the north, but rather by wage competition at European level, continuously restringing direct and indirect wages in Southern Europe and Germany alike. In Europe, however, a further logic was set in motion by the reunification of Germany, and the design of the monetary union agreed at Maastricht, followed by the Stability Pact, both cut to German requirements. Presiding over the common currency would be a central bank of Hayekian conception, answerable neither to voters nor governments, but only to the single objective of stable prices. Dominating the new currency zone would be its biggest economy, now enlarged to the east, with a major reservoir of cheap labour just across its borders. 99

a people’s history of europe

The costs of reunification were high, dragging down German growth. To recoup, German capital enforced an unprecedented wage repression, accepted by German labour under threat of outsourcing to Poland, Slovakia or beyond. As manufacturing productivity rose and relative labour costs declined, German export industries became more competitive than ever, taking an increasing share of Eurozone markets. In the periphery of the Eurozone, on the other hand, the corresponding loss of competitivity of the local economies was anaesthetised by a flow of cheap capital borrowed at interest rates held virtually uniform across the space of the monetary union, according to German prescriptions.41 This quick note was written by Perry Anderson in 1998, ten years before the public debt collapse in Southern Europe after states employed financial resources never seen before to bail out bankrupt banks, via the European Stabilisation Plan and the IMF (International Monetary Fund). Inflation control, as enshrined in the Maastricht Treaty (1992) – which created the European Union (EU) – was crucial for Germany, going through a deep crisis caused by reunification in 1990. The Treaty established that members had to keep an annual deficit no greater than 3 per cent of GDP, maintained a level of price satiability and stated that inflation rates could be no more than 1.5 percentage points higher than the average of the three best performing member-states in terms of price stability. In practice, since there is no such thing as a real growth rate higher than 3 per cent, this meant poorer countries were left no other choice but to cut public expense. Such as the 1970 crisis had been instrumental in creating the single currency, the Lisbon treaty, which came into force in 2009 – and which replaces the right to work with the right to look for work – thus bringing the European welfare pact to an end, cannot be separated from the effects of the 2001 crisis caused by the collapse of ‘new technologies’ or those of the one in 2008. Europe was dealing with the European labour market as one of the key issues of its programme for the last decade (2008–2018). Therefore, the crisis got worse: less public investment, more productive capacity immobilisation (unemployment), lower wages, increasing strain on the workforce, used to its exhaustion limit. 100

the 1945 european social pact

Such complex and asymmetrical evolution strategy since the early days generated a power bureaucracy within the European Union – which, according to Panagiotis Sotiris, holds a disproportionate and undemocratic control over the member-states’ subordinate classes. Still, it remains an imperialist state, unable to ‘go supranational’: theorising on a supranational Europe tends to: overestimate one aspect of this process, the strengthening of EU institutions and the expansion of EU bureaucracy, and to underestimate the continued importance and effectiveness of antagonism and conflict inside the European Union. Therefore, we have to insist that the European integration process is an imperialist project both in the sense of the elation of the EU to the rest of the imperialist chain and the antagonism within it, but also inside the EU in the uneven relation between the different countries.42 Nevertheless, the European Union is not a token for a United Europe – nor for a unified one, for that matter. It never was. And it still isn’t.43 De Gaulle’s France had less productive capacity, and he longed for more. Adenauer’s industry was rather strong, so he wanted more integration: Europe and its market. The Union went through several vicissitudes, but the major one was Europe being, for most of its history, a divided territory – until the wall fell in 1989: ‘Anyone under the age of fifty grew up – or was born into – a world glaciated into its Cold War form,’ wrote the British historian and peace activist E.P. Thompson in 1987. It must seem like an immutable fact of geography that the continent of Europe is divided into two blocks which are struck in postures of ‘deterrence’ for ever more. Two years later, however, the eastern block had dissolved, by the end of 1990 Germany was unified, and on 31 December 1991 the Soviet Union itself ceased to exist. Why did the barriers seem so permanent? Why, in the end, did they fall so quickly?44 On 17 February 1974, Spain filed a petition to the EEC Council of Ministers asking to start accession talks. It had already filed one to join the Common Market back in 1962. On 25 March, the Council rejected Spain’s advances. Italy opposed it, even tough Germany, France, 101

a people’s history of europe

Belgium, The Netherlands and Luxembourg had been in favour. The outcome of a heated debate was new-members admittance discussions being put off until an association doctrine for countries outside the Common Market was decided. In Spain, ‘Europeanisation’ vanished after the civil war (1936–39). The idea was revived by the defeated side, which linked it to democracy, social and economic development, the struggle against Franco and the end of Spain’s traditional isolation. In the 1970s, the main parties and historical nationalities accepted the European model.45 In Portugal, the whole domestic process was more complex because of the revolution. Its political driving force was the Socialist Party and its promise that ‘Europe is with us’, still in the spirit of the Document of the Nine,46 which brought people’s power to an end in 1975. Europe would be a ‘third way’ in-between USSR and capitalism, based on a parliamentary system/pluralist democracy, Keynesian reforms/mixed economy, keeping a certain level of planning and the welfare state, one of the revolution’s legacies. The Socialist Party actually warranted that ‘the revolution’s achievements’ would hold on. The EEC would mean establishing supranational institutions to meet the challenges of a bipolar world, where Europe would be a kind of ‘middle ground’, safe from USA–USSR conflicts. Talks between Portuguese social-democrats and the European institutions had been taking place since 1974, with the aim of consolidating some sort of liberal democracy in order to tame the revolution’s impacts, namely, council democracy, state economy and democratic management of public services. Full support from the EEC and the USA enabled the development of moderate and liberal parties.47 But it was only in 1976, after 25 November 1975 – which crushed the revolution – that the I Constitutional Government, led by Mário Soares, applied for EEC membership. Still, Portugal only joined in 1986, after the Constitution was amended in 1982. It might sound strange for Portuguese people nowadays, but integration in ECC was not a popular demand. Even PCP and CDS were against it. So were most Portuguese citizens, according to surveys carried out at the time.48 In 1979, singer José Mário Branco ironically sang: ‘What do they want? That you give them Europe for Christmas?’ The more moderate pop group GNR chanted: ‘I want to see Portugal in the EEC!’ 102

the 1945 european social pact

In the 1990s, in Portugal and the rest of Southern Europe, the European project went hand in hand with a structural change in credit for an uneven trading of goods (export of cheap products from Portugal; import of machinery from Germany and France) – via structural funds transfer. Even though this credit policy (which will burst in 2008) has raised debt exponentially, it immediately brought major improvements in communications and a growth in housing credit (in a country where there was never a housing policy as such, even after 1974). Ideological acceptance of the EU rose and became widespread. Popular support for the EU project then fell all over Europe, in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis: Comparing EU citizens’ attitudes to the EU between 1993 and 2016, we find that Greece’s trust in the EU has dropped from over 60% to 15% (…). In Spain, trust in the EU is at the same level as in the UK, having nearly halved since 1994 (48% to 27%) according to Eurobarometer EU public opinion surveys. Similarly, pessimism in the EU has risen sharply in the past nine years. In 2007, less than 20% of people in European countries were pessimistic about the EU, but this figure has now risen to close to 40%, led by the likes of Germany and France.49

The Warsaw Pact In June 1953, a revolution began in East Germany led by the construction workers, the key post-war reconstruction sector. The workers demand payment for labour intensification. This uprising becomes a contestation to the GDR government and spreads to several sectors and half a hundred towns. Soviet troops and GDR police will crush it. On 14 May 1955 a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation and Mutual Assistance was signed in Warsaw, the capital of Poland, between the Soviet Union and seven other Eastern European countries: Albania, East Germany, Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Poland and Romania. This treaty, known as the Warsaw Pact, was a response to the threat posed by NATO, which is compounded by the remilitarisation of West Germany, which joins that organisation in the same year. At the end of the Second World War, the Red Army occupied Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Poland, and important parts of Czechoslovakia and 103

a people’s history of europe

East Germany. By 1949, the USSR had concluded bilateral treaties with them all to ensure the continuation of their military presence. One million Soviet soldiers assured it. By contrast, Albania and Yugoslavia were never occupied by the Red Army, and this was decisive in ensuring the independence of the Enver Hoxha and Tito regimes from the Moscow diktats. Yugoslavia will never be part of the Warsaw Pact and Albania no longer actively participates from 1961 onwards. In the inspired expression of historian T.E. Vadney, ‘whereas in most countries the Russians found too few communists by the end of the war, the problem in Yugoslavia was that the party was too strong for Soviet tastes.’50 To get an idea of what the Pact militarily represented, the joint staff had supreme authority over all the Treaty’s armies, navies, and air forces, which totalled 6,200,000 soldiers, 65,000 tanks, 2,000 warships and 15,000 fighter jets. In addition to the joint staff, whose first commander-in-chief was Russian Ivan Stepanovich Konev, the Pact had a political committee, made up of the heads of government of the member states, which met each year to set annual policies and objectives. Formally a defensive alliance, the Warsaw Pact was in fact used by the Soviet Union to ‘keep order’ in its satellite regimes and countries. In 1956, the Pact forces were called to crush the Hungarian insurrection, although Prime Minister Imre Nagy declared that his country was withdrawing from it. In October of that year, armoured tanks from the Red Army and a few other allies entered Budapest, the capital of Hungary, and within two weeks crushed the resistance. García Márquez, who visited the country a year later, wrote: Almost a year after the events that moved the world, Budapest remained a provisional city. I saw large sections where the tramlines had not been replaced and were still closed to traffic. The poorly dressed, sad, concentrated crowd is endlessly queuing up to buy supplies. The warehouses that were destroyed and looted are still under reconstruction. … Very few central buildings have intact facades. I later learned that the people of Budapest took refuge in them and fought for four days and four nights against the Russian tanks. Soviet troops – 80,000 men ordered to crush the revolt – employed the simple and efficient tactic of positioning tanks in front of buildings and destroying facades. 104

the 1945 european social pact

The resistance, however, was heroic. The children went out onto the streets, climbed into the tanks and threw burning gas bottles inside.51 Hungary was liberated and occupied by Soviet troops during the Second World War, after it having a long pro-Nazi reactionary regime headed by General Horthy during the war. Defeated at the end of the war, Horthy was handed over to US troops, witnesses at the Nuremberg trials (Nazi war crimes trials) and takes refuge in Portugal, where he died peacefully in 1953. From 1945 to 1949, the regime remained a democracy with free elections. But in 1949 its dictatorial character was affirmed. The socialist and communist parties merged into one party, and restrictions on freedom and persecutions began. In 1955 Prime Minister Imre Nagy, a member of the reformist wing of the regime, admits that most of the prisoners were industrial workers.52 Among other reasons, because theft spread as the only way to survive, as a disastrous economic policy concentrated the entire economy on heavy industry, leading to food shortages; and because the opponents were persecuted. 30 per cent of the population was on the survival limit and 55 per cent below this.53 With a devastating social scenario, the regime increasingly concentrated its strength on the repressive structure, a state police force (State Protection Authority, ÁVH) under the authority of the Ministry of Interior. In 1956, the students came out to support the Polish uprising – workers at the Poznan factories in Poland had demanded better working conditions in a series of protests in June 1956. Many were killed by the police, possibly half a hundred. In Budapest, in October, solidarity was given to the Poles, elections, a new government headed by Nagy, free radio and press were demanded. A complete revision of the wages for manual and intellectual work was required. Nagy was a bureaucrat, but had not been directly involved in the Stalinist tortures, which in 1956 went public, with Khrushchev denouncing in a famous speech to the Twentieth Congress in February of that year, the ‘cult of personality’ and terror. Peter Freyer was a witness and historian of the Hungarian Revolution. His book Hungarian Tragedy is an exciting portrait of events. The Hungarian Revolution began in October 1956 when a group of students demonstrated in front of Radio Free Europe: 105

a people’s history of europe

It began with a students’ demonstration, partly to show the students’ sympathy for the people of Poland, who that weekend, through Gomulka and the Central Committee of the Polish United Workers’ Party, had resolutely rebuffed an attempt by an unprecedented delegation of Soviet leaders to get tough with them … The students had started marching and meeting in different places during the afternoon. Their demonstration was at first prohibited by the Ministry of the Interior, but the ban was lifted after the Central Committee of the Party intervened.54 ‘The student orators who addressed the demonstration […] recalled the words of Petöfi’: Our battalions have combined two nations, And what nations! Polish and Magyar! Everything seemed calm for the next two hours when suddenly telephone communications between Budapest and the outside world were cut off. What had happened? The ÁVH had indiscriminately fired on the demonstration. The reaction was sudden and unexpected, generating general outrage in the city. It is the beginning of the Hungarian Revolution. A widespread revolt constitutes workers’ councils that sprang up like mushrooms throughout the city organised by new young political directions that in a few hours took the place of the old bureaucratised ones. The population organises militias to defend themselves from the troops and the city is transformed into a theatre of war. The demands are the end of ÁVH and the withdrawal of Soviet troops from the country. The Soviets argued that only ‘white terror’ could have handed over the weapons to the workers, but Freyer had another explanation, which proved factual: Where did the arms come from that found their way so speedily into the hands of the workers and students of Budapest? According to Kádár (Daily Worker, November 20) there were ‘hidden arms’ on the Szabadsághegy (Liberty Hill), and the young people had been told at midday, before the demonstration, to go to a ‘certain place ’ where they would find them. 106

the 1945 european social pact

This version of the arming of the people side-steps the whole question of the attitude of the Hungarian People’s Army. The troops in Budapest, as later in the provinces, were of two minds: there were those who were neutral and there were those who were prepared to join the people and fight alongside them. The neutral ones (probably the minority) were prepared to hand over their arms to the workers and students so that they could do battle against the AVH with them. The others brought their arms with them when they joined the revolution … The ‘mystery’ of how the people were armed is no mystery at all.55 The Hungarian Revolution will succumb to Soviet tanks two weeks later. The USSR argued that they were avoiding counter-revolution. Kadar is the new man of the Russians, and will remain in power until 1988. The crushing of the revolution opened a deep crisis in the Western communist parties with the first splits of leading intellectuals linked to the USSR. Roger Vaillant, a French writer and member of the resistance, confesses that he removed Stalin’s bust from his secretary in 1956.56 A few years later the 1961 Sino-Soviet conflict, which led to the rupture between China and the USSR, and especially May 68, will end the pro-Soviet communist hegemony inherited from resistance to the Second World War. In 1962, Albania abandoned the Warsaw Pact, although the formal breach did not take place until 1968. That year the Pact was again invoked during the so-called Prague Spring. After prolonged intimidation manoeuvres, on 20 August a force consisting of 23 Soviet divisions, one Hungarian, two East German, two Polish and one Bulgarian brigade invaded Czechoslovakia to end the reforms with which Alexander Dubcek’s government sought to respond to the democratic demands of the population. The invasion of Czechoslovakia and the repudiation reactions it provoked had a corrosive effect on the Warsaw Pact. The invasion took place without a meeting of the Political Consultative Committee, the Pact’s governing body, to authorise it. Soviet leaders decided to ignore it to prevent divisions from manifesting. Four countries lined up with Moscow, but Albania and Romania not only did not contribute troops but also contested the intervention. Albania has definitively withdrawn 107

a people’s history of europe

from the Pact and Romania has denounced the invasion as a violation of its principles. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, rapid changes in all Eastern Bloc countries heralded the coming end of the Warsaw Pact. In January 1991, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Poland announced that they would no longer be members. They were followed by Bulgaria in February, and the Pact was officially dissolved on 1 July 1991. But in 1955 its end was a mirage. We were in the midst of the arms race that characterised the entire post-war period, as large-scale armament production became a containment measure to escape serious economic crises. The then US President Dwight D. Eisenhower drafted a defence budget of $35 billion to create the largest air force in the nation’s history, capable of dropping atomic and hydrogen bombs. The measure included $4.7 billion to rearm US allies. On 17 January 1955, the USA launched the first atomic submarine, the Nautilus, with autonomy to travel the world without surfacing. Faced with the arms race in the capitalist West, the USSR denounces that the USA and Europe are not complying with the 1925 Geneva Accords, which prevented the use of chemical and bacteriological weapons in war. On 24 November 1955, it was the turn of the USSR to blow up a hydrogen bomb in Siberia on the Kamchatka peninsula. It was the third in a series of nuclear tests conducted by the USSR in 1955 and the most powerful bomb of the Soviet atomic programme so far. That year, in Tokyo, a document with 22 million signatures demanding the banning of atomic weapons is presented. In response, the USA and USSR present programmes for the peaceful use of atomic energy. Nuclear resistance spread throughout the world, with gigantic demonstrations in the 1970s and 1980s around the world and especially in European capitals. But it didn’t work.

The Berlin Wall Since the end of the Second World War, in 1945, the occupying powers of Germany – the United States, the United Kingdom, France and the USSR – have had great differences over how this country should be managed. France, fearful of a new German recovery, wanted a country that was economically fragile and dispossessed of all military might. The United States and the United Kingdom wanted an economically 108

the 1945 european social pact

rebuilt Germany to make the country a lever for the reconstruction of Europe, an indispensable market for the health of the American capitalist economy. In short, a strong Germany that could influence all of Europe and provide a buffer in the Rhine for Soviet influence in Western Europe. In fact that is what happened in the second half of the twentieth century. The USSR wanted to use Germany as a checkpoint for Western Europe and use its economic and industrial resources for its own reconstruction. Too many antagonistic interests have shattered the most optimistic plans for Germany reached at Yalta and Potsdam. At these conferences it was foreseen that Germany would be occupied and administered by the four war-winning countries; whereas Berlin, situated within the Soviet zone, would also be divided into four zones and would have access to the western sectors; that Germany would have to pay war reparations (although the exact amount was never determined). It was also established that the German economy and its reconstruction would be unifiedly administered by the four occupying powers. The Americans and the British called for a single command and the insertion of Germany in the capitalist economy, a fact that the USSR and France refused. Between March and April 1947 in Moscow, talks broke down and no agreement was reached. In early 1947, the Americans and the British unified their zones into what became known as the Bizone. In the eastern part, socialists and communists were united in one party, the Unified Socialist Party (SED). The Americans and the British continued in 1947 and 1948 with the policy of creating a unified Western State – which would have its corollary at the London Conference, in which the merger of the two zones was decided; the announcement of elections and an international authority for the Ruhr and the implementation of monetary reform. The German mark appears, breaking the German economic unit. Meanwhile, the Bizone Council suppresses rationing and market control, to which the Soviet Union responds by blocking Berlin. The blockade, which actually begins on 24 June 1948, generates the largest air bridge in history. The USA and the United Kingdom provide food and fuel by air to the blocked part of Berlin. On 11 May 1949, the USSR ended the blockade. This was received with enthusiasm by the Germans. A few days after the end of the blockade on 23 May 1949, the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany (FRG) is passed. On 15 109

a people’s history of europe

September, Konrad Adenauer takes office as chancellor (prime minister). FRG becomes an independent state. On 7 October, the German Democratic Republic (GDR) is proclaimed, with the passing of its Constitution. In the first elections to the Bundestag, held in August 1949, the Christian Democratic alliance gained a small advantage over the Social Democrats. Adenauer, head of the government, imposed a bourgeois coalition with the liberals and stated that the electoral victory was a logical consequence of the liberal economic policy that governed the Bizone, clearly alluding to the need to maintain a free market economy in Germany. Betting on supporting this economy, the USA invests heavily in Germany. Nazism is depicted not as a product of the counter-revolution of the German bourgeoisie, but as the fruit of the folly of one individual, Adolf Hitler. Outside the ideological arena, aid is more effective: The Federal Republic receives 70 per cent of the Marshall Plan. German industries will have access to the latest cutting-edge technology, the most disciplined and politically dispersed workforce, confused by the years of Nazism and war, thus rebuilding itself at an astonishing speed as Europe’s economic engine. In the circumstances of global conflict on several geographically dispersed fronts, Khrushchev and Kennedy decide to meet in Vienna on 3–4 June 1961. There are several points on the agenda. And the talks end as they began: with a secret about what was treated, the ‘Viennese secret’. On the agenda were certainly Vietnam, Laos, Cuba, Algeria – and Berlin, of course. In August, less than two months after the Vienna meeting, the construction of the Berlin Wall begins. During June and July 1961, the number of people fleeing from East to West Berlin reached 100,000, including a large number of skilled workers and trained technicians. In June, Macmillan, the British prime minister, makes an unexpected proposal: for Germany to be split in two and Berlin to become a free city. The proposal is not taken seriously by anyone. From the USSR and the USA, the answers are clear: the change of the Berlin statute is not accepted. The war seemed imminent. Washington threatens to mobilise 1 million men for the conflict. The chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, makes the expected declaration in Bonn: Germany is indivisible! 110

the 1945 european social pact

During the night of 12–13 August 1961, GDR soldiers began to erect barricades to prevent citizens from fleeing from East to West. Barbed wire begins to isolate West Berlin. The GDR authorities close the Brandenburg Gate. On 18 August 1961, the Soviet authorities began replacing barbed wire and barricades with reinforced concrete. There are 155 km of concrete, which in some areas reaches up to four meters in height. During the construction, some 5,000 people still manage to cross the border; 3,000 are detained and 267 die in the attempt. 10,000 police ensure no one crosses the two areas of Berlin without a safe conduct. No one had expected that a wall would be erected that night – a wall that only a political revolution, with the popular uprisings of 1989 almost 30 years later would tear down.

The Cuban Missile Crisis In January 1959, a guerrilla movement led by Fidel Castro and Che Guevara overthrew the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista in Cuba. Batista was supported by the United States of America and Cuba was a gigantic casino, where misery raged among the peasants, many of whom worked for the large American fruit companies, the best-known being the United Fruit Company. Castro got support from the peasants to launch a historical offensive. Just 90 miles from the USA, a small guerrilla group dethroned the American-backed dictator. Cuba became a pebble in Uncle Sam’s shoes, but not the only one. In 1961, the Vietcong, led by Ho Chi Minh, seized power in North Vietnam. Already in 1960 Vietnam’s National Liberation Front, Vietcong’s political arm, had achieved important military victories against South Vietnamese troops, namely control of the Mekong delta. This causes changes in US policy in the region. The Kennedy administration decides to send Vice President Lyndon Johnson and General Lyman Lemnitzer to Saigon, the capital of South Vietnam, to locally assess the situation. The conflict threatened to extend to Laos and Cambodia. The Vietcong guerrillas, who in the late 1960s had managed to enter central Laos, were defeating the French. Months later, while Castro had not yet been pushed into Khrushchev’s arms and had not yet begun agrarian reform, the USA set in motion a plan to oust him out of power. The plan included training and armament 111

a people’s history of europe

of Cuban exiles to carry out acts of terrorism and sabotage on the island. It also included the aerial bombardment of the island, as happened when two planes, on 21 October 1959, bombed the country’s capital, Havana, causing two deaths and fifty injuries. Eisenhower, then US President, expressly authorised the CIA to collaborate with terrorist organisations as long as they put an end to the Castro government. In Guatemala, a camp of anti-Castro terrorists who were to invade the island is created. Eisenhower grants $13 million to this camp. On 15 April 1961 the military operation begins: the airports of Santiago de Cuba and San Antonio de los Baños are bombed. Two days later, 1,500 men arrive at the Bay of Pigs in order to invade the island. Cuban forces sank the ships and neutralised the terrorists in an operation that was a disgrace to the USA. John F. Kennedy, who succeeded Eisenhower in the meantime, changes his strategy and decides to impose an economic blockade on the island state. In Moscow, the unfolding of events is closely followed. Already in 1960, Fidel took the first anti-capitalist measures, expropriating United Fruit Company. In May 1962, Nikita Khrushchev sent a few thousand Soviet soldiers and 60 atomic missiles across the Atlantic to Cuba. The most serious post-war crisis that confronted the two great blocs, the United States and the Soviet Union, began. The crisis stems from a USSR response to US aggression against Cuba and the installation of US nuclear missiles on Turkey’s border with the Soviet Union. It is above all a way for the Soviets to gain influence in Latin America and, as in many other situations in the Cold War (Vietnam, Angola, etc.), to measure forces in the peripheral countries. On 14 October, the crisis began when a US U-2 spy plane photographed the missile installation in Cuba. The US government went into shock. Kennedy decided that invading the island would amount to a declaration of war on the USSR. On 22 October, he opted for a naval blockade, preventing any ship with connections to the Soviet Union from reaching Cuba. In those days, war seemed imminent. On 24 October, the press reports that Russian ships en route to Cuba were instructed not to be boarded or accept any kind of inspection on their boats. The USSR also responds in Eastern Europe: large Soviet military convoys including artillery units and tanks were moving towards East Germany and Berlin. 112

the 1945 european social pact

On Friday, 24 October 1962, the Portuguese newspaper República publishes the faces of the main leaders of the crisis: U Thant, UN provisional secretary-general, expects the call to the United States to lift the blockade to be heard: I could barely believe my eyes and my ears. That [the naval blockade] technically meant the beginning of the war against Cuba and the Soviet Union. As I recall, it was the most sinister and most serious speech ever given by a head of state. In Russia, Khrushchev gave orders to prevent all Western diplomats from leaving Moscow; Kennedy sees demonstrations in the United States, especially in New York, against the deal; and Fidel Castro sees the blockade imposed by the United States as an ‘act of war’. It is not only Europeans who oppose the American attitude. Part of the Americans are against it. And around the world there are demonstrations demanding the end of the blockade. They are reported in the press. In Buenos Aires, London, Manchester, Moscow, La Paz. In Rio de Janeiro, dockers refuse to unload cargo from US ships. Major organisations like the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization take a stand against the USA, calling the blockade an act of ‘piracy’. Widespread worldwide condemnation of the US naval blockade of Cuba was essential for the USA to retreat. On 28 October, the USA and USSR sign an agreement on withdrawing the missiles from Cuba and Turkey respectively, and the USA refrains from any further attacks on Cuba (which will not be fulfilled). The lessons of the crisis are many: in Cuba, support for Fidel Castro is reinforced and he aligns definitively with the Soviet Union; the world takes a fresh look at the Castro regime, which is now being claimed by thousands of revolutionaries around the world – six years later, on May 1968 in France, Fidel and Che are reference figures for students and the French labour movement; thousands of militants in Latin America follow the example of Castro’s guerrillas as a way to counter American imperialism on the continent – with tragic consequences, as most will eventually die at the hands of military dictatorships; the USA shifts tactics and begins to promote local organisations against the regimes they consider to be hostile or bloodthirsty military dictatorships, such as 113

a people’s history of europe

Pinochet’s in Chile, rather than failed invasions such as the Bay of Pigs; the USSR gets Turkey’s missiles to be dismantled. The crisis also made room for the first antinuclear treaties. On 6 December 1962, just over a month after the end of the crisis, the US and USSR submitted to the UN Economic and Financial Commission a joint proposal to endorse the SALT I and START II agreements. In the midst of this conflict, the Soviets achieve a triumph, one of the most important events in twentieth-century history. For the first time in human history, on 12 April 1961, a man went into space. He is Yuri Gagarin and the ship carrying him is the Vostok 1. Gagarin orbited the Earth for 108 minutes before returning to become an instant world hero. The Vostok Project, which remained secret until launch day, becomes the icon of the Soviet victory over the USA. Movies are made about Gagarin, songs are sung, and monuments erected for man’s first space travel.

The Second Vatican Council The unity of Europe explicitly based on Christian civilisation is the response of a church in the midst of the greatest war conflict in twentiethcentury history. The pontificate of Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli) began in the midst of a tragedy, the war, and ended as the post-war years of economic growth, in the wake of the Marshall Plan and European reconstruction, were still alive. The Church, even petrified in values that time questioned, kept pace with the history of the twentieth century. Leo XIII was the pope at the turn-of-the-century, when the rise of the labour movement and socialist ideas questioned the capitalist order. So Leo XIII was the pope of the ‘social’ encyclicals, such as Rerum Novarum, which predicated the conciliation of classes. His successor, Pius XII, will try to find a place for the Church between Nazism and the strength of the labour movement. He will zigzag between support for Hitler’s Germany (he will always try to avoid confrontation with the ‘führer’) and sticking with Western democracies. Pius XII’s reaction to war is, in rhetoric, that the Church must be the safe haven for all humanity, affirming the superiority of Christian civilisation. It is also Pius XII who reaffirms the most traditional and conservative values of the Church: the Church recognises an objective 114

the 1945 european social pact

order, wanted by God and which is the natural order of creation. It is in this natural order that law is found, and outside that order are violence and disorder. Historiography has much discussed the controversial role of Pius XII during the Second World War. It is not the absurd question of whether or not Pius XII was a democrat. This question did not even occur to the Church. Democracy for the Church was a non-democracy: respect for the natural order of things and the ethical-religious foundations of justice and law. This did not mean that the Church did not have a policy. On the contrary, Pius XII wanted to intervene socially, but always refusing to assume that he was doing so as the desire of the Catholic Church as an institution. His pontificate is marked by tolerance for the systematic persecution of the labour movement and the communists. In 1944, the first warnings against the Communists were issued and in 1949 a Holy Office decree prohibited all forms of Catholic collaboration with the Communist Party, and the Communists were excommunicated. The ‘social issue’ was so central to Pius XII that in 1953 and 1954 the Church began to intervene against the worker-priests. Pius XII’s pontificate was also marked in the political field by the Church’s initiative to promote Catholic political parties, so that they could play an active role in society, namely in containing the working class. The idea behind the promotion of Catholic political parties was that, given the disarticulation caused by modernisation, Catholics would gather in a political party. This has not been done to this day without huge tensions between the parties created by the Church, Christian democracy, and the Church itself. Pius XII died on 9 October 1958. Angelo Giuseppe Roncalli, an elderly cardinal whom no one expected to become Pope was chosen to succeed him. Cardinal Roncalli was elected Pope on 28 October 1958. He adopted the regnal name of John XXIII. His 78 years made all think that it would be a short-term pope, and that his presumably brief pontificate would cause no surprises. It was the second surprise. Just three months after his election on 25 January 1959, Pope John XXIII announced his intention to call a new council. In contrast to the coldness of his predecessor, John XXIII quickly conquered people with his friendliness and sense of humour. He tried 115

a people’s history of europe

to mitigate the formalism associated with his function with substantial measures, such as the end of Latin Masses – now being celebrated in the languages of each country or congregation – but also through his relaxed personal style. While Pius XII always behaved like a prince of the Church – he never looked straight into a camera, but raised his nose and looked away – John XXIII stared at the camera and smiled. Ecumenical dialogue is one of the hallmarks of his pontificate. Shortly after his election, he was greeted by the Orthodox Patriarch of Constantinople, Athenagoras I. In Western Europe the same path was traced: first it was the Anglicans to engage in a dialogue with Rome, soon followed by almost all Protestant confessions. John XXIII strove in this period to condemn anti-Semitism, which had been a hallmark of the pontificate of Pius XII. The need for updating, or aggiornamento, of the Church (the word was coined by John XXIII himself ) led the Pope not to waste time in calling the council. While the Vatican Curia sought to convince him that at least ten years of preparation would be needed, he intended to give them only months. The Second Vatican Council began on 11 October 1962. Over 2,000 bishops from around the world participated in the conclave. Since the inaugural address, John XXIII proposed that the Church oppose the ‘prophets of doom’ and open to ecumenical dialogue, to a pastoral non-dogmatic attitude and to strive for peace. One of John XXIII’s most important encyclicals is Pacem in Terris (1963), which advocates the establishment of a universal peace based on justice, truth, charity and freedom, and which sought to alleviate the social conflicts that were taking place, whether those who opposed the USA and USSR, or those who opposed the liberation movements to the colonial empires. Pacem in Terris became known as the encyclical of peace. It was written two years after the construction of the Berlin Wall and a few months after the Cuban missile crisis that opposed the USSR and the USA. In this encyclical John XXIII argues that conflicts should not be resolved by weapons but by negotiation. To this John XXIII added, in the spirit of the defence of human rights that followed the defeat of Nazism, that ‘Man has the right to live … to bodily integrity and to the means necessary for the proper development of life.’ The second section of the encyclical deals with the relationship between man and 116

the 1945 european social pact

state, insisting on the collective authority of the latter. The third section establishes the need for equality among nations and the need for the state to be subject to rights and duties that the individual must abide by. It was the Church’s contribution to ‘peaceful coexistence’ – and for this reason Pacem in Terris is still considered one of the most important encyclicals of the twentieth century. John XXIII would not see the end of his council. He died on 3 June 1963, after the first of its three sessions.

117

5 Anti-Colonial Revolutions

Roger Casement, in the fight against forced labour, denounces soldiers in the service of the Belgian King, in the Congo at the end of the 19th century, who had tortured and beaten a man, and addresses one of them: ‘If this boy dies because of the lashes, you will carry a crime on your conscience.’ The Public Force soldier replies: ‘When I came to Congo I took the precaution of leaving my conscience in my country.’ The Dream of the Celt, Mario Vargas Llosa1

The anti-colonial movement Neither the USA nor the USSR had colonies. As it turned out during the Cold War, they had every interest in disputing those territories, markets for raw materials and work power, with the old English, French, Portuguese and Dutch empires. With the conscription of colonial peoples for war, there is an expansion of the ideas that took hold against Nazism: anti-racism,2 the right to self-determination – rights that had become widespread with the socialist ideology, already during the First World War, but that would expand during the Second World War. At the UN, after the post-1945 revolutions, the number of new states represented more than doubled. It is difficult, however, to speak of one single anti-colonial movement. They are very distinct and refer to the internal power relations within States, and for the relations among states in the global world. Amílcar Cabral3 of PAIGC (Portuguese Guinea) mirrors the socialist idea more than the pan-Africanist one of a Sékou Touré or the nationalist-religious of the Algerian National Liberation Front; Che Guevara’s internationalist cry at the 19th UN Assembly in 1964 (‘Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams!’) reflected the desire to bring the socialist revo118

anti-colonial revolutions

lution to the ‘Third World’ by supporting the construction of guerrilla armed parties. Internationalism is a minority among the leaderships of the movements that win in the colonies. In countries where the bourgeois nationalist movement is strongest, such as India (independent in 1947), independence relies less on arms; in countries where the communist current is dominant, war was often the answer.4 The most devastating case was the war in Vietnam and in the whole of Indochina, whose leaders had not only the experience gained in the war against Japan but had adhered to socialist ideas, inspired by the Chinese revolution of 1949. In Arab countries, forms of progressive and secular bourgeois nationalism, such as Nasserism and Baathism, 5 prevail for some years in the 1960s and 1970s. The type of regimes that arise from these struggles varies greatly. From moderate democracies like Sukarno’s in Indonesia, to semi-Bonapartist regimes with political and social modernisation like with the Baath Party in Iraq, to macabre dictatorial regimes like the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. According to T.E. Vadney, the USA contributed more to decolonisation than the USSR,6 which was busy consolidating power in Eastern Europe. It is difficult to say, but it is a fact that anti-colonial revolutions had in most countries, at least in their beginning, the distrust or slow accord of the USSR, even in the case of China in 1949, and of Cuba ten years later. In this regard, it is worth reading the testimony of Jirˇí Pelikán, leader of the Prague Spring of 1968 and with responsibilities in the world leadership of the International Union of Students (IUS), organised from the USSR. Pelikán recalls that the enthusiastic defence of the Cuban Revolution and the struggle for national liberation in Algeria by the youth of the communist parties created internal disturbances in the top brass of the USSR: The policy of peaceful coexistence created the first problems within the International Union of Students … For example, we were deeply involved in supporting Algeria’s national liberation struggle. But when Khrushchev went to France, Soviet representatives were reluctant to vote for Algeria in IUS resolutions, because that would create problems to the French government.7 119

a people’s history of europe

The United States had come out of the Second World War defending the independence of the colonies. In the global context of inter-imperialist struggle, it was detrimental to American trade that countries such as England and France maintained colonies because that meant privileged markets for these countries, where the USA had more difficulty in penetrating. This attitude was also preponderant, albeit with zigzags depending on the moods of the Cold War and American domestic politics, vis-à-vis the Portuguese colonies.8 The Bandung Conference began on 18 April 1955, on the island of Java, Indonesia, a former Dutch colony, with a speech by Sukarno, President of Indonesia. Sukarno will be overthrown by a 1967 US-sponsored coup that brought Suharto to power. In total, 29 countries participated in the Conference, representing a total of 1,350 million people. The following states were present: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Burma, Cambodia, Laos, Lebanon, Sri Lanka, People’s Republic of China, Philippines, Japan, India, Indonesia, Pakistan, Turkey, Syria, Israel, Democratic Republic of Vietnam, Iran, Iraq, South Vietnam, Nepal, North Yemen, Ethiopia, Libya, Liberia and Egypt. As the Observer reported at the conference: In the post-war reconstruction plans [the peoples of Asia] became more clearly aware of their economic situation, of the anachronism of their social structures … In addition to the existence of various civilizations, religions, languages and foreign influences, the situation was common to all Asian peoples.9 The Conference institutionalised a new reality: the emergence of independent nations, with a political programme strongly marked by anti-colonialism. The aims of the conference were: the self-determination of the peoples, the rejection of colonialism and neo-colonialism; the non-alignment with neither of the two superpowers, USA and USSR; the settlement of international conflicts by peaceful means in accordance with the UN charter; the right of each nation to defend itself against aggression. The Bandung Conference is the first major summit that describes racism and imperialism as crimes. Some sectors even propose a court to judge the crimes of colonisation, an idea that will never be put into 120

anti-colonial revolutions

practice, especially under pressure from central European countries and the USA. Bandung introduced a new political jargon: non-alignment, north–south conflict and not just an east–-west conflict. The Third World is born. Vijay Prashad believes that The Third World was not a place. It was a project. During the seemingly interminable battles against colonialism, the peoples of Africa, Asia, and Latin America dreamed of a new world. They longed for dignity above all else, but also the basic necessities of life (land, peace, and freedom). They assembled their grievances and aspirations into various kinds of organizations, where their leadership then formulated a platform of demands.10 The idea of a ‘Third World’ is controversial. The First World would be the capitalist world; the second, the Soviet world and its satellites; and a third, misaligned and poor, proved to be an imprecise hypothesis.11 But that did not correspond to reality. The world was a whole, with an international system of states, crossed by internal contradictions and divided among them. In fact, the economies were so interconnected that the economic crisis of the 1970s led to the end of the USSR and even today the so-called First World does not live without the neo-colonial relationship it established with what was then called the Third World. On the other hand, politically the countries were crossed by contradictions and profound class divisions: the adherence of the ruling classes of the decolonised countries to neoliberalism since the 1980s demonstrated that within the Third World there was an important part of the first, powerful and centralising the world’s productive resources; and in this case highly corrupt. And the global solidarity against the Vietnam War that filled the streets of major cities from New York to Paris showed that in the First World there were parts of the Third one. The impact of the Bandung Conference is undoubtedly a reflection of the mobilisations, in some cases insurrections, of millions of human beings, especially peasants. A world dominated by colonisation – by England and France, Portugal, Spain, The Netherlands – that rebels with the Second World War. In the case of Portugal, left out of the Second World War (albeit with Salazar’s obvious complicities with the Hitlerian regime in the early years),12 it was only in the 1960s that the 121

a people’s history of europe

Empire was going to be questioned by the liberation movements. It was this reaction that reached the streets of London and Lisbon, but dividing the world into geographical areas creates a game of mirrors that hides that important class contradictions have crossed these areas.

‘Create Two, Three, Many Vietnams!’ The problems in the French colonies increased from day to day just after the war. In early December 1952, the general secretary of the Tunisian General Labour Union (Union Générale Tunisienne du Travail/UGTT), Farhat Hached, was assassinated. The event marks the beginning of violent clashes against French colonialism on the streets of the capital, Tunis. The conflict extends to Morocco, which also demands autonomy from France and Spain. At a demonstration in Casablanca, a Moroccan man is killed. The following day, a 24-hour general strike called by the communist and nationalist unions emerges with enormous strength against the occupying countries. Two bombs burst in French commercial establishments and seven Europeans are brutally killed. Casablanca is surrounded by European troops. The day ends with 51 killed by French troops. In 1958, General De Gaulle, already experiencing great difficulties to contain the progress of the struggle for the liberation of Algeria, called a referendum to constitute the V French Republic. This popular consultation aimed to legitimise his policy towards Algeria, the pearl of French colonialism; to take votes from the communists, especially in the agricultural regions where they had gained strength due to their courageous and preponderant role in the Resistance against German occupation; and test the French colonies, which now had an opportunity to express themselves. On 28 September 1958, the French and all the inhabitants of the colonies with the right to vote participated en masse in the referendum. De Gaulle’s strategy reached some of the expected results: the Communists in some regions lost almost 30 per cent of the votes they had obtained so far; and in Algeria, the yes got 96 per cent of the votes, despite opposition from the National Liberation Front. Guinea expressed its desire for independence. The French constitutional referendum of 28 September 1958, which also aimed at creating in the colonies a French community, was rejected in Guinea. There were 122

anti-colonial revolutions

346,058 who did not vote in favour, while only 10,335 voted yes. The leader of the anti-colonial struggle was Ahmed Sékou Touré, founder in 1945 of the General Union of Workers in Black Africa, a union federation whose aim was to organise workers of French West Africa, and leader of the Democratic Party of Guinea. Touré was a man linked to the Soviet Union – in 1961, he received the Lenin Peace Prize – and had travelled to Moscow and Warsaw as leader of the Federation of Trade Unions. The country’s independence was proclaimed on 2 October 1958. France reacts by immediately eliminating any kind of economic aid to Guinea and the young country turns to the Soviet Union, which does not immediately help it economically either. On 12 December 1958, the United Nations recognise the Republic of Guinea, but France refuses to do so and initiates an embargo on the country, which will only radicalise anti-colonial forces, widely supported by the local population. In Algeria, the results of the referendum were apparently favourable to France. But Algerian resistance showed that the problem of colonialism would not be resolved administratively and in 1962, just four years later, France lost the war and was forced to leave the country. After insisting on a bloody war, France is forced to start negotiations for independence with the National Liberation Front, the Algerian anti-colonial army, a coalition of nationalist organisations. Conversations take place in the thermal village of Évian-les-Bains, in France. The French ultra-fascist sectors reacted with disgust to the possibility of an independent Algeria and, in April 1961, created a terrorist organisation, Organization of the Secret Army (OAS), formed by French politicians and military and some Algerians who opposed independence. Among them, a man who would become very famous in the new fascist groups in Europe at the end of the twentieth century, Jean Marie Le Pen. OAS bombs kill in Paris, Algiers and Évian. Muslim villages in Algeria are attacked by OAS, there are death threats and Algiers’ chief commissioner, Roger Gabory, is murdered in his home. Terrorism has not reversed the situation. Support for the FLN was massive, as Gillo Pontecorvo masterfully portrayed it in his epic film La Bataille d’Algers (The Battle of Algiers).13 In 1962, Ahmed Ben Bella, who had been arrested and imprisoned in 1956, became president of independent Algeria. 123

a people’s history of europe

‘Humanitarian intervention’: politics by other means In 1967, few Europeans would be capable of pointing to Biafra on a map. This region in south-eastern Nigeria, crossed by the Niger River, was unknown to the majority of the world population who, in 1967, was shocked by the war that spread there. It was so striking that the generation that witnessed the war recalls the ‘famine in Biafra’ as the following generations would remember Ethiopia or Darfur. Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, is located in the Gulf of Guinea. As early as 1901, Nigeria had become a protectorate of the United Kingdom and in 1914, at the start of the First World War, which disputed the colonial territories, Nigeria had officially become a British colony. Anti-colonial struggles in Nigeria radicalised after the Second World War and the British government swiftly prepared for a transition to a neo-colonial regime, relying largely on the population of the northern region. The British right-hand man was Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Sir Abubakar, after being decorated by Queen Elizabeth II as Knight Commander of the Order of the British Empire. In January 1966, a group of officers linked to the Ibo ethnic group carried out a coup d’état, deposing the federal regime and murdering Abubakar. In the North, the indiscriminate murder of the Ibo who lived there began immediately. Six months later, a counter-coup organised by men from the North, linked to Abubakar and the British, took power from the Ibo. These began to flee towards the region where they were the majority, the Southeast, near the delta of the Niger River where important oil reserves had been discovered. On 30 May 1967, they declared the secession from the rest of Nigeria and proclaimed the Republic of Biafra. The federal government, supported by the British, immediately opposed secession. The Biafra war started there, and would end only in 1970. The British and the Americans supported the federal government of Nigeria to end the rebellion in Biafra, but most African countries did too (fearing that Biafra’s secession would be a precedent for other cases). The USSR also supported the Nigerian government. On the other side were openly colonialist countries, starting with South Africa and Portugal – it was from São Tomé that food and 124

anti-colonial revolutions

weapons were supplied to the men of Biafra. France and Germany, with obvious interests in oil, also supported Biafra. In many countries, such as Portugal and Spain, the saying ‘hungry as in Biafra’ became popular. According to a report published by UNICEF on 23 January 1969, there were already 1.5 million victims of the war, mostly women and children. The Biafra war was the antechamber of the televised war – as would in fact be that of Vietnam. It was also during the Biafra tragedy that humanitarian intervention14 was inaugurated as a way to expand the influence of central countries, bypassing the anti-colonialist opposition of most Europeans, especially those organised around leftist movements. It was ‘politics by other means’. Following the Biafran War, the organisation Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, Doctors Without Borders) was created in France, inaugurating this kind of aid to peripheral and poor countries. France supported the move of French doctors to the region, as a way of gaining worldwide sympathy for the secession of this territory. Among these volunteers was the French doctor Bernard Kouchner who, on his return to France, criticised the widespread famine caused by the Nigerian blockade of Biafra and the ‘complicity’ of the Red Cross. Médecins Sans Frontières were formally created in 1971 and their principle, acquired during the mediatisation of hunger caused by the blockade of Biafra, was that an organisation should not be neutral – a flaw pointed out to the Red Cross. The MSF argued that it was necessary to create an organisation that, in addition to treating the wounded and providing humanitarian aid, should raise awareness among the world population about conflicts and influence political power. The principle was that neutrality could mean complicity. On 12 May 1971, an earthquake devastated East Pakistan, now Bangladesh, and France began sending medicines on behalf of MSF to the region. At the end of the 1970s, in the face of the atrocities in Vietnam and the international campaign against the war, the MSF promoted the campaign ‘Un bateau pour le Vietnam’, which, in addition to bringing medicines, brought dozens of journalists there. Some doctors in the organisation were opposed to this idea, because they thought the show was overlapping humanitarian aid, and there was a split in MSF. Kouchner and 15 other doctors created the organisation Médecins du Monde 125

a people’s history of europe

(Doctors of the World), to carry out the campaign. Today, Doctors Without Borders is present in more than 70 countries worldwide. The perpetuation of the Biafra conflict began questioning France ’s relationship with other African countries and De Gaulle started withdrawing support for Biafra in 1969. At the end of that year, the Republic of Biafra was restored to Nigeria. The war officially ended in 1970. On 12 March 1966, Diário de Lisboa (Lisbon Daily) opens with the news of the ban on the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI) and the seizing of power by General Suharto. The coup, supported by the USA, Britain and Australia, started what historian Eric Hobsbawm called, in The Age of Extremes,15 ‘probably the biggest political carnage in history’: it is estimated that half a million communists and opponents of the new Suharto regime died during and after the coup. Since independence, the Indonesian regime was the result of a fragile national front, made up of an alliance between bourgeois nationalists and the Indonesian Communist Party. Suharto remained in power until 1998, when he was replaced in a cosmetic operation by B.J. Habibie. The regime only trembled when the Asian economic crisis, the East Timorese resistance and popular mobilisations against the occupation of East Timor by Indonesia – which in Portugal took hundreds of thousands of people to the streets in 199916 – forced the USA, through then secretary of State Madeleine Albright, to put pressure on Indonesia. East Timor became independent in 2002, and today its economy is mainly dependent on Australia.

The Middle East and North Africa The most important pieces in the post-war imperialist puzzle and in the neo-colonial model were the Middle East and North Africa, due to their important oil reserves. On 31 August 1969, a coup d’état carried out by a military movement led by Muammar el-Gaddafi overthrew the monarchy in Libya, ending Idris’s reactionary, pro-Western regime and beginning a new period in the history of this North African country. Until 1911, the region that today corresponds to Libya was occupied, almost entirely, by the Ottoman Empire. That year, Italy invaded the region, starting a year-long war. Italy occupied the territory, which became known as Italian North Africa until 1927. In 1927, Italy divided 126

anti-colonial revolutions

the colony into two territories, Italian Cyrenaica and Italian Tripolitania. Only in 1934 did the Italian government led by Mussolini begin to designate this colony as Libya, a recovery of the name given by the Greeks to North Africa (excluding Egypt). During the Second World War, a movement to resist occupation was formed in Libya, which helped to defeat Italy. With the end of the war, the allies were forced to accept Libya’s independence, but in the smoothest possible way, transferring power to King Idris and starting a constitutional and hereditary monarchy. Formally, the United Kingdom of Libya was born on 24 December 1951. The great change in Libya will take place, however, by the end of the 1950s, with the discovery of important oil reserves and the radicalisation of anti-colonial struggles, the Arab nationalist movement and Nasserism, after the Suez Crisis. Despite its natural wealth, Libya continued to be treated as a colony in the international system of states and the majority of the population lived in poverty. The political groups that denounced the concentration of money on the king, his family and a small elite were growing. It was this context that gave rise, in 1969, to the coup led by Gaddafi, who at the time was 27 years old and led a small group of officers who took power when King Idris was on an official visit to Turkey. Eric Hobsbawm, in The Age of Extremes, argues that the Gaddafi coup had in common with other post-Second World War coups the colonial character of the regimes, a majority of the peasant population and the participation of military officers of humble origins: In fact, the typical post-October revolution of the 20th century, apart from some localized explosion, would either be initiated by a coup (almost always military), capturing the capital, or the end result of an extensive and largely rural armed struggle. Since junior officers – much more rarely sergeants – with radical or leftist sympathies were common in poor and backward countries, where military life offered the prospects of an attractive career for healthy and educated young people from families without the right connections or wealth, these initiatives used to be found in countries like Egypt (the Free Officers’ Revolution of 1952) and others in the Middle East (Iraq in 1958, Syria at various times since the 1950s and Libya in 1969).17 127

a people’s history of europe

On 1 September, the day of the coup, the group of officers led by Gaddafi declared the abolition of the monarchy and the proclamation of the new Libyan Arab Republic. The Libyan regime remained relatively closed to the world until 2003, when it signed international agreements that provided for the liberalisation of the economy. That year, after the agreements, the United Nations lifted economic sanctions on Libya and the country applied for membership of the World Trade Organization. At the height of the anti-dictatorial revolutions during the Arab Spring, Gaddafi was overthrown by an American military coalition with the support of some European countries. On 2 June 1964, in East Jerusalem, the Palestinian National Covenant approved the creation of the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), with the aim of fighting for a democratic and secular Palestinian state where Christians, Jews and Muslims could live together in peace. The PLO was born sponsored by the Arab League, but in its genesis is the need for the Palestinians themselves to create an organisation independent from neighbouring Arabs. Its first executive committee was formed on 8 August 1964 and was led by Ahmad Shuqeiri. Since the 1950s, organisations in favour of a Palestinian state have multiplied. In that decade were created the Arab Nationalist Movement, founded in 1951 by doctor George Habash (who in 1967 would form the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine), the League of Poets in 1952, the Al-Ard (The Land) association. Israel emerged strengthened from the Six-Day War in 1967. The situation of the Palestinians, expelled from their territory (literally from their homes) was getting worse. Many Palestinians were placed in refugee camps in neighbouring countries. Among them, Jordan, whose alliance with the United States drove the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) out of its territory, moving to Lebanon. It is during this process that the organisation Black September, directly linked to the PLO, and Al Fatah, led by Yasser Arafat, is founded. Black September’s first major action was the assassination, in 1971, of Jordanian Prime Minister Wasfi Tal. In September 1972, the first Olympic games held on German soil since the Nazi era took place in Munich. They were symbolically called the Peace Olympics. They opened on 26 August 1972. On 5 September 1972, at dawn, a group of guerrillas from the organisation Black Sep128

anti-colonial revolutions

tember entered the Israeli building of the Olympic Village, killed two members of the team and kidnapped nine. The group made public its demands: the release of more than two hundred Palestinian prisoners captive in Israeli territory and a plane to abandon Federal Germany. Israel offered to send a group of special operations, but the German government refused. In the negotiations, the Germans manage to convince the Palestinians that their demands have been accepted and that they are going to take them to the airport to leave Germany. The Palestinian command, nine kidnapped athletes and the police set off for the airport. When they arrive, the Palestinians conclude that it is a bluff and shooting begins. Athletes die in the conflict and the three surviving Palestinians are arrested. The year 1972 was not the first time that the games served as a stage for political protest. In 1936, at the Berlin Olympic Games, a coalition of Jewish organisations and workers’ unions against Nazism was formed. They demanded the non-participation of the USA. The most striking political moment came, however, in 1968, at the Olympic Games in Mexico City, when two African-American athletes, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, went to the podium to receive the medals and raised their fists. In their hands, a black glove symbolising Black Power, the struggle of North American blacks for civil rights and equality. The president of the International Olympic Committee immediately demanded that they be expelled from the games, which actually happened. Back home, they were ostracised in sports and became the target of death threats. But in the left-wing media around the world, in May 68, they were hailed as heroes. In 1980, the United States of America boycotted the Moscow Olympic Games, dragging dozens of allies with them. In 1984, the USSR responded by boycotting the Los Angeles games. In 1967, a coalition of Arab countries was defeated by Israel. This defeat left room for Arafat to become leader of the PLO – which would happen in February 1969 – to the detriment of others, such as Habash, who were politically closer to Arab nationalism. Five years after Arafat’s election, the Arab League recognised the organisation as the legitimate representative of the Palestinian people. In the Palestinian National Charter, part of the Resolutions of the Palestine National Council of 1–17 July 1968, the PLO declared: ‘The Palestinian people possess the fundamental and genuine legal right to liberate and retrieve their homeland’ (Article 29) and its commitment to the struggle ‘to retrieve 129

a people’s history of europe

its homeland, liberate and return to it and exercise the right to selfdetermination’ (Article 26).18 Until the Oslo agreements in 1994, the PLO never recognised the State of Israel. The PLO was born with important internal contradictions, reflected in the Palestinian National Charter. On the one hand, the PLO supported the idea of a single Arab state in the Middle East that would unite the Arab nation, a project led by Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser. On the other hand, the PLO defended and fought for the creation of a Palestinian state. This did not have the agreement, for example, of Jordan, which claimed the territory of the West Bank. Furthermore, in addition to the divisions between Arabs and Jews, there were profound class contradictions among the Arabs themselves, who, with the growing importance of oil, created indigenous bourgeoisies that looked with suspicion on mass movements against Israel. In fact, the secular and progressive Arab nationalisms ended up embracing neoliberal policies that led to the crisis of secular directions and the emergence of ultra reactionary directions such as Islamic fundamentalism, which defeated the Arab Spring of 2010–11, encouraging and worsening one of the biggest crises that these peoples, and secondarily Europe, face until today without solution: the refugee crisis.

At the Izmir pier ‘They screamed.’ It was the worst – the mothers and their screams on the pier. The account is in the short story, ‘At the Izmir pier’, by Ernest Hemingway, returned to arms – now to the Greco-Turkish War of 1919–23. Izmir, in Asia Minor, from where 1.5 million Greeks were expelled after the First World War. These refugees built modern Athens, today a symbol of the decline of the EU project. Since 2008, the number of refugees and displaced persons has grown exponentially. Today, there are 52 million, the majority coming from areas that are rich in raw materials. Only the tip of the iceberg arrives in Europe – those who have the capacity to pay illegal smugglers. Izmir is 150 miles from Bodrum, the beach from where Aylan and Galib, with their mother and father, left on 2 September 2015, in a 5 metre-long dinghy to reach the island of Kos, 15 miles away. One hour later, the small boat capsized. ‘After it capsized, the family clung to the boat. Mr Abdullah tried to hold his two children and wife with his arm, 130

anti-colonial revolutions

but one by one they were washed away by waves.’19 Aylan, a three-yearold little boy, was found lying on the sand in a semi-foetal position. His photo, dead on a sandy beach, went around the world and touched millions. It will go down in history as that of Kim Phúc, the naked girl burnt by napalm who screamed fleeing the horrors of the Vietnam War four decades before. Today, she is a 56-year-old lady living in Canada, the same country where Aylan would have become a man if asylum to his family had not been granted after they were already dead. The film Rambo III was originally dedicated to ‘the brave Mujaheddin fighters of Afghanistan’; it was later changed to ‘the gallant people of Afghanistan’, for obvious political reasons. The ‘brave Mujaheddin fighters’ were armed by the absolute theocratic monarchy of Saudi Arabia and the USA, against the USSR in the civil war that followed the Soviet invasion of 1979. Later many of them would become ‘brave Taliban’. This is the most remote origin of the terrorist groups that filled the pages of Europe ’s newspapers after the terrible attacks in several cities on the continent – London (2005), Paris (2015), Nice (2016), among others, that killed hundreds of people. Strictly speaking, nobody knows today how big these groups are, how many they are, where they come from, who finances them. The historical process is the result of a complex combination of subjective and objective factors, but a barrel of petrol rarely has trouble finding a match. History finds its madmen, if it is prepared for that. The great leap forward in the urbanisation of peripheral societies takes place in the second half of the twentieth century in India, Africa, the Middle East. The end of peasant societies, at the pinnacle of the failed Arab nationalism,20 and the subsequent evolution of these regions towards liberal policies filled their cities with mega-slums inhabited by millions of unemployed people living in subhuman conditions. The welfare state is non-existent in these places, there are old family solidarities, and places of worship have become spaces for education, health, and social services to guarantee the reproduction of the workforce. Western universities have changed the name of academic chairs in peripheral countries, from colonial to post-colonial.21 An uncritical adjustment: without exception, they are all neo-colonial societies, economically more dependent today on the central countries than in the 1960s and 1970s, when this subordination was already manifest. 131

a people’s history of europe

We speak of countries devastated by a neo-colonial policy based on: (a) the massive exploitation of their natural resources; (b) the destruction of their food sovereignty, by mastery of monoculture of tea, coffee, cocoa, etc., and support in Europe for food surpluses which finance the agricultural incomes of the large landowners under the Common Agricultural Policy’s big money – which, in order to prevent them from entering the market by lowering the price of food, are bought by the European states, donated to humanitarian agencies, in Africa, devastating local farmers;22 and (c) US military industrial complex dispossessions all over the place. The huge list of products to be consumed – airplanes, steel, drones, electronics, miscellaneous technology, computers, etc. – is proportional to the epic number of countries being bombed, a list that increases every single year: Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Mali and the Palestinian territories.23 The biggest industry in the world is this one. The heart of the biggest industry is in USA and from its evolution today (combination of productive capacity and costs of labour) that most serious economists evaluate the trigger for the next cyclical crisis.24 In these wars, European rulers have been more than accomplices. They have been comrades in arms, despite 2003 seeing the largest global demonstrations in human history, which showed the rejection of such policies by the peoples of the whole of Europe. In his Nobel Lecture delivered on video before the audience at the Swedish Academy, in Stockholm, on the evening of 7 December 2005, Harold Pinter said: The United States now occupies 702 military installations throughout the world in 132 countries … The United States possesses 8,000 active and operational nuclear warheads. Two thousand are on hair trigger alert, ready to be launched with 15 minutes warning.25 The bulk of trade and value was between European countries and not between these and the colonies. But in the centre’s productive chain of accumulation, there is a dependence on raw materials from the periphery (and cheap or forced labour). Colonial and neo-colonial markets are vital to European economies. Middle East ‘oil and blood’ is an integral part of today’s German automobile production chain, as the cotton harvested by Angolan forced labourers and used by Portuguese (and English companies) in the Portuguese colonies was until 1974 part of 132

anti-colonial revolutions

the textile industry in the north of the country. These are very unequal exchanges between centre and periphery. In a word, neo-colonialism. ‘The average per person income of the Third World was possibly onefifth that of the First World in 1850, one-sixth in 1900, one-tenth in 1960 and one-fourteenth in 1970.’26 We conclude, therefore, with the words of Vijay Prashad: By the 1970s, the new nations were no longer new. … Popular demands for land, bread, and peace had been ignored on behalf of the needs of the dominant classes. Internecine warfare, a failure to control the prices of primary commodities, an inability to overcome the suffocation of finance capital, and more led to a crisis in the budgets of much of the Third World. … the patriotism of the bottom line overcame obligatory social solidarity … Atavisms of all kinds emerged to fill the space once taken up by various forms of socialism. Fundamentalist religion, race, and unreconstructed forms of class power emerged from under the wreckage of the Third World project.27

133

6 Crisis and Revolution: From May 68 to the Carnation Revolution

When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, all bourgeois theatres must become national assemblies.1 Odéon Theatre, Paris, May 1968 Our destiny will be forged by our hands.2 1 May in liberty, Portugal 1974

May 68, the revolution: again ‘the impossible becomes inevitable’ In May and June 1968, the biggest strike in France ’s history ever took place in France. It paralysed the country, leading to shortages. ‘The necessities of life, normally taken for granted, now appeared visibly as the products of human labour.3 But its reach went far beyond Paris – from the City of Lights to Mexico and Buenos Aires, from Beijing to Berlin, from Prague to Turin, everyone lived fully that month of May 1968: the upper classes and their leaders, with anxiety. Most students, working classes and intellectuals with an invigorating enthusiasm, exclaimed: ‘We shall fight, we shall win, Paris, Rome, London, Berlin.’4 If the two biggest post-war revolutions in Europe, Portugal in 1974 and Poland in 1980–81, occurred in countries under dictatorships, without a tradition of democracy or reformist parties, May 68, on the contrary, showed that it was possible to question capitalist accumulation and private property occupying factories, exercising workers’ control over production in advanced capitalist countries, with a regime of bourgeois democracy. For the global revolutionary left it was, recalls Ian Birchall, proof that socialist revolution was a realistic option for the coming decades in advanced capitalist democracies such as Britain, West 134

crisis and revolution

Germany or the United States.5 For the ruling classes in Europe, it was scary. Charles de Gaulle was left without reaction for several days. Little help could then be had from France’s sister countries: in the factories of Turin, in the streets of Berlin, in the cities of the USA, the ‘imagination’ of millions of workers who had remained silent since the war ‘had come to power’. In the early days by the voice of their children, those of the post-war baby boom, now university students; in the following days, by the might of the biggest workers’ strike in the history of France. The detonator was the student protest whose culmination is the night of the barricades, when students barricade themselves on the streets of the Latin Quarter, in the Sorbonne area, throwing stones at the police, who brutally repress the demonstration, sparking the reaction of the workers’ movement in solidarity. More than nine million workers were involved, in all the branches of French industry and in every reach of society from the Meudon Observatory to the Folies Bergères.6 The post-war baby boom and the scientific and technological impulse, pari passu with the social conquests of the Welfare State, had opened universities to the working classes. The number of students in higher education had gone from 175,000 to more than half a million in ten years (between 1958 and 1968). The 1968 strikes cannot be understood outside the context of the 1967 cyclical crisis and the period of global workers’ initiative, with its nerve centre in the North American car factories and in May 1968 in France, resisting the intensification of work,7 according to sociologist Peter Birke. This thesis is confirmed by Pietro Basso’s studies on the evolution of work in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.8 In the summer of 1967, the Government had imposed a cut on medical expenses reimbursements and reduced workers’ participation in the decisions of the Social Security system. The measure caused irritation among workers. In June 1967, Peugeot had called the riot police into an industrial conflict and the police ended up killing two workers, a fact that provoked public outrage. On 3 May, the government closes the Sorbonne. The protests had risen in tone, demanding, among other requests, free movement on campus between the female and male sectors. Clashes between the police and the students began on 10 May, when the students erected about 60 barricades, a movement where several thousand students participate. 135

a people’s history of europe

Paris had a long tradition of barricades that Baron Haussman, between 1852 and 1870, tried to put an end to by razing entire neighbourhoods, building wide avenues, where anti-riot forces could circulate, naturally also responding to the growing industrialisation of the country and the city. The reaction of general disgust to police brutality against student barricades forced the unions to call for a general strike for 13 May 1968. On the day of the strike, a demonstration saw a giant parade of workers of all kinds – electricians, glass and chemical workers, municipal employees, metal workers, painters, railwaymen, teachers, waiters, bank and insurance clerks, decorators, ‘the flesh and blood of modern capitalist society’.9 The next day, at the Sud Aviation factory in Nantes, workers decide to go on strike indefinitely. The motto was set. There followed two weeks of strikes across the country involving nine to ten million workers with widespread occupation of factories. According to Michael Seidman, the unity between students and workers was ‘transitory’, during a few days and only in some sectors,10 but the movement in fact continued in the factories with unprecedented force. The unions had little strength in factories and companies. France had a low rate of union membership, especially after the discouragement that followed the negotiations in social concertation, after the strikes of 1947. In 1968, there were three million unionised workers, and in 1947 there were more than seven million. But during the May general strike, workers – sometimes under the influence of small Trotskyist, Maoist and anarchist groups – created worker–student action committees, based on strike committees. On 19 May in Paris, in a joint Assembly, 149 committees were represented. At the end of the month, they were already 450. In many of these committees, a form of control of production is decided. For example, it was decided, in view of shortages, that minimum essential services would be provided to society. In many places, the workers make decisions about the entire production chain of a striking sector. But in only one city will there be a situation of dual powers: Nantes. Jean-Paul Sartre and Marguerite Duras expressed solidarity with the Sorbonne students, and the Cannes film festival orchestra went on strike. André Malraux, Minister of Culture and ex-combatant in the Spanish Civil War, author of the book L’Espoir (Man’s Hope),11 is, to the 136

crisis and revolution

surprise of many, on the other side of the barricade, supporting the Government. The Odéon Theatre, one of the six national theatres in France, symbol of the victorious bourgeoisie and the creation of a secular republican national ‘soul’, was occupied under the slogan ‘When the National Assembly becomes a bourgeois theatre, all bourgeois theatres must become national assemblies.’12 This time of ‘Il est interdit d’interdire!’ (It is forbidden to forbid) was not experienced only in Paris. In London in 1967 and 1968 the protests paved the way for a growth of forces on the left of the Communist Party. Of these groups, the one that lasted the longest organised around the New Left Review. In Berkeley, California, students marched for peace against the Vietnam War and in support of the civil rights movement, against a South heir to slavery.13 Also against proletarianisation and standardisation – against ‘knowledge factories’.14 The war against the peoples of Algeria had radicalised the National Union of Students of France. Students are also strongly influenced by Maoist China and Guevarism. Che Guevara had been murdered in the fall of 1967 after a US-backed ruthless persecution. In Portugal, student meetings are organised in support of May 68, but it was a time of weakness for the student movement, still poorly recovered from the blows of the 1965 and 1967 regime’s repression on sectors influenced by the PCP and the FAP (Frente de Ação Popular, Popular Action Front, Maoists), the most influential organisations at the time. But there will be a May 68 in Portugal a year later: the so-called ‘academic crisis’ of 1969. Since 1968, there have been protests in Ireland against restrictions on political freedoms imposed by the British. The demonstrators organised around the Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association, influenced by the American civil rights movements. In April 1969 the Portuguese press reported: Northern Ireland on the brink of Civil War. British troops were today in prevention to guard important facilities in Northern Ireland, after 36 hours of disorder in which more than 250 people were injured. Nine of the Belfast post offices, attacked with Molotov cocktails, were still burning in the early hours of the morning, and there were growing fears in this city that there would be more disorders during the day.15 137

a people’s history of europe

Under the impact of the anti-colonial movement worldwide, black Americans also demand equality. The starting point, which detonated years of oppression and accumulated frustrations, was given by a 42-year-old black lady, Rosa Parks who, on 1 December 1955, after a tiring day at work, rejected the bus driver’s order to relinquish her seat in the ‘coloured section’ to a white passenger, after the whites-only section was filled. She was arrested and tried. Her conviction sparked a wave of protests in the USA and a boycott of public transport that left them on the verge of bankruptcy. It lasted 382 days and only ended when the legislation that separated whites and blacks on buses was abolished. In 1957, the American Congress passed the first civil rights law that promoted racial equality. But in the south of the country, characterised by large estates of whites where blacks worked for years as slaves, racism wouldn’t be abolished only with laws. The movement radicalises. What begins as a mass movement for equal rights under the law quickly becomes a movement with very marked class claims: right to work (unemployment was four to five times higher among blacks), equal wages for blacks and whites, decent housing, quality education. It will be already in the second half of the 1960s that leaders influenced by Marxism, such as Malcom X, will direct a large part of this movement, which, meanwhile, coverges with the movement against the war in Vietnam and May 68. Martin Luther King himself, at the end of life (he was murdered in Memphis, on 4 April 1968), adopted socialist ideas, criticising the Vietnam War, and associating racial segregation with capitalism.16 The University of California, Berkeley was also the centre of the student struggle against the Vietnam War. In June 1967, the number of American soldiers killed in Vietnam reached 10,000. The United States try to use the crisis in the Middle East to make people forget this number. US casualties, however, were reaching higher and higher numbers, which the government was trying to hide. In the last week of May 1967, more than 300 American soldiers died (it is also said that more than 2,000 Vietcong died in the same period) and more than 2,000 were injured. In 1968, Vietcong (National Liberation Front of Vietnam) launched a coordinated set of attacks, the bloodiest of the war. They manage to enter cities and American bases. After that, it became clear to anyone who could still doubt that the United States would never win the war. 138

crisis and revolution

However, it was not until 1975 that the USA assumed defeat and withdrew from Vietnam. On 18 March 1967, the supertanker Torrey Canyon sank off the Isles of Scilly in Great Britain. It was the first major oil spill disaster in the world. That is why there were no adequate plans to deal with an ecological catastrophe of this dimension. When it was built in 1959, the Torrey Canyon had a capacity of 60,000 tonnes but was increased in Japan to double. When the accident occurred, the ship was owned by the Barracuda Tanker Corporation and was in charter service for British Petroleum. An ecological movement has since awakened in the students’ claims against mass capitalist production that destroyed the Earth’s resources, destroying the ecosystems. During the Portuguese revolution of 1974 and 1975 a protester spoke: Nowadays certain diseases are called the diseases of civilization. They are rather diseases of barbarism […] caused by the pressure of the rhythm of life, by noise pollution, by pollution at all levels, by canned, industrialized food. They cannot be called diseases of civilization, but diseases of barbarism!17 Charles Tilly ranked May 68 as the biggest mobilisation ever in France.18 However, the statistics for the period have been suppressed. For social scientists Álvaro Bianchi and Ruy Braga: The assessment of the size of the strike has a translation in the combats in historiography. The official data about it has been summarily deleted from the statistical bulletins. Neither the Annuaire statistique de la France nor the Bulletin mensuel de statistiques sociales record data in the columns of May and June 1968! Official history could not recognize the scope of the movement; it chose to delete it. A conservative estimate, based on information gathered in the press and in which strikes in small companies are clearly underestimated, stipulates the number of strikers in 5,196,300. The study, however, reveals the strength of the strike in large industries. In the automobile sector, the strike reached 94.8% of workers; in the textile industry, 94.2%; and in the fuel, minerals, gas, electricity and water sectors, 91.8%. The number generally recognized by the movement itself was ten million strikers.19 139

a people’s history of europe

The position of the French Socialist Party against the independence of Algeria and the hesitant position of the French Communist Party (PCF) in the face of this war, which ended in 1962, together with the attitude, especially of the PCF, of not initially supporting students (for the Socialist Party it was easier to support them because it did not lead these organisations), led them to an erosion of their bases in 1968 – although the end result is complex, with consequences also in other European and Latin American countries; and uneven, depending on whether we look at the short or medium term. On the one hand, in the revolutionary heat, organisations that expressed the existence of dual powers were born that were not controlled by these parties, the action committees. On the other hand, with the loss of strength of the movement, the workers were transferred from the action committees to union structures – which ended up being mostly led by these parties, which had been against the committees. But these parties had an organisation, a material and intellectual structure, more cadres, more professionals and more management experience. At the same time, the PS and the PCF will gain electoral influence during the 1970s. Social, union, electoral and political strength didn’t walk hand in hand. Yet France today was the country most resistant to neoliberalism because many of its unions, won by the Trotskyist, anarcho-syndicalist and Maoist currents that were born or reinforced in May 68, such as the railway workers in the south of the country, or the postmen – who created Sud Solidaires, a radical union federation – acted as a vanguard against labour flexibilisation plans, such as the CPE (First Employment Contract), among other legislative packages aimed at reducing the unit labour cost.20 It was in May 68 that the Stalinist organisations first saw its hegemony as leadership of the European workers’ movement questioned, but this went much further in the Portuguese revolution, where in some of the largest factories in the country (metallurgical, electrical, chemical) the PCP did not have a majority. The social explosions in France and Italy had shown that the working class of the 1960s was also rising up against the union leaderships, opting, in the midst of more radicalised struggles, for more assemblyist methods, in contrast to the less intense moments of social struggle, when 140

crisis and revolution

unions prevail. The accusation of ‘petty bourgeois’ made by the communist parties against radicalised students had little support: With the advancement of schooling, followed by the dissemination of university education and the proletarianization of intellectual work, it is clear that the argument used by the leaders of the official CPs against the rebel students was essentially misleading. Taken by surprise, the bureaucratic unions and the official communist movement – already quite shaken by the denunciations of the ‘crimes of Stalin’ that occurred during the XX Congress of the CPSU in 1956 and by their attitude towards the independence of Algeria – answered the question, ‘after all, who are these students who rebel?’ like this: ‘Today’s students are our future bosses! Don’t take what they’re saying seriously!’21 These accusations and conflicts against dissidents or against the far left did not have a more disastrous effect on these political organisations because in the first place they already were – with their large hundreds of professionals – financially dependent, wholly or partly, on the State, parliament and unions. Second, because there was still an obvious political capital that had endured because the Communists and the Soviet troops were the most massacred during Nazism, suffering the greatest number of victims among the organised resistance. China’s Cultural Revolution was also instrumental in breaking Stalinism’s influence. The crisis had started in the 1961 Sino-Soviet conflict. On 29 May 1966, at Tsinghua University, the first organisation of ‘red guards’ was formed – groups of young people who would have a prominent role in what would become known as the Cultural Revolution (the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution). On 1 June, the People’s Daily published an article citing calls for a major purge of all ‘imperialists’, ‘pro-imperialist intellectuals’ and ‘friends of the imperialists’. On 28 July, representatives of the red guards wrote to Mao Zedong joining the purge campaign within the party and the state. The motto was set. The Great Leap Forward disaster was associated, among some sectors of the Party, with strong criticism to the bureaucratisation of the Chinese CP that was very reminiscent of Soviet degeneration. But to oppose a privileged caste they used methods of power control and mass police repression, exactly the methods characteristic of the bureaucratic 141

a people’s history of europe

USSR. And they used them not only against the privileged but against a large part of Mao’s revolutionary criticisers. For three years, the red guards were the spearhead of a ‘purification’ campaign. Armed with Mao’s Little Red Book, they hung dazibaos (huge posters) and organised large assemblies in which they denounced the ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and made them parade in kinds of Inquisition processions, with posters in which they accused them of the worst crimes. Many central, regional and local leaders, teachers and intellectuals have been deported to camps in rural areas to be ‘re-educated’, arrested or murdered. Rural areas that were still dominated by rural cadres, heavily authoritarian, and that had the support of the People’s Army. Rural areas that were also largely unaware of the power struggles in urban China. In Turin, in 1969, workers at Fiat Mirafiori, the largest Fiat factory in the world opened in 1939 by Mussolini, went on strike. One of the demonstrations, which left the main door of Mirafiori towards the neighbourhood in front, gathered 40,000 workers. Suddenly, from the top of the apartment blocks’ windows, flower pots started to fall directed at the police. It was the first sign that part of Turin’s population was with the workers. It was Autunno Caldo, a series of massive strikes in northern Italy – where there was recent and young emigration from the south – that lasted between 1969 and 1970 and will end with salary increases and the achievement of the 40-Hour Week. And also with a deep crisis in the PCI (Italian Communist Party), which will boost the agreements with Christian democracy, on the one hand, and at the same time pave the way for the party’s dissenting workerists. It was in 1969 that De Gaulle fell, showing that, after all, against all the wishes of his supporters, he had not managed to survive politically the social mobilisation of 1968. The Canadian historian T.E. Vadney, while recalling the value of De Gaulle for European leaders who dreamed of making Europe a ‘third world power’, independent of the USSR and the USA, points out that France’s strongman fell in May 1968, although he formally resigned only in April 1969: They [the workers] identified with student protests against the West’s own version of a bureaucratic-managerial ruling class. On 13 May 1968 a general strike brought Paris to a halt, and 300,000 demonstra142

crisis and revolution

tors went on the march. Within a few days perhaps ten million people were involved in strikes. The government of Charles de Gaulle mobilized support in the provinces and among the middle class and weathered the storm, but the mass participation of the French population in anti-government strikes showed that there were problems in the West. And de Gaulle did decide to resign the next year.22 Following May 1968 and the generalisation of student and worker protests against the French government, De Gaulle left France to meet in Germany with Jacques Massu, then the head of the French forces in Germany. De Gaulle’s encounter with Massu – who had planned a coup d’état during the Algerian War – expressed the scale of the popular revolt in which De Gaulle was submerged. For Ian Birshall, such a meeting was a fraud. The French right had organised itself in demonstrations against May 68, but de Gaulle never thought to use the army, which could split up and refuse to shoot at fellow citizens. De Gaulle trusted the elections, relying on a historical fact: the elections socially distorted the gap between classes in France. Just as in 1852 Louis Napoléon had defeated the Parisian revolt with elections, relying on the province, De Gaulle trusted that the elections would be a counterweight to the student and workers’ force in the cities, giving the word to the middle class, the bourgeoisie and, as Vadney says, the province. This comparison between De Gaulle and Napoleon III (Louis Bonaparte) is made by the BBC on 18 April 1969. The bet was won, at least immediately. In the June 1968 elections, De Gaulle ’s party won 358 of the 487 seats in dispute. But the social situation did not change radically with the victory of the Gaullists. And on 28 April 1969, De Gaulle is forced to resign after defeat in a referendum. His referendum proposal foresaw the transformation of the Senate into a kind of political council and, above all, it instituted, in thanks to the province’s support, a substantial increase in the power of regional councils. De Gaulle lost the referendum with 52.97 per cent of the votes against his proposal and 47.13 per cent for. The day before the referendum, the press already considered De Gaulle defeated. Left-wing newspapers rejoiced at the near end of the man who had led the 1968 defeat. In the end, the social mobilisation of May 68 was defeated because, one by one, the union leaders led the workers to give up the strike, after 143

a people’s history of europe

important social conquests, but less than the strength they showed in those days might have conquered: Thus, while students demonstrated on the streets and workers occupied the factories, the leadership of the PCF negotiated, as of May 25, the ‘Grenelle Agreements’ with representatives of the state and the French bosses. Such ‘agreements’ resulted in a 7% increase in wages for all workers – plus 3% in September – followed by an increase in minimum wages of around 25%. In addition, the employers agreed to recognize factory committees and to reduce the percentage of health expenses not reimbursed by social security from 30% to 25%. Very little for the biggest strike in the history of a country used to big strikes.23 It was finally in May 68 that a new impetus was given to the struggle for the emancipation of women, a theme that will return, again and again, throughout the history of Europe to the present day. Two decades since the beginning of the twenty-first century, gender equality has not yet been fully achieved in Europe. But the combination of the entry of women into the post-war labour market with increasing schooling and widespread education, gave an important boost to greater social equality between genders. The Second Sex,24 a pioneering work on feminism, was published in 1949 by Simone de Beauvoir, an intellectual who participated in May 68, and will be one of the references for the European and global feminist movement. The Bolsheviks had been the first to elaborate a multifaceted vision of women’s emancipation, which included the right to wage labour, therefore freeing themselves from the traditional family and the subjugation of women to their husbands, but also the liberation from certain constraints of wage labour, that is, fighting capitalist exploitation.25 They were also the first to impose measures that became common in the second half of the twentieth century, such as day care centres. They went even further and, although with few means, they tried to create a network of socialised reproductive work, such as laundries and collective canteens, so that women could leave the private sphere and conquer the public sphere, and for couples based on free love to be possible for men and women without succumbing to the strain of domestic work. 144

crisis and revolution

The theme of feminism is vast and complex because it varies widely depending on the decades in which it returns to the centre of public debates – and depending on the countries. In 1968, the radical vision of women who wanted to take responsibility for themselves and open the corridors of love, find themselves hand in hand with men, without walls. Sexual freedom, the right to choose were on the agenda of all student movements in the 1960s. But this has not always been dominant within feminism, which has been plagued by the debate about gender and class, oppression and exploitation. In many countries, liberalism, to fulfil the demand for women in the labour market, played a central role in accelerating women’s independence. In other countries, full employment was artificially achieved – as in the case of Federal Germany and the Netherlands (this one still today) – using part time female employment: Look at female participation in the work force as of 1968. In the DDR, 78.1 percent of women worked and earned 83.2 percent of what men did, while in the West Germany economy only 55 percent of women worked, earning only 70 percent of the male wage.26 For example, 80.2 per cent of children in the DDR were in free day care until age three. By contrast, only 3 per cent of children under the age of three were in public day care in West Germany. It is significant that in the DDR in the 1960s, where there was a dictatorship, gender equality went further than in Federal Germany, where there was a democratic regime. Backwardness sometimes stimulates progress – the colonial wars and emmigration placed Portugal in 1974 with one of the highest female labour rates, close to 40 per cent. Today it is 47 per cent. First of all because unlike in rich countries, two salaries are needed to support the family. At the end of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twentyfirst, the feminist movement gained ground as a movement of the ruling classes associated with the defence of the participation of women in leading positions of companies. Often feminism was also used as a force against the labour movement by the postmodern philosophical wave, encouraging the fragmentation of the working class. In countries with a strong Catholic bent, like Poland, feminism continues to struggle for elementary rights for women, where abortion, a right won in most 145

a people’s history of europe

Western European countries in the 1970s (in Russia in 1917), continues to be a crime. In Ireland, an important victory was won only in 2018. Abortion is now permitted during the first twelve weeks of pregnancy. Nowhere in Europe is there an equal pay for men and women today. For the first time in history, in 2017, there was an international women’s strike on 8 March, which had an impact mainly in Poland, the USA and Argentina, but the impact was still very low worldwide.

The ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 The invasion of Czechoslovakia by Russian troops took place on the night of 20–21 August 1968. At 11pm, some 400,000 to 500,000 Warsaw Pact soldiers crossed the border. Czechoslovakia was one of the few countries in Eastern Europe that did not have Soviet troops in its territory. A series of reforms had changed the face of Czechoslovakia in the period between January and August 1968. Liberalisation of the press, radio and television, and from April onwards an economic plan (The Action Programme) that diminished the centralised control of the State over the economy, giving more power to factory committees. This was one of the nerve points in the demands of the popular opposition, workers and intellectuals, because a highly centralised plan (and not a democratic plan) failed to provide essential services, not taking into account the needs of the population. In these months, the party’s statutes were also renewed, allowing for internal debate, which had been stifled since the late 1940s. A new congress was announced for 9 September 1968, which, with social pressure from outside the party, would reinforce the reformist positions of Alexander Dubcˇek, who had been elected First Secretary of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia in January 1968. Unlike other Eastern European countries, freed from Nazism by the Red Army, Czechoslovakia had a long communist tradition. The party was legal during the country’s liberal democracy regime between 1918 and 1938. Until the invasion and occupation of the territory by Nazi troops, resistance to Nazism in the country was mostly communist, albeit with a bourgeois minority component. The Communist Party of Czechoslovakia had developed some independence from the Comintern until 1929. At that time, a congress 146

crisis and revolution

promoted ‘Bolshevization’ – purges in Stalinist parties were often accompanied by the symbolic use of the word ‘Bolshevism’ (a political project killed in the late 1920s) – and imposed the Stalinist line of ‘socialism in one country’ and the defence of the USSR ‘as the single monopolistic centre of the international revolutionary movement’.27 Then a series of conflicts begins that lead to the gradual loss of members – 70 per cent will then have left the party. With the change, in 1935–36, to the line of the ‘anti-fascist popular front’, the party grew again significantly. However, the hard core of their leadership had been formed in the loyalty to the USSR, educated in fact in the USSR itself. Those communists that were most connected to the interior were viewed by these ‘exterior’ leaders with suspicion. The USSR put pressure on the party to have Czechoslovakia liberated in 1945 by Red Army troops, while its leadership in the interior was betting on a resistance-led uprising. In fact, the clandestine resistance committees organised, in some factories, the popular uprising of 5 May 1945, against the outside leadership of the party. And the same happened with the Slovak uprising in August 1944, which was carried out against the will of the Czech and Slovak pro-Soviet leaders. Added to this is the division agreed upon by the great powers in Yalta and Potsdam. When the uprising in Prague against the Nazis took place in May 1945, American troops were very close in Pilsen, but the Soviets were farther away, and it took them three days to arrive. The Americans refused to move forward because of the Yalta agreement with the Russians. There are three days of confrontations, without outside help, to guarantee the fulfilment of the division of territories between the winning powers of the war. Following liberation, between 1945 and 1949, the country experiences a period of openness, literature and the arts are the most dynamic sector. It is not by chance that Czech literature or cinema will be among the main European artistic vanguards until the end of the 1960s. Artists and intellectuals will oppose the party’s official line of ‘proletarian art’, first of all because: the majority of them were party members before the war when being a communist artist meant being an avant garde artist. Many were, for example, surrealists. In Soviet socialism they recognized a kind of 147

a people’s history of europe

bourgeois realism … and refused to accept this type of art as true socialist art.28 This was just one of the debates that led to dramatic purges in the party between 1949 and 1954, imposing a tough dictatorship until 1968. Czechoslovakia was the country where purges were most violent. Why? According to Jirˇí Pelikán, director of Czechoslovak television in 1968, because socialism was strongest there, and therefore a threat to the bureaucracy entrenched in power: It was in Czechoslovakia that there were more favourable conditions for socialism across Eastern Europe, because of the industrialization of the country, because it had a broad and trained working class, because of the role and prestige of the Communist Party and because of the people’s friendship with the Soviet Union. From this point of view, it seems strange that the biggest purge in any communist party is the one that took place in Czechoslovakia in 1949–54. I think it was precisely because Czechoslovakia had the most favourable conditions; it seemed to be the most independent in looking for its own development path. This did not suit the Soviet leadership. They wanted to monopolize Eastern Europe and impose the Soviet model. For this reason, they were forced to attack the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia strongly. Parties like the Polish, the Hungarian or the Bulgarian CPs were just small vanguard groups that had been underground, in hiding, for 20 to 30 years. It was not so difficult for them to accept Soviet hegemony. But in Czechoslovakia, although the party was subjectively willing to accept this hegemony, the Russians saw it as a potential heretic. Naturally, it seemed paradoxical and shocking to us that the number of victims of repression was the highest in Czechoslovakia, despite all our democratic traditions. Nothing on a comparable scale has occurred elsewhere in Eastern Europe.29 During 1967, the country suffered the effects of the economic crisis of 1963. Demonstrations by students and intellectuals were growing against the lack of freedom, and demanding reforms. This was the ‘workers’ state’, but they did not even know the accounts of the factories of which, in theory, they were collective owners. There is a strong national issue that thickens the crisis, the Slovak issue. 148

crisis and revolution

Following popular pressure, Dubcˇek was elected in January 1968. He was a reformer, but not a dissident. He was not an anti-Soviet, and he tried to manage the pressure of his social base for change without begrudging the USSR – a balance that proved impossible. He did not want to rely on the ‘initiative committees’, which would be the basis for establishing workers’ councils, the only ones that could have resisted the Soviet tanks. Thus, when the USSR invaded the country Dubcˇek and those around him did not promote any kind of resistance, even civilian, as a general strike, limiting themselves to staying, and not hiding it publicly, paralysed and discouraged by the invasion –which was done, according to the Russians, to ‘avoid economic liberalisation’ of the country. The ‘Prague Spring’ was seen publicly by the USSR as the country’s adhesion to capitalism. However, most of the social forces in Czechoslovakia were in fact fighting for democratisation and not for economic liberalisation, although one sector was in favour of a move to a capitalist state. The reality was that the Czech example would have immediate repercussions in Poland and Ukraine. This was in times of crisis in the Warsaw Pact when the USSR no longer controlled Yugoslavia and Romania. The privileges of the leading caste of the USSR and its satellites would be potentially undermined if they moved towards a Socialist State on the basis of workers’ councils, which was more realistic in 1968 than ever because the war had given impetus to industrialisation which was putting the country nearer, not farther, abundance, as a condition and an expression of a socialist society. Czechoslovakia was the eighth industrial power in the world. Yet, tanks have arrived, not socialism. Jirˇí Pelikán writes in 1972 to one of the leaders of the black movement in the USA, Angela Davis,30 who was also a member of the Communist Party USA, asking for her support to fight against the occupation of his country, evoking the fight against the war in Vietnam: But I’m also writing to you because, in spite of our different experiences, we have a lot in common … You say that you became a communist because after seeing the people suffer you understood that society must be changed. So did I. I joined the Communist Party in September 1939. I was a student and I had seen my country occupied by the German Nazis. I wanted to fight for freedom and to change a system which produces wars and oppression. 149

a people’s history of europe

You have lived through the painful experience of prison. So have I. While the Gestapo hunted me, my parents were taken as hostages: and my mother never came back from prison. I know as well as you what is meant by repression, discrimination, and suffering. Like you, I went into the revolutionary movement convinced that socialism can create a more just society for the majority of men. The difference between us consists only in the fact that after thirty years as a militant, in October, 1969, I was expelled from the party along with some half million Czech and Slovak communists simply because we refused to consider the occupation of our small socialist country by a foreign power, itself ‘socialist’, as ‘fraternal aid’. You may say that there is a big difference between American military aggression in Vietnam and the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. I agree, and that is why our people did not defend itself in arms. But the substance of the two interventions is the same: to prevent people from deciding their own destiny. You are for the immediate withdrawal of American troops from Vietnam. So am I. But why, four years after the intervention, are there still 80,000 Soviet soldiers…31 In November 1968, a Czech student declares: ‘the whole country has been feeling sick.32 The leaders have done everything the Russians want. And it is not clear, he says, whether they are obliged to do it or whether it is done willingly. Milan Kundera, in The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an award-winning novel that is situated during the Prague Spring, expresses deep disillusionment with the direction of political life in Czechoslovakia: When I say ‘totalitarian’, what I mean is that everything that infringes on kitsch must be banished for life: every display of individualism (because a deviation from the collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brotherhood); every doubt (because anyone who starts doubting details will end by doubting life itself ); all irony (because in the realm of kitsch everything must be taken quite seriously); and the mother who abandons her family or the man who prefers men to women, thereby calling into question the holy decree ‘Be fruitful and multiply’. In this light, we can regard the gulag as a septic tank used by totalitarian kitsch to dispose of its refuse.33 150

crisis and revolution

The Russians arrived and occupied the country, facing little resistance. Around 50–100 people died – not comparable, for example, with the Hungarian resistance of 1956, in which 20,000 died. However, nothing would be the same as before in the communist world. The May 1968 and the Prague Spring further propelled the social-democratic rupture of the communist parties that were faithful to the USSR. If they managed to show their strength in restraining social movements in Paris, Berlin or Prague, they have not been able to prevent their steady decline since then.

Eurocommunism In 1972, Enrico Berlinguer becomes secretary general of the Italian Communist Party. A contrario of the 1968–69 student and worker mobilisation, which is taking place in opposition to the centre-left government, the Italian Communist Party fears that it will lose the train of government and trails the path of Eurocommunism, a step forward in the strategy of the ‘popular fronts’ adopted by some European communist parties. Eurocommunism cannot be understood as a mere autonomisation of the Soviet apparatus by the Italian, French and Spanish communist parties. The finding does not explain the event. It is in the context of the social explosion that had its epicentre in France in 1968 that one can understand the acceleration of the frontist policy carried out by the PCI (Historic Compromise), the PCF (Common Programme) and the PCE (Pact for Freedom). For Massimo Salvadori, the election of Berlinguer in 1972 is placed in this context: Characterized by a deep economic and social crisis and the expansion of ‘red’ and ‘black’ terrorist organizations, the new Communist Party secretary general, Enrico Berlinguer, who succeeded Luigi Longo in 1972, launches a proposal, through which he immediately refers to the ‘historic compromise’…34 In his speeches, such as that of 23 September 1973, Berlinguer insisted that ‘reactionary adventures’ were at stake, which made the need for a new compromise with Christian Democracy urgent. 151

a people’s history of europe

Now, what was at stake was a student and worker mobilisation in Europe unprecedented since the end of the Second World War. And the reaction of the communist parties in Europe is that the present danger is that of ‘disorder’, ‘adventure’ and the ‘return of the reactionaries’. ‘Leftism’ as the culprit for the return of fascism is a recurring argument in all the programmes of southern European communist parties, including that of Álvaro Cunhal, since the 1964 and 1965 congresses that they held after the Sino-Soviet split. In Italy, the situation was particularly critical for the established order. It was the European country that had more armed groups, on the left and on the right. The first to spread terror – to try to defeat the student movement – were the neo-fascist groups that, between 1969 and 1975, committed more than 4,000 acts of violence, including 63 political murders. On the left, the best-known of the groups were the Red Brigades, which in 1978 executed Aldo Moro, former Italian prime minister and leader of Christian Democracy. Organised violence as an instrument of politics was, on the left and on the right, a symptom of a society in social upheaval for which the PCI wanted a democratic exit within the framework of European capitalism. Berlinguer never hid it: the historic compromise meant to save and defend the regime. The PCI had had 33.4 per cent of the votes in 1971. In 1976, it reached its historic maximum in the elections, with 34 per cent of the votes, ending up, in 1978, supporting a Christian Democracy government. In July 1975, in the midst of a revolutionary crisis in Portugal, the cover of the Communist Party of Spain newspaper, Mundo Obrero, is with Carrillo and Berlinguer speaking to a crowd in Livorno, Italy. The two leaders call for the construction of a democratic Europe, for the ‘socialism of our time’. The cover title is informative: ‘Socialism in Democracy: Sectarian Clichés Isolate the Vanguard.’ One can read in the newspaper that: The defence of democracy, the path to socialism, peace, world cooperation, pass through the alliance of the communists with the socialists, social democrats, Catholics and other forces of progress. And this is, in our opinion, the only possible class policy in Europe today. The repetition of the old fashioned sectarian clichés serves nothing more 152

crisis and revolution

than to isolate the vanguard, divide the forces of progress and prepare new defeats for the workers’ movement.35 The history of the PCE is even more linked to the policy of class conciliation than the Italian one because Spain was the general rehearsal of this strategy. The defeat of the Spanish Revolution paved the way for the republican defeat and the Franco victory in 1939, which, along with Salazar’s, ended up being one of the longest dictatorships of the twentieth century. In June 1956, the PCE presented its national reconciliation policy, ‘For National Reconciliation, for a Democratic and Peaceful Solution to the Spanish National Problem’, where it affirms that: the peaceful solution of Spain’s political, economic and social problems, on the basis of an understanding between left and right forces, has gained a lot of ground … The PCE solemnly declares that it is willing to contribute without reservation to the national reconciliation of the Spanish.36 The political encounter with the ‘civilised’ right will be confirmed in the seventh (1965) and eighth (1972) Party Congresses, which reaffirm this policy, this time in declared opposition to the Maoist groups that formed in Spain from 1963. The first Maoist split occurs in Spain in December 1963, exactly in the same month and year when the leader of the Portuguese pro-Chinese split, Francisco Martins Rodrigues, leaves the PCP. The split causes most of the party’s student organisation in Madrid to leave the PCE, and to found the PCE (ML) in 1964, launching the newspaper Vanguardia Obrera. The national reconciliation of all Spaniards, regardless of class, to peacefully replace the Franco dictatorship, is reaffirmed at the Seventh Congress, in 1965, against ‘leftists’. Santiago Carrillo begins by pretending to ignore pro-Chinese students and intellectuals and then attack them, using the same terms as Portugal’s Álvaro Cunhal: ‘provocateurs’, ‘adventurers’, ‘valets’, etc.37

‘Arriba Franco, más alto que Carrero Blanco’38 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, which means ‘Basque Country and Liberty’), the Basque independence organisation, was born at the end of the 1950s. It was born under the impulse of militants from various 153

a people’s history of europe

sectors, such as EGI, Euzko Gaztedi Indarra, the youth branch of the PNV, Basque Nationalist Party, Ekin, a student and nationalist think tank that was initially only a cultural association, and the movement of nationalist Basque priests. Initially, ETA was heavily influenced not only by movements and events such as the Cuban Revolution and national liberation struggles in Algeria and Vietnam, but also by the ancient Gudari, Basque soldiers of the civil war, who later distinguished themselves in France in the resistance to Nazism. It solidifies its ranks in the heat of the Bizkaia workers’ struggles and in the iron basin in Guipuzkoa. Many militants came from the mountainous areas between these two regions. The year 1967 saw the first major split in its history. In the parish hall of Gaztlelu, in the province of Guipuzkoa, ETA gathers its Fifth Assembly. There, the independentist and nationalist tendency is in the majority, advocating a national front with all the Basque independentists and the reinforcement of the armed struggle – to the detriment of other tendencies which focused more and more on the Spanish situation, almost exclusively on union issues. The organisation will suffer in the future other divisions with similar roots. On the one hand, those who wished to dilute the struggle of the Basques within the social struggles that then took place in Spain, and on the other those who, although influential in the struggles of the industrial workers, put the emphasis on the national liberation of Euskal Herria as a whole, that is, the territories they considered to be part of the Basque nation. On 20 December 1973, newspapers around the world opened with news of the assassination of Carrero Blanco, prime minister of Francoist Spain. It was a ‘perfect’ attack. ETA had killed the president of the government minutes before legal proceedings against the Comisiones Obreras began, a few metres from the US Embassy where Henry Kissinger was staying that day. At 9.30am on 20 December 1973, the unarmoured car bringing Admiral Carrero Blanco, a Dodge Dart 3700, slowly crossed Rua Claudio Coello in Madrid at a speed of about 12 miles per hour. Carrero Blanco had come from Mass, in the Church of San Francisco de Borga, where he went daily – a ritual that he kept religiously. Suddenly, a loud noise was heard, and the street literally rises, with stones flying and a blanket of white smoke rising into the air. The first reaction of the men in the escort car is to call the fire department and ask for ‘another escort 154

crisis and revolution

car’ to accompany the admiral. They didn’t see the car which Carrero was in and thought that he had returned back home, about 200 metres from the site of the explosion. Inspector Alonso, who was part of the escort, went by foot to Carrero’s house to ask if the presidential car had arrived there. Father Gómez-Acebo was on the third floor of a Jesuit residence adjacent to the Church. The reading room where he was located overlooked Rua Claudio Coello. For a moment, he thought that an explosion of butane in the kitchen had caused a disaster, when he heard what he described as a ‘dull noise’. Something had passed by his window. It was Carrero Blanco’s car. The explosion was so powerful that the car was propelled to the full height of the church building, that is, five floors, some 35 metres; it then passed over the roof and fell onto a terrace in the inner courtyard of the Jesuits’ residence. Inspector Alonso returned from Carrero’s house and warned that he has not reached his destination. For a moment, it is thought that Carrero’s car sank in the giant puddle of water that had formed in the hole caused by the explosion. Father Gómez-Acebo sees Alonso, goes to him, and tells him that at the back of the building, on top of the terrace, there is a big black car with two bodies inside – to whom, he has already administered last rites. Everyone heads for the terrace, where it is confirmed that it is Carrero’s car. Inside there were not two bodies, but three: that of Carrero Blanco, inspector Bueno, who accompanied Carrero, and the driver, Pérez Mogena. Luís Carrero Blanco was a hardline Francoist. Born in Cantabria on 4 March 1903, he entered the Naval Military School in 1918 and participated in the Moroccan campaign between 1924–26. When the Spanish Civil War broke out in 1936, after the Francoist uprising, Carrero was in the zone controlled by the Republicans. He managed to take refuge in the Mexican embassy and then in France to move to the nationalist side. After their victory in 1939, Carrero Blanco became one of Franco’s closest collaborators and head of naval military operations. He was a devotee of the Catholic Church and very close to Opus Dei. Carrero Blanco opposed the entry of Spain in the Second World War. In 1941, he was appointed undersecretary of the presidency. Ten years later, he became Minister of the Presidency. In 1967, he was appointed vice-president and in June 1973, he was president of the government. Paul Preston 155

a people’s history of europe

considers that Carrero Blanco was a man who bridged the differences between the various factions of Francoism, especially between the technocratic elite and the bunker hardliners. The British historian recalls that Carrero Blanco’s first political mission was to Rome in 1939 to attend the celebration of the twentieth anniversary of fascism.39 That same night, ETA claimed the attack, classifying it as a response to the death of militants of the organisation, but also stating other objectives: That is why we believe that our action taken against the President of the Spanish Government will undoubtedly mean a fundamental advance in the fight against national oppression and for socialism in Euskadi and for the freedom of all the exploited and oppressed within the Spanish State.40 Furthermore, ETA argued that Carrero Blanco ‘represented, better than anyone, the pure Francoist’, although he was not directly connected to any of the Movimiento’s tendencies, but he was the bridge between them all. Later the attack and its political motivations were described in a book, at the request of ETA, by the Basque writer and activist Eva Forest who interviewed her material authors: ‘After performing the appropriate make-up, for security reasons, the book came out signed with the pseudonym of Julen Agirre, and became an authentic bestseller in the underground,’ inside and outside the Basque Country.41 Across the world among the leftist and even social-democratic millieux, the attack was welcomed. It was supported by UGT, close to the PSOE, and by anarcho-syndicalist sectors, but devalued by the PCE. The Franco regime was hated and, for many, it continued to be an illegitimate regime that was implanted after having provoked a war that caused much commotion in the twentieth century and killed 1 million people. After the death of Carrero Blanco, the slogan ‘Arriba Franco, más alto que Carrero Blanco! ’ (‘Up with Franco, higher than Carrero Blanco!’) will be often heard in anti-Francoist demonstrations in Europe and Latin America. Naturally, the Spanish right reacts differently. The funeral becomes a gigantic tribute to the regime. At the head of this tribute was Juan Carlos de Bourbon, the future king of Spain (1975–2014). Juan Carlos 156

crisis and revolution

attends the solemn mass for the admiral’s soul, held in the church of San Francisco, in the centre of the capital. Juan Carlos heads the funeral procession, which runs along the Paseo de la Castellana, in the absence of Franco. About 100,000 people will have attended the funeral, which took place on the 22 December 1973. Among them, Portugal’s Prime Minister Marcelo Caetano and the then North American vice-president, Gerald Ford. The right knew that this attack was much more than an attempt against the prime minister – the regime itself was hit. Paul Preston in Spain in Crisis argues that the attack accelerated the crisis of the ruling class in Spain: They had eliminated the Caudillo’s successor, his right arm, made in his image and likeness, the man who supposedly was going to make possible the continuation of Francoism without Franco.42 The attack exposed the vulnerability of the regime. In the city of La Coruña, 45 minutes from Franco’s hometown, Ferrol, there is a demonstration of 10,000 people, who, according to the Portuguese newspaper Diário de Lisboa on 23 December, sang the phalanx anthem and ‘raised their right arms in fascist greeting, cheering Franco and the Army’. In spite of all this mobilisation and demonstration of strength, the Francoist right did not succeed, in these years of social mobilisation, to stop strikes that paralysed entire provinces, or prevent the occupation of faculties, and the growth of the forces opposing the regime. On 24 June 1972, the police interrupted a meeting of union leaders of the Comisiones Obreras that was taking place in a private house in Pozuelo de Alarcón, Madrid. At the meeting, which aimed to analyse the situation of the Spanish labour movement and outline a strategy to attract more activists, were present Francisco Acosta Jorge, Juan Muñiz Zapico, Francisco Garcia Salve, Miguel Zamora Antón, Nicolás Sartorius, Fernando Soto Martín, Marcelino Camacho Abad, Eduardo Saborido Galán, Pedro Santisteban Hurtado and Luís Fernández Costilla. These union leaders were imprisoned until December 1973, when the trial began. The regime asked for a total of 162 years in prison for prisoners in case No. 1,001. The social struggles that started in Spain in 1968 and especially 1969, in a context of consolidation of the Spanish labour movement, led to a 157

a people’s history of europe

recomposition of the unions, especially around the Comisiones Obreras, which gained, in those years, many new members. In 1973, the regime decided to make an exemplary trial against some of these men. The victory of the counter-revolution in the Spanish Civil War had devastated the labour movement. Francoism designed, for the labour movement, a model inspired by Italian fascism, of vertical unions, mandatory membership structures in which workers and bosses were together, run by bosses and regime personnel. Only in 1947, almost a decade after the republican defeat in the civil war, the workers’ shouts were heard again, in the strike of 40,000 metal workers in Biscay. In the 1950s, new conflicts appeared that gave rise to comisiones obreras (workers’ committees) that were formed and disappeared to the rhythm of labour conflicts. The first with that name appeared in Gijón, Asturias, in 1957. The Comisiones Obreras, directed mainly by the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), consolidated with the growing industrialisation and managed to hold their first General Meeting in June 1967, in Madrid. It is in that year that they moved from a semi-legal movement to a persecuted organisation – they were considered illegal in November 1967 by the Supreme Court. Between 1967 and 1974, there were thousands of arrests of union leaders. Process 1001 will mobilise all the leftist opposition and even the moderate opposition to the regime. As early as 12 December 1973, there was a huge demonstration calling for the liberation of the prisoners. All of this in a climate of threats and provocations on the part of the far right. The regime does not bend and the prisoners begin to be judged on 20 December. One week later, sentences ranging from 12 to 20 years in prison are published. In February 1975, the sentences were reduced and, in December of the same year, King Juan Carlos was forced to pardon all these prisoners.

The 1970 Global Crisis The social conflicts between 1968–1975 took place at the end of a cycle of economic growth and the beginning of the crisis. If the 1960s had been ‘glorious’ in Europe and also in semi-peripheral countries, which had their great moment of post-war industrialisation, the reality is that the 1970s started with the economic crisis. 158

crisis and revolution

The capitalist engine was again showing signs of weakness. Scholars like American sociologist and economic historian Immanuel Wallerstein and historian Robert Brenner argue that in this period we entered a Kondratiev B cycle, a long depressive cycle. The subject is controversial among historians and economists, as we will see in the last chapter of this book, but it is a fact that in 1971 the structure erected after 1945 fell. In order to react to the economic crisis, Richard Nixon proposed that instead of the 1 per cent fluctuation of the American currency against international currencies, established in 1944 in Breton Woods, a 3 per cent fluctuation should be allowed. Another sign of the crisis comes from OPEC (Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries). Oil-producing countries demand at the Tehran Conference in 1971 an increase in profits from oil production. These were the first signs of the 1973–74 oil crisis. Politically, the transformations are spectacular: the USA was losing the war in Vietnam, which enters its final phase at the same time as the Watergate scandal that led to Nixon’s resignation in August 1974 breaks out. Britain was experiencing what Giuseppe Mammarella calls its ‘most difficult years’43 with an increase in class conflicts in very strong sectors of the labour movement such as the miners. In 1973, a coup carried out by Augusto Pinochet with the support of the USA and with the personal commitment of Henry Kissinger overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende’s Unidad Popular, establishing one of the bloodiest dictatorships in Latin America, which killed about 30,000 people. In the Middle East, in October 1973, the Yom Kippur War broke out opposing Israel to Egypt and Syria and in the same year the oil shock, a symptom of an economy in crisis. The USSR, inserted in the world economy, suffers profoundly from the erosion of this crisis.44 In 1972, good relations between the USSR and the USA were further strengthened, a détente that culminated three years later in Helsinki, 1975, with the Conference on Security and Cooperation in Europe (CSCE). The division of the world between the USA and the USSR, that is, the mutual consent for both countries to intervene in the internal life of other countries whenever the social and economic situation gets out of control is reaffirmed at this meeting. Nixon’s speech on arrival in Moscow, quoted by the BBC on 22 May 1972, leaves little doubt: ‘We must recognize that it is the responsibility of the great powers to influence other nations in conflict or in crisis 159

a people’s history of europe

to moderate their behaviour.’ Richard Nixon is received in Moscow by Brezhnev, the secretary general of the Communist Party of the USSR, by President Nikolai Podgorny and by the Minister of Foreign Affairs Andrei Gromyko. At the negotiating table there is a restraint on arms production, the Vietnam War, the Middle East conflict and commercial and financial collaboration. He met with Premier Alexei Kosygin and General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev. They’ve signed the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABMT), the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT I), and the US–Soviet Incidents at Sea Agreement. Months before his trip to the USSR, Nixon had visited China. Political organisations influenced by Maoism grew all over the world. These groups questioned the traditional communist leaderships from Europe to Latin America, from Africa to Asia, and had a lot of influence on young people, whether it was students in Europe or guerrillas in Latin America. China, which had moved away from the Soviet apparatus in the early 1960s, wanted to consolidate its approach to the United States. Nixon’s visit on 21 February 1972, is the highlight of this change. Nixon says the visit is the obvious result of the convergence of countries that do not want to dominate one another or to dominate the world. Mao Zedong considers that a door has been opened between the two peoples. In those years, stability was sought. But it didn’t arrive. On 10 July 1971, the day of King Hassan II’s 42nd birthday, a group of Moroccan military rebels led by Lieutenant-Colonel Mohamed Ababou under the orders of General Mohamed Medbouh, stormed the king’s summer palace in Skhirat and subdued the monarch, who was accused of serving French and American economic interests. The king managed to escape unscathed, but 300 people died. The overthrow attempt ended when royalist troops took over the palace in combat against the rebels. The repression that followed was harsh: 74 officers and non-commissioned officers were sentenced to prison terms ranging from one year to life imprisonment and ten senior officers (including four generals) were executed. On 23 June 1971, the ninth summit of the Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, comes to an end. The rejection of the dialogue with South Africa’s apartheid regime is stated. Western support for South Africa’s racist government is condemned by all of Africa. In Istanbul, the ‘scenes from the class struggle’ are recurrent. On 18 May 1971, the press reported on the violent repression of elements of 160

crisis and revolution

the far left, accused of abducting the Israeli consul Ephraim Elrom. That same month, an organisation called Liberation Army had already kidnapped four Americans in Ankara. On 2 March 1971, a general strike opens hostilities against the government of Pakistan. The result will be the separation of East Pakistan from West Pakistan. The process, which was eventually led by the Awami League, headed by Mujibur Rahman, culminates on 26 March with the declaration of independence of East Pakistan, now Bangladesh. Independence is supported by the people of Bangladesh and also by important sectors in India, which was in dispute with the government of West Pakistan. In fact, in that year, the third Indo-Pakistani war began on 3 December. The war is short-lived and the independence of Bangladesh is ratified on 16 December, with the capital in Dacca (now Dhaka). On 1 February 1972, Bernadette Devlin, an Irish nationalist MP, slapped Reginald Maudling, the Secretary of State for the Home Department in the Conservative government in the House of Commons. It was the result of the ‘pain and anger’ for the death of 13 Northern Ireland activists on 30 January 1972, killed by British troops during a march of protest against the English occupation. The event went down in history as Bloody Sunday and was popularised all over the world in Sunday Bloody Sunday (1983), by the Irish band U2. Of the 13 who died immediately, six were minors. Everyone was unarmed and five were hit in the back: ‘It was the bloodiest repression ever seen in Ulster: the number of dead and wounded reflects the scale of the tragedy.’45 That Sunday, 30 January 1972, protesters had taken to the streets against the policy of indiscriminate imprisonment by the government of Northern Ireland, a policy directed against the Irish Republican Army (IRA) that was fighting for the independence of that region. The Irish Republican Army had been formed during Ireland’s war of independence against the British occupation between 1919–21. Ireland achieved independence for a territory that excluded the northern counties, whose capital is Belfast, which remained occupied. In 1969, the Provisional IRA was born from an IRA split, which began to use, systematically and with great influence among young people, the armed struggle to achieve the unification of the two Irelands. The armed struggle took on the character of a civil war, as the Unionists, loyal to the maintenance of Ulster in the United Kingdom, also resorted to armed attacks. 161

a people’s history of europe

For the ruling classes in the United States, these years were the most difficult. Richard Nixon was under fire because of the imminent American defeat in Vietnam and the social environment that would lead to his dismissal in the Watergate scandal was already foreseen in the air. On 19 May 1971, Richard Nixon passed emergency laws to suspend the strike of railway signalling workers and restore traffic. More than 500,000 railway workers were on strike and 350,000 passengers were blocked. The strike represented a stoppage of 40 per cent of the cargo transport in the United States. The strength of the unions forced Nixon to sign a 13.5 per cent wage increase for railway workers. But while negotiating, Nixon did not drop his arms and by midnight passed an anti-strike decree. The deepest cause of the social situation in the United States was on the other side of the Pacific, in Vietnam, and throughout Southeast Asia, which included Laos, Cambodia and, indirectly, Thailand. In this latter country, there will also be a coup d’état on 17 November. The USA continued to systematically bomb Laos. It is thought that between 1971 and 1973, 2 million tons of bombs would have been dropped in this country. The struggle against the Vietnamese people was transferred to Laos, where the Communists had a broad base of support among the peasantry. We can mention in these years, which will become known as the ‘Years of Lead’, several organisations in Europe that practised armed struggle with different motivations, but where the social component was always important: the Fraction of the Red Army in Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, several Spanish, Portuguese and Greek groups, etc., which in general had an ephemeral life, all very far from the social and nationalist sustainability base that ensured ETA and IRA their longevity. In some countries, the State, or more generally groups that are close to or supported by it, will practise a dirty war against these organisations – State terrorism, practised through paramilitary groups such as, for example, in Spain, the Guerrillas of Christ the King, the Spanish Basque Battalion and years later the GAL, during the Felipe González Government, or the terrorism of neo-fascist groups in Italy, and also the systematic use of torture and kidnapping as means of combat.

The Chilean Revolution (1970–73) On 4 September 1970, presidential elections were being held in Chile. The winner was the socialist Salvador Allende, candidate of the Unidad 162

crisis and revolution

Popular, with 36.5 per cent (1,075,616 votes) against 34.9 per cent (1,036,278 votes) for Jorge Alessandri, candidate of the conservative right, and 27.8 per cent (824,849 votes) for Radomiro Tomic, candidate for the Christian Democracy Party. It was the fourth time that Allende disputed the presidential elections, having lost in 1952, 1958 and 1964. He used to joke about it saying that his epitaph would say: ‘Here lies the next president of Chile.’ Allende could not imagine that, when he finally won, others were already ordering his tombstone. The impact of Allende’s victory on Europe’s history is overwhelming. Until the Chilean ‘experience’ the ‘Truman doctrine’ was dominant – the USA sponsored bloody coups in the dominated countries that rebelled. But the global impact of the Chilean counter-revolution was colossal, with the mass exile of Chileans, for example, to Sweden by Olof Palme, and the eyes of the world were on the CIA plans, which many considered to be behind the grisly coups. Contrary to Chile, in Portugal and Spain in 1974 and 1975 the ‘Carter doctrine’ was born – the promotion of civilian counter-revolutionary forces based on the peaceful transition from dictatorships to democracies, which had in the Portuguese Socialist Party and in the Spanish PSOE, financed by the USA and the European social democracy, their inaugural political instruments of implementation. Since the 1967 general strike, the class struggle in Chile had intensified. With the Popular Unity government’s ascension to power, in the first year 100,000 homes are built, wages are valued and unemployment is halved. There is an improvement in the national health system. But in the second year of government a widespread economic boycott begins, led by the USA with the support of sectors of the Chilean bourgeoisie, the army and part of the middle class. These paralyse production and hamper supplies, creating a large parallel market. The dollar reserves were running out, consumed in the payment of indemnities to nationalised companies and foreign debt. In similar situations, revolutionary governments would refuse to pay damages or foreign debt – as happened in Russia in 1917 – but Allende tried to maintain international commitments. Partly this worsened the economic chaos in the country.46 To this was added a drop in the price of copper and the blocking of international credits to Chile. 47 The Chilean revolution was advancing. Land occupations by Mapuche indigenous peasants forced Allende to expropriate 2,500 large 163

a people’s history of europe

land properties and factory occupations forced the nationalisation of more than 120 companies. A parallel power, very similar to the soviets of the Russian Revolution, was created in Chile with the constitution of Cordones Industriales48 (industrial belts) that brought together all the factories in a region, with directions elected by the base. To the radicalisation of the methods of industrial belts, the Communist Party of Chile, loyal to Moscow and part of the Allende government, opposed the centralisation of the labour movement in the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores de Chile (CUT), a union federation. On 11 July 1971, Salvador Allende proclaimed the Day of National Dignity and Economic Independence, after nationalising the banks and copper mines. However, Allende does not rely on the mobilisation of workers to face the economic chaos caused by the paralysis of transport, banks and commerce. On the contrary, the government of popular unity is going to seek dialogue with a sector of the bourgeoisie and integrates in the government the summit of the Armed Forces, among them Augusto Pinochet, who entered through the open door. Allende believed that calling these men close to him would bind them more deeply to the Constitution. The government has also passed the Arms Control Law, through which the military could intervene in factories and repress demonstrations and occupations. The UP again won the parliamentary elections on 4 March 1974, which lead the right to attempt a first coup, on 29 June 1973, which, despite having failed, proved to be the dress rehearsal for the bloody 11 September of that year. On 26 July, a truck drivers’ lock-out began, paralysing the freight transport system. To the violent actions of the right-wing paramilitaries, the left responded with massive street demonstrations. General Carlos Prats, minister of National Defence and Allende’s ally, resigned in August and asked Pinochet to replace him, swearing allegiance to democratic institutions. Allende publicly declared confidence in Pinochet, who on 28 August was named head of the army. In August, a group of several dozen sailors from the port city of Valparaíso predicted the coup and made themselves available to the government to fight it, but they were abandoned by Allende and the entire left, ending up arrested and tortured by the military. The military accused these sailors of preparing a coup and even offered them freedom in exchange for confessing. 164

crisis and revolution

In a letter to Salvador Allende, ‘a letter from the tortured sailors to Salvador Allende and the workers of Chile’, the sailors say that no reactionary scammer would make them lie to the Chilean workers, that they respect the legality, the people and the Constitution, and that’s why they denounced Pinochet’s ongoing coup. They remained in prison – some were murdered later. After all, everything they said was true. On 4 September 1973, 750,000 workers demonstrated in Santiago de Chile, the capital, to commemorate the third anniversary of the victory of the Popular Unity. The CP just carried out a petition against the civil war that was expected. On September 11th, the coup led by Pinochet is unleashed. The Presidential Palace of La Moneda is bombed by the Air Force and Allende dies. Officially, it was suicide. In Santiago de Chile, there is a massive persecution of Allende’s supporters and other revolutionaries. The National Stadium of Chile became then sadly famous. Over 40,000 people spent time in the stadium compound, used as a detention centre by the putschists. Several hundred men and women were murdered there, among them the musician Victor Jara. One of the most ferocious military dictatorships in Latin America was installed. In 15 years, more than 5,400 people have been murdered, more than 2,200 have disappeared, 164,000 exiled and 155,000 made prisoners. After the defeat of the revolution, Pinochet’s Chile would be the trial balloon for neoliberal measures.

The Portuguese ‘Carnation Revolution’ (1974–75) Chile’s bloody defeat just seven months before the Portuguese revolution was carefully used, in the fight against memory, to forget a partially victorious revolution in a European country within the sphere of NATO, which took 19 months to be defeated. And it was not defeated mainly by using force, coercion, but by consensus and by accepting vast social achievements. Perhaps this is why Chile in 1973 is better known and studied than Portugal in 1974–75. Portugal opened a wave of resistance in southern Europe that postponed the application of the neoliberal plans tried in 1973–75 to the period of the 1981–84 crisis. Portugal was the empire that used the most systematically and for the longest time various forms of forced labour. Widely denounced in newspapers and international agencies, forced labour brought with it 165

a people’s history of europe

an added role of misery: poverty, lack of social mobility, distance from family and subsistence agriculture, extreme wage inequality and a racist, but effective political police, because with a broader social support base in the colonies than in the metropolis – in addition to promoting, through monoculture, the destruction of African ecosystems. The fundamental feature of the Portuguese empire, historian Perry Anderson wrote, is forced labour. For this reason, the British historian called it ‘ultra colonialism’, an empire where the most pessimistic speak of 2 million forced workers, remembering that 60 per cent of the wages of Mozambican miners in South Africa, for example, many under forced regime, were handed in gold to the Portuguese State, while the same workers were paid in local escudos. This polarisation contributed to transform the population, mostly peasants, into supporters of the liberation movements, a fact that will be at the origin of their strength and the weakness of the Portuguese Army, leading ultimately to the coup of 25 April 1974. It was from the colonies, not from the centre, it was from the periphery to the metropolis that freedom came. On 25 April 1974, a coup carried out by the Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA), in disagreement with the colonial war that had lasted for thirteen years, ended the Portuguese dictatorship, which had lasted 48 years under the leadership of Salazar and, after 1968, Marcelo Caetano. Immediately, and ignoring the appeals of the military who led the coup – who insisted on the radio for people to stay at home – thousands of people left their homes, especially in the two main cities of the country, Lisbon and Porto, and it was with people at the gates of Carmo National Guard Headquarters, in Lisbon, shouting ‘death to fascism’, that the surrounded dictator surrendered. The doors of the Caxias and Peniche political prisons were opened to allow all political prisoners to leave, PIDE/DGS, the political police, was dismantled, the headquarters of the regime newspaper Época was attacked and censorship was abolished. Anachronistic, brutal in the colonies, with a freezing of social mobility in the metropolis, having little to offer to its young people – 1.5 million people emigrated from the country mainly to Western and Northern Europe between 1960 and 1974, the empire took the Portuguese State near to military and financial collapse. The military coup met with little resistance, with a total of four killed, targets of shots fired by the political 166

crisis and revolution

police surrounded in Lisbon, at its headquarters, at Rua António Maria Cardoso. Unable to reform, the regime fell into the hands of the armed forces, in particular intermediate officials, and the Portuguese bourgeoisie was on the verge of losing the state as an instrument to counter the revolution. The revolution that day went up the Lisbon downtown narrow streets behind Captain Maia’s column to surround the prime minister who had locked himself in the headquarters of the Republican National Guard. Trapped there, the dictator begged Captain Maia to be allowed to hand over power to a general. The longest European dictatorship of the twentieth century had crumbled in the most complete humiliation. ‘All that is solid melts into air.’ From this social outburst, which US President Gerald Ford deemed liable to turn the entire Mediterranean into a ‘red sea’ and bring down the regimes of Southern Europe like dominoes,49 came measures such as nationalisation without compensation of banks and large companies, the birth of the Welfare State and Social Security, labour rights and job security, land reform in the southern estates of the country, 300 self-managed companies and large companies under workers’ control. But these measures were not carried out by decree or by government action, which tried to frame them, but in a situation of generalised ‘assemblyism’: banks were under the control of bank clerks, it was them who, before the nationalisation of banking, controlled capital flight; strikes at major private companies led to wage increases and price freezes; hospitals and schools under occupation and with democratic management; public transport under the control of workers and commuters, which determined the extension of their routes and services and reduced prices; and land occupied and worked by rural wage earners.50 In other words, it was not only the results but the democratic way in which this ‘another country’, to use the happy expression of filmmaker Sérgio Tréfaut,51 was erected, which makes the Portuguese revolution an extraordinary case study of ‘those below’. And this happened in the midst of an international cyclical crisis, the crisis of 1973. The growth rate fell from 10.78 per cent in 1972 to 4.92 per cent in 1973, to 2.91 per cent in 1974 and to –5.10 per cent in 1975, entering 1976 in the expansion phase of a new cycle, following the pace of the international recovery. 167

a people’s history of europe

Not all crises mean revolutions, we underline with the risk of repeating ourselves. It is essential to keep in mind that the fractures among the bourgeoisie and the consequent weakening of the State in cyclical crises open the door to revolutions. As Marx defended and the twentieth century confirmed, there are no revolutions without crises, they are an opportunity, but there are crises without revolutions, economic collapses without political responses, which to a large extent happened in 1981–84, in the so-called ‘double dip’ crisis, whose way out was not a political revolution but the victory of neoliberalism. The Carnation Revolution was an urban, European revolution, in a society where the weight of industry and services was already bigger than in most revolutions of the twentieth century. Unlike most of these revolutions, based on peasants and supported by armed parties, the Portuguese revolution may have been not only the last revolution of the twentieth century to call into question the private ownership of the main means of production but the first of the twenty-first century. Most of the social conflicts of the Portuguese revolution are led by workers (19 per cent of the labour conflicts occur in the textile industry, 15 per cent in the machinery and manufacture of metal products, 9 per cent in construction and public works, 7 per cent in the chemical and food industry), in particular the workers in the large industrial belts (Porto, Lisbon and Setúbal), with particular emphasis on Lisbon, a district in which 43 per cent of labour conflicts occur.52 Literally, some of the richest families in the country fled to Brazil, then under a military dictatorship, in 1975. Several authors analysed the policy of the Portuguese Communist Party (PCP) during the revolution, concluding that unlike the Communist Party of Spain (PCE), the PCP sought in 1974–75 to make a ‘Prague coup’, trying a putschist way to achieve state power and impose a satellite regime of the USSR, linked to the Warsaw Pact. This is not the conclusion of our PhD study, The History of the PCP in the Carnation Revolution. A revolution is a complex process. In 19 months, there have been six governments trying the conciliation of opposing classes and interests. In all of them, the PCP had cabinet ministers and the Fourth and Fifth Governments were dominated by them. However, all fell by the force of the workers’ movement. These governments had an increasing presence of military personnel (in a bonapartisation supported by the parties in the ‘People-MFA Alliance’), but were politically 168

crisis and revolution

led by the Socialist Party or the Communist Party, with emphasis on their two main leaders, Mário Soares and Álvaro Cunhal. They also had the participations of the right-wing party PPD. In 1974 and 1975, there were, as never before, alternative political projects in confrontation, some based on the reconstruction of a less regulated capitalist state (Socialist Party and the incipient right-wing parties, PPD and CDS), another project that defended capitalism with regulation and a wide nationalised sector (Communist Party) and another, revolutionary sector, based on the dual power organisms that tended to impose a new State apparatus under the direction of workers (in this project dozens of organisations of the so-called ‘far left’ were involved). At the end of 1975, about 3 million people, almost one-third of the country, were militants or participants in some dual power organisation (committees of residents, workers or soldiers), protests, demonstrations or strikes. The most used word in the April 1975 Constituent Assembly elections was ‘democracy’, according to a published study. However, for some democracy it meant workers’ control in the largest privately owned factories and in the financial sector, with workers controlling payrolls, production, capital outflow); for others, co-management between unions and the State in companies with state intervention (PCP policy); for others still, the non-expropriation of banking (right-wing policy). The people voted en masse in the April 1975 elections, which had more than 90 per cent participation, giving the majority of the votes to the Socialist Party and about 12.5 per cent to the PCP and 4 per cent to their close ally, the MDP. The election ground was favourable to the SP and unfavourable to the PCP. In the elections, all voters have the same weight, while in a process of struggle a few hundred workers can create a dynamic of crisis in the political system. The elections function as an inverted mirror, making millions of people who did not participate in the revolutionary process leave home to deposit their vote. In the elections, a leader of the Chemicals Union or of TAP (Air Portugal) counts as much as a housewife or a priest who never left his church. Despite this fact, the elections have an immense significance. They gave enormous strength to the SP, which dragged along the PPD, and they began to build the alliance that would later co-direct the counter-revolutionary coup of November 1975, a coup that the PCP did not oppose, and with 169

a people’s history of europe

whose leaders it accepts to negotiate, considering the revolutionary military ‘irresponsible and adventurous’ and the SP an ally to recover. But the people voted en masse also, and daily, in factories and companies, schools and hospitals, for a list of demands and assuming a new model of management and control of the production, as it voted in assemblies of all types, many times against what it had been approved by Governments, then unelected. The democratic management born in this period in hospitals will only end in 1988, and in schools in 2010. Never in Portugal’s history have so many people decided so much as in these 19 months. Starting with things as central as the restrictive law on strikes (which, for example, prohibited solidarity strikes) of August 1974, which was never complied with, as the repeated calls for homeless people not to occupy houses were not accepted, or the appeals to ‘calm’ or ‘restraint on wage claims’. The price of rents fell dramatically in May and June 197553 as, under threat of occupation of empty houses, landlords were forced to put the houses on the market for rent. The fall of the regime left behind a European, colonial country, with a social structure that combined a developing industry, a bourgeoisie that took the first steps towards internationalisation and a people kept on low wages, ignorance and backwardness. Someone remembered that Portugal was then a kind of ‘Atlantic Albania’ where: Divorce is repressed, where there are (many) prohibited books, films and songs, where all arts are censored, where the media is gagged, where many children walk barefoot, where most of the population does not have a refrigerator, telephone, television or bathroom, where you can’t tell jokes about the authorities or criticize power, where there is no right to demonstrate or strike, or you need a license to have a battery-powered transistor or a lighter, where farming is done with medieval plows and animal traction, where the road movement is full of wagons and ox carts, where ready-to-wear is almost non-existent, where Coca-Cola is contraband, where political police exercise torture in prisons, where there are no highways or… elections.54 This was also the country where, in the metropolis, 30 per cent of the population was illiterate, there was no universal suffrage, there was no universal welfare system, and going to the doctor always implied a paternalistic and commercial relationship with the Charities controlled by the 170

crisis and revolution

Church. Cruz Oliveira, appointed Health minister just after 25 April, is proud to have put an end to the hospitals’ dependence on charities and to have finished with the stamps business (family members had to pay a stamp to see a patient in the hospital) and the blood business. ‘Blood is not sold or bought, it is donated!’55 Finally, even counting countries like Greece and Spain, Portugal occupied the top place in the list of the lowest European wages.56 The revolution will be the embodiment of two theories of the Third International. The first, defended by Lenin, Trotsky and many other leaders of the International, claimed that anti-colonial revolutions could bring about revolutions in the metropolis. The Portuguese revolution arrived in Lisbon via Bissau, Luanda and Maputo. Nor can one understand May 68 without understanding the defeat of France in the Algerian revolution, nor the fall of Nixon without understanding the defeat of the USA by the revolution (armed party supported by peasants) led by Ho Chi Min in Vietnam. The second hypothesis – whose roots are in the 1848 revolutions57 (Trotsky’s theory of permanent revolution) advanced the hypothesis that revolutions would not take place by stages in the twentieth century (first, a democratic stage, then a socialist stage), against what the pro-Stalinist currents argued, but that the democratic revolution, by setting the proletariat in motion, brought within itself the seeds of a social revolution. The working-class representative bodies (workers’, residents and later soldiers committees) never really had state power, they had more power in production and the economy (specifically in the hierarchy of companies, with the extension of workers’ control from February 1975). The State, even with difficulties and contradictions, did not collapse, maintaining its class nature unchanged. However, a parallel power to the State was created, through democracy in the workplace and housing – that is what defines the existence of a revolutionary process. On 25 November 1975, a coup led by the Group of Nine, the SP, the Church and the right, puts an end, with little resistance, to the dual powers in the barracks. The only structures with national power refuse to act and do not resist, namely the Intersindical union federation. The revolution is defeated in its insurrectional moment, the ‘final assault’ on state power. 171

a people’s history of europe

If the counter-revolutionary coup of 25 November 1975 was democratic and not imposed by the boots of a military dictatorship (as in Chile), it was nevertheless well founded in one sector of the armed forces, the Group of Nine. This thesis – that of democratic reaction, defended by historian Valério Arcary – is the one that finds the most powerful empirical evidence: the 25 November coup restored discipline within the Armed Forces, ensured the stabilisation of institutions, maintained a rule of law, a parliament, free elections, citizens’ rights, freedoms and guarantees. However, contrary to what many authors argue, representative democracy was not the extension of the revolution, but the break with the revolution. The definition of a regime based on the continuity of capitalist modernisation had first to put an end to what was the most revolutionary period in the history of Portugal, its most democratic period.

‘Red Mediterranean’: Portugal, Spain, Greece (1974–78) The United States of America have proven to have understood the importance of the ‘domino effect’: This happy and confident country [USA] started to worry about the advance of communist pawns on the huge chessboard that the world has become. The question of Portugal and its turn towards the pro-communist far left is beginning to take shape, fearing that the domino theory is certain and that the Mediterranean will become an authentic red sea.58 That was how in March 1975 a correspondent in New York of the Barcelona newspaper La Vanguardia synthesised the position of the USA in the face of the eventual revolutionary contagion of the Portuguese revolution to neighbouring Spain. If the Portuguese revolution reached Spain, even with the efforts of the Spanish, Italian and French communist parties to fight for a democratic route in Western Europe, this would have unpredictable consequences for the hegemony of the Western bloc and NATO. President Gerald Ford voices the American sentiment in the face of events in Southern Europe: 172

crisis and revolution

If a member of the Atlantic Alliance became communist, … that would destroy the Atlantic Alliance. We cannot set a bad example in Portugal. We need to strengthen democratic forces in Portugal and help them to get the government out of the hands of the radicals. Encouraging the right-wing forces in Portugal and contacting the right side in Spain will be good for NATO.59 In another register, it can be read in Pueblo that: Western Europe was afraid of the brilliant and skillful communist campaign in Lisbon that threatens to convert a sleepily reactionary country into another politically hostile to the West, with serious repercussions on the weakest members of the same, as Great Britain and Italy.60 Victor Marchetti, a former CIA agent, in an interview with Pueblo, when asked what the CIA’s activities were in Portugal, replied that: ‘The only thing I can tell you about the current situation is that the CIA is concerned about Portugal. The CIA does not want another Portugal to be repeated.’61 Encarnación Lemus situated the Spanish transition between Chile and Portugal.62 It seemed evident, writes Carrillo-Linares, that the Portuguese revolution would have a domino effect over the entire Mediterranean. This is also the historical thesis formulated by César Oliveira, among others, about the impossibility of two very different regimes remaining for a long time in the Iberian Peninsula.63 Spain could not continue to be Francoist attached to a ‘red’ Portugal. Although this fact is today largely ignored by historiography, Spanish and beyond – with rare exceptions, already mentioned by us – all the testimonies and reports of the press of the time point to the thesis that the USA and Western Europe feared the contagion of the Portuguese revolution to Spain and from there to the rest of the southern flank of Europe, and they did much to avoid such a scenario. In the 1960s, there were economic changes in the Iberian Peninsula that caused substantial changes in Southern European societies. As an example, and according to studies by sociologists Hermínio Martins64 and António Barreto,65 it should be noted that the population working in the primary sector went from 42.8 per cent in 1960 to 29.8 per cent in 173

a people’s history of europe

1970 and 10.9 per cent in 1991. In Spain, ‘economic growth has transformed Spanish society. Contrary to the exaltation of rural life by the regime, the countryside emptied itself of its inhabitants.’66 Economic development, the growth of the industrial sector and the urban working class and the crisis that started in the 1970s are all the more important when in Spain, according to various authors, including Paloma Aguilar and Ernest Lluch, the memory of the republican victory and the Spanish Revolution was associated with the 1929 crisis: ‘This crisis had to evoke the one that followed the 1929 crack’;67 ‘One of the factors that had attracted the least attention from scholars, but that had been felt deeply among people was the great impact that the crisis of 29 had had.’68 The Spanish press that we consulted emphasises the attitude of the USA and, in the second plan, of the EEC towards the Portuguese revolution and its consequences in Spain.69 There is a notable pressure, both from the USA and the EEC, to pressure the opening of the Spanish regime. Informaciones publishes an article in which it states that in Europe Madrid’s obsessive immobility is criticised and that it can be read that: Western European press organs comment unfavourably on the decisions or attitudes of official Spanish entities regarding … the limitations imposed by the Law of Associations and the focus that certain local or provincial authorities give to claims movements from the world of labour or to attempts at obtaining greater freedom of expression within the intellectual and academic sectors.70 The external impact of the Portuguese revolution is so evident that the April 1974 elections, in which the democratic and moderate parties obtained the majority of the votes, are seen by the Spanish press as a victory for Europe. In a telegram sent to Lisbon, Menezes Rosa points out that Spain saw in the Portuguese elections a ‘historic fact for Europe; balance in the Mediterranean and East–West relations’ and ‘Real triumph in Portuguese elections means victory for Europe.’71 As Jorge Sampaio stated, The lessons to be learned from the experience and the path of the democratic transition in Portugal … were certainly very important for Spain. As the transition in Spain and Portugal was important for Latin America and, later, for all of Europe’s subsequent evolution.72 174

crisis and revolution

A ‘Red Mediterranean’ was a real threat: in Italy, Enrico Berlinguer’s Compromesso storico (Historic Compromise), an alliance between the PCI and Christian Democracy, was on the table; in France, still in the aftermath of May 68, the Communist Party and the Socialist Party signed the Programme commun (Common Programme). In none of these countries did the communist parties want to take power by revolutionary means or lead a process that evolved towards the expropriation of the means of production. But their electoral scores expressed an extremely broad social base, feared by the ruling class in Western Europe and the USA. The Regime of the Colonels in Greece (1967–74) was never a stable dictatorship. Papadopoulos began 1968 proposing ‘reforms’. In 1969 and 1970, he tried again to introduce changes in the regime, mainly of economic liberalisation. A tougher line of the dictatorship, led by Dimitris Ioannidis, is opposed to any kind of reform. In 1973, there was a military coup led by the Navy, which ended up failing. That year Papadopoulos began a cosmetic operation through a referendum, on 1 June, where he abolished the monarchy and declared himself President of the Republic. However, other factions of the junta complained to Papadopoulos that his reforms had not put an end to popular demonstrations. Greece was in an unstable situation, especially among students. 1973 had started with several protests at the Faculty of Law. The movement that became known as the Athens Polytechnic uprising begins. It was at National Technical University of Athens that students went further. On 14 November, they go on strike and occupy the colleges. Papadopoulos responds on 17 November with the brutality characteristic of military regimes: at dawn, a tank crashes through the gates of the Polytechnic. There will be 24 civilians killed during that day. But the Greek resistance did not drop its arms, despite the regime’s repression. The crisis had been a serious challenge to the regime. Dimitris Ioannidis responded to the student uprising with repressive measures and a coup that brought him to power, responding to the wishes of the Junta that considered Papadopoulos incapable of defeating the popular movement. The Junta’s expansionist policy, now led by Ioannidis, led it to carry out a coup on 15 July 1974 to oust Cypriot President Makarios III 175

a people’s history of europe

from power. Turkey responded strongly, defeated troops supported by Greece and occupied the northern part of the island. It was the end of the Military Junta that, fearfully, nine days later, on 24 July, announced the constitution of a government of national unity. On 17 November 1974, Greece would again have parliamentary elections – the first in more than one decade. In January 1969, in Spain, for the first time since the civil war, Franco decreed the state of siege for three months. The police oversee all the colleges where the students had demonstrated by the thousands. In Barcelona, students threw Franco’s bust out of the rectory window. In 1971, according to the politologist Durán Muñoz, there are more than 1,200,000 striking workers in Spain. In 1971, there were 616 labour conflicts, in 1974, there were 2,290, and in 1976, there were 40,179 labour conflicts.73 When the Portuguese revolution occurs, the social situation in Spain already resembles a powder keg that is about to explode and it is the Portuguese revolution and the fear of its ‘contagion’ that determine that the ruling classes propose to the PCE and PSOE a pact that, in exchange for democratisation, contain the social movement. On 20 November 1975, Francisco Franco died. On 25 November, a coup led by the SP initiates the democratic counter-revolution in Portugal. Three weeks later, in Spain, PCE and PSOE meet to unify the Junta and Plataforma in a Democratic Coordination, which is negotiated in December 1975 and formalised in March 1976. The Moncloa Pacts, signed at the end of 1977, are more liberalising than the economic situation resulting from 25 November 1975 in Portugal, which has maintained an important sector of nationalised banks and companies for about ten years. The ‘peaceful transition’ paradigm, which does not find an echo in the reality of those years, actually plays a political role for current regimes, as the Catalan historian Xavier Doménech points out: The explanatory paradigm of the transition fulfils, at the same time as a ‘scientific’ function, a clear normative function in legitimizing the origin of the current political order. What happened during the dark hours of the dictatorship and the confused years of the transition is a source of political legitimation for institutions – such as monarchy or democracy as we know it – and dominant discourses – modera176

crisis and revolution

tion, centrism as a key value or the rhetoric of modernization – which, despite its apparent current solidity, have evolved its beginnings in a great real weakness. The need to present the transition as a great act of reconciliation of the ‘two’ Spains has led us to a necessary reinterpretation-distortion of our past. The whole notion of collective conflict, of fighting forces and impositions, was abandoned as a means to explain Spain’s past and present.74

177

7 The End of the Social Pact (1981–2018) On 5 December 1863, preceding the founding meeting of the International Workingmen’s Association (28 September 1864), George Odger and others sign a manifesto published in the Beehive, which would become know as the address ‘To the Workmen of France from the Workmen of England’: A fraternity of peoples is highly necessary for the cause of labour, for we find that whenever we attempt to better our social condition by reducing the hours of toil, or by raising the price of labour, our employers threaten us with bringing over Frenchmen, Belgians, and others to do our work at reduced wages; and we are sorry to say that this has been done, though not from any desire on the part of our continental brethren to injure us, but through a want of regular and systematic communication between the industries classes of all countries, which we hope to see speedily effected, as our principle is to bring up the wages of the ill-paid to as near a level as possible with that of those who are better remunerated, and not to allow our employers to play us off one against the other, and so drag us down to the lowest possible condition, suitable to their avaricious bargaining.1 In 2015, an advertisement was spread by social networks in Europe at lightning speed.2 A Polish grandfather orders an English kit for beginners. He plans to visit his granddaughter whom he did not know at Christmas. His son had immigrated to England. He spreads throughout every corner of his house post-its naming things in English – fridge, pot, cup, even the dog has a ‘dog’ label on its nose! There are hilarious moments like when he repeats loudly ‘I love you, I love you!’ in the bus and a young woman looks back, startled. When Christmas arrives, he 178

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

finally lands on the other side of the Channel. A beautiful little baby awaits him, suspicious, and in awe. And he, in almost perfect English, says: ‘I am your grandpa’. The popularity of the advertisement that reached millions of views in a few days focused on the affection and dedication of the grandfather – contrarily to what the Portuguese popular aphorism says, an ‘old ass’ can learn languages after all.3 It’s the power of love. But the most interesting thing about the ad was the baby’s tenuous and realistic reaction – she almost doesn’t react to his declaration that ‘I’m your grandpa’. She continues to stare at him like a stranger – because he’s a stranger. The issue of migration in Europe has become a central theme since the 1990s. According to Crédit Suisse, whose reports on global wealth distribution have massively impacted the media:4 Migration has become one of the most contentious facets of globalization. In particular, forced migration has become a grave political and geopolitical question. The Syrian crisis has displaced 12 million people … Today, the global migrant stock (as a proportion of total world population) is at its highest in 25 years (3.3% in 2015 versus 2.9% in 1990, 2.8% in 2000 and 3.2% in 2010).5 The 1990s shook and exhausted the European social pact erected in the Second World War. It ended in the 1980s, but it is in the 1990s that the great transformations are seen. The opening of the ‘world’s factory’, China, in the late 1980s, with salaries of US$70 a month, 16 working hours a day, and a contingent of 200 million internal migrant workers,6 dragged down the quantitative and qualitative salaries of the workers of the advanced economies during the 1990s. In the West, people are earning less and consuming products of inferior quality (in clothing, food and other products for mass consumption to guarantee the reproduction of the workforce). Cheaper consumer goods allowed for wage restraint or decline, without the working class feeling this disruption so strongly and immediately. It should be noted in this respect that workers’ income must be measured in direct nominal salary (what shows in the payroll) and in real salary (how much and what quality of products can be consumed with that importance) – and also in social salary (welfare state) and relative salary (how much is 179

a people’s history of europe

earned compared to what is produced). Relative wages in Europe have significantly declined in the last three decades.7 In addition to this, two other factors were decisive in order to reverse the fall in the average rate of profit in Europe: 1) the massive substitution of universal policies for the social reproduction of the labour force (welfare state) by the generalisation of targeted welfare programmes (social assistance); and 2) the weight of immigration as a pressure on wages.

Restructuring plans in Europe (from the 1980s to today) In the early 1980s, the world witnessed one of the most violent crises of overproduction and over accumulation of capital (1981–84), known as the ‘double dip’ crisis due to its W-shape, fall, a slight recovery followed by a new fall and a new recovery (as opposed to the regular crises in V, fall and recovery).8 Somehow, the world turned upside down. There is a political, economic, geographic, labour and consequently social change that had not happened since the end of the Second World War in 1945. The USSR collapses like a house of cards. Counter-cyclical measures began in Europe – it was the beginning of the end of the post-war social pact, the same pact that legitimised the profit of some with the existence of full employment and social rights for workers. The most important of these measures for an ‘exit from the crisis’ was certainly taken by the companies and the state – with the support of most of the major trade union structures:9 massive redundancies in ECSC’s founding sector (European Coal and Steel Community). Many thousands of steel workers, coal miners, shipbuilding workers that were laid off and received compensations to accept early retirement. The British miners’ strikes opened the television news programmes with Margaret Thatcher, nicknamed the ‘Iron Lady’, announcing her determination to break the backbone of Britain’s strongest unions and bury the social pact born in 1945. Deng Xiaoping’s reforms opened in China the factories that closed here. In China, the one-child policy gradually pushed to the towns the peasants whose proletarianisation had been delayed by an agrarian reform successfully carried out with the revolution in 1949. Unlike other peoples in the world who migrated to cities in the 1950s and 1960s, in China agrarian reform had fixed peasants on the land. After the ‘internal 180

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

cleansing’ of the oppositionists under the pretext of the cultural revolution, and the last breath of a revolution from the left against the bureaucracy of the Communist Party of China suffocated in Tiananmen in 1989,10 the Chinese peasants were in turn compelled to migrate to the cities to find work. This is one of the innumerable forms of expropriation of peasants and their transformation into wage earners, without means of production (they are expropriated of the children who on the farms are means of production). It was not a question, we believe, of containing population growth, but of guaranteeing the dispossession that forced them to migrate to cities.11 As Marcel van der Linden points out, we are witnessing an exponential supply of labour for the world market at this time: In the 1990s, the turn towards capitalism of the People ’s Republic of China, the collapse of the former Soviet Union, and the economic ‘opening’ of the Republic of India have caused a true ‘labour supply shock’, doubling within a few years time the total number of workers producing for the world market…12 Pari passu, there were major changes in the European social pact due to relocation – and, rather than relocation (Europe did maintain, in contrast to what is said, an employment rate of 20 per cent in industry, reaching 30 per cent in Germany today) – industrial and labour reconversion. This entailed a massive co-optation of union structures and the defeat of those who resisted, in an agile but tense and conflicting relationship between coercion and co-optation, violence and consensus.13 The repression of British miners or of the US air traffic controllers gave us images that have spread all over the world, spurring a wave of solidarity, especially in the case of the former,14 and is inseparable from this turn of the page in the history of Europe. The most peaceful period on the continent was over, if we combine peace among nations and peace among classes within European nations. It was ‘The Glorious Thirty’ – which naturally conceal that violence, struggle between nations, and submission of peoples remained at the periphery of the world-system. But it is a fact that in Europe the years following the war were moments of peace, prosperity and social mobility. The Marxist economist Ernest 181

a people’s history of europe

Mandel classified them using the concept of ‘relative impoverishment’15 – the rich became richer, but the poor became less poor, in short. To the Belgian economist this equation explained the absence of mass force of socialist ideas in post-war Europe. When the Schengen Agreement was enacted on 26 March 1995 allowing for the free movement of people in the EEC/EU without border passport control (except for the United Kingdom and Ireland), creating a free continental market for the circulation of labour, the world had turned 180 degrees and the whole structure inherited from the First World War had disappeared.

The crisis of labour in Europe In 1981, we were again in a global crisis of the capitalist economy, which had created a ‘surplus capital’ (and thus a strong downward trend for the devaluation of all assets), which was opposed by a growing deregulation of international markets (with large capitals searching for ‘super-profits in the periphery’, basically through financial monetization, with gigantic transfers of value to ‘external creditors’) and with the ‘rationalization of production’, in which the exploitation rate was raised by producing relative surplus value, thanks to the increase in the organic composition of capital, driven by the relative increase in the investment in new technologies.16 Until the 1970s, it was impossible to systematically put pressure on workers’ wages. This is the meaning of full employment: workers have a greater bargaining power.17 Two decades later, with the collapse of the post-1945 construction and industrialisation boom, Europe had more than 10 per cent of its population officially unemployed. Official unemployment rates in 1967 in Europe were 0.7 per cent in Norway, 2.1 per cent in France, 2.9 per cent in Spain, 1.7 per cent in Germany, 1.6 per cent in the Netherlands, 2 per cent in the United Kingdom. In 1985, they were 2.6 per cent in Norway, 10.2 per cent in France, 21.1 per cent in Spain, 8 per cent in Germany, 10.9 per cent in the Netherlands and 11.5 per cent in the United Kingdom.18 In 1987, with the devastating effects of the measures against the drastic reduction of profitability (relocation, intensification of work 182

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

rhythms), the Swedish economist and sociologist Bo Stråth elaborated a very detailed pioneering study of the shipbuilding industry in Europe. An intriguing question guided his studies: how had the European naval and steel industry, the European heavy industry, been relocated and restructured, where had the backbone of post-war European social pact unionism been established without a major social conflict between labour and capital? One of the chapters in his book begins with a provocation, quoting a paradox of the Austrian-born physician and economist Rudolf Hilferding, a prominent leader of early twentieth-century German social democracy and famous for his studies on imperialism: ‘The counter-revolutionary effects of the labour movement have weakened the revolutionary tendencies of capitalism.’19 Stråth’s provocation followed this hypothesis of conclusion of his study: the tendency of the rate of profit to fall plunged European capitalism into a deep crisis at the end of the post-war expansionist boom, but the nationalism of the trade unions, that is, the incapacity of the unions to have an international solidarity policy acted as a lifeline of European capitalism for another period of accumulation: Early retirement and voluntary redundancy have individualised the threat of unemployment and removed the shared experience which could have formed the basis for collective action and mobilisation by trade unions.20 The belief in their own ‘possibilities and capabilities’ was replaced by an appeal to the State and company managers for a social pact where trade unions would play a key role in signing restructuring plans. It went from one ‘we do it ourselves’ to ‘they do it for us’, the Swedish author says.21 Stråth is practically alone in this unique interpretation of post-war Europe. The overwhelming majority of authors – conservative right-wingers or liberal social-democrats22 – argue the exact opposite view: that the 1970s crisis led to the relocation, this led to the crisis of the unions and their consequent loss of strength, and this loss of strength, accentuated by the fall of the Berlin Wall, led to the introduction of flexibilisation mechanisms that have changed the social pact of post-war full employment.23 We may find this idea in countless social scientists; we believe it is wrong. 183

a people’s history of europe

The end of the long post-war boom during the second half of the 1970s set in motion three developments that challenged the position of trade unions: an acceleration in the pace of economic internationalisation; the adoption of neoliberal policies; and the reform of production regimes.24 The assumption is quite deterministic. The crisis of 1973 had a revolutionary response in Southern Europe that increased the value of social wages; the 1981–84 crisis had no mass political resistance at all, despite large-scale miners’ and naval workers’ strikes. What is the methodological error of this idea – the impact of the crisis on the trade union milieu – that has become quasi-axiomatic? Confusion is not uncommon in the social sciences, between cause and effect and its proper correlation. The end of the post-war boom would have led to the union crisis, in short. It would thus be concluded that trade unions and labour organisations are strong in times of capital expansion and weak in times of crisis. Stråth, on the contrary, poses the key issue not in the crisis but in the political response of workers’ collective organisations to the crisis. We agree with his hypothesis, which notes the great transformation that has taken place in the world of labour in Europe and has qualitatively altered the landscape of the production of goods and services and the political relationships within the workplace. It was not the weakening of trade unionism that led to the relocation. It was precisely the opposite, its strength, in coalition with the States in Europe that allowed the negotiations that led to the production restructuring – the union effects of this decision. That is, the union crisis would only be felt in the late 1990s when early retirement, or post-war baby boom reforms, caught up with the labour market entry of their offspring as a contingent of precarious workers. This would create a new political category in the Europe of the 1990s: the precariat.25 Although a common category in the development of capitalism since its beginning, the permanence of part-time workers (hired by the day, with zero-hour contracts, now common in the UK, for example) in global capitalism again became the norm – and protected work, which only existed after the apocalypse of 80 million dead in the Second World War, as the exception.26 The union crisis came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but not mainly because of it. It was precisely because of the negotiations carried 184

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

out between 1984 and 1987 by the strong, cohesive, majority unions that created the conditions at the negotiating table for the end of full employment – using massive social assistance. The common sense of most European intellectuals on this question is an obstacle to social knowledge. So, here are our own points in summary form. First, only a deterministic view of history – and hence an ahistorical approach – can assume that the result of a crisis is the inevitable loss of labour’s strength against capital. It was not so in pre-revolutionary France of the Popular Front27 after the crisis of 1929; it was not so in Southern Europe after the crisis of 1970–73.28 On the contrary, in the context of strong economic crises, labour rights and the value of direct and indirect wage mass expanded. During the Portuguese Revolution, in 1974 and 1975, during the oil crisis, the rate of growth fell from 10.78 per cent in 1972 to 4.92 per cent in 1973 to 2.91 per cent in 1974 and 5.10 per cent in 1975. However, capital income also fell from 51.8 per cent of GDP in 1973 to 35.3 per cent in 1975, an unprecedented transfer of income from capital to labour that had never occurred in the history of the country. The reaction to dismissals was the occupation of factories and enterprises; nationalisation without compensation and the creation of a broad social state and pension system, owing to generalised occupation of the workplaces and democratic management. This explains that the outcome of the crisis was not the same for everyone. Labour’s way out of crisis improved its position, not the opposite.29 The difference between the stages of expansion of rights and their contraction is not related to the economic crisis but to the political response to this economic crisis. If it is fragile and defensive on the workers’ side, the counter-tendencies to accumulate capital act more strongly, that is, wage cuts, extension of the working day, expansion of the ‘reserve army of labour’ (unemployed workers), increased foreign trade, labour intensification. Crisis is a necessary condition for pre-revolutionary or revolutionary processes. However, it is not a sufficient condition. This means, to synthesise, that there are no social revolutions without economic crises – but there are indeed economic crises without social revolutions.30 The second point is that there is no proven linear line between the 1970s crisis and the present, a crisis since the 1970s, even though this phrase, ‘since the 1970s’, has become a quasi-dogma in many academic 185

a people’s history of europe

sectors. In fact, Europe – and the world – witnessed moments of strong expansion of the industrial cycle after the recovery from crises since the 1970s – unequal according to countries and sectors. How not to think about the unusual crisis of 1981–84, the double dip recession that we have mentioned, which resulted not only in the collapse of the USSR but also in the advancement of a new phase of global expansion – neoliberalism – with formidable growth rates, up to 2001, in many countries, even though they were still separated by a short cycle of contraction in 1996–97. The development of capitalism is cyclical precisely because of its permanent tendency towards crisis (although the crisis itself is not permanent): it is the crisis that explains the cycle, not the reverse. The crisis restores the necessary conditions for a new period of capital accumulation. In this sense, one cannot speak of a permanent crisis of capitalism. If we look at the cycles of the economy that regulate the phases of crisis and expansion at the world scale in the USA, we have not seen a permanent crisis since the 1970s, but rather expansion and contraction of accumulation. A study published by one of Switzerland’s main banks, the Credit Suisse Globalisation Study, illustrates the times of contraction and expansion of industrial cycles in the long run, curiously a classic analysis of Karl Marx in Das Kapital that is now embodied by the researchers of a banking institution. This was because by 1820 the first crisis of capital over accumulation had occurred and Marx saw what no one had seen. Everyone thought then that, with the steam engine and man’s growing control over agricultural pests, weather and scientific development, crisis was a word of the past. Marx explained why this was not so – crises would be greater, not because of scarcity, but because of their opposite, excess. He explained that the response to the crisis of profitability would essentially be an intensification of work, that this intensification was to be achieved not only by the expansion of the reserve army of labour (contingent of the unemployed, immobilisation of productive capacity), and that this would pauperise fringes of society and force sections of the middle classes into proletarianisation, spurring revolutionary processes. ‘General wage movements are roughly regulated by the expansion and contraction of the reserve army of labour, which is governed in turn by the periodic alternation of the industrial cycle.’ A crisis of over accumulation of capital is not exactly a crisis of excess of commodities – that is 186

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

the consequence – but of an excess of capital. As capitalism expands, there is a tendency for profitability to fall (because it increases investment, that is, costs). Over time, there is a contradiction between people ’s needs, and the capitalists’ needs for profit. The third argument is that significant changes in the labour force that had entered the post-war labour market as young adults occurred before the fall of the Berlin Wall, not after. Miners, steel workers, naval industry workers, dockers – these large sectors which form the backbone of organised labour (it’s not by chance that they called it the European Coal and Steel Community) were mostly co-opted to collaborate in the restructuring plans of the automotive industry, steel mills, ports, for example. In rare cases, they opposed them and were defeated (miners, naval workers in Lisbon/Setúbal, Asturias, the Basque Country and Bremen). Stråth chose to study the case of the naval industry. We have studied the same phenomenon, on world scale, in the global labour history of naval and port workers, of a vast amount of countries, all over the planet.31 Seaborne trade is the backbone of the world economy. Ships transport some 90 per cent of world trade. Shipbuilding and ship-repairing labour are linked to global maritime transport and the world trade market, related to heavy steel production and, partly, to the military industry complex apparatus. The naval industry was a key sector of the European and world economies. It is also an industry sector closely linked to state subsidies and interventions. Like mining and the steel industry, the heavy naval industry was one of the leading post-Second World War industries to see a substantial part of its own production process relocated to peripheral countries, particularly Asia. Today, the naval industry is indeed a globalised industry, so its study allows us to contribute – decisively – to the understanding of such complex phenomena as the analysis of globalisation itself, the international division of labour and the impact that these uneven and combined phenomena have on the life of hundreds of thousands of workers, myriad suppliers of finished goods and/or services in domestic economies, local and regional employment basis, its productive character and limits. For a social labour historian, naval workers are of great interest. The combination of so many different segments of the working class in ever-changing configurations, the concentration of large numbers of labourers in just one place – thus 187

a people’s history of europe

shaping the political culture and social life of the regions in which they are located – and, finally, these huge working-class conglomerations have often played a key role in industrial relations and radical politics, for instance Petrograd (1917–24), Lisbon (1974–75) or Gdansk Solidarnos´c´ struggles (1980–81). The social struggle of the Bazan shipyards in Ferrol, Galicia, Northern Spain, is still today at the origin of the celebration of the Galician workers’ day. The defeat of the naval workers’ struggle in Lisnave and Setenave, in Portugal, led to the creation of the pact of Concertação Social in Portugal,32 following the model of the German co-management and which has spread to all EU countries or to key firms in each country – both concentrated at the company/section level and/or at the state/government level. Solidarity, the Polish movement, was born in the Lenin shipyards in Gdansk, and the 14-month occupation of the Upper Clyde shipyard in Scotland, in 1971, took the face of its leader, Jimmy Reid,33 all over the world. These examples also suggest that there is a political – and subjective – dimension to the impact of these workers’ struggles, beyond the realm of their economic and objective dimension. The shipyards are a true school of labour, but also the locus of political formation. António Saraiva,34 originally from a poor family background, began as an apprentice mechanic locksmith, but managed to negotiate the first agreement of the social pact made in Portugal and today is the president of the Portuguese Industrial Association; Lech Walesa started as an electrician in the Gdansk Shipyards in 1967 and in 1990 became the president of Poland. The success or failure of the strong changes in the organisation of the production process worldwide (such as relocation), and internally (within the shipyards, the evolution of the relation between constant capital [e.g. machines] and variable capital [wages]) and the various forms of flexibilisation depends on the relation of forces that was established between the permanent impulse for the accumulation of capital and the need to resist unemployment or to intensify work rhythms. This justifies, for example, the maintenance of shipyards such as Naval Xixón,35 whose workers’ struggle, led by two smiling workers – Candido and Morala, who had broken with the Comisiones Obreras union when the PCE signed the Moncloa Pact in 1978, inspiring the award-winning film Los Lunes al Sol36 – prevented the closure of the yard until 2008, for almost three decades. This happened despite the fact that it was consid188

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

ered unviable, from the point of view of competition with Asia, since the end of the 1980s. What kept it open was its grand political dimension. Changes in production did not succeed without strong tension, negotiation or co-optation within the ranks of the workers themselves. Take the cases of miners in the UK, or of air-traffic controllers in the USA – both subject to strong repression by both the Thatcher and Reagan governments. These contrast with the stable restructuring plans of the German naval industry of the 1980s or with the Portuguese ports of the 1980s, for example. The relocation of parts of production has different consequences – social, economic, cultural and political – for global labour. What produces unemployment in one arena can create the growth of solid working communities in another; the increase in the rate of exploitation in one part of the world can mean exclusion and social disintegration in another. All of this can happen within the same firm, or conglomerates of firms. In short, after 1984, this was what we have witnessed in Western Europe. This defeat of the most important sector of the working class organised movements was an example for all other sectors of the working and middle classes and had a drastic symbolic effect on the other sectors, as Stoleroff and Stråth,37 among others, point out. It is the case of the defeat of the miners in Britain, the air traffic controllers in the USA, the workers of Fiat in Italy or the Lisnave naval workers in Portugal. In other words, to break the spine of most of the unions, it had to first break the ones who resisted as vanguards of the struggle against restructuring plans. These were strongest links of all chains of production – the brave champions of the global labour movement. We cannot decide that strategic labour sectors are strategic before the course of class struggle itself reveals. That is a historical lesson that the ruling classes all over the world have already learned about radical labour movement. They know who and why to fight to win advantages on a global scale. There is a close link between trade unionism strongly supported by corporate negotiation and the absence of social confrontation. Since this unionism has a strong connection to capitalist democracy, it largely adopts the same viewpoint as its employers. It is seen not as an opponent, but rather as an arbitrator to ‘sell’ proposals to the rankand-file workers (rather than the companies). This was characteristic after the May 1968 great strike (France’s car strike, Fiat strike in 1969, dockers in Sweden in 1969–70, the first miners’ strike in Britain, 1973) 189

a people’s history of europe

and strikes in Portugal, Spain and Greece following the fall of the dictatorship of Salazar and Caetano. The confrontation in the companies was followed by an association between unions and employers to demand subsidies for restructuring. Co-option or union stability achieved by participation in the social plans of the companies occurred at different levels in Europe, according to the unions’ influence. (It was bigger in Sweden, Denmark and the UK, for example.) The key unions at that time accepted the need to ‘exit from the crisis’ by maintaining the same model of accumulation, based on the private property of large corporations and banking/financial sector. Thus, they accepted that ‘exit from the crisis’ was achieved by massive direct companies on the one hand and on the other hand, indirect aid through transfers to the State of part of the labour costs (early retirement or exemption from social security contributions was at the core of the capitalist offensive that guided those years). There were changes in the international world-system of states following the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the USSR, 1989–91. However, it was not, I believe, the end of the USSR that determined the erosion of social rights – although this is often advanced as an argument. In fact, this erosion had started with difficult trade union negotiations before. Yet it seems to be truer that the end of the USSR engendered hopelessness among those who believed – especially in the countries of Southern Europe, with strong communist parties – that ‘somewhere in the East’ there was a more egalitarian society. This feeling was less pronounced in the North, where the hegemonic parties in the working classes are the Social Democrats (remember, for example, that the Communist Party was banned in West Germany). The USSR was not, as we know, an egalitarian or free society, and in an apparent paradox, because it concerns the policy of global peaceful coexistence, the management of precariousness was also negotiated in Southern Europe with the same unions – communist-inspired – who had the USSR as an example and who advocated (in a construction of memory that has not been the target of a critical view yet) that the end of the USSR meant the end of the ‘acquired conquests’ in Western Europe. Improvement in standards of life and levels of consumption of the middle sectors and working classes are real. This improvement actually exists – although it is a non-socialist one – and indeed has been felt by 190

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

many. However, it is not due to real increases in wages, but among other reasons the increase in low-interest credit for family housing purchase (which today is a nightmare and a vile garrotte38 on wages, which meanwhile have fallen precipitously) and commodity market prices, with the massive entry of China and India into production for the global market. This has been associated since the 1990s with the making of the EEC and with the promise of mobility and social prosperity. A fifth factor is the use of social security funds to manage precariousness and unemployment, creating a social cushion. This follows the guidelines of the World Bank, which avoid social disruptions owing to extreme poverty, social inequality or historic regression. This use was negotiated on a case-by-case basis and in most examples accepted by the trade unions, in the form of early retirements in banking, large metal-mechanical companies, port workers and the telecommunications companies sector, to cite a few examples. In exchange, ‘acquired rights’ were retained for those sectors that already had them and/or did not accept new workers. Recruits under a new precarious regime imply a substantial reduction of social security contribution. What is happening around the world has to do with an intimate nexus between management of the employed labour force, social security funds and the increasing creation of welfare-focused measures to mitigate the effects of social conflict arising from a cyclical but growing unemployment situation (unemployment subsidies), lay-off support, vocational training, targeted care plans (basic income), unemployment benefit subsidies.

Facts About the European Labour Market There were extensive changes in the composition of work in Europe after the Second World War and after the 1980s. Public employment grew in all countries between 1967 and 1996 apart from Finland. Another significant change in Europe was the increase in the number of women in the workplace. However, this change was not accompanied by changes in the union demographics; except for the Nordic countries and Ireland, no other country achieved equal recruitment rates between men and women. There was a steady increase in part-time and temporary work from 1973 to 1997, rising from 8.7 per cent to 29.1 per cent in the Netherlands and from 3.8 per cent in Belgium to 17.4 per cent. Women were responsible throughout Europe for the majority of part-time or 191

a people’s history of europe

temporary work – 64.8 per cent in Denmark to 89.1 per cent in Austria. This type of work stems from the social achievements of working people (reduction of working hours without salary reduction) or on the other hand, the precariousness of a labour force that is only called to work in peaks of production or seasonality. Another of the major changes in Europe in the 1990s was privatisation, generally accompanied by decline in trade union membership in the privatised sectors. Once again, the European reality is complex, mediated by unequal and combined south–north development forms. The unionisation rate has fallen across Europe but with a much less pronounced drop in Scandinavia (and Belgium, because unions manage the unemployment fund). It rose generally in all countries between 1955 and 1970 and fell sharply in all between 1980 and 1990. Another central issue is that the unionisation rate tends to be much lower among the young and is further reduced by migrants. Finally, another important fact remains that manual workers are the most unionised, not whitecollar workers. This is despite the increase in strikes and other forms of collective action in the public and middle class sectors. The unionisation rate in 2010 was 24.5 per cent in Austria, 18 per cent in Germany and 19.3 per cent in Portugal, and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) average was 17.5 per cent. However, this rate is variable according to the tradition of leadership (social democrat, religious, communist or grass-roots influence); it varies according to the country and, within each country, with each sector; and it differs depending on the size of the firms as well. However, Europe still has some of the world’s leading unions, such as the German IG Metall with 2.3 million workers, and large unions in the service sector. Today, the distribution of the active population in Europe in the industrial sectors ranges from 17 per cent in the Netherlands to 30 per cent in Germany. It is important to note that many industrial sectors are statistically considered as services (a canteen worker works in a factory – is that services or industry?).

Precarious work and unemployment In the last two decades, social researchers in labour studies have debated the concept of labour precariousness39 in the so-called ‘Global South’ (Southern Europe and Latin America). There has been an exponen192

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

tial increase in the number of workers in this condition from the late 1980s and early 1990s. Also, the concept of unemployment has been controversial. We highlight here the main debates that have occurred in the definition of both social phenomena. In recent decades, countless authors have critically engaged with the concept of precariousness. However, this concept has a very broad sweep in these works, which mixes precarious work relations (type of employment relationship), working conditions (unhealthy conditions, precariousness, dangerous conditions, for example) and various configurations of countries’ legal systems or social mobility of the labour force with no comparative international analysis. Ricardo Antunes, the Brazilian social scientist who invented the much broader concept of the new morphology within the working class as the ‘class-that-lives-on-wages’, points out that in Western countries the dynamics of the world of labour have been the reduction of work regulation and the increase in precariousness and informality, also indissolubly linked to the flexibilisation of companies, for example, sub-contraction. The author has emphasised that the elements within the working class are inextricably linked, regardless of the employment relationship and juridical form of salary contracts: ‘The two most visible – and important – poles of the Portuguese working class were manifesting themselves: the precarious and the working class pole, heiress of the welfare state and of Fordism.’ The close connection between the flexible mode of production, precariousness and its effects on the destruction of one ’s own labour force has been emphasised in the works of Castillo and Huws – in the case of the cyber proletariat – and by Mészáros, among others. According to Felstead and Jewson, more than half of the net increase in jobs from 1980 to 1987 was related to precarious work. Graça Druck elaborated a typology of precarisation: (a) the forms of commodification of the labour force, producing a heterogeneous segmented labour market, marked by structural vulnerability/precarious forms of labour insertion (contracts), without social protection; (b) the patterns of work management and/or labour organisation, which have led to extremely precarious conditions, through intensifi193

a people’s history of europe

cation of work (imposing unattainable goals, extension of the working day, polyvalence, etc.); (c) the conditions of health and safety at work – the result of management standards that disregard the necessary training, risk information, collective preventive measures, etc.; (d) the status of the unemployed person and the permanent threat of job loss; and (e) the weakening of the trade union organisation and forms of social struggle and political representation of workers, owing to the violent competition between them and their heterogeneity /fragmentation/ division, implying an atomisation of trade unions mainly created by outsourcing. The condemnation and dismissal of labour law, the fruit of the fetishisation of the market, has orchestrated and decreed a ‘labour law crisis’, questioning its tradition and existence.40 However, precariousness is also a concept that must have its historical dignity fully restored today. Is being precarious now the same as being precarious, let us say, 150 years ago? Today’s precariousness is distinct from the contingent or casual work that was the pattern of the capital accumulation mode because it suggests social regression: children live worse off than fathers if they only live on income from work (without the ‘family wage’). Its management is carried out by the workers’ own savings, the Social Security fund and the family’s own salary. In a sense, parents pay their children with precarious jobs to prevent them from falling into the conditions of poverty to which real wages would take them, and they pay through the State, faithful custodian of their Social Security, and the family salary, directly helping their offspring. In Portugal, for instance, 47 per cent of people are officially poor before social transfers, after which the number drops to 18 per cent. Even so, by 2015 the majority of all of the unemployed were supported by their families, first, and then by the state. A report commissioned by former Spanish Prime Minister Felipe González (PSOE)41 to James Petras shows us that either he did not act or did not want to act, but that he knew the model of society to which we were heading. For the first time in the known history of Spain, a generation was going to be worse off than the previous one. The contradiction between being raised in cotton sheets and proper child care and having an uncertain future generates social fear and political frustration among young workers that, if 194

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

not channelled throughout class politics, can degenerate into individualised alienation. The Higher Research Scientific Centre of Spain, in the years in which the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) governed, commissioned a social research project over six months in Barcelona dedicated to the study and development of a full report about the gap in the social and labour situation between parents and children – and then condemned its results and prospects to oblivion. The Petras Report concluded that the period between 1982 and 1995 had often favoured foreign moneylenders, bank directors, foreign multinational capital and the personal gain of its governing class. The study also stated that González’s strategy of modernisation had led to an increase in the number of unstable and poorly remunerated jobs for the youth who entered the labour market for the first time; additionally, there was an increase in the number of workers employed beneath their educational level.42 There was a radical diminution of expectations in Spain. In metaphorical form, parents sold their children out when they gave up on social struggle.43 The Iberian Peninsula – Portugal and Spain – witnessed the same historical decline. The concept of precariousness is defined from its opposite, protected work, in fact or de jure. That is, it reflects the degree of job security – which may derive from legal protection or, for example, from some kind of qualification. It does not lie in the kind of work, which may be precarious in the sense of being dangerous (a mine, for example), but not contingent in the sense of protection against dismissal. Thus, precariousness is not about poor hygiene or physical safety, mental health, etc., but about the social mobility of the workforce, which is now permanently between precarious variants of employment and unemployment. In Europe after 1945, having a job became a right, and those who did not have this right were precarious. In Southern Europe, this right was secured during the 1974 and 1975 revolutions and protected in the 1976 Portuguese Constitution, for example, but it also depended on the management of the social pact between employers and workers, on employers’ pressure and workers’ resistance – in other words, on class struggle. Among precarious workers, there are thus many kinds of labour relations, in their legal appearance very different from each other, but which have in common their high vulnerability to dismissals. This category 195

a people’s history of europe

includes: (1) mini-jobs, zero hour contracts; (2) fixed-term contracts; (3) most service providers; (4) scholarship holders, trainees and first-employment contracts (all financed by the State, on a fixed-term, where formally workers are in training but actually perform wage labour); (5) State workers with protected contracts but subject to ‘special mobility’ by the law and the possibility of dismissal; and (6) workers with regular contracts who, due to the reduction of lay-off compensations, became an easy target to be dismissed by companies. The concept of precariousness has also been extended to a specific category of small entrepreneurs. In Europe, there are, in our opinion, precarious workers who apparently are small entrepreneurs, but actually and essentially, are workers. These are not only the obvious cases of self-employed workers already cited. There are more controversial cases, such as small entrepreneurs who are in fact workers. They formally have a ‘company’, usually the result of outsourcing from a large company, but they are, in fact, employees, dependent on large companies and bearing all the costs that the large companies no longer support (social security, production stoppages, etc.). Capital circulates through these small firms, but it does not accumulate there: what they earn is hardly enough to pay the bills in many cases. Some of these are small entrepreneurs, beset by competition, but a fraction of them are essentially precarious workers, although they legally appear as small business owners. Eurostat does not apply any model that gives us a notion, beyond the formal and legal appearances, of who is a worker and who is an employer in the case of these very small companies. Finally, there are work contracts that, although they are at term, imply a very highly qualified labour force. Doctors, for example, do not constitute a precarious sector because the mobility of work or even its intensity does not necessarily imply a situation of unemployment. That is, not all mobility is precarious – and there are certain kinds of regular workers and even entrepreneurs who are in fact precarious. The discussion of these concepts is essential to determine their reality, both historically and in their current form. We will see that the methodologies applied can greatly alter the landscape of a workforce. The unemployed person is defined by the Member States of the European Union and by the International Labour Organization as an individual of working age who does not have a paid job or any other job, who is available to work and in an active job search. The idea of an 196

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

active job search includes a series of procedures including being registered at a job centre, having contacts with employers or going to job interviews. If the worker does not comply with these requirements, he or she automatically falls into the ‘inactive’ or ‘discouraged’ category. Yet what is an available inactive? He or she is an unemployed person, and to this category, we must add the visible underemployed. The division between the inactive and the unemployed results in a difference – in a country such as Portugal – that was expressed in official unemployment figures (13 per cent) and real unemployment figures (23.7 per cent) in 2014. According to Eurostat, in 2012, Portugal, Spain and Poland were the countries where the relative weight of temporary workers in the total number of employees had the greatest significance (respectively 20.3, 22.8 and 26.6 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2012). Today’s Portugal is distinguished by the increase in precariousness to unprecedented levels because the legislative changes of 2013 limited new workers’ rights to indemnities for dismissal to a maximum equivalent to 12 months of basic salary.

Social security: the aid-fund for restructuring The political conditions for reaching this picture in Europe were created using Social Security funds that supported social welfare programmes allowing unemployment and precariousness to increase. In a metaphor, as we said, parents were bought off (with early retirement, maintenance of rights) and sold their children (unemployment benefits, basic income, among other focused plans), but now, with so many ‘unemployed children’, there is an objective pressure for the ‘dismissal of parents’. This is a process that we could consider as the eugenics of the labour force, and that will imply the breakdown of Social Security, which is the fund used by the States to make this historical change in labour relations. This will endanger the well-being of retirees. At the limit, this will lead to a shortage of workforce. The end of the social pact in the 1980s led to the spread of tripartite structures of employees, employers and the State in Spain, Sweden, Germany and Greece, neo-corporatist structures in which labour disputes do not occur between employers and employees at companies and factories, but instead are traded upstream and avoided in a tripartite structure. These policies have been progressively extended and 197

a people’s history of europe

expanded over the last two decades to unemployment, which is created and managed using the funds of those who have cashed in pensions and funds. According to Marques, measures were taken in the context of adapting to the EEC, later the EU, and to the communitarian market, such as unemployment benefit, early retirement owing to unemployment, explicit support for restructuring, active employment policies and vocational training. As stated by Hespanha, the creation of the Financial Stabilisation Fund and the unification of Social Security and the Unemployment Fund were measures that announced the relationship between ‘problems of employment and the need to make the contributions collected more profitable’.44 In the words of Marcel van der Linden, co-founder of global labour history: Social-security arrangements are often considered as an achievement of workers’ struggles and labour movements. But this is not entirely correct. Not only have other social classes often played a major role in their realization (for example the farmers in Sweden), but it is also important to acknowledge that most of the West-European welfare states started to flourish only after the great working-class protests of the late 1940s had ebbed away or had ended in defeat. Many of the social provisions that came about after World War II were not at the expense of Capital. As the United Nations Economic Survey of Europe observed already in 1950: ‘the whole system of social security had actually been financed by a huge redistribution of income within the working class’. In that sense, social security has given the workers a taste of their own medicine.45 The German sociologist Klaus Dörre, in a recent study, remembers that the ‘patient of the Rhine’ changed into the ‘German miracle ’ in little more than a decade. Yes, ‘it transpires that there is absolutely no consensus among admirers of the German job miracle as to what specific characteristics of the German form of capitalism are actually responsible for the country’s employment situation.’46 The explanations for this success range from admiration for the post-war capital–labour social pact to admiration for the Hartz IV reforms – these last ones are in fact the end of the post-war capital–labour social pact. For the economist Michael Roberts, there is no doubt that the German miracle is based on two things: immigration and Hartz IV. The German rate of profit fell 198

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

between the 1960s and the 1980s (by up to 30 per cent), followed by a small recovery and stagnation in the 1990s. ‘The momentum of qualitative leap in profitability was the formation of the Euro Zone in 1999’;47 between 1999 and 2007 are concentrated two-thirds of all profitability since 1980. Relocation to the east and south of Europe was a factor, as well as a real decline in internal wages since 2003: ‘In 2003–2005 the SPD embarked on a series of labour market reforms, Hartz IV.’48 For Dörre, the miracle is mainly the Hartz IV plan, named after its creator, Peter Hartz, former manager of human resources at Volkswagen: Circular mobility: Most of those questioned were unable to make the transition into regular employment, instead finding themselves in a situation of circular mobility. In total, just five of the people we interviewed had succeeded in moving to a lifestyle that enabled them to come off benefits for good. The rest moved around, experiencing two, four, ten or more professional situations – from unemployment to a one-euro job, from there to a temporary job, then onto a training scheme and so on, finally ending up back on benefits. They ran round and round on the spot, like hamsters in a wheel. This phenomenon of circular mobility is also attested by representative data. In the 12 months to August 2012, 1.97 million people managed to get off benefits, but a further 1.76 million people came onto benefits in the same period. Of these, 50% had already received ‘Hartz IV’ in the previous 12 months. In other words, a structural consolidation of benefit dependency is taking place. The average time spent on ‘Hartz IV’ is significantly longer than was the case with the old unemployment benefit and the earlier social assistance.49 Some of the most important moments of this connected relation between social security funds and unemployment managements are: (1) Creation of the unemployment allowance. By imposition (and regional and national acceptance) of the EEC/EU, it is created and extended to all countries of the community, with an association between the social security fund and the unemployment fund. In other words, money from pensions and unemployment allowance is added to the same fund. 199

a people’s history of europe

(2) Institution of the legal regime for pre-retirement, also mandatory by the EU legal framework, in Portugal in 1991 (in Sweden at the time of accession in 1995). (3) Permission to exempt or reduce the interest of social security debts for companies in difficult economic situations or subject to special processes of recovery of companies and protection of creditors. (4) Constitution or expansion of pension funds. (5) Creation of the programmes referred to, such as Danish FlexiSecurity, the 
German Hartz IV or the Portuguese Minimum Guaranteed Income (1996), replaced by Social Integration Income (2003). Today, as Max Koch50 points out for Sweden, there is a reduction of these values for the labour force that does not return to the labour market. (6) Since the late 1980s, mechanisms for exemptions for corporate contributions have been created. The first of these modalities granted exemption to the companies provided that they later hired the worker with a contract without term. Nowadays several mechanisms in Europe allow, for example, the hiring of the worker for six months, with a precarious contract, with salary paid up to 70 per cent by social security – in Austria and Germany this model, as well as mini jobs,51 is widespread. The companies may also pay part of the wages and the rest be paid for partial unemployment allowances. (7) Enterprises opt for lay-offs or stop full or partial production, and workers are paid by social security for a period of six months. They are often already in vocational training, partially paid by social security. (8) Active Employment Policies. In a six-monthly report by the European Commission in 2016, the main concern of the Active Employment Policies is structural unemployment and the recognition that since 2008 its impact on the EU 28 has increased from 34.8 to 49.8 per cent, specifically half of the total unemployed. The report recognises the difficulties of managing the labour market by the factors that it lists: the unemployed are among those who are most likely to go to retirement, enter disability pensions and/or simply become discouraged. In cases where they have little social protection or income, this can lead to marginalisation and increase the risk of poverty and social exclusion. This, according to the Commission, is due to lack 200

the end of the social pact (1981–2018)

of work, lack of training, subsidies and taxes. The report52 suggests that passive unemployment measures – subsidies – be replaced by active measures such as using the subsidies to create their own jobs.53 The European Commission thus acknowledges that unemployment can cease to act as a regulator of labour force prices, if these unemployed, although unemployed, are not actually in the labour market. However, it is a key question outside the analysis: the real subsistence wage and social mobility, that is, the salary incentive offered by the companies and the perspective of autonomy. A career or rewarding work is not on the horizon for the majority of these unemployed who, if given a choice between pensions, albeit low, family and state welfare, and wages of simple biological reproduction or even below that, prefer to be immobile outside the labour market. This has devastating political consequences because outside the labour market does not mean outside of capitalism: on the side of capital, those who do not return to the labour market cannot exert downward pressure, but can provoke social destabilisation with political and electoral consequences. In the Commission, there is concern about the price of the labour force, and the absence of social stability and peace. On the workers’ side, the danger is the atomisation of unemployment instead of the solidarity and resistance at the workplace – in a word, the depoliticisation effects of poverty. Since it is just not possible for historical science to analyse this, we must remember that a broad branch of psychoanalysis links resistance to mental health, and isolation and social atomisation with depression: ‘What distinguishes normal depression from pathological depression is precisely the capacity for revolt’, Coimbra de Matos averts.54 Let’s get back to statistics. Even these are complex. Giuliano Bonoli, the Italian political scientist, has produced a study on active employment policies for the European Commission and its Network of Excellence for the Social Pact and the Social State in Europe.55 He recalls the difficulty that the rank and file of the Social Democratic parties in the European productive centre had in accepting Active Employment Policies because if their leaders regarded them as a social peace factor – to raise profits by not creating extreme immediate impoverishment with labour dissatisfaction – they were introducing into the labour market a labour force below the price of the one that is active, using social security or the salary (unemployment benefits) of the workers themselves as a subsidy for the maintenance of the profits of their companies. This cap201

a people’s history of europe

italist social state, as Armingeon puts it,56 expanded particularly in the 1990s. Among OECD countries between 1980 and 2003, the proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) invested in it doubled. In 2012, it reached 1.4 per cent of GDP in Portugal and 1.6 per cent in Denmark. The EEC’s inclinations are to reinforce these policies and the amounts allocated to them. Social assistance – this needs to be emphasised – is not the social state. Assistance is focused/partial, that is, its purpose is to manage unemployment and the poverty resulting from this and low wages. It is also discretionary. Who decides who gets what? The social state belongs to everyone and to no one, it has a character of universality; it is not dependent on the discretion of the Government and/or its subordinates. To defend jobs, you must understand what unemployment is. Governments have assumed as policy that increasing the profitability of invested capital will occur by reducing the unit cost of labour in a peculiar way. What is it? Destruction of wealth (recession) and massive unemployment. Put in a different way, it is very simple to understand: productivity increases because a worker does more, in more hours and for less money. We are not talking about an improvement in productive technique, but about the exhaustion of the labour force. Unemployment is, in the capitalist mode of production, the most functional way of lowering wages. This is because it creates a bigger supply for labour than demand, and thus a consequent fall in the price of wages. Unemployment is non-invested, unemployed capital, immobilised productive capacity.57 As Karl Marx pointed out in Das Kapital, Volume 1, The course characteristic of modern industry, viz., a decennial cycle (interrupted by smaller oscillations), of periods of average activity, production at high pressure, crisis and stagnation, depends on the constant formation, the greater or less absorption, and the re-formation of the industrial reserve army or surplus population.58

202

Conclusion

For a weak king weakens a strong people Luís de Camões, Os Lusíadas [The Lusiads], Canto III The 1990s were particularly harsh when they decreed – almost without intellectual opponents – that what had ended in 1989 was not the Stalinist dictatorship but, above all, socialism itself. The end of the Cold War provided an opportunity for capitalism to speak out in its own name – neoliberalism. An ideology that announced the arrival of the end point to social becoming, built on the premises of the free market, beyond which it would be impossible to imagine substantial improvements. Francis Fukuyama gave it the broadest and most ambitious theoretical expression when he called it ‘the end of history’.1 In other expressions, more vague and popular, the same message also spread: capitalism is the historical and universal, permanent and inevitable destiny of humankind. Outside this ‘destiny’, there would be no alternative. The death of ideologies – and the so-called ‘end of history’ – is in fact the public consecration of the teleological ideology that man is not the protagonist of his own history. An unhistorical nature, an assured destiny, the future would then be inescapable. In order to bring this ideology to life, a memory of the European past has been built that does not pass through the laboratory of history. History is not memory. Among the dominant theses – which historical science has refuted today with extensive studies – is that of Nazism as the work of a madman, concealing that the Nazi regime was the corollary of the explosion of an entire economic and social system, capitalism, in the crisis of 1929. The other recurring theme, which calls for social resignation, insists that all emancipatory attempts in the twentieth century would result in totalitarian societies, starting with the October 1917 social and political revolution itself. The idea that the European Union is the constructor of the European Social State is another myth disseminated amidst the illustrated common sense. Finally, the hypothesis that European social rights 203

a people’s history of europe

ended, with neoliberalism, because of the fall of the USSR in 1989–91, is another widely disseminated myth.2 All of these hypotheses come face to face with the facts – and with chronology. But chronology is firm, time has an objective force. Hence, the postmodern philosophical theses, embraced by so many historians,3 replace facts and interpretations with timeless and relativistic narratives. They fear facing the burden of historical time. After the crisis of 1929, unemployment in the USA and Europe was only reversed in 1938–1941, when the militarisation of society began and the unemployed became soldiers, at the beginning of the war. It was not the Keynesian measures that reversed the 1929 crisis, but the massive proletarianisation of large peasant sectors (with the forced collectivisation in the USSR or the financial collapse of small peasants in the USA, portrayed in The Grapes of Wrath)4 and later the destruction of property on a scale unprecedented in human history – the apocalypse of the Second World War, with its, ours, 80 million dead. It was humanity’s greatest defeat. Nazi concentration camps were forced labour camps. Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Sets You Free) was the inscription that appeared on the entrance of Auschwitz and some other Nazi concentration camps. Millions of forced labourers between 1939 and 1945, in hundreds of camps and sub camps, incorporated in the productive chain of some of the largest companies in German industry, were at the centre of the Nazi State project. Many of these industries have publicly acknowledged their complicity with Nazi-fascism, reconverted in the post-1945 period and are today part of the thriving German economic engine, although restructured in production: they have gone from producing war material, tanks and bombs, to chemicals and agriculture, electrical appliances, automobiles, among others. Thyssen, IG Farben (AGFA, BASF, Bayer, Hoechst), Volkswagen, just to name the best-known among hundreds. It is important to note that even Allied bombing spared factories, while decimating entire cities. They saved most of the means of production, while inflicting an unconditional defeat on the German and Japanese empires, killing millions of civilians. To the east, in Russia, there was a regime of forced labour, although without recourse to the industrialisation of death in gas chambers (specific to the war), the Gulag.5 The European Welfare State was born robust in 1945–47, ten years before the ECSC (followed by the EEC and the EU). The European 204

conclusion

Union only settled in the 1980s, after several crises. When the European Union was consolidated, the Welfare State was already experiencing a crisis, albeit a gradual one. The EU will play a decisive role, through the European Social Fund and the European Community Directives, in replacing the Welfare State (universal policies based on progressive taxation) with social assistance (policies focused on the unemployed and the poor based on the transfer of income from more affluent workers to poor workers. The great emancipatory efforts of the European twentieth century, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Revolution, resistance to Nazism, the Hungarian Revolution, French May 68 or the Prague Spring, the Carnation Revolution, to name just a few moments in which the spectre of revolution again haunted the old continent, were crushed by brutal counter-revolutions or defeated by broad concessions, by means of reforms, which the states and the ruling classes were forced to carry out. Counter-revolutions did not only imply the co-option and support of union leaders and left wing politicians, journalists and intellectuals who ‘changed sides’, but also methods of civil war against a large portion of the leaders of these processes, murdering them, inhumanly pursuing them in the late 1920s in Russia, in Republican Spain, in the Greek resistance after the war, under Soviet tanks in Hungary in 1956, or in Czechoslovakia in 1968. The hypothesis that emancipation movements would inevitably move towards totalitarianism hides the death of thousands of leaders who have consistently fought for this emancipation against totalitarianism – and died for it. We owe them in first place the best that the continent has left us. Because if, as Camões said, ‘a weak king weakens a strong people ’, also strong leaders with projects of freedom and equality, if they know how to raise and organise the great European social revolts, will impose clear limits on the competitive chaos of the capitalist production mode, and we all will achieve full employment, protected health, guaranteed education, care for old age, regardless of one’s social origin. In short, the original socialist idea. It would be simplistic to say that the modern project of civilisation was imposed only by the world of labour. This ignores the steps taken by the development of capitalism itself. But it is not so to say that the politics of emancipation – and we recently celebrated the bicentenary of the birth of Karl Marx (1818–83) – was forged by that historical tra205

a people’s history of europe

dition that shaped the leaders who dedicated their lives to shorten the path that separates those who govern from those who are governed, who knows and who does, who writes and who reads (or does not read). Many were teachers without disciples. But they were bearers of a revolutionary romanticism that propelled humanity for better. Comparing situations that are not comparable is a common historiographical error. Weimar Germany’s political reformism was contemporary with the strong post-1919 years of accumulation, the Roaring Twenties, or the ‘crazy 1920s’. The French political reformism of 1936 was based on the existence of colonies and the privileged markets they provided. The post-1945 welfare state reforms were carried out while many European workers were armed (millions of soldiers and partisans) and with a war economy, followed by the massive profits allowed by the exceptional growth rates during post-war reconstruction. Social democracy and the communist movement loyal to the USSR in the West embraced the welfare state, but it was not born out of consensus. It was born from the apocalypse of the Second World War. The essence of this pact was job security, in other words, the possibility for workers to regulate the price of labour. Associated with this comes the welfare state and its related rights. This pact ended between 1984 and 1987, before the fall of the Berlin Wall. Negotiations for the end of the social pact (in labour relations in Europe) took place with the consent of the great European trades unions and the left, the social democratic and communist parties, before 1989. Cornered by relocation, having as alternative a fierce struggle that would destabilise the European order and their commitment to social peace with the European ruling classes, they preferred to maintain the rights for those whose contracts had been shaped by the social pact, accepting precariousness for their children. The hypothesis that the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the USSR in 1991 would have opened the door to labour flexibilisation and the crisis of the Welfare State comes to blame Russia once again for the destinies of Europe. This time, paradoxically, according to this thesis, the responsibility of the USSR is to have ceased to exist. It is a false thesis because it disclaims the role of left-wing parties and unions in Europe. And it confuses, once again, the chronologies. It is also a thesis, let’s say it euphemistically, unkind to the past. In fact, developed Western Europe owes a debt, still to be repaid, to the 206

conclusion

backward Russia of 1917 – they dared to make the first revolution in one country. And, immediately, the echoes of this reached the European bourgeoisie, which fearing the repetition of new Octobers and facing the wave of enthusiasm that the revolution of the Soviets aroused in all Europe and the world, accepted to raise the condition of workers to a minimum of dignity. It was after the Russian Revolution that for the first time working hours (together with the intensification of work in Europe) decreased steadily and significantly in the twentieth century.6 We cannot understand the rapid extension of universal suffrage in most European countries without the Russian Revolution. The first social programmes in Europe are due to the October revolution. Europeans marvelled at the artistic vanguards represented by a Mayakovski or an Eisenstein – the revolution had showed humanity at its best in those days. It was also Russia that paid the highest price for the European Welfare State – 20–30 million dead in the Second World War. German social democracy, historically so critical of Stalinism, refused to assume its complicity in the creation of the monster of Soviet bureaucracy. Yet in 1919, 1923 and in the 1930s they refused to support the Russian Revolution, leaving it isolated, in a backward country, without the means to face the dramatic scarcity, thus making the construction of a socialist society unfeasible. That could not be done without abundance, based on the qualification of the workforce, significant scientific and technical advances. The price they paid for their fear of the revolution was the SPD’s near extermination in the 1930s, with the rise of Nazism. The current deep crisis – which is economic, political, and cultural – is due, among other factors, to the moral collapse of social democracy, with the ‘third way’ and the embrace of neoliberal policies, which started in the second half of the 1980s. At the same time that Margaret Thatcher ordered the police to advance violently against the miners, the large union federations of the main European countries, led by social democratic and communist parties, were negotiating their acceptance of production restructuring without struggle. The attempt to cope with the tendency of the rate of profit to fall after the crisis of 1981–84 by creating a hyper-competitive, insecure, uncertain European labour market, where profits would be safer, or at least not as much at the mercy of the changing moods of the cyclical crises, led social democracy to abdicate, just in time, as in a return of the 207

a people’s history of europe

1930s. On the other hand, the communist parties wept over the fall of a world that never existed – the USSR was not a workers’ state, it was a state against the workers. The ideology of assistance to the impoverished, of early retirement, of giving up the fight for the right to work for a reduction of working hours without salary reduction, was born before the fall of the Wall, by the acceptance of the blackmail of relocation. As a political programme, they exchanged the right to work for the right to unemployment benefit. The 1990s only came to consolidate a path that had been traced in the middle of the 1980s, in the seat of social concertation, in practically all European countries, with the exception – and only partially – of France,7 where it occurred later, due to the impact of May 68 on the constitution of unions and radical parties that delayed the application of neoliberal and assistance measures, maintaining a strong Welfare State and protected employment. The ‘septic tank’ to which Milan Kundera referred in the The Unbearable Lightness of Being8 after the ‘Prague Spring’ of 1968 was crushed, would be the inevitable corollary of the human condition. A hug to the eternally returned cynicism of the intellectuals, who put the hopes of the twentieth century in a social project that, time and time again, maintained that between the people and their leaders there was a causeand-effect relationship. In short, each people would have the rulers they chose. The corollary of this hypothesis is obvious: ‘barbarism is inevitable ’. This, from the historical point of view, has the same null value as the assumption that ‘socialism is inevitable’.9 Both need to give up history and live in an eternal present. Both refuse to look at the past. Both see themselves not as projects to dispute, in the social arena, the conscience of the population, but as premises guaranteed in a natural world, without men, without history. Charles Maier proposes a counterfactual exercise. The welfare state was one of the forms of the counter-revolution (avoiding socialist revolutions in Europe), but it was not indispensable. Arguing that social stability ‘is as challenging a historical problem as revolution’,10 Maier stresses that the two periods after the world wars in Europe are marked by the need and the commitment of the elites to rebuild their domination hierarchies. We do not risk saying that it was not indispensable. But the 208

conclusion

author refers the statement to the bold question of the strength of social stability. Indeed, the history of the twentieth century is the history of wars, revolutions, the struggle of the bourgeoisie or ruling classes to prevent and combat them, as well as the attempt, in the last quarter of the twentieth century, to destroy their sense of class, atomise it. Disaggregating the world of labour, whether in different contracts for identical work, in the concentration of offices in the centre and the expulsion of those who work for the periphery, or even in the brutal separation between manual and intellectual work, placing the great mass of those-who-live-fromwork as consumers and not producers of culture, for example. In the celebration of the centennial of the Russian Revolution, the most remembered character in the world media was the leader who ordered the assassination of the majority of the central committee of the Bolshevik Party,11 Joseph Stalin.12 He was the asphyxiating icon on every wall and square in the USSR, since a bureaucratic leadership took over the USSR from 1927–28. But isn’t it also an iconic regression to assume that the Russian Revolution can be dominantly celebrated, 100 years later, with an intense intellectual production on … Stalin? In other words, the icon continues. The surviving communist parties and the ruling classes, in the 1917 centennial, were not tired of associating the most important social revolution of the twentieth century, with the greatest social, cultural and political impact in the world, with this whiskered, rude Georgian general secretary, his brutal practices and zero scholarship. It is significant that in Portugal all the recent works produced after the opening of the Soviet archives are still to be published:13 China Miéville,14 Todd Chretien,15 Paul Le Blanc,16 Neil Faulkner,17 Kevin Murphy,18 Wendy Goldman,19 Alexander Rabinowitch,20 Marcel van der Linden.21 Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution and his autobiography My Life are not published either; Lenin’s philosophical and historical work is unknown; the work of awarded historians Isaac Deutscher22 and Pierre Broué,23 reference books in important universities of the most central countries. However, at the celebration of the centennial of the Russian Revolution, Portugal’s main weekly, Expresso,24 decided to publish the biography of the leader of the counter-revolution, Joseph Stalin. But these works have not been left untranslated in our country just due to the lack of initiative by the ruling classes. The labour movement, 209

a people’s history of europe

that is, parties or institutions representing workers’ interests, had no significant initiative either in the celebration of the centennial, nor in the publishing or republishing of the major works on the history of the Russian Revolution. Although the neoliberal dogma lost strength after the 2008 crisis, with capitalism seemingly unable to contain its crises and its effects on workers (with a real wage drop of 25 per cent at the centre of the system, the USA and a massive increase in global unemployment and the working poor to restore the value of the stock markets lost in 2008), the labour movement, heir to the Russian Revolution, is also in a deep crisis, unprecedented since its beginnings in the 1830s with English Chartism. The economic crises of 2001 and 2008 and the US invasion of Afghanistan, following the 11 September 2001 attacks, and of Iraq in 2003, brought down the idea of an eternal capitalist peace under liberal-democratic regimes. Mass unemployment, competition on a global scale and the highest concentration of wealth ever in the hands of the few 200 families who control more than half of the resources produced worldwide by more than 3 billion people brought with them the end of ‘the end of history’. After 2008, society didn’t become more conservative – on the contrary – but memory did, and this is not about history, which is independent of our will. We don’t change the past. It is about the current profound demoralisation regarding our capacity for transformation, which is mostly due to the disorganisation and disarray of the labour movement, on a scale rarely known in the history of humankind (except perhaps in the triumphant years of fascism) – a measure of this disarray is the current unionisation rate in the world, below 7 per cent.25 Militancy in workers’ political parties is seen as a social evil, although those who appeal to the neutrality of politics and the separation between personal, working and militant life are often the same who remain organised into associations, fronts, and strong political parties that dominate power because they control the state apparatus, albeit in conflicting fractions and with crises. An inspired Soviet joke said that in the USSR, ‘The future is certain; it is only the past that is unpredictable’. Does the joke now apply to the West as well, and to its memory? Today the historical evidence is unavoidable. Contrary to the mediatic thesis, they demonstrate that there is a radical cut between Bolshevik politics (1917–27) and the rise 210

conclusion

of Stalinism. The celebrations of the centennial of the Russian Revolution reproduced an unhistorical narrative. They fought for the central idea of the anti-communist vision of ‘inevitable totalitarianism’. To do so, they despised the scientific production on the subject. All the investigations carried out in the last two decades in Russian archives, which we cited above (we emphasise, all) show a cut in the Soviet regime in 1927–28. It is in those years that forced collectivisation takes place; and the massive introduction of forced labour on a scale of hundreds of thousands until after the war; the beginning of the militarisation of society; in the factories the workers’ committees cease to be the most important organisms and that role starts being played by the head of the political police; women, who experienced the greatest leap in their emancipation after the Russian Revolution, again become slaves of home and factory, with measures such as the reintroduction of the prohibition of the right to abortion and the closure of day-care centres to control the existing and predictable shortage in workforce. Lenin is the man who makes it explicit in his ‘testament’26 that Stalin should not succeed him because he was ‘too rude’ and should be ‘removed’ from the post of Secretary-General and replaced by someone ‘more tolerant, more loyal, more polite and more considerate to the comrades, less capricious, etc.’27 Lenin and Trotsky’s party was shot – in the brutal expression of Victor Serge. 28 The USSR had less effective production in the late 1920s than in 1914. There was neither scientific mastery, nor trained staff, nor technology, nor machines, to produce much for everyone. The solution would therefore be a revolution in Germany and in the countries where there was development; or the dictatorship of a minority – the Party bureaucracy. Bureaucracy started controlling resources, living with privileges (masterfully caricatured by George Orwell in Animal Farm), although the majority of the people had to survive with a shortage of essential goods.29 It was far from the misery of tsarist serfdom, but increasingly distant from any kind of socialism. And in order for a caste to appropriate limited resources, an iron dictatorship was imposed. In an attempt to support these political views, the revisionists defend the thesis that a common trend would link Jacobin terror to Soviet gulags, passing through Nazi concentration camps … Thus, the result of an era characterized by neoliberal maxim ‘There is no alternative!’ 211

a people’s history of europe

(Margaret Thatcher), revisionists are guided explicitly or implicitly by the notion of ‘the end of history’, as more clearly explained by Fukuyama. Therefore, revisionism cannot be seen as a mere ‘academic fashion’, but is the result of a determined socio-historical context. As Jim Wolfreys points out, it is no coincidence that some of the intellectuals who most produced theoretical contributions to the revisionist endeavour (the new philosophers) are characterized by the disappointment of the May 68 generation with the transformative potential of politics.30 It is historical pessimism, which arises from political defeat – and the political disaffections that resentment and fear generate after defeats. But passion and disappointment can be bad advisors in this work of thinking about the past. The vision of a ‘totalitarian’ Russian Revolution confuses governments, regimes and states – it is a gross error. It is subsidiary of the work of the philosopher Hannah Arendt and many simplified interpretations of her work,31 who correctly point out that between Stalin and Hitler there is a great similarity in the regimes (dictatorship), but fail to acknowledge that between Hitler and liberal democracies there is an identity of the (capitalist) state.32 Although no longer with the cold warriors,33 as the historians and social scientists who promoted the ‘continuity thesis’ became known, this view continues to have a dominant impact on the media. Now, what can we conclude today? That the seeds of the Stalinist dictatorship were as present as the seeds of emancipation in Bolshevism. Seeds, strictly speaking, in history, are everywhere and of all kinds. They germinate where there are fertile soils, and only then do they pass from small grains to a dominant social model. Trotsky was not Stalin because he refused to play that role.34 He refused to use ‘his’ Red Army against the emerging bureaucracy, because he was not available to lead a process that had failed internally. Because without milk there is no socialism, and in the USSR there was no milk.35 Socialism requires abundance and, in the USSR, there was scarcity. Stalin’s rise to power is not the result of the revolution, but of its defeat. Trotsky preferred – even exiled in a ‘planet without a passport’ (the expression is by André Breton),36 because all European liberal democra212

conclusion

cies refused the right of exile to him after he was expelled from Stalin’s USSR – to assume the leadership of the Left Opposition and live 20 years under persecution, until he was murdered in Mexico in 1940, when most of the Bolshevik leaders and senior cadres in the Red Army had also been killed or imprisoned. In fact, he was murdered after all the others, not by chance, but because until then he was the scapegoat in the Moscow Trials, whose primary charge was the ‘crime’ of Trotskyism. He dedicated his life to the world revolution. He failed. The absurd, almost laughable way in which many leaders of the Bolshevik Party walked towards executions with false confessions of crimes they never committed, all to ‘save the party,37 was described, for example, by Leonardo Padura in The Man Who Loved Dogs,38 or by Arthur Koestler in his novel about the Moscow Trials, Darkness at Noon.39 For Victor Serge, the chances of defeating the bureaucratic dictatorship after the 1930s were small, but without the struggle of the Left Opposition ‘the defeat of the revolution would have been a hundred times more disastrous.’40 Would it? We do not know. We know that it was necessary to physically defeat and annihilate the Left Opposition in order to lift the Soviet dictatorship after 1928. In the most backward countries, where capitalist modernisation is deferred and there is already a strong labour movement, the tendency is for this modernisation to be carried out using dictatorships – Russia, Italy, Germany, also Portugal and Spain. England, in its ‘Glorious Revolution’ of 1688, and France in 1789 paved the way for the modernisation of their countries, through the classic bourgeois revolutions when the working class was not yet a threat.41 In the interwar period, these states, subject to backward modernization, tended to assume dictatorial forms due to the fear of the threat (real or potential) of the proletariat that was rapidly developing on the historical scene. … In these cases of intensified class struggle and ‘crisis of hegemony’, it is usually the bourgeoisie that is led to break with liberal democracy, establishing open forms of dictatorship through which it guarantees the maintenance of social domination.42 From 1848 and the 1871 Paris Commune onwards, it became too risky to use the workers as a shock troop for democratic and bourgeois rev213

a people’s history of europe

olutions because when on the march, they started their own social revolution.43 It is the thesis of the ‘permanent revolution’,44 that is, the transformation of a bourgeois-democratic revolution into a proletarian-social revolution. It has its first origins in Marx and the revolutions of 1848.45 In the words of Franz Mehring, Marx noted that: the bourgeoisie never fights its own revolutionary battles and that since the revolution of 1848 it had grown unwilling to let the proletariat fight them for it. The trouble was that in this revolution, and in particular in the June struggles in Paris, the proletariat had abandoned its old custom of letting itself be used merely as cannon-fodder for the bourgeoisie and had demanded a share of the fruits of the victories which were won with its own blood and heroism.46 The year 1917 came to confirm that fear was not a delusion. The age of revolution was open – and so also that of the most deadly wars ever to stop them. Those who did not ‘commit suicide’ as a class on Wall Street in 1929 did so 16 years later, between 1939–1945, on the other side of the Atlantic. The most powerful countries in the world have failed to avoid war. Strictly speaking, there were no winners of the Second World War, because after 80 million deaths, there are no winners – there is barbarism. The end of the war, however, saw the construction of a historic eccentricity in capitalism: full employment and the welfare state, erected in exchange for the workers, turned into soldiers, having handed over their weapons in 1945. The structure of social rights in Europe was born before the creation of any Western European unification mechanism, such as the ECSC and the EEC. It arises from the fact that property is destroyed, the resistance is made up of armed workers and the post-war strikes. The destruction of the rival of the USA, France and Great Britain, however, gave birth to a new international relationship among States: American supremacy and the beginning of the Cold War. The Marshall Plan quickly evolved into a mutual aid plan, French resistance to German rearmament was overcome by the integration of The Federal Republic of Germany into NATO and the idea of the United States of Europe, in the Schumann Declaration, was replaced by the construc214

conclusion

tion of a Europe with increasing economic integration. Today, without understanding this subordination of Europe to the USA, we cannot understand the evolution of the European Union, and also of its internal contradictions. The last five decades of Europe’s history have also been marked by the unusual growth of the State’s role in the economy, and not the absence of State intervention in the economy, as so many argue. There have been deep mutations in State intervention. Either through the mechanisms of social concertation, or through focused social policies, social assistance, which cover growing unemployment and/or low wages, or still through changes in the legal framework that regulates job insecurity (labour flexibility is marked by forms of state regulations that promote it; it is not due to the absence of state regulation), public debt, tax collection, subsidies to private companies, and the extension of the State ’s role in the formation and maintenance of the workforce. Today, there is not less but much more State than before the Second World War. The crisis of current European political regimes expressed, among other factors, in the almost constant increase in electoral abstention, in the crisis of bipartisanship, a crisis that worsened in multiple aspects after 2008, is not a crisis of the State. On the contrary, the State was strengthened in the short term, gaining a huge influence on the economic fabric, with the rescue of banking and financial institutions. But the crisis cannot be understood outside the scope of tax increases, concomitant with the loss of services and their diminishing quality – the end of the ‘European social model’. In the medium term, this ‘end of the social model’ will become a crisis of the State itself. Again, intellectuals are called to live up to their ancestors’ tradition, as the philosopher Terry Eagleton argues about intellectuals, criticism and the public sphere: ‘Modern criticism was born out of a struggle against the absolutist state; unless it is now defined as a struggle against the bourgeois state, it is possible that no future is in store for it.’47 It is difficult to say, and with this we end, that the European Union, with increasing inequality, has also not created a strong identity, ‘from the bottom up’ in these decades of peace. What Europeans will do with it in the future remains to be seen. The premise of the Third International that Europe will be socialist or will not be, was not verified – Europe was and is capitalist, and it is, although in a hybrid and new way, partially united. But will Europe be without socialism in the future? That 215

a people’s history of europe

is, will it resist competition from its States and among companies from these States in the next cyclical crisis? It is highly unlikely. We have been testimony to what the American intellectual Ellen Wood called the ‘retreat of the intellectuals’, who gave up thinking freely and being a counter power to the State, to the dominant power.48 They have abdicated to criticise powerfully the economic and social model in which we live, they stopped asking who produces what, for whom and how: We live in curious times. Just when intellectuals of the Left in the West have a rare opportunity to do something useful, if not actually world-historic, they – or large sections of them – are in full retreat. Just when reformers in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe are looking to Western capitalism for paradigms of economic and political success, many of us appear to be abdicating the traditional role of the Western left as critic of capitalism. Just when more than ever we need a Karl Marx to reveal the inner workings of the capitalist system, or a Friedrich Engels to expose its ugly realities ‘on the ground’, what we are getting is an army of ‘post-Marxists’ one of whose principal functions is apparently to conceptualize away the problem of capitalism.49 May this book contribute to reflect, criticise and look for civilised alternatives to a world in deep crisis, that is my wish. I am aware that it is a modest contribution attending to the size of the colossal challenges that lie ahead, as Europeans and as workers of the world – a class so diverse and heterogeneous today, with such inequalities between manual and intellectual work, centre and periphery, crossed by issues as complex as gender, migration, ethnicity, languages, access to culture … However, common in the primordial sense that it is the class-that-lives-from-labour.50 The challenge today is to assume that we have historical responsibilities for the destinies of Europe, as a central idea of fraternity between peoples. This implies a struggle in defence of freedom and equality. In the USSR, there was no freedom and this led to economic stagnation. But job insecurity, which now dominates European states, although with democratic regimes, will bring nothing to Europe other than economic stagnation, a fall in production and, at the limit, albeit cyclical, the scarcity of labour force. We have a responsibility to demand effective 216

conclusion

freedom, in which social rights have the same dignity as political rights; where the right to employment, as a guarantee of survival, and the right to the dignity of living from work and not social assistance, will be cherished with the determination with which the right to vote is protected today. Real equality for everyone that allows for material security so that differences are respected and diversity, art, creation, intense human relationships may flourish. I believe that we may find some answers to these challenges in the past. History does not repeat itself, but it teaches us – much. Nothing good can come out of ignoring it.

217

Notes Preface 1. Condition of the Industrial Classes of Foreign Countries, Reports from her Majesty’s Diplomatic and Consular Agents Abroad, Houses of the Parliament, 1870 (London: Harrison and Sons, 1870). (International Institute for Social History, Archives). 2. ‘As lágrimas amargas do FMI’ [‘The Bitter Tears of the IMF’], in Tudo Menos Economia [Anything But Economy], Público, 5 May 2016. 3. Karl Marx, ‘A Workers’ Inquiry’, La Revue socialiste, 20 April 1880. 4. Peter Laslett, The World We Have Lost (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965), 200. 5. Robert O. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1997), 14. 6. Ibid., 19.

Chapter 1

1. Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quijote de la Mancha (Madrid: A.L. Mateos,

1995), 128. 2. Josué de Castro, Geopolítica da fome: ensaio sobre os problemas de alimentação e de população do mundo, 3rd edn (Rio de Janeiro: Liv. Ed. da Casa do Estudante do Brasil, 1955). 3. Robert O. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century (Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 1997), 4. 4. Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Bookmarks, 1999), 449. 5. Osvaldo Coggiola, História do Capitalismo, 1st edn (Santiago de Chile: Ariadna Ediciones, 2017) in open access: www.ariadnaediciones.cl (accessed 12 May 2017). 6. France lost the territories of Alsace and Lorraine in 1871 following the defeat against Germany in the Franco-Prussian War. 7. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 409. 8. Jean Heffer and William Serman, O Século XIX 1815–1914 (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 1998), 301. 218

notes 9. Eric J. Hobsbawm, Age of Revolution, 1st edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1996), 3. 10. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919). 11. John Reed, The War in Eastern Europe (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1916), 175. 12. Rosa Luxemburg (1871–1919) was born in Poland and was murdered in Berlin. A leader of German and Polish social democracy, faithful to late nineteenth-century internationalism, Rosa was notable for her thesis on militarism, her studies of Capital and her anti-war leadership when her party supported her. In 1915, she founded with Karl Liebknecht the Spartacist League and in 1919 the German Communist Party. Although she was against the January 1919 uprising, which began without her knowledge, Rosa would then take its lead. Due to this, she would be murdered by the Freikorps, a nationalist militia, with the complacency of the Social Democrats. 13. Rosa Luxemburg, The Junius Pamphlet, www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1915/junius/ch01.htm. 14. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 405. 15. Victor Serge, O Ofício de Revolucionário [Memories of a revolutionary] (Lisbon: Moraes Editora, 1968), 62. 16. William Pelz, História do Povo na Europa Moderna [translation of A People’s History of Modern Europe] (Lisbon: Objectiva, 2016), 189. 17. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 406; see also Pelz, História do Povo da Europa Moderna. 18. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 364. 19. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 406–407. 20. Ibid., 408. 21. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, 22. 22. Wendy Goldman, Mulher, Estado e Revolução (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014). 23. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 408. 24. Pelz, História do Povo da Europa Moderna, 206. 25. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, 8. 26. Göran Therborn, Between Sex and Power: Family in the World 1900–2000 (International Library of Sociology), 1st edn (London: Routledge, 2004). 27. Peter Laslett, O Mundo que nós Perdemos (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 1975). 219

a people’s history of europe 28. In 1921, Antonio Gramsci publishes three texts where he discusses the relationships between leaders, parties and the masses: ‘Leaders and Masses’, 3 July; ‘The parties and the Masses’, 25 September; ‘Masses and Leaders’, 30 October; see Antonio Gramsci, www.marxists.org/archive/ gramsci/. In 1940, an unfinished text by Leon Trotsky on ‘Class, Party and Leadership’ was published, in Leon Trotsky, The Spanish Revolution (New York: Pathfinder Press, 1973). 29. Robert Michels, Zur Soziologie des Parteiwesens in der modernen Demokratie: Untersuchungen über die oligarchischen Tendenzen des Gruppenlebens [On the Sociology of the Oligarchical Tendencies of Modern Democracy] (1911, 1925; 1970). 30. Antonio Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, in Selections from the Prison Notebooks (New York: International Publishers, 1971). 31. Stewart Player and Colin Leys, ‘A mercantilização dos cuidados de saúde: o NHS do Reino Unido e o Programa de Centros de Tratamento do Sector Independente’, in Raquel Varela and Renato Guedes (eds), História do Serviço Nacional de Saúde em Portugal: A saúde e a Força de Trabalho, do Estado Novo aos nossos dias (Lisbon: Ordem dos Médicos/ UNL, 2016), 204–223. 32. Gramsci, ‘Americanism and Fordism’, 302. 33. Laslett, O Mundo que nós Perdemos, 223. 34. Manuel Couret Branco, Economia Política dos Direitos Humanos (Lisbon: Sílabo, 2012). 35. György Lukács, Para uma Ontologia do Ser Social (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2012), 2v. 36. Dick Geary, European Labour: Politics From 1900 to the Depression (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1991), 1. 37. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, 27. 38. Ibid., 28. 39. Nick Pinfield, The Quest for Political Stability: Germany, 1871–1991 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 45. 40. Inaugural Address of the International Working Men’s Association. www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1864/10/27.htm. 41. Marcelo Musto (ed.), Trabalhadores uni-vos! Antologia Política da I Internacional (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2009). 42. For further development of this theme, the causes of revolutions, see Valério Arcary, O Encontro da Revolução com a História (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2006); and Michael Löwy, A Política do Desenvolvimento Desigual e Combinado (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2010). 43. Pierre Broué, O Partido Bolchevique (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2014), 47. 44. Ibid., 47. 220

notes 45. Ibid., 49. 46. For Lenin’s conception of the party, see Broué’s masterful work, O Partido Bolchevique; the impressive work of Paul Le Blanc, Lenin and the Revolutionary Party (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 1993); and Tamás Krausz’s new book, Reconstruindo Lênine: Uma Biografia Política (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2017). 47. Pelz, História do Povo da Europa Moderna, 207. 48. Zinn, A People’s History of the United States, 367–368. 49. Reference to the partly autobiographical novel by American writer Ernest Hemingway, who deserted in the First World War in Italy. 50. Pierre Broué, História da Internacional Comunista 1919–1943, Ascensão e Queda (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2007), 37. 51. Angelo D’Orsi, 1917, O Ano que Mudou o Mundo (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2017), 103. 52. Karl Marx, Introduction to ‘A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right’. First published in Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, 7 and 10 February 1844 in Paris, at: www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/1843/critique-hpr/intro.htm. 53. Éric J. Hobsbawm, Nações e Nacionalismos desde 1870, 2nd edn (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1998), 32. See also Benedict Anderson, Comunidades Imaginadas: reflexões sobre a origem e a expansão do nacionalismo (Lisbon: Edições 70, 2005); and Gopal Balakrishnan, Mapping The Nation (London: New Left Review, 1996). 54. Leon Trotsky, História da Revolução Russa [The History of the Russian Revolution], Vol. II, Parts II and III (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2007), 1083. 55. The Paris Commune was confined to a city. 56. Coggiola, História do Capitalismo, 836. 57. V.I. Lenin, ‘Lecture on the 1905 Revolution’. First published in Pravda 18, 22 January 1925. Source: Lenin Collected Works (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1964), Vol. 23, 236–253, at: www.marxists.org/archive/ lenin/works/1917/jan/09.htm. 58. Roger Garaudy, Lembra-te! Breve História da URSS, Porto, Campo das Letras, 1995, p. 15. 59. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Preface. Translated by Max Eastman, 1932, at: www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1930/ hrr/index.htm. 60. Ibid. 61. Maiakóvsky, Poemas (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 2017), 93. 62. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 1, ‘Peculiarities of Russia’s Development’. 221

a people’s history of europe 63. Ibid. 64. On this subject, see Michael Löwy, A Política do Desenvolvimento Desigual e Combinado (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2010); and George Novack, O Marxismo e o Desenvolvimento na Natureza e na Sociedade (Porto: Edições Pluma, 1974). 65. In addition to Trotsky’s theory of uneven and combined development, Wallerstein’s world-system theory will be influenced by dependency theory (eg A. Gunder Frank) and Braudel. 66. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 1, ‘Peculiarities of Russia’s Development’. 67. Novack, O Marxismo e o Desenvolvimento na Natureza e na Sociedade, 37. 68. Moshe Lewin, Le Dernier Combat De Lénine (Paris: Syllepse, 2015). 69. Pierre Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923 (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2006). 70. Name of the calendar month in force during the French Revolution. It corresponded to July. It was at Thermidor (corresponding to 27 July 1795) that Robespierre was defeated. Since then, the term Thermidor refers to a counter-revolution. 71. We will develop this theme in the chapter on the rise of Nazism and the Second World War. 72. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Chapter 4, ‘The Tzar and the Tzarina’. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. John Reed, Ten Days That Shook the World (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1919). 76. William Henry Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (New York: Macmillian, 1935), Vol. 1, 112, quoted in Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, 131. 77. Leon Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 1: The Overthrow of Tzarism, Chapter 11, ‘Dual Power’, at: www.marxists.org/ archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch11.htm. 78. Charles Tilly, Las Revoluciones Europeas, 1492–1992 (Barcelona: Crítica, 1995), 26–27. 79. Valério Arcary, As Esquinas Perigosas da História: Situações Revolucionárias em Perspectiva Marxista (São Paulo: Xamã, 2004), 98. 80. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 2. 81. John Reed, Dez Dias que Abalaram o Mundo [Ten Days That Shook the World] (Lisbon: Europa-América, 1976), 48. 222

notes 82. Trotsky, The History of the Russian Revolution, Vol. 3: The Triumph of the Soviets, Chapter 43, ‘The Art of Insurrection’, at: www.marxists. org/archive/trotsky/1930/hrr/ch43.htm. 83. Coggiola, História do Capitalismo [History of Capitalism], 295–296. 84. Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution: Class Struggle in a Moscow Metal Factory (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007), 225. 85. Raquel Varela, História do Povo na Revolução Portuguesa (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2014). 86. Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution, 226. 87. Wendy Goldman, Mulher, Estado e Revolução (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014). 88. Tilly, Las Revoluciones Europeas, 1492–1992, 26–23. 89. Hillel H. Ticktin, ‘Towards a Political Economy of the USSR’, Critique 1 (Spring 1973). 90. Victor Serge, Ano Um da Revolução Russa [Year One of the Russian Revolution] (Lisbon: Edições Delfos, 1975), 15. 91. Broué, O Partido Bolchevique, 321. 92. Susan Weissman, Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope (London: Verso, 2001), 14. 93. Paxton, Europe in the Twentieth Century, 11. 94. Victor Serge, Ofício de Revolucionário [Memoirs of a Revolutionary] (Rio de Janeiro: Moraes Editora, 1968), 108. 95. See Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1975); and Eric J. Hobsbwam, The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1987). 96. Coggiola, As Grandes Depressões, 10–11. 97. Ibid. 98. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 409. 99. Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016). 100. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Communist Manifesto, translated by Samuel Moore, first published in London, 1848. 101. Arcary, As Esquinas Perigosas da História. 102. Ibid., 104. 103. Ibid., 98. 104. Arcary, O Encontro da Revolução com a História, 296. 105. ‘1% da população global detém mesma riqueza dos 99% restantes, diz estudo’ (‘1 per cent of world population has the same wealth as the remaining 99 per cent, study says’), BBC News, 18 January 2016, www. bbc.com/portuguese/noticias/2016/01/160118_riqueza_estudo_ oxfam_fn (accessed 29 July 2017). About social inequality, see Thomas 223

a people’s history of europe Piketty, Capital in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014). 106. The first successful (anti-colonial) slave revolution in history in a country was Santo Domingo (Haiti), see about it C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins, first published in 1938, by Secker & Warburg. 107. The reasons for collective action by workers are not exhausted or limited to misery. To develop this theme see Barrington Moore Jr.’s challenging book Injustice: The Social Bases of Obedience and Revolt (White Plains, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1978). 108. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 454. 109. John Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried: A People’s History of the British Empire (London: Bookmarks Publication, 2013), 1. 110. Perry Anderson, ‘Portugal and the End of Ultra-Colonialism’, New Left Review 1(15) (May–June 1962), 1 (16 July–August 1962) and 1(17) (Winter 1962). 111. Perry Anderson, ‘Origins of the Present Crisis’, New Left Review 1(23) (January–February 1964). 112. Newsinger, The Blood Never Dried, 117. 113. Ibid., 124. 114. Ibid., 126. 115. John Reed, Insurgent Mexico, at: www.gutenberg.org/files/48108/48108h/48108-h.html. 116. Ibid. 117. Eric J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: A History of the World, 1914–1991 (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 118. Paul Preston, ‘The Great Civil War: European Politics, 1914–1945’, in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford University Press, 1996), 153–184. 119. Charles Maier, ‘The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe’, American Historical Review 86(2): 327–352. 120. Coggiola, As Grandes Depressões, 229–230. 121. George Orwell, Looking Back on the Spanish War, The Orwell Foundation, at: www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/ essays-and-other-works/looking-back-on-the-spanish-war/. 122. António Gramsci, Worker’ control, L’Ordine Nuovo, 10 February 1921. Text from Antonio Gramsci, ‘Selections from Political Writings (1921– 1926)’, translated and edited by Quintin Hoare (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1978), transcribed to the worldwide web with the kind permission of Quintin Hoare. 123. Pierre Milza, Mussolini (Lisbon: Verbo, 2001). 224

notes 124. Giovanni Arrighi and Berverly J. Silver, Caos e Governabilidade no Moderno Sistema Mundial (Rio de Janeiro: Contraponto, 2001), 145. 125. Coggiola, As Grandes Depressões, 150–154. 126. Rerum Novarum, Encyclical of Pope Leo XIII on Capital and Labour, at: www.vatican.va/content/leo-xiii/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_lxiii_enc_15051891_rerum-novarum.html (accessed 2 January 2018). 127. Prosper-Olivier Lisagaray, Histoire de la Commune de 1871 (Paris: La Découverte, 2005). 128. História e consciência de classe: estudos sobre a dialéctica marxista (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2012). Gyorgy Lukács was an important Hungarian philosopher of the twentieth century. His studies cover decisive essays from history and class-consciousness to aesthetics and theory of the novel, and his path to Marxism would lead him, in his mature work, to deal with the ethical question and what would come to be called the ‘ontology of social being’. Currently the so-called Lukács Archives in Budapest are under threat. 129. Georg Lukács, Ontology of Social Being (London: The Merlin Press, 1978). 130. Broué, The German Revolution, 1917–1923. 131. William Pelz, História do Povo da Europa Moderna (Lisbon: Objectiva, 2016), 221. 132. Rosa Luxemburg, The Letters of Rosa Luxemburg, Verso Books, www. versobooks.com/blogs/1809-the-last-letter-written-by-rosa-luxemburg-before-her-death. 133. Ibid. 134. John Steinbeck and Robert Capa, A Russian Journal (London: Penguin, 1999), 48. 135. Ibid., 49. 136. Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, 1940–42, 94, at: https:// libcom.org/files/The%20Case%20of%20Comrade%20Tulayev%20 -%20Victor%20Serge.pdf. 137. Sheila Fitzpatrick, A Revolução Russa [The Russian Revolution] (São Paulo: Todavia, 2017), 243. 138. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 474. 139. Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution, 226–228. 140. David Mandel, ‘El legado de la Revolución rusa de Octubre: “Se atrevieron”’, Sin Permisso, 24 November 2017, at: www.sinpermiso.info/ textos/el-legado-de-la-revolucion-rusa-de-octubre-se-atrevieron; and David Mandel, ‘Factory Committees and Workers’ Control in Petrograd in 1917’, Notebooks, International Institute for Research and Education, no. 21, (1993), 1–43. 225

a people’s history of europe 141. David Mandel, ‘They Dared: The Legacy of the October Revolution’, The Bullet, 31 October 2017, at: https://socialistproject.ca/2017/10/ b1504/

Chapter 2 1. Title of a fresco by Mexican artist Diego Rivera, painted in 1934. 2. William Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 141. 3. Osvaldo Coggiola, As Grandes Depressões (São Paulo: Alameda, 2009), 154. 4. H. Pelling, The History of British Trade Unionism (London: Macmillan, 1987); and C.J. Wrigley, ‘The Trade Unions between the Wars’, in C.J. Wrigley (ed.), A History of British Industrial Relations 1914–1939 (Brighton: Harvester, 1987). 5. Karl Marx, O Capital, Book I, (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2001). 6. Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016). 7. US Business Cycle Expansions and Contractions. The National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc. Cambridge MA 02138, www.nber.org/ cycles.html (accessed 2 February 2018). 8. See Jorge Grespan, O Negativo do Capital (São Paulo: Expressão Popular, 2012), 183–189. 9. Coggiola, As Grandes Depressões, 150–154. 10. Ibid., 164. 11. John Newsinger, Fighting Back: The American Working Class in the 1930s (London: Bookmarks, 2012). 12. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: Perennial, 2001), 402. 13. Walter Benjamin (Gérard Raulet, Über den Begriff der Geschichte. Band 19) (Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2010), 7–20. 14. Andrea Kettenmann, Rivera (Cologne: Taschen, 2001). 15. Jack London, The Iron Heel (New York: Penguin Classics, 2006). 16. Valério Arcary, As Esquinas Perigosas da História: Situações Revolucionárias em Perspectiva Marxista (São Paulo: Xamã, 2004). 17. Fernand Braudel, A Dinâmica do Capitalismo (Lisbon: Teorema, 1992), 94. 18. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (London: Penguin Books, 2006). 19. John Ford (dir.), The Grapes of Wrath (film), 1940. 20. Philippe Schmitter, Portugal: do Autoritarismo à Democracia (Lisbon: Imprensa de Ciências Sociais, 1999); and Fernando Rosas and Álvaro 226

notes Garrido (eds), Corporativismo, Fascismos, Estado Novo (Coimbra: Almedina, 2012). 21. Michael Howard, A Guerra na História da Europa (Lisbon: Publicações Europa-América, 1997), 153. 22. Arcary, As Esquinas Perigosas da História. 23. Apocalypse: The Second World War (French: Apocalypse, la 2e Guerre mondiale) (2009) is a six-part French documentary by Daniel Costelle and Isabelle Clarke about the Second World War. The documentary is composed exclusively of actual footage of the war as filmed by war correspondents, soldiers, resistance fighters and private citizens. 24. See, for example, Dick Geary, Hitler e o Nazismo (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2010); Robert O. Paxton, A Anatomia do Fascismo (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2007); and T.E. Vadney, ‘The German Problem’, in The World Since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 21–25. 25. Zeev Sternhell et al., Nascimento da Ideologia Fascista (Lisbon: Bertrand Editora, 1995), 212. 26. Ibid., 170. 27. Thomas Mann, Um Percurso Político (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2016), 164–165. 28. Paxton, A Anatomia do Fascismo, 93. 29. Dick Geary lists dozens of recent studies in this field and their differences, in Hitler e o Nazismo (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2010), p. 36-45. 30. Primo Levi, The Drowned and the Saved (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017). This is the author’s last work, written in 1986, a year before his death. 31. ‘Ihr, die ihr auftauchen werdet aus der Flut in der wir untergegangen sind (…) Gedenkt unsrer mit Nachsicht’. Bertolt Brecht, To those born later – An die Nachgeborenen, first published in Svendborger Gedichte (1939) in Gesammelte Werke (1967), Vol. 4, 722–725. 32. Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe, 139. 33. Valério Arcary, O Encontro da Revolução com a História (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2006), 253–275. 34. Ibid., 253. 35. Geary, Hitler e o Nazismo, 38. 36. Ibid., 37. 37. Ibid., 39. 38. Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe, 141. 39. Geary, Hitler e o Nazismo, 41. 40. Pierre Broué, História da Internacional Comunista, 1919–1943, Vol. 1: Ascensão e Queda (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2007), 684. 41. Harold James, ‘Banks and Business Politics in Nazi Germany’, in Francis R. Nicosia and Jonathan Huener (eds), Business and Industry in Nazi Germany (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), 43–46. 227

a people’s history of europe 42. Broué, História da Internacional Comunista, 1919–1943. 43. Paxton, A Anatomia do Fascismo, 33. 44. Felipe Demier, O Que é Uma Revolução? (with Varela and Arcary) (Lisbon: Colibri, 2016); and Felipe Demier, O Longo Bonapartismo Brasileiro 1930–1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Maud, 2013). 45. Ibid. 46. In 1932, Trotsky referred to the KPD leaders’ view of the German political situation at the time: Unfortunately, the Communist Party was also completely taken aback by the events. The Stalinist bureaucracy could not foresee anything … Different varieties of fascism take power from one another through ‘fascist’ coups. Is it not evident that the Stalinist theory was created expressly to clog the human brain? Trotsky ‘O único caminho’ [‘Bonapartismo e fascismo’]. The History of the Russian Revolution, 283–284. 47. Carlos Zacarias Sena Junior, ‘Frente Única, Frente Popular e Frente Nacional’, In Anais Cemarx, V Colóquio Internacional Marx Engels, Unicamp, November 2007, 5–6, at: www.unicamp.br/cemarx/anais_ v_coloquio_arquivos/arquivos/comunicacoes/gt7/sessao3/Carlos_ Zacarias.pdf. 48. Broué, História da Internacional Comunista, 1919–1943, 843. 49. Massimo Salvadori (ed.), A Nova Ordem Mundial, Vol. 17, In História Universal, (Lisbon: Planeta DeAgostini, 2005), 126. 50. Bertolt Brecht, The Threepenny Opera (1928); Macheath, Act 3, Scene 3, 92. 51. César Oliveira, Salazar e a Guerra Civil de Espanha (Lisbon: O Jornal, 1987). 52. Andy Durgan, The Spanish Civil War (London: Palgrave, 2007), 8. 53. Ibid. 54. Ibid. 55. Jean-Pierre Barou, La guerre d’Espagne ne fait que commencer (Paris: Seuil, 2015). 56. Paul Preston, Franco: A Biography (London: HarperCollins, 1993), 290. 57. Donny Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War: Resistance versus Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 15. 58. Pierre Broué and Nicole Dorey ‘Critiques de gauche et opposition révolutionnaire au Front populaire (1936–1938)’, Le Mouvement Social 54 (January–March 1966): 91–133. 59. Serge Wolikow, Histoire de l’Internationale communiste (Paris: Editions de l’Atelier, 2010). 228

notes 60. Harman, A Peoples’s History of the World, 494. 61. Pierre Broué, História da Internacional Comunista, 1919–1943, 866. 62. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of United States (New York: Harper­ Collins, 2003), 400–401. 63. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 496. 64. Ibid., 499. 65. Helen Graham and Paul Preston (eds), The Popular Front in Europe (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987). 66. Tony Judt, Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 81. 67. Eric J. Hobsbawm, ‘Forty Years of Popular Front Government’, first published in Marxism Today, republished in Australian Left Review 61 (1977), 21. 68. Broué, História da Internacional Comunista, 1919–1943, 868. 69. Connor Kilpatrick, Lester K. Spence, Liza Featherstone and Ethan Young, Donald Trump and the Rise of the Nationalist Right, Essays (New York: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2016).

Chapter 3

1. Title of Victor Serge’s novel Midnight in the Century (New York: NYRB Classics, 2015), first published in 1939. 2. Primo Levi, ‘Last Christmas of the War’, The New York Review of Books, 30 January 1986, at: www.nybooks.com/articles/1986/01/30/ last-christmas-of-the-war/. 3. Jiri Pelikan, ‘The Struggle for Socialism in Czechoslovakia’, New Left Review 1(71) (January–February 1972), 2. 4. Alden Whitman, ‘Harry S. Truman: Decisive President’, New York Times, at: https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/ general/onthisday/bday/0508.html. 5. Raquel Varela, interview with Gerhard Baumgartner, historian and director of the Austrian Resistance Documentation Centre, Rubra 21 (Winter 2015): 17–22. 6. ‘Portuguese Forced Labourers in the Third Reich 1939–1945: Memory, Responsibility, Future’, edited by Fernando Rosas, at: http://ihc.fcsh. unl.pt/events/trabalho-forcado-na-europa-segunda-guerra-mundial/. 7. Ellen Wood, Em Defesa da História (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editores, 1997). 8. Raquel Varela, interview with Gerhard Baumgartner. 9. Diário de Lisboa, 8 August 1945. 229

a people’s history of europe 10. The Hague Conventions of 1899 and 1907 are, together with the Geneva Conventions, the first international treaties on the laws of war and war crimes. 11. República, Lisbon, 9 August 1945. 12. Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Bookmarks, 1999), 536–541. 13. T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996); and Manuel Branco, Economia Política dos Direitos Humanos (Lisbon: Edições Sílabo, 2012). 14. Donny Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War: Resistance versus Empire (London: Pluto Press, 2012), 131. 15. Leopold Trepper, Great Game: Story of the Red Orchestra, 1st edn (London: Michael Joseph, 1977). 16. Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War, 142. 17. Harman, A People’s History of the World, 536. 18. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), 421. 19. Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War, 212. 20. Ibid., 214. 21. Carlos Santos Pereira, Da Jugoslávia à Jugoslávia: Os Balcãs e a Nova Ordem Europeia (Lisbon: Cotovia, 1999). 22. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. I, Book One: The Process of Production of Capital, Chapter 26: The Secret of Primitive Accumulation, Source: First English edition of 1887 (4th German edition changes included as indicated) with some modernisation of spelling, 507. 23. Gluckstein, A People’s History of the Second World War, 42. 24. Lars Baerentzen and Ole L. Smith (eds), Studies in the History of the Greek Civil War 1945–1949 (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 1987).

Chapter 4

1. Pier Paolo Pasolini, Poemas (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2015), 199. 2. Tony Judt, Post War: A History of Europe Since 1945 (New York: Penguin Books, 2006), 72. 3. John Dunlop, ‘The Decontrol of Wages and Prices’, in Colston E. Warne (ed.), Labor in Postwar America (Brooklyn: Remsen Press, 1949). 4. Raquel Varela, A Segurança Social é Sustentável: Trabalho, Estado e Segurança Social em Portugal (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2013). 5. Judt, Post War, 73. 6. Ken Loach, The Spirit of ’45, 2013 (Nominated for Best Documentary on the 2013 British Independent Film Awards). 230

notes 7. Raquel Varela, Quem Paga o Estado Social em Portugal? (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2012); and Anwar Shaik, ‘Who Pays for the “Welfare” in the Welfare State? A Multi-Country Study’, Social Research 70(2) (2003): 531–550. 8. Hillel H. Ticktin, ‘Towards a political economy of the USSR’, Critique 1(1) (1973). 9. José da Silva Lopes, A Economia Portuguesa desde 1960 (Lisbon: Gradiva, 1999), 314–315. 10. Eric Toussaint, Your Money or Your Life: The Tyranny of Global Finance (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2005). 11. Judt, Post War, 82. 12. Donald Sassoon, One Hundred Years of Socialism (London: I.B. Tauris, 2014), 117. 13. Judt, Post War, 76. 14. Charles Maier, ‘The Two Postwar Eras and the Conditions for Stability in Twentieth-Century Western Europe’, American Historical Review 86(2), 338. 15. Ibid., 345. 16. Ibid. 17. Gabriel García Márquez, Em Viagem pela Europa de Leste (Lisbon: Dom Quixote, 2017), 7 (our translation). 18. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: A People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), 7. 19. George Orwell, 1984 (Lisbon: Antígona, 2007). 20. ‘The Sinews of Peace (“Iron Curtain Speech”)’, 5 March 1946, International Churchill Society, https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/ speeches/1946-1963-elder-statesman/the-sinews-of-peace/. 21. Panagiotis Sotiris and Spyros Sakellaropoulos, ‘European Union as Class Project and Imperialist Strategy’, ViewPoint Magazine, 1 February 2018, 2. 22. Perry Anderson, The New Old World (London: Verso, 2009). 23. ‘Jean Monnet: the unifying force behind the birth of the European Union’, European Commission, https://europa.eu/european-union/ sites/europaeu/files/docs/body/jean_monnet_en.pdf (accessed 2 February 2018). 24. Ibid., 2. 25. FAO: UN Food and Agriculture Organization. 26. Josué de Castro, Geopolítica da Fome (Porto: Brasília Editora, 1978), 388 (our translation). 27. Judt, Post War, 86–87. 231

a people’s history of europe 28. Perry Anderson and Stuart Hall, ‘The Politics of Common Market’, New Left Review 1(10) (July–August 1961), 1. 29. Ibid. 30. Carlos Rebello de Mendonça, Trotsky e a Europa Ocidental do entre Guerras (Rio de Janeiro: Gramma, 2012). 31. Anderson and Hall, ‘The Politics of Common Market’, 1. 32. Mister X [George Kennan], ‘The Sources of Soviet Conduct’, Foreign Affairs, July 1947, at: www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/ russian-federation/1947-07-01/sources-soviet-conduct. 33. Anderson and Hall, ‘The Politics of Common Market’, 2. 34. David Reynolds, ‘Europe Divided and Reunited’, in T.C.W. Blanning (ed.), The Oxford History of Modern Europe (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996), 283. 35. Anderson and Hall, ‘The Politics of Common Market’, 3. 36. Ibid., 4. 37. Mountain ranges in the Carpathians, stretching from the Czech Republic in the west along the border of Poland with Slovakia up to Ukraine in the east. 38. Primo Levi, Last Christmas of the War, translated by Ruth Feldman for The New York Review of Books (30 January 1986). 39. Judt, Post War, 83. 40. Sotiris and Sakellaropoulos, ‘European Union as Class Project and Imperialist Strategy’. 41. Perry Anderson, ‘After the Event’, New Left Review 73 (January– February 2012), 32. 42. Sotiris and Sakellaropoulos, ‘European Union as Class Project and Imperialist Strategy’, 9. 43. József Böröcz, The European Union and Global Social Change: A Critical Geopolitical-Economic Analysis (Oxford: Routledge, 2010). 44. Reynolds, ‘Europe Divided and Reunited’, 282. 45. Juan Carlos Pereira Castañares and Antonio Moreno Juste, ‘A Espanha: no Centro ou na Periferia da Europa?’, in António Costa Pinto and Nuno Severiano Teixeira (eds), A Europa do Sul e a Construção da União Europeia 1945–2000 (Lisbon: ICS, 2005), 45–74. 46. Raquel Varela, A História do PCP na Revolução dos Cravos (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2011). 47. Fernando Pereira Marques (ed.), O Socialismo e o PS em Portugal (Lisbon: Âncora, 2017). 48. Costa Pinto and Severiano Teixeira, ‘Portugal e a Integração Europeia, 1945–1986’, in Costa Pinto and Severiano Teixeira (eds), A Europa do Sul e a Construção da União Europeia 1945–2000 (Lisbon: ICS, 2005), 17–43. 232

notes 49. ‘Getting over Globalization’, Crédit Suisse AG Research Institute 2017, 24. 50. T.E. Vadney, The World Since 1945: A Complete History of Global Change from 1945 to the Present (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 53. 51. García Márquez, Em Viagem pela Europa de Leste, 172. 52. Bill Lomax, ‘The Working Class in the Hungarian Revolution of 1956’, Critique 12(1) (1980): 27–54. 53. Ibid. 54. Peter Freyer, Hungarian Tragedy (London: Dobson Books, 1956), in www.marxists.org/archive/fryer/1956/dec/ (acessed 4 December 2017). 55. Ibid. 56. Roger Vaillant, Escritos Íntimos [Écrits intimes], Vols I and II (Lisbon: Europa América, 1985).

Chapter 5 1. Mário Vargas Llosa, O Sonho do Celta [The Dream of the Celt] (Lisbon: Quetzal, 2010), 57. 2. T.E. Vadney, The World Since 1945: A Complete History of Global Change from 1945 to the Present (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 90. 3. José Pedro Castanheira, Quem Mandou Matar Amílcar Cabral, (Lisbon: Relógio D’Água, 1995). 4. Vadney, The World Since 1945, 99. 5. Gilbert Achcar, Morbid Symptoms, Relapse in the Arab Uprising (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2016); and Karim Makdisi and Vijay Prashad (eds), Land of Blue Helmets: The United Nations and the Arab World (Oakland, CA: University of California Press, 2017). 6. Vadney, The World Since 1945, 97. 7. Jiri Pelikan, ‘The Struggle for Socialism in Czechoslovakia’, New Left Review 1(7) (January–February 1972), 6. 8. Fernando Rosas (Joel Serrão and A.H. de Oliveira Marques), Portugal e o Estado Novo, Nova História de Portugal, Vol. 12 (Lisbon: Editorial Presença, 1992). 9. Observer quoted in República, Lisbon, 22 April 1955. 10. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations: The People’s History of the Third World (New York: The New Press, 2007), xv. 11. Immanuel Wallerstein, O Sistema Mundial Moderno (Porto: Afrontamento, 1990). 12. António Louçã, Negócios com os nazis: Ouro e outras pilhagens, 1933–1945 (Lisbon: Fim de Século, 1997); and António Louçã, Comércio em Tempos de Guerra, 1940–1944 (Lisbon: Terramar, 2000). 233

a people’s history of europe 13. La Bataille d’Algers [The Battle of Algiers], directed by Gillo Pontecorvo, 1966. 14. François Chesnais, La Mondialisation du capital (Paris: Syros, 1997); Joana Coutinho, ‘ONG’s: caminhos e (des)caminhos’, Revista Lutas Sociais 13–14(1) (2005); and Carlos Montaño, Terceiro Setor e Questão Social: Crítica ao padrão emergente de intervenção social (São Paulo: Cortez, 2002). 15. Eric J. Hobsbawm, A Era dos Extremos [The Age of Extremes] (Lisbon: Presença, 1996), 425. 16. Miguel Vale de Almeida, ‘Epílogo do Império: Timor Leste e a catarse Pós-colonial Portuguesa’, Novos Estudos 55 (1999): 7–26. 17. Hobsbawm, A Era dos Extremos [The Age of Extremes], 85. 18. The Palestinian National Charter: Resolutions of the Palestine National Council, 1–17 July 1968. 19. ‘Aylan Kurdi’s story: How a small Syrian child came to be washed up on a beach in Turkey’, Independent, 3 September 2015, www.independent. co.uk/news/world/europe/aylan-kurdi-s-story-how-a-small-syrianchild-came-to-be-washed-up-on-a-beach-in-turkey-10484588.html. 20. Tariq Ali, The Clash Of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, Jihads And Modernity (London: Verso, 2003). 21. Atilio A. Boron et al. (ed.), La Teoria Marxista Hoy: Problemas y Perspectivas (Buenos Aires: Campus Virtual, 2007). 22. Oxfam Report, ‘An Economy for the 1%. How privilege and power in the economy drive extreme inequality and how this can be stopped’, 18 January 2016. 23. José Martins, Império do Terror, Estados Unidos, ciclos económicos e guerras no início do Século XXI (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2005). 24. Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016); Guglielmo Carchedi, Frontiers of Political Economy (London: Verso, 1991); and Marcel van der Linden, ‘Edward L. Sard (1913–99), Theorist of the Permanent War Economy’, Critique 46(1) (2018). 25. Harold Pinter Nobel Lecture, 2005, at: www.nobelprize.org/prizes/ literature/2005/pinter/25621-harold-pinter-nobel-lecture-2005/. 26. Vadney, The World Since 1945, 90. 27. Vijay Prashad, The Darker Nations, xviii.

Chapter 6

1. Ian Birchall, ‘France 1968: “All Power to the Imagination”’, in Colin Barker (ed.), Revolutionary Rehearsals (London: Bookmarks, 1987), 23. 2. Diário de Lisboa, 2 May 1974, 12. 234

notes 3. Birchall, ‘France 1968’, 15. 4. Ibid., 5. 5. Ibid., 6. 6. Ibid., 5. 7. Peter Birke, Bernd Huttner and Gottfried Oy (eds), Alte Linke – Neue Linke? Die Sozialen Kampfe der 1968er Jahre in der Diskussion (Berlin: Karl Dietz Verlag, 2009). 8. Pietro Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the TwentyFirst Century (London: Verso, 2003). 9. Birchall, ‘France 1968’, 12. 10. Michael Seidman, The Imaginary Revolution: Parisian Students and Workers in 1968 (New York: Berghahn, 2004). 11. André Malraux, Man’s Hope (New York: Modern Library, 1984). 12. Birchall, ‘France 1968’, 23. 13. Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time (London: Bookmarks, 2000), 64–65. 14. Chris Harman, A People’s History of the World (London: Bookmarks, 1999), 580. 15. Diário de Lisboa, 21 April 1969. 16. Brian Jones, ‘Martin Luther King’s Revolution’, Jacobin, 4 April 2017. 17. Noticiário Nacional, RTP (Portuguese National Television), 6 June 1975, RTP Archives. 18. Edward Shorter, Charles Tilly, Strikes in France 1830–1968 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). 19. Álvaro Bianchi and Ruy Braga, ‘1968 e depois: os estudantes e a condição proletária’ [‘1968 and beyond: students and the proletarian condition’], Outubro 17(1) (2008), 20–21. 20. Stéphane Braud e Marie Cartier, ‘De la précarisation de l’emploi à la précarisation du travail: la nouvelle condition salariale’ [‘From casualisation of employment to casualisation of work: the new wager’s condition’], in La France invisible (Paris: La Découverte, 2006), 561–573. 21. Bianchi and Braga, ‘1968 e depois: os estudantes e a condição proletária’, 33. 22. T.E. Vadney, The World Since 1945 (London: Penguin Books, 1998), 417. 23. Bianchi and Braga, ‘1968 e depois: os estudantes e a condição proletária’, 35. 24. Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex (1949). First published in English by Jonathan Cape in 1953. 25. Wendy Goldman, Mulher, Estado e Revolução [Women, the State and Revolution] (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2014), 79. 235

a people’s history of europe 26. William A. Pelz, A People’s History of Modern Europe (London: Pluto Press, 2016), 204. 27. Jiri Pelikan, ‘The Struggle for Socialism in Czechoslovakia’, New Left Review 1(71) (January–February 1972). 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid. 30. Angela Davis, Women, Race, & Class, 1st edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 31. Jiri Pelikan, ‘A Letter’, The New York Review of Books, 31 August 1972. 32. Chris Harman, The Fire Last Time (London: Bookmarks, 2000), 123. 33. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (New York: Harper Perennial, 2009), 252. 34. Massimo Salvadori (ed.), Do Início ao fim da Guerra Fria [From the beginning to the end of the Cold War], Vol. 16, in História Universal (Lisbon: Planeta DeAgostini, 2005), 316. 35. Mundo Obrero, July 1975. 36. ‘Por la reconciliación nacional, por una solución democrática y pacífica del problema español’ [For National Reconciliation, for a Democratic and Peaceful Solution to the Spanish National Problem’], PCE, June 1956. 37. Raquel Varela, História do PCP na Revolução dos Cravos (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2011). 38. ‘Up with Franco, higher than Carrero Blanco’. 39. Paul Preston, Spain in Crisis: The Evolution and Decline of the Franco Regime (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1976). 40. ETA press release, cited in Iker Casanova, Eta 1958–2008 Medio Siglo de Historia (Tafalla: Editorial Txalaparta, 2007), 148. 41. Ibid., 149. 42. Preston, Spain in Crisis. 43. Giuseppe Mammarella, Historia de Europa Contemporánea desde 1945 hasta Hoy (Barcelona: Ariel, 1996), 321. 44. Hillel H. Ticktin, ‘Towards a political economy of the USSR’, Critique 1(1) (1973). 45. Diário de Lisboa, 2 February 1972. 46. Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to Socialism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989). 47. Franck Gaudichaud, Chile 1970–1973: Mil días que estremecieron al mundo (Santiago de Chile: Lom Ediciones, 2016; and Peter Winn, A Revolução Chilena (São Paulo: Editora Unesp, 2009). 236

notes 48. Franck Gaudichaud, Poder popular y Cordones Industriales: Testimonios sobre el Movimiento Popular Urbano, 1970–1973 (Santiago de Chile: Lom Ediciones, 2004). 49. La Vanguardia, Barcelona, 23 March 1975. 50. In 1975–76, as a result of the agrarian reform, the number of permanent jobs increased from 11,100 to 44,100. The number of casual jobs increased from 10,600 to 27,800. In rain-fed crops, the area went from 85,000 ha before land occupation to 255,000 ha after. Irrigation has increased from 7,000 hectares to 16,000. The number of tractors went from 2,630 to 4,150 and that of harvesting machines from 960 to 1,720. 51. Documentary film Outro País (Another Country), by Sérgio Tréfaut, Vídeos Público, 25 de Abril, 20 Anos, 2004. 52. Durán Muñoz, Contención y Transgresión: Las Movilizaciones Sociales y el Estado en las Transiciones Española y Portuguesa (Madrid: CPPC, 2000), 105. 53. Chip Dows, Os Moradores à Conquista da Cidade (Lisbon: Armazém das Letras, 1978). 54. Visão, Especial 25 de Abril, 15 April 2004. 55. Interviewed by the author, 24 February 2012. 56. António Barreto and Clara Valadas Preto, Portugal 1960/1995: Indicadores Sociais (Lisbon: Jornal Público, 1996). 57. Michael Löwy, A Política do Desenvolvimento Desigual e Combinado (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2010). 58. La Vanguardia, 23 March 1975. 59. Nuno Simas, Diário de Notícias, 27 April 2004. 60. Pueblo, 22 March 1975, Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático, PEA 16/75 – 311, Information on Portugal in the Spanish press. 61. Ibid. 62. Encarnación Lemus, En Hamelin … La Transición Española más allá de la Frontera (Oviedo: Septem Ediciones, 2001). 63. César Oliveira, Cem Anos nas Relações Luso-Espanholas. Política e Economia (Lisbon: Edições Cosmos, 1995). 64. Hermínio Martins, Classe, Status e Poder (Lisbon: ICS, 1998), 113. 65. António Barreto, ‘Mudança Social em Portugal: 1960–2000’, in António Costa Pinto (ed.), Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisbon: D. Quixote, 2005), 146. 66. Sebastian Balfour, História Concisa de Espanha, edited by Raymond Carr (Lisbon: Europa-América, 2004), 247. 67. Paloma Fernández Aguilar, Memoria y Olvido de la Guerra Civil Española (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996), 211. 237

a people’s history of europe 68. Ernest Lluch, ‘Transición Económica y Transición Política: La Anomalia 1978–1980’, in Javier Tusell y Álvaro Soto (eds), História de la Transición 1975–1986 (Madrid: Alianza Universidad, 1996), 252. 69. Informaciones, 10 February 1975, Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático, PEA 16/75 – 311, Information on Portugal in the Spanish press. 70. Ibid. 71. Menezes Rosa, Telegram from Portugal’s Embassy in Madrid, received 8 May 1975, Arquivo Histórico-Diplomático, PEA 16/75 – 311, Information on Portugal in the Spanish press. 72. Jorge Sampaio, in Miguel Herrero de Miñón (ed.), La transición democrática en España, Vol. 1 (Bilbao: Fundação Mário Soares, Fundación BBV, 1999), 16. 73. Muñoz, Contención y Transgresión. 74. Xavier Doménech Sampere, ‘El Cambio Político (1962–1976): Materiales para una perspectiva desde abajo’, Historia del Presente: La sociedad Española durante el Segundo Franquismo, Asociación Historiadores del Presente, UNED – Centro Asociado de Melilla, no. 1 (2002), 46–67.

Chapter 7

1. Manifesto ‘Zur Geschichte der Ersten Internationale’, in Marx-Engels Archiv, vol. 1 (Frankfurt: Verlagsgesellschaft, 1925), 171. First published in Beehive, 5 December 1863. Also quoted in Marcello Musto (ed.), Trabalhadores Uni-Vos, Antologia Política da I Internacional (São Paulo: Fundação Perseu Abramo e Boitempo, 2014), 19–20. 2. ‘O anúncio de Natal que deixa milhares em lágrimas’ [‘The Christmas advertisement that leaves thousands in tears’], Diário de Notícias, 7 December 2016 (accessed 12 January 2017); also on YouTube, at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=tU5Rnd-HM6A. 3. Corresponding to the English saying: ‘You can’t teach an old dog new tricks’. 4. Global Wealth Report 2016, Credit Suisse Research Institute, at: www. credit-suisse.com/us/en/about-us/research/research-institute/newsand-videos/articles/news-and-expertise/2016/11/en/the-globalwealth-report-2016.html (accessed 30 January 2017). 5. Getting over globalization, Credit Suisse Research Institute, January 2017, 26. 6. Linda Wong, ‘Chinese Migrant Workers: Rights Attainment Deficits, Rights Consciousness and Personal Strategies, The China Quarterly 208 (December 2011): 870–892. 238

notes 7. See Lucia Pradella, Globalisation and the Critique of Political Economy (London: Routledge, 2014). 8. Osvaldo Coggiola and José Martins, Dinâmicas da Globalização: Mercado Mundial e Ciclos Econômicos (1970–2005) (São Paulo: UFSC and Fundação Rosa Luxemburgo, 2006). 9. Bo Stråth, The Politics of De-Industrialization (London: Croom Helm, 1997). 10. Massimo Salvadori (ed.), A Nova Ordem Mundial [The New World Order], Vol. 17, História Universal (2005), 414–415. 11. It is striking, as regards the ability of the leaders of this ‘world’s factory’ to influence demographic policies, that after the 2010 strikes, which drove up the cost of labour, the Chinese government has put an end to the one-child policy; see ‘China Ends One-Child Policy after 35 Years’, Guardian, 29 October 2015. 12. Marcel van der Linden, ‘Prefácio’ [‘Preface’], in Raquel Varela (ed.), A Segurança Social é Sustentável: Trabalho, Estado e Segurança Social em Portugal (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2013), 11. 13. Jacob Gorender, ‘Coerção e consenso na política’, Estudos Avançados 2(3) (1988): 52–66. 14. Alex Callinicos and Mike Simons, The Great Strike. The Miners’ Strike of 1984–85 and its Lessons (London: Socialist Worker, 1985). 15. Ernest Mandel, O Capitalismo Tardio [Late Capitalism], translation by Joris de Bres, 1975, of Le troisième âge du capitalisme (1972) (São Paulo: Abril Cultural, 1985). 16. Osvaldo Coggiola, ‘Programas Sociais Compensatórios: A Experiência Brasileira’ [‘Compensatory Social Programmes: The Brazilian Experience’], Revista Praia Vermelha 23(1) (2013): 69–116. 17. Manuel Branco, Economia Política dos Direitos Humanos [Political Economy of Human Rights] (Lisbon: Edições Sílabo, 2012). 18. Jeremy Waddington and Reiner Hoffmann, ‘Trade Unions in Europe: reform, organization and restructuring’, in Jeremy Waddington and Reiner Hoffmann (eds), Trade Unions in Europe (Brussels: European Trade Union Institute, 2000), 41. 19. Stråth, The Politics of De-Industrialization, 224. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 225. 22. Jeremy Waddington and Reiner Hoffmann (eds), Trade Unions in Europe (Brussels: European Trade Union Institute, 2000). 23. Beverly J. Silver, Forças do Trabalho (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2005), 157. 24. Waddington and Hoffmann (eds), Trade Unions in Europe, 27. 239

a people’s history of europe 25. Marcel van der Linden, ‘San Precario: A New Inspiration for Labor Historians’, Labor: Studies in Working-Class History of the Americas 10(1) (Spring 2014): 9–21. 26. Marcelo Badaró, ‘A lei geral da acumulação capitalista e as relações de trabalho na actualidade’, in António Paço, Diogo Cancela, Raquel Varela and Maria Augusta Tavares, Trabalho, Acumulação Capitalista e Regime Político no Portugal Contemporâneo (Lisbon: Colibri, 2017), 131. 27. Pierre Broué and N. Dorey, ‘Critiques de gauche et opposition révolutionnaire au front populaire (1936–1938)’, Le mouvement social, 54 (January–March 1966): 91–133. 28. On the conquest of labour and social rights in Southern Europe in the 1970s, see Raquel Varela, História do Povo na Revolução Portuguesa (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2014); Encarnación Lemus, En Hamelin … La Transición Española más allá de la Frontera (Oviedo: Septem Ediciones, 2001); and Chip Dows, Os Moradores à Conquista da Cidade (Lisbon: Armazém das Letras, 1978). 29. Manuela Silva, ‘A repartição do rendimento em Portugal no pós 25 de Abril 74’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 15–17 (May 1985): 269–279. 30. Valério Arcary, O Encontro da Revolução com a História (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2006). 31. Raquel Varela, Marcel van der Linden and Hugh Murphy, Shipbuilding Labour Around the World: A Global Labour History (Amsterdam: Chicago University Press, 2017); and Raquel Varela (ed.), ‘Mundos do Trabalho Portuário’, Sindicato Internacional dos Estivadores and Observatório para Condições de Vida (IHC/FCSH/UNL, 2015–2017). 32. Hermes Augusto Costa, ‘A Construção do Pacto Social em Portugal’, Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais 39 (May 1934): 119–146. 33. ‘Jimmy Reid, the Man who Stood up to Ted Heath and Saved 8,500 Shipbuilders’ Jobs’, Daily, 12 August 2010. 34. ‘Eles chegaram ao topo e não são doutores nem engenheiros’, Público, 16 August 2010. 35. Rubén Vega García, ‘Against Market Rules: A Spanish Shipyard Nobody Wanted (Except Workers)’, in Raquel Varela, Marcel van der Linden and Hugh Murphy (eds), Shipbuilding Labour Around the World: A Global Labour History (Amsterdam: Chicago University Press, 2017), 305–319. 36. Mondays under the Sun is an outstanding Galician social drama film directed by Fernando León de Aranoa, starring remarkable actors such as Javier Bardem, Luis Tosar and José Ángel Egido. The movie depicts the degrading effects of mass unemployment on working class social groups of men left jobless by the closure of the Shipyards in Vigo, Galicia, and the class-consciousness that derives from their own lived experience. 240

notes 37. Alan Stoleroff, ‘All’s Fair in Love and (Class) War’, 2012, published in Diário da Liberdade, at: www.snesup.pt/htmls/_dlds/All_is_fair_ in_love_and_class_war_Stoleroff.pdf; and Bo Stråth, La Politica de Desindustrializacion: La Contraccion de la Industria de la Construccion Naval en Europa Occidental (Madrid: Ministerio de Trabajo y Seguridad Social, 1989). 38. The Spanish ancestor of G-knot. It is a weapon, most often referring to a handheld ligature of chain, rope, scarf, wire or fishing-line used to strangle a person. The Spanish dictatorship used it to inflict death penalties upon militants. 39. P. Callaghan and H. Hartmann, Contingent Work: A Chart Book on Parttime and Temporary Employment (Washington, DC: Economic Policy Institute, 1991). see also H.S. Farber, Alternative and Part-time Employment Arrangements as a Response to Job Loss (Cambridge: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1999); R.H. Stamford (ed.), Marginal Employment, Research in the Sociology of Work (Stamford, CT: JAI Press, 2000); Marcel van der Linden, ‘San Precario’; Ruy Braga, Politics of Precariat (New York: Brill, 2018); and Ricardo Antunes, ‘Os modos de ser da informalidade: rumo a uma nova era da precarização estrutural do trabalho?’, Serviço Social & Sociedade 107 (2011): 405–419. 40. Graça Druck, ‘Precarização social do trabalho’, in Anete B.L. Ivo, Elsa Kraychete, Ângela Borges, Cristiana Mercuri, Denise Vitale and Stella Senes (eds), Dicionário Temático Desenvolvimento e Questão Social – 81 problemáticas contemporâneas (São Paulo: Ed. Annablume, 2012), 373–380. 41. Partido Socialista Obrero Español (Spanish Socialist Workers Party). 42. James Petras, El Informe Petras: Padres e Hijos, dos generaciones de trabajadores españoles (Barcelona: Confederación General del Trabajo, 27 May 2007), at: http://cgt.org.es/sites/default/files/IMG/pdf/informe-petras.pdf. 43. Raquel Varela, Para onde vai Portugal? (Lisbon: Bertrand, 2015). 44. Hespanha Pedro, ‘Entre o Estado e o Mercado. As Fragilidades das Instituições de Proteção Social em Portugal Coimbra’, Quarteto (ed), 2000 quoted in Fonseca, Bernardete Maria, Ideologia ou Economia? Evolução da Proteção no Desemprego em Portugal (Tese de Mestrado: Universidade de Aveiro, 2008), 78. 45. Van der Linden, ‘Prefácio’. 46. Klaus Dörre, The German Job Miracle (Brussels: Rosa Luxemburg Stiftung, 2014), 6. 47. Michael Roberts, The Long Depression (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016), 152. 241

a people’s history of europe 48. Ibid., 153. 49. Dörre, The German Job Miracle, 29. 50. Max Koch and Martin Fritz (eds), Non-Standard Employment in Europe: Paradigms, Prevalence and Policy Responses (Work and Welfare in Europe Series) (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013). 51. Lars P. Feld, Miguel Otero Iglesias and Weigert, Benjamin. ‘Putting Germany’s “mini-jobs” in their context’, El Pais, 15 October 2015, Madrid. 52. ‘Active Labour Market Policies’, European Semester Thematic Fiche, European Commission, 4 May 2016, at: ec.europa.eu/europe2020/... / active_labour_market_policies_2016 (accessed 10 March 2017). 53. Ibid. 54. Founding Father of the Portuguese Psychoanalysis’ Association, at: www.publico.pt/2016/02/21/sociedade/ entrevista/-1723592. 55. Giuliano Bonoli, ‘The Political Economy of Active Labour Market Policy’, Working Papers on the Reconciliation of Work and Welfare in Europe, REC-WP 01/2010, Sixth Framework EU Programs. 56. Klaus Armingeon, ‘Active Labour Market Policy, International Organisations and Domestic Politics’, The Journal of European Public Policy 14 (2007): 905–932. 57. Nevertheless, not just any kind of unemployed, for example, to force lawyers’ wages down, there must be unemployed lawyers; to lower the value of teachers’ wages, it takes unemployed teachers, and so on. That is why nowadays the function of the school is, more and more rapidly, to train people who are totally ignorant, lack the capacity for abstract reasoning and basic functions, but that have mastered some tasks and skills. Thus, they can be quickly integrated into the labour market. This is what OECD/PISA measures really are – the imperative to create a pool of unemployed labour as quickly as possible to push down wages. ‘New Opportunities’ is the cynical term for this need to form a reserve army of the unemployed – today this is the main, ubiquitous target (covering all countries and all jobs) of the education policies designed by the World Bank. 58. Karl Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, MIA, 444.

Conclusion

1. Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). 2. This is exposed, for example, in the article on the celebration of the centenary of the Russian revolution by Jerónimo de Sousa, leader of the PCP, one of the largest communist parties in Western Europe, ‘Revolução de 242

notes Outubro: Ideais e valores para o nosso tempo’ [‘October Revolution: Ideals and values for our time’], Diário de Notícias, 7 November 2017. 3. For a critique of postmodernism, see Terry Eagleton, The Illusions of Postmodernism, 1st edn (Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, 1996); and Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (London: Verso; Reprint edition, 17 September 1998). 4. John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1st edn (New York: The Viking Press, 1939). 5. Marta Craveri, ‘The strikes of Norilsk and Vorkuta Camps and Their Role in the Breakdown of the Stalinist Forced Labour System’, in Tom Brass and Marcel van der Linden (eds), Free and Unfree Labour: The Debate Continues (Bern: Peter Lang, 1997); and Tom Brass, Labour Regime Change in the Twenty-First Century: Unfreedom, Capitalism and Primitive Accumulation (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 6. Pietro Basso, Modern Times, Ancient Hours: Working Lives in the Twenty-First Century (London: Verso, 2003). 7. Early retirement programmes were also applied in France during the period of production restructuring. 8. Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being (London: Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2009), first edition 1984. 9. Valério Arcary, O Encontro da Revolução com a História (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2006). 10. Charles Maier, ‘The two postwar eras and the conditions for stability in twentieth-century Western Europe’, American Historical Review 86(2), 327. 11. Vicor Serge, ‘Posfácio Inédito’, Ano Um da Revolução Russa [Year One of the Russian Revolution] (Lisbon: Edições Delfos, 1975), 599–625. 12. Two fundamental biographies about Stalin: Isaac Deutscher, Stalin: A Political Biography (London: Oxford University Press, 1967); and JeanJacques Marie, Staline (Paris: Fayard, 2001). 13. And hundreds of research papers from the University of Glasgow’s Study Group on the Russian Revolution, as well as hundreds of articles published by various authors in Critique: Journal of Socialist Studies. 14. China Miéville, October: The Story of the Russian Revolution, 1st edn (London: Verso, 2017). 15. Todd Chretien (ed.), Eyewitnesses to the Russian Revolution (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017). 16. Paul Le Blanc, October Song (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017). 17. Neil Faulkner, A People’s History of the Russian Revolution (New York: Pluto, 2017). 243

a people’s history of europe 18. Kevin Murphy, Revolution and Counterrevolution (New York: Berghahn Books, 2007). 19. Wendy Goldman, Woman, the State and Revolution: Soviet Family Policy and Social Life, 1917–1936 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 20. Alexander Rabinowitch, The Bolsheviks come to Power (New York: Pluto Press, 2017). 21. Marcel van der Linden, Western Marxism and the Soviet Union (Leiden: Brill, 2007). 22. Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921, Vol. 1 (London: Verso, 2004 [1954]); The Prophet Unarmed: Leon Trotsky, 1921–29, Vol. 2 (London: Verso, 2004 [1959]); and The Prophet Outcast: Leon Trotsky, 1929–40, Vol. 3 (London: Verso Books, 2005 [1963]). 23. Pierre Broué, História da Internacional Comunista, 1919–1943, Vol. 1: Ascensão e Queda (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2007); Pierre Broué, O Partido Bolchevique (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2014). 24. Simon Sebag Montefiore, ‘Estaline – a Corte do Czar Vermelho’, Expresso, 2017. Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (New York: Vintage, 2005). 25. Industrial Relations Data (IRData) – International Labour Organization, at: www.ilo.org/global/topics/collective-bargaining.../index.htm (accessed 2 January 2018). 26. Lenin’s Final Fight, Speeches & Writings 1922–1923 (New York: Pathfinder, 2015). 27. Lenin, ‘Letter to the Congress’, 22, 23, 26 and 29 December, at: www. marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/dec/testamnt/congress.htm. 28. Victor Serge, Ano Um da Revolução Russa [Year One of the Russian Revolution] (Lisbon: Edições Delfos, 1975), 600. 29. Jiri Pelikan, ‘The Struggle for Socialism in Czechoslovakia’, New Left Review 1(71) (January–February 1972); Hillel H. Ticktin, ‘Towards a Political Economy of the USSR’, Critique 1 (Spring 1973). 30. Márcio Lauria Monteiro, ‘Revolução Russa e revisionismo historiográfico: o retorno neoliberal da “tese da continuidade”’, História e Luta de Classes 19, March 2015 (Brazil), 25. 31. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 1st edn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1973). 32. Felipe Demier, O Que é Uma Revolução? (with Varela and Arcary) (Lisbon: Colibri, 2016); and Felipe Demier, O Longo Bonapartismo Brasileiro 1930–1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Maud, 2013). 33. Márcio Lauria Monteiro, ‘Revolução Russa e revisionismo historiográfico’, 29. 244

notes 34. See Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy: The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921; The Prophet Unarmed: Leon Trotsky, 1921–29; and The Prophet Outcast: Leon Trotsky, 1929–40. 35. Escritos de Leon Trotsky, Vol. V (1933–1934), Vol. 1 (Bogotá: Ed. Pluma, 1976), 343. The Writings of Leon Trotsky were also published in English, in 14 volumes, by Pathfinder Press (New York, 1991). Here Trotsky criticises Radek’s statement (in the Berliner Tageblatt) that ‘if working class children do not get enough milk, this is explained by the scarcity of cows and not by the absence of socialism’. ‘Despite all its captivating simplicity,’ Trotsky argues, ‘this theory is radically false. Socialism presupposes not only the nationalization of the means of production but also the ability of the latter to satisfy all human needs.’ The article is titled ‘On the Eve of the Congress’ and was first published in The Militant, 10 February 1934. 36. André Breton, Position politique du surréalisme (Paris: Librairie Générale Française,1997); and André Breton, Manifestos do Surrealismo, translated by Luiz Forbes, 1st edn (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985); and André Breton and Leon Trotsky, Por uma arte revolucionária independente, translated by Carmem Silva Guedes and Rosa Boaventura, 1st edn (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1985). Breton was a founder of the Surrealist movement and militant against socialist realism and the condemnation of artists. 37. See Isaac Deutscher’s trilogy: The Prophet Armed: Trotsky 1879–1921; The Prophet Unarmed: Leon Trotsky, 1921–29; and The Prophet Outcast: Leon Trotsky, 1929–40. 38. Leonardo Padura, The Man Who Loved Dogs (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014). 39. Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon (New York: Vintage Classics, 2019). 40. Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova, The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2015), 4. 41. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1st edn (New York: Vintage Books, 1996). 42. Felipe Demier, O Que é Uma Revolução? (with Varela and Arcary) (Lisbon: Colibri, 2016); and Felipe Demier, O Longo Bonapartismo Brasileiro 1930–1964 (Rio de Janeiro: Maud, 2013). 43. Demier, O Longo Bonapartismo Brasileiro 1930–1964. 44. Carlos Eduardo Rebello de Mendonça, Trotsky e A Revolução Permanente: História de Um Conceito Chave (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2014). 45. Michael Löwy, A Política do Desenvolvimento Desigual e Combinado (São Paulo: Sundermann, 2010). 46. Franz Mehring, Karl Marx: The Story of his Life (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1962), 265. 245

a people’s history of europe 47. Terry Eagleton, A Função da Crítica (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1991), 116. Published in English as: The Function of Criticism: From The Spectator to Post-Structuralism (London: Verso, 1984). 48. Ellen Wood and John Bellamy Foster, Em Defesa da História. Marxismo e Pós-modernismo (Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar Editores, 1997). See Ellen Meiksins Wood and John Bellamy Foster, In Defense of History: Marxism and the Postmodern Agenda (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997). 49. Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Retreat of the Intellectuals, Socialist Register, 1990. Republished in Jacobin, at: www.jacobinmag.com/2016/01/ellenmeiksins-wood-gramsci-socialism-capitalism-intellectuals-post modernism-identity/ (accessed 2 February 2018). 50. Ricardo Antunes, The Meanings of Work: Essay on the Affirmation and Negation of Work, 2nd edn (Leiden: Brill, 2012).

246

Index 1929 crisis, 24, 29, 33, 42–56, 61, 81, 146, 174, 185, 203, 204, 214 Afghanistan, 129, 131, 132, 210 Africa, 1, 74, 121, 123, 126, 131, 132, 160, 166 North Africa, 6, 26, 27, 69, 127 Albania, 25, 75, 77, 103, 104, 107, 170 Algeria, 26, 110, 118, 119, 122, 123, 137, 140, 141, 143, 154, 171 Allende, Salvador, 159, 162–3, 164, 165 anarchism, 10, 60 anarchists, 4, 8, 42, 56, 57, 58, 59, 75, 76, 77, 136 Anderson, Perry, 26–7, 95, 100, 166 Angola, 112, 132 Arab Spring (2010), 128, 130 Arcary, Valério, 19, 25, 172 Asia, 14, 26, 74, 81, 93, 120, 121, 160, 162, 187, 189 Asia Minor, 80, 130 atomic bomb. See nuclear weapons Auschwitz, 50, 97, 204 Australia, 5, 126 Austria, 4, 24, 30, 44, 65, 66, 70, 71, 85, 183, 192, 200 Austro-Hungarian Empire, 2, 35, 65 Bakunin, Mikhail, 9, 59 Balkan Europe, xi, 1, 3 Baltic States, 2, 36, 92 Barcelona, 8, 56, 57, 176, 195 Basque people, 72, 153–6, 187 Basso, Pietro, 22, 135

Belgium, 1, 4, 77, 96, 99, 102, 191, 192 Berlin, 1, 32, 37, 51, 70, 90, 92, 96, 109–11, 112, 129, 134, 135, 151, 206 Berlin Wall, 22, 42, 90, 108, 110, 116, 183, 184, 187, 190, 206 Bloody Sunday (1905), 15, 20 Bloody Sunday (1972), 161 Bolshevik Party, 2, 5, 11, 14, 17, 18, 19, 20, 22, 35, 36, 39, 40, 46, 93, 144, 209, 210, 213 triennium, 24, 56 Broué, Pierre, 11, 52, 55, 61, 64, 209 Cambodia, 111, 119, 120, 162 Canada, 84, 91, 131 Castro, Fidel, 111, 112, 113 Catalonia, 26, 61, 72 Central Europe, 1, 92, 94 Chile, 114, 162–5, 172, 173 China, 1, 25, 26, 27, 29, 68, 79, 93, 107, 119, 120, 137, 141, 142, 160, 179, 180, 191 Communist Party, 28, 181 Christian Democracy Party, 115, 142, 151, 152, 163, 175 Churchill, Winston, 31, 67, 74, 81, 90, 91, 95 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 90, 112, 163, 173 CNT (National Confederation of Labour), 56, 59 Cold War, 48, 93, 95, 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 118, 119, 120, 203, 214 247

a people’s history of europe concentration camps, 71, 204, 211 Cuba, 25, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119 Bay of Pigs, 112, 114 Cuban Missile Crisis (1961), 112, 113, 114, 116 Czechoslovakia, 30, 36, 68, 103, 107, 108 Prague Spring (1968), 24, 107, 119, 146–51, 205, 208 Darfur, 124 Debbs, Eugene, 12 De Gaulle, Charles, 31, 67, 68, 75, 76, 101, 122, 126, 135, 142, 143 Denmark, 99, 190, 92, 202 depressions (economic), 24, 49, 60, 96, 201 Great Depression (1870), 23 EEC (European Economic Community), 99, 101, 102, 174, 182, 191, 198, 192, 202, 204, 214 Egypt, 29, 42, 120, 127, 130, 159 Eisenhower, Dwight D., 108, 112 Engels, Friedrich, 10, 24, 216 ETA (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna), 153, 154, 156, 162 Ethiopia, 1, 68, 120, 124, 160 European Union, 83, 87, 93–103, 196, 203, 205, 215 fascism, 5, 29, 31, 33, 42, 46, 49, 52, 53–4, 60, 66, 75, 77, 78, 97, 152, 156, 158, 166, 204, 210 Finland, 2, 5, 191 First International, 9, 10, 59 First World War, ix, 2, 3, 4, 5, 10, 12, 21, 26, 29–30, 31, 41, 47, 56, 57, 65, 85, 88, 94, 95, 98, 115, 124, 130, 182 Fordism, 7, 87, 193

France, 1, 2, 8, 13, 16, 17, 21, 56, 63, 64, 65, 83, 84, 85, 86, 87, 93–8, 101, 103, 108, 109, 119, 154, 155, 178 182, 189, 213, 214 Algeria, 26 colonisation, 120, 121, 122, 123, 125, 126, 171 First World War, 4, 56 French Communist Party (PCF), 63, 76, 87, 97, 140, 144, 151 Indochina, 26 May ’68, 24, 113, 134–46, 151, 171, 175, 189, 208 popular front, 29, 30, 45, 47, 55, 61–2, 64, 65, 96, 128, 147, 185 Second World War, 5, 24, 47, 61, 67–9, 75–7, 89 Franco, Francisco, 57, 58, 61, 102, 153, 156, 157, 176 Francoism, 57, 76, 155, 156, 157, 158, 173 French Revolution, 2, 7, 213 Fukuyama, Francis, 203, 212 Gaddafi, Muammar el-, 126, 127, 128 Gandhi, Mahatma, 4, 26 German Revolution (1919–23), 16, 23, 24, 29–38, 49 Germany, 2, 24, 42, 47, 48, 49, 52, 56, 62, 65, 83, 85, 86, 87, 93–9, 100, 101, 110, 129, 143, 145, 181, 182, 192, 197, 200, 211, 213, 214 colonisation, 125, 162 Communist Party of Germany (KPD), 9, 53, 54 East Germany, 103, 104, 112 First World War, 4, 5, 8, 9, 36, 37 Second World War, 16, 67–82, 108–9, 114 Weimar Republic, 48, 49, 53, 55, 206

248

index West Germany, 97, 99, 103, 134–5, 145, 190 Gramsci, Antonio, 6, 7, 32, 220n28 Great Britain, 44, 49, 55, 56, 64, 68, 86, 91, 92, 94, 99, 106, 126, 134, 139, 159, 173, 180, 189, 214. See also United Kingdom (UK) England, 1, 4, 5, 8, 17, 24, 26, 27, 42, 43, 61, 67, 68, 76, 80, 85, 91, 94, 95, 120, 121, 178, 213 Labour Party, 4, 43 Greece, x, 6, 75, 78, 80–82, 89, 90, 92, 103, 171, 175–6, 190, 197 Guevara, Che, 111, 113, 118, 137 Guinea, 122, 123, 124 Gulag, 39, 40, 150, 204, 211 Guatemala, 112 Harman, Chris, 23, 40 Hemingway, Ernest, 58, 130 Hiroshima, 69, 72, 73, 74 Hitler, Adolf, 30, 31, 36, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51, 52, 53, 54, 55, 56, 60, 61, 62, 63, 65, 67, 68, 73, 90, 93, 110, 114, 121, 212 Hobsbawm, Eric, 2, 13, 29, 64, 126, 127 Ho Chi Minh, 111 Holocaust, 71–2, 78 Hungarian Revolution, 24, 105–7, 205 Hungary, 35, 36, 65, 103–5, 108 Iberian Peninsula, xi, 1, 173, 195 IMF (International Monetary Fund), 100 India, 26, 27, 29, 119, 120, 131, 161, 181, 191 Indochina, 1, 119 Indonesia, 24, 120, 126 Industrial Revolution, 2, 45, 80

International Workingmen’s Association (IWA), 9, 59 Iraq, 27, 119, 120, 127, 132, 210 Ireland, 25, 29, 99, 137, 146, 161, 182, 191 Iron Curtain, 38, 90, 92 Israel, 120, 128–30, 159, 161 Italy, 5, 8, 24, 32, 33, 35, 56–7, 66, 76, 77, 78, 84, 86, 88, 89, 93, 96, 97, 99, 101–2, 126–7, 140, 142, 152, 162, 173, 175, 189, 213 Caporetto, 13 Japan, 2, 15, 26, 27, 67, 69, 73, 74, 77, 87, 97, 98, 119, 120, 139, 204 Hiroshima, 69, 72, 73, 74 Nagasaki, 69, 73, 74 Jews, 38, 53, 56, 69–72, 128, 130 Karl Marx Hof, 65, 66 Kennedy, John F., 110, 111, 112, 113 Kerensky, 21, 40 Keynesianism, 44, 102, 204 Kissinger, Henry, 154, 159 Korea, 25, 79, 93, 96 Khrushchev, Nikita, 38, 79, 105, 110, 111, 112, 113, 119 Kurdistan, 27 labour camps, 70, 71, 204 concentration camps, 71, 204, 211 Gulag, 39, 40, 150, 204, 211 Laos, 110, 111, 120, 162 League of Nations, 27, 37. See also United Nations Lebanon, 120, 128 Le Havre, 63, 94 Lenin, V. I., 11, 14, 16, 19, 20, 23, 35, 36, 37, 38, 40, 41, 46, 69, 77, 123, 171, 188, 209, 211 Levi, Primo, 50, 67, 97 249

a people’s history of europe Liberia, 1, 120 Libya, 120, 126, 127, 128, 132 Liebknecht, Karl, 9, 37 Loach, Ken, 86 London, xi, 32, 87, 88, 96, 109, 113, 122, 131, 134, 137 London, Jack, 45–6 Lukács, György, 35–6 Luxembourg, 93, 96, 99, 102 Luxemburg, Rosa, 3–4, 9, 37, 219n12 Maastricht Treaty (1992), 99, 100 Madrid, 57, 60, 61, 153, 154, 157, 158, 174 Maier, Charles, 89, 208 Mali, 132 Mao Zedong, 28, 141, 160 Márquez, Gabriel Garcia, 89, 104–5 Marshall Plan, 79, 96, 110, 114, 214 Marx, Karl, x, xi, 9, 10, 13, 24, 35, 43, 45, 50, 88, 168, 186, 202, 205, 214, 216 Marxism, xi, 9, 25, 50, 51, 59, 61, 79, 138, 181 Marxism Today (journal), 64 May ’68, 24, 113, 134–46, 151, 171, 175, 189, 208 Mesopotamia, 6, 27 Mexico, 26, 28, 29, 46, 129, 134, 213 Middle East, 26, 27, 126–30, 131, 132, 138, 159, 160 Morocco, 64, 122 Moscow, 4, 16, 17, 22, 23, 29, 40, 69, 79, 95, 104, 107, 109, 112, 113, 123, 129, 159–60, 164, 213 Moscow Trials, 16, 213 Mozambique, 166 Munich, 48, 68, 128–9 Mussolini, Benito, 33, 68, 76, 78, 127, 142

Nagasaki, 69, 73, 74 Nagy, Imre, 104, 105 Nasser, Gamal Abdel, 119, 127, 130 Nazism, 29, 30, 31, 37, 47–56, 61, 63, 64, 66–72, 76, 77, 78, 79, 81, 85, 87, 89, 105, 110, 114, 116, 118, 128, 129, 141, 146, 147, 149, 154, 203, 204, 205, 207, 211 Netherlands, 1, 67, 77, 93, 96, 102, 121, 145, 182, 191, 192 New York, 42, 72, 113, 121, 172 Nigeria, 124, 125, 126 Nixon, Richard, 159, 160, 162, 171 Norway, 77, 85, 99, 182 nuclear weapons 69, 72–4, 78, 91, 108, 112, 114, 132 October Revolution (1917), 2, 6, 13, 14, 19, 20, 21, 24, 25, 40–41, 56, 64, 127, 203, 207 OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development), 92, 202 Olympic games, 128–9 Orwell, George, 31, 58, 80, 211 Ottoman Empire, x, 6, 35, 126 Palestine, 128, 129, 130, 132 Paris Commune, 2, 8, 25, 35, 62, 213 Paxton, Robert O., xi, 52 Pelz, William, 12, 42, 51 Petrograd, 15, 18, 19, 20, 188 Pinochet, Augusto, 114, 159, 164, 165 Poland, 2, 3, 30, 38, 61, 68, 71, 98, 100, 103, 105, 106, 108, 134, 145, 146, 149, 188, 197 Portugal, x, 1, 8, 13, 24, 26, 85, 86, 99, 102–3, 105, 121, 124–5, 126, 134, 137, 145, 152, 153, 157, 163, 165, 170, 171, 172–4, 176, 188, 250

index 189–90, 192, 194, 195, 197, 200, 202, 209, 213 Carnation Revolution (1974–5), 22, 165–72, 205 Portuguese revolution, 5, 24, 92, 139, 140, 167, 168, 171, 172, 173, 174, 176, 185 Prague Spring (1968), 24, 107, 119, 146–51, 205, 208 Prashad, Vijay, 121, 133 Pravda (newspaper), 11, 19, 20 Rakovsky, Christian, 11–12 Reagan, Ronald, 189 Reed, John, 3, 28 Roma people, 70, 71 Romania, 36, 103, 107, 108, 149 Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 31, 45, 47, 54, 77, 94 Russian Revolution (1917), xi, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13–15, 18–25, 29, 33, 36, 41, 54, 164, 205, 207, 209, 210, 211, 212. See also October Revolution (1917) Salazar, Oliveira, 47, 72, 131, 153, 166, 190 Saudi Arabia, 120, 131 Schumann declaration (1948), 96, 214–15 Scotland, 26, 188 Second International, 10, 12, 65 Second World War, xi, 5, 16, 21, 24, 29, 30, 31, 44, 47, 61, 67–82, 85, 87, 95, 98, 103, 105, 107, 108, 115, 118, 120, 121, 124, 127, 152, 155, 179, 180, 184, 187, 191, 198, 204, 206, 207, 214, 215 Serbia, 2, 5, 78 Serge, Victor, 4, 23, 39, 211, 213 Siberia, 89, 108

Slovakia, 35, 100 South Africa, 124, 160, 166 Spain, viii, 13, 16, 24, 26, 29, 30, 32, 44, 55–61, 76, 101, 102, 103, 121, 122, 125, 152–8, 162, 163, 171, 172–7, 182, 188, 190, 194, 195, 197, 205, 213 SPD (Social Democratic Party of Germany), 9, 10, 51, 53, 54, 55, 199, 207 Stalin, Joseph, 16, 19, 20, 31, 38, 39, 40, 54, 63, 68, 74, 77, 81, 90, 92, 95, 141, 209, 211, 212 Stalinism, 5, 11, 16, 22, 25, 30, 38–41, 52, 53, 54, 105, 140, 147, 171, 207, 211, 212, 228n46 St Petersburg, 13, 18, 29 Sweden, 73, 163, 189, 190, 197, 198, 200 Switzerland, 11, 70, 73, 186 Syria, 120, 127, 132, 159, 179 Taylorism, 7, 33 Thailand, 162 Thatcher, Margaret, 86, 180, 189, 207, 212 Third International, 11, 52, 171, 215 Tilly, Charles, 18, 22, 139 Tito, Josip, 78–9, 104 Tokyo, 69, 72, 74, 108 Treaty of Versailles, 37, 49, 88 Trotsky, Leon, 11, 16, 18, 20, 22, 31, 36, 46, 52, 53, 57, 62, 76, 77, 95, 136, 140, 171, 209, 211, 212, 213 Truman, Harry, 69, 73, 74, 90, 91, 92, 93, 163 Trump, Donald, 66 tsars, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 20–21, 38, 40 Turkey, 6, 80, 87, 90, 92, 1112, 113, 114, 120, 127, 176 Ukraine, 2, 70, 149

251

a people’s history of europe United Kingdom (UK), 25, 78, 86, 93, 98, 103, 108, 109, 124, 127, 161, 182, 184, 189, 190. See also Great Britain United Nations, 37, 74, 123, 128, 198. See also League of Nations United States, 2, 4, 17, 44, 56, 63, 73, 74, 79, 91, 108, 111, 112, 113, 120, 126, 128, 129, 132, 138, 160, 162, 172, 214 USSR, 16, 22, 23, 30, 36, 39, 52, 55, 57, 107, 124, 129, 142, 159, 160, 168, 211, 212, 216 Afghanistan, 141 Cold War, 48, 93, 95, 98, 102, 104, 107, 108, 109, 110, 118, 119, 120, 203, 214 Cuban Missile Crisis (1961), 112, 113, 114, 116 fall of, 86, 90, 108, 116, 121, 180, 186, 190, 204, 206, 208, 209, 210 foreign policy, 27–8

Prague Spring (1968), 24, 107, 119, 146–51, 205, 208 Second World War, 31, 61, 62, 67, 68, 75, 76, 77, 79, 90 Stalin, 31, 40, 82, 213 Yalta, 73–4 Vatican, 114–17 Vienna, 5, 65, 66, 70, 92, 110 Vietnam, 24, 25, 92, 93, 110, 111, 112, 118, 119, 120, 121, 125, 131, 137, 138–9, 149, 150, 154, 159, 160, 162, 171 Wall Street, 42, 214 Warsaw Pact, 79, 95, 103–8, 146, 149, 168 Weimar Republic, 48, 49, 53, 55, 206 Yalta Conference (1945), 69, 73–4, 81, 90, 109, 147 Yugoslavia, 25, 75, 78–9, 89, 104, 149

252

Thanks to our Patreon Subscribers: Abdul Alkalimat Andrew Perry Who have shown their generosity and comradeship in difficult times.

Check out the other perks you get by subscribing to our Patreon – visit patreon.com/plutopress. Subscriptions start from £3 a month.

The Pluto Press Newsletter Hello friend of Pluto! Want to stay on top of the best radical books we publish? Then sign up to be the first to hear about our new books, as well as special events, podcasts and videos. You’ll also get 50% off your first order with us when you sign up. Come and join us! Go to bit.ly/PlutoNewsletter