The Revolution Within the Revolution: Workers' Control in Rural Portugal

by Nancy G. Bermeo

Overview

In this dramatic story of the making and unmaking of Portugal's agrarian reform, Nancy Bermeo probes the origins and effects of the workers' actions.

Originally published in 1986.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780691639086
Publisher:	Princeton University Press
Publication date:	04/19/2016
Series:	Princeton Legacy Library , #427
Pages:	286
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.30(h) x 1.20(d)

Read an Excerpt

The Revolution within the Revolution

Workers' Control in Rural Portugal

---

By Nancy Gina Bermeo

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-07688-1

---

CHAPTER 1

The Preconditions for Radicalization

In order to understand the emergence of workers' control in agriculture, one must understand those aspects of rural social structure that fostered radicalization. Most are rooted deep in regional history.

Landholding and Low Productivity in the Past

The Prerepublican Period

The patterns of landholding that the rural proletarians of the South sought to obliterate were established in the twelfth century at the time of the Reconquista. It was then that Afonso III ended more than five hundred years of Moorish domination, ceding huge tracts of territory to military leaders as defense posts against the Moors. When the battles were over, the Christian victors were rewarded with permanent possession of the lands on which they fought. Joined by the religious orders (who had scored an important victory of their own), the new regional elites came to possess "most of the land" in the South.

The new and very large landholdings were concentrated in the South because it was there that the struggle with the Moors really focused. The Moorish penetration of the North had been seriously hampered by the region's Atlantic climate, hilly terrain, and relatively strong nobility. The Tejo was thus, for generations, the boundary between the Moorish and Christian worlds.

The new elites of the South organized their lands as latifúndia for the cultivation of cereal crops just as the Roman conquerors in the same area had done centuries before. In Roman times, the region was known as "the granary" of the empire, but its productive capabilities had changed markedly by the thirteenth century because the slaves who had worked the lands for first the Romans and then the Moors were gone. In fact, the whole region had become depopulated due to the destruction and danger of the war. If the land were to be worked, the new owners would have to both attract and secure the labor to do it. They failed in this, as they failed in restoring the Alentejo to its former productive position. In fact, the low productivity of the region was to plague heads of state for centuries.

Underutilization was the root of the problem. But monarch after monarch failed to coerce the local landed elite into either more extensive or more intensive farming. Royal decrees demanding the immediate cultivation of southern lands were issued as early as 1362, but the calls went unheeded and the Alentejo remained a rugged wasteland. Seventeenth-century accounts bemoan the "indifference" of the area's landowners and note that "without investment" the miserable and "half-cultivated countryside" could not support even its own "shrinking population."

The nationalization of religious properties in the 1820s and the elimination of feudal obligations in 1832 were to have improved the productivity of the area but were disappointing in effect. Land was now a commodity bought up by an urban bourgeoisie, but its productivity remained problematic. Since small farmers could not hope to outbid the urban bourgeoisie at the public auctions where the land was sold, a nouveau riche simply replaced the older landed elite, holding properties as large or even larger than those of their predecessors.

More land was cleared, and productivity did indeed begin to rise by the middle of the nineteenth century (due in large part to government investment in railroads and roads), but the region's potential remained untapped. Personal reports from the latter half of the century describe the area as a deserted region that "never fully recovered" from the wars against the Moors. An account by a nineteenth-century English nobleman gives us a vivid picture of the region and its problems:

With the exception of the small properties in the immediate vicinity of the principal towns, agriculture appears to be unknown in the Alem-Tejo. ... People of substance [have organized] extensive estates, these have descended from father to son and, through mismanagement and neglect, are at this moment so many waste lands in the possession of proprietors who themselves have not the means of cultivating them, and who will not allow others to do so.

The region that had once been a fertile granary served neither the cereal needs of an ever-expanding urban population nor the employment needs of the dwindling local populace. A vicious circle emerged whereby the underutilization of land produced out-migration, out-migration raised the price of labor, and "high" wage bills discouraged utilization even further. Periodic attempts to break the cycle with guaranteed grain prices had unforeseen negative consequences. The infamous Wheat Law of 1899 guaranteed domestic wheat growers protection from imports and a price that was two times the international market rate. This stimulated a twofold increase in Alentejan wheat production, but the nation was still forced to import half its wheat and a third of all its cereals. More important, perhaps, was the fact that the problem of the underutilization of land had still not been solved. Much of the increase in wheat production came not from clearing land but from changing crops. Moreover, the absenteeism and low investment that had created the crises of production in the first place still remained. The laws, and indeed the whole state, would change radically with the birth of the First Republic in 1910, but the problems of production in the South would continue.

The First Republic, 1910-1926

Portugal's First Republic was racked with troubles, but few were as perplexing and far-reaching as those that emanated from the Alentejo. The problems of production that had plagued previous leaders were made more salient by the politicization that accompanied the establishment of the Republic. The class divisions that lay at the base of this politicization were deep and enduring — so enduring that they would reemerge as the stimulus for radicalization sixty years later.

Predictably, the most important class division was between those who owned land and those who worked it. Agricultural wage workers were numerically dominant in most of the Alentejo by the mid-nineteenth century. In Beja, for example, some 60 percent of the agricultural work force was wage labor as early as 1845.

Though reports of politicization among southern farmworkers date from at least the 1800s, it was the founding of the Republic that precipitated the emergence of farmworkers' unions and agricultural strikes. There were literally none of the former before 1910, but by 1914 there were 110 union locals for farmworkers. Each of these lay south of the Tejo. All the counties in Evora contained a local as did 70 percent of the counties in Beja and 75 percent of the counties in Portalegre.

Strike activity followed closely on the organization of the unions. In the district of Evora alone, seventy farmworkers' strikes erupted between 1910 and 1925. Most, if not all, of these strikes were prompted by a desire for higher wages. But rural workers' congresses issued demands that went beyond what could be characterized as merely "trade unionist." In 1925, for example, the National Congress of Rural Workers' Unions demanded the "integral and complete socialization of agricultural property" and proposed that the agricultural work of the future be organized exclusively by unions. Neither of these demands were met, of course, but they were reflective of a widespread belief that property relations in the South should change.

A whole series of Republican ministers struggled with the problems of production in the South, but their efforts were as fruitless as those of their predecessors. Republican leaders were compelled to act by newly organized and politicized workers' groups but, like their pre-Republican counterparts, they were also moved by the belief that the Alentejo held the key to Portugal's future. Many hoped that the region "could play the role of the American Far West" — if, like the West, it were properly colonized. Thus, in 1911, Agricultural Minister Ezequiel de Campos proposed that all uncultivated land in the South be nationalized and then sold, on credit, to family farmers. The scheme was to improve production in the South and to rechannel the wave of emigration to Brazil, giving Portugal its own frontier. This, and even other less radical schemes to alter land tenure, failed to become law. In fact, the distorted size of the southern properties was actually accentuated during the Republican period.

With absenteeism largely unchanged and the structural distortions of the region growing worse, it is perhaps not surprising that the fields of the Alentejo failed to meet the domestic demand for wheat. Production rose irregularly and never managed to keep pace with demand: the difference between the two was as great in the first five years of the Republic as it was in the last.

Grain production problems and the resultant balance of payments crises helped to bring the Republic itself to an end in 1926. As Antonio Salazar became minister of finance in 1928, and then prime minister in 1932, Portugal entered a period in which yet another new state would make fruitless attempts to improve the agriculture of the South.

The Alentejo Under the Salazar-Caetano Regime, 1932-1974

Salazar was an extraordinary man and he created an extraordinary regime. Its uniqueness derived in part from its origins. Mussolini and Hitler rose to power as heads of national movements. Franco fought his way to power in a civil war. Salazar was simply handed power by the military officers who overthrew the Republic. He was a professor of economics at the University of Coimbra and almost unknown outside the academic community. The fiery oratory and the spectacular displays of mass support that were intrinsic to the emergence of other dictatorships were absent in the Portuguese case. Salazar was stoic, devoutly religious, and inward-looking, and he expected the nation he dominated to be the same.

At the level of organization, this implied a deliberate attempt to forge an apolitical society where conflicting interests would not have free expression. Political parties and free trade unions were banned, the press was censored, and a secret police force came to permeate all levels of society from the ministries to the neighborhood cafes. In these respects, Salazar's regime resembled the other interwar dictatorships, but there were important differences as well. First of all, Salazar's "party," the Uniao Nacional, was not a mass-mobilizing agency. Membership was small, activities were few, and association was not mandatory — even for cabinet members. Second, Portugal was not a developmentalist regime. Mussolini and Hitler linked industrialization to military expansion and had elaborate plans for both. Franco had no plans for military expansion but adopted an ambitious and successful industrialization program after 1959. Salazar remained suspicious of industrialization and was reluctant to follow suit. His primary aim was to right the disequilibrium brought on by the Republic: to crush the left, to balance the budget, and to restore the balance of trade. His policies in the Alentejo were an important component of these goals.

In many respects, Salazar faced a more serious problem in the Alentejo than any of his predecessors. Urbanization was at an all-time high, and demand for bread — and thus wheat — showed no signs of decreasing. Yet, the foreign supply that had satisfied this demand in the past was proving increasingly costly. In the last years of the Republic, the importation of approximately 150,000 tons of wheat annually "was one of the heaviest charges" the nation had to meet, comprising a weighty 22 percent of its balance of payments deficit.

Yet, if imports were curtailed, how would domestic demand be met? Republican leaders had argued that production would only be increased with the restructuring of property relations. Salazar himself, while still a student of economics, had drawn a similar conclusion, but the leaders of the post-Republican state were hardly likely to antagonize the landed elites with redistribution schemes. Mobilized since the 1860s and extremely active in the anti-Republican movement, the latifundiarios were among the new regime's most important allies. If domestic production were to be increased, it would be increased through a process that would leave the properties and the interests of the landed elites unscathed.

The Wheat Campaign of 1929 was the answer to the new regime's dilemma. The Portuguese program was modeled on Mussolini's campaign in Italy and was intended to stimulate production through a combination of guaranteed prices and bonuses. The latter, called prémios de arroteia, were awarded for seeding previously uncultivated land with wheat. Coupled with the increased use of fertilizers, these bonuses did, in fact, stimulate production. Average annual wheat production rose 70 percent over the Republican average, and the nation's wheat import bill plummeted, dropping 95 percent between 1929 and 1933.

Though the Wheat Campaign seemed to solve the import problem, it exacerbated other problems. In their zeal to take advantage of their cultivation bonuses, latifundiários cut down thousands of trees and precipitated a soil erosion crisis. Moreover, the campaign had been so poorly designed that a great deal of the increased production merely rotted because of insufficient infrastructural support. Roads and transportation were among the worst in Europe but the most serious problem was that of storage. Only the largest and most modern estates had their own storage facilities, and the state had no storage facilities of its own. Proposals for county-level warehouses and silos were being studied by 1932, but in the years before they were built, grain was stored precariously in homes, schools, and even Évora's municipal theater.

The final and perhaps the major problem with the Wheat Campaign was that it did not produce a genuine modernization of agriculture. This was one of its official goals, but while there was indeed an increase in the use of fertilizers and machinery during the campaign, Portuguese agriculture remained what many believed to be the most backward in all of Europe.

Part of the problem with the modernization of agriculture in the South derived from Salazar's own romanticization of rural life. He even ran a contest for the "Most Portuguese Village in Portugal," rewarding the most "traditional" village in the nation for "combatting foreign ideas" in dress, music, and life style. This excerpt from a 1932 interview illustrates how his appreciation for the spiritual values of rural life was tainted with a certain hostility to technological change.

We are not seduced by or satisfied with the acme of technique, or the machinery that lessens the man, or the delirium of the mechanical ... if the wings of the spirit do not touch them. The ideal is to flee from the materialism of today: to make the fields more fertile without silencing therein the merry songs of the girls.

The "girls" of the Alentejo's fields were surely not as merry as Salazar maintained and were even less so after the Wheat Campaign came to an end. Thousands of families had been attracted to the area through a government internal colonization program. The project was a redistribution of people rather than property, for it aimed only at the provision of additional labor for the more intensive cultivation brought on by the campaign. Sharecroppers and seeders grew in number as the campaign progressed, but they were forced into much more precarious proletarian positions when it ground to a halt. As a result, the proletarianization that had begun centuries earlier and then decreased now increased, both rapidly and greatly. Table 1.2 illustrates the dramatic trend.

Between the end of the Wheat Campaign and the 1960s the members of this enlarged proletarian class suffered greatly as the landowners around them no longer required their labor. Some landowners turned toward mechanization, but most merely returned to the practices of the past, leaving huge tracts of (now depleted) soil unused and thousands of people unemployed.

The existence and continuing growth of this large and underemployed proletariat was potentially detrimental to the security of the new regime. Continued poverty and increasing frustrations among the people of the rural South were bound to fuel political conflict and thus disturb the order that Salazar had so solemnly promised to preserve. Eventually he decided that the solution for the problem of the South, and indeed for the nation as a whole, was corporatism. As a philosophical perspective, corporatism was rooted deeply in Portuguese political culture and tradition. Based on the premise that hierarchy is natural, that the state is natural, and that the role of the state is to ensure social harmony despite hierarchy, corporatism implies a powerful and autonomous state apparatus.

(Continues...)

---

Excerpted from The Revolution within the Revolution by Nancy Gina Bermeo. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

---

Table of Contents

• FrontMatter, pg. i
• CONTENTS, pg. vii
• LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS, pg. ix
• LIST OF TABLES, pg. xi
• PREFACE, pg. xiii
• LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS, pg. xix
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 3
• ONE. The Preconditions for Radicalization, pg. 9
• TWO. The Political Revolution as a Prelude to the Occupations, pg. 35
• THREE. The Social Revolution and Mass Mobilization in the Countryside, pg. 60
• FOUR. “The Land to Those Who Work It”: The Revolution in Portel, pg. 84
• SUMMARY, pg. 99
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 103
• FIVE. Workers' Control and Its Effects on the Workplace, pg. 106
• SIX. Workers' Control and the Lives of the Workers, pg. 131
• SUMMARY, pg. 158
• INTRODUCTION, pg. 163
• SEVEN. Party Politics and the Problem of Articulation in Portugal, pg. 171
• EIGHT. Conclusion: Lessons from the Portuguese, pg. 205
• APPENDIX I. Questionnaire, 1980, pg. 223
• APPENDIX II. Chronology of Constitutional Governments, July 1976 to June 1983, pg. 239
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY, pg. 241
• INDEX, pg. 259