April 23, 2024
For forty years I have been writing an article about each decade of the revolution of April 25, 1974 that brought democracy back to Portugal after 48 years of dictatorship. The analysis of interpretative or prospective priorities shows that over the years I have been faced with two resentments, one the major one, the other secondary. To both I have responded, without resentment, but with arguments and justification for political choices. I’m referring to resentment of the lost opportunity and resentment of the lost past. Over the course of this long period, the two resentments have changed their positions of relative prominence. The first resentment dominated in the first three decades and the second has dominated ever since.
There are two types of resentment: the historical-ideological and the interpersonal-intra-community. In both cases, what is at stake is emotions or feelings that dramatize damage considered unjust in an ethical-moral and therefore non-political way. They always involve the existence and celebration of victims. Both types of resentment demonize the aggressor and, in the case of historical-ideological resentment, repentance or reparation is much more difficult, if not impossible. In the resentments that abound in contemporary society, we find components of both types of resentment, but it is always possible to detect nuances and prevalences. In this text I’m dealing exclusively with historical-ideological resentment.
The resentment of the lost opportunity.
The revolution of April 25, 1974 unleashed two extraordinary political energies that were intertwined: democracy and socialism. After 48 years of dictatorship, democracy was at the heart of the revolution. It took place a few years after the student movement of 1968, which had its precursor in Coimbra in 1962, and a year after Pinochet’s coup against Salvador Allende’s democratic socialist regim . Of course, in Portugal, extremist positions did emerge in the socialist camp that didn’t want representative democracy because they considered it bourgeois; they were divided between supporters of the Soviet, Albanian or Chinese systems. The truly hegemonic idea was democratic socialism. It was enshrined in the 1976 Constitution and the very parties that are now right-wing considered themselves to be defenders of socialism. The idea of democratic socialism was inscribed in popular aspirations, even if it wasn’t clear what it consisted of. I remember that in 1980 – at the time I was liaising between the University of Coimbra and the Coimbra section of the captains’ Movement of the Armed Forces (MFA), led by Lieutenant General Franco Charais – the Rector asked me to visit Yugoslavia to learn about the self-managing socialist system, which was anti-Soviet but about which little was known, and to write a report about it. I spent a month in that country and also in Albania (for contrast), but when I returned the interest in socialism back home had waned.
In 1985, I wrote: “Portuguese society today lives in an atmosphere of reserved expectation. The last ten years have been the unfolding of a very complex process of social transformation whose implications are not yet fully visible. There are fears and, at the same time, hopes that the future will be different from the many recent pasts that have resulted in our uncertain present. Everything, or almost everything, began with April 25, 1974, undoubtedly the most significant event in our country’s contemporary history. To come to know in depth what happened then (and right afterwards) and why it so happened, is the key to understanding many of our questions today. It is therefore a challenge for social scientists and, in general, for all of us citizens committed to the historical development of our country […], to launch a scientific debate, looking back from this particular historical moment [1985], on this important date in our contemporaneity. It was indeed a rich and complex social process that has covered (deeply? superficially?) the Portuguese reality with development models and political plans, with action projects and programs for the future as so many threads of ruptures and continuities between the emerging society and the old society which went on resisting them with the strength of its years.” Democracy was not questioned, as it was seen as an unconditional and irreversibly acquired good, but socialism was already a long way off, replaced by its capitalist version – never mind the contradiction – of social democracy. The main topics of reflection were “culture and new ways of life; changes in the law and the administration of justice; the struggle for control of production; popular movements to improve living conditions”.
Almost thirty years later, in the midst of the financial-existential crisis that the intervention of the Troika (European Union-European Central Bank-International Monetary Fund) meant, I wrote on April 25, 2011: “We are living the darkest April 25 since the one that 37 years ago, like an unholy miracle, called out to us: get up and walk. And so we did, by leaps and bounds, overcoming challenges, falling into traps, until we reached these days when a strange god, because trinitarian but without grace, commands us: get down on your knees and crawl. It’s also a strange imperative, although not unprecedented in our history, because it offers us salvation in exchange for losing our souls.
We are witnessing the development of our country’s underdevelopment and apparently we are watching passively. As if the country were a distant place, inhabited by people we hardly know, for whom we have no special esteem and who certainly deserve the burden they have to carry. Listening to or reading some commentators gives the impression that they are Germans talking about our country. They dissect the national reality as if they were coroners, butchering the corpse as if they were not part of it. Others, the super-rich, whose money entitles them to a wealth of wisdom, declare themselves disgusted by poverty and miserable pensions, as if poverty were a sin of which their wealth is innocent. And almost all of them flagellate the country, as if the causes of our financial crisis weren’t systemic and therefore, in part, foreign to our action, however clumsy our action may have been. Self-flagellation is the bad conscience of passivity and it’s not easy to overcome it in a context where passivity, when it’s not wanted, is imposed. The arrival in Lisbon of the EU-ECB-IMF trinity symbolically constitutes a high-intensity activism that contrasts with our inability to act. We are being acted upon. Ours is only the name in which others act for the good that is only ours if it is also theirs. In order to act, we have to take our eyes off this landscape and walk in the dark for a few moments until we reach the back of it to see the scaffolding that supports it, observe the bustle that goes on there and identify the empty stretches waiting for our action. We don’t need captains, but we do need the lucidity and courage that some of them had 37 years ago to act without fearing the reactions of the markets or the ratings of the rating agencies.”
This text was part of a book, Portugal: ensaio contra a autoflagelação (Portugal: Essay against Self-flagellation) (Almedina 2012), which, although analytical, represented the end of the idea (and resentment) of the missed opportunity. From then on, another resentment would dominate.
The resentment of the lost past
The last decade has been characterized globally by the growth of the extreme right as a politically organized expression. In Portugal, its organization was later and we have come to attribute this to the strength of the 1974 Revolution. But last March’s elections showed that Portugal was not only not immune to this wave, but was riding it more boldly than other European countries. There are points of convergence both in the causes of this global phenomenon and in the forms it takes. The most common manifestations of the far right are: xenophobic and anti-immigrant nationalism; anti-system, which encompasses more than the political system and embraces social relations; racism and sexism; the idea that all use of power is abuse of power, except when it comes to the forces of repression and security, where all abuse of power is legitimate use of power; instrumental use of democracy with the subversion of the separation of powers and the progressive trivialization of violations of liberal democratic procedures; naturalization of social inequalities; minimal social protection state or only for “us” and strong repressive state and only for “them”.
In the Portuguese case, the extreme right takes the form of resentment of two lost pasts: colonialism, as an expression of greatness and civilization, and the Salazar dictatorship, as a time of order and expectations in line with the country’s limited possibilities. As we can see, these are two pasts based on two contradictory ideas of the country’s identity. One, invoking defiant grandeur, daring out of proportion to real possibilities, and therefore successful; the other, invoking mediocrity, humility, restraint, shrewdness in managing limitations, and therefore successful. It is typical of this type of resentment that the past, whatever it may have been, was better than the present. The contradictions only become apparent when you leave the world of resentment.
The revolution of April 25 implied a profound break with both pasts. The break with the colonial past was irreversible because, to a large extent, it didn’t depend on the Portuguese but on the anti-colonial liberation movements. Despite what colonialist resentment holds, relations with the ex-colonial world continued and diversified, but obviously purged of colonial violence and geared towards reciprocal and multilaterally established benefits. In turn, the break with the dictatorial past was also intended to be irreversible, not least because the fascist regime had placed its future in maintaining the colonies. But the irreversibility of democracy was always less certain than that of the end of colonialism, not only because it depended solely on the Portuguese, but also because it soon cut the umbilical cord with the socialism that supported it at the beginning. The question of irreversibility takes liberal democracy as a fixed and unequivocal entity, which is disproved by reality every day. What is an oyster shell worth without an oyster inside? What will democracy be if the majority of citizens vote for far-right parties that use democracy to get into power but, once in power, don’t use it or accept losing it democratically?
Both concerning the case of Portugal and the global phenomenon, it has been said that the new extreme right, unlike that of the last century, does not resort to one-party fascism. On a formal level this seems to be the case, but the reality is much more complex. The neoliberalism of the post-fall of the Berlin Wall is a new stage in the class struggle that aims to eliminate the relative distribution of wealth that the social struggles of the working classes have achieved at great cost over the last century. Like human rights, democracy has been celebrated at the same time as it has been emptied of material content in the concrete lives of families. Under current conditions, the political cost of eliminating social policies in a democracy is much lower than in a dictatorship. But no one can predict until when.
The other pillar of neoliberalism has been to globalize real political and financial power (centered on a small circle of dominant countries), while keeping democratic political conflicts at national level. This mismatch, combined with the control of media opinion, sophisticated surveillance policies and technological changes in the organization of work, has almost completely disarmed social struggles for a fairer society. If these struggles cannot be rebuilt, democracy itself will be disarmed without being eliminated. President Julius Nyerere of Tanzania once said that the USA was also a one-party regime, only with the specificity that there were two. Democracy, even if empty, is always better than dictatorship, but only for those who can benefit from it. And there are fewer and fewer of them. The masks of colonialist and fascist resentment hide the faces of simple, voiceless people who feel they have lost what little they had and have no hope of getting it back.
This year, more than in previous years, “what’s needed is to cheer people up”, to remember José Afonso. And to do this we need policies and governments that tackle resentment without resentment.
Boaventura de Sousa Santos is the emeritus professor of sociology at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
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