Because of the grave crisis of Portuguese capitalism, the very development of struggles for their demands on the part of the workers gave rise to the emergence of commissions that most often went beyond the tasks of mere committees to lead given struggles and took on tasks of permanent workers control. The development of the workers commissions was a factor of fundamental importance for the Portuguese revolution. These commissions paved the way for overcoming the divisions introduced by the craft unions and for endowing the workers with effective instruments for their struggle.
Our intervention must aim at pushing forward the workers commIssions as tne organised product of mass struggles in the factories, with the following essential functions:
to exercise workers control in the enterprises (prices, raw materials, lay-offs), to combat sabotage, to plan the economy;
- to organise self-defence, to struggle against capitalist reaction; to fight against the isolation of exemplary struggles and to fight for their generalisation to even broader sectors of workers; - to lead the struggle for better working conditions, to struggle against restrictions on the democratic rights of the workers.
It is nonetheless necessary not to push the workers commissions forward in a vacuum, without the workers understanding what they are and what their purpose is, because in that event the worker commissions wind up as forms for administering and controlling the workers. This is especially true in the north and centre of the country, where the role and importance of he workers commissions have been ess understood.
In the case of the workers comnissions in which we have some nfluence, all opportunities must be seized to pose the problems of sectoral and intersectoral coordination, especially in the sectors in crisis, where the demand for credits for the reconversion of raw materials, for example, enables the workers more easily to understand the nec essity of coordinating the workers commissions with other commissions of the same branch or of other sectors.
It is here that the proposals for congresses of the workers commissions in industrial sectors or in compiementary seccors lakes on particular importance; we must take advantage of all opportunities to propel them forward.
But such a centralisation must be able to be based on all the already existing experiences and to struggle for their fusion, which is the only way to broaden the mass base of the workers commissions and to guarantee proletarian democracy within them. It is in this direction that we must orient the Provisional Secretariat of Workers Commissions of the Lisbon Industrial Belt (SPSTSIL), demanding that this body hold local and sectoral congresses to begin prep aration of a National Congress of Workers Commissions.
Such proposals are intimately linked to the struggle for the formation of a tendency in the SPCTCIL, which must be the prime objective of our intervention, given the fundamental weight of the layers of workers led by the SPCTCIL. At the same time, in order to broaden the mass base of the workers commissions, It is necessary to struggle not only for the broadest democracy in the election and functioning of the commissions, for the right of the various currents of the workers movement to express themselves within the commissions, but also for the presentation by the workers commissions of clear projects to defend the interests of the workers and of overall solutions to the that already exist, using them as instruments for pressuring and collaborating with bourgeois SECULOUS.
we must stress the importance of CONTRA-D. NOV *11 DE MARCO FASGIS-TAS FORA
February 1976
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