Territorializing Maoism: Dictatorship, War, and Anticolonialism in the Portuguese "Long Sixties"

In the 1960s and 1970s, the influence of Maoism extended all over the world, although its ideological impact has mainly been associated with certain specific national contexts. The aim of this article is to analyze the projection of Maoism in Portugal in the final years of the Estado Novo dictatorship, focusing on the intervention and discourse of the Movimento Reorganizativo do Partido do Proletariado (MRPP; Movement for the Reorganization of the Party of the Proletariat). The MRPP was not the only organization that claimed an explicit link with Maoism, but it was the one that most clearly combined an imaginary link to the Chinese Cultural Revolution with a particular mix of youth activism, triumphalism and moralism. This article explores the hypothesis that the particular constraints forged by the dictatorship and the significant impact of the colonial war produced a specific territorialization and influence of Maoism in Portugal during the first half the 1970s.

The Portuguese Dictatorship and the Colonial War

It is important to note that during the twentieth century, Portugal lived under a long dictatorship imposed at the beginning of the 1930s within the context of the rise of philo-fascisms in Europe and defined by an antiliberal and corporative ideology. The state was governed by António de Oliveira Salazar until September 1968, when, already extremely frail, he was replaced as president of the council by Marcelo Caetano. Marcelismo, the term used to describe this period, lasting from September 1968 to April 1974, promised modernization and greater political openness, but this would soon be thwarted, mainly by the long impasse created by the colonial war that eroded the legitimacy of the regime and also its international reputation.¹

The regime had faced armed rebellions since 1961, led by movements struggling for independence in the territories under Portuguese administration, first in Angola, in 1961, and afterward in Guinea-Bissau and Mozambique, in 1963 and 1964, respectively. With the exception of Israel, Portugal had the highest percentage of armed men in any Western country. More than a million men, approximately 800,000 of whom were from the so-called metropole, were called up to fight in Africa. This involved a human effort five times greater, in comparative terms, than the one mobilized by the United States of America during the Vietnam War.² The war and poverty effectively drained Portuguese society: between 1957 and 1974, 900,000 Portuguese citizens emigrated to France, representing around one-tenth of the population, 550,000 of whom settled illegally in French territory.³

The apologia for the empire, compounding and reconfiguring themes that dated back to the mid-nineteenth century, was one of the main strands in the construction of a national imaginary that would be seen as indelibly linked to the golden age of the Discoveries and came to define, from the mid-1950s onward, an interpretative framework for the Portuguese colonial experience that presented it as different and more benign than the colonial experiences produced by other European powers.⁴ Hence most of the population viewed the start of the war with nationalist fervor inflated by one-sided reports and images of violence—such as the massacres of Portuguese settlers committed in March 1961 by the União das Populações de Angola (Union of Angolan Peoples).⁵ Subsequently, the image of a "low-intensity" war was constructed, giving the impression that this simply involved "policing the territory" to neutralize specific rebel groups.

The years that followed saw growing discontent with the conflict. By the end of the 1960s in particular, certain fringes of the population had begun to view protest against the dictatorship and protest against the colonial war as part of the same political struggle. A new radicalized activism, which had a particular impact on educated youth, was added to the more traditional communist or republican-socialist antifascist currents. The state unleashed forms of repression against all of them, which ranged from curtailing political activities to detention, torture, and imprisonment. The Estado Novo would only be overthrown on 25 April 1974, by a military coup that would immediately lead to a...