The Captains' Coup
great account of the Carnation "revolution"
Daniela Melo and Timothy Walker are editors of Wilfred Burchett's book, The Captains' Coup, an account of Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The couple are Massachusetts professors both well-steeped in Portuguese politics and history. While bookstore browsing in Lisbon they came across Wilfred Burchett's book in Portuguese translation, then attempted to locate the original English edition. The hunt for Burchett's original manuscript plays a small but intriguing part in the introduction to the book, and Melo and Walker's scholarly notes (and the occasional correction of Burchett's errors) serve readers very well.
Burchett's "you were there" reporting is exciting and very readable, while at the same time he provides much-needed background into the dismal conditions in both the industrial centers of Portugal and in the Alentejo and other agricultural areas.
In 1974 Burchett dropped everything to travel to Portugal to observe the Carnation Revolution (still in progress) and to interview many of the major protagonists, the minor characters, and everyday people who participated in shutting down the world's longest-running empire (at that point) together with a brutal fascist regime.
Burchett's accounts give you a sense of how desperate the Portuguese people were. He paints a detailed picture of the brutality, senselessness, and economic recklessness of conducting multiple simultaneous colonial wars in Africa. At one point 57% of the Portuguese economy was devoted to wars in Africa, with horrendous casualties of the young men of the bourgeoisie and a growing number of working class army and naval officers.
Even as the Portuguese dictatorship was playing colonizer, Portuguese workers were themselves colonized by European and American corporations which treated them as disposable equipment and relied on PIDE, the Portuguese secret police, to crush any labor disturbances. Absentee landlords created many levels of misery for those from whom they stole traditionally communal land. The peasantry was overwhelmingly illiterate and the Church, particularly in the North of Portugal, played an exceptionally reactionary role in mis-informing parishioners and in collaborating with the fascists.
The Portuguese "revolution" was, true to the book's title, more a coup. The Portuguese working class did not rise up in any Marxist sense of revolution. Although different elements of a disgruntled and worn-out military competed for the loyalty of the people, and though the "revolution" at first had some of the characteristics of peasant and worker revolts, particularly against the latifundia, rebellion was quickly quashed by the Socialist Party with a certain amount of acquiescence of the Portuguese Communist Party, which feared not only widespread strikes but that what the "captains" had unleashed could not be put back on a leash.
An Afterword by New Left scholar Tariq Ali attempts to draw lessons from the failure of the Carnation Revolution, fixing blame on the Communists, "ultra-leftists," the Socialists, the CIA, and the Portuguese military itself. Ali quotes Lenin: "without the independent activity of the masses, there can be no revolution," and he goes on to slam the various factions for suppressing the independent activity of the masses.
But at the end of the day, the Carnation Revolution was a bourgeois revolution, fomented by the sons of the privileged classes. To quote Lenin again, "without the independent activity of the masses, there can be no revolution." As Ali points out, the Captains and the young bourgeois officer corps which spawned the revolution had also considered a Plan B – becoming executives in Capitalist enterprises in a modernized European social democratic state.
It didn't take them long to get there.
The authors gave this talk at Fulbright Portugal @65 in June 2025: