Reviews for Prayer

The average rating for Prayer based on 2 reviews is 3 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-02-24 00:00:00 Bradley Mckinsey An engaging first-hand account of Portugal's 'Carnation revolution'; which began when the 'Movement of the Armed Forces' launched a military coup against the fascist dictatorship of António de Oliveira Salazar and replaced it with a 'National Salvation Junta' under the leadership of António de Spínola. At the time, colonial wars in Angola, Mozambique and Guinea were consuming over 40% of GDP whilst leaving much of Portugal's working and peasant classes in dire poverty, underdevelopment and abysmal slum conditions. The Junta brought in all parties, from the Far Left (PCP), PS (social-democracy) to the Conservative right (PPD) etc to 'stabilise the transition to democracy'. But with the coup, a vibrant wave of anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist social struggle was unleashed. Over the next 18 months there were peace negotiations and decolonisation, purges of fascists, strikes, land occupations, housing struggles, experiments across hundreds of industries in workers control/co-operatives and, in among all this chaos, 6 provisional governments. Pushback came from the fascist remnants of the old regime and conservative elements of the new one, with CIA skulduggery lying just below the surface... The 'Movement of the Armed Forces' would eventually splinter. From the start the movement always had factions within it, but contradictions sharpened and relations broke down. With loyalties in flux and the sureness of military authority questionable, there was a real risk of a 'Chile in Europe'. Something had to give, and on November 25th 1974 'The Nine', a group of reactionary officers, struck; took control of the radio, press and TV stations, disarmed the Leftist battalions, rolled back some of the socialist programmes/starved them of credit, halted land-reform, freed PIDE members responsible for torture and murder under Salazar and reinstituted strict military discipline. There was little bloodshed. It went out on a whimper, not a bang. The revolution officially 'ended' with Portugal's transition to a bourgeois liberal democracy with a new constitution in April 25th 1976, 2 years after it had begun. Despite Mailer's own libertarian communism (and an insistent emphasis that socialism needed to be 'from below'), he does manage to provide a reasonably sober analysis as to why the revolution was defeated. The working class themselves were not entirely sold on a deeper socialist transition, or at least, on many of the parties who were promising to carry it out. The PCP and other established leftist groups were often fairly conservative, not wanting to risk encouraging reaction. The firm grip of landed interests and the Catholic Church on the peasant classes in the North was a barrier to connecting the struggles in the Southern countryside to the ones in the North. Many soldiers returning from colonial wars had little knowledge or deep engagement with the movement that had brought them home and fell into line. More besides, NATO was in the background and wouldn't have been too keen on a member going 'red'. It was impossible to go it alone. Still, an interesting portrait of an important revolutionary moment. -1 star for calling the USSR and Cuba 'state-capitalist' and various ultra-left sneers at National Liberation movements #Tankie #Sectarian.

Review # 2 was written on 2008-01-02 00:00:00 Kevin Warren This book took me a long time to finish but was worth reading to be sure. For one its one of the few books in English on contemporay Portugese history and probably the ONLY one on the social revolution and its recuperation that occurred there between 1974-1976. This case study is a flurry of facts, figures, accronyms and names. Honestly these are only important in terms of his thorough scholarship. i think that the lessons drawn from the whole experience are much much more important. Mailer details how the Left parties served as the "midwives of State capitalism," feeding the Portugese people's desires for change and autonomy into channels which the parties could control. Ultimately this led to a strengthening of capitalism. This book is quite a chronicle of a massive social/political and economic upheaval in Portugal.