Google Cloud Speech-to-Text API (Chirp) + Gemini 2.5 Flash Non-Thinking. Treat it as a searchable index of what was broadcast, not a quotation record.
00:00:211917, the
00:01:17king. the
00:01:49the International which would sponsor the
00:02:13capitalism in all
00:02:30prevented the worker from
00:02:33'I see my mother being carried downstairs on a stretcher
00:02:37and uh uh my brothers were crying and
00:02:41optimistic I said oh mom is going to be all right don't worry about mom
00:02:45and poorly paid to is good and as she went past and uh she she just
00:02:48squeezed my hand and somehow I knew things weren't right and
00:02:52she
00:02:55uh I came home from school that day
00:02:58and my
00:03:08said and what really set the fire going inside me was
00:03:12when my father was also crying and the doctor he
00:03:16aspirations of the October said George he said when he died he said for the
00:03:19want of a painter and he said when he died for an for an
00:03:23hospital bed and he said when he died for the want of
00:03:26an abortion I ran up to the mountain with my mother's. on
00:03:30it, I said to that god up there, 'cause we all went to chapel, we found
00:03:34chapel, if you're a decent god up there, I said, my
00:03:37mom was the most wonderful woman in
00:03:39An example of the dead and wounded in the the world, my brothers and sisters have just been dragged off to the
00:03:42orphanage, give us some man back, give me my family back, and I
00:03:46genuinely believe when I went to come back the next morning, and from that
00:03:50point on I was atheist,
00:03:53because I realized that the the
00:03:56only thing, the only persons that could improve the situation was...
00:04:04deep down in the belly of
00:04:09In 1870,
00:04:12The rumors that the a report on the conditions of the working classes in foreign
00:04:14countries was presented to the English Parliament by
00:04:18order of His Majesty. A group of consular agents sent details
00:04:21from various parts of the world about the real conditions that English
00:04:25capitalists would find in each country,
00:04:29of... Portugal recommends Portuguese workers because they don't
00:04:33"Debout les damnés de drink much on Sunday and therefore they work on Monday
00:04:36and because
00:04:38through development of they are content with
00:04:39little.
00:04:43They are content with little, a phrase that the rapporteur would regret
00:04:46revolution on the night of October 4-5 later. Between 1870 and 1920, there will be in
00:04:50Portugal 4636
00:04:53strikes, between 1910
00:04:55Nigeria, you cannot get the history of and 1917, there are
00:04:57country participated. Portugal began to 2046.
00:05:00the words worker and strike will leave the
00:05:02vocabulary, the strike, even prohibited by the penal code of
00:05:061852, restricted or prohibited de facto until
00:05:091974, will never again... leave the contemporary
00:05:13social landscape. Lisbon, Porto, South,
00:05:17Alifaro, are the cities with the most strikes. The
00:05:21most active sectors in the struggles of the 19th century were the
00:05:24textile workers, tobacco workers, with emphasis on cigar makers, the
00:05:27carpenters, welders, cork makers on the left bank of the Tagus
00:05:31river,
00:05:32fishermen.
00:05:35The most important political event in the history of the workers' movement in Portugal in the 19th
00:05:39century is the foundation of the Workers' Fraternity. of the
00:05:42Workers' International after the Paris
00:05:46Commune, in the 70s they will organize dozens of strikes
00:05:49involving thousands of workers in Portugal
00:05:52with strike funds, with resistance funds, this
00:05:56will actually be one of the bases for the creation and
00:06:00development of unions, the fundamental idea was
00:06:03to prevent competition between workers, promote
00:06:07solidarity between different sectors and
00:06:10even between countries... different, the cause of some
00:06:14is the cause of
00:06:15all.
00:06:18In 1872, the carpenters of Docas Cacilhas went
00:06:22on strike and the workers of the Navy Arsenal were called to
00:06:26replace them. They refused. The
00:06:29bosses tried to recruit in Spain in Porto, in
00:06:32vain, nobody accepted. Strike funds and
00:06:35international solidarity were common at this
00:06:38time. In the strike of the foundry workers of Perseverança.
00:06:42Lisbon, the workers of Porto sent a telegram saying that they would not
00:06:46accept replacing the strikers, nor would they accept
00:06:49melting work, sent from factories on
00:06:52strike.
00:06:54Also the typographers of the newspaper "A Noite" refused to work due to
00:06:57delayed wages. From the other companies, none went
00:07:01to replace them, because almost all of them are associated in the
00:07:04workers' fraternity, reads a letter to the International sent by
00:07:08Nobre França, a Portuguese labor
00:07:10leader.
00:07:13"Ignorant, servile, naive,
00:07:17good-natured, taking the supreme symbol of the
00:07:20saddle, as a collective synthesis of
00:07:23all administrative phenomena, more or less
00:07:26based on the tax represented to his spirit,
00:07:30as so many arbitrary acts of which he is a victim, in
00:07:33which all his relations with the community,
00:07:37with the state, with the government, with the civil police, with the municipal
00:07:41guard, with..." the tax collector or with the king,
00:07:44because for him, all these diverse terms are synonymous
00:07:48expressions of the same mysterious and omnipotent entity
00:07:52that is the saddle, servile,
00:07:56exploited, rebellious and critical,
00:07:59so it has both sides, Rafael Bordalo Pinheiro will create Zé
00:08:03Povinho, Zé Povinho is the first great portrait,
00:08:06not only naturalist, the first great portrait of the people, before
00:08:10Bordalo it was José das. of Júlio
00:08:13Dinis, he worked for the boss, highly
00:08:16honest, he is the romantic, incapable of betraying anyone,
00:08:19on the contrary, he is betrayed by everyone, capable of betraying, now
00:08:23a man will appear who is a scoundrel,
00:08:26he criticizes power, but he is servile to power, he is like a
00:08:30pig, he is the pig of politics, he is like a pig, this painting he makes
00:08:34of the pig of politics, this is the first representation of the
00:08:37people, people, people, people, not romantic,
00:08:41therefore not medieval. a bourgeois is the people, that which is not
00:08:45that which gets up in the morning, does not wash its face, does not shave and such, smells
00:08:48bad, but criticized, already
00:08:52criticized the politician and criticized strongly,
00:08:55these people no longer follow heroes, they follow
00:08:58unions, they follow political parties, the first representation of the worker
00:09:02that exists in Portugal, besides Henriques
00:09:05Nogueira is when José Fontana meets
00:09:08Contal in the Tagus, therefore and night.
00:09:12note, nobody sees a small boat there, it's there, they are
00:09:15conspiring to give birth to the Workers' International in Portugal,
00:09:31Patrick, we are at the Wall of the Federates, in the Perlachéz
00:09:34cemetery, where the last battles of the
00:09:37Commune took place, the song "The International" was written a few
00:09:40days later, you sing.
00:09:46la terre, debout les forçats de la
00:09:49faim, la raison tond son
00:09:52cratère, c'est l'irruption de la fin."
00:10:12in the villages
00:10:16for the
00:10:17International.
00:10:35This powerful idea, humanity reconciled with itself, spread throughout the world and
00:10:39has been sung and heard ever since by millions of workers and thousands of
00:10:43intellectuals, artists and
00:10:44leaders.
00:10:52Normally common sense.
00:10:55Always gives the idea that workers need a
00:10:59leadership of professional managers, professional
00:11:03politicians to organize production, to organize
00:11:06companies, to organize schools, to organize society. The
00:11:09Commune was a substantial change from
00:11:13this idea. Yes, the commune, for
00:11:16example, delegate, the
00:11:20delegate of the commune, for labor and
00:11:23industry, a... worker jeweler who
00:11:27was a member of the Workers' International but
00:11:30with uh he was therefore a delegate, not a minister
00:11:34huh, above all it was Léo Fränkel, so a new
00:11:38goldsmith who was
00:11:41he was named therefore
00:11:44delegate uh to take care of labor
00:11:47uh in the commune and so they were named
00:11:51uh by the commune and and they were
00:11:55uh revocable at any time, that too, all
00:11:59all the responsible people were
00:12:02appointed, controlled at every
00:12:05moment. From the Paris Commune, the workers'
00:12:08movement in Portugal gained renewed strength and spread
00:12:14creation of the Workers' International Association in
00:12:17Portugal.
00:12:19It was in fact the first workers' organization in the history of
00:12:22Portugal, between 1870 and...
00:12:251873 there were 72 strikes in
00:12:28Portugal, despite being illegal, the unions,
00:12:31also illegal, grew.
00:12:34Already in the context of the French Revolution, still as a bourgeois
00:12:38revolution, we had a
00:12:41popular protagonism that reached the area of education
00:12:45and that perhaps the best synthesis was by Condorcet
00:12:49when he stated that education should form insubordinate
00:12:52citizens, there in. we already had a germ that
00:12:56education had to do with emancipatory struggles, with struggles
00:13:00for social equality, for struggles for the dignity
00:13:04of the worker, of the working class and
00:13:07this gains a
00:13:10new dimension and an enormous
00:13:12originality which in my view is one of the founding
00:13:16moments of a democratic,
00:13:19radical conception of public education
00:13:22which is the Paris Commune, so in the Paris Commune we
00:13:26indeed have the
00:13:28constitution of a new perspective for education
00:13:32thought up by the working class, the Paris Commune
00:13:35has as its almost
00:13:38foundational act of the Commune
00:13:42the decree on public instruction which was the
00:13:45second decree made by the Commune right, the first decree was
00:13:49obviously the constitution of the popular army right, but
00:13:53the second was the opening of all schools to all people,
00:13:57including private confessional schools should be
00:14:00open to all people, up to here we have no
00:14:03great originality, the main originality was
00:14:07the character of public school in the Commune, the
00:14:10Commune makes it very clear that the
00:14:14workers do not want a school that qualifies them
00:14:17to be an unskilled, exploited,
00:14:20debased workforce. We have a very
00:14:23emotional moment when... We realize that in the Commune, the
00:14:27perspective of public education precisely
00:14:30points first to the broad cultural education of
00:14:33workers, not just art education,
00:14:36art workshops were created with great artists
00:14:40right, Édouard Manet many others, anyway, they
00:14:43self-organized into workshops so that the working
00:14:45class could not only enjoy,
00:14:49feel the beauty of all artistic productions, but
00:14:53also could... experience artistic production
00:14:57and in a very important way the Commune understood
00:15:01that school should
00:15:03ensure that all workers
00:15:06could be leaders of
00:15:08society,
00:15:12the revolutionary environment is feared by the state. the
00:15:15democratic conferences of the casino take place in Lisbon,
00:15:19while the Paris Commune was in power amidst the first wave
00:15:22of workers' strikes in Portugal. In the
00:15:25conferences, Antero de Quental, Oliveira Martins, Teófilo
00:15:28Braga, Eça de Queiroz, want to make the country based on radical
00:15:31, socialist and liberal ideas. The government imposed
00:15:35state censorship and closure. of the work by initiative of the Marquis
00:15:39of Ávila, claiming that they were a threat to social peace
00:15:43and national sovereignty. Antero de Quental reacted
00:15:46violently to the prohibition in a sarcastic letter to the Marquis of
00:15:50Ávila.
00:15:53I will be uncharitable with Your Excellency, because Your Excellency
00:15:56has ceased to deserve my charity.
00:15:59Now, the order with which Your Excellency ordered the closing of the hall of democratic
00:16:03conferences, is an act not only contrary to the Law and the.
00:16:07spirit of the times, everything infringing on the freedom of
00:16:11thought, the freedom of speech, the freedom of
00:16:14assembly. That is, of those sacred rights without which there is no
00:16:18human society, true human society in the ideal,
00:16:21just, eternal sense of the word.
00:16:25There can be without them, an agglomeration of inert bodies that the force of
00:16:28social gravity sustains juxtaposed, there is no
00:16:32association of free
00:16:33consciences.
00:17:08"this the century progresses and we start to develop the steam
00:17:12engine and we can start to have factories
00:17:15and bring workers together
00:17:18uh and and the main um area was
00:17:21in the cotton industry which develops
00:17:24dramatically and in fact I mean the cotton industry
00:17:27is the industry of the industrial revolution
00:17:31problem is that the seam engine knows no
00:17:34limits uh so people are working"
00:17:54The world crisis of 1870 will change the face of capitalism
00:17:58also dependent on the Portuguese market, the intensification
00:18:01of the exploitation of workers in Europe begins, based on new
00:18:05forms of energy, coal, city, gas and oil
00:18:08and machinery, in the great migrations in the
00:18:12colonial
00:18:12expansion.
00:18:19Brute force will be replaced by steam
00:18:23energy, specialization replaces
00:18:26qualification. This means that small children
00:18:30can do small tasks, women, children
00:18:33are recruited en masse for the factories of the textile industry. in
00:18:37Portugal, which will maintain another characteristic
00:18:40well into the 20th century, the combination of factory
00:18:44work, like this one here in the Ave Valley Museum
00:18:47that has several of these machines where thousands of
00:18:51workers worked with home
00:18:53work and domestic work, this is another
00:18:57of the characteristics of Portuguese industrialization,
00:19:01component of wage labor with
00:19:04peasant labor and home labor. Which
00:19:07evidently helped employers outside the big
00:19:11cities like Porto and Lisbon to maintain even lower
00:19:15wages.
00:19:44the subsumption uh formal labor to
00:19:47capital is the first form of organization of
00:19:51manufactures in which the owners of the means of production, owner of the
00:19:54manufacture imposes a discipline of time, they enter
00:19:58at 7, they will leave at 7 at night, long
00:20:01shifts of long time control of long
00:20:04working hours uh that... characterize
00:20:08right, what Marx called absolute surplus value, what
00:20:11characterized work at that moment, the
00:20:15workers, good or bad, had teaching and
00:20:19learning processes within manufactures that allowed
00:20:22an apprentice after a few years to master the means of how
00:20:26fabrics are produced, how certain
00:20:29artifacts are produced, anyway, ah, there were
00:20:32processes in which the workers still possessed
00:20:35knowledge.
00:20:38From the machinery, the incorporation of
00:20:42machines, we will have a new reality, because now we
00:20:45will have a terrible combination of control
00:20:49of the workday. of work at the same time of an
00:20:53intensification of the pace which is the intensification
00:20:56imposed by machines, right, the machine incorporates
00:21:00knowledge, the machine incorporates knowledge, that is, the
00:21:04machine transforms cotton into
00:21:07cotton threads, the cotton threads are transformed into
00:21:11fabric without uh the workers, the
00:21:14female workers having
00:21:17knowledge, now capital has... control
00:21:20over the knowledge process that occurs within
00:21:23production, so the worker is dispossessed of
00:21:26knowledge, this is the great foundation, in my view,
00:21:30of the dualism of educational inequality that exists in the
00:21:34world. Portugal had a population
00:21:37increase in the 19th century from 3 to 5
00:21:40million, although the country maintained a structural delay, if
00:21:43there were no wage earners at the beginning of the 19th century, but rather peasants and
00:21:46artisans, at the beginning of the 20th century, more than 20%.
00:21:50worked in industry and transport, in Lisbon alone more than
00:21:5344%. The textile industry is the
00:21:56main one, 37% of the workers, although the majority were in
00:22:00small factories. The real value is difficult to know,
00:22:04however, because more than half of the textile production was done at
00:22:07home and in small workshops, and the work of women and minors was
00:22:11common. In this period, there were about
00:22:15350 workers' newspapers, anarchists,
00:22:18socialists, syndicalists.
00:22:50all 24 hours a day and
00:22:53thus night work was born
00:22:57no and in the early
00:23:00days of
00:23:03countries working hours
00:23:05reached 12, 14 and
00:23:09even 16 hours a
00:23:11day and slowly a
00:23:15struggle of self-defense
00:23:19of self-defense for one's health, of self-defense
00:23:22of life, no, and of self-defense of one's
00:23:25dignity on the part of workers,
00:23:28and this struggle was particularly acute in the mid-
00:23:3219th century until
00:23:361917-19
00:23:39with the revolution in in Russia and
00:23:43then the revolution in Germany, the working
00:23:47class managed to win the 8 hours. no, it
00:23:50was a historic conquest, the 8
00:23:53daily
00:23:55hours of work, 8 hours, the motto was 8 hours to
00:23:59work, 8 hours to rest, 8 hours
00:24:02for free time, so for one's
00:24:05human development.
00:24:09the most important thing in progress is free
00:24:12time, free time in which individuals can
00:24:15self-actualize through
00:24:18activities uh... playful, cultural,
00:24:21erotic, sports, whatever you want, right? This is
00:24:25human self-actualization and it is achieved by
00:24:28reducing the workday, that is, there is a phrase in Marx's
00:24:31Capital, uh, the reduction of the workday is the beginning of the
00:24:35realm of freedom, so what is at stake there is something
00:24:39fundamental, it is this realm of freedom.
00:24:43Inspired by the martyred workers of Haymarket Square in
00:24:46Chicago, violently brutalized in a public demonstration
00:24:50for the 8-hour workday in 1886,
00:24:53the name May Day gave title in Portugal to no
00:24:56less than 22 newspapers between 1890 and
00:24:591974. Abel Botelho described the May
00:25:03Day procession in Lisbon, in 1895, in the
00:25:07novel "The Morning".
00:25:10At 7 in the morning, the crowd was already enormous, jostling
00:25:13around the Obelisk, at the southern end of the Avenue.
00:25:17From there they took their places in stages. "up
00:25:21the wide avenue, the pedestrians who were to serve as meeting points for the
00:25:25various associations and groups, according to the program published in the newspapers
00:25:28and looking for their order number on the small
00:25:32tablets hanging from the trees, from Praça dos Restauradores to Rua
00:25:36das Pretas.
00:25:38May Day expanded after the internationalist congress in
00:25:41Paris in 1889, where two delegates from the
00:25:47celebrate it in 1890. The
00:25:50May Day celebrations are accompanied by joyful
00:25:53processions, where socialist centers, philharmonic societies,
00:25:57and cooperatives go. According to the press, the processions gathered
00:26:003000 people in 1890. 20,000 in
00:26:041896, 25 to 30,000 in
00:26:071897. On May Day
00:26:091897, a quarter of the population of Lisbon
00:26:12went to
00:26:13work.
00:26:18Germany, the political and institutional situation in the face of the economic
00:26:21and social crisis, with intense worker and popular
00:26:24unrest, that in 1907, in a letter to
00:26:28Prince Albert of Monaco, in the face of the ungovernability of the country, Dom
00:26:31Carlos I. The King of Portugal and the Algarve states that
00:26:35he is trying to carry out a revolution from above to
00:26:38prevent the advent of a revolution from below.
00:26:51It is in this political cauldron of great
00:26:54contradictions and social conflicts, that the king is
00:26:58assassinated, the funeral of Costa and
00:27:01Buíça who... perpetrated the assassination will be a funeral
00:27:05with broad popular participation in the following
00:27:08years with pilgrimages that gathered thousands of
00:27:11people in respect for the men who had killed the
00:27:20rejection of the monarchy came from afar, a peak of the crisis of
00:27:231890 with the so-called Ultimatum crisis,
00:27:27England imposed on Portugal that it could not have colonial
00:27:30pretensions to link Angola. to Mozambique, it was called
00:27:34the Congress of Berlin of 1884-85,
00:27:37the place where the European powers had
00:27:41decided to divide Africa into many places, literally with
00:27:44rulers. Portugal had pretensions to
00:27:48colonially exploit those areas, England
00:27:51did not allow it. This will be the
00:27:54trigger for a much deeper crisis which was an economic
00:27:58and financial crisis, which will give rise to what is called.
00:28:02political development of two currents that
00:28:05will mark the period until after the
00:28:09republican revolution of 1910, republicanism,
00:28:12naturally, anarcho-syndicalism which will be the
00:28:15main current of the Portuguese workers' movement, so
00:28:19the bourgeois republicanism and
00:28:22anarcho-syndicalism will confront each other fiercely in the
00:28:26course of the First Republic from 1910, the project of
00:28:29Portuguese bourgeoisie society was and continued to be based on low
00:28:33wages that impeded economic immigration and kept a large
00:28:37part of the population at the threshold of absolute poverty with working
00:28:40hours that often exceeded 14 or 15
00:28:44hours. It was indeed about ending slave labor,
00:28:47but perpetuating it in the form of forced labor. Portugal will
00:28:51be the empire that will make the most use of forced labor
00:28:55until later in extent and depth.
00:28:58Effectively, until 1974.
00:29:32Zambia and Zimbabwe,
00:29:35there's a train that comes from Angola and
00:29:38Mozambique, from Lesotho, from
00:29:41Botswana, from Swaziland,
00:29:44small the hinterlands of southern and central Africa,
00:29:48strain carries young and old African men were conscripted
00:29:51to come and work on contract in the golden mineral minds of
00:29:55Johannesburg and its surrounding metropolises,
00:29:5816 hours or more a day for almost no.
00:30:03deep, deep,
00:30:07the earth, when they are digging and drilling for that shiny
00:30:10mighty evasive stone, or when they dish that mish mash mush food
00:30:14into their iron plates with the iron
00:30:17shovel,
00:30:20or when they sit in their stinky, funky, filthy, flea ridden
00:30:24barracks and hostels, think about the loved ones they may never
00:30:27see again, because they might already have been forcibly removed from where
00:30:31the last. have them wantonly murdered in the dead
00:30:35of night by roving and marauding, you had a kind of
00:30:39unity amongst the former slave owners and in the
00:30:42new kind of post- slave
00:30:46society colonial powers designing and coming
00:30:49together to find a kind of regional hub for
00:30:52economies that would work and suit their
00:30:55needs so you see had workers even up to
00:30:59the 50s where you
00:31:01couldn't have. any basic rights even the right to strike
00:31:05or such things are banned and made
00:31:06illegal.
00:31:32Forced labor in Africa will become widespread as a way to
00:31:35accumulate wealth in this imperialist phase. The depth of the
00:31:38minerals, the logic of super profit will dictate the
00:31:42imperative of intensive, unfree labor. According to
00:31:46Perry Anderson, without gold there is no South Africa
00:31:49and without Mozambique there is no
00:31:51gold. From 1907, the
00:31:55Cubata tax was introduced. Africans are
00:31:58expropriated from their peasant
00:32:00crops.
00:32:02The rural exodus becomes widespread, with a migratory flow towards
00:32:06South Africa and the gold and diamond
00:32:08mines. The installation of these
00:32:11hells on earth gives way to days and
00:32:14nights. made of cisific labor of abyssal and
00:32:18inhuman prospecting.
00:32:22Black gold to the Mozambican miners, workers and
00:32:25peasants. 60% of the wages
00:32:28from the gold mines were delivered directly in
00:32:32kind to
00:32:32Lisbon.
00:32:40About 12 large plantations control
00:32:4395% of the agriculture of São Tomé and
00:32:46Príncipe.
00:32:48It was rare for their owners, almost always, banking groups or limited
00:32:52companies, to visit their properties, normally
00:32:56managed by the so-called administrators of sad
00:32:59memory. Until recently, the plantation workers were almost entirely
00:33:02Cape Verdean, but they
00:33:05still constitute today more than half of the total plantation
00:33:09workers. The exploitation of labor used in
00:33:12cocoa monoculture became sophisticated. In the
00:33:1550s and 60s in the planting of social
00:33:19infrastructures such as hospitals, crèches and
00:33:21canteens. This was not for humanitarian
00:33:24reasons, but essentially, as a way to
00:33:27keep contracted workers, usually Cape Verdeans,
00:33:30on the plantations. This welfare system allowed
00:33:34colonial capitalists to take care of the health of those who
00:33:38worked for them. The expenses incurred were largely compensated by the
00:33:42very low wages that
00:33:45moving to the city where they would have to pay for their own food and lodging.
00:33:49The plantation thus constituted a kind of well-cared for
00:33:52hygienic prison, where workers and their families were
00:33:56well-treated to work better
00:34:00yield
00:34:00more.
00:34:06During 400 years of slave trade, it is estimated that 18
00:34:09million
00:34:12people were forcibly enslaved. Between 1840 and 1940,
00:34:15approximately 150 million
00:34:19people migrated freely. The labor
00:34:22migration from Europe to the Americas is the best known
00:34:25of these early displacements. Almost 65% went to
00:34:29the United States of America, the rest was divided between Canada,
00:34:33Argentina and Brazil and, to a lesser extent, Cuba,
00:34:37Paraguay and Uruguay. More
00:34:39than 50% before the 1870s were from the
00:34:43British Isles, with a large part of the rest from Northwestern
00:34:47Europe. As migration increased in the 1880s,
00:34:50regions of intensive migration spread to
00:34:54the South and East, to Portugal, Russia and
00:34:57Syria. Up to 2.5 million
00:35:00migrants from South and East Asia also traveled to the
00:35:03Americas, mainly to the western frontiers of North
00:35:07America, or to the plantations of the Caribbean,
00:35:10Peru. Modern imperialism is the contemporary
00:35:13social form of organizing.
00:35:45the working class of Germany or of Portugal
00:35:48or whatever. Through globalization and
00:35:53the whole anti-colonial movements in the 1960s,
00:35:5770s and so, it became
00:35:59clear that it is not possible to write national histories of
00:36:03labor. So, and this was of course also stimulated by the developments
00:36:06in the global south, when you are in
00:36:10the Nigerian labor movement without paying attention to the connections with the British
00:36:14empire, or if you do Brazil, you
00:36:18can also not do
00:36:20the history of labor movement in Brazil without paying attention to the connections in
00:36:24the Portuguese sphere and so on.
00:36:44My father's father, therefore, my paternal grandfather whom I never met,
00:36:48was the founder of the union,
00:36:51so there was already a syndicalist
00:36:54tradition, so to speak, in the future of...
00:36:57of the port workers and my father
00:37:01used to tell a very interesting thing about my grandfather, my grandfather had a
00:37:04hatred for the bosses, because they were so poorly paid and it
00:37:08was all, it was all carried by hand not with machines
00:37:12and one day my grandfather was
00:37:16carrying a bale, a
00:37:19thing that had arrived together with the other worker, it was very heavy, one was
00:37:23on one side and one on the other, some bosses were passing underneath, my
00:37:26grandfather... who told the other to drop it, to drop it
00:37:30on them, of course the other one, thankfully, did
00:37:34not drop it, otherwise he would have been arrested too and maybe
00:37:37they would have killed him, that didn't happen,
00:37:41because they used to tell the workers at that time, the
00:37:44worker only has the right to two
00:37:48shirts, one on the body and one in the laundry and, therefore, they don't need to have
00:37:52more money for
00:37:52anything.
00:37:57There were... two quite different conceptions of
00:38:00how the working class
00:38:03develops, caused that eh defended the idea that
00:38:07class consciousness,
00:38:10socialist class
00:38:12consciousness, was introduced
00:38:15into the working class
00:38:19thesis was curiously taken up
00:38:22by Lenin, against this view
00:38:25others will speak other Marxist
00:38:29thinkers, Leon Trotsky, he
00:38:32criticizes this conception, but the one who will
00:38:35make the deepest , alternative
00:38:38reflection to this, was Rosa Luxemburg. She
00:38:42develops the following hypothesis, that
00:38:45class consciousness is above all a product
00:38:49of the workers' own
00:38:52experience, of the oppressed, right, it is through
00:38:55their experience of exploitation in the first
00:38:59place, but of the struggles,
00:39:02of the need for self-organization,
00:39:05that the enemy is not only a capitalist,
00:39:09but is the capitalist class as a whole and that the state
00:39:12defends the interests, well, it is through
00:39:16their experience of struggle that the mass of the
00:39:19proletariat becomes aware of the need for a social
00:39:22revolution.
00:39:33We held meetings in the civil construction
00:39:37hall in Funchal that filled
00:39:40rooms
00:39:43We held parades and we
00:39:46brought the best of everything. I don't know
00:39:49we congratulated. I
00:39:53said this is not falling down because it filled
00:39:56me up. with even on the tables and chairs
00:40:00there were people everywhere and those people as
00:40:03soon as they saw that we were strong
00:40:07they were
00:40:07too
00:40:16If I knew how to write, we would have had the newspaper long ago,"
00:40:19declared a tobacco worker, referring to the 1870
00:40:22strike of tobacco handlers in Lisbon,
00:40:25one of the main strikes of the second half of the 19th century in
00:40:28Portugal. These workers created their
00:40:31own newspaper, their own voice, the voice of the
00:40:34worker, which had a very important place in the Portuguese
00:40:37labor press. They created an association that still
00:40:40has a prominent place in the city of Lisbon, as a space for
00:40:44instruction and cultural development, of the voice of the
00:40:48workers themselves. The tobacco workers, long before it was
00:40:51stipulated by law, saw here a
00:40:54school for the children of their families. For boys
00:40:58in 1891 and for girls 2 years
00:41:01later. Many young people and
00:41:04children in Portugal only had the right to
00:41:07education guaranteed by the state after the
00:41:10revolution of April 25, 1974. The
00:41:14male and female workers inaugurated them 100 years
00:41:17earlier.
00:41:25groups of workers don't obviously exist. isolation, in
00:41:28isolation from each other, because an individual worker
00:41:32in one trade has some connection with other workers in
00:41:36other trades and other units, but also within society more
00:41:39are very many different social
00:41:43issues which affect a worker's condition beyond their
00:41:47immediate terms of conditions of employment, like
00:41:49housing, other social needs, the the the the social
00:41:53benefits that there might be, the role of government, the legislative
00:41:56measures and so on. And so unions, I think
00:42:00very slowly and rather hesitantly
00:42:04um at their early stages and their formation and to recognize
00:42:08that it was necessary to broad the horizon and to
00:42:12be concerned with politics if you like with
00:42:15political or with more social issues.
00:42:18I am not prepared to associate
00:42:21myself with a policy where well-to-do people can afford
00:42:25to build luxury homes and poor people go out of
00:42:29homes.
00:42:38to dev at University of Oslo, we collected data
00:42:41on mass mobilization campaigns.
00:42:44And we looked at all campaigns, kind of larger
00:42:48campaigns from 1900 and onwards globally and tried
00:42:51to go into and see which socials are participating and
00:42:55dominating these different campaigns and then we're looking into, does
00:42:58it really matter for these campaigns who are the dominating
00:43:02groups for democratization outcomes down the
00:43:05year? So, and what we find is that it it really does.
00:43:09So especially when the urban industrial workers are the dominating
00:43:13force in these mass mobilization campaigns, we tend to see a very
00:43:16systematic and clear pattern towards higher degrees of
00:43:20democracy. We also tend to see that whenever urban middle classes are
00:43:23important and dominating, those campaigns also tend to give more
00:43:27democracy, but it's not as clear, not as systematic for the
00:43:30industrial
00:43:31workers.
00:43:47Who revolts? Who revolted? That was the question asked by the
00:43:50researchers from the Peace Institute of Norway. The answer
00:43:54is surprising: they concluded that the most important social
00:43:57structures and agents for the achievement of democratic and political
00:44:01rights were the labor movement, the
00:44:05organized workers' movement. It was
00:44:07decisive not only in the achievement of social
00:44:10rights such as the 8-hour workday, education, health, but also of
00:44:14democratic and political rights, universal suffrage,
00:44:18freedom of association, freedom of assembly and
00:44:22freedom of the press. What these
00:44:25researchers proved and demonstrated in their study
00:44:28is that, contrary to what is thought, it is not the economic agents
00:44:32or particularly entrepreneurs or liberal sectors who played a
00:44:36preponderant role in the achievement of social and political rights.
00:44:40On the contrary, the world of workers was
00:44:42decisive.
00:44:47In the relationship between the social and the political, historical time
00:44:50is spatialized territorially. That
00:44:53is, in Portugal, this wave of great transformations will lead to the
00:44:56Republican Revolution of 1910.
00:45:00The English ultimatum, the monarchy's malaise and a generalized
00:45:04crisis of the economy, politics and society as a whole, give
00:45:08rise to revolt. On October 5,
00:45:111910, a coup d'état with ample popular
00:45:14support ended the monarchy.
00:45:19establishment of the republic shows the role of the
00:45:22workers. 12 factory workers, 11
00:45:26office workers, 10 carpenters, 10
00:45:29locksmiths, 10 carpenters, eight bricklayers, seven
00:45:32cashiers, seven shopkeepers, seven students, six
00:45:35porters, five masons, four painters, four shoemakers,
00:45:39four turners, three typographers, three domestic
00:45:42workers, three printers, among other
00:45:45workers.
00:45:52revolution in Lisbon was about to break out made
00:45:56these men want to abandon their workplaces,
00:45:59the workshops, the factories, to head to Bocage's part,
00:46:03thousands of people and within the spaces of the council
00:46:07entered into a conflict with the monarchical police. Because
00:46:10they believed and managed to replace the monarchical
00:46:14flag to overthrow the republic,
00:46:17but it is this very important meaning that these
00:46:21workers did not want to wait for the revolution in the capital, they wanted to make their own
00:46:26they are already implanting the republic in Setúbal, which is
00:46:29impressive.
00:46:34A long pre-revolutionary situation will last from 1910 until
00:46:381926, marked by a workers' offensive,
00:46:42an unprecedented wave of strikes, several
00:46:45general strikes, repression with deaths in between, the tragedy
00:46:48of the First World War. More than
00:46:5145 governments in 15 years failed to socially
00:46:54defeat the workers nor achieve political stability
00:46:58for capital accumulation. The first
00:47:01modern trade unions were formed. The
00:47:04first communist party in Portugal was founded in
00:47:061921 with a revolutionary syndicalist
00:47:09base. In February
00:47:13Russian Revolution began. The Bolsheviks took power and were
00:47:17a hope for the workers of
00:47:19the world.
00:47:22The most combative sectors of the history of the Portuguese labor movement are the
00:47:26railway workers, from the great strike of 1873 until
00:47:29the strikes of the republic, they were also
00:47:32brutally repressed, not only
00:47:35general anti-strike decrees, but also with militias that were
00:47:39created during the Republic to persecute the
00:47:42strikers, with attacks on their families,
00:47:45with dismissals, with the threat of losing their
00:47:49homes, with persecutions even a terrible and...
00:47:52barbaric ghost wagon in which railway workers were placed
00:47:56at the front of the train to ensure that if there was an attack or
00:48:00sabotage, these men would be human
00:48:03shields.
00:48:05The war resulting from the struggle for raw materials becomes a pattern
00:48:09of capital accumulation, and will become
00:48:12increasingly deadly. 600,000 dead in the American
00:48:15Civil War, 1 million in the Franco-Prussian
00:48:18War, and 20 million in the First World War.
00:48:26As in all modern wars, in Portugal it is
00:48:29the workers who die
00:48:30the most.
00:48:33Of the 200,000 mobilized, approximately 10,000
00:48:37die. The Spanish flu, which killed more
00:48:40in the unhealthy working-class neighborhoods, without access to healthcare.
00:48:44saúde.
00:48:47Antero de Quental will commit suicide in the Azores,
00:48:50his homeland, on this bench. Ironically, next
00:48:54to the Convent of Hope. Few
00:48:58people are as well-suited to the idea of
00:49:01being a spokesman for the Portuguese labor movement. Antero de
00:49:04Quental, poet, writer, typographer,
00:49:07socialist leader, will exhort the workers in the
00:49:111870s, in the pamphlet "The International,"
00:49:14to stop believing in saviors and messiahs,
00:49:17to leave mutualism behind
00:49:20and think about directing their own
00:49:24destinies. The revolution, however, did not
00:49:27arrive. In the last quarter of the 19th century, the labor
00:49:31movement had grown, radicalized,
00:49:34and developed a lot. The generation of 1870 will
00:49:38reflect and understand like no one
00:49:41else, the bourgeois revolution that no longer is and the social
00:49:44revolution that still does not arrive, which will only arrive, by the way, in
00:49:481974, almost 100 years
00:49:52after his suicide, which is a public act, reminds
00:49:56us of another public suicide, that of the poet
00:49:59Mayakovsky when Stalin came to
00:50:02power and imposed the Stalinist counter-revolution that
00:50:06defeated all the Revolution of
00:50:091917.
00:50:15Dark clouds then began to form on the horizon,
00:50:18of the political impasse between the fundamental
00:50:22classes, bourgeoisie on one side, proletarians on the
00:50:25other, generating disaggregation of poverty and an
00:50:29authentic crisis of interregnum. "The old
00:50:32cannot die, the new cannot be born," Antonio
00:50:35Gramsci would say. Unions are closed,
00:50:39strikes are prohibited. The advent of fascism does not appear
00:50:42like a bolt from the blue, nor does it impose
00:50:45itself naturally. It results from a long crisis in which
00:50:49Republicans fight with Bonapartist measures against the
00:50:52labor movement, and the latter responds, but fails to reach
00:50:56power. There is a crisis of bourgeois hegemony
00:50:59and a crisis of proletarian leadership, from above and from
00:51:03below. The sky of history announces bad
00:51:06weather. Will it be possible to avoid the
00:51:09worst?
00:51:17I promise you that everything else will be
00:51:20possible.