In the same way, the French Union of the Left is a trap insofar as it has insisted, in General Cluseret's words, on having "the army constitute an unknown quantity in the social equation." In short, its only s trength has been its silence on the military question. It is inevitable that its undoing will be the problem of national Defense, and that the Communists, who have always accepted the Marxist model of military proletarianization, wil find themselves confronting radicals and socialists who, since May 1 968, have invested in a socialism "with a human face," liable to assemble a new, somewhat depoliticized electorate. It was under the auspices of the Portugese generals of the Armed Forces Movement that "the end of the dictatorship of the proletariat" was decreed in Southern Europe. We should not see in this, as Georges Marchais will later claim, a cause for rejoicing, a softening of ideological will, "the word 'dictatorship' having an unpleasant sound since the fascist experience." Indeed, we cannot accuse the Portugese military leaders-returning to their country after a long and bloody campaign of colonial repression-of excessive humanism. In fact, with the Marxist generals courted by Cunhal, the dictatorship of the proletariat regains its original military significance; and as good technicians of war, they acknowledge that the time when the proletariat's kinetic energy dominated political life, after having dominated the battlefield, is reaching an end-the time when, as Lenin says, the working class suddenly found itself courted and solicited even by the capitalists .
From now on, the animal body of the worker is devalued as the bodies of other domestic species were before him. The end of the dictatorship of the proletariat is only the Communist version of facts already noted-by the French army, for example, when they did away with the review board (law of ]uly 9, 1 970) , or in 1 975, on the liberal side, by the " Trilateral Commission" on the crisis of democracy: "We have come to recognize that if there are potentially desirable limits to economic growth, there are also potentially desirable limits to the infinite expansion of democracy. " The crisis of these liberal democracies is the end of a form of mobilization of the citizenry. The central historical pseudo-figure of the dominating producer is simultaneously removed by the two great ideological blocs, the proletarian worker declared unusable along with the consumer-producer of the capitalist world. The revolutionary experiment of the Armed Forces Movement was in this context exemplary because it claimed to raise the Portugese leftist forces to another level, that of an "army civilization." Thus in 1 97 5 , ship's captain Correia Jesuino, who had become "Minister of Social Communication" (we are reminded here of the naval proletarianization under Louis XIV by M. de Valbelle, the former captain of the galleys) , depicts the "left wing" oficers as "ethnologists studying a primitive people. " For, in his view, the Portugese people is underdeveloped. Jean Francois Revel, reporting these statements in L'Express (April 14, 1 975), indicated that the average salary of a Portuguese was comparable to that of a Breton or a Welshman, and didn't quite see where the "underdevelopment" was.
The End of the Proletariat
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