Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

Saramago frames Marxism less as a doctrine adopted and more as a climate you breathed if you were paying attention. The tell is in his phrasing: “oriented” and “natural” dodge the language of conversion. He’s not staging a youthful flirtation with radical chic; he’s describing an intellectual compass set by pressure, censorship, and class reality under Salazar’s Estado Novo. In that setting, “political formation” sounds almost vocational: you were trained by the constraints around you, by what the regime wouldn’t let you say, print, or organize.

The key subtext is legitimacy-by-circumstance. By anchoring his Marxist direction in “active critical resistance,” Saramago positions the ideology as the responsible default for anyone who wanted to think clearly in a dictatorship. That is both an explanation and a quiet rebuke to liberal neutrality: if power is coercive, “moderation” can read as accommodation.

He also sweeps a long historical arc into one sentence, running “all of the dictatorship” straight into “the Revolution of 1974,” Portugal’s Carnation Revolution. The effect is to tie his personal intellectual biography to national rupture: Marxism wasn’t merely an abstract influence, it was part of the moral and organizational toolkit that made democratization imaginable. There’s restraint here, too. He doesn’t claim heroism; he claims continuity. The humility is strategic: it makes the radicalism sound less like posturing and more like memory, lived and earned.