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In Borges Coelho, the concelhos emerge as historically powerful realities, even if they are communally confined, and their power resides in their evidential capacity and spectrality, from which the possibility of "other parameters of collective life" emerged. When seeking to understand the emergence of modern Portugal, which is said to have sprung forth spectacularly in 1383, the historian tells us that the historical effects of the concelhos should not be underestimated.
Borges Coelho's sensitivity to the possibility of new types of power relations contrasted with another sensitivity, which is best found in the writings of other Marxist historians and can be classified as avant-garde. According to this vanguardist sensitivity, "bottom-up" political power would be a necessary but never sufficient condition for historical transformation. In Álvaro Cunhal's writings on class struggles at the end of the Middle Ages, the place of the working classes was decisive, but ultimately it was also always determined by someone else, namely the bourgeois hero, who both led and betrayed those same working classes. Under the banner of betrayal (in the figure of Miguel de Vasconcelos), ambiguity (in the figure of Nuno Álvares Pereira) and absence (in Victor de Sá's denunciation of the lack of working-class leadership, with respect to the history of Setembrismo), despite the conceptions of power conveyed by Borges Coelho's analysis of the municipal movement, there was an avant-garde conception of historical change in Marxist historiography.
In this contrast between more egalitarian and more vanguardist sensitivities, different ways of understanding emancipation are at stake. While egalitarian sensitivity emerges indebted to an understanding of the emancipatory process as an exercise in autonomy, vanguardist sensitivity displays openness to thinking about the place of heteronomy in that same process, in line with a teleological vision of historical becoming, according to which the class (but one could also say the nation) is found to be in a condition of "backwardness" from which it can only break free when guided by an "external" element.
From the Marxist-Leninist point of view, which became the dominant form of Marxism in the twentieth century, this element preferably takes the form of the Communist Party, however it should be noted that the avant-garde conception of politics is far from being exclusive to the Marxist-Leninist political culture or even to the Marxist tradition.
