*This defeat is not that of the working class, nor of us. It is that of the reformist organisations and their strategy.... We are thus faced with a historic responsibility - to create the. conditions for a victorious mobilisation by the workers to overthrow the dictatorship and carry through the socialist revolution. After such an experience the Chilean masses will not allow themselves to be drawn up the same blind alley again.' It was a comrade from the Central Committee of the MIR who put forward this position to us a few weeks after the coup, in mid-Oct ober 1973. It reflects quite well the thinking tion to launch isolated actions, etc. number survived in such a situation. political maturity to the new situation, LIOL ably in its opposition to any ultra-left temptaIn the course of the eighteen months since then, hundreds of its militants have fallen. Only at a considerable cost have the gaps been filled, have the defeats been overcome as quickly as possible, and has what has been destroyed been relentlessly rebuilt. Few organisations in the history of the world revolutionary movement have experienced the kind of repression which has been directed against the MIR - the one target of the Chilean military in their efforts to destroy all forms of working class organisation and most particularly those of a revolutionary character. Fewer still have
ISOLATION
This political isolation, the result of the weight and tactics of the reformists, poses more sharply than ever the problem of a Revolutionary Front. Because it dominates the extreme left, only the MIR could provide the backbone for such a structure. Yet just because it is dominant, it considerably underestimates this necessity. Numerically, the forces that would make up such a front would not - at the beginning - be that much greater than those of the MIR itself.
Politically, on the other hand, the impact of such a front on the confused sectors, on the vacillating left of the Socialist Party, on the isolated militants who continue to regard them-