The recent military coup in Chile sets two important tasks for the left in Britain – to solidarise with and defend those who are fighting back against this bloody military dictatorship, and to learn from the Chilean catastrophe in order that such a tragedy need never again take place. The International Marxist Group pledges all its energies to the carrying out of these tasks and Red Weekly will treat them as a top priority.
The bloody tragedy that has overtaken the Chilean working class offers only one compensation: at least the lessons of this experience can be studied and taken to heart by the workers' movement everywhere, so that such a disaster need never again take place.
The events in Chile have shown that a working class movement that fails to develop its own political institutions, that fails to challenge the ruling class monopoly of violence, that fails to break up and smash the instruments of capitalist rule, remains completely at the mercy of the forces of reaction and can take only the most limited steps in the direction of socialism.
A working class movement which, from the seat of government, calls for the expropriation of one sector of the ruling class after another, yet utterly fails to develop the political and military means necessary to carry these expropriations out, places itself in a death-trap. In such a situation the only alternatives are permanent revolution or military dictatorship: either the workers' movement resolutely tackles the question of the 'armed bodies of men' controlled by the ruling class, or it will be massacred by them.
Familiar though these lessons may seem, they are now expressed in a way which enables us to see concretely the alternative road, the road to victorious workers' power which is, in the end, much less bloody than the 'peaceful road' to military dictatorship.
ELECTION OF ALLENDE
The background to the election of Allende in 1970 was one of rising class struggle and a greatly weakened capitalist order. The victory of the Cuban revolution, the strengthening of revolutionary currents on the Latin American left, the defeats inflicted on US imperialism in Vietnam, all helped to give the workers' movement in Chile a new strength. Above all the guerrilla campaign of Che Guevara had an immense impact on the political thinking of the masses in Chile, as elsewhere in Latin America. Allende himself was very aware of this factor in the political situation and sought to identify with the Cuban revolution whenever possible.
Allende became President in a country which had already experienced six years of half-hearted reforms under Eduardo Frei's Christian Democrats. Both Frei's nationalisation measures and his agrarian reform programme had aroused mass expectations without satisfying them. They had been carried out entirely within the framework of capitalism and imperialism. Yet at the same time they had helped to spark off bitter social struggles such as the long strike at Puerto Montt in which two dozen workers were shot. There was also a growing movement of land seizures by peasants, especially in the south. Chilean workers and peasants were beginning to demand a fundamental transformation that would go beyond piecemeal reforms.
Partly in response to this, the programme of the Socialist Party took a sharp turn to the Left. It was able to insist, against the wishes of its Communist allies, that the election platform would announce the goal of suppressing capitalism and installing socialism. Since the programme failed to tackle the question of the class character of the state it was not a revolutionary programme – but neither was it a classical 'Popular Front' programme.
WORKERS GOVERNMENT
The election of Allende could have been a great step forward for the Chilean working class. Revolutionary Marxists oppose the myth of the 'peaceful' or 'parliamentary' road to socialism, but that does not mean that we reject the possibility of workers' organisations forming the government within the framework of the capitalist state.
The formation of such a government can powerfully assist the development of the workers' movement, so long as the central objective of this government is to promote mass mobilisations outside of the framework of parliament and the state machine, to encourage the growth of organs of workers' power, and to prepare the ground for the inevitable showdown with the capitalist state machine.
However, Allende and the Popular Unity coalition, rather than adopting this approach, time and again chose to try and deal with the problems facing them, not through the mobilisation of the masses, but by relying on their eventual executioners – the capitalist police and military.
The first economic measures of Allende improved the material position of the masses, restrained inflation and led to the expropriation of a number of enterprises and the beginnings of a serious land reform. Support for Allende grew, and in the April 1971 elections for Congress the Popular Unity received just over 50% of the vote. This growth of electoral strength, however, was not in any way matched by a growing working class mobilisation. During the 1970 presidential elections, almost 15,000 Popular Unity Committees had been established throughout the country. However these committees were limited almost exclusively to electoral ends. They were created from top down as bodies appointed by, and accountable to, the Party bureaucrats and not directly to the masses. Instead of being used to mobilise mass backing for Government measures, the Popular Unity Committees were put into cold storage to await the next election.
HANGMAN'S NOOSE
By embarking on something approaching an anti-capitalist economic programme without any attempt to back it up through organs of popular power, the Government was putting its head in the hangman's noose.
Inevitably, economic problems beset the economy, aggravated by the sabotaging operations of both Chilean and international capitalists. Sales of Chilean copper were boycotted in the United States and elsewhere, while the US government insisted on the repayment of immense debts incurred by the previous Frei Government. A Government firmly on the revolutionary path would have been able to repudiate these debts. As it was, rapid inflation began to develop, shortages of spare parts began to appear, foreign reserves dried up and the middle sectors of the population became alienated from a Government that did not seem to have a clear solution.
These strata provided fertile ground for the growth of a rightist counter-attack to the Government, including the development of fascist currents around a group called 'Fatherland and Freedom'. In September 1972 the counter-revolutionary mobilisation against the regime acquired a new strength: there was a strike against the Government by many professionals and by the lorry owners. The lorry owners were both numerous and important, since they were mainly self-employed drivers owning only a single vehicle. The country relied heavily on transport, so this strike seriously damaged the economy and threatened the movement of essential food-stuffs.
Tens of thousands of lorry owners, along with their families, camped outside the capital city of Santiago. The Government sought to deal with this threat through a combination of concessions to the lorry owners and attempts to end the dependence on the lorry owners through the development of the state transport system. To restore the confidence of the ruling class in the 'law-abiding' intentions of the Government, three top-ranking military officers were brought into the cabinet.
This did not stop the lorry owners challenging the Government again when they ran into further difficulties. The Government then sent in the
police to break up the strike and to take possession of the lorries. It was this series of events that led directly up to the military coup.
REVOLUTIONARY STRATEGY
Clearly a workers' government guided by a revolutionary strategy would never have dealt with the crisis in this way. A mobilisation of the masses should have been used to demonstrate the real strength of the Government and to end the lorry owners' strike. If hundreds of thousands of workers had surrounded the lorry owners' encampment there is every likelihood that they could have forced them to abandon the strike. Though the fascist groups were certainly active among the lorry drivers, a proletarian mobilisation would have split the drivers and persuaded a section of them to abandon their conspiracy against the Government. However, instead of mobilising the masses in some such way as this, the Popular Unity Government insisted that the best way to beat the lorry owners' strike was for the workers to stay at work and maintain production.
The decision to invite the military into the cabinet could only help to legitimise military intervention and to prepare the ground for a coup. At every point the Popular Unity sought to do deals with the military top brass and failed to agitate politically among the rank and file of the army. In the first months of victory the Government was in an excellent position to insist that the rank and file of the armed forces be organised in trade unions which would have provided a counterweight to the authority of the military chiefs. The existence of the still untouched capitalist armed forces was a critical obstacle with which the Popular Unity Government had to deal. However, these forces were in some ways less formidable than they might have been. They numbered some 25,000 – fairly small compared with the mass organisations on which the Popular Unity was based, which number their members in hundreds of thousands.
ARM THE MASSES
The central aspect of any revolutionary strategy should have been to arm the mass organisations. Though some elements to the left of the Socialist Party, and in the left wing of Popular Unity, did raise this question, the leadership of the Popular Unity, and above all the Communist Party, completely evaded it.
Workers' and peasants' militias could only have been formed on the basis of careful technical and political preparation. The Communist Party and the right wing of the Socialist Party, rather than continually alerting the masses to the need to establish their own armed force, systematically fed them with parliamentary illusions, and inhibited them from any independent mobilisation. Political preparation for armed struggle should have been carried out both by propaganda and by developing the beginnings of proletarian power. The technical preparation should have been undertaken with all necessary security by the working class parties themselves.
The slogan 'arm the masses' can be an abstract absurdity if it is left too late – this was something the Sudanese Communists discovered to their cost in 1971, since the masses they armed completely lacked the necessary organisation and training. But in the Chilean case the struggles around the implementation of the Popular Unity programme could have provided many opportunities to carry out the technical and political preparation that was necessary.
The forces of the counter-revolution gave the Popular Unity nearly three years' grace. To have moved against it right in the beginning would have been very difficult. If the Government had been following a revolutionary strategy the military top brass might well have moved sooner, but they would have met a workers' movement which was equipped to do battle. As it was, the three years were wasted and Popular Unity met its decisive test in complete disarray.
Allende's response to the military coup seems to have reflected the contradictions of his whole previous record. He was woken early in the morning with the news of the revolt. He then went to a Government-controlled radio station to urge the workers to remain at work and to appeal to the Army officers to remember their duty to 'the Nation'. With a force of armed police he then occupied the Moneda Palace, where he put up a last desperate resistance to the forces which he had so hopelessly and so disastrously sought to appease. He chose not only to die fighting – an honourable decision – but to die fighting in the symbolic home of Chilean bourgeois constitutionalism, rather than in the working class suburbs where the strength of the Popular Unity lay.
His reported last words were: 'Trust in your leaders, trust in the masses'. At that very moment those workers and peasants who had trusted their traditional leaders were paying a terrible penalty. Those who trusted only their own strength and their own struggles were beginning the task of confronting the dictatorship with armed resistance.
Robin Blackburn