On September 11 of 1973, a dramatic revolutionary situation was destroyed and crushed. As tanks roared passed the city streets of Santiago bombs rained down on the presidential palace La Moneda, where the president Salvador Allende now lay dead. This was the tragic scene of a coup conducted by General Agustin Pinochet and the Chilean ruling class with assistance by the C.I.A. In the aftermath of the coup, 3.000 leftists, Allende supports, trade unionists and revolutionary workers were killed. Not only were they killed some were tortured and made examples of for future generations. Victor Jara the famous folk musician--The Bob Dylan of Chile--was beaten, burned in the hands and then forced to play his guitar before being gun down in the Chilean National Stadium where thousands of others were brutally murdered. It has become a ritual on every September 11 for Chileans to protest the Pinochet dictatorship and to fight for the state to recognize the real numbers of those killed by it. What is important for us is not to mourn those killed, but to learn. The best tribute we can pay to thousands of radicals who lost their lives is to draw the lessons from the mistakes they paid for with their lives. It is for this reason why I will not focus on the role of the C.I.A. and U.S. imperialism but instead on the mistakes made by the Chilean left in order to learn from it.
Today I believe that the lessons of the Chilean Road to Socialism have never been more relevant for us to come to terms with. There has been a reawakening of the Latin American working class, from the factory takeovers of Argentinean workers in 2001, the heroic Venezuelan workers defense of Chavez during the attempted coup in 2002, to the uprising in Oaxaca Mexico, there has been a sharpening in class struggle. If we look closer at these struggles against the ruthless free market, we find the movement dealing with key questions: Is there a need for the explicit building of a revolutionary organization? Can the existing state be used for the purpose of the movement? Is the working class capable of leading a revolution? Can we reform capitalism? The Chilean revolutionary process and its rich history I believe gives us answers to those questions and teaches us important lessons that are indispensable in struggles that lay ahead. Primarily lessons for the potential of working class struggle from below.
Promises of the Unidad Popular and the dominance of the Right:
Salvador Allende’s rise to presidency took place at a time when the Chilean working class began to grow much more confident and class-consciousness was rising. Allende assumed the presidency in November of 1970 through the coalition of leftist parties called Popular Unity. The UP was composed of six parties including Allende’s Socialist Party and the Stalinist Communist Party. Both parties had a mass base in the industrial working class of Chile that had been forged in the early parts of the century with the upheaval of the Nitrate workers. Both political parties had highly become focused on popular front strategies since the 1930’s, even electing as president in 1938 member of the Radical Party, Aguirre Cerda, effectively putting the Popular Front in power for the first time. The popular front strategy was nothing new. This tactic of class collaboration was born out of the necessity for Stalin in the 1930’s to seek allies against a war with Hitler. In practice, this meant that socialists were to be uncritical of reformists, the middle class and bourgeois parties and seek to work together. So by the time Allende was elected president in 1970 it was his sixth appearance as a candidate for a broad coalition like the UP and his third time as president.
It is important to understand the period before Allende’s presidency because it helps explain what were the expectations and visions of the organized left that became his supporter. Popular Unity was different from other Popular Fronts strategy due to three key elements, the failure of the former president of Chile, Eduardo Frei, to live up to its promises of reform and the crises of his government, which set in motion the second element: an increasingly combative working class movement. The Frei government had promised agrarian reform in the countryside to ease rural tensions. However, the land owning oligarchy was not going to hear it, a class that Frei’s government did not dare confront. This caused many peasants who had voted for Frei into open revolt. Frei’s government also promised industrial growth in the cities that attracted thousands of unemployed rural workers into working class areas and cities, who at once in the city began to demand free housing and basic services like clean water and food. What did all this mean concretely?: for one the strikes in this period increased and so did the workers involved: from 230.725 in 1969 to 316.280 a year later. Factory occupations also rose from five in 1968 to 24 in 1969; they then jumped to 339 occupations in 1971. It also led to the third central element that led to the rise of Allende, which was the reorganization of the left during the crises of Frei’s government. The Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR), which was a group who formed in 1965 and with a deep admiration towards Che Guevara, began to play a key role in the student movement for educational reform. In addition, sections of Frei’s party began to split forming the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU) and the Christian Left, all of whom joined UP, with a vision that Allende will conduct the agrarian reform that Frei did not pass. Allende rise to presidency rode the waves of working class and peasant struggles, which will be reflected in its program.
The program of the UP tried to unite conflicting class interests, for which its survival in the electoral arena depended on. If you take a look at UP’s platform and their “Forty Measures” they promised honest government or “Popular Government”, an end to corruption and the abuse of power, more extensive and cheaper social benefits. The UP’s electoral program promised a number of strategic economic measures, including the nationalization of Chile’s U.S. owned copper mines, private banks and insurance companies. Allende proposed to establish a “social property sector” whose goal was to protect important industrial monopolies and certain parts of the service sector, which were important for social and economic development. Allende’s economic policy, according to socialist Mike Gonzalez in his article Chile: the Workers United: “was an orthodox Keynesian plan for reactivating the economy. It contained no challenge to the dominance of private capital; on the contrary, it gave the industrial bourgeoisie a range of guarantees and provided land- owners with generous compensation”. An example of this was the Agrarian Reform Act that Frei did not dare pass; unlike Frei, however, Allende promised landowners possession of the most productive acres and the best farm machinery, thus preventing a confrontation with the landowning class.
This is what Peter Winn author of Weavers of Revolution has to say about UP’s electoral program:
The UP’s program reflected its political strategy an alliance of the middle and lower classes, blue and white-collar workers, intellectuals and peasants. It contained something for almost everybody and particular assurances to the non-Marxist middle class that a Popular Unity victory would benefit them and hurt only "monopolists" and "imperialists". (Winn 65).
Further on, I will argue that this strategy was untenable and consequently led Allende to be more alienated to the interests of the working class.
Within Allende’s Socialist Party there existed a strong current that believed socialism had to be achieved through a revolution and if you read the party’s literature and paper Chile Hoy, that was put forward. However, Salvador Allende, who I believe represented the conservative wing of the Socialist Party, had a fundamentally different understanding of Chile’s road towards socialism:
In the transition to socialism, the legal norms will respond to the necessity of the peoples will to build a new society...On the realism of the Congress, it depends, to a great extent that the capitalist legality transitions to the socialist legality, according to the socio-economic transformations that we are implanting, without a violent fracture, which we responsibly want to avoid. (Textos Escogidos 119, emphasis added.)
This was Salvador Allende’s May 22 1971 message to a congress made up of the Chilean right wing and parties of the ruling class, titled The Road to Socialism. Allende’s strategy was to enact reforms that was possible to carry out under existing legislation and could win approval of the congress. Consequently, allowing the right to determine the pace of change. In fact, the congress believed having him in power would actually help restrain and control working class self-activity, which was growing.
On the contrary to some bosses’ fears, we see that Allende does not want to confront the Chilean bourgeoisie. Even before he was able to assume the presidency as the worlds first ever “Marxist elected president” Allende had to agree to terms that would keep the existing political establishment together, make sure that the legal system would not be touched, and most importantly that the armed forces would remain free to “guarantee democracy”. This behind the scenes agreement with the ruling class i.e. bosses, bankers, owners of the press etc, is known as the “Statute of Guarantees”. What is interesting about the passing of this agreement is that it was never discussed and voted on with rank-file members of the UP. On another level, this agreement proved that Allende had a fundamentally different vision of socialism. For Allende socialism meant turning the existing state apparatus with its laws, courts and armed forces into a pro-worker state. However, what Allende failed to understand is that the ruling class does not take this lying down. I will try to demonstrate in later events that developed in Chile that proved this reformist view wrong.
Cracks in the Coalition – Advanzar o Consolidar:
The first year of Allende’s presidency was relatively peaceful. Nonetheless, there were some stirrings in the countryside in where land seizures began to rise; partially due to UP’s commitment to agrarian reform and the rise of confidence in peasants. Overall, in 1970 the Chilean working class experienced a rise in wages, which was soon to be cut short. We can say that this was the calm before the storm. The ruling class at this moment was looking for the correct moment to launch its first challenge, and the moment was November 1971 with leader of the Cuban Revolution--Fidel Castro visiting Chile. The march, which is known as the “March of the Empty Pots”, was organized by the right wing parties, in which hundreds of middle class women came out with their saucepans (and house cleaners) in a symbol of the shortages (and class status). Although this might seem like a joke, it was actually a warning sign by the Chilean ruling class of battles to come and a concrete effort to begin mobilizing the middle class. So in this light Allende began his second year in office, and it was here where a debate within the UP began to form.
The debate in the UP and its conclusion further highlight its political character. The dispute focused around the questions: should the UP support the workers in their struggle to defend their living standards? Moreover, if the workers decided to fight back what political strategy should it be carried out with? These debates, took place in two UP conferences at La Arrayan and Lo Curro in February and June 1972, and were centered on the label advance or consolidate. The right wing of the Popular Unity argued to stop the process of reforms and to seek wider electoral support before advancing, while the left wing argued for the quickening pace of the reforms and the continuing enforcement of the working class, which had begun to prove it can struggle forward. However, the left wing’s arguments were not substantial enough to lead to a decisive break with the Popular Unity’s framework. Nor did it lead to question the relationship between the state and the ruling class, nor the control and direction of the economy and the role of the working class in that process. In the end, the left of the UP, which consisted of elements of the United Popular Action Movement (MAPU), the leftwing of the Socialist Party, and the Christian Left were poorly organized to amount a serious challenge in the political direction of the UP. So it was at the Lo Curro conference where the rightwing secured a majority. In this context, the boom of 1971 had receded and the Chilean ruling class was reassured that Allende and Popular Unity were more interested in compromise. Chile under Allende was about to experience some of the harshest class battles the world has seen, but yet the organized left and more importantly the mass socialist and communist parties in the UP were only to be witnesses at the brave creativity of the Chilean working class to confront the bourgeoisie’s offensive.
The Rise of Los Cordones and the betrayal of the UP:
The independent organization of the Chilean working class and poor peasants was a process in which peoples expectations were raised and their living standards attacked while the right wing of the UP sat back and watched and even at times attacked them. It was also a process of confusion. One of the UP’s famous slogans was “popular power”. For UP officials this meant unconditional support for their government, while for workers this actually meant create socialism right here right now. The first of these and one of the most important organizations to appear in the political scene in Chile was the Cordon Cerrillos-Maipu, a cordon meaning industrial belts, which were workers councils setup across Chile in response to the attacks on the working class. The town Cerrillos is an industrial suburb of Chile’s capital and had the largest concentration of industries in Chile with over 45.000 workers and 250 factories. Maipu is a farming area that borders Cerrillos. The forming of this cordon like others arose due to concrete problems. In Maipu 44 peasant leaders were arrested for taking over a farm that was soon to be expropriated. The Judge in this case ruled against the peasants and used government policy to back himself. This led to large demonstrations against the judge and an increase in land seizures as well. Meanwhile, Cerrillos was going through several waves of strikes and factory occupations, in particular in a factory owned by textile monopolists Yarur Inc. This factory, which was not due to be expropriated under the governments list, was taken over by the workers in an attempt to push the government’s policy further to the left and in a concrete effort to raise their living standards. In an inspiring meeting with the Yarur workers and union officials, the workers decided to “socialize” the textile plant. This is an account of one of Allende’s representatives Jorge Varas who was present at the meeting:
I have never in my life seen anything like this... When the union officerd told them that the company didn't want to receive them and had denied all their petitions, the people stopped them and began to cry 'Socialization! Socialization!' It was incredible. It was revolution! Two-thousand workers standing and shouting: 'We want Socialization' And the women calling out: 'No more exploitation!' They were in a state of euphoria. (Winn 174, original emphasis)
What is interesting about what occurred afterwards was that the Yarur workers demanded that Jorge Varas speak in behalf of Allende, this is what he had to say (note on his language):
"Comrades! You have decided that this enterprise should pass to the social property area. My duty is to demand this of the government." There was a round of applause; then an old-timer banged his fist on the table and cried: 'And right now, comrades! We are going on strike and we won't go back with those octopuses inside!' Jorge Varas decided that he had no choice except to follow their lead. "Well, comrades if you resolve to go on strike immediately, we have to see what is the best way to do it..." 'By seizing the industry!" one old-timer shouted out from below. "No comrade! We are not discussing a factory seizure. Yes, we will take the industry, but from outside. You have to guard the strategic spots of the enterprise...while we propose this to the president of the Republic. And I know that he will have to accept your position." (Winn 175, original emphasis).
This was a primary example of how workers were ready to go on the offensive against an increasingly paranoid ruling class, however, Allende and the UP and their revolution from above, acted as a brake in this process because they sought to work jointly with the legal system.
Because of these joint struggles, Cerrillos and Maipu both joined forces with an aim of denouncing the vacillations of the so-called “Peoples Government” and demanding it take action in behalf of the workers. The Cordon Cerrillos put forward a political program, which was far in advance than anything the organized left was arguing for:
1. Support President Allende’s government in so far as it interprets the struggles and mobilizations of the workers.
2. Expropriate all monopoly firms and those with more than 14 million escudos capital, as well as all industries which are in any way strategic, all those which belong to foreign capital, and all those which boycott production or do not fulfill their commitments to their workers.
3. Workers’ control over production in all industries, farms, mines and so on, through delegates’ councils, delegates being recallable by the base...
4. Set up the Popular Assembly to replace the bourgeois parliament. (Roxbourough 170).Clearly, this strategy was fundamentally different from the UP’s: a revolutionary alliance between the working class and other oppressed groups, and not with the middle class, under the program of: workers’ control. It was also a testament to the revolutionary consciousness of the Chilean working class. Despite this, the program of the cordon contained two key weaknesses, one was president Allende and the second was the problem of what to do with the bourgeois state. The problem with supporting Allende is that it hid the real political situation, which the working class found themselves in. The working class was directly challenging the control of the ruling class on the shop floor, this in turn was setting the stage for the bourgeoisie to strike back. Allende was not interested in protecting the concrete gains the working class militants had achieved. While the workers were struggling with how to go forward, Allende called their acts “crass irresponsibility”. This was so because “the government already represented the interests of the working class”, so they had no reason to struggle. Instead, during this time the UP was trying to convince workers of the participatory role of the armed forces in Chile’s Road to Socialism. Once again, the temperature of the class struggle was about to rise, and so was the power of the cordones with the Transportation Bosses’ lockout that began on October 11 1972.
Bosses on the Offensive and the response of the cordones:
The bosses in Chile had several strategies to counter the revolutionary process in Chile. What occurred on September 11 was the last brutal option. Before that, the ruling class relied on its economic position as owners of the means of productions and its role in the flow of capital to bring the country to its knees. The impact of the transportation bosses’ lockout was to be devastating. The absence of road transport, which Chile heavily relies on, would have stopped the transportation of spare parts, raw materials and most importantly the distribution of food for the working class. The strategy of the bosses was to use their economic leverage to bring the country to the brink of chaos and blame the policies of Allende. Their goal: was for Allende to resign or to win effective control of congress in the upcoming congressional elections of March 73 in order to impeach Allende. Once again, the Chilean working class rose to the occasion. All across Chile workers began to form comandos. These were community-based councils that sought to continue the distribution of food and to continue to run hospitals, which had been abandoned by doctors who supported the lockout. In factories across Chile where bosses tried to stop production in support of the lockout, workers took over the factory in order to keep supplies moving and industries running. New cordones sprang up in every major industrial town of Santiago with the simple task of seizing control of the factories; protect truck drivers who were still working from fascist violence, and to maintain production. The class character of the October Bosses’ strike made it possible for the Chilean working class to organize itself in opposition.
Allende’s response to the lockout was to immediately please the bourgeoisie. After failed negotiations with the transportation bosses Allende reshuffled his cabinet, adding three heads of the armed forces and declared a “State of Emergency” using the army to “restore order” and to return factories taken over by workers to the bosses, for workers this was not a moment for negotiations. These are the words from a young woman worker in Fabrilana after hearing Allende’s response:
I think comrade Allende has been very soft; he says it’s because he wants to avoid violence, but I think we should respond with more force, scare them to death. They’re trying to take away what we’ve won. (Gonzalez 58)
Without a doubt if it were not for the heroic efforts of the workers, Chile would have collapsed. Not only did workers defeat the ruling class offensive but they did this in spite of the vacillations of the leadership in the left. In the process of taking over production, workers experienced a glimpse of what it means to run society. This was the time when Chilean-working class was at its most active and most militant and yet the UP and Allende acted as an obstacle to the political development of the working class movement. Yet no organization in the left argued for an independent break from the UP. Instead, the leftwing of the Socialist Party who were playing an important in the cordones, continued to provide Allende with a leftwing cover to his continuing rightward shift, by not breaking from him.
The congressional elections of March 1973 that the ruling class had prepared so much for had strengthen the UP who received 44% of the votes. The increase vote for the UP was clearly a demand of action by the masses. The goal of the ruling class of undermining UP’s electoral support with the bosses’ lockout failed miserably. Now, the ruling class realized that in order to do away with Allende it would have to be through forcible means. At the same time, the elections of March were made top priorities in all main leftist parties and Chile’s national trade union (CUT), which worked closely with the cordones. The channeling of working class militancy into and election campaign led to the cordones becoming demobilized and losing its momentum after the October bosses’ strike in where the immediate goal was to occupy factories and resist and it now became large demonstrations for Allende and the UP with banners declaring “Workers Firmly behind its Government”. Peter Winn rightly captures this shift at the worker run Yarur factory:
Ex-Yarur was no longer in the vanguard of the revolution from below, but rather a bastion of worker support for Allende's more cautious reform from above. It was a shift symbolized by Salvador Allende's decision to celebrated the second anniversary of his inauguration at the Yarur mill, where he thanked the cheering workers for their support and appealed to them to channel "the commitment demonstrated during the October strike" into the election campaign. (241)
The second setback for the working class movement came with the El Teniente Copper Miner’s Strike that lasted from April 1973 until June, approximately two months before the coup. The workers went on strike here because Allende failed to deliver a promise to raise wages for them. This strike is important for several reasons. El Teniente at the time was the world’s largest copper mine, secondly miners in Chile have historically played a leading role in the labor movement, but as of yet had not been active in revolutionary process of Chile. Thirdly, the strike represented a direct challenge to Allende’s role as negotiator between the price of labor and capital. Nonetheless, the weakness of the left was the order of the day. The CP denounced the miners as a “labor aristocracy”, while the UP called the leader of the miners strike a “Nazi”. Other sections of the left were less harsh; the Revolutionary Movement of the Left (MIR) characterized the struggle of the miners as pure “economism”. The reality is that an increase in wages for the miners would have a come out of the pockets of the bourgeoisie, as the price of copper in the world market was declining. The miners strike also brought to light a key weakness of the cordones in Chile. The traditional best-organized sectors of the Chilean working class were absent from the cordones national network. Two months before the coup, the miners strike was defeated but there was still patches of resistance in the working class movement particularly in Entre Lagos where workers occupied a sawmill factory, and Constitucion a coastal town which was under direct control of the masses. However, by this time the working class movement had reached a point of no return.
On June 29, Colonel Robert Souper declared a coup and rolled his tanks into the streets of Santiago. The workers responded by taking over factories, reorganizing the distribution of goods and arming themselves against the threat of the bourgeoisie. Souper’s attempted coup was very similar to the bosses’ strike of October 1972. However, there were some distinct factors: by this time, the Chilean workers had experienced several months of self-organization and secondly, the military factor was now posed as the central question: in whose interest did the state and its armed forces with its guns, tanks and helicopters represent? The ingredients for a social revolution were here: the means of production and distribution and workers defense and social services were in the hands of the cordones and the comandos. At the same time the ruling class was deeply divided, some considered Souper’s attempted coup to be to premature. Chile’s economy was paralyzed with the ruling class ceasing to invest and with bosses’ threatening to strike again. After the failure of Souper’s coup, Allende declared his second “State of Emergency” and passed the Arms Control Law whose purpose were not to disrupt those preparing to overthrow him but as a way of attacking and disarming the cordones and the working class. It was his last way of showing sections of the ruling class that he was determined to control and restrain working class militancy. The army was sent into various comandos and to major cordones like Cordon Cerrillo to occupy the factories. At the same time, Allende promoted General Augusto Pinochet to Commander in Chief, exactly 19 days before the coup. To Unidad Popular the self-activity of the working class was the main enemy.
The role of the Revolutionary Party and the State:
Clearly, workers in Chile were ready to struggle against the bourgeoisies order. The cordones and comandos in Chile legitimately represented the embryo of a socialist society. Yet to the very end, every organization in the Chilean left directed its forces, energy and political outlook towards the Popular Unity. What was missing was a national political leadership of revolutionary workers, independent of Allende, whose vision was the arm conquest of power by the cordones, comandos and workers. Organized into a truly revolutionary party could have provided clear leadership and an alternative strategy from the debates in the UP and could have called out Allende for what he really was. Without this the working class became demoralized and it was in this moment that with the sense of “we struggled but got nothing” that the ruling class decided to launch its decisive blow.
The need for the organization of a party that is rooted in the working class and which can struggle hand in hand with workers cannot be overstated. Workers are not blank slates. If they are not won to the need for a fundamental transformation of society, they will continue to accept the old ideas that justify the existing society. It is also true that there is unevenness in class-consciousness in the working class, some being more conservative than others are. However, the role of a party would be to organize the most militant sections of the working class into a single organization that could then strategize on the next steps and assess political developments. In Chile, this was sorely missing. So instead of a clear left-wing case for the need of the cordones to defend the cause of the striking miners, you had the left turn their backs on them. And instead of a concise left wing case for why the workers should not use their energies for the reelection of the UP and instead focus on retaining the power on the shop floor, workers began to demobilize for UP’s congressional campaign. The various leftist parties did not provide the working class to learn and generalize from there struggles but this does not arise out of nowhere, it requires the conscious intervention of those truly seeking to build a new society.
Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution wrote in State and Revolution:
Every great revolution raises practically, palpably, and on a mass scale of action, namely, the question of the relation between special bodies of armed men and the “self-acting armed organization of the population”. (State-Rev- 11)
This was true in 1973 where you had dual power between the cordones and the military. What was also true is that the nature of the state as an instrument for the exploitation of the working class was not taken up by anybody. The State apparatus with all its courts, armed forces, and police exist to hold the current system together, as Chilean workers realized the hard way. The state cannot be replaced by socialist politicians but needs to be smashed and in its place has to be workers councils.
Reform or Revolution?
The ultimate lesson to draw from the rich history of Chile’s revolutionary process is that during revolutionary situations reformism can prove deadly. It is not that Salvador Allende envisioned a great “Chilean Road to Socialism” or had more pragmatic goal of workers emancipation but he had a different agenda and a fundamentally different understanding of how to build a socialist society. What Allende tried to do is impossible: a strategy of cross class alliance and socialism through legal reforms. Rosa Luxemburg the German socialist, argued over a century ago against this in her pamphlet: Reform or Revolution:
He who pronounces himself in favor of the method of legal reforms in place of and as opposed to the conquest of political power and social revolution does not choose a more tranquil, surer and slower road to the same game goal. He chooses a different goal. Instead of taking a stand for the establishment of a new social order, he takes a stand for the surface modifications of the old order... not to the realization of the socialist order, but to the reform of capitalism, not to the suppression of the wage system, but to the diminution of exploitation; in a word, to the elimination of the abuses of capitalism instead of to that of capitalism itself... (157, original emphasis)
What is required is the organization of the working class from below and a revolutionary workers party to overthrow capitalism, and in its place a truly democratic society where workers control and human need is the order of the day. This I believe was possible in Chile, and it would be a tragedy if we did not learn from it.
1 comment:
Makes me wish I was there to see the talk. Keep posting!
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