With the defeat of the Bolivian working class in August 1971, Chile became the epicenter of the class struggle in Latin America. The international revolutionary movement followed events in Chile knowing that a test of strength was inevitable. This test of strength—prepared by the increasingly bitter partial confrontations of the past two years and foreshadowed by the unsuccessful coup of June 29—came dramatically on September 11. The armed forces launched a criminal attack on the working class, its organizations, and its long-standing and newly won gains, an attack against the most basic democratic rights. This new manifestation of the barbarism of the so-called national ruling classes and imperialism has been marked by the death of thousands, and no doubt even tens of thousands, in Santiago and other parts of the country. Once again these rulers have shown—through rivers of blood—that all political, judicial, and human considerations are subordinate to the ferocious and intransigent defense of their threatened interests.
Once again there has been a tragic confirmation of the danger to humanity from capitalism in its death agony; once again a confirmation of the shamefully mystified nature of the "principles" and "values" of a society of exploitation and oppression! Once again a confirmation of the catastrophic consequences for the working class that lurk behind the illusory and irresponsible perspective of a "peaceful" and "democratic" transition to socialism in a world in which for more than half a century there have been on all continents local and generalized wars, revolutionary convulsions, bloody repressions, and fascist and military dictatorships!
The Unidad Popular Program and the Dynamics of Mass Mobilization
The Unidad Popular schema was presented by its supporters as the prelude to a stage in which the passage to socialism would be on the agenda; it foresaw reformist action within the framework of the capitalist system. That is why the coalition included political formations of bourgeois origin. What is worse, it sought collaboration with sectors of the bourgeoisie and the party representing these sectors and reaffirmed its complete fidelity to the existing constitutional system. That is why the key layers of the bourgeoisie—which had already sanctioned a moderate reformist course under Frei's presidency—decided to give a green light to the Allende experiment in the framework of the conditions laid out during the negotiations that followed the September 4, 1970, elections, conditions that included the unaltered maintenance of the military apparatus. To symbolize the relative continuity of the reformist undertaking, the Unidad Popular did not propose a new agrarian reform, but limited itself to applying in a more systematic and rapid fashion the reform enacted by Frei. Nevertheless, the victory of September 4 and Allende's accession to the presidency were felt by the broad masses to be a defeat of historic dimensions inflicted on the class enemy. In fact, a new relationship of forces was created, more favorable than ever before to the working class, the peasants, and the radicalized petty bourgeoisie.
The carrying out of the reforms promised in the UP program and the blow dealt to imperialist property in the mining industry were additional stimuli to the mass movement. Quite rapidly, the mass movement showed a tendency to clash with the reformist framework upheld by Allende and his coalition: The workers wanted to expropriate the factories that were supposed to remain in the private sector; the peasants interpreted the agrarian reform in their own way. The dynamic of the class struggle was rapidly unfolding according to the logic of basic class interests, breaking the preestablished schemas.
Even the sectors of the bourgeoisie that had initially been favorable to the UP began to become alarmed, as they became alerted to the dangers threatening their interests as exploiters, not the "freedom" of the Chilean people or basic democratic rights. After many crises, they clearly went over to the opposition. The right wing of the UP left the government and quit the coalition. The Christian Democrats adopted an increasingly aggressive attitude, going so far as to engage in obstruction and sabotage. As conflicts became increasingly acute, action by fascist squads and instigation of a reactionary revolt among petty-bourgeois layers became the political instruments used on a greater and greater scale. Imperialism—primarily American imperialism—made its own contribution through blackmail, threats, and financial and economic pressures and maneuvers of all kinds.
The situation thus emerged as an absolutely clear counterposition and delimitation of antagonistic forces, with the petty-bourgeois layers divided and vacillating. At that point the bourgeoisie, frightened by the dynamic of the mass movement, abandoned the reformist project. The proletariat struggled to widen the breaches opened in the system and to establish its power. The Unidad Popular, while desiring an agreement and desperately seeking a compromise, could not accept the capitulation demanded by the bourgeoisie, which would have meant breaking with the masses, thereby bringing on defeat.
The Bourgeoisie Chooses the Road of a Military Coup
The basic failure of the Christian Democrats' plan to force Allende to capitulate through a series of partial confrontations leading to the progressive erosion of his mass base was highlighted by the outcome of the struggles of October 1972, by the results of the March 1973 elections, and by their inability last June to mobilize more than a small percentage of the El Teniente miners in a campaign of demagogy and sabotage. For the Christian Democrats, and for the whole bourgeois front, this failure once again posed the problem of fundamental strategy. Could they afford to keep playing the game of respecting constitutional norms and using the mechanisms of the state apparatus to thwart or even to paralyze Allende's actions, or would they have to move to a coup d'etat?
The failure of the June 29 coup—leaving aside the possible mistakes and technical hitches—reflected the bourgeoisie's persisting indecision, its internal differences, and the hesitation of the armed forces themselves. But Colonel Souper's coup triggered a significant mass mobilization. The masses attained an unprecedented level of radicalization. More than 1,000 factories were occupied by the workers, who, making use of the full potential of the cordones industriales, the organs of proletarian democracy thrown up by the October 1972 struggles, organized their own political control and defense, and proclaimed their will not to return to the owners even the factories theoretically included in the private sector. At the same time, mass consciousness took a qualitative leap forward, as the workers grasped the necessity of arming themselves to deal with new reactionary attacks.
The Chilean bourgeoisie soon understood that the situation had come to a crucial turning point. It had sustained a very severe blow against its economic power; it saw that the outlines of a situation of dual power were emerging and that embryos of workers militias were being formed. With the agreement of the leaders of American imperialism, it decided to abandon partial confrontations in order to move to a major test of strength, to abandon utilization of all the "legal" tricks and obstructive maneuvers in order to turn to the use of arms. The July-August negotiations were probably aimed either at gaining time or at testing, one last time, whether it was possible to force Allende to step down peacefully.
Since Allende could not and would not step down peacefully and since the mass movement did not ebb, the coup was unleashed with all the determination and ferocity required, from the standpoint of defending the interests of the exploiters, by a very explosive situation and an extraordinary mass mobilization.
The Chilean working class opposed the coup d'etat with a courage and spirit of sacrifice that will go down in the history of the international workers movement. They defended the factories arms in hand against the military's attacks; pockets of resistance cropped up even in the center of Santiago and in its suburbs; groups of soldiers and sailors of working-class and peasant origin would not obey the criminal orders of their officers and heroically rebelled. Despite the massive use of measures of extermination, despite the veritable massacres, the resistance has not been completely broken. The working class and democratic public opinion on all continents quickly expressed its indignation and condemnation of the coup on an unprecedentedly massive scale.
The Latin American workers movement, which in the month of July suffered a coup in Uruguay, has suffered a defeat of great dimensions. If the new military regime consolidates itself, this defeat will weigh heavily on the relationship of forces throughout the continent.
The Lessons of a Tragic Defeat
For three years the Communist and Socialist parties throughout the world held up the Chilean example as proof of the validity of their theories on the transition to socialism. The tragic experience of the Unidad Popular bears a series of essential lessons. These lessons should have been drawn from innumerable experiences in the past, notably in Latin America from the overthrow of the Arbenz regime in Guatemala by a mercenary army in 1954 through the coup fostered by the imperialists and the Brazilian gorillas that placed Banzer in power in Bolivia in August 1971. The Chilean proletariat has paid a very high price for the fact that these lessons were learned only by vanguard elements that were not yet in position to determine the course of events. It is the duty of revolutionists to struggle so that the heroic sacrifice of thousands of Chilean workers and militants should not be in vain, so that the reformist and opportunist mystifications imposed on the masses by the traditional bureaucratic apparatuses should be definitively destroyed.
The Chilean events of the past three years demonstrate just how illusory is the perspective of a "democratic, anti-oligarchic, and anti-imperialist stage" of the revolution in which the national bourgeoisie can participate, from the standpoint both of objective facts and of political possibilities. No bourgeoisie can go beyond absolutely limited reforms or attack the basic interests of imperialism. Further, no bourgeoisie is inclined to move even to a reformist course unless it is assured of being able to strictly control the process and to crush any independent dynamic of the mass movement. The Peruvian military regime is a classic illustration of this.
The Chilean events show that labor reformism, even under broadly favorable conditions, leads rapidly to an impasse. Even the reforms actually carried out threaten to be challenged and emptied of all content unless they are generalized. Such a generalization leads inevitably to a threshold that cannot be crossed without breaking the mechanism of the capitalist system itself. And further, partial measures attack many bourgeois interests without destroying them; they inevitably provoke reactions by forces that continue to command powerful resources and allies. Once again, it has been proven that the petty bourgeoisie cannot be won over by a conciliationist attitude; an anticapitalist perspective must be offered to combat in the most determined fashion the maneuvers of the ruling class.
The Chilean events show the absurdity of the plan of a transition to socialism without the destruction of the entire state apparatus, the apparatus that the ruling class has organized and structured to be as efficient as possible in guaranteeing the maintenance of its system of exploitation and oppression. This is not to deny the tactical need to utilize every legal possibility or to exploit exceptional circumstances such as those created by the elections of September 4, 1970, in Chile. What must be understood is the absolute and urgent necessity, in a situation of mass revolutionary upsurge, of building revolutionary organs of proletarian democracy, elements of dual power, instruments of struggle for the conquest of power, and embryos of qualitatively new political structures of a workers state that will issue from the revolution.
The Chilean reformists systematically denied this necessity; they contented themselves with promoting organs with altogether limited functions, devoid of any real independence from the "constitutional" state organs. Under the impact of dramatic experiences, the workers, especially during the past year, had rediscovered these fundamental needs and had formed organs rich in revolutionary potential, such as the cordones industriales. But their initiatives were developed too late; they were not generalized; and worse, they were often partially deprived of their content by the maneuvers of the bureaucracy, which was determined to remove from the cordones their potential to become Chilean soviets and, after having devitalized them, to integrate them into the reformist constitutionalist strategy.
And finally, the Chilean events show once again that the premise that it is possible to overthrow the capitalist regime without revolutionary violence, without armed struggle, is the most shameful of mystifications and the most suicidal of illusions. It is of primary necessity to understand that when the crucial moment of the confrontation for power comes, armed conflict, independent of the specific forces involved, is inevitable in every case and that, to repeat Lenin's expression, "the military question is the central political question."
The working class must systematically prepare itself within such a perspective, rejecting all spontanéist illusions and understanding the necessity, on this point too, of centralized action. It must understand that a purely defensive attitude prepares defeat when the crucial time arrives, and it must seize the initiative from the enemy.
"The experience of other countries, above all in Latin America," said a resolution on Chile passed by the United Secretariat of the Fourth International in December 1971, "from the invasion of Guatemala in 1954 to Banzer's coup d'etat in Bolivia last August, has shown that the working class must consider its own self-defense as an elementary task. The lesson is written in letters of blood—the blood of workers, peasants, and students. Any illusions in the 'good will' of the foe must be rejected as suicidal. In view of the nature of the government and the relations between the Unidad Popular coalition and the broad majority of the masses, the task facing the workers and peasants is to arm themselves, to form political and military instruments of self-defense, to organize a genuine popular militia, to disseminate revolutionary propaganda among the soldiers. Not to begin along these lines would mean in practice depending on the 'democratic loyalty' of the army and the specialized repressive bodies. It would mean incapacity to respond to the need felt by increasingly broad sectors of the masses, alerted by the events in Bolivia. Allende's proclamations, according to which the Popular Unity will meet any reactionary violence should it occur, constitute nothing but demagogic bragging, since they involve nothing practical. In place of relying on spontanéism and improvisations, the necessary instruments must be put together now to prevent the class enemy from achieving a crushing material superiority when the inevitable confrontation comes about. Against any possible misunderstanding, the revolutionary Marxists stress that it is not against Allende, but against the threats from the right, and to answer any attack from the forces of bourgeois repression, that the workers and peasants must place on the agenda the crucial problem of arming themselves."
The Chilean reformists disputed these elementary truths. The fact that many of them have added their names to the long list of martyrs of the workers movement neither eliminates nor moderates their heavy historical responsibility. The absence of a revolutionary party capable of playing a leading role on a mass scale has been proven once more to be a decisive factor for the proletariat.
"... Chile will not prove to be a historic exception," affirmed the December 1971 United Secretariat resolution; "the capitalist system in Chile will not be overturned without the decisive intervention of a revolutionary party, the conscious vanguard of the masses. The tasks pertaining to such a party cannot be left to the Chilean Communist party to carry out. This party, bearing the stamp of a long Stalinist tradition, is the instrument of an indigenous labor bureaucracy and relatively conservative layers of the proletariat that have not been mobilizing in the current crisis with the same dynamism as the younger generation. It has maintained all its traditional concepts, not cutting in the least way the umbilical cord tying it to the Soviet bureaucracy. The tasks of the revolutionary party cannot be left to the Socialist party either. While the SP has gained a wider hearing, particularly among the younger workers, and has, in the organizations it controls, adopted positions to the left of those of the Communist party—a genuine cesspool of reformism—it does not have the structure of a combat party, it does not have solid and continuous links with the masses it influences, and is more a conglomeration of tendencies and groups than a homogeneous formation, and, in the final analysis, bears the characteristic traits of a centrist organization. In any case, it is necessary to reject any concept based, explicitly or implicitly, on the hypothesis that, thanks to the dynamism of the revolutionary process and the power of the mass movement and thanks to the weakening of the bourgeoisie and its very likely continuing decomposition and a situation in which imperialism would be compelled to renounce military intervention, the proletariat can come to power even without a genuine revolutionary Leninist party. It is likewise necessary to reject the variant derived from the hypothesis that an ersatz revolutionary party might prove sufficient, that is, some kind of front in which the revolutionists assemble together, or a cartel in which different organizations of the far left join up."
Struggle Against the Military Dictatorship! Organize Militant International Solidarity!
A military coup d'etat in a situation like that of Chile during recent months could not be imposed bloodlessly or by limited repressive action. All signs confirm that there has been courageous and tenacious resistance from the proletariat; it is not excluded that sectors of the army—The rank and file of which is made up of sons of workers and peasants doing their military service—might revolt against the orders of reactionary officers, thus setting in motion a civil-war dynamic.
The resistance has developed heroically and has not been completely crushed. But the possibility of a revolt in the army has not materialized, or has not materialized sufficiently to create the preconditions for immediate civil war.
The question of struggle against the military dictatorship is on the agenda. It is the duty of the revolutionary vanguard to carry out the necessary turn as quickly as possible. The problem of armed struggle is no longer posed in the same terms as it was after September 1970. The prior orientation—centered on the arming of the masses—remains fundamentally valid in the event of a civil war in which the worker and peasant forces occupy certain regions of the country. In that eventuality, the revolutionists would launch on a world scale the slogan of formation of international brigades.
It is necessary now to build an active campaign of solidarity throughout the world in the best traditions of the mobilizations for Vietnam.
Chile must be defended against the barbarism of the putschists and their "national bourgeois" and imperialist masters!
For immediate, massive, and militant solidarity with the Chilean proletariat! Halt the criminal hand of the assassins! Demand the reestablishment of the Chilean people's elementary democratic rights! Demand the immediate release of all political prisoners! Defend the right of asylum for political refugees from the other countries of Latin America and their right to travel to any country of their choice! Extend political and material aid to the heroic resistance of the Chilean workers!
Imperialism and the so-called national bourgeoisie are cynically hailing the coup that they have inflicted on the Chilean workers and peasants and on the workers and peasants movement throughout Latin America and the whole world. But the enormity of the crime and the heroism of the resistance will have incalculable repercussions. The Chilean events will press forward the maturation of revolutionary consciousness, as did imperialism's criminal war in Vietnam and the heroic Vietnamese popular struggle. Capitalism will pay for its current success in Chile—a historically ephemeral success—with a dramatic deepening of its own contradictions.