We have passed the fiftieth anniversary of the Chilean coup – an event that shocked worker activists the world over. The Junta surrounded mines and factories with tanks. Sickening descriptions were given by eye-witnesses of sadistic beatings and tortures. Tens of thousands were executed: summarily shot, bludgeoned, mutilated and tortured to death, or hurled into the sea from helicopters. Witnesses imprisoned in the National Stadium in Santiago saw with their own eyes the shooting of hundreds of prisoners in batches of 30 to 40. This was reaction at its ugliest. All the hopes of the oppressed masses lay in ruins under the iron heel of a military dictatorship.
When Allende was elected president in September 1970, the world held its breath. This was hailed as a model of peaceful change for workers everywhere. It was to be the living refutation of those “ultra-lefts” who ruled out the possibility of a gradual and constitutional transition to socialism. It was also, if not quite logically, asserted in the same breath, that such a change was all the more possible in Chile, because of its alleged unique tradition of parliamentary democracy, respect for the constitution, the neutrality of the armed forces, etc. This was already a travesty of the historical truth.
Could the ringing promises of Allende’s election programme really have been implemented within the framework of the existing constitution? Were the workers, peasants, office workers and intellectuals, in the words of Allende, really to become “masters of Chile”?
Allende defended “the Chilean road” because “though it is the most difficult, it is the best and carries with it the fewest risks in human terms”. His speeches make gruesome reading today, as the thousands of corpses in Chile’s mass graves pile on top of the junta’s first victim – Salvador Allende.
It became fashionable in left-wing circles to talk of “the Chilean experiment”. The entire official left, most notable of all the Communist Parties, gave unqualified approval to Allende’s programme. This was to be the living refutation of those “defeatists” and “ultra-lefts” who argued that no fundamental changes could be made without a mobilization of the oppressed masses against capitalism.
An experiment? So be it. Once an experiment fails the test, then the responsible course for any honest observer to take is to draw the necessary conclusions; not to doggedly repeat the same blunders over and over again.
On 5th September 1973, the Morning Starcelebrated the third anniversary of Allende’s election with the words: “When Chile’s Popular Unity government took office in September 1970, many people did not give it three months of existence, let alone three years.” That government then had just six days left to live,
Why was it overthrown? According to the Morning Star, because of “the plots of imperialism and the CIA”. Certainly, the hands of US imperialism are deeply stained with Chilean blood. But what was to be expected? American capitalists had lucrative stakes in Chile. These were the first enterprises to be nationalised by Allende’s government. To expect the monster of US imperialism to roll over and play dead is inexcusably naïve.
In the same way that certain reactionaries always explain strikes by the presence of “Communist agitators”, some sections of the left think that once they have discovered the hand of “American imperialist aggression”, there is nothing more to be said. History unfolds not fundamentally through “plots” and “conspiracies” but through the class struggle. The hand of American imperialism was not an unseen and accidental intervention from outside, but the major obstacle in the path of the Chilean revolution. It is unworthy of those claiming leadership of the working class to wring their hands and say: “how unfair; the revolution was getting along so beautifully. If only the ruling class hadn’t come along and spoiled it”. If the ruling class were not hell-bent on hanging on to its power, no matter what the cost in workers’ lives, then the Socialist revolution would be not only easy; it would be unnecessary.
American imperialism dared not intervene directly. Its recent humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the scramble from South East Asia, the weakness of the dollar, the degradation of the White House under Nixon, and the explosive mood all over Latin America, all made direct US military invasion of Chile unthinkable. The prospect of victory could not have been more favourable.
Certainly, the fault was not that of the workers. They responded magnificently to the challenge. In enthusiastically carrying out in spontaneous deeds the fine words of Allende’s programme – in taking over the factories and landed estates, in voting by the million and marching by the tens of thousands, and when the time came, by fighting and dying for it. The workers and poor peasants showed that their defeat was not due to any lack of courage and determination on their part.
If socialism itself is not a sentimental pipe-dream, then there is only one conclusion: that the leadership and programme of the Popular Unity government was false. And that is our conclusion: the workers were led like lambs to the slaughter by the false and inadequate programme of their leaders.
Allende’s government carried through impressive reforms hardly equalled in history. Copper, coal, nitrates, steel, cement, telephones, tyres, textiles, banking, fishing, were all either totally or partially nationalised. About nine million acres of the biggest landed estates were distributed to the poor peasants. Great social reforms were achieved, raising the living standards of some workers by 20%. Children were given free milk and meals at school. Great strides forward were taken in pensions, welfare services, health, housing and education. The poor supported with growing enthusiasm what they saw as “their” government.
But what was “Popular Unity”? Far from an ingenious new experiment, it was yet another variant of an old failed strategy: a shaky collaboration of workers’ parties striving for a new society with capitalist parties wearing a liberal reformist mask and financed by big business to exploit the votes of the middle classes. It was another variant of the “Popular Front” governments of France and Spain in the 1930s. Never in history have such alliances made any lasting gains for the working class; all of them have led to bloody defeats. It took the bold leadership of the Bolsheviks in Russia to win the masses away from such false prophets, to save them from a bloodthirsty slaughter at the hands of Kornilov (the Russian Pinochet) by mobilising them for revolution.
The ”Popular Unity” government was a coalition of the two workers’ parties – the Communist Party and, to its left, the Socialist Party – together with no less than six small liberal splinter factions which had very little electoral support and acted mainly as a deadweight around the necks of the workers’ parties. It “united” this assortment of incompatible parties in the hope that this was the way to unite their supporters. But the presence of such parties in coalition with the workers’ parties can only bring a Trojan Horse of the ruling class into the alliance. The only way to win the middle class to the side of the workers – especially in the nightmare conditions of soaring inflation – is by bold deeds exposing the role of the banks and the monopolies and demonstrating to them in practice the superiority of a planned economy.
Every party was thrown into internal convulsions by the upheavals of the three years of the “Popular Unity” government. One wing of the Christian Democratic Party split off to form the MAPU. Later there was a further split and the Christian Left also broke away. These successive leftward defections from the Christian Democratic Party obviously left that party more firmly under the control of its right wing leadership under Frei and Alwyn – a factor that emphasises still further Allende’s folly in trying to appease the Christian Democrats to the bitter end.
The Radical Party too was swept leftwards. At its Congress in July 1971, it passed a resolution accepting “historical materialism and the class struggle” and calling for “the abolition of private property in the means of production”. This in turn provoked the right wing to break away and form the misnamed Radical Left Party (PIR).
Even within the Communist Party, a certain polarisation was beginning to take place in the last days of the Allende government, when an opposition to Corvolan crystallised around Jorge Insunza.
But the Socialist Party above all became the arena for bitter political struggle. The right-wing around Briones was ejected and the General Secretary Carlos Altamarino became the focal point for a left wing which maintained a vigilant and critical stance. Both the Santiago branch of the Party and the Young Socialists called on the leadership to set up a workers’ militia, and it was these sections which played the main role in importing arms into the factories.
Finally, the Movimiento de Izquierdia Revolucionaria(Movement of the Revolutionary Left) was a tendency based mainly on students who isolated themselves from the workers’ organisations. Here and there they successfully encouraged occupations of landed estates and in some cases of factories, but they based their tactics on “single combat” with the representatives of state power. Their sporadic occupations were never linked to the overall perspective of mobilizing the working masses. They hoped to build a revolutionary movement while bypassing the existing traditional organisations of the working class. They sought instead to mobilise the most backward layers of society, the poor peasanty or the lumpenproletarian (or semi-proletarian) elements in the shanty towns encircling Santiago. Tragically, they dissipated the radicalism of their supporters in impatient adventuristic policies, creating “armed combat organisations” to shoot it out with the incomparably mightier repressive apparatus of the state machine, instead of adopting the method of Lenin in April 1917 – only six months before the world’s first socialist revolution! – in pursuing a meticulous policy of “patient explanation”, to raise the consciousness of the workers to a sense of their own innate power.
The “Popular Unity” government descended every time to the lowest common denominator, giving a veto not only to the bourgeois parties within the coalition but also in effect to the biggest opposition party in Congress – the Christian Democtats – who at every turn pressurised and blackmailed the government and were soon to be found supporting the military dictatorship which overthrew it.
Allende had only become president on the basis of literally fatal concessions to the Christian Democrats:
- to respect the “freedom of the press” – which in practice meant giving the millionaire press tycoons free licence to pour out a daily stream of lies, filth and slander;
- to leave intact the composition of the judiciary and Supreme Court, which was to repay the favour by constantly overruling him and which Allende was soon to accuse of “partiality in the administration of justice”; and,
- worst of all, to make no changes in the strength of the army, navy, air force or police, appoint no military officers not educated in the military academies, and allow no “unconstitutional private militias” – thus leaving intact the forces which would soon crush his government underfoot. Other than writing a postdated suicide note, it would be hard to imagine a more deadly strategy.
What programme could Allende hope to carry through under such conditions? All that was left was his promise to “strengthen democracy”. But this was the kind of woolly verbiage that Lenin time and again castigated.
History knows of only two kinds of democracy. There is capitalist democracy, which, in Lenin’s words, “is bound to remain restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and deception for the poor”. And there is proletarian democracy, which must be based on workers’ councils, election of all officials with guaranteed right of recall, an armed people, rotation of state duties, and the strict limitation of pay to all administrators to the average skilled workers’ wage.
Any talk of “real democracy” under capitalism is dangerous. In Lenin’s words, again: “There is not a single state, however democratic, which has no loopholes… in its constitution guaranteeing the bourgeoisie the possibility of dispatching troops against the workers… in case of a ‘violation of public order’ – and actually in case the exploited class ‘violates’ its position of slavery and tries to behave in a non-slavish manner.” The Chilean coup is a perfect confirmation of Lenin’s words.
Allende claimed that his aim was to “install a new system of power in which the working class and the people are the ones who really exercise power”. And this was to be achieved within the existing constitution, with the permission of the press tycoons, the judiciary and the armed forces? Certainly, said Luis Corvalan, General Sectretary of the Chilean Communist Party: “In the conditions prevailing in our country, changes cannot be effected according to the classical patterns of revolution; they can be effected only within the frame of the law.”
Such words fly in the face not just of Lenin’s clear words, but of elementary human reason. It was Marx who patiently explained in his comments on the Paris Commune: “One thing was proved by the Commune: namely, that the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes.” He wrote that the task of the revolution was “no longer as before to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to smash it; and this is essential for every real people’s revolution.” Finally, Engels wrote: “From the very outset the Commune had to recognise that the working class, once in power, could not go on managing with the old state machinery; that in order not to lose again its only just won supremacy this working class must, on the one hand, do away with all the old repressive machinery previously used against it itself; and on the other, safeguard itself against bits own deputies and officials by declaring them all without exception subject to recall at any moment.”
Undoubtedly, great reforms were introduced by Allende’s government, which gained massive popularity. It granted much-needed wage increases, land reforms, welfare handouts. It is perfectly true that Allende did not have an overall majority of the population behind him, and that it was necessary to win over the mass of the middle class. But he demonstrated tragically that concessions to the Right were no way to do it.
The nationalisation of the American-owned copper mines was supported by 93% of the population. The vote for Popular Unity candidates rose from 36% in the presidential election in 1970 to 49.7% in the municipal elections of 1971 – more than the British Labour Party has ever won! More significant still, it was the Socialist Party on the left of the coalition which raised its share of the vote from 13.9% to 22.4%, while the Radicals, the main force of the right of the coalition, halved their vote from 16% to 8%. It was the radical actions of the government, and not its concessions, which were winning support. That was the moment in which Allende should have gone back to the country and appeal for an overwhelming mandate to carry through his reforms to the very end.
It hardly needed a Lenin to explain that “in every profound revolution, the prolonged stubborn resistance of the exploiters… is a rule. Never… will the exploiters submit to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make use of their advantages in a last desperate battle.” Yet there are none so blind as those who refuse to see. To quote Corvalan once again: “The legitimacy of the election victory which no one can challenge… explain(s) why US imperialism and Latin American reaction will find themselves compelled to accept the situation in Chile.” He continued: “The Chilean armed forces have retained their spirit of professionalism, their respect for the constitution and the law… The immediate formation of an armed people’s militia… would be equivalent to a mark of defiance of the army… It must be won to the cause of progress in Chile and not pushed on to the other side of the barricades.” And Allende “issued a warning against classifying the armed forces as reactionary and thus preventing them from being a dynamic force…”
Far from provoking or defying the officers, Allende’s government grovelled before them, raising their salaries in the hope of buying their gratitude. Yet the counter-revolution was being prepared under the very noses of the government. The army Commander-in-Chief General Schneider was assassinated by fascist gunmen in 1970 in an attempt to forestall Allende’s election victory. A 2,000-man force was recruited to sabotage transport, water, gas and power. Repeated attempts were made on Allende’s life. Massive “strikes” were staged by lorry owners, shopkeepers and highly-paid copper workers, and noisy pots-and-pans demonstrations were held by middle-class housewives. Owners of the large estates slaughtered livestock, refused to plant grain, and stockpiled machine guns. Again and again, trade unionists and government supporters were gunned down by fascist assassins. And at every blow from the right, further concessions were granted by Allende. Left ministers were sacked and replaced by generals; laws were revoked; reforms were dropped – while workers occupying factories and peasants taking over landed estates were denounced for their “irresponsibility” and “anarchy”. Such blindness would make the very stones weep!
But why were large sections of the middle class discontented under Allende’s government? Not because it was “too left”, but because despite the massive extension of public ownership, overall control of the economy was still not in the hands of the government. For it was above all the chronic rate of inflation which drove sections of the middle class to the right. Inflation was caused initially by the penetration of millions of worthless paper dollars from the USA, into Chile as into the rest of Latin America and indeed the whole capitalist world. It soared sharply in the last period of Allende’s government, getting a new impetus partly from the deliberate campaign of sabotage by the capitalists of Chile and the USA. Only a planned economy, rationally harmonising the overall growth of production, could guarantee secure and rising living standards.
At the end of June 1973, the cost-of-living index had risen by 283.4% in 12 months. In the first six months of 1973, food prices rose by 68.6% and clothes by 166.7%. The economy because grotesquely distorted. A bottle of Coca-Cola cost more than a ton of steel, and a plastic bag more than the cement it could hold! The nightmare of inflation continually undermined the government’s reforms. Wage increases disappeared before the ink was dry on the banknotes. To protect the workers’ living standards, the government had to grant bigger and bigger wage increases. In January 1972 wages were raised by 22.1% and in October they were raised again by 99.8%. Even this was barely sufficient to catch up with prices. So it was decided to pay workers partly in kind rather than in cash. Naturally, in conditions of dire shortage, grossly exacerbated by the lorry-owners’ strike, a black market boomed everywhere, aggravating inflation still further. By the time of the coup, half the food consumed had been bought on the black market. The escudo, valued officially at 350 to the dollar, soared to unofficial exchange rates of over 2,000.
The workers were partly insulated against the effects of inflation by the wage increases and the payment in kind. But the middle class were plunged into a nightmare of insecurity. They depended on cash, and their lives were rocked by instability. In the two weeks preceding the “employers’ strike” on November 1972, Argentine beef prices soared by 200%, and those of sugar, coffee, flour, milk, butter and margarine nearly doubled! It is not surprising that they were prey to the strident propaganda of the capitalist Press against the government.
The middle class are doomed under capitalism. Even the Generals, with all their guns and their smart uniforms, cannot command prices to “stand at attention”. The only way out of the impasse of inflation lies in the construction of a publicly planned economy. If the Chilean workers’ parties had conducted a forthright campaign on this programme, and exposed the rackets and the profiteering of the monopolies, they could have won far wider strata of the middle class. But to do this, they would have had to break with the “consensus” with the Radicals and the Christian Democrats.
Allende’s vacillation, temporising and half-measures drove the middle class to despair. The government faced a rising revolt of shopkeepers, lorry-owners, doctors, small farmers, clerical workers, bank employees, lawyers, teachers, airline pilots, and the highly-paid copper miners, all of whom participated in crippling strikes. Middle-class housewives took to the streets. It was out of the ranks of the middle strata that recruits were made for the small but ferocious gang of Fascist thugs “Patria y Libertad”, which reared its head with growing audacity. Allende imagined that parliamentary concessions to the Christian Democratic politicians would endear him to the middle class, regardless of the problems they faced in the real world outside Congress. Allende bargained with the Christian Democrats at every turn, even begging them in the last days before the coup to enter the Cabinet. But it was the Christian Democratic Party in league with the Nationals which brought down one Allende Cabinet after another, even impeaching certain Ministers. Finally, it voted with the Nationals in favour of the notorious censure motion which accused Allende of “violating the Constitution” and in the next breath “reminded the armed forces of their duty to protect the Constitution”, thus brazenly inviting the Generals to stage a coup.
On 29th June 1973, naval officers staged a rebellion. Due to their haste and their failure to consult their counterparts in other sections of the armed forces, the coup failed. A golden last opportunity was given to the working class – a precious breathing space in which to prepare a workers’ militia and appeal to soldiers, sailors and airmen to co-ordinate resistance.
And what happened? Corvalan praised “the prompt and determined action by the Commander-in-Chief of the army and the loyalty of the armed forces and police”. In reply to the demand for a workers’ militia, he said: “No sirs! We continue to support the absolutely professional character of the armed institutions.” And the Morning Star reported “Chile’s Popular Unity government has emerged strengthened and toughened…”
Meanwhile, Allende was well aware how strong and tough his government really was. His acolyte Regis Debray described Allende’s fatalistic reaction: “The next day he discovered that he could count on only four generals out of 22… For several days this apparatus had been out of control and was sliding gradually into open insubordination… Allende was no longer making any plans further than 48 hours ahead.” When the left socialist Altamirano urged Allende to mobilise the masses, arguing quite correctly that “the best way to bring about a confrontation and make it even bloodier is to turn your back on it”, Allende retorted: “And how many masses does it take to stop a tank?” So for all the rhetoric, Allende had no faith in the “loyalty” of the officer caste, let alone the capacity of rank and file soldiers and sailors to respond to a class appeal.
So instead, he begged the armed forces to come back into his Cabinet! And his last desperate bid for survival at any cost was to revoke all those decrees of nationalisation that had not been explicitly approved by Congress. But the more craven his concessions, the more contemptuously the generals spat on his government. And as soon as they felt ready, they put it out its misery like an elephant squashing a flea.
By this point, Allende had privately already given up. His sole concern was for the dignity of his own defeat. “I shan’t let myself be bundled on to an aircraft in my pyjamas, and I shan’t ask for asylum in some embassy.” And, sure enough, when the time came Allende acted with exemplary personal heroism, refusing to abandon the presidential palace as the air force bombed it, and him inside it, to smithereens. A noble personal gesture, but a political betrayal of a class.
Why do we hark back half a century to the history of a little Latin American country a hemisphere away? Because nothing can be more vital to the future of workers in Britain, Europe, Asia or Africa.
Two more recent stories… The former minister in Greece’s SYRIZA government Varoufakis described the scene in the government’s conference room on the night of the referendum which had voted an astounding 61.31% in favour of defying the European banks. “I jumped up and punched the air… only to realise that I was the only one in the room celebrating.” An extraordinary exchange followed immediately afterwards between Varoufakis and Tsipras.
“When I entered his office, Alexis stared at me and said we had messed up badly… At that point Alexis confessed to something I had not anticipated. He told me that he feared a ‘Goudi’ fate awaited us if we persevered – a reference to the execution of six politicians and military leaders in 1922… Alexis then began to insinuate that something like a coup might take place…”
Tsipras was confessing to a wretched degree of cowardice that could only have aroused contempt from the descendants of those hundreds of thousands of Greeks who had given their lives in the resistance to Nazi occupation and overthrown them single-handed, and then fought first the British and then the US army in years of civil war; and likewise from the survivors of the youth uprising which had brought down the colonels’ junta in 1974.
One more example. Chile was often called “the England of Latin America”. It was in any case a myth that Chile had an unblemished stable parliamentary tradition in any but a local context. But the parallels could be a lot closer than is apparent at first sight. The former leftish MP Chris Mullin once wrote a novel called A Very British Coup, in which a leftish prime minister was brought down not by a military coup but by a campaign of subtle manipulation and blackmail – the implication being that the British are true gentlemen; they don’t resort to crude violence but operate by more subtle methods. That was certainly not the experience of the hundreds of peaceful Indian demonstrators mown down in the massacre at Amritsar in 1919. Or the hundreds of Kikuyu men tortured, mutilated and murdered in Kenya in the 1950s. Or the Irish victims of torture and assassination in the 1970s and 1980s.
Even under the very mild Wilson governments in Britain both in the 1960s and more seriously in the 1970s, serious military plans for a coup were under preparation by shadowy elements in the military and security services. Contingency plans were under active consideration to overthrow the government and establish a dictatorship, with the Queen’s cousin Lord Mountbatten serving as a royal figurehead. In 1968 this cabal had drawn inspiration from the recent coup in Greece; and in 1975 directly from Pinochet’s coup in Chile – a precedent welcomed and implicitly recommended in a notorious editorial in The Times. A former Deputy Director of MI6 and some retired generals and serving officers recruited a secret army. The shipping company Cunard was approached with a request to requisition the liner QE2 for use as a detention centre for the Cabinet. And the Army staged full-scale military manoeuvres at Heathrow Airport without giving even prior notice to the government.
The experience of the Corbyn era showed that Britian could easily prove to be “the Chile of Europe”. The odious Ian Duncan Smith announced that “Corbyn’s sole purpose in life is to do damage to the country”; a general openly threatened mutiny against a Corbyn government; paratroopers were videoed using a photo of Corbyn for target practice. One Labour MP had already been murdered by a Nazi assassin, and another escaped the same fate only in the nick of time. This was no game.
It was not thanks to the scruples of the British ruling class that a coup was avoided. It was Momentum,
the Campaign group and Corbyn personally who proved so timid that a direct confrontation proved unnecessary. But the far right is taking power all over Europe, including in traditionally social-democratic Sweden and in Italy with its now-eclipsed communist traditions. In Britain too, the next government after Starmer will pose a similar mortal threat. We ignore the writing on the wall at our peril.
The Junta swore to “stamp out Marxism”. How many times have we heard this threat? Chile today is once again finding its path towards human dignity. Like many such dictators before them, the Chilean generals too found that they couldn’t order the class struggle to stop. History cannot be pushed backwards. Marxism has been prematurely buried over and over again, under the general’s gun, the professor’s textbook, or the traitor’s lie; but it returns again every time with redoubled force, because Marxism alone corresponds to modern social reality.