By Roger Silverman
Image – Library of the Chilean National Congress – Attribution 3.0 Chile (CC BY 3.0 CL)
Fifty years ago this month, on September 11, 1973, a military coup took place in Chile, putting a committee (‘junta’) of generals in power, led by General Pinochet. The coup resulted in the bombing of the presidential palace and the subsequent murder of the president, Salvador Allende. Allende’s government had been a left “Popular Unity” government, committed to reforms in the interests of workers and the overthrow was instigated by the Chilean and international capitalist class.
This article by Roger Silverman was published in the Militant International Review in January 1974 under the heading, Counter Revolution in Chile. It gives a powerful description not only of the events that led up to the coup itself, but also points to the lessons that socialists need to learn from it.
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The counter-revolution in Chile is in full blast. Thousands of workers have died under its blows. An American doctor in Santiago has estimated that up to 25,000 Chileans have been executed. Two American students who were imprisoned in the National Stadium in Santiago – where the Junta is holding 7,000 prisoners – saw with their own eyes the shooting of 400 to 500 prisoners in groups of 30 to 40. A Mexican diplomat has asserted that the regime has a blacklist of 13,115 foreigners to be systematically wiped out – mostly political exiles from Bolivia, Brazil, Uruguay and other Latin American states. Sickening descriptions have been given by eye-witnesses of sadistic beatings and tortures.
In the whole violent history of the South American continent, the classical home of military coups, this is undoubtedly the bloodiest upheaval in more than fifty years. It is a massacre almost on the scale of the Indonesia bloodbath of 1965, where, as in Chile, an enraged officer class avenged itself on the workers’ organisations after overthrowing a government which tried to lean on the support of the working class. The Junta has surrounded mines and factories with tanks, and decreed that workers must work on Saturdays and on two public holidays without extra pay. This is reaction at its ugliest. All the hopes of the oppressed masses lie in ruins under the iron heel of a military dictatorship. A cruel lesson is being given to the workers and poor peasants of the whole teeming continent.
The Junta itself estimates that as many as 15% of the workforce have been sacked as “militants”’ and “agitators”. These workers are starving and destitute, unable to get new jobs, forced into vagrancy and crime. The Junta has sworn to “stamp out Marxism” in Chile. How many times before have we heard this threat? The generals will find that they cannot 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.
The generals, as loyal servants to the ruling class, have announced that the “immense majority” of companies nationalised by the Popular Unity government are to be returned to their former owners. Pinochet, Leigh and the other leaders of the Junta have Fascist ambitions. They have vowed to crush Marxism and they have shown unrelenting savagery in their violent war on the workers’ parties and trade unions. But they have seized power without any solid social basis. They do not have the organised paramilitary force of demented small businessman, bankrupts, former officers and thugs that made up Mussolini’s Fascisti, Hitlers’s SA and SS or Franco’s Falange. There is just a small “Gremialist” movement, based largely on the Catholic University, which stands for the replacement of trade unions by guilds (‘gremios’) containing both workers and employers, and the other paraphernalia of a corporate state.
But the Gremialists and the Patria y Libertad do not provide the basis for a Fascist regime which can roll back history even for a couple of decades. Most of the politicians from the orthodox right-wing parties are pressing the regime to set up an equivalent to the Arena, the civilian party which give a parliamentary façade to the Brazilian junta. But it will remain an unstable military dictatorship, a regime of crisis.
A regime resting on nothing but its own police and army is always precarious, no matter how brutal it might be. The Argentine generals and the Greek Colonels have discovered that. The Chilean coup is similar to the reaction following the defeat of the Asturian Commune in 1934 in Spain, which killed 30,000 workers. Only two years later, the revolution leapt forward once again.
The workers of Chile will have the last word, and this bitter blow will harden their resolve to carry the revolution through to a conclusion. But the lessons of the Chilean coup extend far beyond Chile’s borders. Allende’s election in 1970 was hailed as a model of peaceful change for workers everywhere. This was to be the living refutation of those “romantics” and “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 the unique tradition of parliamentary democracy, respect for the constitution, the neutrality of the armed forces, etc.
An “imperialist plot”?
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.
Why did the “Chilean experiment” fail? The Morning Star blamed “the plots of imperialism and the CIA”. John Gollan, Secretary of the British Communist Party (Morning Star, September 15, 1973), wrote: “Nixon and the Pentagon are in the thick of this vile crime”. Tony Chater, another CP leader (Comment, October 6, 1973) called the coup “a brutal act of imperialist aggression” and listed the evidence of American involvement.
Certainly, the hands of US imperialism are deeply stained with Chilean blood. To take the most scandalous example, a letter was unearthed from Hal Hendrix (head of the private Latin American intelligence service of the multi-national corporation ITT) to a colleague, in which he talked of General Viaux’s plans to launch a coup to prevent Allende taking office: “Rumour that (Viaux) would trigger a coup on October 9 or 10 were rampant…Word was passed to Viaux from Washington to hold back last week. It was felt that the was not adequately prepared, his timing was off, and he should cool it for a later, unspecified date…as part of the persuasion to delay, Viaux was given oral assurance that he would receive material assistance and support from the US and others for a later manoeuvre.”
There was plenty of other evidence. The Observer provided evidence of connections between the Fascist “Patria y Libertad” organisation, the big industrialists’ association and two CIA agents in the copper miners’ strikes. The Chilean paratroop regiment were trained in the USA. The State Department admitted having prior knowledge of the coup, and the same day US warships lay off Valparaiso, for “joint naval manoeuvres”. Neither is there any secret about the cutting off of all loans and credits from 1971 onwards, and the speedy resumption of aid after the coup.
But what was to be expected? American capitalists had lucrative stakes in Chile. After an initial investment of $50-80million 44 years ago, the copper mine owners alone have raked in a cool $4,000million profit, according to Allende. These were the first enterprises to be nationalised by Allende’s government. To expect the military espionage monster of US imperialism to roll over and play dead is as naïve as to call the recognition of the new regime by British capitalism “the stench of betrayal”, as Gollan did. For capitalists to show solidarity against world revolution is no betrayal!
Certain reactionaries always explain strikes by the presence of “Communist agitators”. In the same way, 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 no explanation to say “the revolution was just getting along nicely, when the ruling class came 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, but unnecessary.
From 1918 to 1921 the Russian workers and poor peasants had to stand up not just to hidden sabotage and undercover aid to the White Guards, but to the direct military intervention of no less than 21 imperialist armies! How did the Bolsheviks respond to this? With complaints at the “unsporting behaviour” of world imperialism? On the contrary, they replied with the implacable argument of armed resistance, linked to bold internationalist propaganda. Faced with an armed people, a militia of ragged workers and peasants ready to fight with their bare fists if need be to defend their revolution, the troops of the intervention melted away.
The soldiers and sailors became infected with revolution. Mutinies and desertions were rampant. Industrial action by the workers in Western Europe, electrified alike by the power of their Russian brothers, forced world capitalism to retreat. The world revolution emerged enormously strengthened by the courage and skill of the Bolsheviks in the teeth of reaction.
How much flimsier was the challenge facing the leadership of the Chilean workers? American imperialism dared not intervene directly. The days of Panama, Guatemala and Santo Domingo are over. The humiliating defeat in Vietnam, the scramble from South-East Asia, the weakness of the dollar, the degradation of the White House, and the explosive mood all over Latin America… all made military invasion of Chile unthinkable for the American ruling class.
The Chilean workers fought heroically, ready to sacrifice their lives under the tanks, planes and firing squads of the hated junta. From the very beginning, they had rallied loyally to the support of the Popular Unity government. They have earned an honoured place in the long scroll of martyrs for socialism. Either socialism itself is just a sentimental dream – or the energies of the workers were needlessly squandered. Any socialist must conclude that the workers’ leaders failed to harness the masses’ power; that their false programme delivered them into the bloody hands of their executioners.
Allende’s government carried through a programme of reform within the confines of capitalism hardly equalled in history. Copper, coal, nitrates, steel, cement, telephones, tyres, textiles, banking, fishing, were all either totally or partially nationalised. In the first year, industrial production rose by 13%. 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 the fields of pensions, welfare services, health, housing and education. The poor supported with growing enthusiasm what they saw as “their” government.
What was the “Popular Unity”?
To understand how their hopes were so cruelly dashed, it is necessary to examine exactly to what extent it was “their” government. What was the “Popular Unity”? It was an electoral bloc which tied the two mass workers’ parties, the Communists and, to their left, the Socialists – both nominally Marxist-Leninist parties – together with the Radicals and five small liberal splinter groups.
These latter six parties stood for reforms within the framework of capitalism, and their main function was to act as watchmen over the workers’ parties, millstones around their necks, to hold them back from taking full revolutionary measures against capitalism. It was hence a coalition of conflicting interests, an unprincipled bloc. Allende thought that by “uniting” this assortment of mutually incompatible parties around a minimum programme which represented the lowest common denominator, he could unite their supporters into a solidly welded monolithic movement for gradual change. The “Popular Unity” government therefore proclaimed its intention not to proceed immediately to socialist policies, but to complete first the “anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist” revolution, and then to “open the road” to socialism sometime in the future. While carrying through sweeping reforms, it also tried to contain the spontaneous movement of the workers and poor peasants to take over the factories and landed estates.
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, which entered the alliance and gravitated rapidly towards the left. Later, there was a further split and the IC (Christian Left) also broke away to support Popular Unity. The original leaders of MAPU, uneasy about that party’s radicalization, left MAPU to join this new formation. These successive defections from the Christian Democratic Party obviously left that party more firmly under the control of its right-wing leadership under Frei and Alwyn, which 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, and 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 strong left wing, which maintained a vigilant and critical stance in relation to Allende. 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.
If a clear, conscious Marxist cadre had existed within the Socialist Party, it would have become the nucleus for a mass revolutionary tendency in the stormy events from 1970 onwards. A Bolshevik party could have been created, capable of articulating the instinctive movement of the working class for power, and of carrying revolution through to a successful conclusion. 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. The sporadic occupations were never linked to the overall perspective of mobilizing the working masses to take power.
It was this tendency, founded by self-styled “Trotskyists” who, here as elsewhere, hoped to build a revolutionary movement while bypassing the existing traditional organisations of the most conscious strata of the working class. They sought to mobilise the most backward layers of society, the poor peasanty and the lumpenproletarian (or semi-proletarian) elements in the shanty towns encircling Santiago. Their exploits in seizing certain medium-sized estates made no impact on the political consciousness of the activists within the workers’ parties. It was only at the end of 1972 that a “regroupment” of some of these grouplets took place and a new party was founded, once again in isolation from the mass organisations: the “Revolutionary Socialist Party”. It is a tragic fact about the Chilean events that those revolutionary elements to the left of the mass parties impatiently followed adventuristic policies of 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 relentless and meticulous policy of “patient explanation” to raise the consciousness of the workers to a sense of their own innate power.
The Popular Unity government was similar in composition to the Kerensky regime in Russia, after the direct representatives of the capitalists had been forced out of the coalition. The workers’ parties gave permanent right of veto not only to the Radicals and the other reformist parties inside the coalition, but above all to the Christian Democrat opposition, on whose votes in Congress the government depended. This was the real character of the government led by what the Press called “the world’s first democratically elected Marxist President”.
In reality, the Chilean “experiment” was nothing new. Didn’t the Russian Mensheviks in 1917 also patch up a coalition government with the peasant Social-Revolutionary Party? And even, while they could, with the Cadets, the capitalist party, on the grounds that it was necessary to secure the maximum “popular unity” in defence of the “anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist” February Revolution? And what about the “Popular Front” government in Spain, which brought the parties at the head of the revolutionary working class into a coalition with the “shadow of the capitalists”, the abandoned relics of the old liberal parties of a ruling class that had already fled to the Fascist camp? That too was justified by the need to “unite the forces of democracy” against Franco.
Why the middle class despaired
The so-called “parties of the middle class” have always been based on deceit of the middle class. For what are the real historic interests of the middle strata of society? The lower peasantry in the countryside and the small businessmen in the town, squeezed dry by finance capital and crushed by the monopolies, face under capitalism only bankruptcy and ruin. They can only be forced down into the ranks of the proletariat. Their only real salvation, then, lies in the victory of the workers and socialism. The parties which misrepresent them under capitalism are financed by their worst enemies – Big Business – in order to pander to their basest prejudices and rouse them against the workers. The presence of such parties in coalition with the workers’ parties can only bring a Trojan Horse of the ruling class into the alliance.
Every such coalition leads eventually to catastrophe. In Germany, the Menshevik policies of the Social-Democratic leaders following the 1918 revolution paved the way for terrible social crisis and the trampling of the workers under the jackboots of Hitler’s Gestapo. In Spain, the road of “Popular Frontism” led to the slaughter of a million people and the victory of Franco. In France, it led directly to the Vichy regime and Nazi occupation. In Greece, it led to the colonels’ putsch. In Brazil and Uruguay, it had the same consequences. The only reason why it did not end in a horrible defeat in Russia at the hands of General Kornilov – the Russian Franco or Pinochet – is that there was a Bolshevik Party which struggled tenaciously against the politics of class collaboration, and in mobilising the workers for socialism won all the millions of toiling people in town and country into a real alliance to change society. The Bolsheviks formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Social-Revolutionaries – the poor peasants whom they had won away from the treacherous double-dealing of the SR leadership, and thus created a real unity of the working masses.
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 fact that Allende won 36.2% of the votes – more than either the National or the Christian-Democratic candidates – marked the beginning of the Chilean revolution. Only twenty years earlier, he had won a mere eight per cent of the votes! All the workers except the most highly paid, and a large section of peasants, voted for what they saw as fundamental revolutionary change. Allende began with far more support than the Bolsheviks had in February 1917! Bold propaganda, the formation of workers’ councils, mass action, could have quickly rallied wider strata against the big landowners and the monopolies.
The bold reforms, which were carried out mostly within the first year or so of the Popular Unity government, did inspire enormous support. The nationalisation of the copper mines was supported by 93% of the population, and even the ultra-Right National Party had to vote for it in Congress. In the 1971 municipal elections the Popular Unity candidates won no less than 49.7% of the votes – more than the British Labour Party has ever won in any general election! What is more significant still is the fact that 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 action of the government, and not its concessions, which was winning support. Even in the “mid-term” Congressional elections of March 1973, which took place amid economic chaos and after the first crippling lorry-owners’ strike, the Popular Unity candidates still won 44% of the votes. Once again, the Socialists doubled their Congressional seats from 14 to 28, while the Christian Left suffered a decline from seven seats to one.
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, and partly also from the big wage and pensions increases which pumped extra currency into a chaotic capitalist economy. 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%. Money supply was rising by nearly 1% a day! The economy because grotesquely distorted. A senior United Nations executive pointed out, for instance, that 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” of 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. They will see that 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 the 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, the ”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.
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.
Capitalist or Workers’ Democracy?
Allende’s first and most fatal concession came even before his election as President had been endorsed by Congress. He secured the votes of the Christian Democrats only on the basis of accepting a list of crucial demands including promises not to interfere with the “freedom of the press” (i.e. the freedom of the press tycoons to pour out a ceaseless daily flow of lies, filth and slander against his government); not to touch the judiciary; and – most deadly significant of all – not to tamper with the armed forces. He promised not to allow the formation of any “unconstitutional private militias”, to “appoint no military officers not educated in technical academies” and to make “no changes in the strength of the Army, Navy, Air Force or national police…except by laws passed by Congress”.
Since Chilean politicians have always boasted that Chile has “a Prussian Army, a British Navy and an American Air Force”, that was fatal! Why did the Christian Democrats insist on it, if not to keep open the option of a military coup later on? Unlike Allende, who still talked of “strengthening democracy”, the Christian Democratic leaders obviously had no illusions about the true essence of the State – the “armed bodies of men”. The state apparatus thus remained firmly in the hands of the ruling class. What did this mean for the Popular Unity government which nominally presided over it? The Supreme Court, with increasing insolence, overruled its authority, upholding, in one monstrous example, the appeal of the putschist General Viaux, and substituting for the original 25-year sentence a mere two-year jail term (quite a lenient penalty for plotting to overthrow the elected government by force!). (Allende last June accused the Supreme Court in an Open Letter, of “partiality in the administration of justice”.) And the armed forces, under the grip of the officer caste trained in the elite military academies, killed the President, dissolved Congress, suspended the Constitution and ruled by decree.
Nobody could reasonably complain that the Generals had not given ample warning of their preparations for military intervention. Two days before Congress ratified Allende’s election, the Army Commander-in-Chief General Schneider was assassinated for opposing a coup. Then a coup was prepared by General Viaux, General Valenzuela and Admiral Barros – a coup postponed only at Washington’s request, as we have already seen. The secret correspondence on this conspiracy, including the clear warning of Washington’s support for a future coup, was published in 1971 and was common knowledge to every Chilean. Countless beatings and assassinations were committed by the “Patria y Libertad”. In the countryside, a 2000-man force was recruited to sabotage transport, water, gas and power supplies. The big landowners stock-piled machine guns. Only weeks before the junta seized power, there was a full-scale revolt by the Admirals, and troops clashed outside the Presidential Palace. Allende’s own aide-de-camp was murdered. It was against this backcloth of violent tension that the “Comrade President” had walked on to the stage, promising to “strengthen democracy” and ultimately “instal a new system in which the working class and the people are the ones who really exercise power”.
How was this to be implemented by a governmnt which had just assured the ruling class of unchallenged control of the armed forces, the judiciary, the Press and the civil service? Were the capitalists really expected to sit back and watch their power being dismantled, without any attempt at resistance?
Allende said on one occasion: “Chile has chosen to carry out a revolution within a bourgeois democracy and will continue to do so, even though it is difficult”. What did he mean? Was it to remain a “bourgeois democracy” after the revolution had been accomplished? If not, how was it to be transformed? If so, in what did the “revolution” consist? Was it the “anti-oligarchic and anti-imperialist” revolution? But if the Chilean capitalists were supposed to be an ally in this fight, why should it be “difficult” to pursue it within a bourgeois democracy?
The truth is that Allende, like many others before him, supposed the state to be a neutral entity which could be “democratised” and later put at the service of the workers. All the promises to “strengthen democracy” remained pathetic hopes. Allende, in the event, never dared to hold a plebiscite to consolidate his authority and clip the powers of reaction, although he was constitutionally entitled to do this. He never submitted his proposals for the replacement of the two Houses of Congress by a single directly-elected unicameral “people’s parliament”. He even withdrew his proposal for local “neighbourhood courts” of lay trade unionists and peasants.
There has never been any such thing as a neutral, classless “democracy”, and Allende made strange claims for a leader of a “Marxist-Leninist” Party. As Lenin argued in The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky: “If we are not to mock at common sense and history, it is obvious that we cannot speak of a ‘pure democracy’ as long as different classes exist; we can only speak of class democracy.” It is “bound to remain restricted, truncated, false and hypocritical, a paradise for the rich and a snare and a deception for the exploited, for the poor.”
“There is not a single state”, wrote Lenin, “however democratic, which has no loopholes…in its constitution, guaranteetring the bourgeoisie the possibility of despatching 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.” That was the nature of the “bourgeois democracy” in Chile, and recent events there demonstrate more eloquently than any theoretical arguments the frailty of capitalist democracy when the ruling class feels its vital interests threatened.
There is only one way to “strengthen democracy”: to take the power and wealth out of the hands of the capitalists, to establish workers’ management of the economy as a whole and workers’ control in the factories. Workers’ Councils must be set up in every locality, composed of lay delegates elected from all the workplaces and subject to instant recall. Every Council must elect delegates on the same basis to a Regional and Central Workers’ Council, which would in turn report back to the local and regional Councils. There must be no standing army or police force, but an armed people. No administrator must be paid more than the average skilled worker’s wage, and all state duties should be rotated to involve the entire working population. That is the foundation for a workers’ democracy, as described by Marx, Engels and Lenin: a state which would gradually wither away and dissolve into society, so that “government of the people” would be replaced by “administration of things”.
The most consistent theoretical supporter of Allende’s programme was Luis Corvolan, General Secretary of the Chilean Communist Party – a party, incidentally, which was on the right of the coalition and vociferously defended every concession to the Christian Democrats. Corvolan argued again and again that, as he put it as late as in November 1972, “in the conditions prevailing in our country, changes cannot be effected according to the classical pattern of revolutions. They can be effected only within the frame of the law.”
Every scientific socialist since the days of Karl Marx has argued tirelessly that abstractions like “democracy” or “the law” are meaningless unless they are given class content. Corvolan meant that revolutionary changes could be brought about within the framework of capitalist law. Once again, the experience of all history and its concentrated expression in Marxist theory has long ago refuted this dream.
Marx and Engels concluded from the Paris Commune over a hundred years ago, that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for its own purposes” (Introduction to The Communist Manifesto). Marx wrote that “the task of the revolution is no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to the other, but to smash it, and this is essential for every real people’s revolution.” (Letter to Kugelman). Engels, again, spelt out the answer to Allende and Corvolan: “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 used against itslef, and, on the other, safeguard itself against its own deputies and officials by declaring them all, without exception, subject to recall at any moment.” (Introduction to The Civil War in France).
The role of the army
If this had been a “real people’s revolution”, the first task would have been to “do away with all the old repressive machinery”, disarm the officers by appealing to the troops to set up revolutionary committees, set up Workers’ Councils and ensure the right of recall over all officials. Allende, on the contrary, actually began by raising the salaries of the privileged officers, in the vain hope of buying their loyalty, and ended by inviting them into his government! The result was that all the workers’ gains have been lost again, with a vengeance.
Lenin wrote: “In every profound revolution, the prolonged, stubborn and desperate resistance of the exploiters…is the rule. Never – except in the sentimental fantasies of the sentimental fool, Kautsky – will the exploiters submit to the decision of the exploited majority without trying to make use of their advantages in a last desperate battle.” How would Lenin have described Luis Corvalan?
It is bitterly ironic to read Corvalan’s impassioned defence, in one speech or article after another, of the armed forces’ “spirit of professionalism, their respect for the Constitution and the Law” (World Marxist Review, December 1970) – and even their “loyalty to the elected government” (World Marxist Review, November 1972). For Luis Corvalan today is languishing in the military dictatorship’s prisons, awaiting execution by firing-squad. He is finding that the Generals show no gratitude for his compliments over the past three years.
In December 1970, Corvalan described the masses’ enthusiasm at Allende’s election, and concluded: “This atmosphere of approval and solidarity, plus the legitimacy of the election victory which no-one can challenge, and the powerful impact of world socialism, explain why US imperialism and Latin American reaction will find themselves compelled to accept the situation in Chile”. In reality, the ruling class have no scruples about the people’s wishes or the legitimacy of election results when their power is at stake. It was Corvalan, above all, who advanced the most ingenious arguments in defence of the armed forces. Denying that they were “loyal servants of the imperialists and the upper classes”, he wrote: “Our ground troops and navy were constituted in the fight for independence. Privates and NCOs in all the three arms come from a poor social background, and nearly all the officers from the middle strata. The oligarchy and the prosperous bourgeois have long stopped choosing a military career for their sons…These days, no social institution is indifferent to the social storms raging all over the world and the tragedy of the hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people. The attitude of the armed forces of the Dominican Republic and the progressive nature of the military government in Peru show that a dogmatic approach to the army is no longer valid…The military establishment, too, needs change – but that change should not be imposed upon it.”
The whole barrage of arguments in defence of the officer caste has been very persuasively refuted… by Corvalan’s own jailers! But even without them, it would be obvious that no army in history has not been composed mainly of soldiers from a “poor social background”. We talk of a “capitalist army” not because we expect to find sons of the “prosperous bourgeoisie” in its ranks, or even among most of the officers, but because it is forcibly controlled by a privileged caste, imbued with reactionary prejudices, owing allegiance to the ruling class, trained in such military academies as the Christian Democrats were so anxious to protect. The fact that the Chilean Army fought Spanish colonists, that a group of radical officers in the Dominican Army could revolt against despotism only to be savagely crushed by their own fellow-officers, or that the Peruvian military clique combines demagogic anti-American measures with the torture of trade unionists – these certainly are no insurance that the armed forces are on the side of the socialist revolution. Certainly, the world’s “social storms” affect the army like any other group of people – but no real Communist can lump the Generals with the privates into a monolithic mass. Did Corvalan expect the hearts of monsters like Generals Leigh and Pinochet, butchers of Chile, to melt at the “tragedy of the hundreds of millions of poverty-stricken people”? What is dogmatic about a class approach to the army? And how is “change” going to come to the armed forces without “imposing” it on the Generals?
The rank and file of the Chilean armed forces, who come from a “poor social background”, could easily have been won if any organised appeal had been directed at them. They could not be expected to risk execution for mutiny without such an appeal. A bloodless revolution could have been achieved if the workers’ parties had campaigned among the troops for revolutionary committees to be set up.
Shortly before the coup, sailors on two battleships off Valparaiso were found reading Socialist propaganda. So terrified were the Admirals that hundreds of sailors were arrested and many were tortured to death in the ships’ holds – and this while the Popular Unity were still in office! It was a betrayal of these soldiers that no action was taken against the officers.
Were the Chilean workers’ leaders really so childlike as to trust the Generals? Or were they trying to “embarrass” them into passivity? Corvalan wrote in the Morning Star (29/12/70): “To hold that armed confrontation is certain implies the immediate formation of a people’s militia. In the present situation, that 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.”
Allende, too – as late as June 1973! – “issued a warning against classifying the armed forces as reactionary and thus preventing them from being a dynamic force in Chile’s development”. Two months later, the armed forces began to play a very “dynamic” role, starting with Allende’s murder. What blindness it was, to expect the Generals to respond to such flattery, or that they would be restrained from action by the fact that the workers were not mobilised! They needed no “pushing” to get on to the other side of the barricades. Their job was to act as the ruling class’ armed watchdog. How was power to be taken from the ruling class without “provoking reaction”?
It was this kind of logic that lay behind the cry: don’t give the officers any excuses! The British “left” Labour journal Tribune expressed it like this: “Allende desires and in fact has no alternative to working strictly within the Constitution. Most observers here say that while he does that, he can count on the loyalty of the Army. That is why the demand of the Leftist groups for more sweeping measures outside the Constitution is a danger, because the Right hopes for provocations.” (20/10/72). Eric Heffer MP wrote a few weeks later that “most of the senior officers are socialist-inclined”!
Allende criticised the “irresponsibility” and “anarchy” of the workers and peasants who “went too far”. The Socialist Minister of the Interior Espinoza warned: “The government will strictly apply the law in regard to the maintenance of order against those who seek to promote disorder by occupying factories, villages, building sites or land.” His successor Briones – also a Socialist – announced that “enterprises occupied without reason and not intended for State ownership, will be restored to their owners”. All this was done to avoid “provoking” the Generals. But who needs “excuses” if he has tanks and planes? Were General Kornilov in Russia, or Admiral Kapp in Germany, prevented from establishing military dictatorships because the workers of Petrograd and Berlin mobilised to repulse them – or because they couldn’t think of any “excuses”?
However, Allende made more and more humiliating concessions with every blow from the Right. When the naval officers bungled an attempted coup on June 29th 1973, through their haste and failure to co-ordinate with the other services, the workers’ leaders were only frightened into grovelling even more profusely before the Generals. Nobody could have asked for such a rare and unmistakeable warning, such a golden opportunity to mobilise, such a precious breathing-space in which to prepare resistance to the menace looming ahead. But instead, appeasement went still further.
Corvalan (in a speech reprinted in the September 1973 issue of Marxism Today) praised the “prompt and determined action by the Commander-in-Chief, the loyalty of the armed forces and the police”, and replied to allegations that the CP were in favour of organising a workers’ militia: “No, sirs! We continue to support the absolutely professional character of the armed institutions. Their enemies are not in the ranks of the people, but in the reactionary camp.” Allende took advantage of hisshort new lease of life…to beg the armed forces to come back into the Cabinet! It was Allende in July who appointed General Pinochet, the new dictator of Chile, Commander-in-Chief of the Army! The Generals, on July 4th, of course, swore solemnly to give “invariable support to the constitutional regime” and “respect presidential prerogatives”. On August 8th, he finally persuaded them to re-enter the Government, and he proclaimed this “an indispensable step, not a retreat but the restoration of order and a step forward in the revolutionary process”.
At the same time, Allende begged the Christian Democrats to enter the government, When negotiations broke down, he tried to appoint the Rector of the Catholic University as minister – an offer which was declined “for reasons of Party discipline”. Briones, the new Socialist Minister of the Interior, hastened to assure the world that “Chile would have neither a Castroite dictatorship nor at this stage a dictatorship of the proletariat” and he “reaffirmed the government’s determination to adhere to democratic and constitutional methods”.
But the more obsequious the posture of the Popular Unity government, the more contemptuously did the Generals spit on it, and when they felt ready, they put it out of its misery like a man crushing a flea.
The September 1973 edition of World Marxist Review – which appeared after the coup – contained a statement by Yanez and Banchero, two leading members of the Chilean CP, which expresses particularly poignantly the delusions of that party, after the failure of the June 29 coup:”The people and the army won an important victory. They defended the government, disarmed the adventurist and criminal elements…who had betrayed the glorious traditions of our armed forces. The Chilean soldiers displayed their unswerving determination to defend the government elected by the people. Patriotism and courage triumphed…Comrade Luis Corvalan has emphasised that we have always maintained – and despite recent events have reaffirmed – that in Chilean conditions, the anti-imperialist and anti-oligarchical revolution can be carried out by peaceful means; that Socialism can be achieved without civil war…If the reactionaries do unleash an armed struggle, they will be defeated. Of that there cannot be the slightest doubt, for the people will rise to a man to crush the enemy.” Before this article was off the press, the workers’ attempt to defeat reaction had been crushed – and solely because their leaders had substituted euphoric phrases for the necessary preparation.
Optimistic as ever, Sam Russell of the Morning Star (10/7/73) reported: “Chile’s Popular Unity government has emerged strengthened and toughened after the defeat of the latest and most dangerous attempt to overthrow it”. But Allende’s “Marxist” apologist Regis Debray has described how “strong” and “tough” Allende really thought his government was: “He discovered that he could count on only four Generals out of 22…For several months, this (state) 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.” (Observer, 16/9/73).
What was Allende’s response to this alarming situation? Debray describes how “Salvador, in high spirits…sat us round a camembert and told us about his interview the night before with a plotting General, the Air Force Commander, whom he had appointed the Minister of Transport, in order to neutralise him.” Evidently, Allende had little faith in the effectiveness of this tactic, as most of his conversation revolved around how he would protect his dignity when the Generals took over: ”I shan’t let myself be bundled onto an aircraft in my pyjamas,” he said, “and I shan’t ask for asylum in some Embassy.”
However honourable the exit of Allende, it hardly makes much difference to the working class. And his refusal to mobilise them meant that all their courage was dissipated. They were left to organise sporadic resistance on their own initiative, shooting out from the factories, sitting targets for raids from the air, cut off from any prospect of appealing to the troops to come over to the side of the workers. According to Debray, when Carlos Altamirano, General Secretary of the Socialist Party, urged Allende to organise a workers’ militia, 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 only retorted: “And how many masses does it take to stop a tank?” Of course it is not a military but a political question. The same man who was publicly praising the loyalty of the officers to the elected government, privately had no faith in the possibility of winning over the rank-and-file soldiers!
It is a tragedy that, while the Generals were preparing their forces to seize power and violently crush the workers, Allende was telling high-spirited stories over a camembert, worrying about whether he would be wearing pyjamas when the counter-revolution triumphed, and making fatalistic jokes about masses and tanks.
Crucial lessons of the coup.
Nobody can accuse us of “wisdom after the event”. As early as March 1971, we printed an article in Militantunder the headline “CHILEAN CRISIS – ARM THE WORKERS AGAINST REACTION”. On October 1, 1971, we warned: “The sympathy of the soldiers will be of no avail unless the hold of the officer caste is shattered. That is impossible unless the army is faced with a powerful movement of the armed people. While Allende and the CP are busy lulling the masses with beautiful pictures of ‘peaceful parliamentary change’, the ruling class is systematically preparing for a counter-stroke.” In January 1972, we predicted in Militant International Reviewthat “Allende’s slavish respect for authority – in the form of an army jackboot – will not slave his skin when conditions permit the counter-revolution to raise its head”. In August 1973, our headline read “CATASTROPHE THREATENS UNLESS WORKERS ARE ARMED”.
It is no cause for pleasure on our part that our warnings have proved correct. But why have those who held up Chile as a model for the last three years said not a word to correct their mistake? The arguments put forward by the Morning Star (17/9/73) give no reassurances that the deadly mistakes of the Chilean workers’ parties have been absorbed. And if the lessons are not well learned by the workers who face similar traps all over the world, then the Chilean workers will have died in vain. The best tribute to their memory is to learn from their experience.
The Morning Star claimed that in Chile “the Communists combined the aim of completing the anti-oligarchical and anti-imperialist revolution without civil war, with warnings about the danger of a coup and the need to resist it should it take place”. Buried in the welter of words praising the “loyalty” and “professionalism” of the armed forces, one can find here and there, odd references to a possible coup. For instance, in the same speech where he repudiated the idea of a workers’ militia, Corvalan said: “Today, more than ever, we say no to civil war! But we stand ready to crush any sedition!” As we see, the Generals were not in the least deterred by these fine words. Since the workers proved quite unready to “crush sedition”, this was obviously just demagogic speechifying. How could they “stand ready” without a militia? Allende now and again talked, too, of “replying to reactionary violence with laws and justice, and if need be, with revolutionary violence”, and appealing “to the law, to the armed forces and, if necessary, to the people’s forces, to prevent Fascism from achieving its aims”. But it was necessary, and the people had no forces with which to mount effective resistance. What kind of leaders talk about “the need to resist a coup should it take place”? The Generals were not playing cricket, and they didn’t give formal notice of their intentions! It was too late to resist after they had taken power.
The Morning Starcontinued: “The Chilean Popular Unity government came into office in conditions of extraordinary difficulty and complexity. Far from having the support of the majority of the people, Allende got only 36% of the votes in 1970. The objective was therefore to win more and more people to support the government…Whether more could have been done to win them, the extent to which they were antagonised by the adventurist actions and policies of the ultra-left, the tactics adopted toward the armed forces – these and other questions will need serious examination and discussion.”
Revolutions are periods when the mass of the population get up on their feet and invade the political arena in the struggle to shape their own destinies. In such a period, their consciousness can grow by leaps and bounds in a matter of days. Chile was undoubtedly entering a revolutionary period, and such periods are by definition “extraordinarily difficult and complex”. Revolutionaries must prepare themselves for decades to live up to situations such as these. If they explain their failure to meet the challenge by the “complexity” of the conditions, then they are only confessing that they have degenerated into petty pragmatists.
We have explained above the falsity of hoping to win the middle class by appealing to the right. If the workers’ parties are to bear the odium for inflation and the other evils of capitalism, the desperate middle strata write them off as “fine talkers” who are incapable of action. All the official condemnation of “illegal” factory and land occupations did nothing to ingratiate the government to the middle class. Apparently, it is not sufficient that the government should denounce the spontaneous actions of its supporters and invite Generals into the Cabinet – there must be 100% unanimity behind the government’s concessions! But it is impossible to cry halt to the class struggle, to hold the entire population in check, while the government majestically issues successive decrees to change society. The class struggle waits for no-one. Allende’s election was the signal for all the pent-up energies of the masses to break forth. How can their aspirations to use their power be frozen – especially in “conditions of extraordinary complexity” – i.e. a revolution?
Kerensky in 1917 also hysterically denounced workers and peasants for “provoking” the Generals by their “adventurist and ultra-left actions”. It was the Bolsheviks refusal to desert them despite all the pressures that earned them the political authority to carry through the socialist revolution. Kerensky’s government could end only in Soviet power or Kornilov’s terror. So it was in Chile. We hold no brief for the MIR, but it is ridiculous to blame the coup on them. Our criticism of this ultra-left grouping is not that they encouraged the occupation of factories and estates, but that they refused to work within the workers’ main organisations and dabbled instead with the pre-Marxist methods of “Guevarism” and “Castroism”. As for what was called “tactics adopted toward the armed forces” – to dissuade them from taking power by force by inviting them to enter the government peacefully – Allende learned the same lesson as the Spanish “Popular Front”, which also invited a general called Franco into the government in 1936, and likewise saw its “moderation” rewarded with murder.
The Morning Star promises us “serious examination and discussion” of the Chilean coup. But the material produced by the Communist Party since the coup reveals that it has learned nothing from the Chilean events, and that it is still putting forward the same dangerous policies for Italy, France, Britain and elsewhere. A pamphlet entitled “CHILE – SOLIDARITY WITH POPULAR UNITY” repeats all the discredited arguments of the Chilean CP.
The aim of the “Popular Unity” government, it explains approvingly, was “for a national democratic revolution, paving the way for Socialism by carrying through basic democratic transformations in the economy and the State”: such reforms as “to put an end to the power of imperialists, the monopolists and the landowning oligarchy”. The conclusion which we have drawn from the Chilean coup and from similar utopian “experiments” in the past, is that it is impossible in the epoch of imperialism and monopoly capitalism to separate the “national democratic” from the socialist revolution. The pamphlet admits that “the real reason for the coup” was “the progress being made in weakening the economic and political power of the ruling class, in enabling more power and a bigger slice of the national cake to pass into the hands of the working class and its allies” – and then goes on to defend the CP “strategy” of carrying through “a transitional democratic phase” permitting a “change in the balance of class forces”! Its programme for Britain consists of “a left Labour government, and at a later stage a Socialist one”.
The Chilean Communist Senator Volodia Teitelboim wrote in the Morning Star (15/10/73) of the CP’s “conception of a pluralist revolution in the heart of the people, which brings together Marxist, Christian and rationalist forces”; condemned the “traitor Generals” who “betrayed their military oath”; and defended the alleged “Leninist teaching on the necessity for the people – legitimate expression of democracy – to take control of the state”. Every line of his article reveals a completely anti–Leninist conception of the state, as can be seen from the quotations from Lenin given above.
It was the same Volodia Teitelboim who painted the situation in glowing colours in the Morning Star (10/3/72): “The armed forces support the government as it is legally elected by the people…The classic Latin-American way of a military coup is more difficult in Chile…While the people of Chile have not yet got full power in their possession, they have the fundamental executive power based on the country’s constitutional and presidential regime…”
The Morning Star ended its article with the comment: “It would be a miracle if no mistakes had been made. But that does not mean that the general strategy was not correct. Those who criticise it have the obligation to say what their alternative would have been. If they argue that during the past three years, the Chilean revolutionary movement should have embarked on the path of armed struggle, then they have to show how this would have done anything other than play into the hands of reaction and resulted in the still earlier imposition of a right-wing dictatorship in Chile.”
The alternative was not exactly to “embark on the path of armed struggle”, but to prepare and organise in advance, and hence perhaps make unnecessary, the resistance of the workers who were mown down fighting reaction anyway. Was it not “playing into the hands of reaction” to leave them almost defenceless, and lull their vigilance with nursery rhymes about the Generals’ “loyalty”? Apparently, the Generals will always take power whatever you do. What a bleak choice the Morning Star offers the workers: defeat today or defeat tomorrow! How little faith it has in the working class!
It is revolting complacency to sit in an editorial office, writing “the general strategy was correct”, when thousands of workers lie murdered. A “general strategy” which leaves out of account the gathering counter-revolution is useless. Certainly, “it would be a miracle if no mistakes had been made” (although we still have not been told what they were). But what a catastrophe if the very same mistakes are then repeated elsewhere! The long history of class collaborationism is drenched in the blood of workers left politically and militarily disarmed against counter-revolution. And throughout the world today, we see workers’ parties preparing just the same kind of “alliance” with “democratic”, “progressive”, or “liberal” parties who abhor the socialist revolution. In France, the “Popular Union” is tying the workers’ parties to the small Left-Radical party. In Germany the SPD is in a coalition with the FDP. In Italy, the CP is wooing “progressive” elements within the Christian Democracy for a coalition. In Spain, A “Liberty Pact” is proposed, linking “all democratic tendencies from Communists to conservatives and monarchists”. In Greece, the CP is linked to Papandreou’s “Patriotic Front”.
Let no-one trust the “democratic traditions” of the armed forces of Western Europe. The French ruling class is openly preparing the police and army for counter-revolution, as Mitterand has protested. The Italian Generals linked to the Fascist MSI have been caught hatching several putschist conspiracies already in the last ten years. Let us remember, too, that Chile was always called the “England of South America”. The reaction of the British ruling class to the Chilean coup must never be forgotten. The Economist (1/9/73) anticipated the coup by commenting: “The armed forces now hold the key to the future…The Marxist parties in Chile…have travelled a long way in less than three years towards destroying the economic base for the opposition parties and the independent press.” The Times(15/9/73) agreed that “there is a limit to the ruin a country can be expected to tolerate…The circumstances were such that a reasonable military man could in good faith have thought it his constitutional duty to intervene”.
The writing is on the wall: let a Labour government begin to “destroy the economic base” for the Tory party and Fleet Street, and there will be no shortage of Generals who will “in good faith” decide that “the country cannot tolerate any more ruin”. The Times has stated bluntly that the Labour Party, (unlike the Parliamentary Labour Party) is “dominated by Marxists” and has even talked with alarm of a possible “Chilean situation” in Britain, with a “Marxist Party” in government over a divided opposition. Top strategists like Brigadiers Kitson and Calvert have foreseen situations in which, with the collapse of the British economy, millions of people could have “justifiable grievances” and the Army might need to assist the police in quelling riots. Note that they do not bother to talk of “terrorists” and “fanatics”, but of the justified grievances of ordinary people!
The fact that Chilean servicemen are now being trained in Britain, and that British jet aircraft are being sold to Chile, is the best evidence of the British ruling class’s real attitude to “democracy” when the interests of capitalism are at stake.
The British Embassy in Santiago, according to The Observer, gave the new junta “undisguised approval” and – almost alone of all the foreign embassies – barred the door to refugees from the military terror.
The British Labour Movement, in preparing to contend with the upheavals of the next few years, will ignore the lessons of Chile at its peril.