CHILE

End of the parliamentary road

(September 1973)

From International Socialism (1st series), No.62, September 1973, pp.9-14.

Transcribed by Ted Crawford.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for the Marxists’ Internet Archive.

‘Allende can no longer hope to satisfy the owners of industry and the working class. He will have to
choose to side with one or the other.
‘But one side is armed, the other not. And Allende shows no inclination at all to break his pledges
to the middle class of a year ago not to “interfere” with the state machine.
‘Instead he will probably use his influence, and that of the bureaucrats within Chile’s working-class
based parties and trade unions, to persuade workers to put up with harsh conditions and an erosion
of last year’s reforms.
‘Such a course will tend to create confusion and a lack of direction among many workers. But it is
not likely to lead to any great loss in the spontaneous militancy in the factories and mines. Because
of that it will not satisfy those who continue to hold real power in Chile. In the past we have seen a
number of examples of regimes in some ways similar to Allende’s.
‘After a period their mass support became demoralised and the government themselves were easily
overthrown by right-wing military coups.’
Socialist Worker, 20 November 1971
The Chilean experience is exciting the British people, because their own perspective of achieving
socialism is only possible within the constitutional framework, following a path similar to that
taken by Chile.
(El Siglo, the Chilean Communist paper, 25 March 1972)
The Chilean experiment with the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ has come to an abrupt end. A
military coup has overthrown the Popular Unity government and President Allende is dead. As we
write, reports from Chile indicate that thousands of people have been killed and many more injured.
Factories and offices from which snipers have been holding out have been reduced to rubble.
Workers have been summarily executed. Armed forces have closed down the headquarters of the
Communist Party and Socialist Party – each as big, in relation to the size of the population, as the
French Communist Party.
It is not certain yet how strong the resistance to the military is. Some reports speak of continuing
struggle outside Santiago. But one thing is clear. The theory of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’
had been put to a decisive test and found to be fundamentally mistaken. Thousands of workers are
paying for that mistake with their lives.
The talk about a ‘Chilean road to socialism’ began three years ago when Allende, candidate of the
Popular Unity coalition, topped the poll in the presidential election. He did not get an absolute
majority over the other two candidates combined. But the other parties were in too great a state of
disarray to block his way to the presidency. When the American multi-national company, ITT, tried
to organise a coup, it found that few sectors of the Chilean establishment had enough nerve to join
in.
The reason for the disarray lay in the failure of previous, conventional capitalist governments, to
solve the country’s basic problems.
The right-wing Christian Democrat, Frei, had beaten Allende in the election of 1964 by promising a
‘revolution in liberty’, which would alleviate the worst of Chile’s poverty, give the land of the great
landowners to the peasants, and establish Chile’s economic independence by taking control over the
American owned mines.
But by 1970 the reforms had ground to a halt. The land reform left vast tracts of land in the hands of
less than one per cent of the population, while a third of the rural population remained unemployed.
The American copper companies were making bigger profits after the Chilean state had bought up
51 per cent of their shares than before. The economy was stagnating, with a growth rate of less than
two per cent a year. Much of industry was working at only two-thirds or even a half of capacity.
Real wages were falling as prices rose by 40 per cent a year. And 28 per cent of the population
continued to share between them less than five per cent of the national income, which gave each of
them less than half the subsistence wage.
Even Frei’s own party was compelled to put forward a presidential candidate, Tomic, with an
apparently left-wing line.
Despite the talk of Allende as ‘the world’s first democratically elected marxist president’, the
programme of the Popular Unity coalition itself was not all that extreme.
Certainly, it promised attacks on the power of the American mining companies and the Chilean
oligarchy. But in itself it posed no threat to the mass of medium sized Chilean capitalists.
‘Enterprises where private ownership of the means of production will remain in force,’ it said, ‘in
terms of numbers they will remain the majority.’ [1] Overall it was planned to nationalise only 150
out of the 3,500 firms, which would leave outside the public sector between 50 and 60 per cent of
industrial production and the vast majority of the industrial work force. [2]
Finally, Allende willingly accepted constitutional amendments which prevented him interfering
with the power of the officers in the armed forces. In doing so he agreed that these would always be
a powerful watch-dog standing over him – a watch-dog which would safeguard the interests of the
Chilean bourgeoisie and, in time, wreak a vicious vengeance for the reforms of the Allende period.
Everything seemed to go like a dream for the first 12 months or more of the Popular Unity
government. The copper mines were nationalised by a unanimous vote of congress; the power of the
giant landowners in the countryside was drastically weakened, with almost as much land being
redistributed in six months as the Christian Democrats had redistributed in six years; the gross
national product shot upwards by 8 per cent; unemployment fell; the share of wages in the national
income rose; average wages increased 50 per cent; the rate of inflation fell to less than half the
figure for the year before.
Electorally, the position of the Popular Unity coalition improved dramatically. In the local elections
of April 1971 it got more than half the votes cast – an increase of 14 per cent of the total vote on its
performance in the presidential election. [3] The Financial Times correspondent could report, that
after 12 months of Allende’s government ‘the opposition is in disarray. The right-wing Nacionales
are leaderless and the Christian Democrats have suffered two splits in the last 18 months and may
well split again.’ [4]
However, Allende’s early successes were not the result of socialist measures, but of orthodox
Keynesian techniques for turning a recession into a boom. These enabled the living standards of
workers to be raised, without prices being pushed up at once. [5] But they left intact the capitalist
structure of the economy and did not even bite into the massive incomes of the very rich.
The nationalisation measures which were carried through were certainly not enough to change the
overall character of the economy. The government refused compensation to the American owners of
the copper mines, but elsewhere it took over banks or monopolies by buying their shares on the
market at their current value. It nationalised only 38 of the 284 enterprises that controlled most of
Chilean economic life in the first 18 months of its existence (although it was forced to administer
263 factories which had been occupied by their own workers).
The nationalised enterprises were run by bureaucrats – in some cases army officers – very much as
capitalist firms are run. Between 50 and 60 per cent of the Public Works budget went to private
contractors. The workers were denied real control in the factories. ‘The administrative councils are
made up of 11 members – five of them to be elected by the workers and five are appointed by the
government, with the administrator or director of the firm being appointed directly by the President
of the Republic.’ Two of the ‘workers’ representatives’ were elected, not from the shop floor, but by
the administrative and professional employees. Even the land reform was not as radical as it
seemed. It benefited only seven per cent of the rural population, who were transformed into a class
of medium sized capitalist farmers, with a third of the land between them. [6]
By the end of 1972, Allende had exhausted all the reforms that could be accomplished without
antagonising the middle classes and their parties. Shortages of certain foodstuffs and commodities
began to arise because of the increasing consumption of these by the working class. There was no
spare capacity left to meet this growing demand and prices began to increase more quickly. Imports
also began to rise, while the foreign currency earnings to pay for them declined due to a
considerable drop in the world price of copper.
Two possible paths opened up before the government. One would have involved carrying the social
transformation through further, cutting into the living standards of the wealthy, and using the
nationalised sector of the economy to increase investment. This alternative was certainly available
to the governmental parties, given the massive support their policies had won them among workers
and peasants. But it would inevitably have brought them into conflict with the opposition parties,
with the middle class Radical Party within the. Popular Unity coalition, and above all, with the
armed forces whose power they had been bolstering for the previous year.
The other alternative was to try to provide incentives for private industry to invest – by urging wage
restraint upon workers, by giving guarantees that nationalisation would not spread further and by
effectively ending the transformation of society.
But there were obstacles in the way of this path as well. The class struggle is not a tap that political
leaders can turn on and off at will. A year with ‘their government’ in power had increased the
fighting spirit of workers enormously. In the towns there were a growing number of strikes and
workers had taken over factories when the owners tried to close them.
The struggle in the countryside also spread spontaneously beyond confines laid down by the law.
Peasants began taking over medium sized farms and their owners organised armed squads to seize
them back.
The middle classes began to protest vociferously. Even Tomic, the reputed ‘left wing’ Christian
Democrat, complained of ‘the illegal occupations of farms, small holdings, shanty towns, rented
land, commercial offices, factories, mines, schools, colleges, public buildings, roads and bridges.
Illegal occupations are not only the work of the ultra-left; they are also the spontaneous action of
groups of peasants, workers and miners ...’ [7]
Allende soon showed that he was not prepared to go towards a socialist solution to the growing
crisis. The programme of immediate nationalisation was cut back; Vuskovic, the economic minister
most associated with the redistribution of income to the advantage of the workers, was replaced;
attempts were made to make another agreement with the Christian Democrats; and a right wing split
away from the middle class Radical Party was given two seats in the government.
The President begged workers to behave with moderation, asking them to ‘limit wage claims’ and
criticising those who had occupied an American bank. He resisted a strike by copper workers for a
50 per cent increase in wages in November 1971 and he repeatedly warned the organisations of the
revolutionary left that ‘they must end their illegal seizures of land and property’. [8]
However, words of admonition from the government to the extreme left and the workers were not
enough for the enraged middle classes. They demanded physical action as well. They began to
argue that if the government did not engage in vicious repressive measures, it was behaving
‘unconstitutionally’ and should be replaced.
In the last weeks of 1971, Santiago was swept by demonstrations and riots, triggered off by a march
of well-to-do housewives, protesting at food shortages. This was the first of a series of such
incidents which were to break out every two or three months for the next year and a half.
Further life was given to the right wing, when the opposition parties found that the support which
had been flowing from them to the government earlier, was now moving the other way. In by-
elections in 1972 the government parties found that their vote was less than in 1971. Some of their
supporters, fed up with sharp rises in prices and the exhortation to wage restraint, were falling for
the easy promises of the right.
The Communist Party reacted by taking the policy of appeasing the right to its logical conclusion. If
the middle classes were frightened of the continuing militancy of workers and peasants, the way to
prevent a swing behind the right wing parties was to be as good at keeping ‘order’ as the right. A
leading Communist, Volodia Teitelboim, equated the activities of the socialist left with those of the
fascists.
‘There is an extreme right that traffics in arms and is aiming at civil war,’ he said. ‘But there are
also “ultra” groups that call themselves “left” who are following the same course, playing the role
of partner in a mad waltz with their political opposites.’
And his party did not restrict itself to words alone in its condemnation of the revolutionaries.
‘Forty eight hours after Senator Teitelboim’s speach, the governor of Concepcion, Vladimir Chavez,
a member of the central committee of the Communist Party, authorised the Grupo Movil of the
Carabineros to use force to break up a demonstration called by the workers and students of the city
of Concepcion. The action of the Grupo Movil cost the life of a 17-year-old student and left 40
wounded, some of them seriously. Many people were arrested, all of them activists in the left
parties.’ [9]
But the turn by the government to repressive measures did not placate the right. The very wealthy
had had the fright of their lives at the time of Allende’s election and many had gone into exile. Now
they regained their confidence. Each concession by the government made them feel more powerful
and they upped their demands still more. The demonstrations and provocations grew more intense,
not less so.
The growth of the right could not leave the working class movement itself unperturbed. A
significant proportion of workers now began to see the correctness of the revolutionary left’s
warnings that armed struggle was inevitable. In the southern Chilean city of Concepcion, the local
sections of the Popular Unity coalition, with the exception of the Communist Party, began to work
with the revolutionary group, the MIR. And in the union elections of 1973 the MIR showed, for the
first time, that it was gaining a real base among industrial workers. All this made it more difficult
for the government to accede to the right wing’s demands to impose ‘discipline’. Its commitment to
‘constitutional’ methods prevented a socialist solution to the growing social and economic crisis.
And its dependence on working class support prevented it carrying through the full range of
repressive measures demanded by a capitalist solution.
As the crisis became more heated, Allende and the Communist Party turned increasingly to the
military to bolster up their position. The courting of army officers was backed up with bribes, in the
form of raising their pay (while workers were being urged to exercise restraint ‘in the national
interest’) and increasing the level of military expenditure, so as to allow the forces to be equipped
with more modern arms – the arms today being used to murder workers.
Both Allende and the Communist Party reiterated time and again that the army would be loyal to the
regime and that fears of a coup were misplaced. The Communist general secretary, Corvalan,
insisted that
‘the army is not invulnerable to the new winds blowing in Latin America and penetrating
everywhere. It is not a body alien to the nation, in the service of anti-national interests. It must be
won to the cause of progress in Chile and not pushed to the other side of the barricades.’ [10]
Allende also made it clear that he had no intention of permitting the formation of any form of
workers’ militia.
‘There will be no armed forces here other than those stipulated by the constitution, that is to say, the
Army, the Navy and the Air Force. I shall eliminate any others if they appear.’ [11]
One of the jobs given the army was special responsibility in Southern frontier regions ‘... in order to
control the arms traffic conducted by the extreme right or the revolutionary left.’ [12]
The first great threat to the Allende regime was in October of last year. The lorry owners took their
vehicles off the road, in a bosses’ strike. Nominally this was in protest at plans for an integrated
state transport system, but the real motive was very much opposition to the government as such.
Other sections of the middle class began to join in, with factory owners trying to shut down their
premises. The government’s working class supporters responded by occupying factories to prevent
their closure and taking measures themselves to keep supplies moving.
Allende, however, put more faith in the military than in the organised working class. The army was
brought out to maintain law and order and to keep supplies running. Finally, as an assurance to the
Christian Democrats that the government did not intend to take extreme actions, three generals were
brought into the Popular Unity government (two of them are in the counter-revolutionary
government today!). Allende then launched a campaign for ‘social peace’ together with the
commander in chief of the army, who was given control over internal security.
What ‘social peace’ meant was soon clear to some workers at least. Where they had occupied
factories, for instance in the town of Arica in Northern Chile, they were told to allow the old bosses
to take over again. As the bosses did so, they sacked militant workers. [13] This was what Allende
and the Communist Party meant by a ‘dialogue’ with the middle class.
Yet it is difficult to see any justification for the faith put in the armed forces and the police by the
Popular Unity government. At least one observer, friendly to the government, could note early in
1972 that:
‘On the whole, the officers’ attitude to the government reflects the same reticence as that from the
entire upper-class to which they belong ... All of the younger officers ... have been partially trained
in the United States. Collectively they [the officers] remain ensconced behind their purely
professional principles, individually they adhere closely to the standard pattern of their class of
origin and to moderate options of the right or centre. There is, of course, a good deal of anti-
Communism. The officer corps therefore constitutes a breeding ground for military conspiracies.’
[14]
There was no objection from Allende when the US, which cut back its civilian aid to Chile,
increased its military ‘aid’. The adherents of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ were so blinded
by their own misconceptions that they ignored the obvious. Their response to the growing
antagonism between classes was to build up the power and prestige of an instrument that was bound
to side with the employing class when the chips were down. Such was the logic of
‘constitutionalism’.
In March 1973 the Popular Unity was relatively successful in obtaining 43.9 per cent of the vote in
the legislative elections. But Allende’s strategy of conciliation with the right suffered a sharp
setback three weeks later when the representatives of the Army resigned from the government,
apparently after making deliberately unacceptable demands. From this point on the right wing
offensive against the Allende government was intensified.
The main theme of the attack on Allende was that he had reduced the country to economic chaos.
Inflation was running at between three and four hundred per cent a year; the shops were empty and
black marketeers were advertising openly in the press. Clearly some of the factors responsible. for
this situation were outside Chilean control; but it is important to stress that to a large extent the
chaos was the direct result of conscious economic sabotage by the Chilean bourgeoisie. This was
done by various means: the withdrawal of bank deposits and the flight of capital abroad; a stop to
investment in industry and agriculture; and hoarding designed to produce artificial scarcity.
The next major setback for the Allende regime was the strike at the El Teniente copper-mine, which
lasted from mid-April to early July. The miners were fighting in defence of the sliding scale of
wages, clearly a crucial safeguard in a period of galloping inflation. It is of course true that the
copper miners, despite tough working conditions, have a level of pay far higher than most Chilean
workers; it is also true that the unskilled workers returned to work first, while the supervisory staff
stayed out longest.
But the copper miners are part of the working class, exploited like the rest, and with a long tradition
of militant struggle. In March they had voted 70 per cent for the Popular Unity.
The rhetoric that high-paid workers should moderate their demands in the interests of the lower paid
is well-known to British workers. In Chile the government’s rhetoric went so far as to label the
miners ‘fascists’ and ‘traitors’; and the miners got not only rhetoric, but tear gas and water cannon.
As a result, the copper miners, who could have been a powerful ally of the left, were adopted by the
right. It denounced the government for challenging the right to strike; and right-wing inspired
doctors, teachers and students struck in support of the miners. In the prosperous suburbs of Santiago
ladies in fur-coats were collecting for the miners. [15]
Even more tragically, the forces to the left of Allende failed to back the miners. The MIR criticised
the use of force, but attacked the miners for ‘economism’ even though they were fighting to
maintain their living standards in an economy that remained capitalist.
Just as the strike was coming to an end, Allende faced yet another challenge from the right, with an
attempted military putsch on 29 June. Though this was the most direct confrontation yet, it was not
a serious threat as it was supported by only a small section of the army. Events made it clear that
Allende still maintained a considerable popular base and the national trade union federation called
for occupation of the factories. Yet Allende was cautious not to allow working-class activity to go
too far; in a radio appeal during the fighting he said: ‘People must remain calm for I have complete
confidence that loyal forces will normalise the situation.’ [16]
By now the Popular Unity was losing whatever support it had previously had among the middle
classes; and groupings of the extreme right, notably the ‘Fatherland and Freedom’ organisation,
were gaining ground and urging direct sabotage of the regime. This became clear at the end of July
with the outbreak of the second lorry-owners’ strike.
The strike succeeded in aggravating the already serious economic disorder and further spreading
demoralisation. At the same time it raised the issue of the workers themselves creating an
alternative distribution system. Allende, however, preferred to rely on the army rather than the
workers, and attempted to use the army to break the strike. But the army somehow never got round
to seizing the immobilised lorries.
Allende’s policy now involved a consistent strategy of concessions to the right and attacks on the
left. For the working class Allende’s main advice was to work harder. In his May Day speech he
said: ‘Only the devastating force of the people can detain this fascist threat by producing more,
working harder, and showing greater total effort.’ [17] He continued to attack the extreme left for
breaches of ‘legality’, and when, in August, the leaders of the CUT offered him assistance in
dealing with the lorry-drivers, he refused it, preferring to rely exclusively on the army. [18]
But for the right he had ever more offers. Before the cabinet reshuffle in July he approached two
distinguished university rectors, both leading members of the Christian Democratic Party, and
invited them to enter the government. Both were instructed to refuse by their party, anxious not to
compromise itself by backing up a government so near the brink. [19]
In all this Allende was backed up, and indeed inspired, by the Communist Party. In face of the right-
wing threat the CP launched the slogan: ‘Collect signatures against civil war’. [20] Even after the
failed putsch in June, the CP continued to stress its respect of legality. In a speech on 8 July general
secretary Corvalan made this clear. [21] Denouncing the right-wing National Party for its calls for
civil disobedience, Corvalan said: ‘Such declarations expose this party, and we must let the Military
Office of Prosecutions unroll the entire skein and the state security organs take corresponding
action.’ At the same time he denounced those trying to ‘drive a wedge between the people and the
armed forces’, and stated: ‘We continue to support the absolutely professional character of the
armed institutions. Their enemies are not amongst the ranks of the people but in the reactionary
camp.’
Yet while Allende and Corvalan were continuing to clutch at the crumbling edifice of legality, an
alternative source of power was just beginning to emerge. The various ‘bosses’ strikes’ of the
preceding year had begun to raise the question of workers’ control in a particularly concrete form.
Workers who had occupied factories discovered that they could get on perfectly well without the
employers and saw no reason to have them back. In Santiago new forms of workers’ self-
organisation were beginning to develop in the form of the cordones. The role of these was described
by the Peruvian revolutionary exiled in Chile, Hugo Blanco. [22]
‘Cordon is the term used to refer to the concentration of factories along certain avenues in
Santiago ... The working class is organised into unions on a factory basis, and these unions are
grouped into federations of the various industrial branches ... As in every pre-revolutionary process,
the masses are beginning to create new organisations that are more responsive to their struggle,
though for the moment they are not abandoning the old ones. The cordones are a partial innovation
in the sense that they continue to make use of the unions, but they are linked by zone, by cordon,
rather than by industrial branch. At first the top leadership of the CUT refused to recognise the
cordones, and the CP called them illegal bodies. Today this is no longer tenable, and the reformists
now reluctantly recognise them in view of the fact that their own rank and file has refused to heed
their effort to ignore the cordones.’
And on 30 July the Guardian correspondent in Santiago reported:
‘Since 29 June many more Cordones have been organised until now they dominate all the access
roads into the capital. Furthermore, in response to instructions from the labour leadership, the
workers have occupied something like one hundred factories, most of which are now being
administered by the unions.’
But Allende had already turned his back on the one class that could have saved Chile from military
take-over. The workers were left to confusion and demoralisation.
There were revolutionary militants who could have offered an alternative leadership to workers in
opposition to the policies of Allende and the Communist Party. But many were stranded inside the
Socialist Party, whose would-be ‘leftist’ leadership continued to tolerate Allende as a member and
put forward the notion that forms of popular power could coexist with the existing set-up. The most
important independent revolutionary group was the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left),
and in the course of this year it attracted towards itself many of the worker militants inside the
Socialist Party. It certainly put forward a programme for dealing with the Chilean crisis in a
socialist manner: demanding that workers counter the economic sabotage of capitalists and
bureaucrats by establishing their own control in the enterprises, the building of popular councils
which would link workers and peasants, the formation of armed workers’ militias, and systematic
organisation within the armed forces to turn the rank and file against the officers.
But the MIR suffered from its own previous history. It had begun life as a terrorist organisation on
the lines of Uruguay’s Tupamaros – carrying out bank raids and giving the proceeds to the poor. Its
energies initially were concentrated on work among the slum dwellers in the towns and the poorest
peasants in the country. It was not until 1972 that it paid real attention to activity among the
industrial workers who held the key to Chile’s future, and even then it seems to have been more an
organisation for workers, rather than an organisation of workers.
The army, meanwhile, was beginning to act more and more independently, and to take upon itself
the mission of smashing the left. Even though the 29 June coup had failed, it served as an
encouragement to the extreme right. As the Financial Times reported on 9 August:
‘Availing themselves of powers given them under an army control law signed last October, the
services set about searching factories and leftist enclaves. These raids, carried out with little
delicacy, incurred the wrath of the left. Few arms have apparently been turned up by the searches,
and while nests of weapons have been uncovered by police in the redoubts of wealthy rightists, and
the present wave of violence certainly comes from the right the military’s attention has been
focussed exclusively on the left.’
Even at this stage, the victory of the right could have been prevented. Although workers were faced
with falling living standards, shortages of basic foods, and intimidation from the right and from the
army, they still showed willingness to demonstrate behind the banners of their parties and unions.
Even Christian Democrat workers were ready to back factory occupations aimed at preventing
hardship to their class. And the rank and file in the armed forces were not immune to the feelings in
the working class districts from which many of them had sprung. This was demonstrated
dramatically when a section of the fleet rebelled against its right wing officers.
For members of the armed forces in any country to disobey orders is much more dangerous than for
workers to go on strike. The penalty is invariably a long term of imprisonment, a risk which even
the most militant socialist will only take if he believes there is some hope of his action enjoying
success. If on the other hand, he believes the same officers will enjoy the same powers after the
mutiny as before, he will hold back from action.
The revolt of the rank and file sailors might have presented an opportunity to begin to break the
hold of the right wing officer corps throughout the forces. But instead of giving encouragement to
the sailors, Allende and the Communist Party stood back while they were thrown into naval
dungeons. Even worse, they showed that under the Popular Unity government, the power of the
officers to impose harsh sentences was in no way threatened: those who carried out the jailings were
still welcomed as ministers in the ‘People’s government’.
On 9 August a new cabinet was formed, including the leaders of the three armed forces. It lasted
just a fortnight. On 23 August General Prats resigned from the government and as head of the army.
Prats may have been sincerely sympathetic to Allende’s policies, but he was not prepared to isolate
himself completely from the army. As he said: ‘I am leaving, because I do not want to smash the
institution to which I belong. Among the women who have been demonstrating outside my home
there were several generals’ wives.’ [23]
By 28 August Allende had managed to scrape together yet another government, which actually
contained four military leaders. But he no longer had anything to offer the workers, except an
endless perspective of more and more concessions to the right. The army could now safely hope to
intervene without fearing massive resistance. The water was tested with demonstrations and
counter-demonstrations, while acts of terrorism proliferated. On 11 September the Army moved in,
and Allende was reported to have committed suicide. In fact he had done so politically much earlier.
The lessons of the Chilean experience, are not particularly original ones. They were first drawn by
Marx, at the time of the Paris Commune more than 100 years ago, and they were reiterated by Lenin
writing ‘State and Revolution’ on the eve of October: there is no way of carrying through a socialist
transformation of society without first destroying the old state apparatus, with its standing army, its
police, its judiciary, its bureaucratic hierarchy. In its place has to be established the rule of directly
elected and recallable workers’ delegates, backed up by a workers’ militia.
Many would-be marxists have claimed that under modern conditions the bourgeois state can be
reformed peacefully, at least in countries with strong parliamentary traditions.
These were the arguments used by Allende and the Communist Party in Chile. They are also the
arguments of the labour left and the Communist Party in Britain. The Chilean coup has proved their
fallacy. The ruling class will not just sit back and accept in-roads into its privileges, however
‘constitutionally’ reforms are carried through or however deep-rooted parliamentary traditions. The
state machine in even the most democratic bourgeois states is built on strictly hierarchic principles,
with control over the activities of the army, the police and the civil service concentrated in the hands
of the relatives and friends of those who hold economic power. And the ruling class will use this
state machine to re-establish its own, untrammelled domination the moment it feels the balance of
forces are favourable to it.

Footnotes
1. Popular Unity programme, printed in J. Ann Zammit (ed.), The Chilean Road to Socialism,
Brighton 1973.
2. Allende’s advisor, Joan Garces, in Zammit, ibid., p.185.
3. Figures given in Zammit, ibid., p.245.
4. 16 November 1971.
5. For an account of this policy, see the then minister of economics, Vuskovic, in Zammit, op. cit.,
p.52.
6. S. Baranclough gives figures in Zammit, ibid., p.120.
7. In Zammit, ibid, p.37.
8. Quoted in the Morning Star, 7 August 1972.
9. Punto Final, 23 May 1972. The Grupo Movil were special riot police, roughly equivalent to the
French CRS. The Popular Unity programme had promised that they would be dissolved.
10. Interview in the Belgian Communist paper, Drapeau Rouge, 1 January 1971.
11. Speech of 10 September 1972, quoted in Financial Times, 12 September 1972.
12. A. Joxe in Zammit, op. cit., p.234.
13. Details in Socialist Worker, 13 January 1973
14. A. Joxe, op. cit., p.232.
15. Le Monde, 19 June 1973.
16. Quoted in Intercontinental Press, 9 July 1973.
17. Quoted in Intercontinental Press, 14 May 1973.
18. Le Monde, 25 August 1973.
19. Guardian, 12 July 1973.
20. Quoted in Intercontinental Press, 11 June 1973.
21. Translated in Marxism Today, September 1973.
22. Intercontinental Press, 11 June 1973.
23. Le Monde, 25 August 1973.

The Parliamentary Roaders

and the Chile defeat
 
From International Socialism, No. 63, (Mid-October 1973, pp. 15–17.
Transcribed by Christian Høgsbjerg.
Marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
 
THE PROPONENTS of the ‘parliamentary road to socialism’ have been in turmoil since the coup
in Chile early in September. They have been compelled to try and explain how it is that the Popular
Unity government, which they pointed to for three years as an example of what could be achieved
by socialists acting constitutionally, fell. And they have also had to attempt to prove that a left wing
government elected in a country like Britain would be able to avoid the same fate.
Their efforts to do so have led them to string together a series of arguments purporting to show
that the Popular Unity parties in Chile behaved correctly, or at least that there was no alternative
which would have done any better.
 
1.The first argument is that:
‘Far from having a majority of the population, Allende got only 36 per cent of
the votes in 1970. The objective was therefore to win more and more people to
support the government. Despite all the difficulties the aim was being realised
and the vote for the Popular Unity in the congressional election in March rose to
44 per cent.’ [1]
The argument contains a significant omission – it forgets to mention that support for Popular Unity
did not grow slowly, but shot up in Allende’s first months of office, until the coalition received
more than 50 per cent of the votes in the municipal elections of 1971, and declined, albeit slowly,
afterwards.
However, there is a much worse fault than that with it. It identifies votes in elections with power
in social terms. But the equation is untenable. No revolution in history has been carried through on
the basis of a majority of the whole electorate in advance for the revolutionary party: in 1917 for
instance, the Bolsheviks did not have an electoral majority in the Constituent Assembly. What they
did have was the majority of the workers – a class which has the power to carry through a
transformation of society, even when it is the numerical minority. The Russian revolution was only
possible because, as Lenin pointed out, ‘the revolutionary proletariat is incomparably stronger in
extra-parliamentary than in the parliamentary struggle, as far as influencing the masses and drawing
them into the struggle is concerned.’ [2] (his emphases).
Chile was no exception to this general rule in the period of the Popular Unity government. This is
shown by the simple fact that the government survived for three years, despite Allende’s minority
vote in 1970. The same landowners, industrialists and army officers who overthrew Allende did not
feel powerful enough to prevent his accession to the presidency three years ago and refused to back
the coup then planned by ITT. As late as June this year, the armed forces estimated that popular
working class support for the left would give a coup little chance of success: why else should the
same officers that now rule Chile have refused support for an attempted coup at that date?
Those parties which claimed to be Marxist in Chile certainly had as much support among the
workers as the Bolsheviks had in Russia in 1917. The difference was that the Bolsheviks took the
opportunity when their support was at its greatest to smash the old state, by destroying the power of
the officers in the army and establishing a Soviet, workers’ council, state. The Chilean parties, by
contrast, bolstered up the old state machine. According to one of the British CP’s own experts on
Chile, writing in July, ‘the whole country has been declared an emergency zone. This means that the
armed forces, the army, is in charge of the situation in all parts of the country. Each chief of
Emergency Zone, a high level member of the armed forces, has the power to decide what may be
done and what may not be done while the emergency zone exists.’ [3]
 
2. The argument about the low Allende vote is followed by a stress on the need for the Popular
Unity parties to have gained more support.
‘Therefore the central aim of the forces of Popular Unity was to drive forward
the implementation of its programme, step by step, in order to weaken the
economic and political positions of the big capitalists and landowners and
detach from their side a substantial section of the peasants, urban petty
bourgeois, professional people, technicians and women, and even some sections
of the workers who in Chile have usually voted Christian Democrat or
Nationalist.’ [4]
Now in itself the argument is not wrong. What it does not say is how other sections of the
population are supposed to be brought to follow the lead of the left. What in fact this meant for the
Popular Unity government (and for the Communist Party in particular) was trying to come to an
agreement with the Christian Democrat party and the armed forces – an agreement which could
only mean curtailing the programme of reforms, even though most of the economy remained
privately owned.
But Chile has been gripped all this year by escalating inflation – partly because of capitalist
economic sabotage, partly as a result of the ‘normal’ functioning of a capitalist economy in a semi-
backward third world country. To talk of an agreement with the Christian Democrats meant
accepting that it was possible to deal with this inflation under capitalism – a policy which was
unlikely to work and would, in any case, mean attacks on workers’ living standards. However,
without a programme for dealing with inflation quickly, there was no chance of drawing the ‘middle
strata’ to the government.
Similarly, in the countryside, the medium sized capitalist farmers, faced with growing discontent
from their labourers, were not likely to rush to support the Popular Unity government unless it was
brutally repressive. And the labourers had little real reason to either, given that the government told
them effectively that they must remain labourers for ever – its land reform only benefitted 7–15 per
cent of the population and left untouched farms of up to 180 acres, [5] ‘where exploitation is
frequently greater than on the large estates.’ [6]
As Lenin pointed out in 1917, if ‘the people are being overcome by apathy, indifference; it is all
the same to them, because the hungry man cannot see the difference between the republic and the
monarchy; the freezing, barefooted, worn-out soldier sacrificing his love the republic.’
‘We have not yet seen, however, the strength of resistance of the proletarians
and poor peasants, for this strength will become fully apparent only when power
is in the hands of the proletariat ... when every labourer, every unemployed
worker, every cook, every ruined peasant sees, not from the newspapers, but
with his own eyes, that the proletarian state is not cringing to wealth but is
helping the poor, that this state does not hesitate to adopt revolutionary
measures, that it confiscates surplus stocks of provisions from the parasites and
 distributes them to the hungry, that it forcibly installs the homeless in the houses
of the rich, that it compels the rich to pay for milk but does not give them a drop
until the children of all poor families are sufficiently supplied, that the land is
being transferred to the working people and the factories and banks are being
placed under the control of the workers, and that immediate and severe
punishment is meted out to the millionaires who conceal their wealth – when the
poor see and feel this, no capitalist or kulak forces, no forces of world finance
capital which manipulates thousands of millions, will vanquish the people’s
revolution.’ [7]
Instead of following this advice, the Popular Unity government tried to administer capitalism –
something which socialists are no better at than capitalists. Inevitably it paid the price – the ‘middle
strata’ blamed it for the economic mess, and even sections of workers (notably the copper workers)
found themselves on strike against the government for which they had voted and its ‘socialist’
incomes policy.
 
3. ‘Whatever their intentions, the ultra-left groups outside the Popular Unity,
such as the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), and those sections
supporting them in the Socialist Party and in MAPU (two of the Popular Unity
coalition parties) played into the hands of reaction. By their adventurism, they
contributed to the alienation of large sections of the middle strata, and
aggravated the situation of conflict at a time when the relation of class forces
was still unfavourable, if the Popular Unity had been able to gain more time,
then there would have been the possibility of winning a decisive majority of the
people and this would have had, its impact on the armed forces too. ‘ [8]
The implication is that the defeat in Chile must be blamed not on the mass working class parties,
which had enormous influence, but on small left wing groups which, unfortunately, did not.
What was it that annoyed the Chilean bourgeoisie – including its ‘liberal’ sections – and made
them opt for a coup? We have the answer from the mouth of the ‘left wing’ Christian Democrat
Tomic already more than a year ago: ‘the illegal occupations of farms, small holdings, shanty
towns, rented land, commercial offices, factories, mines, schools, public buildings, roads and
bridges.’ [9]
And who was behind these occupations? ‘They are not only the work of the ultra-left: they are
also the spontaneous action of groups of peasants, workers and miners.’ [10]
The argument against the ultra-left is really an argument that the Chilean workers should have
held back from the most elementary forms of class struggle, so as not to ‘aggravate the situation of
conflict at a time when the relation of class forces are unfavourable’. For the Popular Unity
ministers this was not just a question of words: they were prepared, on occasions, to send in the
police and troops to drive peasants from the land, to break up left wing demonstrations and to force
workers (albeit well paid copper workers) back to work.
What this waiting for the ‘possibility of winning a decisive majority of the people’ meant in terms
of the balance of class forces was shown by the reaction of the government to the refusal of rank
and file sailors to obey orders from their reactionary officers soon after the first abortive attempt at
a coup in June. Instead of trying to spread the revolt of the rank and file to the rest of the armed
forces and mobilising backing for it among the workers (for instance, with a general strike,
demonstrations to the barracks and so on), the Popular Unity leadership sat back while the mutiny
was suppressed and continued to collaborate in the government with the officers who were
suppressing it.
 
4. It is said that the Communist Party in Chile did not put all its faith in constitutional methods. It
recognised ‘the dangers of a coup and the possibility of people having to face armed struggle’. [11]
 This seems to be little more than a downright lie. In a speech made in Santiago on 8 July, the
general secretary of the Chilean CP insisted that ‘we continue to support the absolutely professional
character of the armed institutions. Their enemies are not among the ranks of the people but in the
reactionary camp.’ [12] Corvelan is now in prison and on trial for his life. But it does not seem to
have altered his views. He recently told a Daily Telegraph correspondent:
‘We never backed the guerrillas, or the idea of an armed rising. On the contrary,
when we were called upon to support a civil war, I drew up a letter on the need
for a constitutional solution and went to see President Allende on Sunday, 9
September (two days before the coup).’ [13]
And Kate Clark, the British CP’s correspondent in Chile wrote on 28 July:
‘The recent abortive coup has shown that the great majority of the armed forces,
whatever their personal opinions may be, are not prepared to go against their
professional tradition, their long standing loyalty to the Chilean constitution and
the constitutional government of the day, even if the government is a
revolutionary one, such as the Popular Unity is.’ [14]
What is true is that the Chilean CP occasionally made vague statements to the effect that
reactionaries might try to overthrow the government and that if this happened the CP would fight
back. ‘If the reactionary sedition becomes greater, entering the realms of armed struggle, let nobody
have any doubts that the people will rise promptly, as one man, to crush it.’ [15]
But a policy of waiting for the ruling class and the officer corps to launch an attack inevitably
leads to disaster. It means that the officers have all the time in the world to separate out militant
leftists among the army rank and file and prevent them influencing their fellow soldiers. It means
also that the officers can wait until inflation and food shortages, arising from economic sabotage by
the capitalist class, have demoralised a significant number of workers and have driven the middle
class into bitter opposition to the government.
The argument about waiting for the right wing to launch its attacks is not new. It was used in
1917 by those who opposed Lenin’s call for an armed insurrection. Lenin poured scorn on the
argument.
‘The leading article in Novaya Zhizn of 1 October produced another gem of
stupidity ... “The lessons of movements ... have shown quite clearly that the
democracy, having at its command organs that exercise immense influence
among the population, is invincible when it takes a defensive position in civil
war, and that it suffers defeat, loses all the middle vacillating groups when it
takes the initiative and launches an offensive.” If the Bolsheviks were to yield in
any form and in the slightest degree to the philistine stupidity of this argument
they would ruin their party and the revolution.’ [16]
Lenin then went on to quote Marx on the danger of trying to disarm the ruling class while assuming
a defensive posture.
‘The defensive is the death of every armed rising; it is lost before it measures
itself with its enemies. Surprise your antagonists while their forces are scattered,
prepare the way for new successes, however small, but prepare daily; keep up
the moral superiority which the first successful rising gives you; rally in this
way the vacillating elements to your side which always follow the strongest
impulses and are always on the look-out for the safer side; force your enemies to
retreat before they can gather their strength against you; in the words of Danton,
the greatest master of revolutionary tactics yet known: “de l’audace, de
l’audace, encore de l’audace!”.’
 
5. The final argument used by the proponents of the parliamentary road is that there was, in Chile,
no alternative.
‘The choice of “revolution” rather than “legality” was not on. Neither in
military nor in political terms was the Popular Unity in a position to win a trial
of physical strength. Certainly, Allende hated civil war ... But Allende did all he
could to avoid it, because he believed that his side would lose a civil war; and he
was undoubtedly right.’ [17]
‘For the “ultra-left” the perspective would have been an unsuccessful leftist
coup d’etat.’ [18]
If these statements are true, then only one conclusion can follow: there was no way open for the
Chilean workers and peasants to prevent a reactionary coup and the destruction of their
organisations. For, if an armed uprising might have failed, the constitutional road did fail. The
lesson that must be drawn by hundreds of millions of people who live below the subsistence level
throughout the third world must be: do not even go as far as the Popular Unity government and the
workers’ movement did in Chile in extracting concessions from big business; if you do you will
inevitably be buried in wood as were the Chileans. Such is the logic of those who claim that the
‘constitutional road’ is the only road to socialism!
 
What then was the alternative?
It was not, as those committed to the parliamentary road to socialism imply, a coup, carried
through by a conspiracy of armed revolutionaries and a few left wing officers in the armed forces.
Nor was it to start to arm the workers at the last minute in July and August of this summer. It was to
prepare the working class – at first by propaganda and then in practice – for a decisive struggle to
smash the old state machine. There were at least three years in which to make these preparations.
The army in Chile, as in every other country in the world, is organised along strictly hierarchic
lines, with the officer corps drawn from the middle and upper classes and mixing daily with their
class of origin; the rank and file are drawn from the working class, but separated from their own
class of origin in barracks, trained to obey orders given to them from above and facing harsh
punishments the moment they disobey any orders, however distasteful. The Popular Unity parties
chose to strengthen that army, by buying it expensive modern weapons and giving it internal
security powers.
A genuinely Marxist workers’ movement would have acted in a completely different way,
opposing any attempt to improve the army’s equipment, voting against every military budget,
repeatedly telling the workers to distrust the army. It would have countered the attempts at
economic sabotage by the bourgeoisie with a call for workers to occupy their factories and exercise
physical control over the economy at the point of production. It would have argued for safeguarding
this control with armed pickets – the embryo of a workers’ militia. It would have gained backing for
its struggle in the countryside by guaranteeing land to every single landless labourer and small
peasant. It would have agitated among the rank and file of the armed forces for them to turn against
their reactionary officers. Finally, it would have argued that delegates from factories, the peasantry
and the rank and file of the army should meet together to unite their struggles, so that every worker,
socialist, Communist or Christian Democrat, trade unionist or non-trade unionist, felt that he was
part and parcel of the developing movement.
What was involved was not an uprising prepared in secrecy and carried out behind the back of
the mass of the population, but the building up of an armed mass movement, which could break the
hold of the officers over much of the army and, gaining arms in the process, at a crucial point use
these arms to smash once and for all those sections of the old army which remained intact.
All the elements necessary to such a movement were present in Chile: the occupation of the
factories, the fight of the peasantry for land, the preparation of at least some sections of workers for
armed struggle, the linking of factories together in new delegate structures, the workers’ cordones,
the attempts at mutiny in the armed forces. The tragedy was that instead of drawing together these
elements, the main workers’ parties lulled themselves to sleep with talk about the ‘constitutional
role of the army’ and left the initiative with the ruling class.

Notes
1. The Morning Star, 17 September 1973. The argument is repeated, virtually word for word, by Jack Woddis in
an article from the Morning Star, 22 September 1973, which the Communist Party has reprinted in hundreds of
thousands of copies as a leaflet, and also appears, again almost word for word, in Comment, 7 September 1973.
2. Lenin, The Russian Revolution and the Civil War, Rabochy Put, 29 September 1917, in Collected Works,
vol. 26, p. 33.
3. Kate Clark, in Comment, 28 July 1973.
4. Woddis, op. cit.
5. Estimates given by S. Barraclough, in K.J. Ann Zammit (ed.), The Chilean Road to Socialism, Brighton 1973,
p. 120. The seven per cent figure to refer to the total number of peasants granted land about 18 months ago; the 15
per cent figure to the total number who would have received land if the reform had been completed.
6. Jacques Chonchol (Allende’s minister of Agriculture) in Zammit, ibid., p. 100.
7. Lenin, Can The Bolsheviks Retain State Power (September 1917), Collected Works, vol. 26, p. 127
8. Woddis, op. cit.
9. In J. Ann Zammit, op. cit., p. 37
10. Ibid.
11. Woddis, op. cit.
12. Speech reprinted in Marxism Today, September 1973.
13. In Daily Telegraph, 6 October 1973.
14. Comment, 28 July 1973.
15. Corvalan in Marxism Today, op. cit.
16. Lenin, Can the Bolsheviks Retain State Power, op. cit., pp. 131–2.
17. Eric Hobsbawm in New Society, 20 September 1973.
18. Digby Jacks, letter to Morning Star, 1 October 1973.

Luis Angel Fernandez Hermana

Chile:
Workers’ Struggle Under Allende
 
From International Socialism, No.66, February 1974, pp.22-26.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
 
MUCH HAS been written about the military coup which overthrew Chile’s Popular Unity
 government last September. In issues 62 and 63 this journal carried articles describing
the events which led to the coup and their lessons for the working-class movement
internationally. This article, has a much more limited aim – to describe how the Chilean
workers threw up a form of organisation, the industrial cordones, capable of developing
into workers’ councils and acting as the embryo of a genuinely working class state
power. The author was in Chile until the coup.

THE MAIN struggles of the working class during the period of the Popular Unity government took
place within a particular context: the ‘Social Area’ (i.e. government controlled sector) of the
economy. This sector was the key-piece in the government’s strategy for a ‘peaceful road to
socialism’. It was here that it hoped to establish the foundations of a ‘new society’ using the very
laws and institutions which the ruling classes had built up over 150 years in order to protect their
rule.
The government had organised the Social Area by agreement with the CUT (the Chilean TUC) so
as to enable the bureaucracies of the state and the unions to come together to control jointly the
working class. To this end, the agreement meticulously stipulated the way in which the transference
of private industries to state control should take place and how they were to be administered.
The basic administrative structure imposed, both at the national level and for particular
industries, was one in which top decisions were made by a council of five government appointees
and five union appointees (at the factory level only three were from the manual workers’ unions,
with one from the white collar unions and one from professional employees) presided over by a
government representative. This meant that the workers were always in a minority position.
The government placed a chief administrator in all of the factories in the Social Area and in those
likely to be taken over soon. The job of this Administrator was similar to that of the ex-bosses when
faced with the demands of the workers: either to repress their demands or to dictate measures
without taking the workers into account. It was for these reasons that a great many workers’
assemblies in the factories were demanding the removal of their ‘new bosses’ (who were on the
whole Socialist and Communist Party militants) and the handing-over of the factory’s
administration to the workers.
A further impediment to workers controlling things themselves was provided by the way in which
the CUT was organised. Although there were fairly regular elections for officials, these were chosen
according to party slates. Once elected officials were the property of their respective parties, which
could replace them if they wished. (The MIR used this device to remove their elected official,
Alejandro Alarcon, after they had expelled him from the party for demanding a democratic
assembly in which the different tendencies within the rank and file could express themselves.)
However, this hierarchic structure did not prevent the Social Area becoming the main arena of
struggle for the working class. The government had drawn up a strict list limiting the number of
industries destined to be taken over. But workers fought to get others incorporated into the state
sector – partly because of the need to get control of the productive apparatus, partly because wages
were higher in the state sector than elsewhere. At the same time, there was a growing struggle for
economic demands. The government was insisting that the main aim should be to increase
productivity, claiming that ‘the productivity battle must be won, more has to be produced for the
good of the country in order to deprive the rich of their power and to give more to the poor’. But
with rapid inflation (the result of the economic crisis the country had been suffering for at least 10
years) what was really happening was that profits were going straight into the pockets of big
businessmen: through their connections with world capitalism and their political, military and
ideological power, they were able to lay down the rules of the game with regard to exports, imports,
credit, production quantities, and distribution control, as well as engage in whatever sort of boycott,
fraud or hoarding suited them.
 

The Bosses’ Strike

WHILE THERE was growing concern among the working class about these problems, many
smaller businessmen were also losing out. But their anger was directed against the government and
the working class rather than the large capitalists who were gaining at their expense. Their anger
expressed itself in the bosses’ ‘strike’ of October 1972 and the bourgeoisie immediately seized upon
this as a means of isolating the working class with the aim of taking back the gains it had made.
The ‘strike’ began in the far southern area of Punta Arenas where a number of small lorry-owners
opposed the installation of a state-owned transport company. The area’s shopkeepers joined them. In
less than one week the capitalists had paralysed the country, they blocked roads, abandoned the
production centres and boycotted public services. The left wing parties were disconcerted. Their
view of the class struggle did not envisage such methods as a general bosses’ strike. And in their
perplexity they preferred to appeal to the patriotic sentiments of the bourgeoisie and to remind them
that they were infringing the country’s democratic order, rather than be guided by the militant spirit
of the workers.
It was a policy that played straight into the hands of the ruling class and opened up to it the
possibility of defeating the workers. But the workers were not prepared to sit back and accept such a
defeat. It was then that the industrial cordones really began to develop.
 

The Cordones
THE CREATION of these organs had begun quietly a few months before October. They grouped
together all those factories in the same geographical area and had arisen as a way of providing the
unions with a unified leadership over demands of an immediate economic nature. Their leaders
obviously came from the union organisation, although neither the Popular Unity nor the CUT
accepted them and were able to restrict them to being more an idea than a reality. Now however, the
working class movement was forced to search desperately for some means of confronting the
bourgeoisie on the terrain they had chosen – that of who organises the relations of production.
The workers saw that the two principal problems were the organisation of production and the
distribution of goods, and that these two activities had to be combined in the widest possible
movement of socialisation. Their future as a class depended upon the success of this first step.
They began by requisitioning all those industries abandoned by their bosses and integrated them
into the corresponding cordon, or created new cordones where they did not previously exist. Within
a few days the following cordones had been formed in Santiago: Mapocho, Alameda Station,
O’Higgins, Macul, Cerrillos and Vicuna MacKenna. In this way effective workers’ control began to
develop. Production was directed by the workers, much vaunted ‘commercial secrecy’ was
destroyed with the taking over of the accounting books, and the administration of industry was
made much easier. Each cordon was directed by an executive, elected in the factory assemblies,
whose job was to co-ordinate all the tasks in the sector. Each member in the executive had a specific
job to fulfill, previously decided upon in the assembly discussions.
The immediate need to link all these cordones together and to the rest of the population gave rise
to the appearance of co-ordinating committees – the central nerves of the workers’ organisation. The
members of these committees were elected by the executives of the cordones and their activity was
closely and permanently supervised by the base, with whom a close relationship had to be kept in
order to take up the initiatives that arose in the rank and file and to put them into practice. These
committees were also linked to the neighbourhood organisations, thus forming a circle whose
influence, beginning in the factory, reached the most distant section of the people.
Grouped together under the name of Communal Commands were the Neighbourhood ‘Juntas’,
Mothers’ Groups and ‘Juntas’ for the Control of Prices and Food Distribution. The latter had been
created by the state bureaucracy a few months before as a desperate attempt to control the
distribution mechanism and as a substitute for taking more effective measures in the productive
sector itself. Now, in the workers’ hands and closely bound to the productive cycle, they showed an
operative capacity far different to that ever dreamed of by their creators.
The leaders of these Communal Commands were also elected and their tasks decided upon by the
assemblies of the respective Juntas. In all these elections the masses showed their organisational
and decision-making capacity. Neither names or demagogic background counted; the men chosen
were the most determined and the most capable.
With the same decisiveness all speculators and intermediaries were done away with overnight.
Goods travelled directly from the factory to the consumer. Their sale was direct and controlled by
the people’s organisations. Small shops and supermarkets which had joined in the bosses’ strike
were forcibly reopened, their sales controlled by the housewives, protected by pickets of slum
dwellers. The people occupying the supermarket on Macul Avenue resisted two attempts by the
police to eject them, and only gave in finally once the strike had ended, after conciliatory action
from the Popular Unity.
A solution was found to the shortage of vehicles; the order was given that all lorries that were not
working should be requisitioned and used either for food or passenger transport. The cement factory
‘Ready Mix’ made all its lorry transport available to the Co-ordinating Committees. At a
community level militias of watchmen were created spontaneously to protect this new activity and
to defend the class from terrorist acts which were being committed increasingly by the right-wing
commando-groups.
The main priority throughout this period of conflict was that of providing foodstuff and other
essential articles to the poorer working class areas of the towns. The bourgeoisie meanwhile either
lived off its hoarded supplies or at the expense of those sectors of the population which were still
controlled by Allende’s verbiage – but these sectors were few compared with those that acted freely.
The conditions were created in the October crisis for the working class to begin an offensive
against the enemy positions and to prepare itself for further struggles by increasing the power of the
organisations it itself had thrown up – the only organisations that could overcome the ideological
fragmentation of the class which capitalism had produced.
For the first time in two years of socialistic phraseology, the real prospect of power by the
working class was emerging. The working class was showing with its creative ability that it was not
enough to talk about blueprints. What was needed was to attack the bourgeoisie where it hurt most:
excluding it from the reorganisation of production, so demonstrating its parasitical and exploitative
character and proving that society could do without it.
Although the movement was centred in the Social Area, where the control from above by the
CUT bureaucracy was strongest, it was initiated by the rank and file, taking as its starting point the
pursuit of economic goals. In the critical situation facing the country, this meant disputing the
bourgeoisie’s right to organise society. In this sense the economically motivated struggle became
concerned with a political problem – with the greatest political problem of all class struggles. Thus
events occurred like those in the town of Talca, where the workers occupied, edited, wrote and
printed the newspaper El Sur, using it to give clear instructions for taking control of the town.
The whole crisis served to train militants and workers’ leaders in a new way: for the first time in
their lives they were gaining political experience closely linked to the masses and not through
participation in rigid bureaucratic mechanisms. Political party differences disappeared among the
workers and the militant rank and file from all the left wing parties was united with independent
workers and the proletarian sections of the Christian Democrat Party. The state administrators either
disappeared or were absorbed into the movement.
The co-ordination of the different organs developed on the basis of their economic interrelation.
Industries were integrated into cordones, and from there their influence spread to other social
groups by means of the co-ordinating committees which, in turn, made possible the working of the
neighbourhood organisations grouped into the Communal Commands.
In this way, the working class maintained its leadership and integrated other social groups into
the struggle (professional men, students, housewives, slumdwellers), all pursuing the same
objective – something that had never been achieved by the Popular Unity in its two years in
government.
The movement was not restricted only to Chile’s capital, Santiago, but was a national
phenomenon. Organisations of a similar character were thrown up in each of the 13 most important
provinces of the country. However, the spontaneous character of the movement meant that national
co-ordination did not develop.
Finally, the parasitical nature of the bourgeoisie was demonstrated. It was shown that workers
could take control of the organisation of society and begin to demolish the myth about the
immutability of bourgeois relations of production.
 

Decline of the Cordones

HOWEVER, these positive factors were not the only ones at work. The subjective element – the
continuing ideological influence of the reformist ideas of Popular Unity – caused the popular
movement to recede after the October crisis. The bourgeoisie was allowed to resume its advance
and reinstate its own brand of ‘legality’ long before the final coup. This was possible because:
1.The workers did not see their mobilisation as involving a direct break with the
reformist leadership. Indeed, their prevailing attitude was that the mobilisation was in
support of that leadership. In just three weeks of spontaneous activity, the working
class could not possibly free its consciousness from the ideology which had
dominated it for 50 years. This ideology placed on a pedestal both formal, bourgeois
democracy and the institutions of the bourgeois state, including the army, presenting
them as if they belonged to the workers. Because the crisis took the form of an attack
by the bourgeoisie on the Popular Unity government, workers could believe that they
themselves were only a secondary object of the attack (whereas in reality, the main
attack was on their gains) and direct all their activity towards a reaffirmation of
Popular Unity leadership within the existing state apparatus. The necessary qualitative
leap of converting the workers’ organisations created in the crisis into independent
proletarian institutions could not be taken. No revolutionary party existed that
supported the workers’ conquests and the majority of the workers were still under the
control of reformism.
2.In the middle of the bosses’ strike, the government declared an ‘emergency zone’,
thereby automatically bringing the armed forces into play. An enormous publicity
campaign was mounted presenting the armed forces as ‘supporting the people’s cause,
because the people act within the limits of the constitution and its laws’. But what
really happened was that the army did its utmost to control the activity of the people’s
organisations so as to ensure that the bourgeois institutions were not vitally affected in
any way. Consistent with its reformist traditions, the working class did not
contemplate any sort of policy against the military; and so facilitated the latter’s
actions once the bosses’ strike was over.
The bourgeoisie took advantage of the ideological confusion within the working class to ensure an
outcome in its own favour. With the consent of the left wing parties, military representatives joined
Allende’s cabinet and all attention was focused on the electoral fight due in March. By making the
elections seem the axis around which the class struggle evolved, the bourgeoisie, with the Popular
Unity’s complicity, reduced the possibilities of the uncontrolled actions of the masses going beyond
the bounds of the system.
The result was that the movement that had developed in October declined and disintegrated.
Further social and political development were confined within the bourgeois structure, and the
armed forces were introduced to safeguard this situation.
None of the left wing parties had accompanied the working class in its confrontation with the
bourgeoisie. These parties preferred to conciliate with the capitalists rather than support
wholeheartedly the efforts of the workers. Even the MIR (the Movement of the Revolutionary Left,
which had originally been an urban guerrilla group – ed.) said that it supported the joint UP-
Military government ‘in so far as it encouraged the struggle of the masses’. The unions were not
flexible or representative enough to be able to lead the fight.
The organisation born in October needed to be developed and to extend their sphere of operation
from an economic confrontation to a political one. Only in this way could they nave become
instruments capable of ensuring the political and ideological independence of the class and suitable
for the seizure of power.
However, the Communist Party and those who followed its line claimed that the outcome of the
bosses’ strike had been a victory for the working class. They urged workers to express this victory
in the ballot boxes. And as this was the central aim in the political struggle the CP supported the
military’s order that those industries occupied in October should be handed back to the employers.
Nor was this all. The Party boycotted the cordones and prepared laws giving guarantees that ‘no
such excesses of behaviour leading to the indiscriminate occupation of factories’ should be repeated
(part of the text of the Communist economics minister, Orlando Millas’ project for a new law).
Thanks to this, a great number of industries were returned to their original owners, although this
often took months of continual ejections and occupations, as in the electronic industry in the
northern town of Arica.
The Socialist Party and the MIR joined forces in employing threatening and arrogant language
against the bourgeoisie. But the Socialist Party remained in the government and both put stress on
the preparation for the elections and the need to avoid, at all costs, a bourgeois majority in a
bourgeois parliament.
From October to March both the Co-ordinating Committees and the Communal Commands
languished and gradually disappeared. Empty of content and without any short-term creative
objectives, they were diluted by the effort demanded of the workers for the electoral confrontation.
This type of activity, however, meant that the spirit of October was lost.
In the elections the Popular Unity obtained the excellent result of 43 per cent of the votes. But the
reformists believed, as always, that this high percentage signified support for their conciliatory
policies and did not see it as a product of an ever-sharpening class struggle which had clearly
separated the voters into two poles: the right and the left.
 

Prelude to the Coup

AFTER THE elections not one political directive was given to the working class. When the
cordones continued trying to solve the immediate problems of distribution of supplies by setting up
local stores and distribution points, their initiatives were quickly sat upon by the state bureaucracy.
The bourgeoisie was left a free hand for preparing its final blow.
The appearance of tanks in the streets during the first abortive coup of 29 June showed the bitter
reality of the plans the bourgeoisie were preparing for the working class movement. But the Popular
Unity regarded the coup as the act of madness by an isolated lieutenant backed by the extreme right.
While calling for confidence in the patriotic feelings of the soldiers, the CUT ordered the workers to
occupy the factories and keep calm. The whole left wing leadership supported this policy. Those
who made speeches about the unconquerable strength of the masses or boasted of the steps they had
taken towards socialism (as if just talking about them brought them into existence) found that when
the armoured vehicles of the bourgeoisie appeared on the streets, all they could do was advocate
calmness and serenity, ordering the workers to return to the factories and, come what may, produce.
The bourgeoisie now decided to solve, once and for all, its most glaring and important problem:
the existence of a real working class vanguard which was revitalising the industrial cordones.
This vanguard had taken note of what had happened after the attempted coup. It was beginning to
become aware of the vacillation of the Popular Unity in the face of the bourgeois offensive. This
was brought home even more forcefully by the beginning of a new offensive of lorry owners and
basically right wing white collar unions, which attempted to impose the same terms as in October –
with one difference: the right wing confederations were now openly demanding Allende’s
resignation. In such conditions, one might have expected the exploited class to have seen much
more clearly than in October the real objectives of the struggle.
However, it was the bourgeoisie which had most thoroughly learnt the lessons. On this occasion
they were not prepared to permit any initiative which might threaten their stability as a class. And so
they adopted the tactic of engaging in a series of small-scale confrontations aimed at gradually
undermining the political cohesion of the workers, who were forced to retreat more and more into
their workplaces. Workers were prevented from engaging in action on the streets, factories were
searched by the military for arms, agrarian reform centres were ransacked, stoppages were
organised in the different public sectors. All this was combined with acts of terrorism by the right,
including sabotage and murder, which became more and more general and violent.
This time, the bourgeoisie did not launch an instantaneous strike as in October, leaving the
working class to react as it saw fit. Instead, the exploiting classes prepared very carefully for the
final blow, weakening the ability of the workers to fight back. They were protected by the fact that
the workers were still subjected to the empty slogans of a reformism which told them to remain
passive and above all by the fact that the reactivated cordones were not being allowed to extend
their base beyond their industry of origin. Workers who were beginning to see what needed to be
done had to fight against the CUT which opposed inch by inch the development of the cordones,
declaring them to be ‘breakaway’ organisations, and attempted to convert them into merely
territorial units. The workers replied that the fight to restore the class content to the union could not
constitute a ‘breakaway’ and that to propose an independent organisation of tht working class was to
place the struggle in the context of two classes struggling for power.
The Communist Party was much more direct in its actions. First of all it tried to boycott the
cordones by establishing its own parallel cordones with its own militants. Then, when this attempt
was proven futile, it demanded that its own union leaders be the leaders of the cordones, on the
grounds that they belonged to ‘the most important workers’ party’. It was trying to prevent the
development of what the workers were really demanding: workers’ democracy in which leaders
would be elected in the workers’ assemblies, given authority for particular tasks and subject to
recall at any time.
While the struggle over the cordones was taking place, the workers were also having to wage a
difficult battle with the reformists in relation to economic issues: in October 1973 they were due to
submit a new wage claim.
Allende had already labelled any attempt at a serious struggle in this sense as ‘economistic’. The
workers, however, paid little attention to this. By means of the cordones, all the building unions
presented a united claim, insisting upon a wage increase in line with the increase in the cost of
living (300 per cent). The textile workers and the copper workers from the five biggest mines did
the same, thus presenting united claims for the first time in their history.
However, the newly emerging vanguard of the class was still prevented by the influence of the
Popular Unity from co-ordinating and centralising itself, and from overcoming its isolation from
other social groups and proletarian centres. The class enemy continued to have room for
manoeuvre, which it used to carry through the September coup and inflict massive repression.
 

Conclusion
DESPITE THE defeat, the Chilean working class indicated which way forward the movement had
to go, both from a political and economic point of view. This necessarily is the key to any
reactivation of its fight against capital in Chile. Any policy which ignores the essence of these
developments, vivid in the workers’ consciousness, will be condemned to failure because it-will
inevitably provide a policy for the working class, not of it.
Those who raise Allende as a ‘martyr of the revolution’ just cannot understand the state of mind
of those workers who, while awaiting torture in the Football Stadium, held meetings in which they
criticised his suicidal policies – policies which always put more trust in the ‘loyalty’ of the
bourgeoisie and its generals than in the militant capacity of the workers.
Political strikes have already been carried out by the workers in Talca, Lota Schwager and two
factories in Santiago, demanding the release of their comrades in the concentration camps. But these
will mean little to those middle class revolutionaries who see the only way out of the present
situation as through an imaginary insurrection against the regime and who believe that the bitter
blow suffered by the proletariat proves only that it needs their help to liberate itself.
With the loss of its own blood, the Chilean working class has lost many of its illusions in formal
democracy. But it has also learnt that the simple desire to overthrow the system is not sufficient to
lead to victory, unless the workers’ movement possesses the necessary instrument for ensuring its
own leadership of society, drawing behind it the other sections committed to socialist revolution.
The organisations which remain intact in Chile have two choices: either reconstructing the
movement within the class or acting outside of the class and disorganising it even more. Time alone
will tell which of these options is taken.