Chile, Allende, and Democratic Socialism
Various reports from the ground paint a compelling picture of class struggle in one of the most unequal countries in Latin America, where 1% of the population controls some 26% of the total wealth. By design, the neoliberal policies pushed forward under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinoche and continued by successive governments have increased the wealth of Chilean and international capitalists while immiserating the masses. Today, protestors chant, “it is not 30 pesos, it is 30 years”, alluding to the decades of hardship brought by capitalism in the post-dictatorship era.
The national police force (Carabineros de Chile), at least some of whom snort cocaine before attacking protestors, have killed several people, including 29-year-old Abel Acuña. After Acuña collapsed, police shot at paramedics attempting to save the young man. President Piñera — whose declaration of a national emergency (the first since the Pinochet dictatorship) due to “war with a powerful and implacable enemy" sent the army into the streets — has “condemned” the abuse in a cynical attempt to calm the protestors. While police fired into crowds, permanently blinding thousands, Piñera was photographed eating expensive pizza at a birthday party in one of Santiago’s wealthiest districts, prompting the question "Did you declare a state of emergency to eat in peace?"
Various assemblies have been created by working people taking power into their own hands, kindling semi-dormant memories of worker organizations during the years of Salvadore Allende. It remains to be seen what role these assemblies will play in the weeks and months going forward. Perhaps the only point of comparison to the United States and Europe is the Occupy Movement of 2011. The murderous Piñera government has announced plans to rewrite the constitution, but protestors seem to understand the move as a cynical trick. Protestors must continue to extricate themselves from the existing political apparatus and form their own democratic organizations. The attempt at a constitutional referendum is a trap designed to bring protestors back within the political arena defined by capitalist realism, in which there is no “logical” or “reasonable” alternative to commodity production based on profit instead of need.
The history of the class struggle in Chile is ripe with lessons for the struggle ahead. This article is not a complete summary of Chilean history, and will focus mostly on a critique of democratic socialism, a term that has become something of a floating signifier in common discourse. In this case, I define democratic socialism as a reliance on constitutional and parliamentary means to achieve graduale gains for the working class while avoiding conflict with the capitalist (though assumed neutral) state. For those interested in an in-depth history (and far more articulate critique) of democratic socialism, I recommend Donald Parkinson’s essay in Cosmonaut. Those looking for a more in-depth exploration, particularly of the period between 1970-1973, should watch Patricio Guzmán’s illuminating documentary series, La batalla de Chile (The Battle of Chile), alongside Mike Gonzalez’s chapter in Colin Barker’s edited collection Revolutionary Rehearsals, and his essay in the Journal of International Socialism. (The three-part documentary series by Guzmán, in particular, cannot be recommended highly enough). What follows draws heavily from all of the above sources.
The Birth of a Working Class
When Marx wrote that capital first entered European markets “dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt”, he was primarily describing the extraction of riches from various mines in the newly-conquered Americas. The blood, of course, mostly belonged to the enslaved native populations. After being marked with the royal brand and the initials of their master, these slaves were worked so hard that, according to the journals of more sentimental observers, “For half a league around these mines and along a great part of the road one could scarcely avoid walking over dead bodies or bones, and the flocks of birds and crows that carne to fatten themselves upon the corpses were so numerous that they darkened the sun.” Chile’s modern working class, as well as its modern bourgeoisie, has its roots in these pre-industrial catacombs. Mines formed made up the backbone of the country’s economy (by 1900, a staggering 97% of state revenue came from sodium nitrate — “white gold” — mining), and miners formed the country's first trade unions and helped create the Chilean Communist Party in 1922, and the Socialist Party in 1933. In 1973, a strike by workers at the world’s largest copper mine gave further truth to the lie of Allende’s worker’s government; a decade later, those same miners would strike against the military dictatorship.
Elected in 1920, president Arturo Alessandri Palma promised liberal reforms to workers and their political representatives in the name of "evolution to avoid revolution" (the Russian Revolution, one must remember, had taken place just three years prior). Yet, Alessandri’s true interests lay in appeasing the needs of capital and the conservative right-wing, as demonstrated by the Masacre de Marusia (Marusia massacre) in 1925. Importantly, at no point during the 20th century did the so-called Communist and Socialist parties of Chile advocate a break from the bourgeois state and the underlying structure of the capitalist economy. Following Stalin’s rise to power and the solidification of socialism in one country, the existing left parties looked to work within the existing system through political alliances and backroom deals. Socialism would come through political, not social revolution.
The Rise of Allende and Unidad Popular (UP)
Salvador Allende did not will himself into existence like some benevolent overlord; instead, his election was an outgrowth and expression of the existing class struggle among millions of workers. In 1964, Eduardo Frie of the Christian Democratic party — whose belief in “social capitalism” through Christian ethics betrays its confused, if not downright deceptive, politics — defeated Allende to become President of Chile. Essentially a more conservative version of Allende, Frie was blasted by the left as too timid in his reforms and by the right as too extreme. Now overlooked in favor of what would come later, broad swaths of peasants, urban migrants, and students were increasingly active in the years leading up to 1970, when revolution seemed possible in cities across the world.
Teased by a few of the policies under Frie, including several related to land distribution, disillusioned voters swung further left in 1970, electing Salvador Allende, leader of a six-party coalition, Unidad Popular (Popular Unity, or UP). Perhaps the Socialist Party could do something the Christian Democratic Party could not. With deep roots in the working class, Allende’s election, along with the subsequent nationalization of the American owned copper mines, marked a turning point in the minds of the Chilean ruling class. In the end, it was never primarily Allende — whose socialist credentials are grossly overstated, if not downright fraudulent — who the capitalist class and right wing-opposition feared, but the growth of workers’ power and organization outside the confines of the state (and against the best efforts of Allende himself). When the coup came, it was because Allende proved no longer capable of meeting the needs of capital.
The Statute of Guarantees
In describing an offer of comradery from the French crown to Toussaint Louverture during the Haitian Revolution, C.L.R. James wrote, “In politics, abstract terms conceal treachery.” This warning should be written on every city wall and in every meeting hall. Allende was known for his declarations of “popular power” — in reality, a declaration of willingness to work alongside the interests of capital. Allende’s reliance on collaboration with the bourgeois was epitomized by his signature on the secret 'Statute of Guarantees' — a promise that UP would, as described by Mike Gonzalez, “respect the state and its structures and leave intact all those instruments which the bourgeoisie had evolved to defend its class interests — the education system, the Church, the mass media and the armed forces.” In reality, Allende was never interested in fundamentally altering the capitalist economy, aiming instead to appease the interest of all parties. A more-than-willing representative of the bourgeois rule of law, Allende went as far as to blame the left for the country’s instability. He was quick to condemn squatting by peasants and declared national emergencies when strikes got out of hand.
Workers’ Power and Organization
Much of the history covering Chile’s so-called revolutionary period indulges in surface-level explanations for the rise of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, blaming the United State’s CIA and gunboat diplomacy for destroying Salvadore Allende’s supposed radical machinations. Little is said about the working people themselves. I previously called the work of Guzmán and Gonzalez illuminating because both documentarians reveal the extent to which real potential lay not in Allende and his UP government, but in the grassroots organizations of the workers, in particular the cordones (“industrial belts”) between industries that bypassed the Communist Party-dominated trade unions. According to Gonzalez, the cordones created their own declarations, which included demands for “workers' control of production and the replacement of parliament by a workers' assembly.” Importantly, the cordones declared “support President Allende’s government insofar as it interprets the struggles and mobilisations of the workers.”
In 1972, when owners halted production on an attempt to further destabilize the country and unseat the Allende government, the working class organized to keep the economy moving. As Gonzalez describes in Revolutionary Rehearsals
At the EI Melon cement factory, a strike already in progress was
immediately brought to an end and its workers returned to work. At
the Perlak textile plant, to compensate for the lack of milk from the
countryside, the workers organised a high-nutrition soup for their
children. The Polycron workforce took their textiles to the working class
areas and sold them directly. Raw materials and finished goods
began to be exchanged between factories, but also between workers
and peasants.
Workers guarded against sabotage, kicked out their bosses, volunteered to organize food distribution and transportation, and continued to show up to work. Local residents from the country’s pourer districts (distinct from the more conservative middle class population) forced shop owners to open stores. Doctors reopened shuttered hospitals. Defense committees were formed. Gonzalez’s assertion in Revolutionary Rehearsals that if not for the working class, “the bourgeoisie would have succeeded in its campaign”, reminds one of the Spanish workers rushing to arm themselves and form barricades against Franco’s fascists despite the imbecilic and cowardly reassurance of the Spanish Republic.
The Failure of Democratic Socialism
In the months leading up to his death, Allende led an essentially impotent government with little to no control over any of the important sectors in Chilean society; true power lay further to the left, in the hands of the cordones, and to the right, in the guns of the military. But Allende himself refused to admit that the center could not hold and ignored warnings from his supporters that a coup was imminent. He maintained his faith in the constitution, the armed forces, and the bourgeois state until the end. The army, under Allende’s oversight, stripped the workers of their few remaining weapons only months before the coup. As Gonzalez states in Revolutionary Rehearsals, “the working class was prepared for the final phase of the class struggle — but its leadership was not.” The UP was committed to appeasing a long-ago disinterested rightwing, and the official Communist and Socialist parties, while commmited to revolution on paper, had longsince committed to working with the bourgoiusie.
The French Jacobin Louis Antoine de Saint-Just once remarked that “those who make revolutions by halves do nothing but dig their own tombs.” Salvadore Allende, writes Gonzalez, thought he could play something of a “referee” within the class struggle, never daring to favor one side of the conflict over the other. In the end, he and his government retarded the workers’ movement — the only force that could have defended Chile from Pinochet’s coup and in so doing spared the country from decades of dictatorship. Ultimately, by disarming the workers, attacking the strikers, and empowering the military, Allende and his democratic socialist ideology helped dig the grave of the working class movement. Had Trotsky been alive to observe Allende’s UP coalition in action, he surely would have grouped its tactics within his condemnation of the Germany Social Democratic Party (SPD) leading to the rise of Hitler, and the Spanish Republic government upon hearing Franco’s declaration of civil war.
There are forces which would like the bail to roll down towards the right and break the back of the working class. There are forces which would like the ball to remain at the top. That is a utopia. The ball cannot remain at the top of the pyramid. The Communists want the ball to roll down toward the left and break the back of capitalism. But it is not enough to want; one must know how.
One week before the presidential palace was bombed, nearly one million people took to the streets in commemoration of the third anniversary of Allende’s election. Their militant presence, writes Gonzalez, “was testimony that they were ready to fight, to defend their class against an armed bourgeoisie. But there was no revolutionary leadership to grasp that historic responsibility and coordinate and arm the mass workers’ organisations.”
The greatest tragedy leading to the coup of September 11, 1973, is that the Chilean masses knew how to roll the ball to the left but continued to look towards leaders who preferred an impossible balancing act. Only the workers seemed to understand that the class struggle does not stand still. The situation was pregnant with the possibility of the new; what could have happened if workers had disillusioned themselves from Allende and the UP? In future struggles, Chilean workers must, in the words of Trotsky, “break over the barriers excluding them from the political arena, [and] sweep aside their traditional representatives.” Once free from its traditional representatives, the working class needs a workers party in order to continue the revolution (this, of course, is a much larger conversation).
Neoliberalism and Dictatorship
The events of September 11, 1973, are widely known; needless to say, they fit the definition of a General’s Coup. A career military man, Augusto Pinochet (in yet another move indicative of Allende’s confidence in the army) had been appointed Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces by Allende that August. Ultimately, such a grand display of force was only the last stop in a longer line of previous attempts to oust Allende. A right-wing controlled Parliament was not enough (the opposition had hoped to impeach Allende following elections that May), and the working class had organized to overcome the bosses strikes of 1972. Monetary support for the opposition from the CIA and KGB was twice unable to swing elections. Unlike Allende, the right-wing opposition wasn’t afraid to shred the constitution when the cards were down.
With a military junta in power, economists trained under Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago — the so-called “Chicago Boys” — were put in charge in the economy and began what many consider to be the first test of neoliberal economics. Unions were banned, social security and state-owned enterprises were privatized, and capital was generally given free rein. Wages decreased, pensions were slashed, and social spending was cut. Massive loans flowed in from the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and foreign corporations, including Dow Chemical and Firestone Tires, returned to exploit the workforce. By the end of the dictatorship, some 45% of the country was in poverty while the top 1% saw their income increase by over 80%. In short, neoliberalism, a tool of class warfare and wealth accumulation, was a resounding success.
The human cost of the dictatorship was immense. Thousands were killed (including hundreds at the hands of the notorious Caravan of Death), tens of thousands were tortured and disappeared, and hundreds of thousands were exiled. Patricio Guzmán’s more recent film, Nostalgia de la luz (Nostalgia for the Light), follows the search for the remains of loved ones in the vast Atacama Desert. Germain to the contemporary relationship between the armed forces and the Chilean masses, Pinochet was given a military funeral upon his death in 2006, and the Chilean national flag was draped over his coffin. In Spain, supporters of Francisco Franco honored a man who took over 300 charges of human rights violations with him to the grave.
Lessons Learned?
They say the owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk. There can be no denying the power of Allende’s final address to the world before killing allegedly himself with a gun gifted by Fidel Castro (“...I will pay the people’s loyalty with my life...”). At the same time, his last words are exemplary of his naive faith in class-collaboration (“...my words do not have bitterness but disappointment”), loyalty to the state (“...who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and the law and did just that...”), and proclivity towards abstraction. Allende thanks the workers (“...I want to thank you for the loyalty you always had...”), seemingly unaware of his ultimate role in the history of class struggle. Nor can one deny the broad support the UP received from the workers, peasants, students, and most vulnerable in Chilean society. By no means a naive man, Allende rightfully feared his internal and external enemies. But crucially, as dictated by his reliance on the bourgeois state, he also feared his greatest and most powerful allies; the workers. Instead of encouraging grassroots organizations that developed irrespective of his wishes, Allende took their weapons and defended the police and soldiers who broke their strikes and beat them to death (many were first tortured ) in the name of law and order. Allende may have been well intentioned in his naive desire to avoid a conflict with capital and the bourgois, but a conflict was inevitable. As the old saying goes, the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
In the end, intentions mean very little unless backed by organization, power, and decisiveness. When the cards were down, only Allende hesitated. History, likewise, means little if it doesn’t serve as a guide for future action. Those who uncritically praise Allende and the project of democratic socialism can’t plead ignorance when faced with such a devastating example of their project in action. As Parkinsons explains
It is a fool's errand to tell the masses that a peaceful road to a workers republic, essentially a change in class governance, is something that can be promoted. Even if it was possible and the government was able to enforce a minimum program without prompting civil war, it would still require mass mobilization to combat sabotage...They treat the liberal state as a neutral site of class conflict that the proletariat can transform to its own ends over time, slowly enough to avoid a period of social conflict where a rupture in the class nature of the state will occur. This ideas assumes we can sneak a revolution past the bourgeois and ignores problems like capital flight that crash attempts at social-democratic reforms.
It’s strange to hear Allende’s last speech, with his declaration of certainty that “the seeds we have sown in the dignified conscious of thousands...of Chileans will not be shriveled forever”, and that “Sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again, where free men will walk to build a better society.” Could the great orator have imagined the streets of Chile in 2019? It is up to the people of Chile to liberate themselves, and in so doing, perhaps rescue Salvadore Allende from himself.
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