This coming September 11 will mark the
fortieth anniversary of the coup overthrowing the elected government of Chile,
a country that, at the time, enjoyed the longest enduring tradition of
electoral stability in South America. Despite the uninterrupted existence of a
constitutional parliamentary system from 1932, the Chilean military—aided by US
covert services—overthrew the President, Doctor Salvador Allende Gossens, and
violently suppressed his supporters, installing a military junta that ruled for
26 years.
What prompted the US government and its
traitorous allies in the Chilean military to destroy the fabric of Chilean
civil society in 1973? What “sin” could possibly warrant the installation of a
murderous, fascistic regime under the leadership of General Pinochet and his
collaborators?
The answer is found in one word:
socialism. Not the grafting of a tepid welfare safety net to the fringes of
capitalism as promised by social democrats, not the “socialism” of workers’
token participation in management, not the bad faith of class collaboration or
the regulation and management of a voracious and predatory profit system, but
the real and robust pursuit of revolutionary and transformative change.
For Salvador Allende and Popular Unity--
the coalition of Communists, Socialists, and other worker and peasant
organizations that backed his election in 1970, the vote was the opening steps
on the unique “Chilean road to Socialism,” a road that would hopefully lead to
working class political power and social ownership superseding the private
ownership of the leading economic enterprises and giant agricultural estates.
The Allende government pressed forward
with its agenda, nationalizing key industries and creating new and parallel
organizations and institutions of local and workplace power. Of course this did
not go well with the wealthy and powerful in Chile or unnoticed by their North
American allies. Millions of our tax dollars were devoted to funding
counter-revolutionary groups and actions in Chile. Provocative strikes were
organized by middle-strata shop keepers, transportation owners, and managers to
disrupt the economy. Demonstrations were instigated to bring sections of the
middle strata—the “momios”—into the street in protest. Sabotage and vandalism
were pressed. Even neo-Nazi terrorist groups were encouraged and funded by the
CIA. And, of course, the US government did everything it could to isolate the
Popular Unity government from international assistance, credits, and trade.
In the face of these provocations,
Allende and his supporters urged workers and peasants to step forward in
defense of the economy and the bourgeois democracy. And they did, in great
numbers.
Thus, the expected rejection of Popular
Unity in the elections of March, 1973 never materialized. Despite an
unprecedented destabilization campaign, the Right was unable to muster enough
votes to depose Allende. The only path left open to the enemies of popular
power was the military coup. Six months later, Allende was dead and tens of
thousands were about to be killed, jailed, tortured, disappeared or in hiding.
The
Guzman Chronicles
It is rare to have a vivid and detailed
account of such an important and tragic historical process. But thanks to the
hours of video documentation secured by film maker Patricio Guzman, we can
trace the powerful people’s movement that coalesced around Salvador Allende,
the excitement and empowerment of the masses as they forged ahead, the hopes
and disappointments of workers and the poor, and the betrayal and destruction
of national aspirations. Guzman was a partisan of Popular Unity, yet open to
recording the views and movements of the opposition. He captures the euphoria
of workers and peasants finding their voices, the explosion of meetings and discussions
of the formerly powerless, and the new-found confidence of the liberated.
His trilogy, The Battle of Chile (The Insurrection of the Bourgeoisie, The Coup
d’Etat, and Popular Power) is available on DVD (Icarus Films) along with
the 1996 film (Chile, Obstinate Memory)
of his return to Chile to show his work in the post-Pinochet era.
Guzman’s prescient sense of the
significance of Popular Unity seemingly put him on every corner, in every
demonstration, in the mines and factories, and in the seats of governance. The
visual imagery of workers, peasants, and ethnic minorities in the tens of
thousands rallying to the cause of Popular Unity is unforgettable. Conversely,
the faces of the “momios” and the military leaders reflect the ugliness of both
their fear and their arrogance. Nor will one will ever forget the footage of a
camera operator filming his own death at the hands of a soldier.
Far better than the many written
accounts of the Chile tragedy, Guzman’s films expose the truths of class and
ethnic divisions without adornment. In most cases, one can identify whether an
interviewee on the streets of Santiago supports or opposes Popular Unity before
he or she even speaks. Class identity is transparent.
Yes, it is class war, conscious class
war. But class war that the long-ruling oligarchs, the industrialists,
landlords and their minions could only win with the intervention of the
military and their powerful friends to the north.
While the popular forces lost the
battle of Chile, the collective memory of the peoples’ rising had to be
extinguished before Chile could be returned to anything close to a “normal”
bourgeois republic. For some time after elections were restored, Chile still
lay in the shadows of the Generals, fearful of their return.
When Guzman arrived to present The Battle of Chile for the first time
in his native land, he recorded the responses of a group of youth, both before
the showing and after. Before the viewing and with only modest exceptions, the
students mouthed the views received from Pinochet-era textbooks and
documentaries. They showed some sympathy for the conditions of the very poor
that might move them to support Popular Unity, only to charge the partisans
with impatience, irresponsibility, or poor judgment. The views expressed were
remarkably similar to those one might encounter in an upper-middle class
suburban school in the US.
When the lights came on after the
screening, the students were visibly moved—some were reduced to tears, others
spoke openly for the first time of relatives who were repressed. Despite the concerted effort to remove the
memory of Popular Unity, The Battle of
Chile shocked the young people into a sympathetic encounter with their own
history. This moment is captured vividly in Guzman’s Chile, Obstinate Memory.
A
Vital Source
But the events of these three years, as
revealed by the film and other chronicles, constitutes more than the nostalgia
of those of us who placed so much hope in Popular Unity. Rather, the Chilean
experience was a case study of the struggle to throw off the yoke of
imperialism and capitalism. This episode bore many features unique to the
conditions existing at that time and the pathway chosen by the movement’s
leaders. At the same time, the Chilean revolutionaries faced adversaries and
obstacles that are universal in any profound social change. In short, we have
much to learn from Chile’s tragedy.
Today’s militancy, emerging slowly, but
inexorably from the crushing impoverishment and stark inequities spawned by the
global crisis, constitutes a new and promising assault on wealth and power.
However, a new generation of the angry and defiant risk failure and
disillusionment unless it draws lessons from the successes and failures of the
past. History is cruel to those who turn away from those lessons.
Only those who are terminally jaded can
but admire the energy of the “Occupy” militants in the US and the “Indignados”
in Europe. But any who view The Battle
of Chile will quickly recognize that powerful ruling classes with
far-reaching police, a sophisticated intelligence apparatus, and a modern
military at their beck and call are not readily moved to surrender power and
position to forces organized in open-air general assemblies or in urban street
encampments. Nor will they accommodate demands issued with the nobility of
moral authority. Chile’s legacy reminds us that transformational change is
about overcoming the nexus of economic and state power.
Recognition of the fusion of economic
and state power in our time—what Marxists call “state-monopoly capitalism”—is
essential to any credible assault on the fortress of wealth and privilege. To
reach for state power, the majority must begin to disable the economic might
wielded by the few. But to accomplish this, the many must act to take the power
of the state that preserves and protects the economic basis of the ruling
elites.
Solving these two challenges simultaneously is the task of
revolutionaries. In Chile, Popular Unity hoped to meet the challenges by
establishing loci of peoples’ organizations in neighborhoods and workplaces and
nationalizing the heights of the economy. They understood that presidential
power was only a fragile link to state power and far from sufficient to
neutralize the economic might of the Chilean capitalists and their courtiers
and attendants. Our modern day would-be revolutionaries are well-advised to
grasp these realities.
The Battle for Chile is cold water in the face of so many erstwhile
advocates of social justice who have turned to timid or utopian schemes to address
a capitalist social system that has only become more aggressive and rapacious
since the era of Chile’s interrupted revolution. While the loss of a
counter-force to the US and its allies—the European socialist community—has
vastly strengthened the hand of global capitalism, it neither excuses nor
justifies a retreat from an anti-capitalist program. We see alternative schemes
emerging from those disillusioned with the politics of reformism, but uneasy
with revolutionary politics; they advocate motley theories of “radical
democracy,” cooperatives, “The New Economy,” various strains of anarchism and
kindred rejections of “hierarchies,” among others.
Marx and Engels anticipated these
developments over a century and a half ago when they wrote in the Communist Manifesto:
Historical action is to yield to their
personal inventive action; historically created conditions of emancipation to
fantastic ones; and the gradual, spontaneous class organisation of the
proletariat to an organisation of society especially contrived by these
inventors. Future history resolves itself, in their eyes, into the propaganda
and the practical carrying out of their social plans.
In the formation of their plans, they
are conscious of caring chiefly for the interests of the working class, as
being the most suffering class. Only from the point of view of being the most
suffering class does the proletariat exist for them.
The undeveloped state of the class
struggle, as well as their own surroundings, causes [activists] of this kind to
consider themselves far superior to all class antagonisms. They want to improve
the condition of every member of society, even that of the most favoured.
Hence, they habitually appeal to society at large, without the distinction of
class... For how can people, when once they understand their system, fail to
see in it the best possible plan of the best possible state of society?
Hence, they reject all political, and
especially all revolutionary action; they wish to attain their ends by peaceful
means, necessarily doomed to failure, and by the force of example, to pave the
way for the new social Gospel.
Such fantastic pictures of future
society, painted at a time when the proletariat is still in a very undeveloped
state and has but a fantastic conception of its own position, correspond with
the first instinctive yearnings of that class for a general reconstruction of
society…
They, therefore, endeavour, and that
consistently, to deaden the class struggle and to reconcile the class
antagonisms. They still dream of experimental realisation of their social
Utopias, of founding isolated “phalansteres”, of establishing “Home Colonies”,
or setting up a “Little Icaria” — duodecimo editions of the New Jerusalem — and
to realise all these castles in the air, they are compelled to appeal to the
feelings and purses of the bourgeois…
They, therefore, violently oppose all
political action…; such action, according to them, can only result from blind
unbelief in the new Gospel.
Revolutionaries must and will put these
“castles in the air” behind them as the struggle for social justice sharpens.
And ahead are the many obstacles
underscored by the Chilean events chronicled in Guzman’s film. Two critical problems of revolutionary
theory that loom large in the battle for Chile are (1) the question of the
military and other “security” organs and (2) the question of the “middle
class.”
Clearly, Popular Unity failed to solve
the problem of the military in 1973, though its leaders certainly recognized
it. In our time, the near-coup in 2002 against President Hugo Chavez in
Venezuela demonstrates the continuing dangers from those social elements
holding a near monopoly on physical force: the military. Like the police and
other organs of social control, the military invariably align with those
opposing change. Without Chavez’s uniquely strong links to long-cultivated and
sympathetic elements of the military, the coup would have undoubtedly led to a
bloody and uncertain outcome. Any real quest for transformative change must
wrestle with this question.
The question of the “middle classes” is
really the problem posed by those who occupy the social space between the
ownership class (the 1%) and those conscious
of their diminished status resulting from employment by or servitude to the
ownership class. While those who occupy this space are, in reality, also
subservient to the rich and powerful, they see their status as above the poor
and working class and identify their aspirations with the fate of those who
rule. Labor leaders and other image shapers foster illusions about a broad and
inclusive “middle class.” They offer the fantasy that auto workers and bus
drivers have the same class interests as corporate lawyers and bond traders. In
this imaginary world, their lives intersect at the shopping mall, the stadium,
and the television set. Of course they really don’t. Even arch conservatives
like Charles Murray have concluded that this view is nonsense, but the view
persists widely in the mainstreams of both the US and Europe.
The dangers of these illusions are
demonstrated well in The Battle of Chile.
The “momios” who provided a mass base for the opposition to Popular Unity
would, by and large, have eventually benefited from the Chilean road to
socialism. But seduced by the lure of consumerism, vulgar culture, crass
individualism and the delusional promise of joining the ranks of the privileged
few, they proved to be an enormous obstacle to advancing the Popular Unity
program.
In the more prosperous capitalist
countries, the problem of the middle strata is even more acute today. While
Marx’s judgment that the “…individual members of this class… are being
constantly hurled down into the proletariat…” may be somewhat affirmed by the
global economic crisis, the fact remains that the middle-class world view is
resilient and will persist for some time. Belief in personal exceptionalism,
like belief in spirits, is a difficult deception to shed.
“To be young and a revolutionary is a
biological imperative” was a piece of graffiti scrawled on a wall in Santiago
and translated for me by my friend Kay when we visited Santiago in the fall of
1990. After Pinochet, this was a welcome inspiration for those of us who placed
hope in the Chilean revolutionary process. But biology will only take
revolutionaries so far without a study of history. In fact, without heeding the
lessons of history—in this case the Allende government and its violent
suppression—the imperatives and energy of youth will dissipate and give way to
cynicism and disappointment. The Battle
of Chile offers these hard lessons, but also profound inspiration.
Zoltan
Zigedy
zoltanzigedy@gmail.com
