Remembering Chile

September 11 will mark 45 years since the military coup deposing the elected Popular Unity government of Chile. With the electoral victory on September 4, 1970 and under the leadership of presidential candidate, Salvador Allende, the Chilean left proclaimed the first steps on a peaceful transition to socialism. Millions of progressive and socialist-minded people worldwide followed the Chilean developments with intense interest only to witness their hopes dashed and tens of thousands of Chileans brutalized or murdered by the junta lead by Augusto Pinochet.

In the aftermath of the violent coup and the destruction of Chile’s constitutional system, hundreds of thousands worldwide marched and organized in solidarity with Chilean democrats, socialists, and Communists. At the same time, a rigorous examination of the three-year experiment took place, dissecting the objective and subjective factors leading to and allowing the coup. Articles, books, forums, and witnesses argued passionately the possibility of peaceful transition, of a parliamentary road, the role of intermediate strata, the absence or necessity of stages of struggle, the role of reformism, of compromise, of dependency, of foreign intervention, of the socialist countries, of economic priorities, and of many other aspects of the Chilean struggle.

Today, the questions raised in the 1970s-- a time of great promise for socialism-- remain relevant, urgent, and vigorously debated. With the passage of time, they stand out as essential to interpreting our world, theoretically and practically. Every process for change, from the Italian elections, the Portuguese revolution, and African liberation movements of the 1970s to the most recent events in Syria and Nicaragua, prompts most of the same questions that were raised by the Chilean counter-revolution.

The Role of the US

The one point of agreement shared by Communists, socialists, democrats and even the left wing of Christian Democracy was that US influence occupied an essential place in the undermining of the Popular Unity government and its programs and prospects. We know even better today of the active, intense interventions of the CIA and US corporations like Anaconda, Kennecott, and ITT in strangling the Chilean economy. From the first election, the US government at the highest levels devised a plan and began actions to derail the Chilean left.

Credits and loans were denied. The global price of copper (70-80% of Chilean exports) was manipulated downward to deny Chile’s government essential revenue for the country’s social programs (salaries rose between 35% and 66% in 1971) and industrial development.

Without hard currency outside loans or revenue from trade, hyperinflation eventually plagued Chile, reaching 163% in 1973.

“The US credit and trade squeeze was designed for a political purpose…: to promote the political demise of a democratic socialist government. Economic pressures led to economic dislocations (scarcities), which generated the social basis (discontent among the middle class) that created the political context for a military coup.” (The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government, James Petras and Morris Morley)

Funding middle class truck-owners’ “strikes” through the CIA and AIFLD further fueled middle class alienation (the middle strata in Chile was quite large-- one study claimed that the 45% of the population beneath the top 5% shared 53% of national income).

Of course the Chilean military maintained strong and dependent contact with its US counterpart, a fact that guaranteed that the US would be a partner in the coup.

The CIA paid bribes to Chilean legislators, funneled money to leading newspapers to influence popular opinion, and encouraged and financed acts of terror.

Writing in 1970 and anticipating the impact of economic warfare on three Latin American independent and progressive processes-- Peru, Chile, and Bolivia-- Italian Communist, Renato Sandri, astutely observed:

The strategy of the imperialist siege of the three countries seems to be a combination of an insidious pressure from the outside, primarily on the economic level, with internal resistance by the unseated oligarchies, [and] the reactionary sectors of the armed forces… The besiegement of these countries, in which the contradiction between the desperate needs of the largest masses and the possibilities of meeting them soon is so acute, has a clear objective: to force them into economic bankruptcy, to bring the governments to their knees in isolation from their own peoples… (Critica Marxista, 1970, number 6)

For those most sincerely in solidarity with the Chilean people, condemnation of both US intervention and the Pinochet regime became the immediate priority. For those dedicated to returning governance to the people of Chile, resisting the machinations of the US ruling class and its allies overshadowed settling the political differences following in the wake of the coup.

For a broad base of US leftists and democrats, Chile solidarity served as the template for internationalism, solidarity, and anti-imperialism. At its core was the idea that US activists must first and foremost resist the meddling of the more powerful country in the affairs of a weaker country; solidarity required a universal respect for another country’s absolute right to determine its own fate regardless of what we may think of its internal affairs.

A Lesson Learned?

For reasons that are not easily discerned, the US left has compromised the principles that united the many factions in the Chile Solidarity movement. Despite deep political divides, solidarity work in the past stood firmly on the foundation of respect for other countries’ right of self-determination. Another lesson learned-- though less widely accepted-- was to avoid the conceit of judging other people’s paths, especially by the conventional standards of affluent, privileged US citizens.

But that resolve was to erode after the Pinochet coup. By the end of the decade, most of the US left failed to respond to the US intervention in Afghanistan which fell on the side of the anti-secularist, millenarian, ultra-conservative counter-revolutionaries. No doubt, anti-Communism played a role, but it is worth noting that liberal values supposedly deeply embedded in the US left were quietly retired before the onslaught of the Jihadis.

Cold War politics surely account for the disinterest of the predominantly white left organizations in the US government’s substantial support for the wrong sides in the liberation of the last remaining colonies in Africa. “Specialized” organizations and a fairly broad section of the Black community were moved to condemn US engagement.

Anti-Reaganism and a determined core of Latin American solidarity activists restored some of the vigor of the Chile Solidarity era with an insistent defense of the Sandinistas against the onslaught of the US-sponsored Contras. It helped that the cause proved useful in the Democratic Party’s fight against Reagan and his cohorts.

The dismantling of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia was a non-event for most of the US left and a troubling turning point in US left solidarity. As the US and its NATO allies encouraged, financed, and actually interceded in the orgy of nationalism, with roots in World War II fascism and anti-fascism, there were no demonstrations, marches, or actions in the US. Few voices, notably excepting Diana Johnstone, Michael Parenti, and scant others, challenged the newly minted doctrine of “humanitarian intervention” concocted by the Democratic administration.

When the Jihadis bit the hand that fed them in the twenty-first century, the US struck hard at Afghanistan. Given the popular image of the US as an innocent “victim,” it was not surprising that little opposition arose to the invasion.

But then emboldened by that lack of opposition, the US brazenly invaded Iraq in 2003. For this naked aggression, the broad left mobilized, agitated, and demonstrated, particularly after the claimed justification collapsed. Once again, hatred for a Republican president fueled the mass expression, along with pacifistic anti-war convictions devoid of deeper solidarity sentiments (muted by vulgar charges of “islamo-fascism”).

Obama’s wars brought a further decline of left internationalism in the US. Partly because of the ascendance of a Democratic president unjustifiably deified by much of the left, murderous actions in the US’s longest war, in a once-stable Libya and Syria, and through remote drones, were shamefully ignored by much of the left. The deliberate destabilization of countries like Serbia, Georgia, and Ukraine, the meddling in Iran’s elections, and the coup in Honduras were largely met with left indifference.

The turn-of-century anti-imperialist renaissance in Latin America created excitement and support from a broad segment of the US left. Developments in Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Ecuador, and Venezuela, ranging from liberal nationalism to proclaimed socialist-orientation (and real socialism in Cuba!), inspired many to celebrate a crack in the US global hegemony.

But as hardships piled up and US economic warfare increased against these upstarts, many in the US abandoned them, surrendering to North American-media charges of corruption, incompetence, and human rights violations. The shallowness of US left solidarity is on full display.

After the charismatic Hugo Chavez died in Venezuela and after the US economic sanctions tightened (in a way only too much like Chile during Popular Unity), many on the US left fled the Venezuelan cause like rats from a sinking ship.

Still others turned on the leadership, voicing intense criticisms of the Venezuelan government’s chosen path at the moment of greatest duress. Nothing gives meaning to great-power chauvinism like the second-guessing of a privileged US leftist.

But the reaction of the US left to the recent events in Nicaragua exceeds the shabby sell-out of Venezuela. Despite the fact that the Sandinista government won an overwhelming victory in elections last year, we are to believe that they are now disowned by a majority of the citizens. We are to believe that confidence in the government is so fragile that it justifies burning cars and buildings, constructing homemade mortars, and organizing violent attacks, actions that would turn US liberals and some on the left running to demand police intervention should this happen in their own country.

The carping and criticizing of the Sandinista government-- a matter best left to Nicaraguans-- overshadows the well-documented intervention of US agencies in Nicaraguan affairs. The media’s overwhelmingly negative and one-sided campaign against the Sandinistas should be transparent to anyone who has faced the US media’s persistent negative characterization of anything remotely left wing. Yet many US leftists ponder the “complexity” of the conflict. Many hesitate to defend not only the government, but Nicaraguans’ right to determine their own future, their own fate, free of US influence. Maybe the bully has good intentions?

One would think that a left worthy of the name would gladly err on the side of any regime that found itself in the gun sights of the US government, its security agencies, and the corporate media. When, since World War II, has that formula NOT been a fairly reliable guide to taking an anti-imperialist stand?

The Chile Solidarity moment is a dim memory. In the past, solidarity movements-- the Spanish Republic, the Vietnamese Liberation Front-- were springboards for the US left. Unfortunately, the same is not true in the wake of Chile Solidarity.

Social Democrats or Democratic Socialists or Democratic Democrats seem only interested in democracy in the US; they show little regard for the global democracy of self-determination and national independence. When it comes to the fate of peoples in far-off lands victimized by an arrogant US foreign policy, they are too often diffident.

Those ignorant of the nobler episodes of US solidarity with the victims of US imperialism are not to blame. But those leaders on the left who are beholden to foundations, think tanks, non-profits, and other organs of dependency have tarnished that legacy. They cannot hide behind the fig leaf of class-defined “human rights” forever.

Thankfully, there are still some who remain dedicated to principled solidarity work, there are many diligent enemies of the bullies of the world, steadfast in accepting the heavy burden of fighting their own country’s bid for global dominance. Anti-imperialism does live!

We celebrate their work on the anniversary of the tragic end to the Chilean people’s reach for control over their lives.

Greg Godels

zzsblogml@gmail.com

Chile, a Revolution Denied

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