WeeklyWorker

07.09.2023
Augusto Pinochet meets and greets US secretary of State Henry Kissinger

National road to disaster

Some 60,000 died, huge numbers were tortured and driven into exile, the parties of the left were banned and driven underground. Mike Macnair asks if any strategic lessons were learnt

September 11 marks the 50th anniversary of the 1973 military coup in Chile, which overthrew the government of Salvador Allende and ushered in a regime of terror against the left and trade unions. Chile was also the site of an early experiment with the ‘Chicago Boys’ and their shock therapy of privatisation, deregulation and so on.

The history is well-known, and whoever wrote the Wikipedia page on the coup has done a good job with thorough use of relevant materials (some only declassified this year).1 The USA was, from the moment that the election of Allende as president looked possible in 1970 (when he won the largest minority), determined that it should not happen, and if it happened there should be a coup. And, once CIA efforts to persuade the Chilean Congress - where Allende’s Unidad Popular coalition government did not have a majority - to go for a stop-gap president who would hand over to the right failed, the CIA embarked on a destabilisation programme, including external financial and economic pressure, and mobilisation of the middle classses. Allende and his UP coalition attempted to placate the military after the failed coup attempt of June 1973, but this policy did not succeed. August 1973 saw calls for action against the government by both the Supreme Court and the Chamber of Deputies - and September 11 saw the coup led by general Augusto Pinochet.

The Chilean coup was a severe defeat for the competing strategies of the left. This was not only true of the strategies of the advocates of people’s fronts, like Unidad Popular, and ‘national roads to socialism’ (Chile was until 1973 believed to be a stable parliamentary-liberal regime). It was also true of the strategies of the advocates of extra-parliamentary action. The Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) had about 10,000 members in 1973, which, since Chile’s population at the time was around 10 million, would be comparable to a party in Britain of around 67,000. By way of comparison, the Communist Party of Chile had, according to US estimates, 27,500 members in 1968. I have not been able despite fairly extensive web searching to find membership figures for the Socialist Party of Chile, but from the various literature about it, it seems likely before 1970 to have been significantly smaller than the CPC, though in the same range of electoral support, so probably in the same size range.

The MIR gave critical support to the Allende government, and (though active in attempting to construct a party military wing and in intervening in the army ranks) was effectively politically helpless in the crisis of 1972-73. MIR attempts to conduct guerrilla resistance to the post-coup regime failed - yet another nail in the coffin of the strategy of ‘prolonged people’s war’, as applied to Latin America.

Meanwhile, the Chinese People’s Republic displayed the real meaning of Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing, when it was one of the few governments in the world not to (temporarily) break diplomatic relations with Chile after the coup. China thus aligned itself with US policy in Latin America (and globally); so that Maoism began to fall into crisis - though this was a gradual process through the mid-late 1970s.

At the time of writing, only two September 2023 versions of left comment on this strategic defeat are out, and both of those are reprints of older texts (Tony Saunois from 1998 in Socialism Today, and Daniel Bensaïd from 2008 on the Anti-Capitalist Resistance website).2 However, so little has changed in the stories the left tells itself in the last 50 years that it is probably fair enough to assume that there will be nothing radically new this week. Thus in the Morning Star a book review by Carlos Martinez in 2013, and in 2018 Kenny Coyle’s introduction to a reprinted 1978 collection of articles by Chilean CP leaders, tell us much the same story as each other.3 The Socialist Workers Party has told its version of the story, beginning in 1973, and repeated in simplified versions in 2003, 2013 and 2020 (the last being for the 50th anniversary of Allende’s election).4 Socialist Appeal in 2013 reprinted a long 1979 article by Alan Woods.5

Largely these are actually stories of failure to learn lessons from the experience of the Allende government. On the one hand, UP was the sort of ‘broad democratic alliance’ which the Morning Star continues to promote as a strategy for British politics (as its sister parties promote such alliances elsewhere). Allende’s overthrow is not just a story of military action, but of a political battle fought by US financial and economic warfare against Chile and of US (and British and Australian) disinformation operations. The British left has recently (in 2017-19) lost a similar battle, thanks to US and British security apparat disinformation operations. Just as the Chilean Christian Democracy deserted its partial alliance with UP in 1972, so the Labour right preferred to see Labour lose in 2019. And so on …

On the other hand, the far-left versions reassert the strategy of building soviets. They play up the cordones industriales, which were in effect shop-steward combines on an industrial-estate-wide basis aimed to defeat the capitalists’ (and USA’s) economic sabotage operations, none having the level of city-wide control of production of the 1905 Petrograd soviet (let alone the effective halfway sovereignty of the 1917 soviets). Conversely, the significance of the MIR is underestimated. Birchall and Harman, writing in 1973, took the MIR fairly seriously, as did Bensaïd; subsequent SWP authors ignored it, as did Woods (and as do the Morning Star writers); Saunois provided only glancing mentions. Not taking the MIR seriously is a route to not considering the possibility that a ‘strategy of extra-parliamentary action’ might be worthless in an acute crisis, even when applied by quite a large organisation.

Some ‘official communists’ in the period after the coup blamed ‘ultra-leftism’, meaning the MIR and other far-left groups which supported strike action, demands for expropriation of ‘sabotaging’ firms, etc, for the defection of the Christian Democrats from their initial passive support for Allende, the middle classes taking fright, and so on.6 But US documents have trickled out, making clear that the US administration was determined from the outset that there should not be an Allende presidency (and, if there was, it should be made to fail). No amount of increased caution on the part of UP and the workers’ movement would have stopped the US destabilisation campaign or prevented some kind of coup - even if it might have been different from the one which actually happened.

Framework

The problem of failing to address the role of US economic and disinformation/political mobilisation warfare is common to both sides of the debate. It arises because both the ‘official communist’ views about the Chilean defeat and the far left operate within the framework of ‘national roads to socialism’. This is unsurprising from the ‘official communists’, but more than a little surprising from groups of Trotskyist origin, like the Mandelite Fourth International, the SWP, SPEW and Socialist Appeal.

For Carlos Martinez, “… what the fall of Allende does show is that revolutions do not exist in isolation and that sometimes the prevailing regional and global conditions simply do not allow them to survive.” But neither he nor Kenny Coyle, nor the Chilean communists in 1000 days of revolution, can offer a strategic line for the defeat of the USA’s war on the revolution or, hence, any ground for supposing that future attempts along the same lines will not result in a similar disaster. Some 60,000 were killed, large numbers fled into exile and the parties of the left were banned.

Birchall in 2003 had the merit of addressing the question - but only to argue that the weakness of the US’s situation in the period meant that it could not have intervened if a strong line had been taken by the Chilean left:

But the point should not be overstated. The US could only intervene on the basis of the balance of forces inside Chile. They were disentangling themselves from defeat in Vietnam, and direct intervention was out of the question.

But the US’s economic and disinformation/political mobilisation warfare, starting in 1970, created the “balance of forces inside Chile”. And all through the 1950s-60s, US-sponsored coups had been far more common in Latin America than actual cases of “send the marines”.

Tony Saunois argued that:

A revolutionary party with a precise programme and correct tactics was needed to direct this energy towards the completion of the revolution and the overthrow of capitalism and its state machine. But no such party existed in Chile.

Had it existed, the revolution could have emerged victorious and would have opened up the prospect of a socialist revolution throughout Latin America and beyond. Even the election of the UP government with its ‘Marxist’ president and the revolutionary process that developed amongst the working class had an electrifying effect on the masses in Latin America and Europe. It coincided with a rising struggle against the Franco dictatorship in Spain.

The spreading of the revolution to any of the Latin American countries, linked with a direct appeal to the working class in the USA, would have decisively checked the ability of US imperialism to intervene.

Less elaborately, Alan Woods after a long history of Chile and a long and wildly unrealistic assessment of Chilean politics in 1979, wrote:

The socialist revolution in Chile would be an example for the working class and all the oppressed peoples of Latin America. With a workers’ government in Chile, how long would the military dictatorships in Argentina, Uruguay, etc last?

The problem with these arguments is that they fail altogether to address the USA’s economic warfare operations and their effects on the Chilean economy and, in consequence, the ability of a revolutionary Chile to feed its people: after World War II, Chile became increasingly dependent on food imports,7 which made it dependent on the copper, and so on, exports which the US by financial sanctions from 1970 interrupted.

The result is that the ‘isolated socialist state’,8 far from being a beacon for the peoples of the world or even of the region, and leading to a spreading revolution, becomes an awful example to them, leading to reaction not only in the country targeted by economic warfare, but also in its neighbours. Both the Nicaraguan revolution, created by an actual insurrectionary overthrow of a military dictatorship in 1978-79, and the Venezuelan Chavista regime, created by an electoral victory in 1999 of a movement led by an army officer and with significant army support, provide more recent examples.

The Russian Revolution is a standard counter-example. But this counter-example is wildly unrealistic. The revolution took place under conditions where open war between the major imperialist powers had already radically disrupted the economy; and, this apart, the revolution took place across the former tsarist empire, which was peasant-majority and before 1914 a food exporter. (The Bolsheviks promised self-determination to Russia’s dependencies, but were actually forced, in order to survive, to reconquer all of them during the civil war - except for the Baltics and Finland, which were held by German troops.)

All subsequent cases of countries added to the ‘socialist camp’ by ‘national roads’ depended on the prior existence of the USSR. Breaking with the US-controlled world capitalist order to join the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance (Comecon) would be a feasible strategic option, if the USSR leadership was willing to take the country on board. Most cases (North Vietnam included) were immediately post-World War II; but the USSR was willing to back Cuba because the contemporary Sino-Soviet split and the recent struggle with the ‘Anti-Party group’ made a left posture advantageous to Nikita Khrushchev; and to back South Yemen because the cost was low and the Aden naval base advantageous to the Soviet navy. This was not a generally available option, because the Soviet leadership was not willing to trigger a general confrontation with the US: even Cuba threatened general crisis, though the deal made was not a simple Soviet backdown, as it was presented in the western media.9

Birchall is right that the general position of US imperialism in 1970‑73 was relatively weak, after the Tet Offensive in Vietnam, the British scuttle out of Aden, and so on.10 But that did not mean that it was not massively stronger than any single country in Latin America. If the global left had consistently through the 1950s and 60s characterised US financial and commercial ‘sanctions’ as acts of war, and promoted the idea that they should be met by seizure of US assets and repudiation of debts to US institutions, not only by the country affected, but by other countries, it is possible that the US response to the election of Allende could have triggered a general crisis of a sort which would force the US to back down.

Equally, if the US left had been unambiguously disloyalist and had - again, from 1945 on - recognised sanctions, etc as acts of war in violation of US constitution, article I, section 8, clause 11 (which requires a declaration of war by Congress, in the absence of a direct attack on the US), it might have been possible to build a movement in the US itself, alongside the subsisting anti-Vietnam war movement, against US economic warfare on Chile.

But promoting either idea would be inconsistent with the basic idea of ‘national roads to socialism’. Thus the party programme of the Communist Party USA, ‘Road to socialism USA’, is decidedly ‘soft’ on the US constitution. ‘National roads’ here produces accommodation to the very common US constitutional patriotism.11

Perhaps more immediately relevant to the coup of 1973, ‘national roads’ up till 1973 produced the illusion that Chile’s long ‘democratic’ (ie, liberal-constitutional) tradition would mean that a military coup was unlikely, in spite of the frequency of US-sponsored military coups across Latin America in the preceding period. Thus Birchall and Harman quote Chilean CP general secretary Luis Corvalan in 1971:

… 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.

The same Luis Corvalan commented in 1978 that:

Since 1963 the party had been giving its members military training and making efforts to acquire enough arms to defend the government that we were confident the people would set up, but this was not enough, because our activity in this direction was not accompanied by the main thing: namely persistent and sustained propaganda to give the popular movement a correct attitude to the military.12

What the “correct attitude” would be remains utterly unclear in Corvalan’s account.

This is just a part of the question of the illusions which UP had promoted in the workers’ movement when Allende came to office (we should not say ‘to power’, since this would be misleading). Thus Allende said in 1972:

My government maintains that there is another path for the revolutionary process that is not the violent destruction of the current institutional and constitutional regime.

The entities of the state administration act today not at the service of the ruling class, but at the service of the workers and the continuity of the revolutionary process; therefore, one cannot try to destroy what is now an instrument to act, change, and create for the benefit of Chile and its labour masses.

The power of the big bourgeoisie is not based on the institutional regime, but on its economic resources and on the complex web of social relations linked to the capitalist property system.

We do not see the path of the Chilean revolution in the violent bankruptcy of the state apparatus. What our people have built over several generations of struggle allows them to take advantage of the conditions created by our history to replace the capitalist foundation of the current institutional regime with another that is adapted to the new social reality.

The popular political parties and movements have always affirmed - and this is contained in the government programme - that ending the capitalist system requires transforming the class content of the state and of the fundamental charter itself. But we have also solemnly affirmed our will to carry it out in accordance with the mechanisms that the political constitution has expressly established to be modified.13

The claim that the “power of the big bourgeoisie is not based on the institutional regime, but on its economic resources and on the complex web of social relations linked to the capitalist property system” is widely believed to be orthodox Marxism (in the sense that similar comments can be found from Engels and Kautsky), but it is straightforwardly wrong.

Regime

The institutional regime of the rule of law and separation of powers, together with the tradeable-debt-funding of state activities, the free market in legal services, the advertising-based media and so on, delivers the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie: that is, that capital in the money form (at the two ends of the circuit M-C-P-Cʹ-Mʹ) is above the law and dictates what the law is. In countries outside the US, but having broadly liberal constitutions, because the dollar is the global reserve currency, that institutional form delivers the dictatorship of US capital over the laws of the UK, France … and Chile.

These institutional forms have created the basis of the loyalty of the armed forces (including the police) the civil service, the judiciary, and so on, and constitute them as a state rather than a mere temporary kleptocracy or protection racket. In consequence, Corvalan’s idea as of 1971 of winning the army as a whole to the side of the people was delusional. But it was equally illusory to imagine that the judiciary would not - as they did in August 1973 - call for a coup. Illusions in judges are more widespread than illusions in generals …

In this context, the workers’ movement needs, before it takes office, to pose the question of radical constitutional change. Usually, the ‘push-back’ inherent in the state officials’ loyalty to the constitutional order will knock down radical aspirations long before reaching the point of a 1970-73-style crisis (as was visible in the UK in the 1924 Zinoviev letter and its current equivalent, the ‘anti-Semitism’ smear campaign).

Expose

Posing the question of radical constitutional change requires not just consistent work to expose the corrupt character of the existing regime. It is also necessary to pose, concretely, a positive alternative. That implies, for example, proposing the abolition of the standing army and its replacement with a people’s militia, and the necessary corollary of that: the right to keep and bear arms. It implies also the defence and extension of trial by jury; the belief among non-Anglo leftists that this is an odd-ball Anglo phenomenon is a matter of these leftists being duped by what Engels called (of France) “the empire of 1799 without the emperor”: ie, the capitalist class’s adoption of the judicial methods of late feudal absolutism as a bulwark against the working class. It implies institutional forms to reduce excessive trust in judges.14 It implies the rejection of directly elected presidencies and other monarchical forms, of second chambers in parliaments and congresses. And so on.

As delusional as Allende’s loyalism towards the Chilean liberal constitution is the belief of the SWP authors and Saunois that it is possible to counter the problem of state loyalism by two steps. The first is in propaganda to argue that the state must be as a matter of Marxist theory a class instrument - in a completely abstract or dogmatic way, without addressing concrete issues of state form. This argument, because it is abstract, can have no serious political purchase. The second step is to argue that in revolutionary crises the workers will necessarily throw up institutions of self-organisation (like the Chilean cordones industriales) and that these can form the basis of a counter-power. This is a fantasy version of the Russian Revolution, which leaves out the role of mass parties in creating and leading the soviets.

It also leaves out Leon Trotsky’s judgment in 1923 and again in 1931 of the fetishism of soviets.15 That is, there were workers’ councils (Räte) in Germany and Austria in 1918. But the leadership of these councils remained with the majority Social Democrats in Germany, with the Socialdemocratic Party in Austria. As a result, the Räte could not serve as a counter-power. The same is true all the more of the Chilean cordones industriales, which never approached being a counter-power.

When push came to shove, the problem in September 1973 was that the armed forces were not split: hence the fact that there were no rival aircraft, or anti-aircraft missiles, to defend the presidential palace against the coup-makers. For the armed forces to be split needed enough of the junior ranks to be convinced that their seniors’ intervention in politics amounted to treason. That, in turn, required that the left should have been exposing the constitutional order and proposing an alternative for years, not just months, so that the electoral victory of the UP would then reflect an actual belief among broad masses that it was time to be done with that order. Such a belief would then stretch into the ranks of the armed forces.

Trotskyist authors place great emphasis on the fact that UP was (as its name tells us) a popular front. But the question posed is: would a united front government, of the SP and CP alone, have been any better? The answer is quite plainly not. I have quoted above the delusions in the Chilean constitutional order promoted both by Allende and Luis Corvalan.

The essence of the problem is that UP formed a minority government, on the basis of wildly unrealistic expectations about the willingness of the other side - the USA and its local political clients - to play by the constitutional rulebook. The price they, and the whole of the Chilean workers’ movement, paid for this choice was tragic.

But the idea was already long established that workers’ parties should not participate in government unless there is a majority for the implementation of their minimum programme - a minimum which consisted chiefly of constitutional proposals. It was already Karl Marx’s and Friedrich Engels’ critique of Louis Blanc for participating in government in 1848. It was a critique which Engels repeated to correspondents in Italy and elsewhere in the 1890s. It was repeated as a principle by the Second International in response to then-socialist Alexandre Millerand’s participation in a ‘government of republican defence’ in France in 1899.

Since 1900 we have had many, many examples of left parties wrecking themselves by minority participation in governments (recently, Rifondazione Comunista in Italy springs to mind) or forming minority governments (eg, Syriza in Greece). Chile 1973 was a tragedy. But it was a tragedy arising from strategic mistakes which the left still clings to, and which are still disastrous - even when the results are banal demoralisation rather than tragedy.

  1. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1973_Chilean_coup_d%27état; supplementary information from en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende and en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Salvador_Allende.↩︎

  2. socialismtoday.org/chile-1973-heroism-was-not-enough (September 4); anticapitalistresistance.org/remembering-september-11-1973-the-us-backed-pinochet-coup-in-chile (August 29).↩︎

  3. ‘Salvador Allende: revolutionary democrat’ Morning Star October 1 2013; ‘1,000 days of revolution’ (undated, but presumably 2018): morningstaronline.co.uk/article/1000-days-revolution.↩︎

  4. I Birchall and C Harman, ‘Chile: end of the parliamentary road’ International Socialism September 1973: www.marxists.org/archive/harman/1973/09/chile.html; I Birchall, ‘Chile 1973: the other 11 September’ Socialist Review September 1 2003; K Olende, ‘40 years since the coup in Chile: lessons to learn’ Socialist Worker September 10 2013; S Squire, ‘Chile 1970 - why the hope was broken’ Socialist Worker August 30 2020.↩︎

  5. socialist.net/the-lessons-of-chile-1973.↩︎

  6. There are several examples in the essays in 1000 days of revolution Glasgow 2018.↩︎

  7. A Valdés, ‘Trade policy and its effect on the external agricultural trade of Chile 1945-1965’ American Journal of Agricultural Economics Vol 55, 1973 (pro ‘free-trade’ polemic, but the data is clear enough).↩︎

  8. The phrase was originally from G von Vollmar, “Der isolierte sozialistische Staat: Eine sozialokonomische Studie” (1878-79) in W Albrecht (ed) Reden und Schriften zur Reformpolitik Bonn 1977.↩︎

  9. See, for example, www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/jupiter-missiles-and-endgame-cuban-missile-crisis-sealing-deal-italy-and-turkey.↩︎

  10. ‘May 68’ strengthened the US position in Europe by replacing de Gaulle with a more consistent Atlanticist, and the ‘Prague spring’ weakened the position of the USSR.↩︎

  11. www.cpusa.org/party_info/party-program.↩︎

  12. 1000 days of revolution pp115-16.↩︎

  13. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidency_of_Salvador_Allende, citing Textos de Salvador Allende 1972, 2016, p459.↩︎

  14. I have suggested some possibilities in ‘On reducing undue trust in judges: or, against the modern doctrine of precedent’ King’s Law Journal Vol 31, pp41-58 (2020); these do not represent the CPGB position.↩︎

  15. www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1924/lessons/ch8.htm; www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1931/spain/spain09.htm.↩︎