Allende in his own words
Salvador Allende Reader: Chile's Voice of Democracy —
Ocean Press, Melbourne
287pp., $29.95
Review by Jorge Jorquera
Thirty years after his election to the post of president of Chile in September 1970, Ocean Press has released a selection of socialist Salvador Allende's speeches. It is a welcome addition to the material already published on the experience of the Allende government and the class struggle that surrounded it.
Every page of the Salvador Allende Reader recalls the tragedy of the Chilean experiment. If Allende proved incapable of providing the leadership the Chilean working classes expected from him, he was certainly not alien to their hopes. Every speech reflects the new-found dignity of the increasingly class conscious Chilean masses. However, every speech also reflects Allende's inability to interpret the political significance of this class consciousness.
Allende's words inflamed every hope but rejected the only means of realising them. The masses were asked to rely on Allende's Popular Unity government, to trust in Chile's "democratic traditions", and "surely but slowly" gain power. Discipline was exhorted, only to restrict independent working-class action. Having raised their hopes and expectations, in its final days the Allende government left the Chilean masses dispersed, strategically confounded and disarmed. On the first day of Augusto Pinochet's military coup, thousands of workers died defending their factories, with no hope of triumph but in desperately acting to maintain their dignity in the face of the arrogant ruling class.
The 'transaction' to socialism
Allende's speeches reflect the ambiguities of his government and the disagreements among the parties that formed the Popular Unity coalition. In general, Allende appreciated that forming the Popular Unity government was part of a larger "objective" — the "establishment of a new structure of power". However, Allende believed this could be realised by gradual, "progressive" developments, starting with economic measures.
In his first annual message to the National Congress, Allende proclaimed: "The new institutions will conform to the principle which justifies and guides our actions, that is, the transference of political and economic power to the workers and to the people as a whole. In order to make this possible, the first priority is the socialisation of the basic means of production."
Influenced by the Chilean Communist Party, Allende's government prioritised the creation of a socially owned sector in the economy, expecting that the erosion of bourgeois ownership would politically weaken the domestic bourgeoisie and imperialism. In its first year, Popular Unity increased the state share of gross domestic production by almost 20%, and gained almost complete control of the production of nitrates, iodine, copper, coal, iron, steel; about 90% of the financial and banking sector; almost 80% of exports and 55% of imports; as well as a substantial part of the textile, cement, metal, fishing, soft drink, and electronics industries, and part of the distribution industries.
To run the nationalised firms, the Allende government had to increase worker participation and the level of government planning in the economy. This further politicised the working classes, despite the bureaucratism of the government's measures. Chilean workers and peasants took the implementation of government policy into their hands, establishing distribution committees, factory coordinating councils, and seizing land.
Allende's redistributive economic policy hardened the political resolve of imperialism and the Chilean bourgeoisie to depose it. The growing confidence of the working classes disturbed the middle class whose political loyalty was to the capitalist elite.
Allende considered winning the political approval of Christian Democracy as the key to winning the middle class. Christian Democracy was the political leadership of the bourgeoisie, so appeasing them required the demobilisation of the advanced elements of the working class. Hence the constant praise for the "responsibility" shown by the union leaderships and the polemics against "extremist sectors" in Allende's speeches.
This weakened the resolve and unity of the most politically conscious elements of the working masses and undermined the possibility that the middle class might develop confidence in the leadership capacity of the working class.
State power
In his farewell speech to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who visited Chile in November 1971, Allende claimed that, "When the people are the government, the public order favors revolution".
Allende found justification for his view in a distorted understanding of Chilean history and a wishful interpretation of Marxist theory. Allende believed that "Chile's institutionality is open, it allows transformation and change ... We will proceed in a revolutionary manner, without hesitation, within the framework of the bourgeois constitution." He never tired of applauding the historical constitutionality of the armed forces, urging that the occasions when the military intervened in politics were aberrations.
Allende's views reflected the way in which the question of state power had become framed in the Latin American left's debate between Stalinism's "peaceful parliamentary road" and the "armed road" of the Cuban and Vietnamese revolutions. The strategic significance of "smashing the bourgeois state apparatus", which would require violent class confrontation but not necessarily qualitatively more than was already occurring during Allende's government, was hidden in a polemic against guerillismo.
Stalinism's last stand
Allende stood on the shoulders of the Chilean Communist Party (CCP), not his own Socialist Party. Ten years before Allende's election, Luis Corvalan, CCP general secretary, declared: "The great merit of the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU is that it reestablished the validity of the peaceful road rejected by the Communist movement after Lenin's death, even as an exceptional possibility."
The CCP was Allende's intermediary in the working class. It consistently opposed the self-organisation of the working masses, counterposing the bureaucratic structures of the trade unions. The growing power of the neighbourhood distribution committees, and more importantly, the development of the industrial cordons (local factory assemblies) and the comandos comunales (community councils) were targeted by Allende and the CCP.
In an interview with journalists, Allende said: "I have had to use my influence to hold back strong groups of workers, like the group in Cordon Cerillos, for example. Fifteen thousand workers could come to downtown Santiago to sweep away 300, let's say 600, insolent fascists, provocateurs, and I have told them no. The government has the force that allows it to guarantee order."
Even after the first attempted coup, imperialism's dress rehearsal, on June 29, 1973, Allende's message to the workers of Chile was the same: "Comrade workers, we have to organise. We have to create people's power that is not antagonistic to, or independent from, the government, that is the fundamental force and the lever that the workers possess to advance in the revolutionary process."
People's power
While the sharpening of the class struggle produced an increasingly radicalised working class and peasantry and the development of various methods of self-organisation, it could not produce a political leadership to lead it to victory.
The Socialist Party, MAPU, the Christian Left and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) gave support to most of the initiatives of the working masses but proved unable to forge an alternative to the parliamentarism of Allende and the CCP. While the need for this was recognised, these forces failed to wage a political struggle to split the Popular Unity government and refocus the class struggle on the battles on the ground, even if this meant risking the apparent strength gained by holding government.
Without political leadership, the workers of Chile were mowed down and humiliated, 30 years later this humiliation persists.
The Salvador Allende Reader is highly recommended to those who wish to understand the perils of reformism.
[Chile's Voice of Democracy: the Salvador Allende Reader will be launched in Melbourne on Wednesday, May 31, 7pm, at Green Left Weekly's Politics in the Pub, Comrades Bar, cnr Queensberry and Swanston Streets, Carlton. Ph (03) 9639 8622.]