Fifty years on from the Pinochet coup in Chile, the Left continues to draw different conclusions from the defeat. Kieran Allen describes the tensions between the Popular Unity government and the workers’ movement at the time, arguing that although Allende was courageous, he made major strategic errors that gave ground to the military in the lead-up to the coup.
Fifty years ago, the Chilean military led by Augusto Pinochet overthrew the first ever elected President who described himself as a Marxist, Salvador Allende. The date 9/11 may now be associated with the attack on the Twin Towers but the date was originally a reminder of the bloody Chilean coup.
The coup showed the limitations of capitalist democracy. The overthrow and murder of a President sent out a clear message: You can speak, but don’t dare tamper with wealth. As soon as Allende was elected, the US began operations to overthrow him. Between his inauguration in 1970 and the coup in 1973, the US spent $8 million on covert actions, according to a 1975 Senate report. The CIA was in regular contact with the military, promoting plans for a coup. The US company International Telephone and Telegraph passed money to his opponents. But the US was not just the puppet master of the coup. The Chilean rich wanted his overthrow. As the historian Eric Hobsbawm put it, the left had ‘underestimated the fear and hatred of the right, the ease with which well-dressed men and women acquire a taste for blood”.
After the coup, there was a myth that Chile was an unstable country, prone to coups. Military coups against leftists might occur in exotic Latin America countries but not in the West. You got an echo of this suggestion when Irish Independent journalists expressed outrage when People Before Profit dared to cite the Chilean example in the pamphlet, The Case for a Left Government. Yet Chile had a long history of constitutional rule and even left-wing figures expressed confidence that the military would abide by the constitution. Early in 1971 the general secretary of the Communist Party, Luis Corvalán, insisted that the Chilean military was “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.” Allende praised the “patriotism of our armed forces, their traditional professionalism, and their submission to the civil authority”.
The lesson of the Chilean coup divided the international left. Some drew the conclusion that the overthrow of Allende confirmed the argument of Lenin in State and Revolution that the existing capitalist state could not be used as a vehicle for achieving socialism. In the week after the coup, for example, there was a march in Paris where thousands shouted the slogan, ‘Votez à gauche mais gardez vos fusils’ – Vote left but keep your rifles. Yet others argued that Allende had gone too far and the left had to move more slowly. This argument was influential in the Eurocommunist movement. This began when the Spanish general secretary of the Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo published a book, Eurocommunism and the State. His aim, he suggested, was to “elaborate a solid conception of the possibility of democratising the apparatus of the capitalist state, transforming it into a valid tool for constructing a socialist society, without needing to destroy it radically by force’. The Eurocommunist movement led directly to the ‘historic compromise’ in Italy where the Communist Party sought to forge a coalition with the Christian Democrats.
The reality was that Allende never sought to usher in socialism. Instead he attempted a radical form of Keynesianism that benefited workers. Thus, in the first year his Popular Unity government brought a general wage rise of 38% for manual workers and 120% for white collar workers, unemployment fell to below 10%, 90 factories were nationalised and 1,400 estates (30% of Chile’s cultivable land) were taken into state ownership. The US controlled copper industry was nationalised without compensation. This was unanimously supported in the Chilean parliament, even by parties of the right. The expropriation of landed estates continued a programme that was first initiated by Eduard Frei’s Christian Democrats. The declared aim of the government was the creation of a “social property sector” which would secure control over “strategic industrial monopolies”. It was never to uproot capitalism.
Yet the Popular Unity government created a dynamic that it could not control. Namely, it heightened the class struggle to an intense degree. Workers regarded the Popular Unity government as their government and a wave of factory occupations spread. Peasants staged land occupations, often led by a radical left MIR party, which had been influenced by Guevara. 1971 ended with the highest number of land occupations (1,278) and strikes (1,758) hitherto recorded.
The rich and the upper middle class watched these developments with growing anxiety. By 1972, inflation was rising and they moved to halt Allende’s measures. The right wing parties used their control of Congress to impeach one of Allende’s Ministers and to halt the nationalisations. They denounced the ‘illegal’ occupations and demanded police action against them.
The Popular Unity government faced a choice. It could either bow to the Right or it could call forth popular mobilisations to carry through its programme for reform. Tragically, it chose the former. It opened talks with the Christian Democrats. It denounced the occupations and, on occasion, even sent the police against them. When workers occupied The Catholic University channel, Channel 9, which was run by a neo-fascist priest called Hasbun, it handed it back. Allende agreed to an Arms Control Law, which although it was supposedly directed at the right, was directly administered by the army and used to stage raids on working class districts.
If the Popular Unity government adopted a strategy of appeasement, the working class did not follow obediently. Instead they formed cordones to coordinate resistance and push through their class demands. The cordones were rank-and-file organisations in industrial districts, bringing together workers from all the factories to organise production. Sometimes they moved in a very radical political direction as the programme of the Cordón Cerrillos-Maipú indicates.
- Support President Allende’s government in so far as it supports the struggles and mobilisations of the workers.
- Expropriate all monopoly firms and those with more than 14 million escudos of capital, as well as all industries which are in any way strategic, all those which belong to foreign capital, and all those which boycott production or do not fulfill their commitments to their workers.
- Workers’ control over production in all industries, farms, mines and so on, through delegates’ councils, delegates being recallable by the base …
- Set up the Popular Assembly to replace the bourgeois parliament.
Most workers who took part in the cordones still placed their faith in Allende but the classic signs of dual power were emerging.
Pinochet’s coup in 1973 needs to be understood as the outcome of these developments. There can be little doubt about Allende’s personal bravery. His final moments are captured by a photograph at the Moneda presidential palace with a machine gun in his hand. Yet the weakness of his political strategy should be a lesson for all radical leftists today. Two moments in his final year show what was wrong.
On June 29th, the tank regiment of Santiago under Roberto Souper declared a coup. It was a total failure but the whip of reaction spurred workers onto new heights of militancy. The working class itself moved on from slogans calling for the defense of the government, to demands for: ‘A hard line’, ‘Fascists to the wall’ and ‘Close the National Congress’. Factories were again occupied, but the documents issuing from the cordones made it clear that this time they would not be returned under any circumstances. Militias were organised to defend the factories and the working-class areas.
Allende’s response was the opposite. He invited army officers to join his cabinet. On August 24th, none other than Augusto Pinochet joined the cabinet, replacing General Prats who favoured a constitutional strategy to stop Allende’s reforms. When sailors publicly warned against the impending coup, they were ignored and then tortured by army officers. The bloody coup of September 11th butchered a whole generation of Chilean socialists and working class militants or forced them into exile. It was the price the Chilean rich and their US allies extracted for daring to threaten their privilege.
After the coup Chile became the first laboratory for the neoliberal experiment when the Chicago boys were brought in to run the economy. So the first 9/11 became a global event. It also taught a bloody lesson to socialists. If you ever challenge the privileges of the rich, carry through the attack. Those who half do a revolution are more likely to dig their own grave.
