[The following article is translated by Intercontinental Press from the June 7 issue of Avanzada Socialista, the weekly organ of the Argentine Partido Socialista de los Trabajadores (PST- Socialist Workers party).]
For more than forty days the workers at "El Teniente" copper mine have been on strike. This is the largest copper mine in the world. It employs 13,000 workers and personnel and constitutes one of the most important sources of foreign exchange for the Chilean economy.
The strikers say that the aim of their movement is to defend the sliding scale of wages won after hard struggles with the previous Yankee bosses. The workers at another big mining center, Chuquicamata, observed work stoppages in solidarity with them, and, as this issue went to press, the possibility of a general strike was under discussion.
The Allende government is accusing the movement of "economist" deviations, that is, of being more concerned June 25, 1973
with their own problems than with those of the country. He says that it is being led by the right wing and has launched a campaign of false stories to the effect that the majority of the workers have returned to work. He also attempted to intimidate the strikers by declaring a state of emergency in O'Higgins Province and by authorizing more than 500 carabineers and two armored cars to go into action. The result was more than thirty wounded.
The right wing, for its part, is trying to take political advantage of the conflict by giving it verbal support. The president of the Senate turned up in the zone, and a right-wing student leader made a speech to the miners in which he expressed his "solidarity."
What is really happening is that the cost of living in Chile is skyrocketing and threatening to wipe out the substantial increase in the standard of living that the workers received when the Popular Unity government came to power.
There are a number of reasons for this. First, the sabotage of producmajority in the congress, is not going to give in unless forced to by the mobilization of the workers themselves.
The fact that the right wing might take advantage of these struggles to fight the Allende government is not the responsibility of the workers but, above all, of the government itself. This is a government perched atop a parliament in which the bosses constitute a majority, a judicial power where the same thing holds true, and an army that stands ready to arbitrate the situation and makes no moves against the "legal order" because it is saving itself as the last line of defense for the capitalist system. In short, this is a reformist government that is taking positive anti-imperialist measures but is not tampering in any basic sense with the two foundations of rule by the owning class: property and weapons.
This policy of the government, together with the line of class harmony pushed by the leadership of the unions and the parties in the Popular Unity coalition like the Socialist and Communist parties, is leaving the workers movement disarmed; it could lead to splits within its own ranks, and it is endangering not only the advances that have been made but the Allende government itself.