Santiago
JUNE 9- For some two months now, the reformists in the UP [Unidad
Popular - Popular Unity] coalition, in particular the Communist party, have been shouting at the top of their lungs that there is an immediate threat of civil war prepared by the right and that it must be stopped by avoiding the creation of any problems for the government, by maintaining calm, by producing more, and by collecting signatures against civil war.
It is true that there is a powerful right-wing offensive and that it is becoming increasingly bold. It is true that the fascist organization Patria y Libertad [Fatherland and Freedom] is getting stronger. It is true that urban transport owners paralyzed services.
But all this is a far cry from the imminence of civil war. The overall aim of the right is to make the government retreat, and it is achieving this aim.
At the present time, when the working class is still strong, the right knows that the best tool for crushing the workers is not civil war but the reformism of the UP, which serves as a brake on struggles.
Of course, the dynamic of the class struggle in Chile daily is moving closer to violent confrontation between the classes. And the UP is, in reality, seeking to prevent it in the only way possible under the circumstances-by lulling the workers and making them retreat little by little. It is turning the working class, bound hand and foot, over to the clutches of reaction.
Faced with the rising cost of living, some sectors of workers, such as those in Public Works and the urban transport workers (who staged a strike, separate from the one of their bosses), have engaged in struggles for salary increases. The government branded them agents of the right, like those who take part in tomas [take-overs of factories, land, etc.]. The workers in the Public Works sector replied with 798
great clarity that they were prepared to take over El Mercurio (a far-right daily newspaper) and to move forward without regard for the parliament and the armed forces. Unfortunately, not all the workers are as clear on the matter as these companeros. As a result, the right is taking advantage of this fact and is "supporting" certain strikes, thereby confusing the class even more.
This is what is happening in the case of the workers in the El Teniente copper mines.
These workers struggled for the nationalization of the mines together with their brothers at the Chuquicamata mine. They have pretty much always been the vanguard of the Chilean workers movement; thanks to them it won gains like the sliding scale of wages. It should also be pointed out that they voted 70 percent for the UP during the last elections.
Today they are defending the sliding scale of wages, which the government, though recognizing it, is trying to observe only grudgingly. The pettifogging arguments it uses to justify this approach are not worth mentioning.
The present strike, which began on April 15, holds serious implications for the working class. The miners are defending their standard of living and they are showing that they are not rightists but that they support the general process of change that is occurring.
The government and the UP have furiously torn into the strikers, branding them agents of fascism. In this, as in everything, it is the CP that stands out; it is organizing parades in Santiago against the miners, calling on the government to use a firm hand," since in its view there is no difference between this strike and the bosses' strike last October.
The MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria - Movement of the Revolutionary Left] is tail-ending the
UP; although it criticizes the use of repressive methods and asks that they be replaced by methods of persuasion, it ends up qualifying the miners as "economists" and is against the strike. The position of the left wing of the Socialist party is even more capitulationist, more or less approximating the position of the government.
Every shade of opinion on the right is "supporting" the strike.
All this is undoubtedly confusing the masses. With the exception of the province in which the mine is located, even sectors of the proletarian vanguard are against the strike.
In the midst of all this, it is worth calling attention to the courageous position of the Partido Socialista Revolucionario [PSR— Revolutionary Socialist party], the Chilean section of the Fourth International. It is on the side of the miners. That this position is correct can be seen from the following:
Chile is a capitalist country. The nationalization of "basic industry," leaving derivative industry in the hands of private capital, involves nothing more than a kind of state capitalism. The number of factories that have been "taken over" by the workers and that the government has found itself forced to "intervene" is relatively small. Distribution remains 70 percent in private hands, and most of the remainder is also carried out with the aid of private concerns.
In this situation, all the efforts of the workers in the so-called Social Sector of the economy end up in the pockets of the capitalists.
The black market is full of products made by workers in the Social Sector at low cost. The difference between the production cost and the price obtained on the black market goes to the speculators.
The dollars earned by the efforts of the copper workers are sold at a low price to importers of essential consumer goods, machines, and raw materials. The consumer goods go to the black market. The machines and raw materials go at bargain rates to private factories, which nevertheless sell their products at a high price.
Thus the sacrifice of the miners is swelling the profits of capitalism.
As the PSR points out in one of its publications, only in a socialist society, in which production and distribution in their totality are nationalized and administered by the workers, will anyone have the right to call on the miners to make sacrifices for Chile and not to be economist.
In view of the fact that inflation is continuing at a galloping rate, as is the right-wing trend in the government, it is probable that we will soon see more strikes that will be dubbed "economist." This will aid the working class to see which side the government is on.