By Hugo Blanco
[Shortly after arriving in Sweden on November 5, the Peruvian revolutionist Hugo Blanco, who had been in exile in Chile until the September 11 coup, wrote an analysis of the cordones industriales (organizations of workers management in local industrial concentrations) for the Swedish Trotskyist press. This article follows. The translation from the Spanish is by Intercontinental Press.]
With a rise in its struggle, the working class changes its method of organization. The classical unions and federations organized by industry are replaced by more supple organizational forms more suited to a powerful dynamic of struggle.
In Chile, this process went only half way.
What developed were the cordones industriales, organs that tended to embrace all the workers in an industrial district, that is, 200 or 300 plants along an avenue.
I said that this was a half-completed process both because these committees only managed to take root in the vanguard plants and because they were based on the unions in the individual factories. In general, the workers were represented through the chairmen of their union locals. Only to a lesser degree was there representation through delegates directly elected to the cordones.
It was the ineffectiveness of the CUT [Central Unica de Trabajadores- United Federation of Workers] that gave rise to the cordones. This ineffectiveness was due both to the reformist leadership of the union federation, which was dominated by the CP, and to the new requirements of the struggle, which demanded a geographical kind of organization rather than one based on trade or occupation.
An example will show this more clearly. If the workers in a canning factory seized their plant, they needed an immediate mobilization of the neighboring factories to help them defend it. In these conditions, an organization including all the workers in a district could function more easily than a federation of workers in canning plants scattered in the various areas of the country.
The main cordones arose during the bosses' strike in October 1972 (except for the Cordón Cerrillos, which had developed shortly before).
The cordones distinguished themselves in organizing transportation (during the bosses' strikes), in defending the seized factories, in their radical statements, and in giving an initial impetus toward direct distribution and armed defense. Their most outstanding contribution to the struggle was in carrying out seizures in the districts where they were established, which sometimes involved cutting off the access routes to the city, as in the case of the Cordón Cerrillos.
The cordones did not succeed in overcoming the bureaucracy; at important moments the Socialist party put on a brake. The cordones did not manage to cut the umbilical cord linking them to the reformist leaderships. They were badly organized, and in general their ongoing life was very weak, although they firmed up during conjunctural high points.
They were not able to organize the struggle on a centralized basis.
All this prevented them from growing and becoming a powerful center.
The attitudes of the left parties toward the cordones can be summarized as follows:
The CP: It fought the cordones, regarding them as competing bodies with the CUT, which it dominated. Later, in view of the ineffectiveness of its attacks, it tried to destroy them from inside or through flanking maneuvers. But before this campaign was well under way, the coup occurred.
The SP. The Socialist party was the dominant force in the cordones, and its internal struggles were reflected in them. The left-wing sections of the SP had a good field of activity, but when they knuckled under in the last instance to their leaderships, it harmed the cordones.
The MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria - Movement of the Revolutionary Left]: The MIR in its theory discounted the importance of the cordones, stressing instead the comandos comunales [municipal commands]. Besides the unions, these latter bodies included shantytown neighborhood associations and student and peasant organizations.
This meant diffusing the workers among the petty bourgeoisie.
The cordones did not oppose the formation of comandos comunales, but they argued that they should be the backbone of these organizations.
In practice, the comandos comunales were never able to develop beyond the embryonic stage, and the MIR was active in the cordones, although less than in the countryside and the shantytowns.
The PSR [Partido Socialista Revolucionario - Revolutionary Socialist party, the Chilean section of the Fourth International]: The PSR proposed strengthening the cordones, organizing them in a solid way, getting them to function on a regular basis, and democratizing them.
It recognized them as the most advanced organizations of the working class, which should serve as the axes of the comandos comunales.
And above all, the PSR stressed the need for class independence from the reformist leaderships.
The program the cordones were developing, which was in general correct, could not be put into practice until these preconditions were achieved.