[The following article was published in the February 3 issue of Rouge, the weekly newspaper of the Ligue Communiste, French section of the Fourth International. The translation is by Intercontinental Press.]
For some time now the Allende government has been facing mounting economic difficulties — galloping inflation (114.3 percent in 1972); a foodsupply crisis, with the disappearance of numerous products from the market (meat especially) and, as a result, the massive importing of food supplies; a worsening of the balance of payments deficit; and the draining of currency reserves. These difficulties are well known and they explain why the Union of the Left in France has discreetly stopped hailing the "Chilean example" of the peaceful, electoral road to socialism.
The economic problems of the Unidad Popular [UP - Popular Unity] government are obviously exploited March 5, 1973
demagogically by the Chilean right, which is trying to take advantage of popular discontent to denounce the "misdeeds of socialism." This theme has found a distant echo in the disgusting anticommunist propaganda of the UDR [Union des Démocrates pour la République- Union of Democrats for the Republic, the Gaullists] in France, in which Chile is held up as a horrible "socialist" bogeyman.
Our answer to this ballyhoo is simple: Chile's economic difficulties are not the result of socialism, but of precisely the absence of socialism. It is the inability of the reformist government in Chile to call into question the foundations of capitalism and the power of the bourgeoisie that explains these current economic problems.
The UP government has not broken the bourgeoisie's hegemony over the economy. Seventy percent of industry remains in the hands of private capital, as well as most of the trading and banking facilities, ete. Moreover, the UP has compensated those few tion. In the face of the threat of agrarian reform, landowners have stopped investing or are secretly moving their livestock to Argentina. In regions where the reform has been implemented according to the bourgeois law of the Christian Democratic government), the peasants find themselves on the worst parcels of land without any capital, seed, equipment, or machines - all of which remain on the eighty-hectare "reserves" that are still in the hands of the former owners. Is it at all surprising that under such conditions there should be a decline in agricultural production and a shortage of food supplies in the city markets?
• The secret hoarding of merchandise in order to create an artificial scarcity so it can be sold at exorbitant prices on the black market. Products subjected to price controls are especially made to "disappear" in this way. In some cases, manufacturers simply stop making items that are subject to price controls. Shoe manufacturers, for instance, have given up certain cheap styles for which they figured their profit margins were too low.
This systematic policy of economic sabotage is, on the one hand, an "instinctive" response by the bourgeoisie to the "insecurity" of having a government dominated by working-class parties (even reformist ones), and, on the other hand, a deliberate plan aiming at overthrowing Allende by creating a situation of "economic chaos," or at winning the March 1973 elections by taking advantage of the discontent resulting from these difficulties.
Produce
What is the solution proposed by the Popular Unity government and in particular by the Chilean CP, which is the most coherent and obstinate reformist force in it? "The battle for production"! "Produce first," the Chilean reformists tell the workers (just like the PCF [Parti Communiste Fran- çais - French Communist party] in 1945 — naturally, any resemblance is purely coincidental), thereby substituting an economistic pseudo solution for a genuine political solution of the problem.
How can the workers be mobilized to increase production if they continue to be working for bosses, if production continues within the framework of capitalist exploitation, and if the profits continue to flow into the pockets of the bourgeoisie? To transform the battle for production into the priority task is to politically demobilize the workers and divert them from the real battle-the battle for power, which is the only battle capable of solving the economic problems once and for all by going to their very root.
What reformists do not understand is that there exist two contradictory and irreconcilable logics— the profit logic of capitalism and the logic of socialist planning. Any attempt to "mix," reconcile, or make these two logies coexist with each other is impossible, inevitably doomed to failure. The economic policy of the Popular Unity coalition is just "left" enough to irritate and worry the bourgeoisie, while leaving it in possession of real economic power. The inevitable result is economic sabotage by this bourgeoisie, which makes use of the control levers still in its hands as a weapon against the workers and the reformist government. Nothing could be more wrong than to think that the Allende government is a government 246
SALVADOR ALLENDE
"of the bourgeoisie" or the mere continuation of the Christian Democratic reformism of Frei. Through its links with the organized and bureaucratic workers' movement, it furnishes the bourgeoisie with weapons that can be used to overthrow it or totally neutralize it.
A Different Path
Another solution is possible-a political and revolutionary solution that is logical, clear, and coherent. This is the solution proposed by the Chilean MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria - Movement of the Revolutionary Left]:
"If the bosses refuse to produce, transport, distribute, and market their goods, the people can and must take these activities into their own hands. The working class does not need the big capitalists in order to carry out these tasks..