[We have translated the following article from the January 8 issue of the Belgian revolutionary socialist weekly La Gauche.]
The Popular Unity [Unidad Popular] victory in the Chilean elections, with 36 percent of the vote, and the installation of a popular front government, presided over by the Social Democrat Salvador Allende and including three Communist ministers, has inspired hosannas from the Belgian Communist newspaper. Bursting with joy and pride, the comrades of Le Drapeau Rouge are congratulating themselves on being in the center of things. After so much fratricidal warfare, they are overcome with a feeling of renewed brotherhood among the CPs of the world.
Under the direction of their traditional leaders, the Communists of Le Drapeau Rouge would like to celebrate a victory reconsolidating the old Stalinist complicity and confirming the validity of a line they have stubbornly defended since 1935. But this is a bit premature.
They are already raising the shout of victory. But whose victory? The victory of an alliance of Social Democrats, Communists... and bourgeois liberals - an alliance that exercises power only within the framework of a bourgeois government and only on the condition that it maintain bourgeois order and respect both "personal human rights," that is, essentially, private property, and the honor of the army.
But the electoral successes of the Unidad Popular (UP) and the CP's achievement in finally getting accepted into a bourgeois government cannot be mistaken for a victory of the Chilean revolution. A revolutionary victory would take something more than the sort of promises of profound refashioning of the existing structures contained in the UP program to which Salvador Allende is committed!
But for traditional Communists, victory is nothing more than the UP and the CP getting the upper hand in dominating the Chilean masses.
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CORVALAN: Don't "distrust... the army."
"There is nothing more revolutionary than to contribute to the success of the people's government presided over by Comrade Allende; there is nothing more revolutionary than carrying out his program, widening the support of the people's government, and... consolidating the influence of the Communist party."
On this subject, you have to read the interview with Luis Corvalán, the general secretary of the Chilean CP, in the January 1 issue of Drapeau Rouge. Here the confusion of the electoral victory with a victory of the revolution stands out clearly. It is deliberate. The objective of advancing and developing the UP is substituted for developing and advancing the Chilean revolution.
Of course, Luis Corvalán does not claim that the revolution has already come to pass. Nor has he yet forgotten about it. He begins in fact by noting that the steps that have been taken in this direction are still far from irreversible. He points out that the UP enjoys only a plurality in the government, that the administrative personnel remain bourgeois, and that the imperialists and the oligarchy still control the centers of economic power.
But, Corvalán says, the UP program is not reformist because it includes measures of a really fundamental character. And, in moving without delay to carry it out - if unity, the Allende government, and the "Party" are defended -the decisive stage will be passed in the next three months.
"Our strategy of unity has not always been understood by everybody," Luis Corvalán dares to say. And he repeats the explanation aimed at justifying the unprincipled alliance with the petty-bourgeois parties. But the need of winning over the petty bourgeoisie as an auxiliary force has long been understood. However, the dangers are also known that flow inevitably from a counterrevolutionary alliance with bourgeois parties. It is easy to become the hostage of such parties if you are not careful.
Above all, we know the vital necessity in cases of alliances with bourgeois parties of bolstering the activity of all the working-class organizations through united action in a proletarian united front. Only such a workers' alliance can confront the bourgeois united front which coalesces unfailingly when the bourgeoisie feels threatened.
The difference between a workers' united front and a popular front (which includes the bourgeoisie) has been understood by everyone who has any clear idea of what happened in France and Spain in 1936, in China in 1927, or more recently in Indonesia. It would be understood all too well by those who perished as a result of this criminal policy promoted by Stalin, which the CPs that identify with Moscow or Peking continue obstinately to defend today. This is the policy that tends to disarm the workers and peasants and finally gets them to lay down their arms before the bourgeoisie when the counterrevolutionaries ultimately turn their weapons against the revolutionists.
Who has not understood the limits and dangers of the popular front strategy? Who but our good Stalinist comrades. Closing their eyes even to the glaring evidence of the massacres in Indonesia, they are starting again with their arguments, their accusations of and ultraleftism, sectarianism to drown out all discussion by sending up a chorus of cries for "unity"!
Unity with whom? With the proletarian forces or with the bourgeoisie? Are you familiar with the cartoon that appeared in a bourgeois daily at the time of the popular front in France? Trying to puff up a red scare to denounce the popular front government, it showed the liberal Daladier being pushed out by the Social Democrat Léon Blum, who in turn was being pushed out of the picture by an enormous Maurice Thorez [the CP leader].
What in fact happened? It was Thorez and Blum who were pushed out by Daladier. And later, by capitulating at Munich he prepared the way for the second world war. This, moreover, was after he had gotten Blum to agree not to intervene in the Spanish civil war.
Isn't concrete proof enough for the Stalinists? No, because this strategy enabled the CP in France after 1936 to win hegemony over the masses of French workers. And this position enabled it, through the war and the liberation, the Algerian war, Gaullism, and May 1968, to protect the gains of the workers, which they themselves had won by their struggle - collective bargaining and paid vacations.
We are far from denying the need for tactical and temporary alliances with bourgeois forces. But such alliances must not lead to letting yourself be tied up by these forces and then smothered or massacred. It is equally obvious that the primary task of any Communist party worthy of the name is to help the workers to organize independently and to move toward arming them. Parallel to this, it must work for the practical realization of a program including nationalization of the essential sectors of the economy and of foreign trade, as well as a radical agrarian reform.
Isn't this precisely what Allende is doing? No! It would be precisely the worst deception to claim this.
Of course, the promised 66 percent increase in the minimum wage, free hospital and clinic care, rescinding price-rise decrees, a free half-liter of January 25, 1971
milk for children, and dissolving the mobile police (a special antiworkingclass brigade) would represent extraordinary gains. We would never deny this. But this is not enough. This could simply be the ransom the bourgeoisie had to pay to curb the powerful mass mobilization which assured the UP success in the elections and which has since broadened further.
The creation of a national economic council including representatives of the unions and the social organizations along with representatives of the state and the employers (it goes without saying that representatives of the capitalists and their government will be included but Luis Corvalán neglects to mention this) is simply an institutionalization of the situation where the unions are integrated into the capitalist state. We do not see any means here for assuring the working masses real control over the administration of public affairs and the economy ...
Establishing diplomatic relations with Cuba, China, and North Korea? That is unquestionably positive. But there is still nothing here absolutely unacceptable for imperialism. It tolerates a lot of other countries. These are minor concessions that can easily be taken back when the flood of mass mobilization has receded to safe channels, or resumed an obscure course through the subterranean depths.
Finally we come to the difficultstage: passing the point of no return. Isn't President Allende quickening the advance of the revolution by nationalizing the copper mines, coal mines, and private banks, as well as by undertaking an extensive and deepgoing agrarian reform?
The Brazilian masses are waiting for this and applauding Allende; certainly the Latin-American masses are, too. And this is true as well of the masses of the entire world, who, while apprehensive about the reaction of American and international imperialism (five of the nationalized, or rather, statized, banks were owned not only by American but also French, Italian, English, and Brazilian capitalists), hope for a revolution in Latin America.
But nothing in these measures is yet of a nature fundamentally inimical to the interests of imperialism or the Chilean oligarchy.
Nationalizing the copper mines has been the most spectacular of all these measures. But this sort of action is no longer an affront to the imperialists. In view of the continually mounting dangers of revolution on the Latin-American continent, which threaten to definitively undermine their interests, the imperialists have decided - after Nelson Rockefeller's reconnaissance in South America -to modernize the forms of their penetration in the area.
Now imperialism is withdrawing on its own from extracting and exporting raw materials, which was the chief form of pillaging the third world, and the crudest. Today it seems more inclined to resort to other, less obvious forms of pillage, involving especially processing plants. Such a shift also permits an apparent liberalization of the economy and social life, in limited sectors of course. This is why the atmosphere seems to be easing in Latin America. Imperialism has new perspectives. The "left" nationalist military regimes have the wind in their sails. And with this in prospect, Allende could very well offer a democratic variant fitting in perfectly with the development projects of neoimperialism in Latin America.
This is true, so long as he doesn't go too far. In that case the bourgeois army, which still constitutes the capitalists' best guarantee, is always ready to intervene. But so far no fires have been lighted!
The state intervention in the steel industry and the Lota-Schnager coal mines, notoriously in the red, should not arouse very lively criticism. Salvador Allende himself told the miners that the company and the state had reached an agreement to transfer ownership without any cash payment. The state assumed the liabilities of the company, whose production was dropping and which "lacked financial resources to develop."
Nationalizing deficits is something that we have experienced even under the capitalist system and even under a coalition of the PSC [Parti Social Chrétien - Social Christian party] and the PSB [Parti Socialiste de Belgique - Belgian Socialist party]. We have also experienced growing state intervention in the affairs of the private sector to cover the risks of the private capitalists and increase the drains on the public coffers for their benefit. There is nothing heretical, from the capitalist standpoint, about this procedure.
Under state control the banks will continue to function according to their charters. The measure is in fact a statization and not a nationalization. This is all the more true because it is announced that foreign banks will be accorded special conditions and the stock will be repurchased by the state at an advantageous rate for the holders.
It was Luis Corvalán, in his interview in Drapeau Rouge, who listed among the government's achievements the expropriation of the important Bellavista-Tome textile concern. Its principal stockholder left the country taking 2,000,000,000 pesos |8.57 Chilean pesos equal US$1] with him. Ironically Corvalán says: "This is the first decree of this type and President Allende has said that it will not be the last."
Here also there is nothing very dangerous in the government's projects! But the regime has announced the nationalization of foreign trade, of the monopolies in production and distribution, and a deepgoing agrarian reform. On these points the parliamentary and extraparliamentary opposition is aroused. Does Allende intend to go ahead? Why not, after all? It is not too late and giving him a push might be enough. But for that you must not rely on the Chilean CP.
The real challenge is to make a genuine start on agrarian reform, that is, speed the movement of land occupations by the most underprivileged peasants. This must be done not so as to form a layer of favored peasants all devoted to the regime, but to satisfy the most poverty-stricken class in the country and genuinely transform Chile's economic and social structures.
Where are we now in this regard? The agrarian reform corporation (CORA) has announced that sixty-two holdings have been expropriated, but the decision to do this was made by the preceding regime. The Unidad Popular program calls for eliminating the class of 4,500 big landowners existing today in Chile, "with the most complete respect for personal human rights." What heavy burdens in compensation will this mean for the national treasury? Already the opposition is up in arms against granting the additional credits that were supposed to be accorded to the office of the president and the Ministry of Agriculture.
Allende would like to remain faithful to his program and, also, insofar as 64
possible, avoid clashes with forces inside and outside the country. Nonetheless, the time is coming when he will have to choose between being faithful to the bourgeoisie or to the working class whose votes brought him to power.
Sit-in strikes have occurred in factories in Santiago, in various provinces, and in various industries- in the postal and telegraph system, municipal services, and education. The workers are demanding that the promises made to them be kept, and first of all the wage increase that the still thoroughly bourgeois government set "for next year." And we are now in 1971!
On several large agricultural estates in Chile, the farm workers have occupied the land to press their demands for better wages and working conditions.
In answer to the chairmen of the farmers' associations, who, alarmed by this wave of land occupations, asked him to set the rules of the game, the president said that he considered these actions "improper." Some occupations were understandable, however, he said, in cases where the owners abandoned their land.
That, alas, is how Allende seems to think he is going to carry out the fundamental structural transformations he promises. He seems to think that he can do this by taking advantage of the indifference, default, and complacency of those who own the country.
It has already come to light that big landowners have formed private armed forces. Where is the revolutionary party that will be capable of organizing the popular masses for the confrontation that is building up? Will it be the CP?
Let's go back to Drapeau Rouge and Luis Corvalán, general secretary of the Chilean CP:
"The eventuality of an armed confrontation cannot be entirely excluded. Our task is to do everything to prevent this, to put a straitjacket, not on the opposition but on the imperialists and oligarchs, that will render them incapable of unleashing a civil war."
But what is the oligarchy concretely, if not the opposition? The opposition and the army?
Is an armed clash inevitable? "Some ultrarevolutionary circles," Corvalán said, "consider it inevitable [the traditional logic of the Stalinists is well known!]. There is no basis for such a categorical judgment.
"In the meantime, the position that an armed confrontation is unavoidable - as some suggest - would require the formation of armed popular militias."
In the face of the danger inexorably looming up, the CP leaders know what they must do. But they shirk their responsibility. Why?
"In the present situation that would be equivalent to showing distrust in the army. But the army is not invulnerable to the new winds blowing in Latin America and penetrating everywhere. It is not a body alien to the nation, in the service of antinational interests. It must be won for the cause of progress in Chile and not pushed to the other side of the barricades."
But where has anyone ever seen a bourgeois army so transform itself as to go over to the service of the workers intact? What has, alas, been seen are Communist parties degenerated to the point where they renounce their class positions and, for all practical purposes, play the game of the bourgeoisie and the imperialists. This is what threatens to happen when the barricades go up in the near future in Chile.
The real character of the "ultraleftists" of the MIR [Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria - Movement of the Revolutionary Left] remains in question. Corvalán mentions their positions only for the purpose of refuting them. But he nonetheless concedes the MIR a place in the mass movement. Could he do otherwise when it is solidly implanted there?
The MIR claimed that armed struggle was the only road likely in Chile, which was false, in part, because all legal channels there had not yet been completely closed. Some elements in the MIR understood this and have participated in the mass movement building up under the impetus of the elections. Today, knowing that an armed confrontation is inevitable, they are preparing for it and training the masses. It is these comrades who have taken the correct position; they are the real revolutionists. Because of the MIR, Allende, the CP, and Unidad Popular may be saved from ruin and dishonor.
You tremble indeed for the honor of the Communists when you see Corvalán say in Drapeau Rouge: "Resistance by our adversaries may lead to an armed clash. We will do everything to prevent it."