Reformism: the Gateway to Fascism

Some factors to explain the defeat of September 11, 1973 and to advance towards victory.

On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the fascist military coup of September 11, every social class, even some class sectors. through their organizations, ranging from the bourgeois Armed Forces to the political parties, including our Communist Party (Proletarian Action) [PC(AP)], as well as churches, express their evaluations, draw their conclusions and point out the paths forward according to their own class interests.

The fascist military coup that took place in Chile in 1973 was not just one more of the countless ones in the history of Latin America and the world. It has special significance, not only for its great brutality but also for the long duration of fascist rule and the characteristic reordering of capitalist oppression and exploitation in Chile, at the demand of yankee imperialism and its local partners. For us, and this is the goal of the present paper, this holds many vivid lessons for the workers and popular movement and the outcome of their struggle, depending on the ideas that guide their practice.

Given the low level of the existing ideological debate, we do not want to be misunderstood or to confuse anyone about the truly proletarian and revolutionary character of our analysis. As has been proven by our tireless practice, we want to first express a well-deserved tribute to all the victims of fascism, to all the fighters who fell in the defense or construction of their trade unions, popular organizations, on the neighborhood barricades, in the armed confrontation, to all those who fought resolutely against the coup itself as well as against the fascist dictatorship. In honoring them, no matter how hard it might be for some to admit the communist truth, we cannot stop putting forth widely our Marxist-Leninist opinion of the main, i.e. the internal factor (of the popular movement), that led the working class and the people to the defeat, to the massacre, to confront the reactionaries unarmed ideologically, politically and materially. We do this to break with the opportunist attitude of revisionism which, in order to avoid its criminal responsibility, focuses only on the external factor, on the reactionary behavior of imperialism and local capitalism, of ITT, on the "wickedness and treachery" of Pinochet, etc. One could not expect them to behave differently, due to their reactionary nature.

The ideological and political confusion about the Popular Unity (UP), Salvador Allende and all of those who considered themselves the "vanguard", or at least "leftist," in the period prior to the fascist coup, has not diminished. On the contrary, it is on the rise, and it has reached such a level that those who stand for the "path of Allende and the UP" are treated as "ultra-leftist." Moreover, some young people who have recently joined the social struggle, seeking a means to expose so much treason and opportunism, try to find a revolutionary alternative in the praiseworthy and courageous attitude of Salvador Allende, who in the last moments of his life picked up a machine gun in order to resist the fascists hordes attacking the Moneda (the government palace, Note of transl.). They uphold the slogan: "He did not surrender, he fought with a rifle!" What is important here is that the youths are expressing their desire for a revolutionary change. The confusion is being cunningly used by opportunism to divert the struggle and again lead the workers and popular movement along the path of defeat. It is mainly revisionism and its social-democratic partner who are in charge of this.

There is not doubt that from the point of view of the masses, in regard to bourgeois democratic liberties and the space gained in which to express the desire for revolutionary change in society, there has not been in the history of Chile and maybe of all of Latin America a more favorable period than the experience of the UP. This is something that was not only experienced by the people, but was also observed and acted upon by reaction and Yankee imperialism.

The fervor of the masses was an important ingredient during the whole period of Allende's government. The masses mobilized not only against imperialism and reaction, against the sabotage of production and the black market, as the revisionists argue, but also to advance towards the seizure of power, despite the policies and actions of the UP itself. A proof of this was the fact that the Unified Confederation of Workers (CUT), led by the "C"P and the "S"P, was overtaken by the formation of the Industrial Belts. These organizations, even though they still displayed some confusion in their objectives and demands due to the negative influence of some opportunist petty-bourgeois ideas, together with the Community Commandos and other new forms of Popular organization, had the great merit of pointing to the fundamental problem of the whole class struggle, the conquest of political power. This latter, in fact, was precisely what precipitated the fascist coup: imperialism and the bourgeoisie could not allow the workers and the rest of the popular masses, who were seizing lands and industries, maintaining productivity, managing distribution, etc, to make clear in practice that the capitalists were no longer needed.

As we shall see further on, "Popular Unity," UP, was the result of a long work of reformism and revisionism, which found strong international support in the revisionist policies of the former Soviet Union after the death of comrade Joseph Stalin and the triumph of the Khrushchevite coup in the former Soviet Union. We must stress the role played then and now by the experience of the UP in the ideological and political debate that was developed and is still developing between Marxism-leninism and revisionism, in our country and internationally.

It is necessary to bear in mind that the experience of the UP aroused many illusions at that time in various countries, especially in the so-called "third world," whose peoples struggled and are still struggling to overcome the yoke of imperialism, to achieve progress and social justice. In whatever manner, the "UP" was presented by international revisionism as the confirmation of the thesis of "peaceful transition" or the "peaceful path" to socialism, adopted by the congress of infamy, the XXth Congress of the CPSU in opposition to the Marxist-Leninist teaching of the revolutionary seizure of political power, as defended in the time of Lenin and Stalin.

The "peaceful path" of opportunism was a slogan and permanent practice directed at the workers movement and the popular masses, a slogan that denied the revolutionary truth of the inevitability of armed confrontation, when the class struggle reaches a higher stage and the question of power comes to the forefront. This was especially true in Brezhnev's time, when the inter-imperialist confrontation between the USA and the revisionist Soviet leadership had sharpened. However, and here the CONSCIOUS BETRAYAL of revisionism was shown, when it became clear that a material (armed) force was needed to prevent the "reactionary uprising," the revisionists spoke to us of so-called "patriotic officers," of "maintaining the constitutional character of the Armed Forces," of "integrating our Armed Forces into the change." They popularized demobilizing and defeatist slogans like "friend soldier, the people are with you" and "the Armed Forces are the people in uniform," or as Luis Corvalan maintained in December of 1970 (International Journal), "one can ASSERT that the people of Chile and the Armed Forces of the country shall resolutely rise in combat in the defense of the sovereignty of their motherland." In consequence of this view, the whole parliament, with the exception of Senator Raul Silva Ulloa, during the government of Salvador Allende, adopted the "law of arms control" which gave the bourgeois Armed Forces the right to gain access to and break into any place suspected of storing weapons. This was a great help to the fascists in preparation for the 1973 coup; months, days before the coup, the bourgeois Armed Forces, using the law voted for by the whole UP together with the Christian Democrats and fascist mummies, broke into industrial establishments, intimidated workers and confiscated some old shotguns and pistols, thus inhibiting the ability of the workers to respond to the massacre that they were preparing.

The "military" policy of revisionism, apart from handing over the disarmed people to their enemies, obtained some meager results in the person of Army General Carlos Prat, Air Force General Bachelett, some officers of the military police and a handful of members of the Navy, who were arrested and tortured by the armed forces days before the coup itself. Finally, it is important to point out that the "extreme left" has been blamed for the coup for many years. When revisionism adopted its amorphous "policy of popular rebellion," which never put forward any goal other than the "return to the democracy" which existed before the coup, it organized "the armed struggle" against Pinochet, but once again without the masses, based on highly specialized armed equipment. And they, together with the other sectors of the bourgeois opposition to Pinochet, denied and abandoned this struggle at the most crucial moment.

The UP materialized petty-bourgeois thought, not only of revisionism, with some phrases borrowed from Marxism-Leninism; it also expressed the thought of social-democracy, represented with lower or higher degrees of radicalism by the Socialist Party of Chile, whose member and leader was Salvador Allende, and by the Radical Party; most of their leaders, including Allende, admitted that they were organizationally and philosophically members of the Masons. Another element that contributed to the total ideological and organizational confusion in the leadership of the UP was the "progressive" Christian thought represented by elements who split from the Christian Democrats (DC), by the MAPU and the Christian Left (IC) who, based on their origins and petty-bourgeois thought, vacillated between the "left" and the "right." In any case, their weight within the UP was never determining, among other reasons because both organizations were a hybrid of political definitions, which prevented them from forming a different line from that of the "C"P-"S"P axis.

For a better understanding we believe it is very important to depict the ideological and political lines of, at least, the main trends in the UP, that is the "S"P and the "C"P.

The Socialist Party of Chile


Perhaps it would be enough to define them by the popular term, "slick partners" [phony socialists], since in general, apart from scarce and remarkable exceptions, the majority of them have always used their membership as a personal step up the social ladder, to have access to the bureaucratic apparatus of the bourgeois capitalist State, and get their share of the exploitation of the workers and the alienation of the national resources. Always, in one way or another, through ministries, agreements or anything else, the "S"P has participated in an open or disguised manner in almost all of the regimes that have governed Chile. The exception, and moreover, the persecution to which they were subjected during the fascist military dictatorship, must be understood in the general international framework of the inter-imperialist struggle between the two imperialist super-powers of that time, Yankee imperialism and Russian social-imperialism. In that context, the "S"P and its alliance with the "C"P was placed under the umbrella of Soviet revisionism, one of the elements against which Yankee imperialism stirred up reaction and the bourgeois Armed Forces. The other and main objective was, as we all know, to prevent the working class, leading the people, from advancing towards the conquest of political power, which would have led to the expulsion of imperialism from Chile and the beginning of the construction of a new country of popular democracy and socialism.

The leaders of "S"P, who yesterday were government ministers, ambassadors, members of parliament, top union and student leaders in the period of the UP, are today the champions of neo-liberalism and defenders of the institutional order inherited from the dictatorship. Their members of parliament share seats, banquets and privileges with the fascist members of parliament, with the senators appointed for life, with Pinochet himself. Their ministers, like Ricardo Lagos, are received with honors by the representatives of Yankee imperialism, the local capitalist bosses express their public approval, even "if one of them were one day to become President of the Republic."

The "S"P leaders have been put in charge of the dirty work of the reactionary Chilean State. The "socialist" Marcelo Schilling, a member of the Central Committee, was the founder of the sinister "Office of Investigations" of the government of reconciliation, whose objective has not been the dismantling of the fascist legacy but, on the contrary, to infiltrate, provoke and destroy the revolutionary organizations of the people and even in some cases to assassinate their members. The Gendarmerie of Chile is in charge of keeping behind bars and annihilating psychologically and physically dozens of social fighters in "high security jails," while hosting in a "five star hotel" a couple of symbolic military fascist criminals, and it has been and is led now by top "socialist" leaders.

The "S"P was born ideologically, politically and organizationally as a clearly social-democratic, opportunist, anti-communist formation, something which it was never able to overcome. The left-wing positions that it has adopted at times were due to their exclusion from the bourgeois government in office or to tactics tending to resolve the problems of hegemony in relation to other bourgeois political formations, such as revisionism, for example.

Another feature of the "S"P of Chile is that of being a shelter for various opportunist positions and figures that call themselves "leftists," that have attacked or attack Marxism-Leninism. Trotskyites, Titoites and their anti-communist embryo of self-management, the phony arm-chair guerrillas have found shelter or rather a hide-out there; in these years of "reconciliation," a large number of former MIR, former FPMR and former CP members have joined them. Those who tired of fighting have joined with fascist militarism in the administration of the bourgeois State, profiting from the exploitation of the workers and viciously fighting those who have not leaped with them into the marsh of betrayal.

The social-democrats of the "S"P have always found their brothers in the leadership of the "C"P, the tireless peddlers of unity of both organizations and positions. Before the formation of the "UP" the General Secretary of the "C"P reiterated again and again that "we will keep insisting that that which unites the socialists and communists is much stronger [than that which divides them]" (Luis Corvalan, Fighting in Broad Daylight).

Today, 25 years after the coup, the leadership of the "C"P persists in its efforts of "unity" with the "S"P. In this respect Jorge Insunza, in a lengthy interview in "El Siglo" (Number 890, August 6, 1998) regarding the proposals made to the "S"P for joint tributes to Salvador Allende, complained about the failure of his initiative and confessed with a bitterness worthy of better lovers: "Frankly, we did not achieve the success we had hoped for. This week, after more than two months of dedication, we received the answer from the leadership of the Socialist Party that they will not honor the commitment that they had made to us to form a broad national committee in which they would participate."


The "Communist" Party of Chile ("C"P)


For a variety of ideological and political reasons, both national and international, the revisionist "C"P was the main force that defined the thought and practice that gave birth to the experience of the UP. This can not be understood without understanding the long work carried out by the leadership of the revisionist "C"P in this respect. One can have an almost complete global picture of the ideological and political support that made the UP government possible and that led the workers and the people into that arms of the fascist massacre of September 11, 1973, only by following the development of the "C"P, something which is not the same as that of the "S"P with its carnival-like existence.

The main support for the so-called "Chilean road to socialism" was developed contrary to all the historical experience of the working class and its revolutionary outlook, Marxism-Leninism. The ideas of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin on the revolutionary struggle, power, the State, the leading role of the working class, the proletarian character of the party, etc, were never present. Therefore the tragedy and defeat of the "UP." which was paid for by the working class and the people, just as in the revisionist former USSR and the countries of Eastern Europe, were the tragedy and defeat of social-democracy and revisionism, not of Marxism-Leninism. In any case, when Gladys Marin, General Secretary of the revisionist "C"P and eternal candidate for the presidency of the Republic, speaks of retaking the "path of the UP and Allende," it is no longer a tragedy but a farce.

For many years the revisionist leadership of the "C"P has idealized the possibilities of parliamentary work, adopting an attitude of "parliamentary cretinism," against which Lenin often warned the communists. For many years it has disguised the dictatorship of the bourgeois classes under the mask of holy bourgeois "democracy," and it gambled on the "great tradition of respect for the law and democracy" that the bourgeois Armed Forces and other State institutions supposedly showed. All the arguments of revisionism were and are based on subjective idealism, on opportunism, not on Marxism-Leninism. To start, let us look at some of its historical manifestations.

Under the often used slogan of "all parties and sectors without exception," the revisionist "C"P in the mid-1940s managed for a short period to join the government of Gabriel Gonzalez Videla. Having been elected with the votes of the "C"P, he later expelled them from the government and banned them. All this, nevertheless, was no problem for the opportunist leadership of the "C"P, who from the beginning did not understand what was happening, and even offered their "constructive support to the government."

From abroad, the "C"P accepted "willingly" or "unwillingly" the negative influence of Browderism. Browder at that time was the General Secretary of the "C"P of the USA who supported the opportunist trend of class conciliation, reducing the role of the Party to some kind of cultural organization. This influence from abroad united with a strong tendency that negatively influenced the leadership of the "C"P of Chile, which put forward the necessity of constructing the Antifascist United Fronts (necessary to confront fascism on a world scale) in an exclusively legalist and pacifist manner. They actually subordinated the proletariat to other forces, to the so-called "progressive bourgeoisie," renouncing the necessary and irreplaceable leading role of the proletariat in this front. The "foreign" influence further strengthened the opportunist pacifism that had already been consolidated in the leadership of the "C"P.

The influence of the Soviet Union at the time of comrade J. Stalin, of his proletarian internationalist policies, and the enforcement of the anti-communist law of Videla, known as the law for the defense of democracy, or known by the people as the damned law, led a section of the leadership of the revisionist "C"P to adopt a more radical stand, embodied in the "Program of National Salvation." But soon this section was defeated and its supporters were expelled. The "C"P adopted a new line of class conciliation, putting out an opportunist document called the "Emergency Plan," in total opposition to the earlier program.

The revisionist leadership of the "C"P gave strong support to Ibanez by putting forward its proposal of "decisively contributing to the success of the work of Mr. Ibanez's government for the good of the country." Later they added, reaffirming their character of extinguishers of the fire of the class struggle, that "our invariable rule is to see to it that labor conflicts should be solved harmoniously by any means. We only support going on strike, which is a right recognized by the Labor Code, when all other means fail." (Document of the Leadership of the "C"P in the first year of the government of Ibanez).

The opportunist line of the leadership of the revisionist "C"P found support in the revisionist leadership of N. Khrushchev, whom they blindly followed. Despite the foolish attempt of the revisionist leaders, who tried to present themselves as "independent" and "original," it is good to remember the actions of Volodia T., Mr. T. He exuberantly tried to be more Catholic than the Pope, going around telling whoever would listen, the bourgeois press, that the "C"P was for perestroika before Gorbachev launched his perestroika. This was no "return to Leninism," as the Trotksyites and revisionists claimed.

The devious attitude (see the interview published in El Siglo N. 890) of the "C"P is today focused on using the "experience of the UP" to attack and slander the proletarian socialism constructed in the times of Lenin and Stalin, in the times of the dictatorship of the proletariat. See how Jorge Insunza attacks socialism: "In many respects, the program of Allende meant completely distancing oneself from that model." "To retake the experience of the Popular Unity and its government is to show the people that we do not bow to models which were actually opposed to what we wanted to put into effect." It is a fact that the UP did not have anything to do with the proletarian socialism that makes the opportunists so uncomfortable. But Mr. Insunza, let us remind you that, in the time of Khrushchevite revisionism, the leadership of your party here in Chile sneezed when your "elder brother" in Moscow caught a cold.

The tailism of local revisionism in relation to Soviet revisionism had its highest and most grotesque expression in the hasty convocation of the Xth Congress of the "C"P of Chile, barely two months after the XXth Congress of the CPSU, in which the "peaceful path to power" was "discovered." Issue #35 of the journal "Principios" (Principles, Note of transl.), referring to the "peaceful path," argued that "this question has been put forward from the high tribune of the XXth Congress of the CPSU." After this, the deceptive efforts to claim "originality" and "ones own elaboration" seem ridiculous. Corvalan made his "contribution" to the "creative development" of Marxism in the same way that Khrushchev presented his bourgeois poison, saying that "to tell the truth, it (the peaceful path) had already been put forward by life itself. In many countries revolutionary changes have taken place through new paths that cannot be considered as insurrectional.

"In Chile itself, the possibility of utilizing the parliamentary road to achieve power by the popular forces had already been shown. But this question was not sufficiently clear for us" (Luis Corvalan, "Our revolutionary path"). And, to leave no room for doubt as to the "contributions" that revisionism is so proud of and which have done so much harm to the workers' and popular struggle, Corvalan reminds us that: "we pointed out the necessity to make in it (the program of the "C"P) a more complete and richer analysis of the peaceful road. We said that it should be clearly established that this path only excludes civil war and armed insurrection."

The whole period prior to the fascist military coup of 1973, from Ibanez to S. Allende, including the time of Alessandri and Frei Montalba and their "revolution in liberty," which followed the guidelines and demands of the "Alliance for Progress," was for local revisionism a period for giving proof of its good behavior to the bourgeoisie and imperialism. At the 24th plenary session of the C.C. held in 1957, the revisionist leadership of the "C"P made very clear their counterrevolutionary political objectives: "We want and demand our freedom. And we solemnly proclaim that, being free to take part again in political life, we will not constitute a threat to any respectable interest. We stand for the democratic resolution of all questions according to the will of the majority of the country within the framework of the free play of all parties and political currents. Today we do not aim to replace the property of the Chilean capitalists with collective property. And if tomorrow it should be necessary to advance along this path, we believe that this should be done according to the will of the majority of the Chileans, through the peaceful road and by guaranteeing the well-being and the rights of the capitalists, that is by compensating them properly."

Special attention should be paid to the "constructive" attitude of the revisionist leadership of the "C"P towards the "pro-development" or bourgeois reformist government of Eduardo Frei Montalba who, consistent with his class character, had not the least hesitation in suppressing and murdering workers, peasants, the indigenous Mapuches, students and neighborhood residents, who were fighting for their economic and political demands (who does not remember, for example, the massacre of residents of Puerto Montt).

From the Senate and the Chamber of Deputies the "C"P and the "S"P voted for the most diverse projects of Frei's government. The peasants who seized lands, the students who radicalized the struggle for university reform, the workers and union leaders who opposed and ignored the "agreement" between the C.U.T. and the government that restricted the workers demands, those who from revolutionary positions called for the armed struggle and the road of mass insurrection, all these were denounced as ultra-leftists in the pages of "Siglo," the organ of the "C"P.

As their Italian brothers in opportunism, the revisionist leadership of the "C"P never, even in the period of the UP stopped trying to form their boasted-of "Historic Compromise" with the Christian Democrats.

In December of 1970, Salvador Allende had already been elected President of the Republic. Luis Corvalan (International Journal, December 1970) rendered an early homage to the thesis of the electoral way or the "peaceful road" of revisionism, of N. Khrushchev and his successors. "The 'Chilean example' will show that the ways and methods of the revolutionary process have their own peculiarities in each country, and proves that the thesis of the XXth Congress of the CPSU in not so absurd." Two and a half years after Corvalan, leading the Volodias, Millas and Marin, etc., rejoiced at the alleged "triumph" of the Khrushchevite thesis, in September of 1973 not only the absurdity of the thesis proclaimed by the XXth Congress of the Russian revisionist party was proven, but its criminal and treacherous character was exposed. The shamelessness of Corvalan has no limits: a few years before the election of Allende, in Indonesia, the absurdity of the "peaceful path" had been proven once again, when more than 500,000 communists and patriots were murdered by the fascist coup carried out by the bourgeois army of general Suharto against the "constitutional" President and father of the motherland SUKARNO.


The anti-reformist "left"


From the "left," that is those sectors who took up the struggle against the "peaceful path" or the "electoral road," great efforts were made to oppose bourgeois reformism, the "peaceful path" and class conciliation imposed by the so-called "traditional Left." A large number of comrades who belonged to the "revolutionary left," the MIR [Movement of the Revolutionary Left], PCR {Revolutionary Communist Party] and other smaller groups, were examples of courage in confronting the fascist dictatorship. Although the revisionists claimed that they were responsible for provoking the coup, in fact, apart from their ideological and political mistakes, it is in these groups that one can find the most consistent search for a revolutionary way out of the crisis of the bourgeois democratic form of capitalist exploitation that existed in Chile before September 11, 1973.

In one way or another the experience of the UP caused different reactions within the "revolutionary left." For example the Marxist Revolutionary Vanguard, which to a certain extent struggled against Khrushchevite revisionism at that time, was paralyzed and self-destructed. Most of its members opportunistically joined the "S"P and some the "C"P, swelling their most "left" wings and, curiously enough, became the most fervent defenders of the UP government, formed on the basis of the so-called "peaceful path to socialism" that they had formerly fought. In the end it became clear that their break with revisionism never went beyond tactical contradictions, the supposed contradiction of simple paths, that is the armed path versus the "peaceful path." With the electoral "victory" of the UP, the contradiction that initially motivated their difference with the latter ceased to exist. They never understood that the electoral victory of the UP would prove the non-existence of the "peaceful path." Those who did not join the UP maintained certain organizational links and mostly died fighting the fascist coup.

With respect to the Revolutionary Communist Party, one should acknowledge that the process of cooptation and destruction caused by the electoral "victory" of the UP and its "peaceful path" also weakened it greatly and caused it great internal divisions, leaving it with little influence among the popular masses and almost isolated from the great fervor and the existing class confrontation. This was just at the time when two highly explosive elements began to combine: the general dissatisfaction of the workers and the people with the vacillation, paralysis and legalism of the leadership of the UP and the open sabotage of the reactionaries and fascists under the shelter and orders of Yankee imperialism.

In order to wage political struggle and preserve themselves, the Revolutionary Communist Party mechanically transplanted the international position of the C.P. of China, which led them to serious mistakes in characterizing the main imperialist enemy of the Chilean revolution. They attacked equally and sometimes more forcefully Russian social-imperialism than Yankee imperialism, ignoring the fact that, although both imperialisms were equally dangerous for the peoples in general, Yankee imperialism was dominant in Chile. In any case, an important merits of the PCR was that it kept alive the anti-imperialist debate, and did not confine it almost exclusively to the level of propaganda. With the inevitability of the confrontation that the social conditions gave rise to, by the end of 1979, and after having promoted and participated in the resistance to the fascist military dictatorship, both factions into which the PCR had split ceased to exist as a party and some of their rank-and-file, of those who stayed in Chile, continued the struggle for the Popular Revolution and Socialism.

An organization that stood out for uniting important sectors in disagreement with the bourgeois reformism of the leadership of the UP, was the Movement of the Revolutionary Left, MIR. This movement was made up mainly of radical students strongly influenced by the Cuban experience and the figure of the guerrilla fighter Ernesto Che Guevara. They raised slogans for the armed struggle based on the theory of the "guerrilla foco," of "going to the mountains." The MIR in those years developed various experiences working with the masses in specific fronts, which led them to become the largest of the organizations of the "ultra-left," as the revisionists of the UP used to call them. Politically, the MIR developed a sort of critical support of the government of Salvador Allende. They took certain actions for the seizure of small agricultural and industrial properties, as well as large and monopolistic ones, which they regarded as being the same or almost the same. This helped to increase the confusion as to who were the main and the secondary enemies of the Chilean revolution.

Outstanding figures of the old MIR were men such as Miguel Henriquez, who took up with exemplary courage the commitment to the revolutionary struggle. On the other hand, others today are a slap in the face of the former; they not only retreated to the extent of turning the MIR into small remnants, but even renounced all revolutionary ideas and transformed themselves into spokespersons of capitalist exploitation, joining the "S"P or the PPD or even the Christian Democrats.

An example of individual anti-reformist struggle, isolated from the masses, reached its clearest expression in the Organized Vanguard of the People, VOP. Faced with police persecution and as a way to "wake up" the masses from the illusion of the UP, its members turned themselves into "Living Bombs" and exploded themselves in front of the general headquarters of the Investigation police, where all their members and some policemen died.

Coming from organized Trotskyism, and only to add humor to this paper, it is good to remember the vicious attacks of one of their leading figures, who today seeks to "save Marxism with Christian ethics." Luis Vitales, not satisfied with his membership in a large number of small petty-bourgeois groups, pretended to be a historian and attacked Bernardo O'Higgins and other independence fighters of the Spanish colonial period for not having fought for the Socialist Revolution.

Another fact that, were it not for the confusion and desperate search by the masses for a Revolutionary alternative to the UP, would only serve to calm our nerves, was the Trotskyite Revolutionary Workers Party, which was divided into little groups. During the UP, its newspaper called for a National Strike in support of Allende; 15 days later, having failed in realizing a national strike, it called for a Continental Strike, and without expecting any kind of sympathy for their call, 15 days later it called for a "World Strike in support of Allende and against the imperialist attack."

All the various groups of the left, apart from the Trotskyites who are brothers in treason with revisionism, sought for a revolutionary way out of the crisis of the bourgeois democratic system existing in Chile until September 11, 1973. They made great efforts, among which were examples of heroism. No one can conclude that their defeats were due to a lack of "will" or courage; on the contrary they had plenty of that. The explanation for their defeats must be sought in the ideas that guided their practice, in their eclectic thinking, which was far from the proletarian revolutionary understanding, from the Marxist-Leninist ideology, from the teachings of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin applied to the reality of Chile.

Once more, at the expense of the blood of the workers and people, of the lives of honest and militant fighters, the class struggle reminded us that the working class and the peoples have no future, no perspective for genuine social change, for socialism, if they do not have a genuine Proletarian Party, tempered in the class struggle and formed on the basis of the communist ideology, Marxism-Leninism.

On the 25th Anniversary of the fascist military coup, the working class and the people of Chile do not only have defeats to show, but mainly a treasure of valuable lessons learned through blood and 18 years of ideological, political and organizational efforts for the construction of a genuine Marxist-Leninist Party. These efforts have been crowned with success in the Chilean Communist Party (Proletarian Action) PC(AP). This party has no commitment other than that which emanates from revolutionary consistency, from Marxism-Leninism, from the Revolutionary interests of the working class and the peoples of Chile. It has been able to and can provide, unlike any other organization that calls itself left or revolutionary, the elements that allow us to expose the true causes of the past events, to face with success the present revolutionary struggle and point out its perspectives.

To conclude, let us present the following excerpt from the Programmatic Thesis of the PC(AP) published in June of 1995: "The heroic days of struggle that preceded us should be summed up from an open, scientific point of view, leaving aside the dogmatist, idealist and essentially religious conduct that deprive them of any revolutionary essence, presenting them (the days of struggle. Note of translator) as something already concluded, not subject to an analysis that might expose their successes and shortcomings, the positive and negative lessons that emanate from them. Those who today proceed in that way disguise their ideological and intellectual inability, or even worse, persist in past errors that will lead to new defeats for the people.

"From a sound and correct point of view, both the objective and the subjective conditions that have determined all past struggle should be studied, in order to draw revolutionary scientific rigor correct lessons that will enable us to accomplish the historic demand of Popular Democracy and Socialism that our country requires today.

"Based on the understanding that the objective conditions (national and social oppression and exploitation) for a revolutionary change in a country like ours have always been present, it is above all necessary to analyze more profoundly the politics that were in control of past struggles.

"Without a doubt, the quality of the subjective factor is always of primary importance, and the outcome of the struggle, its victory or defeat, depends fundamentally upon this. The failure of past struggles are not a result of the absence or weakness of the objective factor, of historical fatalism, or betrayal by this one or that, and still less of the lack of commitment of our unselfish people. On the contrary, our people have filled thousands of pages with their heroism that would move anyone to tears.

"The resistance to and rejection of imperialism and reaction in the past, particularly in the republican period, could not rely on programs with a genuine revolutionary class alternative, for the destruction of the existing bourgeois power and the construction of a new one, of socialism. On the contrary, these alternatives had been based on progressive reforms, on 'broadening democracy,' on trying to gradually 'take over' the Capitalist State dependent on imperialism, seeking the 'transformation' of the latter to put it into the 'service' of the people and the workers. Based on this erroneous ideological and programmatic foundation of the former leaders of the Popular Movement, forms of struggles were developed that did not have the perspective of placing the seizure of power, that is the social revolution, on the order of the day. A good example of this is the parliamentary road, the 'peaceful path,' chosen by the Popular Unity, with the whole tragedy that this meant for the Chilean Workers and Popular Movement. This can also be seen in the anti-fascist resistance itself which, although it engaged in open and mass combat, even armed combat, was always carried out under the banner of the restoration of the bourgeois democracy that existed before September 11, 1973.

"In this trend the National and Social Liberation, the Popular Democratic and Socialist revolution was absent.

"The subjective factor, the political leadership and its ideas is therefore the determining element on which the workers and popular struggles depend. The collapse the former USSR and of the countries of Eastern Europe are the Universal proof of our statement, that what happened there was not the failure of Socialism, still less of communist ideology, but was, on the contrary, a consequence of their desertion and betrayal. Today this is clear even to the ultra-blind idealists, to those who did not want to see the revisionist and anti-communist reality of the leaderships of those Parties and those former States.

"National and international reaction have muddied the waters for a short historical period, some self-proclaimed leftist and revolutionaries have abandoned the trenches of struggle and have openly joined reaction, others still vacillate and in an opportunistic manner try to serve reaction and imperialism, using 'progressive,' social-democratic phrases.

"The masses, although temporarily confused, seek a way out of the crisis of capitalist super-exploitation, the workers and popular movements follow one another. In general, it can be stated that in Chile, as in the rest of the world, a new wave of revolutionary struggle of the workers and peoples is taking shape. This should be greeted with a revolutionary class ideology and politics, of a higher caliber than those in the past, which will really allow us to reach the objectives put forward for the present period and will assure the socialist perspective of the process."


Communist Party of Chile (Proletarian Action)
Eduardo Artes
August, 1998