A Chile truth
Lucia Santa Cruz
Chile's Marxist Experiment Robert Moss (David and Charles £3.75)
A great deal has been said about the lessons to be learnt from the results of the 'Chilean experiment.' The discussion has been monopolised by the left. Their argument about Chile is a continuation of a long dispute between the orthodox communist parties, who believe that in the West violent revolution is not viable and that therefore the only alternative is to establish communism through an electoral alliance of Marxist parties and left-wing social democrats, and, on the other hand, other Marxist groups who believe that any assumption of power legally is bound to destroy the revolution. The former have a vested interest in presenting the failure of the Chilean experiment as the result of the action of the extreme left represented in Chile by the Socialist party and the MIR, and the latter in blaming the "legalistic" attitude of the communists who wanted to consolidate their power before making any more revolutionary advances. Both prefer to believe that the disaster was caused by factors which are alien to the general process of 'democratic Marxism' and are specifically Chilean, therefore not applicable or valid in any other country. Hence, the blame is placed on the underdeveloped structure of Chile's economy, its dependence on 'American imperialism,' the
manipulations of the ITT and of the CIA.
But equally interesting and far more relevant are the lessons to be learnt by the democrats of the West from Chile's Marxist experiment. Mr Moss has written the first serious study of the three years of Unidad Popular. It is not an academic book and it is written from the point of view of someone who believes that communism, whether legally or violently established, is in itself a not very desirable goal: whether it applies to a developed country Or not. One of the most attractive sides of his writing is that he does not believe that that which is not good enough for the developed countries of the West should be good enough for those less developed. He judges events in Chile according to an absolute yardstick without making dangerous concessions. He is exceptionally well versed in the ideological implications of Marxism as well as being a good journalist; his book should clarify a debate which has been obscured, in his words, by the mindless use of a "confetti-cloud of phrases like reform, people's government, and the necessary cost of building socialism."
Chile's Marxist Experiment should also revive many of the truths which are already being submerged in legend. In the first place, the fact is that Allende was not a social democrat in the Western sense. It is quite possible that Allende's reading of Marx was not very profound: he was an able political manoeuvrer, but not a political thinker or an intellectual. But he was throughout his life a disciplined member of the Marxist-Leninist Socialist party. His family connections drove him towards the revolutionary left: his sister Laura, a Socialist senator, was one of Altamirano's closest associates; his nephew Andres Pascal was the second most important leader of the MIR; his daughter Beatriz was married to a Cuban intelligence officer. He himself with Castro, his political mentor, founded OLAS, designed to spread the armed struggle in Latin America. He chose as his personal guard (illegally created, without parliamentary consent) a group of miristas and Cubans who slept and lived in his house. At his country retreat of 'Carlaveral' he kept a guerrilla training camp.
Secondly, the Popular Unity programme was meant to be implemented, and was, not only through the legal and democratic institutions, but also through the concept of 'mass mobilisation,' which included de facto seizures of land and factories, and the use of street violence and intimidation.
It was the very nature of the Allende government which dictated the course of the conflict which developed between the majority, represented by the opposition parties, and the Marxist parties. As Mr Moss says, the conflict took place on three different fronts. There was a political contest between the President and the democratic majority in parliament which opposed his policy of wide nationalisations by administrative decrees and worker take-overs supported by the government. There was a contest between the judiciary, whose power was undermined by the government's refusal to implement the courts' orders, and the executive which put itself above the law. There was a fight for the control of the economy which both sides considered the key to political power: growing government control of credit, production, ad vertisement, employment, distribution of food and other essential goods dealt a direct blow to the survival of political pluralism. Further more, the opposition wanted to halt a process which was deteriorating into chaos because of falling productivity in the copper industry and in agriculture; the losses in the nationalised industries amounted to several times the size of the whole national budget and were financed by the inflationary issue of currency. Finally, there was the conflict for the streets which the concept of 'mass mobilisation' im posed. This led to daily controntations in the country and the towns during the last months and cost one hundred lives in three years, not very much by Belfast standards but too much for a country which saw its last political assassination before 1970 in 1836.
Against this background, Mr Moss thinks that the military intervention was based on four things: the objective evidence of an economic crisis characterised by a Weimar republic rate of inflation; the conviction that the Marxist parties were aiming at the seizure of absolute power; the existence of a clear popular mandate for intervention demonstrated by the declaration of the Supreme Court and Congress; and the discovery of the efforts of the extreme left to incite rebellion within the armed forces themselves.
It is one of the most depressing and alarming features of the Popular Unity post-mortem that, even amongst the most sophisticated political commentators, the debate is focused around the statement that Allende was "democratically elected." This is not very relevant in itself. It only demonstrates that a system existed prior to 1970 which allowed a Marxist minority to assume power legally. Implicit in this narrow approach is the assumption that if a government's origins are democratic, it can exercise power without further restraints: that is, if Mr Nixon was democratically elected, he can have Watergate and more; one could even add that Hitler 'was also democratically elected too. The issue is not whether the Allende government was freely elected or not. It is whether it fulfilled the minimum requirements of representing a national consensus or not, whether it guaranteed the civil and individual rights without which a government can be good or bad but certainly not democratic, and whether the state it proposed to create, with a popular assembly on the Soviet model and popular tribunals on the Cuban, would have preserved the qualities of a democracy.
The questions that we should be asking ourselves, therefore, are more complex: can the dictatorship of the proletariat, intrinsic to Marxism-Leninism, be established by the will of the majority? Can there be political pluralism in a state where control of all the means of production is in the hands of a government which is ideologically committed? Is the 'irreversibility' of the Marxist revolution compatible with the notion of permanent right of redress? Many of the answers can be found in Robert Moss's analysis of the Chilean experience. His findings are that a Marxist government can be freely elected; that a Marxist minority which attempts to change so dramatically the very conception of society will provoke a powerful reaction from the majority, which in Marxist terms identifies itself with the bourgeoisie; that the legal instruments available to a Marxist government in a 'bourgeois' society are not sufficient to make a revolution, and must be coupled with the "mobilisation of masses"; that when this happens, the legal instruments of parliamentary democracy are inadequate when the scenario has moved to the streets; that a rapid programme of nationalisation, essential if the state is to control the means of production, will create economic chaos; that the stimulation of the 'class struggle,' through propaganda of class hatred and violence, will divide and polarise the country bitterly. That the armed forces, which have kept their discipline and integrity and are not demoralised by defeat at war, will back the majority of defenceless civilians when a situation of anarchy and imminent civil war develops. That the cost to democracy of the "experiment" will be high.
Lucia Santa Cruz, who will be writing regularly for The Spectator from Chile, is the daughter of Victor Santa Cruz who was for many years Chile's ambassador to the Court of St James.
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